And the landowner feels it.  He knows quite well, though he may not say so, that the Corot trees, though they do not dwell upon margins, are in spirit almost as extra-territorial as the rushes.  In proof of this he very often cuts them down, out of the view, once for all.  The view is better, as a view, without them.  Though their roots are in his ground right enough, there is a something about their heads—.  But the reason he gives for wishing them away is merely that they are “thin.”  A man does not always say everything.

A NORTHERN FANCY

“I remember,” said Dryden, writing to Dennis, “I remember poor Nat Lee, who was then upon the verge of madness, yet made a sober and witty answer to a bad poet who told him, ’It was an easy thing to write like a madman.’  ‘No,’ said he, ’’tis a very difficult thing to write like a madman, but ‘tis a very easy thing to write like a fool.’” Nevertheless, the difficult song of distraction is to be heard, a light high note, in English poetry throughout two centuries at least, and one English poet lately set that untethered lyric, the mad maid’s song, flying again.

A revolt against the oppression of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries—­the age of the re-discovery of death; against the crime of tragedies; against the tyranny of Italian example that had made the poets walk in one way of love, scorn, constancy, inconstancy—­may have caused this trolling of unconsciousness, this tune of innocence, and this carol of liberty, to be held so dear.  “I heard a maid in Bedlam,” runs the old song.  High and low the poets tried for that note, and the singer was nearly always to be a maid and crazed for love.  Except for the temporary insanity so indifferently worn by the soprano of the now deceased kind of Italian opera, and except that a recent French story plays with the flitting figure of a village girl robbed of her wits by woe (and this, too, is a Russian villager, and the Southern author may have found his story on the spot, as he seems to aver) I have not met elsewhere than in England this solitary and detached poetry of the treble note astray.

At least, it is principally a northern fancy.  Would the steadfast Cordelia, if she had not died, have lifted the low voice to that high note, so delicately untuned?  She who would not be prodigal of words might yet, indeed, have sung in the cage, and told old tales, and laughed at gilded butterflies of the court of crimes, and lived so long in the strange health of an emancipated brain as to wear out

   Packs and sects of great ones
   That ebb and flow by the moon.

She, if King Lear had had his last desire, might have sung the merry and strange tune of Bedlam, like the slighter Ophelia and the maid called Barbara.