I discovered wonderful books back there in the "stack" ... the works of Paracelsus, who whispered me that wisdom was to be found more in the vagabond bye-ways of life than in the ordered and regulated highways. That the true knowledge was to be garnered from knocking about with vagrants, gipsies, carriers ... from corners in wayside inns where travellers discoursed....
And there was Boehmen, the inspired German shoemaker, who was visited by an angel, or some sort of divine stranger, and given his first illumination outside his shop ... and later walked a-field and heard what the flowers were saying to each other, seeing through all creation at one glance, crystal-clear.
And there were the unusual poets ... old Matthew Prior, who wrote besides his poems, the Treaty, was it, of Utrecht?... hobnobbed with the big people of the land ... yet refused all marks of honour ... the best Latinist of the day ... at a time when Latin was the diplomatic language of Europe.
When he wasn't hobnobbing with the aristocracy or writing treaties he was sitting in inns and drinking with teamsters ... had a long love affair with a cobbler's wife, and married the lady after the cobbler died....
There was Skelton and his rough-running, irregular rhythmic rather than strictly metrical verses ... mad and ribald ... often tedious ... but with wild flashes of beauty interwoven through his poems ... the poem about his mistress's sparrow ... the elegy on its death ... where he prayed God to give it the little wren of the Virgin Mary, as a wife, in heaven—"to tread, for solas!"
And Gay, the author of many delightful fables ... who must wait still longer for his proper niche, because he showed gross levity on the subject of death and life ... he who wrote for his own epitaph:
"Life is a jest, and all things show it;
I thought so once, but now I know it."
For all those who would not keep step, who romped out of the regular procedure and wantoned by the way, picking what flowers they chose, I held feeling and sympathy.