Lavengro | Page 8

had she been placed in such circumstances as Charlotte Bronte placed Shirley."
"But the most damning thing of all," said Hake, "is that umbrella, gigantic and green: a painful thought that has often occurred to me."
"Passion has certainly never disturbed his nature-worship," said I. "So devoid of passion is he that to depict a tragic situation is quite beyond his powers. Picturesque he always is, powerful never. No one reading an account of the privations of Lavengro during the 'Joseph Sell' period finds himself able to realise from Borrow's description the misery of a young man tenderly reared, and with all the pride of an East Anglian gentleman, living on bread and water in a garret, with starvation staring him in the face. It is not passion," I said to Hake, "that prevents Borrow from enjoying the peace of the nature-worshipper. It is Ambition! His books show that he could never cleanse his stuffed bosom of the perilous stuff of ambition. To become renowned, judging from many a peroration in 'Lavengro,' was as great an incentive to Borrow to learn languages as to Alexander Smith's poet-hero it was an incentive to write poetry."
"Ambition and the green gamp," said Hake. "But, look, the rainbow is fading from the sky without the intervention of gypsy sorceries, and see how the ferns are changing colour with the change in the light."
But I soon found that if Borrow was not a perfect Child of the Open Air, he was something better: a man of that deep sympathy with human kind, which the "Child of the Open Air" must needs lack.

IX. THE GYPSIES OF NORMAN CROSS.
Knowing Borrow's extraordinary shyness and his great dislike of meeting strangers, Dr. Hake, while Borrow was trying to get as close to the deer as they would allow, expressed to me his surprise at the terms of cordial friendship that sprang up between us during that walk. But I was not surprised: there were several reasons why Borrow should at once take to me--reasons that had nothing whatever to do with any inherent attractiveness of my own.
By recalling what occurred I can throw a more brilliant light upon Borrow's character than by any kind of analytical disquisition.
Two herons rose from the Ponds and flew away to where they probably had their nests. By the expression on Borrow's face as he stood and gazed at them, I knew that, like myself, he had a passion for herons.
"Were there many herons around Whittlesea Mere before it was drained?" I said.
"I should think so," said he, dreamily, "and every kind of water bird."
Then, suddenly turning round upon me with a start, he said, "But how do you know that I knew Whittlesea Mere?"
"You say in 'Lavengro' that you played among the reeds of Whittlesea Mere when you were a child."
"I don't mention Whittlesea Mere in 'Lavengro,'" he said.
"No," said I, "but you speak of a lake near the old State prison at Norman Cross, and that was Whittlesea Mere."
"Then you know Whittlesea Mere?" said Borrow, much interested.
"I know the place that was Whittlesea Mere before it was drained," I said, "and I know the vipers around Norman Cross, and I think I know the lane where you first met Jasper Petulengro. He was a generation before my time. Indeed, I never was thrown much across the Petulengroes in the Eastern Counties, but I knew some of the Hernes and the Lees and the Lovells."
I then told him what I knew about Romanies and vipers, and also gave him Marcianus's story about the Moors being invulnerable to the viper's bite, and about their putting the true breed of a suspected child to the test by setting it to grasp a viper--as he, Borrow, when a child, grasped one of the vipers of Norman Cross.
"The gypsies," said Borrow, "always believed me to be a Romany. But surely you are not a Romany Rye?"
"No," I said, "but I am a student of folk-lore; and besides, as it has been my fortune to see every kind of life in England, high and low, I could not entirely neglect the Romanies, could I?"
"I should think not," said Borrow, indignantly. "But I hope you don't know the literary class among the rest."
"Hake is my only link to that dark world," I said; "and even you don't object to Hake. I am purer than he, purer than you, from the taint of printers' ink."
He laughed. "Who are you?"
"The very question I have been asking myself ever since I was a child in short frocks," I said, "and have never yet found an answer. But Hake agrees with me that no well-bred soul should embarrass itself with any such troublesome query." This gave a chance to Hake, who in such local reminiscences as these had been able to take no part. The