When Borrow was in his nineteenth year—according to Dr. Knapp’s estimate—he told his father what he had done: “I have learned Welsh, and have translated the songs of Ab Gwilym, some ten thousand lines, into English rhyme. I have also learnt Danish, and have rendered the old book of Ballads into English metre. I have learned many other tongues, and have acquired some knowledge even of Hebrew and Arabic.” He read and conversed with William Taylor; he read alone in the Guildhall of Norwich, where the Corporation Library offered him the books from which he gained “his knowledge of Anglo-Saxon and early English, Welsh or British, Northern or Scandinavian learning”—so writes Dr. Knapp, who has seen the “neat young pencilled notes” of Borrow in Edmund Lhuyd’s ‘ArchÆologia Britannica’ and the ‘Danica Literatura Antiquissima’ of Olaus Wormius, etc. He tells us himself that he passed entire nights in reading an old Danish book, till he was almost blind.

In 1823 Borrow began to publish his translations. Taylor introduced him to Thomas Campbell, then editor of the “New Monthly,” and to Sir Richard Phillips, editor and proprietor of the “Monthly Magazine.” Both editors printed Borrow’s works.

Sir Richard Phillips was particularly flattering: he used Borrow’s article on “Danish Poetry and Ballad Writing” and about six hundred lines of translation from German, Danish, Swedish and Dutch poetry in the first year of the connection, usually with the signature, “George Olaus Borrow.” I will quote only one specimen, his version of Goethe’s “Erl King” (“Monthly Magazine,” December, 1823):

Who is it that gallops so late on the wild!
O it is the father that carries his child!
He presses him close in his circling arm,
To save him from cold, and to shield him from harm.

“Dear baby, what makes ye your countenance hide?”
“Spur, father, your courser and rowel his side;
The Erl-King is chasing us over the heath;”
“Peace, baby, thou seest a vapoury wreath?”

“Dear boy, come with me, and I’ll join in your sport,
And show ye the place where the fairies resort;
My mother, who dwells in the cool pleasant mine
Shall clothe thee in garments so fair and so fine.”

“My father, my father, in mercy attend,
And hear what is said by the whispering fiend.”
“Be quiet, be quiet, my dearly-loved child;
’Tis naught but the wind as it stirs in the wild.”

“Dear baby, if thou wilt but venture with me,
My daughter shall dandle thy form on her knee;
My daughter, who dwells where the moon-shadows play,
Shall lull ye to sleep with the song of the fay.”

“My father, my father, and seest thou not
His sorceress daughter in yonder dark spot?”
“I see something truly, thou dear little fool,—
I see the great alders that hang by the pool.”

“Sweet baby, I doat on that beautiful form,
And thou shalt ride with me the wings of the storm.”
“O father, my father, he grapples me now,
And already has done me a mischief, I vow.”

The father was terrified, onward he press’d,
And closer he cradled the child to his breast,
And reach’d the far cottage, and, wild with alarm,
He found that the baby hung dead on his arm!

The only criticism that need be passed on this is that any man of some intelligence and patience can hope to do as well: he seldom wrote any verse that was either much better or much worse. At the same time it must not be forgotten that the success of the translation is no measure of the impression made on the young Borrow by the legend.

His translations from Ab Gwilym are not interesting either to lovers of that poet or to lovers of Borrow: some are preserved in a sort of life in death in the pages of “Wild Wales.”

From the German he had also translated F. M. Von Klinger’s “Faustus: his life, death and descent into hell.” {75a} The preface announces that “although scenes of vice and crime are here exhibited, it is merely in the hope that they may serve as beacons, to guide the ignorant and unwary from the shoals on which they might otherwise be wrecked.” He insisted, furthermore, that the book contained “the highly useful advice,” that everyone should bear their lot in patience and not seek “at the expense of his repose to penetrate into those secrets which the spirit of man, while dressed in the garb of mortality cannot and must not unveil. . . . To the mind of man all is dark; he is an enigma to himself; let him live, therefore, in the hope of once seeing clearly; and happy indeed is he who in that manner passeth his days.”

From the Danish of Johannes Evald, he translated “The Death of Balder,” a play, into blank verse with consistently feminine endings, as in this speech of Thor to Balder: {75b}

How long dost think, degenerate son of Odin,
Unmanly pining for a foolish maiden,
And all the weary train of love-sick follies,
Will move a bosom that is steel’d by virtue?
Thou dotest! Dote and weep, in tears swim ever;
But by thy father’s arm, by Odin’s honour,
Haste, hide thy tears and thee in shades of alder!
Haste to the still, the peace-accustom’d valley,
Where lazy herdsmen dance amid the clover.
There wet each leaf which soft the west wind kisses,
Each plant which breathes around voluptuous odours,
With tears! There sigh and moan, and the tired peasant
Shall hear thee, and, behind his ploughshare resting,
Shall wonder at thy grief, and pity Balder!

There are lyrics interspersed. The following is sung by three Valkyries marching round the cauldron before Rota dips the fatal spear that she is to present to Hother:

In juice of rue
And trefoil too;
In marrow of bear
And blood of Trold,
Be cool’d the spear,
Threetimes cool’d,
When hot from blazes
Which Nastroud raises
For Valhall’s May.

1st Valk. Whom it woundeth,
It shall slay.

2nd Whom it woundeth,
It shall slay.

3rd Whom it woundeth,
It shall slay.

In 1826 he was to publish “Romantic Ballads,” translated from the Gaelic, Danish, Norse, Swedish, and German, with eight original pieces. He “hoped shortly” to publish a complete translation of the “KjÆmpe Viser” and of Gaelic songs, made by him “some years ago.” Few of these are valuable or interesting, but I must quote “Svend Vonved” because Borrow himself so often refers to it. The legend haunted him of “that strange melancholy Swayne Vonved, who roams about the world propounding people riddles; slaying those who cannot answer, and rewarding those who can with golden bracelets.” When he was walking alone in wild weather in Cornwall he roared it aloud:

Svend Vonved sits in his lonely bower;
He strikes his harp with a hand of power;
His harp returned a responsive din;
Then came his mother hurrying in:
Look out, look out, Svend Vonved.

In came his mother Adeline,
And who was she, but a queen so fine:
“Now hark, Svend Vonved! out must thou ride
And wage stout battle with knights of pride.”
Look out, look out, Svend Vonved.

“Avenge thy father’s untimely end;
To me, or another, thy gold harp lend;
This moment boune thee, and straight begone!
I rede thee, do it, my own dear son.”
Look out, look out, Svend Vonved.

Svend Vonved binds his sword to his side;
He fain will battle with knights of pride.
“When may I look for thee once more here?
When roast the heifer and spice the beer?”
Look out, look out, Svend Vonved.

“When stones shall take, of themselves, a flight
And ravens’ feathers are waxen white,
Then may’st thou expect Svend Vonved home:
In all my days, I will never come.”
Look out, look out, Svend Vonved.

If we did not know that Borrow used these verses as a kind of incantation we should be sorry to have read them. But one of the original pieces in this book is as good in itself as it is interesting. I mean “Lines to Six-foot-three”:

A lad, who twenty tongues can talk,
And sixty miles a day can walk;
Drink at a draught a pint of rum,
And then be neither sick nor dumb;
Can tune a song, and make a verse,
And deeds of northern kings rehearse;
Who never will forsake his friend,
While he his bony fist can bend;
And, though averse to brawl and strife,
Will fight a Dutchman with a knife.
O that is just the lad for me,
And such is honest six-foot three.

A braver being ne’er had birth
Since God first kneaded man from earth;
O, I have come to know him well,
As Ferroe’s blacken’d rocks can tell.
Who was it did, at SuderÖe,
The deed no other dared to do?
Who was it, when the Boff had burst,
And whelm’d me in its womb accurst,
Who was it dashed amid the wave,
With frantic zeal, my life to save?
Who was it flung the rope to me?
O, who, but honest six-foot three!

Who was it taught my willing tongue,
The songs that Braga fram’d and sung?
Who was it op’d to me the store
Of dark unearthly Runic lore,
And taught me to beguile my time
With Denmark’s aged and witching rhyme;
To rest in thought in Elvir shades,
And hear the song of fairy maids;
Or climb the top of Dovrefeld,
Where magic knights their muster held!
Who was it did all this for me?
O, who, but honest six-foot three!

Wherever fate shall bid me roam,
Far, far from social joy and home;
’Mid burning Afric’s desert sands;
Or wild Kamschatka’s frozen lands;
Bit by the poison-loaded breeze
Or blasts which clog with ice the seas;
In lowly cot or lordly hall,
In beggar’s rags or robes of pall,
’Mong robber-bands or honest men,
In crowded town or forest den,
I never will unmindful be
Of what I owe to six-foot three.

That form which moves with giant grace—
That wild, tho’ not unhandsome face;
That voice which sometimes in its tone
Is softer than the wood-dove’s moan,
At others, louder than the storm
Which beats the side of old Cairn Gorm;
That hand, as white as falling snow,
Which yet can fell the stoutest foe;
And, last of all, that noble heart,
Which ne’er from honour’s path would start,
Shall never be forgot by me—
So farewell, honest six-foot three.

This is already pure Borrow, with a vigour excusing if not quite transmuting its rant. He creates a sort of hero in his own image, and it should be read as an introduction and invocation to “Lavengro” and “The Romany Rye.” It is one of the few contemporary records of Borrow at about the age when he wrote “Celebrated Trials,” made horse-shoes and fought the Blazing Tinman. So far as I know, it was more than ten years before he wrote anything so good again, and he never wrote anything better in verse, unless it is the song of the “genuine old English gentleman,” in the twenty-fourth chapter of “Lavengro”:

“Give me the haunch of a buck to eat, and to drink Madeira old,
And a gentle wife to rest with, and in my arms to fold,
An Arabic book to study, a Norfolk cob to ride,
And a house to live in shaded with trees, and near to a river side;
With such good things around me, and blessed with good health withal,
Though I should live for a hundred years, for death I would not call.”

The only other verse of his which can be remembered for any good reason is this song from the Romany, included among the translations from thirty languages and dialects which he published, in 1835, with the title of “Targum,” and the appropriate motto: “The raven has ascended to the nest of the nightingale.” The Gypsy verses are as follows:

The strength of the ox,
The wit of the fox,
And the leveret’s speed,—
Full oft to oppose
To their numerous foes,
The Rommany need.

Our horses they take,
Our waggons they break,
And ourselves they seize,
In their prisons to coop,
Where we pine and droop,
For want of breeze.

When the dead swallow
The fly shall follow
O’er Burra-panee,
Then we will forget
The wrongs we have met
And forgiving be.

It will not be necessary to say anything more about Borrow’s verses. Poetry for him was above all declamatory sentiment or wild narrative, and so he never wrote, and perhaps never cared much for poetry, except ballads and his contemporary Byron. He desired, as he said in the note to “Romantic Ballads,” not the merely harmonious but the grand, and he condemned the modern muse for “the violent desire to be smooth and tuneful, forgetting that smoothness and tunefulness are nearly synonymous with tameness and unmeaningness.” He once said of Keats: “They are attempting to resuscitate him, I believe.” He regarded Wordsworth as a soporific merely.