interest in medievalism,
warmed the imaginations of verse men and prose men alike. The impulse to
wander, to scale some "peak in Darien" for the joy of a "wild surmise,"
seized every artist in letters--poet, novelist, essayist. A longing for
the mystic world, a passion for the unknown, surged over men's minds with
the same power and impetuosity as it had done in the days of the
Renaissance. Ordinary life had grown uglier, more sordid; life seemed
crushed in the thraldom of mechanism. Men felt like schoolboys pent up
in a narrow whitewashed room who look out of the windows at the smiling
and alluring world beyond the gates. Small wonder that some who hastened
to escape should enter more thoroughly than more cautious souls into the
unconventional and the changeful.

The swing of the pendulum was sure to come, and it is not surprising that
the mid-century furnishes fewer instances of literary Vagabonds and of
Vagabond moods. But with the pre-Raphaelite Movement an impulse towards
Vagabondage revived. And the era which started with a De Quincey closed
with a Stevenson.

VI

Many writers who cannot be classed among the Vagabonds gave occasional
expression to the Vagabond moods which sweep across every artist's soul
at some time or other. It would be beside my purpose to dwell at length
upon these Vagabond moods, for my chief concern is with the
thorough-going wanderer. Mention may be made in passing, however, of
Robert Browning, whose cordial detestation of Bohemianism is so well
known. Outwardly there was far less of the Vagabond about him than about
Tennyson. However the romantic spirit may have touched his boyhood and
youth, there looked little of it in the staid, correctly dressed,
middle-aged gentleman who attended social functions and cheerfully
followed the life conventional. One recalls his disgust with George Sand
and her Bohemian circle, his hatred for spiritualism, his almost
Philistine horror of the shiftless and lawless elements in life. At the
same time I feel that Mr. Chesterton, in his brilliant monograph of the
poet, has overstated the case when he says that "neither all his
liberality nor all his learning ever made him anything but an Englishman
of the middle class." He had mixed blood in his veins, and the fact that
his grandmother was a Creole is not to be lightly brushed aside by a
Chestertonian paradox. For the Southern blood shows itself from time to
time in an unmistakable mann