Philip Sparrow, Tom Tit, Tom-a-Bedlam. And after him came the "Abram
men," who were sane parodies of the crazed, and went to the fairs and
wakes in motley. Evelyn says of a fop: "All his body was dressed like a
maypole, or a Tom-a-Bedlam's cap." But after the Civil Wars they
vanished, and no man knew how. In time old men remembered them only to
remember that they had not seen any such companies or solitary wanderers
of late years.

The mad maid of the poets is a vagrant 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.