Word: vagabonde
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This morning the Vagabond is sick unto death of culture. The Cantabrigian mists, swirling their gyral shapes about the familiar tower, serve as an ethereal transport for his soul, and carry it to far climes. There, the allusions of Professor Babbitt forgotten, the Vagabond recalls an author he once read, a febrile man, Edger Rice Burroughs by name. As the memory returns, he hears the scream of a gorilla, charmingly uncultured. Then, all around him, swarming from the trees, comes a clan of the great apes. The vagabond sits in their midst, learning tricks that neither Burroughs nor his familiars...
...Vagabond turned over lazily as the Chapel bell tolled the hour, swung his feet to the floor, and rejoiced that it was over. Once again he could ascond the dizzy heights of his aesthotic seclusion, leaving the sordid world of men and Professors. He lighted a leisurely pipe, that first, sweet, fragrant pipe before breakfast. New-found freedom found him unprepared, a man lost in the aether with no ground under his feet. The gleaming morning sun flashed in rosy reflection from the gilt binding of a small book on the dusty shelves. Shelley, that was it! Now there...
...Vagabond, retreating from the snow flurries to the airy warmth of his tower, meditates by preference on those not-so-spacious but still glamorous days when Leicester's barge moved down the Thames in the evening, when a bribed servant brought a certain ring to Elizabeth on the morning of Essex's execution. On winter nights, with a sheet of snow on the streets, and the wind making the torches flare, a group of roisterers would come back from an afternoon at the Globe, or bear-baiting on the Bank side, or even from an excursion among the wenches...
...Vagabond reflects that not even greater men are exempt from the blight. On his own bookshelves reposes the embalmed corpse of the "Faery Queene," which later on of course he means to read. But not just yet. He will take it up someday, with the tragedies of Ben Jonson, and also "Paradise Regained." And Pope. In the eighteenth century the little man in black, with the twisted shoulder and the twisted smile, was the terror as well as the delight of London. A single translation made him rich; he was bribed to write and believed to be silent. Pope...
...said that a certain Elizabethan poet, a rugged fellow and something of a cynic, ordered that a Latin inscription be carved under his name on his tombstone, which translated reads: "Dedicated to Oblivion." The Vagabond, like a bad preacher, has put the text at the end of the sermon, but perhaps it can pass for a moral as well...