erve anything. I am unworthy the least regard,
and yet I am made to rejoice. I am impure and worthless, and
yet the world is gilded for my delight and holidays are
prepared for me, and my path is strewn with flowers. But I
cannot thank the Giver; I cannot even whisper my thanks to
the human friends I have.

In the essay on "Walking," Thoreau says that the art of walking "comes
only by the grace of God. It requires a direct dispensation from
Heaven to become a walker. You must be born into the family of the
Walkers." "I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits,
unless I spend four hours a day at least,--it is commonly more than
that,--sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields,
absolutely free from all worldly engagements."

Thoreau made good his boast. He was a new kind of walker, a
Holy-Lander. His walks yielded him mainly spiritual and ideal results.
The fourteen published volumes of his Journal are mainly a record of
his mental reactions to the passing seasons and to the landscape he
sauntered through. There is a modicum of natural history, but mostly
he reaps the intangible harvest of the poet, the saunterer, the
mystic, the super-sportsman.

With his usual love of paradox Thoreau says that the fastest way to
travel is to go afoot, because, one may add, the walker is constantly
arriving at his destination; all places are alike to him, his harvest
grows all along the road and beside every path, in every field and
wood and on every hilltop.

All of Thoreau's books belong to the literature of Walking, and are as
true in spirit in Paris or London as in Concord. His natural history,
for which he had a passion, is the natural history of the walker, not
always accurate, as I have pointed out, but always graphic and
interesting.

Wordsworth was about the first poet-walker--a man of letters who made
a business of walking, and whose study was really the open air. But he
was not a Holy-Lander in the Thoreau sense. He did not walk to get
away from people as Thoreau did, but to see a greater variety of them,
and to gather suggestions for his poems. Not so much the wild as the
human and the morally significant were the objects of Wordsworth's
quest. He haunted waterfalls and fells and rocky heights and lonely
tarns, but he was not averse to footpaths and highways, and the
rustic, half-domesticated nature of rural England. He was a
nature-lover; he even calls himself a natu