The Wanderer

“ The Wanderer looked, and, as in dreams, he knew that what he saw was unreal, he knew that the changing walls and streets and houses and public places were built up of gravestones which in truth were deeply planted in the ground, immovable and incapable of spontaneous motion; he knew that the crowds of men and women were not human beings but gnarled and twisted trees rooted in the earth, and that the hum of voices which reached his ears was but the sound of dried branches bending in the wind ”

“ All the creatures of earth and air manifestly loved the Wanderer of the Wilderness—and as for human beings, she was named, in their pity, their wonder, and their delight, the Blind Beauty of the Moor! ”

“ Heaven, indeed, have pity upon that wanderer, out on the bleak highroad to Slopperton; out on the shelterless Slopperton road, a mile away from the Black Mill! The wanderer is a young man, whose garments, of the shabby-genteel order, are worst of all fitted to keep out the cruel weather; a handsome young man, or a man who has once been handsome, but on whom riotous days and nights, drunkenness, recklessness, and folly, have had their dire effects. ”

“ In "The Wanderer" there is abundance of gloom, but it is a less noble poem than "The Ruined City," for the speaker is in sorrow, not for the griefs of all mankind, but for his own. He is an exile, homeless, in fact a tramp, Eardstapa. He has lost his lord, his patron; and dreams of his kindness, in the old happy days; and wakens, an aged man, friendless, to see the snow falling in the ocean, and the seabirds flitting with their white wings through the snow. The house where he had been young has fallen, and he laments over the ruins. ”

“ Never had the Wanderer in all his voyaging on the sea and on the great River Oceanus that girdles the earth, and severs the dead from the living men—never had he beheld such a darkness. Presently he came as it were within the jaws of it, dark as a wolf’s mouth, so dark that he might not see the corpses on the deck, nor the mast, nor the dead man swinging from the yard, nor the captain of the Phoenicians who groaned aloud below, praying to his gods. ”

“ As much even as the wild flowers themselves were the children a feature in the seemingly interminable panorama, that flitted past me in my long tour in the Wanderer. The wild flowers were everywhere; by wayside, on hillside, by streamlet, in copse, hiding in fairy nooks among the brackens in the woodlands, carpeting mossy banks in the pine forests, floating on the lakes, nodding to the running brooklets, creeping over ruined walls and fences, and starring the hedgerows,—wild flowers, wild flowers everywhere. ”

“ The wanderer seats himself on the trunk of an oak to await the return of day; he looks alternately at the nocturnal luminary, the darkness, and the river; he feels restless, agitated, and in expectation of something extraordinary; a pleasure never felt before, an unusual fear, cause his heart to throb, as if he were about to be admitted to some secret of the Divinity; he is alone in the depth of the forests, but the mind of man is equal to the expanse of nature, and all the solitudes of the earth are not too vast for the contemplations of his heart. ”

“ If I could rise up in a cloud
And look down on the new earth in flight,
Shadow-like cast my thought's thin shroud
Back upon these fields of light;
And hear the winds of day and night
Meet, singing loud!
THE WANDERER
Over the pool of sleep
The night mists creep,
Then faint thin light and then clear day,
Noontide, and lingering afternoon;
Then that Wanderer, the Moon
Wandering her old wild way.
How many spirits follow
Her in that dark hollow!
Like a lost lamb she roams on high
Through the cold and soundless sky,
And stares down into her deep
Reflection in the pool of sleep. ”

“ But while he himself keeps the distance she has imposed upon him, he sees a younger, more brazen admirer pushing himself into her favor. The scruples that bind the man past fifty have no existence for the youth of twenty-two. The Wanderer feels no passion of jealousy, but only a great weary lassitude and loneliness. ”

“ Both these features are accentuated further in the story of the Wanderer with the Mute. It is a continuation of Under Höststjaernen, and forms the culmination, the acquiescent close, of the self-expressional series that began with Sult. The discords of tortured loveliness are now resolved into an ultimate harmony of comely resignation and rich content. "A Wanderer may come to fifty years; he plays more softly then. Plays with muted strings." This is the keynote of the book. The Wanderer is no longer young; it is for youth to make the stories old men tell. ”

“ There were the rooftops of the city in Urtraria and its magnificent domes, a transparent yet substantial reality superimposed upon the gloomy city of cones of the metal monsters.
"Jupiter!" Bert breathed. "They're going through!"
"They are, Earthling. More accurately, they did—thousands of them; millions." Even as the Wanderer spoke, the metal monsters were wriggling through between the two planes, their enormous bodies moving with menacing deliberation.
On the rooftops back in Urtraria could be seen the frantic, fleeing forms of humanlike beings—the Wanderer's people. ”

“ The wanderer, who is nearing his final rest, feels his strength revived as he sees the metal star that shines on the tower of his home, or the smoke that rises from the paternal roof, and he struggles with renewed vigour to reach the longed-for goal. How much more must we when we are weary, be refreshed by a glance upwards at the real stars, at the distant clouds which look down upon us from our Father's House. ”

“ The sound of its church-bells makes an agreeable impression upon the wanderer, as he steps out of the woods on the nearest hill-top; and when it so happens that the sun is mirrored in the windows of the two churches and the houses, this same wanderer seldom remembers that all is not gold that glitters, and that evening-bells, fruitful fields, green meadows, and a pretty little town in a valley, is not enough by far to make an idyl. ”

“ XIV. THE MAGIC PACKET A POOR man, called Iena, or the Wanderer, was in the habit of roaming about from place to place, forlorn, without relations, and almost helpless. He had often wished for a companion to share his solitude; but who would think of joining his fortunes with those of a poor wanderer, who had no shelter in the world but such as his leather hunting-shirt provided, and no other household than the packet in which his hunting-shirt was laid away? ”

“ The Wanderer's wife and his two daughters and his baby lived in the women's quarters. I have not described and cannot describe these four. The little son of whom he was tremendously proud slept with his father in the great quilts in The Enormous Room. Of The Wanderer's little son I may say that he had lolling buttons of eyes sewed on gold flesh, that he had a habit of turning cart-wheels in one-third of his father's trousers, that we called him The Imp. He ran, he teased, he turned handsprings, he got in the way, and he even climbed the largest of the scraggly trees in the cour one day. ”

“ From behind the various and manifold scenes of this amazing labyrinth, there arises the pale figure of the Wanderer, terrible and diabolical, yet suffering and despairing, to bear witness to his own defeat and the victory of human nature, so weak and yet so invincible, the object of at once his hatred and his adoration; and is it not, when we stand face to face with this wonderful creation of a great genius, indifferent where and when and by whom the separate tales are related? ”

“ The Wanderer sighed, and said: 'When women in rich attire move around you, and you feel that the faint fluttering of the snowy robe is more spiritual than the life-breath of their souls—murmur ye: The Dead!'
The young man seemed not to hear the words of his friend. Heavy masses of lurid clouds gathered from every direction, and obscured the face of the sky. How different the hour of the gloomy noon from that of the fresh, transparent morning!
The men before whom the People of the Black Nation kneel and prostrate themselves now began to move through the streets. ”

“ Bert calmed immediately under the spell of the Wanderer's new mood.
"My mission throughout eternity, Earthling—can't you sense it? Forever and ever I shall roam infra-dimensional space, watching and waiting for evidence that a similar catastrophe might be visited on another land where warm-blooded thinking humans of similar mold to my own may be living out their short lives of happiness or near-happiness. ”

“ The wanderer trembled when he saw all this,
Because he deemed by magic it was wrought;
Yet in his heart a longing for some bliss,
Whereof the hard and changing world knows nought,
Arose and urged him on, and dimmed the thought
That there perchance some devil lurked to slay
The heedless wanderer from the light of day. ”

“ The question of style apart, we do not feel that "The Wanderer" shows the slightest decline in its author's powers. The plot is as ingeniously complicated as ever, the suspense as skilfully maintained; the characters seem to us as real as those in "Evelina," or "Cecilia," or in the "Diary" itself; the alternate pathos and satire of the book keep our attention ever on the alert. ”

“ The Wanderer’s Return.
[Written by W. A. C. Shand, and first published in "The Edinburgh University Souvenir," 1883, a little volume of which the author was editor. Mr. Shand is a native of Aberdeen, and at present resident in Russia.]
Alone, alone, in the evening beam,
By the flowery marge of my native stream,
Weary, and wan, and faint I stand,
'Mid the old green bowers of my fatherland.
I hear the strain of the wandering rills,
In sob and swell 'mid the far-off hills;
Softly blent, as they dream along,
With the reaper's shout and the goatherd's song. ”

“ The psychology of places, for some imaginations at least, is very vivid; for the wanderer, especially, camps have their "note" either of welcome or rejection. ”

“ It gets colder and colder, and I am fain to wrap myself in my Highland plaid.
We meet some horses and carts; the horses start or shy, and remembering our adventure of yesterday we feel nervous till they pass.
On and on, and up and up. We are among the clouds, and the air is cold and damp.
We now near the gloomy mountains and deep ravines of Slochmuichk.
We stop and have a peep ahead. Must the Wanderer, indeed, climb that terrible hill? Down beneath that narrow mountain path the ravine is 500 feet deep at the least. There is a sharp corner to turn, too, up yonder, and what is beyond? ”

“ Even the Wanderers' children could do strange things, for if any one of them met with a child of Nen the two would stare at each other in silence with large grave eyes; then the Wanderer's child would slowly draw from his turban a live fish or snake. ”

“ THE principle motive of the wander-spirit is curiosity—the desire to know what is beyond the next turning of the road, and to probe for oneself the mystery of the names of the places in maps. In a subconscious way the born wanderer is always expecting to come on something very wonderful—beyond the horizon’s rim. The joys of wandering are often balanced by the pains ”

“ In other parts, the disconsolate wanderer, wherever he turns, sees nothing around him but a vast interminable expanse of sand and sky; a gloomy and barren void, where the eye finds no particular object to rest upon, and the mind is filled with painful apprehensions of perishing with thirst. ”

“ Even the amniotic fluid and the nutritive liquid for the fœtus are present, and the wanderer remakes himself into a splendid king. He can really do it better than his father. The dream carries the wish fulfillment to the uttermost limits.
Let us examine the process somewhat more in detail. The wanderer, by virtue of a dissociation, has a twofold existence, once as a youth in the inside of the glass sphere, and once outside in his former guise. Outside and inside he is united with his mother as husband and as developing child. ”

“ The delightful and erudite essay on the 'Weird of the Wanderer' is, perhaps, the best thing in the book, and strikes the undercurrent of mysticism with fine suggestiveness.... Whoever the author is, he is a man of nice penetration, and a philosopher worth listening to. ”

“ Yet when the practical and perhaps sordid work of the day was done, and we gathered together around one or other of the numerous camp fires, it seemed as if a new world had descended upon us when daylight gave place to the mystic glimmer of the lesser stars and the steadfast radiance of the glorious Southern Cross. Only the world-wanderer who has slept beneath all skies can truly appreciate the grandeur of the southern constellations. ”

“ Thus has the bewildered Wanderer to stand, as so many have done, shouting question after question into the Sibylcave of Destiny, and receive no Answer but an Echo. It is all a grim Desert, this once-fair world of his; wherein is heard only the howling of wild-beasts, or the shrieks of despairing, hate-filled men; and no Pillar of Cloud by day, and no Pillar of Fire by night, any longer guides the Pilgrim. ”

“ In "The Last Joy" old age is no longer standing at the door; it has come in and laid its hand upon him. "I am driven by fire and fettered by ice," writes the Wanderer in the hut where he has retired to make the big irons within him glow. In truth he is not sure whether he still has any irons or whether he can still heat them. ”

“ The Prospector still pushes his small pack-mule through the snow of glacial passes, seeking the unexplored, and therefore more alluring, mountain ranges.
The Lonesome Man still seeks forgetfulness of crime in the solitude, building his cabin in the shadow of great peaks.
The Trail-Tramp, mounted wanderer, horseman of the restless heart, still rides from place to place, contemptuous of gold, carrying in his folded blanket all the vanishing traditions of the wild. ”