To tell the truth, I saw an advertisement for able-bodied seamen, when I was a boy, sauntering in my native port, and as soon as I... came of age I embarked.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I, who cannot stay in my chamber for a single day without acquiring some rust,... confess that I am astonished at the power of end...urance, to say nothing of the moral insensibility, of my neighbors who confine themselves to shops and offices the whole day for weeks and months, aye, and years almost together. I know not what manner of stuff they are of,--sitting there now at three o'clock in the afternoon, as if it were three o'clock in the morning.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
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 the pretense of going à 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.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
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.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To come down to my own experience, my companion and I ... take pleasure in fancying ourselves as knights of a new, or rather an ol...d, 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.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
So we saunter toward the Holy Land, till one day the sun shall shine more brightly than ever he has done, shall perchance shine in...to our minds and hearts, and light up our whole lives with a great awakening light, as warm and serene and golden as on a bankside in autumn.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »