Borrowdale

“ But the time it will come, when from your, riches you must die, and leave them behind you, and it certainly and shortly will come, when you all must cease from your tale; when your luxurious great ones in Borrowdale shall no more tread down the poor ones to the ground, and the time it will come, when there will be no respect of persons with God ”

“ And if you do not use your riches on earth, you cannot get the use of them in heaven; a place where money will not buy. So I well may call some of yon crazy bodies, and well I may say some of you is destroyed for lack of knowledge, and some of you are not half wise; and I often have heard of the gouks of Borrowdale, and they may be compared to the cookoo, crying in the fields, for they are so brutish and ignorant. ”

“ But the finest prospect is from a gate about halfway up the hill, whence you look down upon the head of Derwentwater, with all the alps of Borrowdale, opening darkly.
After descending Castle-rigg and crossing the top of St. John's vale, we seemed as going into banishment from society, the road then leading over a plain, closely surrounded by mountains so wild, that neither a cottage, or a wood soften their rudeness, and so steep and barren, that not even sheep appear upon their sides. ”

“ Sleep on, fair maiden of Borrowdale!
Sleep! O sleep! and do not wake!
Dream of the dance, till the foot so pale,
And the beauteous ancle shiver and shake;
Till thou shalt press, with feeling bland,
Thine own fair breast for lover's hand.
Thy heart is light as summer breeze,
Thy heart is joyous as the day;
Man never form of angel sees,
But thou art fair as they!
So lovers ween, and so they say,
So thine shall ween for many a day!
The hour's at hand, O woe is me!
For they are coming, and they are three! THE CURSE OF THE LAUREATE. (SOUTHEY) Carmen Judiciale. ”

“ Borrowdale is joined on the east by the bare wild dale of Langstrath, and the Greta joins the Derwent immediately below Derwentwater; the town of Keswick lying near the junction. Derwentwater and Bassenthwaite occupy a single depression, a flat alluvial plain separating them. From Seatoller in Borrowdale a road traverses Honister Pass (1100 ft.) , whence it descends westward, beneath the majestic Honister Crags, where green slate is quarried, into the valley containing Buttermere (94 ft. max. depth) and Crummock Water (144 ft.) ”

“ I had occasion enough to reflect on the folly of my precipitation, as I lay crouched in some draughty cave of boulders, watching the livelong day the clouds lower and lift, the battalions of the rain trample across the fells, and seeking to warm myself with the thought of that army in Scotland marching to the English borders. At nightfall I would creep down into Borrowdale, procure food from one of my old tenants who was well-disposed to me, and so get me back again to some jutting corner whence I could look down Gillerthwaite to Applegarth. ”

“ There is still a court-room over the gateway, "where the bailiff of Hawkshead held court, and distributed justices in the name of the abbot."
From the tremendous steeps of the long fell, which towers over Hawkshead, astonishing views open to the distant vales and mountains of Cumberland; overlooking all the grotesque summits in the neighbourhood of Grasmere, the fells of Borrowdale in the furthest distance, Langdale-pikes, and several small lakes, seen gleaming in the bosom of the mountains. Before us, rose the whole multitude of Coniston-fells ”

“ Wastwater, its bed hewn and filled by Almighty power in the beginning to contrast the silvern temporalities of a level mere with the solid, silent, rugged eternities of rock around. There is always some pleasure to the hale of body and mind in climbing from Wastwater, whether by pony-track, mountain-path, or dangerous puzzle route up the cliffs. In early October I had to cross to Wastwater from Keswick. In the golden glory of afternoon we passed up Borrowdale. One side the glen sloomed in dying bronze of bracken, the other was grey with nude birches below, chocolate with heather above. ”

“ Keswick town almost adjoins, though nowhere trenching, on its lower end, and behind Keswick the great cone of Skiddaw fills the north. Though of no distinction in itself, not a country town in all England is so felicitously placed. Within five minutes' [Pg 36] walk of its extremity its fortunate burghers can pace the shores of Derwentwater, or, better still, the fir-clad promontory of Friars Crag, and look straight up the mountain-bordered lake to the yet sterner heights looming at its farther end, known as the Jaws of Borrowdale. ”

“ The perception was a spark to the train of his fears. They flashed into one monstrous conjecture. Gordon thrust it down; it sprang up again and clutched at his throat, stifling him.
Beyond that field, the track from Styhead--the track which he had watched that afternoon--ran towards the lake. If you came from the Pass to the upper part of Wastdale--say to the Inn--you crossed the field, you joined the lane at the very spot where Gordon stood. And over the Pass the woman had come--must have come. For Gordon's farm was the outpost of the village. The next house was built in Borrowdale. ”

“ Turning round, I looked through Borrowdale out upon the Derwentwater and the Vale of Keswick, even to my own house, where my own children were. Indeed, I had altogether a most interesting walk through Newlands to Buttermere, over the fells to Ennerdale, to St. Bees; up Wastdale to Sca Fell, down Eskdale to Devock Lake, Ulpha Kirk, Broughton Mills, Tarver, Coniston, Windermere, Grasmere, Keswick. If it would entertain you, I would transcribe my notes and send them you by the first opportunity. I have scarce left room for my best wishes to Mrs. ”

“ And all your promiscuous multitude of you will be bundled together, and all erudition, with-out any rank or seniority, must come to a retirement, and suppose some of you people in Borrow dale domi neer or tyranize over a stranger, yet the time it will come, when you will get no more but the breadth of your backs. ”

“ In Wild Wales we have George Borrow in his most genial mood. There are none of the hair-breadth escapes and grim experiences of The Bible in Spain, none of the romance and the glamour of Lavengro and its sequel, but there is good humour, a humour that does not obtain in the three more important works, and there is an amazing amount of frank candour of a biographical kind. We even have a reference to Isopel Berners, referred to by Captain Bosvile as “the young woman you used to keep company with . . . a fine young woman and a virtuous.” It is the happiest of Borrow’s books, and not unnaturally. ”

“ In any case we need not press too hard the Cornish and French origin of George Borrow to explain his wandering tendencies, nor need we wonder at the suggestion of Nathaniel Hawthorne, that he was 'supposed to be of gypsy descent by the mother's side.' You have only to think of the father, whose work carried him from time to time to every corner of England, Scotland, and Ireland, and of the mother with her reminiscence of life in a travelling theatrical company, to explain in no small measure the glorious vagabondage of George Borrow. ”

“ The question that really exercises Borrovians most is the relative merit of stories and sections of the narrative—the comparative excellence of the early ‘life’ in Lavengro and of the later detached episodes in the Romany Rye. Most are in some sort of agreement as to the supremacy of the dingle episode, which has this advantage: Borrow is always at his best when dealing with strange beings and abnormal experiences. When he is describing ordinary mortals he treats them with coldness as mere strangers. The commonplace town-dwellers seldom arouse his sympathy, never kindle his enthusiasm. ”

“ Three years separated the sojourn of the Borrow family at Norman Cross from their sojourn in Edinburgh—three years of continuous wandering. The West Norfolk Militia were watching the French prisoners at Norman Cross for fifteen months. After that we have glimpses of them at Colchester, at East Dereham again, at Harwich, at Leicester, at Huddersfield, concerning which place Borrow incidentally in Wild Wales writes of having been at school, in Sheffield, in Berwick-on-Tweed, and finally the family are in Edinburgh, where they arrive on 6th April, 1813. ”

“ To-day, a little colony of dwellers in red-brick villas have invaded the lonely spot where Borrow lived; but even now you have but to turn aside a few steps from the lake side to reach the edge of far-stretching marshland levels that have changed their face but little during the passage of many centuries. Farther away the marshlanders have seized upon any slight piece of rising ground to establish a firm foundation for their humble homes ”

“ Much more than in any of his other books Borrow is the hero in “Wild Wales”—a strange black-coated gentleman with white hair striding over the hills and along the rivers, carrying an umbrella, asking innumerable questions and giving infinite information about history, literature, religion, politics, and minor matters, willing to talk to anyone, but determined not to put up at a trampers’ hostelry. The Irish at Chester took him for a minister, the Irish reapers in Anglesey took him for a priest and got him to bless them in Latin while they knelt. ”

“ The scene of these transactions was a wooded glen or dingle a few miles from Willenhall, in Staffordshire, where Lavengro and Isopel were encamped in their respective tents, having as their neighbours the gipsy clan of which Jasper was the chief. Upon the whole the Dingle chapters are perhaps the most brilliant and the most enduring that Borrow ever achieved. Their interest is greatly enhanced by the fact that they are probably a naked transcript from actual fact, for Borrow was a poor hand at invention. He rarely, if ever, invented a character. ”

“ In such scenes, naturally, Borrow placed nothing common and nothing mean. He must have a madman among the ruins, or by a pool a peasant woman sitting, who has been mad ever since her child was drowned there, or a mule and a stallion fighting with hoofs and teeth. The clergy, in their ugly shovel hats and long cloaks, glared at him askance as he passed by their whispering groups in Salamanca: at the English College in Valladolid, he thought of “those pale, smiling, half-foreign priests who, like stealthy grimalkins, traversed green England in all directions” under the persecution of Elizabeth. ”

“ The reason why Borrow was so misjudged in Norfolk was, as I have hinted above, that the racial characteristics of the Celt and the East Anglian clashed too severely. Yet he is a striking illustration of the way in which the locality that has given birth to a man influences his imagination throughout his life. His father, a Cornishman of a good middle-class family, had been obliged, owing to a youthful escapade, to leave his native place and enlist as a common soldier. Afterwards he became a recruiting officer, and moved about from one part of Great Britain and Ireland to another. ”

“ Isopel Berners he wished it to be known was a queenly creature, and he described her as taller than himself (he was 6 feet 2 inches without his shoes) . Exaggeration is colour, not form. A disbelief in his having encountered the convict son of the old apple-woman near Salisbury does not imply that the old woman herself is a fiction. Borrow insisted upon Norfolk as his county, “where the people eat the best dumplings in the world, and speak the purest English.” ”

“ I shall then start for Badnor by Tregaron, and hope soon to be in England. I have seen an enormous deal since I have been away, and have walked several hundred miles. Amongst other places I have seen St. David's, a wonderful half ruinous cathedral on the S. Western end of Pembrokeshire, but I shall be glad to get back. God bless you and Hen.
George Borrow.
Henrietta! Do you know who is handsome?
To Mrs. George Borrow
Presteyne, Radnorshire, Monday morning.
Dear Carreta,—I am just going to start for Ludlow, and hope to be at Shrewsbury on Tuesday night if not on Monday morning. ”

“ The greatest loss to Borrow, consequent upon his imprisonment, no government could make good. His faithful Basque, Francisco, had contracted typhus, or gaol fever, that was raging at the time, and died within a few days of his master’s release. “A more affectionate creature never breathed,” Borrow wrote to Mr Brandram. The poor fellow, who, “to the strength of a giant joined the disposition of a lamb . . . was beloved even in the patio of the prison, where he used to pitch the bar and wrestle with the murderers and felons, always coming off victor.” ”

“ Borrow always struck me as a dear old creature. When Borrow married her she was a widow with one daughter, Henrietta Clarke. The old lady used to dress in black silk. She had little silver-grey corkscrew curls down the side of her face; and she wore a lace cap with a mauve ribbon on top, quite in the Early Victorian style. I remember that on one occasion when she and Miss Clarke had come to Brunswick House they were talking with my mother in the temporary absence of George Borrow, who, so far as I can recall, had gone into another room to discuss business with John Pilgrim. ”

“ In 1847 he had hopes of the consulship at Canton, but Bowring wanted it for himself, and a misunderstanding over this led to an inevitable break of old friendship. Borrow’s passionate love of travel was never more to be gratified at the expense of others. He tried, indeed, to secure a journey to the East from the British Museum Trustees, and then gave up the struggle. Further wanderings, which were many, were to be confined to Europe and indeed to England, Scotland, Ireland, and the Isle of Man. ”

“ Often the swarthy, horse-dealing gipsy was the mouthpiece through which he breathed forth his own abhorrence of conventional restraints and the thronging crowds of busy streets. He loved the open air country life that he lived near the Suffolk coast, where the fresh salt winds sweep up from the sea across gorse-clad denes and pleasant pasture-lands. He was happiest when amongst the “summer saturated heathen” of the heath and glen. Who can doubt that the much-quoted conversation in the twenty-fifth chapter of p. 75“Lavengro,” gives expression to much of Borrow’s own philosophy? ”