There never was any kinder incentive of companionship.  It is the bright Thames walking softly in your blood, or you that are flowing by so many curves of low shore on the level of the world.

Now you are over against the shadows, and now opposite the sun, as the wheeling river makes the sky wheel about your head and swings the lighted clouds or the blue to face your eyes.  The birds, flying high for mountain air in the heat, wing nothing but their own weight.  You will not envy them for so brief a success.  Did not Wordsworth want a “little boat” for the air?  Did not Byron call him a blockhead therefor?  Wordsworth had, perhaps, a sense of towing.

All the advantage of the expert is nothing in this simple industry.  Even the athlete, though he may go further, cannot do better than you, walking your effectual walk with the line attached to your willing steps.  Your moderate strength of a mere everyday physical education gives you the sufficient mastery of the tow-path.

If your natural walk is heavy, there is spirit in the tackle to give it life, and if it is buoyant it will be more buoyant under the buoyant burden—­the yielding check—­than ever before.  An unharnessed walk must begin to seem to you a sorry incident of insignificant liberty.  It is easier than towing?  So is the drawing of water in a sieve easier to the arms than drawing in a bucket, but not to the heart.

To walk unbound is to walk in prose, without the friction of the wings of metre, without the sweet and encouraging tug upon the spirit and the line.

No dead weight follows you as you tow.  The burden is willing; it depends upon you gaily, as a friend may do without making any depressing show of helplessness; neither, on the other hand, is it apt to set you at naught or charge you with a make-believe.  It accompanies, it almost anticipates; it lags when you are brisk, just so much as to give your briskness good reason, and to justify you if you should take to still more nimble heels.  All your haste, moreover, does but waken a more brilliantly-sounding ripple.

The bounding and rebounding burden you carry (but it nearly seems to carry you, so fine is the mutual good will) gives work to your figure, enlists your erectness and your gait, but leaves your eyes free.  No watching of mechanisms for the labourer of the tow-path.  What little outlook is to be kept falls to the lot of the steerer smoothly towed.  Your easy and efficient work lets you carry your head high and watch the birds, or listen to them.  They fly in such lofty air that they seem to turn blue in the blue sky.  A flash of their flight shows silver for a moment, but they are blue birds in that sunny distance above, as mountains are blue, and horizons.  The days are so still that you do not merely hear the cawing of the rooks—­you overhear their hundred private croakings and creakings, the soliloquy of the solitary places swept by wings.