It is needless to accumulate examples of a doctrine which will no
doubt be accepted as soon as it is announced. Walking is the best of
panaceas for the morbid tendencies of authors. It is, I need only
observe, as good for reasoners as for poets. The name of "peripatetic"
suggests the connection. Hobbes walked steadily up and down the hills
in his patron's park when he was in his venerable old age. To the same
practice may be justly ascribed the utilitarian philosophy. Old Jeremy
Bentham kept himself up to his work for eighty years by his regular
"post-jentacular circumgyrations." His chief disciple, James Mill,
walked incessantly and preached as he walked. John Stuart Mill imbibed
at once psychology, political economy, and a love of walks from his
father. Walking was his one recreation; it saved him from becoming
a mere smoke-dried pedant; and though he put forward the pretext of
botanical researches, it helped him to perceive that man is something
besides a mere logic machine. Mill's great rival as a spiritual guide,
Carlyle, was a vigorous walker, and even in his latest years was a
striking figure when performing his regular constitutionals in London.
One of the vivid passages in the _Reminiscences_ describes his walk
with Irving from Glasgow to Drumclog. Here they sat on the "brow
of a peat hag, while far, far away to the westward, over our brown
horizon, towered up white and visible at the many miles of distance a
high irregular pyramid. Ailsa Craig we at once guessed, and thought
of the seas and oceans over yonder." The vision naturally led to a
solemn conversation, which was an event in both lives. Neither Irving
nor Carlyle himself feared any amount of walking in those days, it is
added, and next day Carlyle took his longest walk, fifty-four miles.
Carlyle is unsurpassable in his descriptions of scenery: from the
pictures of mountains in _Sartor Resartus_ to the battle-pieces in
_Frederick_. Ruskin, himself a good walker, is more rhetorical but not
so graphic; and it is self-evident that nothing educates an eye for the
features of a landscape so well as the practice of measuring it by your
own legs.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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