There is a place above the Roman Wall beyond the River Tyne where one can do this thing. Behind one lies the hospitality and the human noise which have inhabited the town of the river valley for certainly two thousand years. Before one is the dead line of the road, and that complete emptiness of the moors as they rise up toward Cheviot on the one hand and Carter Fell upon the other. The earth is here altogether deserted and alone: you go out into it because it is your business to go: you are walking away. As for your memories, they are of no good to you except to lend you that dignity which can always support a memoried man; you are bound to forget, and it is your business to leave all that you have known altogether behind you, and no man has eyes at the back of his head--go forward. Upon my soul I think that the greatest way of walking, now I consider the matter, or now that I have stumbled upon it, is walking away. H. BELLOC. Walking an Antidote to City Poison There is moral as well as bodily wholesomeness in a mountain walk, if the walker has the understanding heart, and eschews _picnics_. It is good for any man to be alone with nature and himself, or with a friend who knows when silence is more sociable than talk: "In the wilderness alone, There where nature worships God." It is well to be in places where man is little and God is great--where what he sees all around him has the same look as it had a thousand years ago, and will have the same, in all likelihood, when he has been a thousand years in his grave. It abates and rectifies a man, if he is worth the process. It is not favourable to religious feeling to hear only of the actions and interference of man, and to behold nothing but what human ingenuity has completed. There is an image of God's greatness impressed upon the outward face of nature fitted to make us all pious, and to breathe into our hearts a purifying and salutary fear. In cities everything is man, and man alone. He seems to move and govern all, and be the Providence of cities; and there we do not render unto CÊsar the things which are CÊsar's, and unto God the things which are God's; but God is forgotten, and CÊsar is supreme--all is human policy, human foresight, human power; nothing reminds us of _invisible dominion, and concealed omnipotence_--it is all earth, and no heaven. One cure of this is prayer and the solitary place. As the body, harassed with the noxious air of cities, seeks relief in the freedom and the purity of the fields and hills, so the mind, wearied by commerce with men, resumes its vigour in solitude, and repairs its dignity. _Sydney Smith._ On Going a Journey One of the pleasantest things in the world is going a journey; but I like to go by myself. I can enjoy society in a room; but out of doors nature is company enough for me. I am then never less alone than when alone. "The fields his study, nature was his book."