No More Learning

I had
got up before breakfast and gone out to buy a newspaper. I had noticed
the servant, a girl who had come from the country some years before,
laying the table for breakfast. As I had passed her I had been telling
myself one of those long foolish tales which one tells only to oneself.
If something had happened that had not happened, I would have hurt my
arm, I thought. I saw myself with my arm in a sling in the middle of
some childish adventures. I returned with the newspaper and met my host
and hostess in the door. The moment they saw me they cried out, 'Why,
the _bonne_ has just told us you had your arm in a sling. We thought
something must have happened to you last night, that you had been run
over maybe'--or some such words. I had been dining out at the other end
of Paris, and had come in after everybody had gone to bed. I had cast
my imagination so strongly upon the servant that she had seen it, and
with what had appeared to be more than the mind's eye.

One afternoon, about the same time, I was thinking very intently of
a certain fellow-student for whom I had a message, which I hesitated
about writing. In a couple of days I got a letter from a place some
hundreds of miles away where that student was. On the afternoon when
I had been thinking so intently I had suddenly appeared there amid a
crowd of people in a hotel and as seeming solid as if in the flesh. My
fellow-student had seen me, but no one else, and had asked me to come
again when the people had gone. I had vanished, but had come again
in the middle of the night and given the message.
I myself had no
knowledge of casting an imagination upon one so far away.

I could tell of stranger images, of stranger enchantments, of
stranger imaginations, cast consciously or unconsciously over as
great distances by friends or by myself, were it not that the greater
energies of the mind seldom break forth but when the deeps are
loosened. They break forth amid events too private or too sacred for
public speech, or seem themselves, I know not why, to belong to hidden
things. I have written of these breakings forth, these loosenings of
the deep, with some care and some detail, but I shall keep my record
shut. After all, one can but bear witness less to convince him who
won't believe than to protect him who does, as Blake puts it, enduring
unbelief and misbelief and ridicule as best one may. I shall be content
to show that past times have believed as I do, by quoting Joseph
Glanvil's description of the Scholar Gipsy. Joseph Glanvil is dead, and
will not mind unbelief and misbelief and ridicule.

The Scholar Gipsy, too, is dead, unless indeed perfectly wise magicians
can live till it please them to die, and he is wandering somewhere,
even if one cannot see him, as Arnold imagined, 'at some lone ale-house
in the Berkshire moors, on the warm ingle-bench,' or 'crossing the
stripling Thames at Bablock Hithe,' 'trailing his fingers in the cool
stream,' or 'giving store of flowers--the frail-leaf'd white anemone,
dark bluebells drenched with dews of summer eves,' to the girls 'who
from the distant hamlets come to dance around the Fyfield elm in May,'
or 'sitting upon the river bank o'ergrown,' living on through time
'with a free onward impulse. ' This is Joseph Glanvil's story--

There was very lately a lad in the University of
Oxford, who being of very pregnant and ready parts and
yet wanting the encouragement of preferment, was by
his poverty forced to leave his studies there, and to
cast himself upon the wide world for a livelihood. Now
his necessities growing daily on him, and wanting the
help of friends to relieve him, he was at last forced
to join himself to a company of vagabond gipsies,
whom occasionally he met with, and to follow their
trade for a maintenance. . . . After he had been a pretty
while well exercised in the trade, there chanced to
ride by a couple of scholars, who had formerly been
of his acquaintance. The scholar had quickly spied
out these old friends among the gipsies, and their
amazement to see him among such society had well-nigh
discovered him; but by a sign he prevented them owning
him before that crew, and taking one of them aside
privately desired him with his friend to go to an inn,
not far distant, promising there to come to them. They
accordingly went thither and he follows: after their
first salutation his friends inquire how he came to
lead so odd a life as that was, and so joined himself
into such a beggarly company.