No moralist—but a philosophy of a kind The value of “messages” in Literature Whitman and Browning compared Whitman and culture Whitman and science Compares here with Tennyson and Browning Tonic influence of his writings “I shall be good health to you” His big, genial sanity LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS WILLIAM HAZLITT _Photogravure Frontispiece_ From a crayon drawing by W. Bewick, executed in 1822 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 38 From an engraving by W. H. More GEORGE BORROW 60 From a portrait in the possession of Mr. John Murray. Reproduced by kind permission of Mr. Murray ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 118 From a woodcut by R. Bryden RICHARD JEFFERIES 146 From a photograph. Reproduced by kind permission of the London Stereoscopic Company WALT WHITMAN 172 From a woodcut by R. Bryden INTRODUCTION THE VAGABOND ELEMENT IN MODERN LITERATURE “There’s night and day, brother, both sweet things; sun, moon, and stars, brother, all sweet things; there’s likewise a wind on the heath.”—_Lavengro_. I There are some men born with a vagrant strain in the blood, an unsatiable inquisitiveness about the world beyond their doors. Natural revolutionaries they, with an ingrained distaste for the routine of ordinary life and the conventions of civilization. The average common-sense Englishman distrusts the Vagabond for his want of sympathy with established law and order. Eccentricity and unconventionality smack to him always of moral obliquity. And thus it is that the literary Vagabond is looked at askance. One is reminded of Mr. Pecksniff: “Pagan, I regret to state,” observed that gentleman of the Sirens on one occasion. Unhappily no one pointed out to this apostle of purity that the naughtiness of the Sirens was not necessarily connected with paganism, and that the siren disposition has been found even “in choirs and places where they sing.” Restlessness, then, is one of the notes of the Vagabond temperament. Sometimes the Vagabond is a physical, sometimes only an intellectual wanderer; but in any case there is about him something of the primal wildness of the woods and hills. Thus it is we find in the same spiritual brotherhood men so different in genius and character as Hazlitt, De Quincey, Thoreau, Whitman, Borrow, Jefferies, Stevenson.