It was surely the name of the maid who died singing, as Desdemona remembers, that lingered in the ear of Wordsworth.  Of all the songs of the distracted, written in the sanity of high imagination, there is nothing more passionate than that beginning “’Tis said that some have died for love.”  To one who has always recognized the greatness of this poem and who possibly had known and forgotten how much Ruskin prized it, it was a pleasure to find the judgement afresh in Modern Painters, where this grave lyric is cited for an example of great imagination.  It is the mourning and restless song of the lover ("the pretty Barbara died”) who has not yet broken free from memory into the alien world of the insane.

Barbara’s lover dwelt in the scene of his love, as Dryden’s Adam entreats the expelling angel that he might do, protesting that he could endure to lose “the bliss, but not the place.” (And although this dramatic “Paradise Lost” of Dryden’s is hardly named by critics except to be scorned, this is assuredly a fine and imaginative thought.) It is nevertheless as a wanderer that the crazed creature visits the fancy of English poets with such a wild recurrence.  The Englishman of the far past, barred by climate, bad roads, ill-lighted winters, and the intricate life and customs of the little town, must have been generally a home-keeper.  No adventure, no setting forth, and small liberty, for him.  But Tom-a-Bedlam, the wild man in patches or in ribbons, with his wallet and his horn for alms of food or drink, came and went as fitfully as the storm, free to suffer all the cold—­an unsheltered creature; and the chill fancy of the villager followed him out to the heath on a journey that had no law.  Was it he in person, or a poet for him, that made the swinging song:  “From the hag and the hungry goblin”?  If a poet, it was one who wrote like a madman and not like a fool.

Not a town, not a village, not a solitary cottage during the English Middle Ages was unvisited by him who frightened the children; they had a name for him as for the wild birds—­Robin Redbreast, Dicky Swallow, 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.