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.