h's existence. De Quincey assures us that
the poet's props were very ill shapen--"they were pointedly condemned by
all female connoisseurs in legs"--but none the less he was _princeps
arte ambulandi_. Even had he lived to-day, when all our roads are
barbarized by exploding gasoline vapours, I do not think Wordsworth
would have flivvered. Of him the Opium Eater made the classic
pronouncement: "I calculate that with these identical legs W. must have
traversed a distance of 175,000 to 180,000 English miles--a mode of
exertion which, to him, stood in the stead of alcohol and all other
stimulants whatsoever to the animal spirits; to which, indeed, he was
indebted for a life of unclouded happiness, and we for much of what is
most excellent in his writings."

A book that says anything about walking has a ready passage to my inmost
heart. The best books are always those that set down with "amorous
precision" the satisfying details of human pilgrimage. How one
sympathizes with poor Pepys in his outburst (April 30, 1663) about a
gentleman who seems to have been "Always Taking the Joy Out of Life":

Lord! what a stir Stankes makes, with his being crowded in the
streets, and wearied in walking in London, and would not be wooed to
go to a play, nor to Whitehall, or to see the lions, though he was
carried in a coach. I never could have thought there had been upon
earth a man so little curious in the world as he is.

Now your true walker is mightily "curious in the world," and he goes
upon his way zealous to sate himself with a thousand quaintnesses. When
he writes a book he fills it full of food, drink, tobacco, the scent of
sawmills on sunny afternoons, and arrivals at inns late at night. He
writes what Mr. Mosher calls a book-a-bosom. Diaries and letters are
often best of all because they abound in these matters. And because
walking can never again be what it was--the motorcars will see to
that--it is our duty to pay it greater reverence and honour.

Wordsworth and Coleridge come first to mind in any talk about walking.
The first time they met was in 1797 when Coleridge tramped from Nether
Stowey to Racedown (thirty miles in an air-line, and full forty by road)
to make the acquaintance of William and Dorothy. That is practically
from the Bristol Channel to the English ditto, a rousing stretch. It was
Wordsworth's pamphlet describing a walk across France to the Alps that
spurred Coleridge on to this expedition