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\title{Walking}
\author{Henry David Thoreau}
\date{1862}

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\textbf{Walking, Henry David Thoreau, 1862}

I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness,
as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil, --to regard man
as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member
of society. I wish to make an extreme statement, if so I may make an
emphatic one, for there are enough champions of civilization: the
minister, and the school-committee, and every one of you will take
care of that.

I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who
understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks, --who had a
genius, so to speak, for sauntering: which word is beautifully derived
``from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages,
and asked charity, under pretense of going \'a la Sainte Terre,'' to
the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, ``There goes a
Sainte-Terrer,'' a Saunterer, --a Holy-Lander. They who never go to
the Holy Land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers
and vagabonds; but they who do go there are saunterers in the good
sense, such as I mean. Some, however, would derive the word from sans
terre, without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense,
will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home
everywhere. For this is the secret of successful sauntering. He who
sits still in a house all the time may be the greatest vagrant of all;
but the saunterer, in the good sense, is no more vagrant than the
meandering river, which is all the while sedulously seeking the
shortest course to the sea. But I prefer the first, which, indeed, is
the most probable derivation. For every walk is a sort of crusade,
preached by some Peter the Hermit in us, to go forth and reconquer
this Holy Land from the hands of the Infidels.

It is true, we are but faint-hearted crusaders, even the walkers,
nowadays, who undertake no persevering, never-ending enterprises. Our
expeditions are but tours, and come round again at evening to the old
hearth-side from which we set out. Half the walk is but retracing our
steps. We should go forth on the shortest walk, perchance, in the
spirit of undying adventure, never to return, -- prepared to send back
our embalmed hearts only as relics to our desolate kingdoms. If you
are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife
and child and friends, and never see them again, --if you have paid your
debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a
free man, then you are ready for a walk.

To come down to my own experience, my companion and I, for I sometimes
have a companion, take pleasure in fancying ourselves knights of a
new, or rather an old, order, --not Equestrians or Chevaliers, not
Ritters or Riders, but Walkers, a still more ancient and honorable
class, I trust. The Chivalric and heroic spirit which once belonged to
the Rider seems now to reside in, or perchance to have subsided into,
the Walker, --not the Knight, but Walker, Errant. He is a sort of fourth
estate, outside of Church and State and People.

We have felt that we almost alone hereabouts practiced this noble art;
though, to tell the truth, at least, if their own assertions are to be
received, most of my townsmen would fain walk sometimes, as I do, but
they cannot. No wealth can buy the requisite leisure, freedom, and
independence, which are the capital in this profession. It comes only
by the grace of God. It requires a direct dispensation from Heaven to
become a walker. You must be born into the family of the
Walkers. Ambulator nascitur, non fit. Some of my townsmen, it is true,
can remember and have described to me some walks which they took ten
years ago, in which they were so blessed as to lose themselves for
half an hour in the woods; but I know very well that they have
confined themselves to the highway ever since, whatever pretensions
they may make to belong to this select class. No doubt they were
elevated for a moment as by the reminiscence of a previous state of
existence, when even they were foresters and outlaws.
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