Yet there was much of Borrow’s nature that was in common with that of Jasper Petulengro. 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 “Lavengro,” gives expression to much of Borrow’s own philosophy? “Life is sweet, brother.” “Do you think so?” “Think so! There’s night and day, brother, both sweet things; sun, moon and stars, brother, all sweet things; there’s likewise a wind on the heath. Life is very sweet, brother; who would wish to die?” “I would wish to die?” “You talk like a gorgio—which is the same as talking like a fool—were you a Romany chal you would talk wiser. Wish to die, indeed! A Romany chal would wish to live for ever!” “In sickness, Jasper?” “There’s the sun and stars, brother.” “In blindness, Jasper?” “There’s the wind on the heath, brother; if I could only feel that, I would gladly live for ever.” Like Bamfylde Moore Carew, though for a different reason, it was to the gipsy life that Borrow turned after his unsuccessful literary work in London. Disappointed and despondent, he fled the scenes that had witnessed his failures. It is easy to imagine how great must have been his sense of freedom when he cast off the shackles of city life, and breathed again the air of the hills and pine-woods of rural England. With the poet whose bones rest in the midst of the little town of his birth, he felt and all his life maintained, that “’Tis liberty alone that gives the flower Of fleeting life its lustre and perfume, And we are weeds without it. All constraint, Except what wisdom lays on evil men, Is evil; hurts the faculties, impedes Their progress in the road of science; blinds The eyesight of discovery, and begets In those that suffer it, a sordid mind Bestial, a meagre intellect, unfit To be the tenant of man’s noble form.”