If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again,-if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man, then you are ready for a walk. We should go forth on the shortest walk, perchance, in the spirit of undying adventure, never to return,- prepared to send back our embalmed hearts only as relics to our desolate kingdoms. Half the walk is but retracing our steps. Our expeditions are but tours, and come round again at evening to the old hearth-side from which we set out. It is true, we are but faint-hearted crusaders, even the walkers, nowadays, who undertake no persevering, never-ending enterprises. For every walk is a sort of crusade, preached by some Peter the Hermit in us, to go forth and reconquer this Holy Land from the hands of the Infidels.

But I prefer the first, which, indeed, is the most probable derivation. He who sits still in a house all the time may be the greatest vagrant of all but the saunterer, in the good sense, is no more vagrant than the meandering river, which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest course to the sea. For this is the secret of successful sauntering.

Some, however, would derive the word from sans terre, without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere. They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean.

I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks,-who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering: which word is beautifully derived 'from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretense of going à la Sainte Terre,' to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, 'There goes a Sainte-Terrer,' a Saunterer,-a Holy-Lander. I wish to make an extreme statement, if so I may make an emphatic one, for there are enough champions of civilization: the minister, and the school-committee, and every one of you will take care of that. I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil,-to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society.

Walking david thoreau