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Your muscles tighten rarely as you stump on over the elastic herbage; two miles an hour is quite enough for your modest desires, especially as you know you can quicken to four or five whenever you choose. As the day wears on, the glorious open-air confusion takes possession of your senses, your pulses beat with spirit, and you pass amid floating visions of keen colour, soft greenery, comforting shades. The corn rustles on the margin where the sandy soil ceases; the sleepy farmhouses seem to ‘give you a lazy greeting, and the figures of the labourers are like natural features of the landscape. Everything appears friendly; it may be that the feeling of kindness and security arises from your physical well-being, but it is there all the same, and what can you do more than enjoy? Perhaps in the midst of your confused happiness your mind begins acting on its own account, and quite disregards its humble companion, the body. Xavier de Maistre’s mind always did so, and left what Xavier called the poor bete of a carcass to take care of itself; and all of us have to experience this double existence at times. Then you find the advantages of knowing a great deal of poetry. I would not give a rush for a man who merely pores over his poets in order to make notes or comments on them; you ought to have them as beloved companions to be near you night and day, to take up the parable when your own independent thought is hazy with delight or even with sorrow. As you tramp along the whistling stretches amid the blaze of the ragworts and the tender passing glances of the wild veronica, you can take in all their loveliness with the eye, while the brain goes on adding to your pleasure by recalling the music of the poets. Perhaps you fall into step with the quiver and beat of our British Homer’s rushing rhymes, and Marmion thunders over the brown hills of the Border, or Clara lingers where mingles war’s rattle with groans of the dying. Perhaps the wilful brain persists in crooning over the “Belle Dame Sans Merci;” your mood flutters and changes with every minute, and you derive equal satisfaction from the organ-roll of Milton or the silvery flageolet tones of Thomas Moore. If culture consists in learning the grammar an etymologies of a poet’s song, then no cultured man will ever get any pleasure from poetry while he is on a walking tour; but, if you absorb your poets into your being, you have spells of rare and unexpected delight.

The halt is always pleasant. On our sand-hills the brackens grow to an immense height, and, if you lie down among them, you are surrounded by a pale green gleam, as if you had dived beneath some lucent sun-smitten water. The ground-lark sways on a frond above you; the stonechat lights for an instant, utters his cracking cry, and is off with a whisk; you have fair, quiet, and sweet rest, and you start up ready to jog along again. You come to a slow clear stream that winds seaward, lilting to itself in low whispered cadences. Over some broad shallow pool paven with brown stones the little trout fly hither and thither, making a weft and woof of dark streaks as they travel; the minnows poise themselves, and shiver and dart convulsively; the leisurely eel undulates along, and perhaps gives you a glint of his wicked eye; you begin to understand the angler’s fascination, for the most restive of men might be lulled by the light moan of that wimpling current. Cruel? Alas, yes!

That quaint old cruel coxcomb in his gullet
Should have a hook, with a small trout to pull it.

That was the little punishment which Byron devised for Izaak Walton. But of course, if you once begin to be supersensitive about cruelty, you find your way blocked at every cross-road of life, and existence ceases to be worth having.