scinating moonlight
dreams--Ancient Mariners and Christabels, Wonder Books and Tanglewood
Tales. And the fairies and goblins, the witches and wizards, were they
not born by moonlight and nurtured under the glimmer of the stars?

But there are dreams by sunlight and visions at noonday also. Such
dreams thrill us in another but no less unmistakable way, especially when
the dreamer is a Scott, a William Morris, a Borrow.

And dreamers like Borrow are not content to see visions and dream dreams,
their bodies must participate no less than their minds. They must needs
set forth in quest of the unknown. Hardships and privations deter them
not. Change, variety, the unexpected, these things are to them the very
salt of life.

This untiring restlessness keeps a Richard Burton rambling over Eastern
lands, turns a Borrow into the high-road and dingle. This bright-eyed
Norfolk giant took more kindly to the roughnesses of life than did
Hazlitt and De Quincey. Quite as neurotic in his way, his splendid
physique makes us think of him as the embodiment of fine health. Illness
and Borrow do not agree. We think of him swinging along the road like
one of Dumas' lusty adventurers, exhibiting his powers of horsemanship,
holding his own with well-seasoned drinkers--especially if the drink be
Norfolk ale--conversing with any picturesque rag-tag and bob-tail he
might happen upon. There is plenty of fresh air in his pages. No
thinker like Hazlitt, no dreamer like De Quincey; but a shrewd observer
with the most amazing knack of ingratiating himself with strangers.

No need for this romancer to seek distant lands for inspiration. Not
even the villages of Spain and Portugal supplied him with such fine stuff
for romance as Mumper's Dingle. He would get as strange a story out of a
London counting-house or an old apple-woman on London Bridge as did many
a teller of tales out of lonely heaths and stormy seas.

_Lavengro_ and _The Romany Rye_ are fine specimens of romantic
autobiography. His life was varied enough, abounding in colour; but the
Vagabond is never satisfied with things that merely happen. He is
equally concerned with the things that might happen, with the things that
ought to happen. And so Borrow added to his own personal record from the
storehouse of dreams. Some have blamed him for not adhering to the
actual facts. But does any autobiographer adhere to actual facts? Can
any man, even with the most sensitive feelin