dead, unless indeed perfectly wise magicians
can live till it please them to die, and he is wandering somewhere, even
if one cannot see him, as Arnold imagined, 'at some lone ale-house in the
Berkshire moors, on the warm ingle-bench,' or 'crossing the stripling
Thames at Bablock Hithe,' 'trailing his fingers in the cool stream,' or
'giving store of flowers--the frail-leaf'd white anemone, dark hare-bells
drenched with dew of summer eves,' to the girls 'who from the distant
hamlets come to dance around the Fyfield elm in May,' or 'sitting upon the
river bank o'ergrown,' living on through time 'with a free onward
impulse.' This is Joseph Glanvil's story--

There was very lately a lad in the University of Oxford who, being of
very pregnant and ready parts and yet wanting the encouragement of
preferment, was by his poverty forced to leave his studies there, and
to cast himself upon the wide world for a livelihood. Now his
necessities growing daily on him, and wanting the help of friends to
relieve him, he was at last forced to join himself to a company of
vagabond gipsies, whom occasionally he met with, and to follow their
trade for a maintenance.... After he had been a pretty while well
exercised in the trade, there chanced to ride by a couple of
scholars, who had formerly been of his acquaintance. The scholar had
quickly spied out these old friends among the gipsies, and their
amazement to see him among such society had well-nigh discovered him;
but by a sign he prevented them owning him before that crew, and
taking one of them aside privately, desired him with his friend to go
to an inn, not far distant, promising there to come to them. They
accordingly went thither and he follows: after their first salutation
his friends inquire how he came to lead so odd a life as that was,
and so joined himself into such a beggarly company. The scholar gipsy
having given them an account of the necessity which drove him to that
kind of life, told them that the people he went with were not such
impostors as they were taken for, but that they had a traditional
kind of learning among them and could do wonders by the power of
imagination, and that himself had learned much of their art and
improved it further than themselves could. And to evince the truth of
what he told them, he said he'd remove into another room, lea