fore me, and a three hours' march to
dinner--and then to thinking! It is hard if I cannot start some game on
these lone heaths. I laugh, I run, I leap, I sing for joy."

BRAVO! After that adventure of my friend with the policeman, you would
not have cared, would you, to publish that in the first person? But we
have no bravery nowadays, and, even in books, must all pretend to be as
dull and foolish as our neighbours. It was not so with Hazlitt. And
notice how learned he is (as, indeed, throughout the essay) in the
theory of walking tours. He is none of your athletic men in purple
stockings, who walk their fifty miles a day: three hours' march is his
ideal. And then he must have a winding road, the epicure.

Yet there is one thing I object to in these words of his, one thing in
the great master's practice that seems to me not wholly wise. I do not
approve of that leaping and running. Both of these hurry the
respiration; they both shake up the brain out of its glorious open-air
confusion; and they both break the pace. Uneven walking is not so
agreeable to the body, and it distracts and irritates the mind. Whereas,
when once you have fallen into an equable stride, it requires no
conscious thought from you to keep it up, and yet it prevents you from
thinking earnestly of anything else. Like knitting, like the work of a
copying clerk, it gradually neutralises and sets to sleep the serious
activity of the mind. We can think of this or that, lightly and
laughingly, as a child thinks, or as we think in a morning doze; we can
make puns or puzzle out acrostics, and trifle in a thousand ways with
words and rhymes; but when it comes to honest work, when we come to
gather ourselves together for an effort, we may sound the trumpet as
loud and long as we please; the great barons of the mind will not rally
to the standard, but sit, each one, at home, warming his hands over his
own fire, and brooding on his own private thought!

In the course of a day's walk, you see, there is much variance in the
mood. From the exhilaration of the start, to the happy phlegm of the
arrival, the change is certainly great. As the day goes on, the
traveller moves from the one extreme end towards the other. He becomes
more and more incorporated with the material landscape, and the open-air
drunkenness grows upon him with great strides, until he posts along the
road, and sees everything about him, as in a cheerful dream. The first
is certainly brighter, but