POETS AS WALKERS

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 53, Issue 3800, 26 August 1936, Page 3

POETS AS WALKERS

MEMORIES OF WORDSWORTH KEATS AND SHELLEY. k “I imagine,” writes a learned correspondent of the Manchester Guardian, “that Mir Ivior Brown’s remark in his article of a recent issuer, ‘I cannot fancy that the Romantics themselves were great walkers,’ will have filled your mail bag with letters of protest. Wordsworth may have been ‘quite happy looking at the hills . . . without the compulsion to scale the sumlmits,’ but in his youth, at least, he was an inveterate walking tourist. In company with his sister, Or with Coleridge, he tramped Salisbury Plain, the Seven Valley, the Wye Valley and the Yorkshire moors, as well as the Lake district, and that he possessed the true hiker’s spirit is witnessed by his dedication to the Rev. Robert Jones of his ‘Descriptive Sketches Taken During a Pedestrian Tour Among the Alps.’ ‘You know well,’ he says, ‘how great is the difference between two companions lolling in a post-chaise land two travellers plodding slowly along the road side by side, each with his little knapsack of necessaries upon his shoulder, How much more of heart hetween the two latter!’ ( “Coleridge, however, was the mightiest walker of them all. He thought nothing of walking forty miles in one day, and at the end of a long tnamp to visit Wordsiworth at Racedown he wias so fresh that he ‘leapt over a gate and bounded down the pathless field!’ In Scotland he walked two hundred and sixty-three miles in eight days. “Even Lamb,” our correspondent continues, “the unlikliest of the lot, was a confirmed lover of country walks. His letters lare sprinkled with references to them. In 1833, when he was fifty-eight, he writes to Wordsworth: ‘Walked sixteen miles yesterday.’ And Keats’s long walking toijr with his friend, Charles Armitage Brown, is famous. They started from Lancaster in June, and finished at Cromarty in September, after seeing Wjordsworth’s, Scott’s and Bruns’s country, and most of the Highlands and islands. At Cromarty, Keats was overcome by a bad cold and toothacre, but many a modern and more muscular hiker by that time would have been only fit for the hospital. “As for Shelley, listen to Peacock: ‘During his residence (at Miarlow v/e often walked to Londoq, frequently in company with Mr Hogg. It was our usual way of going there when not pressed by time. . . The total distance was thirty-twio miles to Tyburn turnpike. We usually stayed two nights, and walked back on the third day.’ “No,” our erudite correspondent concludes, crushingly, “the only difference between ourselves and the Romantics as walkers is that nowadays touring on foot has become a Movement and we are self-conscious about it.”