There is, indeed, that kind of pilgrimage which some few sad men undertake because their minds are overburdened by a sin or tortured with some great care that is not of their own fault.  These are excepted from the general rule, though even to these a very human spirit comes by the way, and the adventures of inns and foreign conversations broaden the world for them and lighten their burden.  But this kind of pilgrimage is rare and special, having its peculiar virtues.  The common sort (which how many men undertake under another name!) is a separate and human satisfaction of a need, the fulfilling of an instinct in us, the realisation of imagined horizons, the reaching of a goal.  For whoever yet that was alive reached an end and could say he was satisfied?  Yet who has not desired so to reach an end and to be satisfied?  Well, pilgrimage is for the most a sort of prefiguring or rehearsal.  A man says:  “I will play in show (but a show stiffened with a real and just object) at that great part which is all we can ever play.  Here I start from home, and there I reach a goal, and on the way I laugh and watch, sing and work.  Now I am at ease and again hampered; now poor, now rich, weary towards the end and at last arrived at that end.  So my great life is, and so this little chapter shall be.”  Thus he packs up the meaning of life into a little space to be able to look at it closely, as men carry with them small locket portraits of their birthplace or of those they love.

If a pilgrimage is all this, it is evident that however careless, it must not be untroublesome.  It would be a contradiction of pilgrimage to seek to make the journey short and rapid, merely consuming the mind for nothing, as is our modern habit; for they seem to think nowadays that to remain as near as possible to what one was at starting, and to one’s usual rut, is the great good of travel (as though a man should run through the Iliad only to note the barbarous absurdity of the Greek characters, or through Catullus for the sake of discovering such words as were like enough to English).  That is not the spirit of a pilgrimage at all.  The pilgrim is humble and devout, and human and charitable, and ready to smile and admire; therefore he should comprehend the whole of his way, the people in it, and the hills and the clouds, and the habits of the various cities.  And as to the method of doing this, we may go bicycling (though that is a little flurried) or driving (though that is luxurious and dangerous, because it brings us constantly against servants and flattery); but the best way of all is on foot, where one is a man like any other man, with the sky above one, and the road beneath, and the world on every side, and time to see all.

So also I designed to walk, and did, when I visited the tombs of the Apostles.

THE ARENA