University of Virginia Library

3. CHAPTER III.

So, leaving those who had no such dread of the sea, as I
now began to have, nor any such dread of sleep as I thought
I soon should have, to pursue their search after smooth white
pebbles and other like wonders of the deep, I reascended the
cliff, called the boy away from his beer, tumbled into the gig
as if it were a wherry, and left him to steer whithersoever he
would, until he drew up and asked me if I had not better
leave him where he was, and walk round by a little church
and a cottage or two, that I saw huddled up together among
the trees a great way below the wood. It was quite impossible
to stay in the gig after one look at the entrance to the
cool shadowy hollow where these cottages were concealed—
a green cave, a narrow path-way, a thatched-roof, and large
trees were before me; but they were not long before me, I
promise you. Ere the boy could make me understand
where I was to meet him, I had escaped through the cloudy
path-way and arrived at a large barn—the very counterpart
of the barns that we have in America, where we
never think of leaving either hay or wheat exposed to the
open air. Attracted by the familiar noise of the flail, I drew
near and saw a sight worth going a voyage for, one that
I never shall forget, I am persuaded—never—the longest
day I have to live. I stopped—I stood still—every thing
about me, every thing I heard, every thing I saw reminded
me of America, and of the habits there while they were happy,
and before they had begun to tread out their grain with
the feet of young horses, driven about in a circle. Two

young men were at work, in a stillness like that of the Sabbath-day,
and in a strong current of air, with a pile of wheat
on every side of them as high as they could reach, and cartloads
of straw at the door. The barn where they worked
was all open to the sky.—I could see through and through
it, and there was nothing to impede my view but a mass of
bright green foliage that overhung the further door-way with
a sort of transparent shadow—I never did see any thing so
beautiful. I could have sworn that the very sky itself was
covered with grape-leaves.

I inquired my way to Bow-Church, and they directed me
without looking up. I was to keep the path and go through
a wicket, when I would see the church `right afore me';
if I stepped quick, I might overtake a lady and a gentleman
who had preceded me but a very few minutes. Now, though
I am not of a very hard or unsocial temper I flatter myself,
nor much given to solitary indulgences, I declare to you
reader, that after I had gone a little way, I would rather have
met the—ahem—or any thing else alive or dead, a ghost or
a bailiff, than such a thing as a gentleman or a lady in my
path. A man or a woman, or any other natural thing I
could put up with in a place like that which I saw before me,
though I would rather be alone I confess—altogether alone,
if I could not have with me some one of the six or eight
brave girls that I might happen to be over head and ears in love
with at the time—girls of the sky, creatures of the blue
atmosphere, the blue sea, or the green wood, superb spiritualities
I mean reader—of course. A man or a woman I
could bear—but God preserve me from those who prattle
when a shadow is all about their feet, when they live and
breathe and move in a shadow, and the great green trees
are above their way and about their way, go whithersoever
they will; creatures who dare not breathe as we breathe,

who dare not step on the wet grass, nor move without being
tied up and laced up, from the very crown of the head to the
sole of the foot, and who look as if, in spite of all their outcry
and artificial rapture, nothing on earth would provoke them
to a hearty romp.—I speak of the male creatures too,
the tidy little things who run about in the woods a-tiptoe,
and who if they ever happen to be caught in such a grave-yard
as I saw before me, a grave-yard all open to the sea
and sky; or on the top of a great hill (such as Leith-Hill1)
with an empire lying under their feet like a map; or at any
other place where a man would be sure to hold his breath,
—are pretty sure to be occupied in picking their teeth, or in
wiping their new hats or their new boots (both of which it
would be torture to wear) with a white pocket-handkerchief.
Gentle-men forsooth! As if to be without manhood were to
be gentle; as if to be gentle were to be weaker and more
helpless than a great girl; and as if it were worthier of a
man to have a little white hand, or smooth soft hair, than it
would be to have a little white face, or no beard.

I know very well that if you hope to enjoy any thing here,
(in this world I mean,) a walk in the woods, or over the
hills, or along the shore, by night or by day, you must have
a woman with you—for a man, if he is a man, will be very
sure to disturb you with argument or philosophy or something
worse; a woman too that you are in love with, and just
enough in love with, to enable you to see and feel the
beauty and the power of solitude. If there be too much
love between you, you may overlook the landscape and
forget every thing but each other; if too little—you have
no relish for what you see, you might as well be with
a man. With a man!—ay, with a dog—you had much

better be a dog, yourself and be with a dog; for you are a
slave without even the reward of a slave, or the privilege of
one.

But while it is very true that if you are to enjoy a walk any
where, you must have a woman with you, and such a woman
as I say, with wit enough to know when to talk and when to
hold her tongue—a beloved wife who is able to understand
you and make herself understood without speech; and while
it is true, that in no other way can you enjoy a walk or a
stroll as they are to be enjoyed by the true epicure, it is also
true that if you wish to be tired before your blood is warm,
weary before you know why, fatigued before you are exhilarated;
or if you are to walk for your sins, and have done
something or thought something, for which a trip to the pole
with peas in your shoes were too mild a punishment, you
have only to take a woman with you—a lady—for whom
you don't care a fig.

Labor is not exercise. Fatigue is not exhilaration.
Therefore I say to those who walk much—Do not walk alone,
for if you do, it is fifty to one that your mind is harder at
work, than it would be in your study; you might as well
rock in a chair till you dropped out of it, or run up stairs
and down till you were ready to cry with fatigue. But if
you do walk alone, beware how you walk the self-same road
as a great many do, day after day year after year. You
had much better be at home; you would have as good air,
nay better, nine tenths of the time, and you would not be
half so likely to overdo your mind—for the mind and the
body will work together. And if you walk where there is
nothing new to make you loiter on the way, you soon get
walking faster than you should; for the mind will hurry
on if there be no check nor stay to the current of thought,
and the body will keep step with it, like a soldier treading to

music. But your step may be quick, whatever be the state
of your mind. If it be cheerful and your thoughts flow like
a river, you are anxious to get home, where you may turn
that river to account; if it be perplexed and your thoughts
flow like the drops that are wrung out of the body by hard
labor, you are only the more anxious to be at home; for it is
there, if any where, that you hope to meet with and overcome
your adversary. I never knew a solitary walker who did not
begin with walking a much slower pace than he left off with;
nor one who was not sure to outwalk other people whenever
he got on a road which he was familiar with; nor one
who did not walk as if he had a job waiting for him at home,
or as if the walk itself were a job, which he would be glad to
have ended. Of what avail are such walks? They are
downright labor; they beget no exhilaration; they are sure
to be followed with a sense of fatigue—a sign of itself that
you have not been relieved by your walk, either in body or
mind. They are all this even if they are made in fair weather;
but how much worse are they, when made in foul
damp weather? I have an idea that I could tell by the
very step of a man, by the swing of his arms, by the stoop of
his neck, by the lounge of his whole body, or by his half-military
air, not only whether he was in the habit of walking
much alone, but whether he was in the habit of walking much
over the same road.

If you wish to profit by a walk therefore, do not walk alone.
But whether you walk alone or not, never walk the same road
till you are tired of it, or so familiar with it as to remember
nothing of your walk after you have got home, save that you
have been to a particular house, or a particular tree; in
which case it would be well for you never to go that road
again till you had forgotten every step of the way. Otherwise,
your walk would be of no use to you, either in body or

mind; you might as well trot round a cage of six feet by
four. Above all, do not walk with a woman, if she be not of
those, who while they are very dear to you, as I have hinted
already, are not so very dear as to shorten your walk or spoil
it. Nevertheless, if there be no other way, if you must walk
or die, you may take the air with a female you don't care a fig
for; you may even go out with a dog, or a stick, or a child,
if it be to save your life; but let nothing induce you, nothing,
to walk with a gentleman or a lady, in a place that you ever
hope to see again with pleasure.

There! will any body tell me now that my story has no
moral to it? Or will any body say that I have not packed up
as much good new and useful truth in it, as the age will
bear?

So, such being my notions of the matter, I need say no
more to convince you that instead of trying to overtake the
lady and gentleman who had `stepped' a little before me,
I rather chose to keep out of their way. I did so for a good
while, when at last, having got near enough to peep into the
little grave-yard—it was like that of one family, the graves
were so few and so near to each other, and the whole were
so near the sea, that a stranger would have thought a brave
ship had been wrecked there with all her crew, and the church
had been built over them—near enough to peep into the grave-yard,
to reconnoitre all the paths about, and to satisfy myself
that I had nothing to fear from the lady, I sprang over the barrier,
with a step not well suited, I confess, to the green dwelling
of the dead, the antechamber of the sky; and after looking into
the little portico of the church—it was all written over
with names that nobody knew, and with dates that nobody
cared for, scored on the white-washed wall or cut into the
wood,—I had begun to puzzle out a few of the epitaphs that
were mouldering away, virtue by virtue, from the wooden

tombstones about me, and was getting ahead bravely, when I
lighted upon one—a very droll affair, which I knew that I had
seen somewhere else, but where I could not remember for a
long while. It ran thus—

Why, Voltaire could not have expressed himself with more
caution. To live with Christ and be at rest—I hope the
change is for the best! Well, well, it was a very odd
epitaph—but where had I seen it before? After a few minutes
I recollected where—it was in a church-yard at Dorking
Surrey. At Dorking—Surrey—in a moment—in the
twinkling of an eye, the whole course of my thought was
changed—I forgot where I was—I saw nothing more of the
church nor the church-yard—I thought only of Box-Hill, of
Leith Hill, of the heights, and of the Holm-wood, of the barren
heath, so like the lands of America that have been exhausted
by tobacco, and of the wild shrubbery; of all I had seen, of
all I had thought for an age, in that glorious and beautiful
part of our earth, where if the wind shifted, or the sky changed,
while we were out in the high places among the purple
heather, every part of the landscape would come and go with
a perpetual variety, wearing every minute a new shape, and
looking every day as if we had never seen it before. What
business had I in a grave-yard, while my heart was heaving
with such recollections? Very little, I fear—and so I came
away, and pursued my walk for a good while without looking
up or turning aside in the narrow pathway which I had stumbled
upon—so still was it, and so like a path made by the
feet of children or lovers—or sheep. I know not how long
I might have walked here, if I had not been roused by the
approach of a dog—the finest dog I ever saw. I called him
to me, and was trying to get acquainted with his cur-ship

(I borrow that idea from the philosopher of Q. S. P.), when
I heard a whistle in the sky, and immediately after that, a
voice, the tone of which I shall never forget. I looked up
and saw a man far above me on a huge pile of rock that appeared
to have been hewed for a pedestal, ages ago, with
a flag-staff rooted in the middle of it. I started—for the
shape of the man was that of him I had encountered three
years before in the solitudes of Westminster-Abbey. But
what of that? Who cares for a shape? In the course of
that period, had I not seen fifty people with a shape like his,
and half a score that were otherwise like him? And if it
should prove to be the same individual that I saw there, of
what use would that be to me? I did not care to see him:
It was the woman I was after (in a lawful way), not the man.
Very true—but—but—if I were to fall in the way of the man,
would not that be one step toward falling in the way of the
woman, or at least of learning who and what she was, and
whether married or single? Ah—but if she were married—
if she should turn out to be that man's wife? or any other
man's wife, and very beautiful or very wise, what would
become of me? It would be unlawful, you know—very unlawful
to care a fig for another man's wife; and so—and
so—and so, while I was determining to avoid the mischief
and keep clear of the temptation for the rest of my life, I
found myself, I never knew how, at the foot of the rock, on
the top of which I had seen the stranger not five minutes before.

1 Near Dorking Surrey, celebrated for its broad, variegated, and very
English prospect.