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66

IX.

CAMPING OUT.

the fires of vagabondage which smoulder beneath the surface of most men's conventionalismswhich mountain and river and winds had liberated and fanned. Deep in our hearts we hide the diminished flame, and brood above it with memories of forest and mere." -J. CHAPMAN WOODS.

WHITTIER gives us an attractive picture in his poem, The Tent on the Beach, of three literary friends, who

"When heats as of a tropic clime

Burned all our inland valleys through,

*

*

*

Pitched their white tents where sea-winds blew.

*

"They rested there, escaped awhile

From cares that wear the life away,
To eat the lotus of the Nile

And drink the poppies of Cathay

To fling their loads of custom down,

Like drift-weed on the sand-slopes brown, And in the sea-waves drown the restless pack Of duties, claims, and needs that barked upon their track."

These three friends, Whittier, Fields, and Bayard Taylor, have quite a Bohemian time of it, hearing

"The bells of morn and night

Swing, miles away, their silver speech."

Our readers—at least, the few of them who know not Whittier—must go to the poem for the stories; just here the Quaker-poet shall give us only the portraits of the "companions three":

"One,* with his beard scarce silvered, bore
A ready credence in his looks,

A lettered magnate, lording o'er
An ever-widening realm of books.
In him brain-currents, near and far,
Converged as in a Leyden jar;

The old, dead authors thronged him round about, And Elzevir's gray ghosts from leathern graves looked out.

"Pleasant it was to roam about

The lettered world as he had done,

* J. T. Fields.

And see the lords of song without

Their singing robes and garlands on : With Wordsworth paddle Rydal mere, Taste rugged Elliott's home-brewed beer, And with the ears of Rogers at fourscore, Hear Garrick's buskined tread and Walpole's wit once more."

Whittier draws his own picture :

"And one there was a dreamer born,
Who, with a mission to fulfil,
Had left the Muses' haunts to turn
The crank of an opinion mill,
Making his rustic reed of song
A weapon in the war with wrong,
Yoking his fancy to the breaking plough
That beam-deep turned the soil for truth to spring
and grow.

"For while he wrought with strenuous will
The work his hands had found to do,

He heard the fitful music still

Of winds that out of dreamland blew.

The din about him could not drown

What the strange voices whispered down ; Along his task-field weird processions swept, The visionary pomp of stately phantoms stepped. "The common air was thick with dreamsHe told them to the toiling crowd; Such music as the woods and streams Sang in his ear he sang aloud."

Bayard Taylor was the

"One whose Arab face was tanned
By tropic sun and boreal frost,
So travelled there was scarce a land
Or people left him to exhaust,

In idling mood had from him hurled

The poor squeezed orange of the world, And in the tent-shade, as beneath a palm, Smoked, cross-legged like a Turk, in Oriental calm.

"The very waves that washed the sand
Below him he had seen before
Whitening the Scandinavian strand
And sultry Mauritanian shore.

From ice-rimmed isles, from summer seas,
Palm-fringed, they bore him messages;
He heard the plaintive Nubian songs again,
And mule-bells tinkling down the mountain-paths
of Spain."

X.

A PASSING GLIMPSE.

"I yield the palm to no man's love! but others loved thee first."

I WONDER What particular associations were present in the mind of Hawthorne, as he strolled about London with his friend Bennock in search of Johnson's old haunts! Were the worthy doctor's pompous phrases coursing through his mind?* or did he recollect the fact that one

* "A fine day," said Sir Joshua Reynolds to Dr. Johnson.

66

Sir," he answered, "it seems propitious, but the atmosphere is humid and the skies are nebulous."

Any recorded conversations with Johnson always make me think of the interesting question of the languid young lady who wished to ring the tea

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