“What have our cities to offer to senses surfeited with such ever-varied effects and emotions? What in such eyes can ever equal the bloody drama of a dying sun? What can rival in voluptuous sweetness the rosy halo of early dawn? What other voice can equal in majesty the thunder-roll of a midsummer storm, to which the woodland echoes respond as the voice of a mighty chorus? What elegy so exquisite as the autumn wind stripping the foliage from the blighted forest? What power can equal the frigid majesty of the cruel frost, like an implacable tyrant bidding the sap of trees to stand still, and rendering silent the voices of singing birds and babbling streams? To those accustomed to quaff of this bottomless tankard, must not all other pleasures by comparison appear empty and meaningless?
“Indifferent to the minute and complicated passions by which educated mankind is swayed, callous to the panting, gasping effects of such microscopic and supercultured vices as vanity, ambition, intrigue, and avarice, the Tzigane only comprehends the simplest requirements of a primitive nature. Music, dancing, drinking, and love, diversified by a childish and humorous delight in petty thieving and cheating, constitute his whole répertoire of passions, beyond whose limited horizon he does not care to look.”
Having begun this chapter with the words of Liszt, let me finish it with those of the German poet Lenau, who, in his short poem, “Die Drei Zigeuner” (“The Three Gypsies”), traces a perfect picture of the indolent enjoyment of the gypsy’s existence:
“One day, in the shade of a willow-tree laid,
I came upon gypsies three,
As through the sand of wild moorland
My cart toiled wearily.
“Giving to naught but himself a thought,
His fiddle the first did hold,
While ’mid the blaze of the evening rays