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THE PRAISES OF WAR.
91

"I ride from land to land,
I sail from sea to sea;
Some day more kind I fate may find,
Some night, kiss thee."

Now, apart from the charming felicity of these lines, we cannot but be struck with their singleness of conception and purpose. "The Wandering Knight" is well-nigh as disincumbered of mental as of material luggage. He rides as free from our tangled perplexity of introspection as from our irksome contrivances for comfort. It is not that he is precisely guileless or ignorant. One does not journey far over the world without learning the world's ways, and the ways of the men who dwell upon her. But the knowledge of things looked at from the outside is never the knowledge that wears one's soul away, and the traveling companion that Lord Byron found so ennuyant,

"The blight of life—the demon Thought,"

forms no part of the "Wandering Knight's" equipment. As I read this little fugitive song which has drifted down into an alien age, I feel an envious liking for those days when the tumult of existence made its triumph, when action fanned the embers of joy, and when