Paths mattered to Bashō, who could — like Wordsworth or John Muir — cover twenty or thirty miles a day by foot. In his youth, it seems he traveled only as circumstances required. In mid-life, he traveled by choice, following the example of earlier poet-wanderers he admired. By the end of his life, his journeying gives off the scent of an irrefutable restlessness, a simple incapacity to stay long at home.