This is an excerpt from a delightful vintage book by the said author. Haultain circles around all facets of walking during his time in the 1900’s. As one works one’s way through the book the reader will be struck by the fact that not much has changed with our vocation throughout the years. You will be smitten with the long gone turn of phrase. More passages of text will appear over time.
For, mark you, the essence of a country walk is that you shall have no object or aim whatsoever. The frame of mind in which one ought to set out upon a rural peregrination should be one of absolute mental vacuity. Almost one ought to rid oneself, if so be that were possible, even of the categories of time and place: for to start with a determination to cover a certain distance within a specified time is to take, not a walk, but a “constitutional”; and of all abortions or monstrosities of country walks, commend me to the constitutional. The proper frame of mind is that of absolute and secure passivity; an openness to impressions; a giving-up of ourselves to the great and guiding influences of benignant Nature; a humble receptivity of soul; a wondering and childlike eagerness—not a restless and too inquisitive eagerness—to learn all that great Nature may like to teach, and to learn it in the way that great Nature would have us learn.
Yet, true, though we take with us a vacuous mind, it must be a plenable mind (if I may coin the word), a serenely responsive mind; otherwise we shall not reap the harvest of a quiet eye.
“How bountiful is Nature! he shall find Who seeks not; and to him who hath not asked Large measure shall be dealt,”
sings Wordsworth; and of Nature and of Nature’s ways no one had a greater right to sing. Wordsworth must have been an ideal country walker. “The Excursion” is the harvest of innumerable walks, and when Wordsworth depicts the Wanderer he depicts himself:
“In the woods A lone Enthusiast, and among the fields, Itinerant in this labour, he had passed The better portion of his time; and there Spontaneously had his affections thriven Amid the bounties of the year, the peace And liberty of Nature; there he kept, In solitude and solitary thought, His mind in a just equipoise of love.”
Only, “the w . . . w . . . worst of W . . . W . . . Wordsworth is,” as a stammering friend of mine once remarked, “is, he is so d . . . d . . . d . . . desperate p . . . pensive.” (I was expecting a past participle, not an ungrammatical adverb for the “d.”)—He is; and like, yet unlike, Falstaff, he is not only pensive in himself, but he is the cause of pensiveness in other things—to wit, his “stars,” his “citadels,” and what not; and certainly his diary of “A Tour in Scotland” makes the driest reading I know.—Nevertheless, Wordsworth must have been an ideal country walker. He was
“A lover of the meadows and the woods, And mountains; and of all that we behold From this green earth”; and if we would understand him, we ourselves must “Let the moon Shine on us in our solitary walk; And let the misty mountain winds be free To blow against us.”
The Order Of Walkers 