YOU need a book, but you cannot carry Gibbon’s Decline and Fall with you, even if you feel the need. The tramp’s library is limited, for books are heavy. It is best to tramp with one book only. But it is a missed opportunity not to have one book. For you can gain an intimacy with a book and an author in that way, which it is difficult to obtain in a library or in the midst of the rush of the books of the season.
Each will have his choice though many will choose alike. The inexperienced may pop the latest yellow-back into the rucksack, not grasping that it will be read through in two lazy afternoons, and that then he will have no book to fall back upon. In the trenches in France a happy habit developed of leaving read books upon dry ledges in the dugouts. One often came upon a treasure trove of the kind. But when tramping, you cannot leave books for others with much hope of their being found. And rarely does one find any stray literature unless it be some tract on the futility of sin.
It is better, therefore, to take with one a whole-time book. It is good to have a book that is full of meat, one with broad margins for scribblings and extra pages for thoughts, poems, thumb-nail sketches. After a long tramp it is nice to see a book which has been clothed with pencilings. It records in a way the spiritual life of the adventure, and will recall it to you when in later years you turn over the page again.
It is well to take a book that you do not quite understand, one that you have already nibbled at but have found difficult. I do not mean an abstruse work, but one you are just on the verge of understanding and making your own.
At different stages of development you will have different books. A boy just beginning to think could do worse than take The Autocrat at the Breakfast Table, or Thoreau’s Walden; a little later comes Erewhon or Eöthen. At eighteen Sartor Resartus or Carpenter’s Towards Democracy, or Browning’s “Paracelsus.” A good deal depends on temperament as to whether a volume of Shelley or Keats will keep you company all the while. You read and reread a poem that you like until it begins to sing in your mind. It becomes your possession. There are marvelous passages lying hidden in a poem like “Paracelsus”:
Ask the gier-eagle when she stoops at once
Into the vast and unexplored abyss,
What full-grown power informs her from the first
Why she not marvels strenuously beating
The silent, boundless regions of the sky!