From childhood imagination predominates in him; his intellectual curiosity and facility are very great. He is a vagabond by nature, both mentally and physically; he roams over the domains of science as he did over his beloved hills, at random, plunging into theology, logic, law, astronomy, "an harde thynge"; or losing himself in reveries, reading romances of chivalry, following Ymagynatyf, who never rests: "Idel was I nevere." He studies the properties of animals, stones, and plants, a little from nature and a little from books; now he talks as Euphues will do later, and his natural mythology will cause a smile; and now he speaks as one country-bred, who has seen with his own eyes, like Burns, a bird build her nest, and has patiently watched her do it. Sometimes the animal is a living one, that leaps from bough to bough in the sunlight; at others, it is a strange beast, fit only to dwell among the stone foliage of a cathedral cornice. He knows French and Latin; he has some tincture of the classics; he would like to know everything: Alle the sciences under sonne | and alle the sotyle craftes, I wolde I knewe and couth | kyndely in myne herte![632] But, in that as in other things, his will is not on a par with his aspirations: this inadequacy was the cause of numberless disappointments. Thou art, Clergye says most appropriately, one of those who want to know but hate to study: The wer lef to lerne | but loth for to stodie.[633] Even in early youth his mind seems to lack balance; being as yet a boy, he is already a soul in trouble. His dreams at this time were not all dark ones; radiant apparitions came to him. Thou art young and lusty, said one, and hast years many before thee to live and to love; look in this mirror, and see the wonders and joys of love. I shall follow thee, said another, till thou becomest a lord, and hast domains.[634] But one by one the lights faded around him; his patrons died, and this was the end of his ambitions; for he was not one of those men able by sheer strength of will to make up for outside help when that fails them. His will was diseased; an endless grief began for him. Being dependent on his "Clergye" for a livelihood, he went to London, and tried to earn his daily bread by means of it, of "that labour" which he had "lerned best."[635] Religious life in the Middle Ages had not those well-defined and visible landmarks to which we are accustomed. Nowadays one either is or is not of the Church; formerly, no such obvious divisions existed. Religious life spread through society, like an immense river without dykes, swollen by innumerable affluents, whose subterranean penetrations impregnated even the soil through which they did not actually flow. From this arose numerous situations difficult to define, bordering at once on the world and on the Church, a state of things with which there is no analogy now, except in Rome itself, where the religious life of the Middle Ages still partly continues.