Ceres' Runaway, and Other Essays

								

storm, free to suffer all the cold--an unsheltered creature; and the
chill fancy of the villager followed him out to the heath on a journey
that had no law.  Was it he in person, or a poet for him, that made the
swinging song: "From the hag and the hungry goblin"?  If a poet, it was
one who wrote like a madman and not like a fool.
Not a town, not a village, not a solitary cottage during the English
Middle Ages was unvisited by him who frightened the children; they had a
name for him as for the wild birds--Robin Redbreast, Dicky Swallow,
Philip Sparrow, Tom Tit, Tom-a-Bedlam.  And after him came the "Abram
men," who were sane parodies of the crazed, and went to the fairs and
wakes in motley.  Evelyn says of a fop: "All his body was dressed like a
maypole, or a Tom-a-Bedlam's cap."  But after the Civil Wars they
vanished, and no man knew how.  In time old men remembered them only to
remember that they had not seen any such companies or solitary wanderers
of late years.
The mad maid of the poets is a vagrant too, when she is free, and not
singing within Bedlam early in the morning, "in the spring."  Wordsworth,
who dealt with the legendary fancy in his "Ruth," makes the crazed one a
wanderer in the hills whom a traveller might see by chance, rare as an
Oread, and nearly as wild as Echo herself:-



   I too have passed her in the hills

   Setting her little water-mills.
His heart misgives him to think of the rheumatism that must befall in
such a way of living; and his grave sense of civilization, bourgeois in
the humane and noble way that is his own, restores her after death to the
company of man, to the "holy bell," which Shakespeare's Duke remembered
in banishment, and to the congregation and their "Christian psalm."
The older poets were less responsible, less serious and more sad, than
Wordsworth, when they in turn were touched by the fancy of the maid
crazed by love.  They left her to her light immortality; and she might be
drenched in dews; they would not desire to reconcile nor bury her.  She
might have her hair torn by the bramble, but her heart was light after
trouble.  "Many light hearts and wings"--she had at least the bird's
heart, and the poet lent to her voice the wings of his verses.
There is nothing in our poetry less modern than she.  The vagrant woman
of later feeling was rather the sane creature of Ebenezer Elliott's fine
lines in "The Excursion"--



   Bone-weary, many-childed, trouble-tried!

   Wife of my bosom, wedded to my soul!
Trouble did not "try" the Elizabethan wild one, it undid her.  She had no
child, or if there had ever been a child of hers, she had long forgotten
how it died.  She hailed the wayfarer, who was more weary than she, with
a song; she haunted the cheerful dawn; her "good-morrow" rings from
Herrick's poem, fresh as cock-crow.  She knows that her love is dead, and
her perplexity has regard rather to the many kinds of flowers than to the