nt 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
old story of his death; they distract her in the splendid meadows.

All the tragic world paused to hear that lightest of songs, as the
tragedy of Hamlet pauses for the fitful voice of Ophelia. Strange was
the charm of this perpetual alien, and unknown to us now. The world has
become once again as it was in the mad maid's heyday, less serious and
more sad than Wordsworth; but it has not recovered, and perhaps will
never recover, that sweetness. Blake's was a more starry madness.
Crabbe, writing of village sorrows, thought himself bound