Tennyson, FitzGerald, Matthew Arnold, Carlyle, Kingsley, Meredith, Richard Jefferies.  What walker can ever forget the day when he first read “The Story of My Heart?” In my case it was the 24th of August, 1912, on a train from London to Cambridge.  Then there were George Borrow, Emily Bronte on her Yorkshire moors, and Leslie Stephen, one of the princes of the clan and founder of the famous Sunday Tramps of whom Meredith was one.  Walt Whitman would have made a notable addition to that posse of philosophic walkers, save that I fear the garrulous half-baked old barbarian would have been disappointed that he could not dominate the conversation.

There have been stout walkers in our own day.  Mr. W.H.  Davies (the Super-Tramp), G.M.  Trevelyan, Hilaire Belloc, Edward Thomas who died on the field of honour in April, 1917, and Francis Ledwidge, who was killed in Flanders.  Who can forget his noble words, “I have taken up arms for the fields along the Boyne, for the birds and the blue sky over them.”  There is Walter Prichard Eaton, the Jefferies of our own Berkshires.  One could extend the list almost without end.  Sometimes it seems as though literature were a co-product of legs and head.

Charles Lamb and Leigh Hunt were great city ramblers, followed in due course by Dickens, R.L.S., Edward Lucas, Holbrook Jackson, and Pearsall Smith.  Mr. Thomas Burke is another, whose “Nights in Town” will delight the lover of the greatest of all cities.  But urban wanderings, delicious as they are, are not quite what we mean by walking.  On pavements one goes by fit and start, halting to see, to hear, and to speculate.  In the country one captures the true ecstasy of the long, unbroken swing, the harmonious glow of mind and body, eyes fed, soul feasted, brain and muscle exercised alike.

Meredith is perhaps the Supreme Pontiff of modern country walkers:  no soft lover of drowsy golden weather, but master of the stiffer breed who salute frost and lashing rain and roaring southwest wind, who leap to grapple with the dissolving riddles of destiny.  February and March are his months: 

    For love we Earth then serve we all;
      Her mystic secret then is ours: 
    We fall, or view our treasures fall,
      Unclouded, as beholds her flowers.

    Earth, from a night of frosty wreck,
      Enrobed in morning’s mounted fire,
    When lowly, with a broken neck,
      The crocus lays her cheek to mire.

I suppose every walker collects a few precious books which form the bible of his chosen art.  I have long been collecting a Walker’s Breviary of my own.  It includes Stevenson’s “Walking Tours,” G.M.  Trevelyan’s “Walking,” Leslie Stephen’s “In Praise of Walking,” shards and crystals from all the others I have mentioned.  Michael Fairless, Vachel Lindsay, and Frank Sidgwick have place in it.  On my private shelf stands “Journeys to Bagdad” by Mr. Charles Brooks, who has good pleasantry to utter on this topic; and