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THE outlandish figure which a distinguished poet has added to our literature has been seen, or imaged, probably by many people. It is pleasing to think of such an inhabitant of the wilds; and if we do not now see his grey cloak among the trees, we can still think of him as near us in all our wanderings abroad—just behind that ridge of hill or beyond that tangle of underwood—a shadow which shuns our inquiry. For, in truth, he is an enchanting figure, with his antique habit, his haunting face, and wild keen eyes which see many things that are hidden from others. He is a scholar, too, and a good one, for he carries books in his cloak; and if we came up with him by some happy chance, we might find him reading Theocritus from an antiquated text of three centuries ago.

It is many a day since the story "ran through Oxford halls," and the Scholar- Gipsy has long since ceased his wanderings. Yet his spirit by some occult transmigration is still abroad in the world and in many unlikely places. Like the young Will o' the Wisp in Andersen's story, no rank, no profession, is a safeguard against it. Sage men of law, scholars, divines—all have felt this wandering impulse, which would lead them, like Waring, to slip off "out of the heed of mortals" and see the world of which they know so little. And some who are wise in their generation, like this old scholar, seek to see both sides of existence, and add to their scholarship that knowledge of natural life which is becoming rarer as we travel further from the primeval simplicity.

In former times this gipsying was part of a scholars life. He was compelled to journey over half of Europe, it might be, to the college of his choice, in a time when journeying was not always pleasant and seldom safe. The laws against begging were relaxed in his favour. He had no baggage except a book or two, and with his staff in his hand he trudged merrily forward on his adventurous way. These men were the most cultured of their age. The head that was covered by that tatterdemalion bonnet might be debating grave points in the Aristotelian logic, or with Plato framing immortal commonwealths. A sun-browned scholar was not apt to suffer from pedantry or unreal visions of things; while to sustain him on his way he had his love for learning and many rich eclectic stores to draw on for his entertainment. In days nearer our own some few members of the fraternity still survived. Goldsmith, fresh from his desultory college life, tramped through many countries with his flute in his pocket, and gained that large kindliness which makes one of the best features of his work. In our own day one of our most ingenious story-tellers has gone far and wide in many unchristian latitudes in search of wisdom and adventure. But after all, of the many who follow the life few ever attain to any reputation; for among other good things they acquire a genial contempt for fame, which is peculiar to men of genius and this disreputable brotherhood.

It is not that this wandering spirit is rare to-day, for it is essential to the natures of great men of science, travellers, explorers, and many men of action. These, in pursuit of their callings, travel in rough, far-away places, and live with a careless scorn of the luxuries of civilisation. But the scholar is overmuch a man of books and colleges; pale-faced and dull-eyed, lacking the joys and humanities of life; yet still, it may be, with a drop of gipsy blood in his veins, which warms at the tale of wars and gallant actions and makes its possessor feel that his life is a very one-sided affair. Yet the way for him is easy; down one street and across another; and thence to the open country, to the green woodland, where the air is free and the great Earth-Mother as gracious as the Muses.

The union of the two lives is fraught with so many rich and apparent advantages, that its apologist is almost unneeded; for neither is perfect, and the defects of each are remedied in great part by the other. The scholar has a mind filled with many creations of romance and poetry. He can people the woods with beings of his own, elves and kindly fairy folk, which are gone nowadays from our theology, but still live in the scholar's fancy. That rare classical feeling, which one finds in Milton and Tennyson, which sees the fair images of an older economy in common things of to-day, is only possible for the scholar. The old wandering minstrel had his share of it. Nicol Burne the Violer, who wrote the ballad of "Leader Haughs," and may have been, for all we know, the original of Sir Walter Scott's "Last Minstrel," has a way of introducing the divinities of Greece and Rome into the scenery of the Border country, which is distinct from any false classical convention.

Pan playing on his aiten reed,

And shepherds him attending,

Do here resort their flocks to feed,

The hills and haughs commending;

With cur and kent upon the bent,

Sing to the sun good-morrow,

And swear nae fields mair pleasures yield

Than Leader Haughs and Yarrow.

An house there stands on Leader-side,

Surmounting my descriving,

With rooms sae rare and windows fair,

Like Daedalus' contriving;

Men passing by do often cry,

In sooth it hath no marrow;

It stands as sweet on Leader-side

As Newark does on Yarrow.

Further, nothing can so clarify and perfect the intellectual senses as the constant association with beautiful natural sights.

A strange sunrise or sunset is a greater element in the education of a man than most people think. Every appreciated object in Nature has an influence, imperceptible it may be, but none the less real, on the mental culture. Truth of perception, which was commoner among our grandfathers than with us, is one of the least of the benefits of Nature. A larger sense of form and colour and the beauty thereof, a finer feeling for the hidden melodies which may be heard hourly in any field, and a vastly increased power of enjoyment of life, are things which some would not count too dear at any price.

The sadness, the continuous tragedy, which is inseparable from all natural life is bereft of its pain by the equipment of religion or an elevated philosophy, with which we may suppose the scholar to be furnished. The savagery of natural people like the gipsies is no imagined thing; this wanton cruelty and callousness to the pain of others forms the darkest blot on their lives. The robustness of healthy outdoor life is in no way weakened if tempered with a sensitive sympathy for weaker folk.

As for the gipsy part, its advantages are far in excess of the somewhat slender stock that the scholar brings with him. The wandering among the fields and hills carries with it a delicate and abiding pleasure that to some means more than the half of life. The blessedness of mere movement, free and careless motion in all weathers and in all places is incomparably great. One morning sees a man in a country of green meadows and slow lowland streams, where he may lie beside a tuft of willows and dream marvellously; and the next finds him in a moorland place, high up above the valleys, where the air is like new wine, and the wide prospect of country gives the wanderer a sense of vast proprietorship. Whether the heather be in flower and the wilderness one great purple sea, or whether the bent be grey and wintry and full of pitiful black pools, it is much the same to him; for one of the marks of this spirit is its contentment with the world at all seasons. He may arrive tired and hungry at some wayside inn, and taste the delicious sleep of utter lassitude; or he may make his bed for the night in some nook in a wood among green brackens, and wake with a freshness which makes him wonder at the folly of man in leaving the open air for the unworthy cover of a house. For him there is no restraint of time or place. He can stay an hour or a week, as it suits him; he can travel fast or slow; he can turn if the fancy takes him, away from the highroad down green, retired lanes, and enjoy the satisfaction which comes from long hours of leisure in the height of summer.

To the artist in life, the connoisseur of sensations and impressions, this manner of spending his days commends itself. There is a subtle influence about every place which dwells long in a man's memory, and which he may turn to time upon time and not exhaust its charms. Each type and shade of weather and each variation of scene leaves an indelible impression, so that soon he will have a well-stocked gallery in his mind to wander through, when the dull days come and he is bound hand and foot to his work in a commonplace town. Every sound carries with it for him a distinct sensation; the crowing of cocks about a farm, the far-off bleating of sheep on a hillside, the ceaseless humming of bees, and the plash of the burn among the grey rocks. Rhymes run in his memory, confused lines of great poets which acquire a meaning never grasped before; and he himself gets into a fine poetical state, and dreams pleasant things, which are vast nonsense when written down, but which seemed to him there and then to be of the essence of poetry. What philosophical system of life, though it be followed ever so rigidly, can make a man so high and free in spirit? It must needs be that one who lives among great sights should win something of their greatness for himself. The artist, too, whether in colours or words, gains a becoming humility. He feels the abject powerlessness of his brush or pen to express, in anything like their pristine beauty, many of the things he meets with. Not dazzling summer days or autumn sunsets, for these come within the limits of his art; but the uncommon aspects, like the dim look of the hills on certain days in April—such make him feel the impotence of language.

The man who is abroad at all hours and seasons meets with many things which other folk never think of. Apart from mere fantastic sights, curious unions of earth and sky and weather, he begins to delight in the minutiae of observation. He loves to watch the renascence of life, the earliest buds, the first flowers, the young, perfumed birch leaves, the clear, windy skies. He can distinguish the call of the redshank or the plover among a concert of birds on a moor. He can tell each songbird by its note amid a crowd. Being out of doors at all times he becomes a skilful fisherman, though his tackle is often rude enough in all conscience; for by the riverside he learns something of the ways of a man with a fish. He takes pleasure in long wanderings after a mythical bird or fern, for to him the means are no less pleasing than the end. Every object in the world acquires for him a personal charm. He is interested in the heron as in some fellow-fisherman; the ways of the wren and linnet are not below his consideration; he has actually a kindly feeling for the inherent depravity of the crow. And behind all, like a rich background, come days of halcyon weather, clear, ineffable April evenings, firm October days, and all the pageantry of the "sweet o' the year" But above all such temporal blessings, there is that greatest endowment, which Wordsworth and Thoreau and Richard Jefferies sought and found—the sense of kinship with nature. Our attitude is too much that of aliens wandering on sufferance in a strange country, or rather like children looking through the bars of a gate into a rich demesne. Now there is a great deal of very whimsical nonsense talked on this subject, but there is more than a little truth. Most people witness fine natural sights as exiles, feeling with a living regret that such are foreign and beyond their narrow world. But to the man who is much abroad these come with pain or pleasure, according to their nature; but not as scornful, uncontrollable giants who mock his impotent wonder, but rather as forms of the great mistress whom he seeks to know. Rough shepherds on the hills have a way of talking of streams and weathers with a personal tone, as things which they meet in their daily life and have attained to some considerable knowledge of. Surely this is an enviable degree of kinship.

As a man's mind is richly advantaged, so also is his body. He loses the sickly humours, the lassitude, the dulness, which oppress all sedentary folk. His sinews grow firm and his nerves strong. Tramping many miles over heather and inhaling the wholesome air of the uplands, or basking in sunlight among the meadows, makes his frame hardy and active and his skin as brown and clear as a moorland trout-stream. He begins to feel the gaudium vivendi, the joy of living, that the old Greeks felt, who in their wisdom built the palæstra beside the school. All immoment philosophies, nugatory and unsatisfying endowments born of the dreams of dyspeptic townsfolk, are banished from his brain; and he goes on his way with a healthy clarity of mind. He is not careful to seek an answer; nor is he perplexed by the ravings of a vitiated decadence; for he seeks only the true and strong in nature and art. But if he lacks in this he has other things at his will. His brain is a perpetual whirl of airy notions and wayside romances, which, like the sounds in Prospero's island, "give delight and hurt not." In his wanderings, he meets with all sorts of odd people, whimsical and grave; and he gets some little insight into the real humour and pathos which habit in the lowliest places.

But after all it is more a matter of feeling than of practice. A man may live in the town eleven months of the year and yet be at heart one of this old romantic brotherhood. It is ingrained deep in the nature of some; others are so cumbered about with wrappings of convention that they take years to get free. They are seldom talkative people, at least in houses and among strangers, so they go on their pleasant way for the most part undisturbed, though their wide toleration, acquired from their manifold experience of life, wins them some few friends. The class is of necessity a limited one; for the majority of mankind are dull, equable folk, whose only romance in life is its close. But the eager, insatiable scholar and the wild, gipsy spirits, when in some rare case they come together, produce a union so enchanting that it is apt to seem to onlookers the very secret of life.

For, if the one exists without the other, there come those tantalising regrets, those vistas of unused pleasure, which go far to make life a burden. Often when a man is sunk in town-life and thinks of nothing beyond, the mere sight of a bronzed face, a breath of the country, the glimpse of leaves or brown heather, and the old glamour of the greenwood is upon him and he grows weary with unsatisfied longings. Or, when one has been living for weeks in the heart of the natural world, with a heathenish disregard of man and all human inventions, a stray book in the corner of an inn, a chance sight of an old friend, recalls to him that he has been living in error and he sets about mending his ways with all speed.

As for the end of life, when the strong man bows within us, surely it is they who have passed their days in ignorance of pain or true pleasure in a methodical existence, who have never felt the high hopes and the warm humanities of the scholar and the gipsy, who have never followed impossible ideals and eaten of the tree of knowledge whose fruit is for life—surely it is they who will find it hard to die. The man who has lived the best moments of his life abroad with nature sees no occult and terrible import in its end, regarding it as the passing, the dying unto life, which falls to the lot of all natural things. So, like Mr. Standfast, when "the time comes for him to haste away, and he goeth down, there will be a great calm at that time in the River."