As far as I remember, the only objection made by the critics to _Aylwin_ was that I had imported into a story written for popular acceptance too many speculations and breedings upon the gravest of all subjects--the subject of love at struggle with death. My answer to this is that although it did win a great popular acceptance I never expected it to do so. I knew the book to be an expression of idiosyncrasy, and no man knows how much or how little his idiosyncrasy is in harmony with the temper of his time, until his book has been given to the world. It was the story of _Aylwin_ that was born of the speculations upon Love and Death; it was not the speculations that were pressed into the story; without these speculations there could have been no story to tell. Indeed the chief fault which myself should find with _Aylwin_, if my business were to criticise it, would be that it gives not too little but too much prominence to the strong incidents of the story--a story written as a comment on love's warfare with death--written to show that confronted as a man is every moment by signs of the fragility and brevity of human life, the great marvel connected with him is not that his thoughts dwell frequently upon the unknown country beyond Orion where the beloved dead are loving us still, but that he can find time and patience to think upon anything else--a story written further to show how terribly despair becomes intensified when a man has lost--or thinks he has lost--a woman whose love was the only light of his world--when his soul is torn from his body, as it were, and whisked off on the wings of the 'viewless winds' right away beyond the farthest star, till the universe hangs beneath his feet a trembling point of twinkling light, and at last even this dies away and his soul cries out for help in that utter darkness and loneliness.
It was to depict this phase of human emotion that both _Aylwin_ and its sequel, _The Coming of Love_, were written. They were missives from the lonely watch-tower of the writer's soul, sent out into the strange and busy battle of the world--sent out to find, if possible, another soul or two to whom the watcher was, without knowing it, akin.
And now as to my two Gypsy heroines, the Sinfi Lovell of _Aylwin_ and the Rhona Boswell of _The Coming of Love_. Although Borrow belonged to a different generation from mine, I enjoyed his intimate friendship in his later years--during the time when he lived in Hereford Square; and since his death I have written a good deal about him--both in prose and in verse--in the Athenæum, in the Encyclopædia Britannica, and in other places. When, some seven or eight years ago, I brought out an edition of _Lavengro_ (in Messrs. Ward, Lock & Co.'s Minerva Library), I prefaced that delightful book by a few desultory remarks upon Sorrow's Gypsy characters. On that occasion I gave a slight sketch of the most remarkable 'Romany Chi' that had ever been met with in the part of East Anglia known to Borrow and myself--Sinfi Lovell. I described her playing on the crwth. I discussed her exploits as a boxer, and I contrasted her in many ways with the glorious Anglo-Saxon road-girl Isopel Berners. Since the publication of _Aylwin_ and _The Coming of Love_ I have received very many letters from English and American readers inquiring whether 'the Gypsy girl described in the introduction to _Lavenyro_ is the same as the Sinfi Lovell of _Aylwin_,' and also whether 'the Rhona Boswell that figures in the prose story is the same as the Rhona of _The Coming of Love_?' The evidence of the reality of Rhona so impressed itself upon the reader that on the appearance of Rhona's first letter in the _Athenæum_, where the poem was printed in fragments, I got among other letters one from the sweet poet and adorable woman Jean Ingelow, who was then very ill,--near her death indeed,--urging me to tell her whether Rhona's love-letter was not a versification of a real letter from a real Gypsy to her lover. As it was obviously impossible for me to answer the queries individually, I take this opportunity of saying that the Sinfi of _Aylwin_ and the Sinfi described in my introduction to _Lavengro_ are one and the same character--except that the story of the child Sinfi's weeping for the 'poor dead Gorgios' in the churchyard, given in the Introduction, is really told by the Gypsies, not of Sinfi, but of Rhona Boswell. Sinfi is the character alluded to in the now famous sonnet describing 'the walking lord of Gypsy lore,' Borrow, by his most intimate friend Dr. Gordon Hake.