W_ING

Therefore am I still
A lover of the meadows and the woods,
And mountains; and of all that we behold
From this green earth; of all the mighty world
Of eye, and ear,—both what they half create,
And what perceive; well pleased to recognise
In nature and the language of the sense,
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being.


Studies found that walkers are less likely to contract cancer, heart disease, stroke, diabetes and other killer diseases. They live longer, and their mental and spiritual health benefits from regular walking.
About two hundred years ago, the British Romantic poet William Wordsworth - although neither a medic nor a scientist - basically said already the same when he described nature as his nurse and the guardian of his heart and soul. Wordsworth was a passionate walker despite having legs that were "condemned by all the female connoisseurs." Thomas De Quincey then, however, admits that these very legs served Wordsworth well since he "must have traversed a distance of 175 to 180,000 English miles" with them and "has been indebted [to them] for a life of unclouded happiness".

Wordsworth's stimulus, walking, is in grammatical terms a gerund, the present participle of a verb that functions as a noun, as for example in "Quitting is foolish." Gerunds usually name activities, such as quitting or walking, rather than people or objects and can always be replaced with a proper noun: "His notice to quit is foolish."
The –ing form of a verb, its present participle, can, of course, also function as part of the verb or as an adjective.

An excerpt from "The legs of William Wordsworth" goes a long way to show the range of usage of the -ing form:

While many other Romantic poets went on walking tours, the center of Wordsworth’s life was walking.
To understand his walking, it is important to break away from the idea of ‘the walk,’ meaning a brief stroll about a pleasant place, and from that other definition of the recent writers on Romantic walking, of walking as long-distance travel. For Wordsworth, walking was a mode not of traveling but of being. At twenty-one, he set off on a two-thousand mile journey on foot, but during the last fifty years of his life, he paced back and forth on a small garden terrace to compose his poetry, and both kinds of walking were important to him, as was cruising about the streets of Paris and of London, climbing mountains, and walking with sister and friends, whose coming along he utterly enjoyed. All this walking found a way into his poetry. I could have written about his walking earlier, with the philosophical writers who made walking part of their thinking process, or later, when I turn to the histories of walking in the city. But he himself linked walking with nature, poetry, poverty, and vagrancy in a wholly new and compelling way.
In his early twenties, he seems to have set about to systematically fail at every alternative to being a poet and chosen wandering and musing as the preliminaries for realizing his vocation. The turning point in both his life and The Prelude is his amazing 1790 walk with his fellow student Robert Jones across France into the Alps, when they should have been studying for their Cambridge University exams.
Travel has its rogue and rebel aspects - straying, going out of bounds, escaping - but this journey was as much a quest for an alternative identity as an escape. The Grand Tour had been a standard feature of English gentlemen’s education, usually going by coach to meet people of their own class and see the artworks and monuments of France and Italy. To go on foot and make Switzerland, rather than Italy, the destination of the trip expressed a radical shift in priorities, away from art and aristocracy toward nature and democracy. The Alps themselves, already central objects in the cult of the landscape sublime, were part of the attraction, but so was Switzerland’s republican government and its association with Rousseau. (Rebecca Solnit,
wanderlust)

The gerund as the subject of a sentence:
Playing the violine requires a lot of practice.

The gerund as a subject complement:
The center of her life was playing the violine. Even though "was playing" looks like a verb, it isn't since the center of her life was not playing any instrument.

The gerund as an appositive:
Her biggest dream, playing the violine professionally, may come true. "playing the violine professionally" is the appositive phrase that adds information about the preceding noun "dream."

The gerund as object:
She (=subject) began playing the violine (=object) when she was just four years old. Her first violine (=subject) needs fixing (=object).

The gerund as object of a prepositional phrase:
Every day after school, she had to chose between playing the violine and joining her friends for a bike ride around town.

Because of its noun properties, the possessive is preferred for a noun or pronoun preceding a gerund.
We enjoyed the violinist's playing (not the violinist playing since we did not enjoy the violinist but his playing).

The –ing form as part of the verb:
She should have been practicing.

The –ing form as adjective:
Her amazing performance took our breath away.

The –ing form as the modifier of a noun in a reduced adjective clause:
"The violin, being a rather finicky instrument, must be nursed like a baby," instead of "The violin, which is a rather finicky instrument, must be nursed like a baby."


verbs that require a gerund
admit, anticipate, appreciate, avoid, complete, consider, delay, deny, discuss, dislike, enjoy,
excuse somebody’s doing something, finish, can’t help, imagine, keep doing something, mention, mind, miss, postpone, practice, put off, quit, recall, recollect, recommend, resent, resist, resume, risk, stop, suggest, tolerate, understand

prepositional verbs that require a gerund
accused of, agree/disagree with, apologize for, approve of, argued about, believe in, blame for, boast about, charge for, charge with, choose between..and..., complaining about, concentrate on, decide against, disapprove of, excuse somebody for, feel about, feel like, forget about, forgive somebody for, give up, grumbling about, hear about, insist on, interfere with, thinking of, look like, object to, part with, pay for, prepare for, prevent somebody from, protest about, punish somebody for, rely on, save somebody from, succeed in, suffering from, take up, talk somebody into, talk somebody out of, warn somebody about, worry about

prepositional adjectives that require a gerund
accustomed to, annoyed about, anxious about, ashamed of, astonished at, aware of, capable of, characteristic of, crazy about, dissatisfied with, doubtful about, enthusiastic about, excited about, famous for, fed up with, fond of, frightened of, get used to, guilty of, interested in, involved with, pessimistic about, pleased with, presented with, proud of, puzzled about, qualified for, respected for, responsible for, safe from, serious about, sick of, sorry for, sympathetic with, tired of, what's wrong with

prepositional nouns that require a gerund
advantage of, attitude to, comments on, congratulations on, delay in, difficulty with, experience in, expert on, hope of, information about, intention of, knowledge about, matter with, news of, notice of, opinion about, protection from, reaction to, report on, result of, study of, tax on, trouble with, zest for

phrases that require a gerund
it is no use, there is no point in, it is not worth, it is no good

To forget, to remember and to stop can be followed by either an infinitive or a gerund, but there will be a difference in meaning. I stopped smoking is something quite different from I stopped to smoke (meaning, I was driving but stopped in order to smoke)