hose where he describes the time when he walked between Wrexham and
Llangollen, his imagination aglow with some lines of Coleridge. De
Quincey loved the shiftless, nomadic life, and gloried in uncertainties
and peradventures. A wandering, open-air life was absolutely
indispensable to Borrow's happiness; and Stevenson had a schoolboy's
delight in the make-believe of Romance.

II

Another note now discovers itself--a passion for the Earth. All these
men had a passion for the Earth, an intense joy in the open air. This
feeling differs from the Nature-worship of poets like Wordsworth and
Shelly. It is less romantic, more realistic. The attitude is not so
much that of the devotee as that of the lover. There is nothing mystical
or abstract about it. It is direct, personal, intimate. I call it
purposely a passion for the Earth rather than a passion for Nature, in
order to distinguish it from the pronounced transcendentalism of the
romantic poets.

The poet who has expressed most nearly the attitude of these Vagabonds
towards Nature--more particularly that of Thoreau, Whitman, Borrow, and
Jefferies--is Mr. George Meredith.

Traces of it may be found in Browning with reference to the "old brown
earth," and in William Morris, who exclaimed--

"My love of the earth and the worship of it!"

but Mr. Meredith has given the completest expression to this
Earth-worship.

One thinks of Thoreau and Jefferies when reading Melampus--

"With love exceeding a simple love of the things
That glide in grasses and rubble of woody wreck;
Or change their perch on a beat of quivering wings
From branch to branch, only restful to pipe and peck;
Or, bristled, curl at a touch their snouts in a ball;
Or, cast their web between bramble and thorny hook;
The good physician Melampus, loving them all,
Among them walked, as a scholar who reads a book."

While that ripe oddity, "Juggling Jerry," would have delighted the
"Romany"-loving Borrow.

Indeed the Nature philosophy of Mr. Meredith, with its virile joy in the
rich plenitude of Nature and its touch of wildness has more in common
with Thoreau, with Jefferies, with Borrow, and with Whitman than with
Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, or even with Tennyson--the first of our
poets to look upon the Earth with the eyes of the scientist.

III

But a passion for the Earth is not sufficient of itself to admit within
the charmed circle of the Va