The logical English train a scholar as they train an engineer. Oxford is Greek factory, as Wilton mills weave carpet, and Sheffiel...d grinds steel. They know the use of a tutor, as they know the use of a horse; and they draw the greatest amount of benefit from both. The reading men are kept by hard walking, hard riding, and measured eating and drinking, at the top of their condition, and two days before the examination, do not work but lounge, ride, or run, to be fresh on the college doomsday.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
And then came the most devastating thought of all: I was one of them. I who used to swing upside down on a living horse, who alway...s danced when mere walking would have done, so glad was I of life, so full of health. It was the most gruesome thought I had ever had in my life.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I was once reproved by a minister who was driving a poor beast to some meeting-house horse-sheds among the hills of New Hampshire,... because I was bending my steps to a mountain-top on the Sabbath, instead of a church, when I would have gone farther than he to hear a true word spoken on that or any day. He declared that I was "breaking the Lord's fourth commandment," and proceeded to enumerate, in a sepulchral tone, the disasters which had befallen him whenever he had done any ordinary work on the Sabbath. He really thought that a god was on the watch to trip up those men who followed any secular work on this day, and did not see that it was the evil conscience of the workers that did it. The country is full of this superstition, so that when one enters a village, the church, not only really but from association, is the ugliest looking building in it, because it is the one in which human nature stoops the lowest and is most disgraced. Certainly, such temples as these shall ere long cease to deform the landscape. There are few things more disheartening and disgusting than when you are walking the streets of a strange village on the Sabbath, to hear a preacher shouting like a boatswain in a gale of wind, and thus harshly profaning the quiet atmosphere of the day. You fancy him to have taken off his coat, as when men are about to do hot and dirty work.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Just walking around, An object of curiosity to some,... But you are too preoccupied By the secret smudge in the back of your soul To say much, and wander around, Smiling to yourself and others.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
[T]he syndrome known as life is too diffuse to admit of palliation. For every symptom that is eased, another is made worse. The ho...rse leech's daughter is a closed system. Her quantum of wantum cannot vary.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If a walker is indeed an individualist there is nowhere he can't go at dawn and not many places he can't go at noon. But just as i...t demeans life to live alongside a great river you can no longer swim in or drink from, to be crowded into safer areas and hours takes much of the gloss off walking--one sport you shouldn't have to reserve a time and a court for.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Off south, the bison multiply so fast a slaughter's mandatory every spring... and every spring the creeks get fat and Kicking Horse fills up.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »