I recall has set forth the Gospel of Walking so
eloquently and so stimulatingly. Thoreau's religion and his philosophy
are all in this chapter. It is his most mature, his most complete and
comprehensive statement. He says:

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....
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.

Thoreau was the first man in this country, or in any other, so far as
I know, who made a religion of walking--the first to announce a Gospel
of the Wild. That he went forth into wild nature in much the same
spirit that the old hermits went into the desert, and was as devout in
his way as they were in theirs, is revealed by numerous passages in
his Journal. He would make his life a sacrament; he discarded the old
religious terms and ideas, and struck out new ones of his own:

What more glorious condition of being can we imagine than
from impure to become pure? May I not forget that I am
impure and vicious! May I not cease to love purity! May I go
to my slumbers as expecting to arise to a new and more
perfect day! May I so live and refine my life as fitting
myself for a society ever higher than I actually enjoy!

To watch for and describe all the divine features which I
detect in nature! My profession is to be always on the alert
to find God in nature, to know his lurking-place, to attend
all the oratorios, the operas, in nature.

Ah! I would walk, I would sit, and sleep, with natural
piety. What if I could pray aloud or to myself as I went
along the brooksides a cheerful prayer like the birds? For
joy I could embrace the earth. I shall delight to be buried
in it.

I do not des