Thames walking softly in your blood, or you that are flowing by so many
curves of low shore on the level of the world.

Now you are over against the shadows, and now opposite the sun, as the
wheeling river makes the sky wheel about your head and swings the lighted
clouds or the blue to face your eyes. The birds, flying high for
mountain air in the heat, wing nothing but their own weight. You will
not envy them for so brief a success. Did not Wordsworth want a "little
boat" for the air? Did not Byron call him a blockhead therefor?
Wordsworth had, perhaps, a sense of towing.

All the advantage of the expert is nothing in this simple industry. Even
the athlete, though he may go further, cannot do better than you, walking
your effectual walk with the line attached to your willing steps. Your
moderate strength of a mere everyday physical education gives you the
sufficient mastery of the towpath.

If your natural walk is heavy, there is spirit in the tackle to give it
life, and if it is buoyant it will be more buoyant under the buoyant
burden--the yielding check--than ever before. An unharnessed walk must
begin to seem to you a sorry incident of insignificant liberty. It is
easier than towing? So is the drawing of water in a sieve easier to the
arms than drawing in a bucket, but not to the heart.

To walk unbound is to walk in prose, without the friction of the wings of
metre, without the sweet and encouraging tug upon the spirit and the
line.

No dead weight follows you as you tow. The burden is willing; it depends
upon you gaily, as a friend may do without making any depressing show of