led, as the sick take medicine at stated
hours--as the swinging of dumb-bells or chairs; but is itself the
enterprise and adventure of the day. If you would get exercise, go in
search of the springs of life. Think of a man's swinging dumb-bells
for his health, when those springs are bubbling up in far-off pastures
unsought by him!

Moreover, you must walk like a camel, which is said to be the only
beast which ruminates when walking. When a traveller asked
Wordsworth's servant to show him her master's study, she answered,
"Here is his library, but his study is out of doors."

Living much out of doors, in the sun and wind, will no doubt produce a
certain roughness of character--will cause a thicker cuticle to grow
over some of the finer qualities of our nature, as on the face and
hands, or as severe manual labor robs the hands of some of their
delicacy of touch. So staying in the house, on the other hand, may
produce a softness and smoothness, not to say thinness of skin,
accompanied by an increased sensibility to certain impressions.
Perhaps we should be more susceptible to some influences important to
our intellectual and moral growth, if the sun had shone and the wind
blown on us a little less; and no doubt it is a nice matter to
proportion rightly the thick and thin skin. But methinks that is a
scurf that will fall off fast enough--that the natural remedy is to be
found in the proportion which the night bears to the day, the winter to
the summer, thought to experience. There will be so much the more air
and sunshine in our thoughts. The callous palms of the laborer are
conversant with finer tissues of self-respect and heroism, whose touch
thrills the heart, than the languid fingers of idleness. That is mere
sentimentality that lies abed by day and thinks itself white, far from
the tan and callus of experience.

When we walk, we naturally go to the fields and woods: what would
become of us if we walked only in a garden or a mall? Even some sects
of philosophers have felt the necessity of importing the woods to
themselves, since they did not go to the woods. "They planted groves
and walks of Platanes," where they took _subdiales ambulationes_ in
porticos open to the air. Of course it is of no use to direct our
steps to the woods, if they do not carry us thither. I am alarmed when
it happens that I have walked a mile into the woods bodily, without
getting there in spirit. In my afternoon walk I would fain