Project Gutenberg's Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862, by Various

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Title: Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862

Author: Various

Release Date: May 10, 2004 [EBook #12310]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ATLANTIC MONTHLY, NO. 56 ***

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THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY.

A MAGAZINE OF LITERATURE, ART, AND POLITICS.

* * * * *

VOL. IX.--JUNE, 1862.--NO. LVI.

* * * * *

WALKING.

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 pretence 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 th