Some do not walk at all; others walk in the highways; a few walk across lots.  Roads are made for horses and men of business.  I do not travel in them much, comparatively, because I am not in a hurry to get to any tavern or grocery or livery-stable or depot to which they lead.  I am a good horse to travel, but not from choice a roadster.  The landscape-painter uses the figures of men to mark a road.  He would not make that use of my figure.  I walk out into a Nature such as the old prophets and poets, Menu, Moses, Homer, Chaucer, walked in.  You may name it America, but it is not America:  neither Americus Vespucius, nor Columbus, nor the rest were the discoverers of it.  There is a truer account of it in mythology than in any history of America, so called, that I have seen.

However, there are a few old roads that may be trodden with profit, as if they led somewhere now that they are nearly discontinued.  There is the Old Marlborough Road, which does not go to Marlborough now, methinks, unless that is Marlborough where it carries me.  I am the bolder to speak of it here, because I presume that there are one or two such roads in every town.

THE OLD MARLBOROUGH ROAD.

    Where they once dug for money,
    But never found any;
    Where sometimes Martial Miles
    Singly files,
    And Elijah Wood,
    I fear for no good: 
    No other man,
    Save Elisha Dugan,—­
    O man of wild habits,
    Partridges and rabbits,
    Who hast no cares
    Only to set snares,
    Who liv’st all alone,
    Close to the bone,
    And where life is sweetest
    Constantly eatest. 
  When the spring stirs my blood
   With the instinct to travel,
   I can get enough gravel
  On the Old Marlborough Road. 
    Nobody repairs it,
    For nobody wears it;
    It is a living way,
    As the Christians say. 
  Not many there be
   Who enter therein,
  Only the guests of the
   Irishman Quin. 
  What is it, what is it,
   But a direction out there,
  And the bare possibility
   Of going somewhere? 
    Great guide-boards of stone,
    But travellers none;
    Cenotaphs of the towns
    Named on their crowns. 
    It is worth going to see
    Where you might be. 
    What king
    Did the thing,
    Set up how or when,
    By what selectmen,
    Gourgas or Lee,
    Clark or Darby? 
    They’re a great endeavor
    To be something forever;
    Blank tablets of stone,
    Where a traveller might groan,
    And in one sentence
    Grave all that is known;
    Which another might read,
    In his extreme need. 
    I know one or two
    Lines that would do,
    Literature that might stand
    All over the land,
    Which a man could remember
    Till next December,
    And road again in the spring,
    After the thawing. 
  If with fancy unfurled
   You leave your abode,
  You may go round the world
   By the Old Marlborough Road.