University of Virginia Library

More than one way of walking? Verily;
But, for the art of walking, only one.
Beginners in the ambulative art,
As in all art, are immethodical:
Your want of method, rightly understood,
Is faculty, and not its absence; style
Adventurous of genius; say, a gift;
Immethod, necessary handicap
Upon originality, that loses
Matches many on time or weight, but beats
The winner virtually. The crammer's wiles,
And royal roads to knowledge, short-cuts, keys,
And time-and-labour-saving mechanism
Beset the ambulative acolyte;
But true originality in art
Would not at first, even if it could, possess
Impeccable technique; and your foredoomed
Pedestrian errs designedly (if one
Whose privilege it is to deviate
Can ever be arraigned for trespass) bent
On quitting, jeopardy or none, the old
Immediately seductive methods blazed
By trained precursors in pedestrial art.

At first then the prospective walker, rash
As any hero, dedicates himself
To chance. A vagabond upon the earth
He leads a life uncertain: art and craft
Pedalian suffer secret chrysalid
Probations and adventures ere they gain
The ultimate imago of complete
Pedestrianism. Through gross suburban miles
And over leagues of undistinguished ground
He plods, he tramps. Utilitarian thoughts
Of exercise and health extenuate
The dullness of the duty; he persuades
Himself he likes it; finds, where none exist,
Amazing qualities; and tires his limbs,
His thought, his fancy, o'er and o'er again.
But in the dismal watches of the night
He knows it all delusion; beauty, none,
Nor pleasure in it; ennui only—eased
By speculation on the wayside-inn,
Or country-town hotel where lunch permits
An hour's oblivion of his self-imposed,
His thriftless drudgery. Despair!—And life?
Worth picking from the gutter? No; not worth
The stooping for! Natheless, a walker born,
He takes the road next day; steps out once more,
As if the world were just begun, and he,
Sole monarch; plods the suburb, tramps the waste—
Again returning baffled and dismayed.

He tries a comrade. Worse and worse!—for that,
In high pedestrianism, turns out to be
A double misery, a manacled
Contingence with vexation. Walking-tours?
Belletrists crack them up. He takes one:—lo,
A sheer atrocity! A man may like
To drink, but who would quench next morning's drouth,
Unholy though it be, with torture forte
Et dure in gallon draughts when by his bed
A hair gleams of the dog that bit him! Tours
Pedestrious? Madness, like the poet's who thought
To write a thousand sonnets at the rate
Of three a day! And this the tale of years!

Forth from his travail and despair at last,
Crash through his plodding apparatus, breaks
The dawn of art. He recollects a mile,
Or half a mile that pleased him; a furlong here,
And there a hundred yards; or an hour's march
Over some curve of the world when everything
Above him and about him from the zenith
To the sky-edge, and radiant from his feet
Toward every cardinal point, put off the veil,
Becoming evident as guilt or love, as things
They cannot hide:—becoming him,
And he becoming them; and all his past
And all his future wholly what they are,
The very form and meaning of the earth
Itself. And at these times he recollects,
And in these places, how his thoughts were clear
As crystal, deeper than the sea, as swift
As light—the pulse, the bosom and the zone
Of beauty infinite. And then and there
Whatever he imagined took at once
A bodily shape; and nought conceived or done
Since life began appeared irrational,
Wanton or needless. Since, the world and fate,
Material functions of each other, apt
As syllables of power and magic mind
In some self-reading riddle, as fracted bits
In self-adjusting instruments that play
Unheard ethereal music of the spheres,
Assumed their places equably; all things
Fell duly into line and dressed their ranks.

Thus art begins, as sudden as a star
In some unconstellated tract of space,
Where two extinct long-wandering orbs collide
And smite into each other and become
A lamp of glory, no crepuscular
Uncertainty, no interval between
The old misfortune and the new delight.
And thus at once the plodder of the waste
Attains utility and finds himself
Aristocrat and patron of the road;
The artisan, an artist—aristocrat
And artist being over synonymes.
All vagabondage, all bohemianism,
All errantry, the unlicked, chrysalid
Condition of aristocracy and art,
Cut off for ever, the proud pedestrian free
Of the world, walks only now in picked resorts,
And can without a chart, without a guide,
Discover lands richer than El Dorado,
Sweeter than Beulah, and with ease
Ascend secluded mountains more delectable
Than heights in ancient pilgrimages famed,
Or myth-clad hills, or summits of romance.
Old traversed roads he traverses again,
Untroubled; nothing new he sees
Except the stretch of pleasure-ground, like one
Who turns the leaves o'er of a tedious book,
Careless of verbiage, to reperuse
The single page inspired; in regions new
He goes directly to his own like beasts
That never miss the way; and having marked
A province with the beauties of his choice,
In them alone he walks, lord of the world.