第50章

I do not deny the attraction of walking.I have bored this ancient city through and through in my daily travels, until I know it as an old inhabitant of a Cheshire knows his cheese.Why, it was I who, in the course of these rambles, discovered that remarkable avenue called MYRTLE STREET, stretching in one long line from east of the Reservoir to a precipitous and rudely paved cliff which looks down on the grim abode of Science, and beyond it to the far hills; a promenade so delicious in its repose, so cheerfully varied with glimpses down the northern slope into busy Cambridge Street with its iron river of the horse-railroad, and wheeled barges gliding back and forward over it, - so delightfully closing at its western extremity in sunny courts and passages where I know peace, and beauty, and virtue, and serene old age must be perpetual tenants, -so alluring to all who desire to take their daily stroll, in the words of Dr.Watts, -"Alike unknowing and unknown," -

that nothing but a sense of duty would have prompted me to reveal the secret of its existence.I concede, therefore, that walking is an immeasurably fine invention, of which old age ought constantly to avail itself.

Saddle-leather is in some respects even preferable to sole-leather.

The principal objection to it is of a financial character.But you may be sure that Bacon and Sydenham did not recommend it for nothing.One's HEPAR, or, in vulgar language, liver, - a ponderous organ, weighing some three or four pounds, - goes up and down like the dasher of a churn in the midst of the other vital arrangements, at every step of a trotting horse.The brains also are shaken up like coppers in a money-box.Riding is good, for those that are born with a silver-mounted bridle in their hand, and can ride as much and as often as they like, without thinking all the time they hear that steady grinding sound as the horse's jaws triturate with calm lateral movement the bank-bills and promises to pay upon which it is notorious that the profligate animal in question feeds day and night.

Instead, however, of considering these kinds of exercise in this empirical way, I will devote a brief space to an examination of them in a more scientific form.

The pleasure of exercise is due first to a purely physical impression, and secondly to a sense of power in action.The first source of pleasure varies of course with our condition and the state of the surrounding circumstances; the second with the amount and kind of power, and the extent and kind of action.In all forms of active exercise there are three powers simultaneously in action, - the will, the muscles, and the intellect.Each of these predominates in different kinds of exercise.In walking, the will and muscles are so accustomed to work together and perform their task with so little expenditure of force, that the intellect is left comparatively free.The mental pleasure in walking, as such, is in the sense of power over all our moving machinery.But in riding, I have the additional pleasure of governing another will, and my muscles extend to the tips of the animal's ears and to his four hoofs, instead of stopping at my hands and feet.Now in this extension of my volition and my physical frame into another animal, my tyrannical instincts and my desire for heroic strength are at once gratified.When the horse ceases to have a will of his own and his muscles require no special attention on your part, then you may live on horseback as Wesley did, and write sermons or take naps, as you like.But you will observe, that, in riding on horseback, you always have a feeling, that, after all, it is not you that do the work, but the animal, and this prevents the satisfaction from being complete.

Now let us look at the conditions of rowing.I won't suppose you to be disgracing yourself in one of those miserable tubs, tugging in which is to rowing the true boat what riding a cow is to bestriding an Arab.You know the Esquimaux KAYAK, (if that is the name of it,) don't you? Look at that model of one over my door.

Sharp, rather? - On the contrary, it is a lubber to the one you and I must have; a Dutch fish-wife to Psyche, contrasted with what Iwill tell you about.- Our boat, then, is something of the shape of a pickerel, as you look down upon his back, he lying in the sunshine just where the sharp edge of the water cuts in among the lily-pads.It is a kind of a giant POD, as one may say, - tight everywhere, except in a little place in the middle, where you sit.

Its length is from seven to ten yards, and as it is only from sixteen to thirty inches wide in its widest part, you understand why you want those "outriggers," or projecting iron frames with the rowlocks in which the oars play.My rowlocks are five feet apart;double the greatest width of the boat.

Here you are, then, afloat with a body a rod and a half long, with arms, or wings, as you may choose to call them, stretching more than twenty feet from tip to tip; every volition of yours extending as perfectly into them as if your spinal cord ran down the centre strip of your boat, and the nerves of your arms tingled as far as the broad blades of your oars, - oars of spruce, balanced, leathered, and ringed under your own special direction.This, in sober earnest, is the nearest approach to flying that man has ever made or perhaps ever will make.As the hawk sails without flapping his pinions, so you drift with the tide when you will, in the most luxurious form of locomotion indulged to an embodied spirit.But if your blood wants rousing, turn round that stake in the river, which you see a mile from here; and when you come in in sixteen minutes, (if you do, for we are old boys, and not champion scullers, you remember,) then say if you begin to feel a little warmed up or not! You can row easily and gently all day, and you can row yourself blind and black in the face in ten minutes, just as you like.It has been long agreed that there is no way in which a man can accomplish so much labor with his muscles as in rowing.