“Did a true Child of the Open Air ever carry a gigantic green umbrella that would have satisfied Sarah Gamp herself?” I murmured to Hake, while Borrow lingered under a tree and, looking round the Park, said, in a dreamy way, “Old England! Old England!” VIII. A CHILD OF THE OPEN AIR UNDER A GREEN UMBRELLA. Perhaps, however, I had better define what Hake and I meant by this phrase, and to do this I cannot do better than quote the definition of Nature-worship, by H. A. the “Swimming Rye,” which we had both been just discussing, and which I quoted not long after this memorable walk in a literary journal:— “With all the recent cultivation of the picturesque by means of water-colour landscape, descriptive novels, ‘Cook’s excursions,’ etc., the real passion for Nature is as rare as ever it was,—perhaps rarer. It is quite an affair of individual temperament: it cannot be learned; it cannot be lost. That no writer has ever tried to explain it shows how little it is known. Often it has but little to do with poetry, little with science. The poet, indeed, rarely has it at its very highest; the man of science as rarely. I wish I could define it:—in human souls—in one, perhaps, as much as in another—there is always that instinct for contact which is a great factor of progress; there is always an irresistible yearning to escape from isolation, to get as close as may be to some other conscious thing. In most individuals this yearning is simply for contact with other human souls; in some few it is not. There are some in every country of whom it is the blessing, not the bane, that, owing to some exceptional power, or to some exceptional infirmity, they can get closer to ‘_Natura Benigna_’ herself, closer to her whom we now call ‘Inanimate Nature,’ than to the human mother who bore them—far closer than to father, brother, sister, wife, or friend. Darwin among English _savants_, and Emily Brontë among English poets, and Sinfi Lovell among English gypsies, showed a good deal of the characteristics of the ‘Children of the Open Air.’ But in the case of the first of these, besides the strength of his family ties the pedantic inquisitiveness, the methodising pedantry of the man of science; in the second, the sensitivity to human contact; and in the third, subjection to the love passion—disturbed, and indeed partially stifled, the native instinct with which they were undoubtedly endowed.