Part 14

But though they measure your wrinkles never so carefully they do not see you personal and close--

As you disclosed yourself among the chimney-tops last night to the eyes of a child--

When you thought no one else was looking.

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Anyhow I see plainly that like all created things you do not yield yourself up as to what you are at the first or the thousandth onset,

And that the scientific people for all their telescopes know as little about you as any one--

Perhaps less than most.

How curious the mystery of creation."

The poet, bereft of words whereby to give vent to his emotion, falls back on "the mystery of creation."--Not dissimilarly says Carlyle, "The rudest mind has still some intimation of the greatness there is in Mystery." And again, "The mystical enjoyment of an object goes infinitely farther than the intellectual."--It is not alone the indescribable colour of the delicate corolla, nor is it the minute knowledge of its astonishing structure, that causes to blaze up in the beholder a sense of something profound; it is not alone the majestic heap of the cloud, nor the piercing radiance of the quiet stars, known to be incomputably distant, that lifts one to the contemplation of the lofty; it is the immanent, the permanent Mystery that pervades and unifies all that ever was or is or shall be.

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XXVI

The Pleasures of Walking

§ 64

"But what possible pleasure, what possible profit," I can hear the practical and common-sensible man asking, "is to be gained from walking--walking? Surely walking is the paltriest of sports. Why not write of riding, driving, rowing, bicycling, motoring, aeroplaning--any mode of locomotion rather than that of mere trudging?"--Well, in a technical and paronomasiacal phrase, the question really solvitur ambulando. For one thing, horses have to be baited, boats caulked, bicycles pumped up, balloons inflated, and motor cars eternally tinkered at--aeroplanes fly far beyond my welkin. For another thing, not the least of the practical blessings incident to a walk is that you are beyond the reach of letters and telegrams and telephones. You are not likely to be served with a writ when walking; you can laugh at capiases and injunctions; drafts at sight and judgment summonses cannot easily overtake you on a trudge. "I have generally found," says De Quincey, "that, if you are in quest of some certain escape from Philistines of whatsoever class--sheriff-officers, bores, no matter what--the surest refuge is to be found amongst hedgerows and fields." (Had De Quincey lived in the twentieth century, truly he might have added that it is amongst the fields and hedgerows also that one gets away from that pest of civilisation, the pene-ubiquitous advertisement.--And not always even amongst fields and hedgerows, as the landscape-spoiling hoardings along the routes of our railways prove. Like Nero, I sometimes wish that the erectors of sky-signs and the daubers of barns and fences had but one neck that I might ... that I might--lay upon it a heavy yoke of taxation.--I throw out that hint to any Finance Minister or Chancellor of the Exchequer that may care to act upon it.)

But far rather would I reply to my quærist in other words than mine.--"I went to the woods," says Thoreau, "because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life.... I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.... Our life is frittered away by detail.... In the midst of this chopping sea of civilised life, such are the clouds and storms and quicksands and thousand and one items to be allowed for that a man has to live, if he would not founder and go to the bottom and not make his port at all, by dead reckoning, he must be a great calculator indeed who succeeds."

Hear, too, Henri-Frédéric Amiel:

"1st February 1854.--A walk. The atmosphere incredibly pure--a warm, caressing gentleness in the sunshine--joy in one's whole being.... I became young again, wondering, and simple, as candour and ignorance are simple. I abandoned myself to life and to nature, and they cradled me with an infinite gentleness. To open one's heart in purity to this ever-pure nature, to allow this immortal life of things to penetrate into one's soul, is at the same time to listen to the voice of God. Sensation may be a prayer, and self-abandonment an act of devotion."

Or hear a greater man than these--hear the great Jean-Jacques Rousseau, he who divided with Voltaire the intellectual realm of the eighteenth century:

"What I regret most in the details of my life which I have forgotten is that I did not keep a diary of my travels. Never have I thought so much, never have I realised my own existence so much, been so much alive, been so much myself if I may so say, as in those journeys which I have made alone and afoot. Walking has something in it which animates and heightens my ideas: I can scarcely think when I stay in one place; my body must be set a-going if my mind is to work. The sight of the country, the succession of beautiful scenes, the great breeze, the good appetite, the health which I gain by walking, the getting away from inns, the escape from everything which reminds me of my lack of independence, from everything which reminds me of my unlucky fate--all this releases my soul, gives me greater courage of thought, throws me as it were into the midst of the immensity of the objects of Nature, which I may combine, from which I may choose at will, which I may make my own carelessly and without fear. I make use of all Nature as her master; my heart, surveying one object after another, unites itself, identifies itself with those in sympathy with it, surrounds itself with delightful images, intoxicates itself with emotions the most exquisite. If, in order to seize these, I amuse myself by describing them to myself, what a vigorous pencil, what bright colours, what energy of expression they need! Some have, so they say, discerned something of these influences in my writings, though composed in my declining years. Ah! if only those of my early youth had been seen! those which I have composed but never written down!"

Thus wrote the great Jean-Jacques in the calm of his declining years. Those walking inspirations must have been potent indeed to have left so lasting an impression.

§ 65

But Thoreau and Amiel and Jean-Jacques Rousseau are perhaps counsellors of perfection; exemplars too remote for our purpose. Permit me then to resort to an argumentum ad hominem.--I knew a man who one summer tried to do two and a half men's work in one. For five days in the week it took him from early in the morning of one day till early in the morning of the next. On Saturday afternoon he was free, and on Saturday he took the boat to a village twenty-one miles distant. Sunday afternoon was devoted (alas, necessarily) again to work,--but in the open air. At two-thirty on Monday morning he started on his return journey--afoot; breakfasted halfway in; and was at his desk in as good time as spirits.--Profit? That early morning walk picked him up for the week. Pleasure? My dear practical sir, would you had been with him! Would you had felt the quiet, the serenity, the calming influence of unsullied Nature; the supreme repose in those early morning hours, the solitude, the vastness, the expansion of soul and spirit beneath the silent stars, the quiet morn. He saw the full moon pale and set; he saw great Nature slowly wake; the sleepy cows knee-deep in clover; the fields begemmed with dew; the little pools--pools which at noon would be muddy puddles--glistening like emeralds and garnets in the dawn. By degrees, growing things were individualised. Each shrub, each creeping thing, had a life of its own. The veriest weed was exalted into a vegetable personality which had dealings with the Infinite and the Divine: and "all flowers in field or forest which unclose their trembling eyelids to the kiss of day" spake to him.--He was alone--alone with unhurrying, uncareful Nature. The peace of untold æons entered his soul and couraged him to battle with the petty and the trivial for five more wearing days without a qualm.--Profit? Pleasure?--What nag, what buggy, what skiff, what bike, what motor, what dirigible balloon, or hydro-aeroplane would have got him that? In simple truth, of all that he learned and did during those arduous weeks, only those lovely lonely walks live in that man's memory to-day.--Would that oftener we bathed our thirsty souls in the dews of the dawn! Would that oftener men gat them away from offices and counters and desks--nay, from balls and bats and cleeks--away into the quiet country, where nor strife nor struggle, noble or ignoble, has place or worth! The world is too much with us. Call-loans--narrow margins, with a slump in the market--killing races with a dark horse--quickly changing quotations--prolonged ill luck--unstable tariffs--strikes and rumours of strikes--such things perturb the human mind. Well, I know few more efficacious antidotes to mental perturbation than an early morning walk. It is a psychic as well as a sanitary investment.

§ 66

It is also a mental tonic--even in homœopathic doses.--I took last Sunday a little four-mile stroll before breakfast, and its calming and beneficent influence is with me still. No one was about; I had the whole country to myself, and I bathed a tired head in the spacious quietude of earth and sky. From a height I looked over a great and restful country, across the sleeping town, and far away over the peaceful lake. Above it all stretched the benevolent heavens, brooding over this pendent world.--I thought I saw fixity in the midst of motion; substance beneath evanescence; unity in multiplicity; a sort of goal where everything was cyclical; an end where all things seemed only means; infinity lurking in finitude; a divine inhering in the human. After the treadmill of the week it was uplifting, exalting. I inhaled great draughts of air from ultra-planetary spaces; I fed on manna fallen from the highest heavens. This tiny planet, with its trivial cares and duties, vanished from my eyes, and I cooled my brow in the clouds of the holy of holies.--But none the less did I recognise the all-importance, to it and to me, of earth's small cares and duties. Were they not part of that infinite multiplicity in which lurked that infinite unity? Did they not go to make up the "spiritual economy" of the cosmos? But I saw them in a newer light--a larger light than merely solar, and they took on a new aspect, and declared themselves integral portions of that divine All without which that divine All would cease to be.

There is something strangely pure and purifying about early morning air. It is Nature's great steriliser. It is aseptic; and none breathes it but is more or less cleansed of the taint of noontide life. The noxious germs of care and anxiety cannot live in it. It is a magnificent bactericide. Nature is herself then. Even the denizens of Nature seem to know this, for never is bird or beast more blithesome than at dawn.

§ 67

For lonely souls, for luckless souls, there is, perhaps, after all is said and done, but one source of solace. "Nothing human," said Eugénie de Guérin, "nothing human comforts the soul, nothing human supports it:--

'À l'enfant il faut sa mère, À mon âme il faut mon Dieu.'"