thoreau-walking

Thoreau, Henry David. Civil Disobedience and Other Essays. New York, NY: Dover Publications, Inc. 1993.

I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, ok 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 for charity, under pretence of going a la Sainte Terre," to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, "There goes a Sainte-Terrer," a Saunterer, —a Holy-Lander. 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, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere.