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Walking by Henry David Thoreau
This etext was prepared by Q Myers, Bend, Oregon.





Walking
by Henry David Thoreau

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,