During Thoreau’s time, there were two models of travelogues: sequential and topical. He preferred to use the first but used the second in Walden. It was understood even at his time that a travelogue doesn’t have to have a coherent structure. While order was free, most travelogues at this time committed to totality.
Romantic travel writers needed to be very versed with observation, but they also had to go beyond this. In Thoreau’s words, they have to tell “how they have happened to the universe.” Generally, romantic excursions during Thoreau’s day portrayed lightness—that the the travelogue would bring both writer and reader to a pastoral dream-world where everything is pleasant.
In the popular romantic excursions of the era there is, so to speak, a convention of levity, a tacit assumption that the prevailing atmosphere is going to be bucolic reverie or musing, which will furnish both author and reader an escape from business and the city into a pastoral dream-world.
References
Buell, Lawrence. “Thoreau and the Literary Excursion.” Literary Transcendentalism: Style and Vision in the American Renaissance, Cornell University Press, 1973, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7591/j.ctt1g69x7r.14.
most travelogues used one of two models: the sequential, sometimes day-by-day (Tudor’s “A Tour,” lrving’s Tour, Brackenridge’s Journal), or the topical (Mme de Stael’s Germany, Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, Emerson’s English Traits). Thoreau preferred the former model in general, though he used the latter in Walden. A literary travel book was not expected to have a very coherent structure; one of its pleasures, indeed, as James Russell Lowell said in his review of Thoreau’s A Week, was in its ” happy fortuity.”
A talent for observation and description was a sine qua non, but romantic travelers were expected to go beyond this and tell not simply “what has happened to them,” but ” how they have happened to the universe,” in Thoreau’s words
there were no special ground rules for the order in which a travel writer should proceed-that would depend on the order of observation or reflection, but there was an unspoken commitment to totality.
In the popular romantic excursions of the era there is, so to speak, a convention of levity, a tacit assumption that the prevailing atmosphere is going to be bucolic reverie or musing, which will furnish both author and reader an escape from business and the city into a pastoral dream-world.