8
From land to land a pilgrim, yet at home
Where’er thy journey
Thou didst a dweller in the Eternal come;
The dust thy floor, the heaven of stars thy dome,
To break a lance for Truth in some new tourney.
With Nature blent
Art thou, and the wide world thy monument.
9
Thou gypsy of all time, no lot seems strange,
No life was sterile
To that free spirit, wrought by rugged change;
Thy heart found rest in strife, and did outrange
The farthest fancy, and woo the sorest peril.
Hardships and lack
Were comrades, and the milestones on thy track.
F. W. Orde Ward.
GEORGE HENRY BORROW.
The time is ripe, and over ripe, for a commemorative celebration of George Borrow in a city with which he was so long, and so intimately, associated as he was with Norwich. His increasing fame as a foremost literary man of the nineteenth century is amply witnessed to by the various biographies of him, and the numerous appreciations of him by writers of repute, and Mr. Clement Shorter’s forthcoming “Life of Borrow” will certainly add to the cult.
The following sketch of this wayward genius is mainly devoted to outstanding characteristics, with necessarily brief accounts of his works and journeyings. It seems convenient to sum up his career in the four divisions which follow.
Section I.
(1803-15)—Early Wandering Days.
Borrow’s father, Thomas Borrow, was a patriotic, pugnacious, but God-fearing Cornishman, born at an old homestead known as Trethinnick, in the parish of St. Cleer, in which his forbears had been settled well back in the seventeenth century, probably earlier. To quote Dr. Knapp: “They feared God, honoured the king, and believed in ‘piskies’ and Holy Wells.”