Ceres' Runaway, and Other Essays

								

have caused this trolling of unconsciousness, this tune of innocence, and
this carol of liberty, to be held so dear.  "I heard a maid in Bedlam,"
runs the old song.  High and low the poets tried for that note, and the
singer was nearly always to be a maid and crazed for love.  Except for
the temporary insanity so indifferently worn by the soprano of the now
deceased kind of Italian opera, and except that a recent French story
plays with the flitting figure of a village girl robbed of her wits by
woe (and this, too, is a Russian villager, and the Southern author may
have found his story on the spot, as he seems to aver) I have not met
elsewhere than in England this solitary and detached poetry of the treble
note astray.
At least, it is principally a northern fancy.  Would the steadfast
Cordelia, if she had not died, have lifted the low voice to that high
note, so delicately untuned?  She who would not be prodigal of words
might yet, indeed, have sung in the cage, and told old tales, and laughed
at gilded butterflies of the court of crimes, and lived so long in the
strange health of an emancipated brain as to wear out



   Packs and sects of great ones

   That ebb and flow by the moon.
She, if King Lear had had his last desire, might have sung the merry and
strange tune of Bedlam, like the slighter Ophelia and the maid called
Barbara.
It was surely the name of the maid who died singing, as Desdemona
remembers, that lingered in the ear of Wordsworth.  Of all the songs of
the distracted, written in the sanity of high imagination, there is
nothing more passionate than that beginning "'Tis said that some have
died for love."  To one who has always recognized the greatness of this
poem and who possibly had known and forgotten how much Ruskin prized it,
it was a pleasure to find the judgement afresh in Modern Painters,
where this grave lyric is cited for an example of great imagination.  It
is the mourning and restless song of the lover ("the pretty Barbara
died") who has not yet broken free from memory into the alien world of
the insane.
Barbara's lover dwelt in the scene of his love, as Dryden's Adam entreats
the expelling angel that he might do, protesting that he could endure to
lose "the bliss, but not the place."  (And although this dramatic
"Paradise Lost" of Dryden's is hardly named by critics except to be
scorned, this is assuredly a fine and imaginative thought.)  It is
nevertheless as a wanderer that the crazed creature visits the fancy of
English poets with such a wild recurrence.  The Englishman of the far
past, barred by climate, bad roads, ill-lighted winters, and the
intricate life and customs of the little town, must have been generally a
home-keeper.  No adventure, no setting forth, and small liberty, for him.
But Tom-a-Bedlam, the wild man in patches or in ribbons, with his wallet
and his horn for alms of food or drink, came and went as fitfully as the