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                            WALKING ESSAYS




                            WALKING ESSAYS

                                  BY

                            A. H. SIDGWICK

                                LONDON
                             EDWARD ARNOLD
                                 1912

                         _All rights reserved_




            _DEDICATION_

            _COMITIBUS_


    _O you who walked the ways with me
      On hill and plain and hollow:
    I ask your pardon, frank and free,
      For all the things that follow.
    Let me at least make one thing clear;
      In these--I know no name for them--
    These dreary talks on futile themes,
    Dim visions from a dullards dreams,
      At least you take no blame for them._

    _You cheered my heart, made short the road,
      And kept me philanthropic;
    I only write this little ode
      Which desecrates the topic.
    You trode with me the mountain ridge
      And clove the cloud wreaths over it;
    I take the web of memories
    We wove beneath the summer skies
      And lo! the ink-spots cover it._

    _How vain my effort, how absurd,
      Considered as a symbol!
    How lame and dull the written word
      To you the swift and nimble!
    How alien to the walkers mind,
      Earth-deep, heaven-high, unfillable,
    These petty snarls and jests ill-laid
    And all the profitless parade
      Of pompous polysyllable!_

    _But yet, I feel, though weak my phrase,
      My rhetoric though rotten,
    At least our tale of Walks and Days
      Should not go unforgotten;
    At least some printed word should mark
      The walker and his wanderings,
    The strides which lay the miles behind
    And lap the contemplative mind
      In calm, unfathomed ponderings._

    _And one rebuke I need not fear
      From those of our profession,
    That Walking Essays should appear
      To be one long digression.
    Let others take the hard high-road
      And earn its gift, callosity:
    For us the path that twists at will
    Through wood and field, and up the hill
      In easy tortuosity._

    _Therefore, companions of the boot,
      Joint-heirs of wind and weather,
    In kindness take this little fruit
      Of all our walks together.
    For aught it has of wit or truth
      I reckon you my creditors;
    Its dulness, errors, want of taste,
    Inconsequence, may all be placed
      To my account, the editor’s._

    _And haply you skim the work
      In skilled eclectic hurry,
    Some word may find the place where lurk
      Your memories of Surrey;
    Or, as you read and doze and droop
      Well on the way to slumberland,
    Before you some dim shapes will float,
    Austere, magnificent, remote,
      Their Majesties of Cumberland._

    _Dream but awhile: and clouds will lift
      To show the peaks at muster,
    The driving shadows shape and shift
      Before the hill-wind’s bluster:
    Below far down the earth lies spread
      With all its care and fretfulness,
    But here the crumpled soul unfolds,
    And every rock-strewn gully holds
      The waters of Forgetfulness._

    _So dream; and through your dreams shall roll
      The rhythm of limbs free-striding,
    Which moulds your being to a whole
      And heals the worlds dividing;
    So dream, and you shall be a man
      Free on the open road again;
    So dream the long night through, and wake
    With better heart to rise and take
      The burden of your load again._




PREFATORY NOTES


1. I have to thank two friends, who read or listened to large portions
of this work, for their sympathy, long-suffering, and good advice, and
to acquit them of all further complicity.

2. I must also thank a fellow-walker, who, on Maundy Thursday of 1910,
as we climbed the road out of Marlborough into Savernake Forest,
suggested to me the magnificent quotation from Cicero which heads the
essay on Walking and Music.

3. I have stolen the substance of one epigram from an _obiter dictum_ in
‘My System for Ladies,’ by J. P. Müller; but it was too good to miss.

4. None of the remarks about beer apply to Munich beer.

A. H. S.

_August 1912._




CONTENTS


                                                                    PAGE

      DEDICATION,                                                      v

   I. WALKING AND CONVERSATION,                                        3

  II. WALKER M