Wander he must, but he carries away a home relic with him, and dies with it on his breast.  His nature is truant; in repose it longs for change:  as on the journey it looks back for friends and quiet.  He passes to-day in building an air castle for to-morrow, or in writing yesterday’s elegy; and he would flyaway this hour, but that a cage, necessity, keeps him.  What is the charm of his verse, of his style, and humor?  His sweet regrets, his delicate compassion, his soft smile, his tremulous sympathy, the weakness which he owns?

Your love for him is half pity.  You come hot and tired from the day’s battle, and this sweet minstrel sings to you.  Who could harm the kind vagrant harper?  Whom did he ever hurt?  He carries no weapon, save the harp on which he plays to you, and with which he delights great and humble, young and old, the captains in the tents, or the soldiers round the fire, or the women and children in the villages, at whose porches he stops and sings his simple songs of love and beauty.  With that sweet story of “The Vicar of Wakefield” he has found entry into every castle and every hamlet in Europe.  Not one of us, however busy or hard, but once or twice in our lives has passed an evening with him, and undergone the charm of his delightful music.

II.  ADDISON. (436)

We love him for his vanities as much as his virtues.  What is ridiculous is delightful in him; we are so fond of him because we laugh at him so.  And out of that laughter, and out of that sweet weakness, and out of those harmless eccentricities and follies, and out of that touched brain, and out of that honest manhood and simplicity—­we get a result of happiness, goodness, tenderness, pity, piety; such as doctors and divines but seldom have the fortune to inspire.  And why not?  Is the glory of Heaven to be sung only by gentlemen in black coats?

When this man looks from the world, whose weaknesses he describes so benevolently, up to the Heaven which shines over us all, I can hardly fancy a human face lighted up with a more serene rapture; a human intellect thrilling with a purer love and adoration than Joseph Addison’s.  Listen to him:  from your childhood you have known the verses; but who can hear their sacred music without love and awe?

  “Soon as the evening shades prevail,
  The moon takes up the wondrous tale,
  And nightly to the listening earth
  Repeats the story of her birth;
  And all the stars that round her burn,
  And all the planets in their turn,
  Confirm the tidings as they roll,
  And spread the truth from pole to pole.

  “What though, in solemn silence, all
  Move round this dark terrestrial ball;
  What though no real voice nor sound
  Among their radiant orbs be found;
  In reason’s ear they all rejoice,
  And utter forth a glorious voice,
  Forever singing, as they shine,
  The Hand that made us is divine.”