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
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 vagra