There is no way to get the values of the countryside so good as walking. If you have a horse he gets in between you and the glory of the landscape, and if you whiz along the road in an automobile you had as well, save for the fresh air, be at a moving-picture show. Only when you walk do you get that personal, minute, and intimate acquaintance with nature.
It is even so in our intellectual life. When we think along with a political party, a religious sect, a literary club, or an artistic school, we may be said to be travelling by train through the land of ideas. When we leave all groups and creeds and plunge alone into life’s problems, see and determine things for ourselves, and form our own tastes and persuasions, we may be said to walk.
There are times, perhaps most of the time, when we must perforce go by train; the affairs of society and the state being too complex for individual capacity. We must possibly vote the party ticket, go to church, join the literary crusade, and co-operate in this or that group; but we should reserve the right to go often upon an independent ramble.
“There are men,” writes Hamerton, “whose whole art of living consists in passing from one conventionalism to another, as a traveler changes his train. To them intellectual independence is unintelligible. Why go afoot when you may sit comfortably in a train, a rug around your lazy legs and your head resting softly in a corner?”
