Title:  Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862

Author:  Various

Release Date:  May 10, 2004 [EBook #12310]

Language:  English

Character set encoding:  ASCII

*** Start of this project gutenberg EBOOK Atlantic monthly, no. 56 ***

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THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY.

A magazine of literature, art, and politics.

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Vol.  IX.—­June, 1862.—­No.  LVI.

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WALKING.

I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil,—­to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society.  I wish to make an extreme statement, if so I may make an emphatic one, for there are enough champions of civilization:  the minister, and the school-committee, and every one of you will take care of that.

I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks,—­who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering:  which word is beautifully derived “from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretence of going a la Sainte Terre,” to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, “There goes a Sainte-Terrer” a Saunterer,—­a Holy-Lander.  They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean.  Some, however, would derive the word from sans terre, without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere.  For this is the secret of successful sauntering.  He who sits still in a house all the time may be the greatest vagrant of all; but the saunterer, in the good sense, is no more vagrant than the meandering river, which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest course to the sea.  But I prefer the first, which, indeed, is the most probable derivation.  For every walk is a sort of crusade, preached by some Peter the Hermit in us, to go forth and reconquer this Holy Land from the hands of the Infidels.