The Tao of Travel

WORDSWORTH'S PASSION FOR walking inspired his poems, which often praise the joyful activity of walking. At the age of seventy-three, reflecting on one of his earliest poems, "An Evening Walk," he wrote that he was an "eye-witness" to the features of the countryside that he put into the poem. Speaking of a particular couplet, he wrote, "I recollect distinctly the very spot where this first struck me. It was in the way between Hawkshead and Ambleside, and gave me extreme pleasure. The moment was important in my poetical history; for I date from it my consciousness of the infinite variety of natural appearances which had been unnoticed by the poets of any age or country, so far as I was acquainted with them; and I made a resolution to supply, in some degree, the deficiency."

His life was shaped by walking. Walking home after a party, while in his teens, overcome by a sunrise and a glimpse of mountains, he felt he was witnessing a revelation, and was so moved he decided that his role in life would be a "Dedicated Spirit."

Walking became part of his routine, living with his sister Dorothy at Dove Cottage in Grasmere. Dorothy remarked on how he walked for hours, even in the rain, and that "he generally composes his verses out of doors."

"He was, upon the whole, not a well-made man. His legs were pointedly condemned by all female connoisseurs in legs," Thomas De Quincey wrote waspishly, yet his legs were "serviceable," adding, "I calculate, upon good data, that with those identical legs Wordsworth must have traveled a distance of 175,000 to 180,000 English miles."

Wordsworth ambled around Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. In his fifties he toured the Continent, walking up and down France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and elsewhere, writing the whole time. Even in his sixties he was able to walk twenty miles a day. Dorothy wrote, "And as to climbing of mountains, the hardiest & the youngest are yet hardly a match for him." At seventy he climbed Helvellyn, at over three thousand feet the third-highest peak in the Lake District.

He died at the age of eighty, a few weeks after being taken ill on a walk. One of the oddities of Wordsworth as a lover of flowers and fresh air is that (so everyone who knew him testified) he had no sense of smell.

Thoreau's "Walking

HENRY DAVID THOREAU, who made a sacrament of walking, was a relentless analyzer of his experience and a constant refiner of his prose style, as his voluminous journals attest. And Thoreau was never happier than when he was robustly explaining the crochets of his life. His essay "Walking," which appeared in his posthumous volume Excursions, is one of his happiest pieces. It is also one of the best essays on the subject of perambulation. Thoreau lived near enough to nature in Concord that he did not have to go far to feel he was surrounded by wilderness, even when he could hear train whistles.

He is specific about miles—he walked as much as twenty a day, he says—and about hours too: "I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I spend four hours a day at least, and it is commonly more than that, sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields, absolutely free from all worldly engagements."

This sacramental walking must not be confused with mere physical exercise, he says, but is more akin to yoga or a spiritual activity. "The walking of which I speak has nothing in it akin to taking exercise, as it is called, as the sick take medicine at stated hours, as the swinging of dumb-bells or chairs; but is itself the enterprise and adventure of the day. If you would get exercise, go in search of the springs of life. Think of a man's swinging dumb-bells for his health, when those springs are bubbling up in far-off pastures unsought by him!" Since walking cannot be separated from the process of thought, "you must walk like a camel, which is said to be the only beast which ruminates when walking. When a traveler asked Wordsworth's servant to show him her master's study, she answered, 'Here is his library, but his study is out of doors.'"

In "Walking" Thoreau writes, "Two or three hours' walking will carry me to as strange a country as I expect ever to see. A single farmhouse which I had not seen before is sometimes as good as the dominions of the King of Dahomey." This is a classic Thoreau conceit, the isolated farmhouse every bit as satisfying as distant Dahomey. In fact, Thoreau was a wide reader of travel books, and though Sir Richard Burton's Mission to Gelele, King of Dahomey came out the year after Thoreau died, he was familiar with Burton's travels in the lake regions of central Africa and elsewhere—twelve of Burton's books of travel and discovery were published in Thoreau's lifetime, including Wanderings in West Africa.