The following is a specimen of a Gipsy poetic effusion, which my Gipsy admirers will not consider an extraordinarily high-flown production—the outcome of nearly one million Gipsies who have wandered up and down Europe for more than three hundred years, as related by Borrow.
TWO GIPSIES.
“Two Gipsy lads were transported,
Were sent across the great water;
Plato was sent for rioting,
And Louis for stealing the purse
Of a great lady.“And when they came to the other country,
The country that lies across the water,
Plato was speedily hung,
But Louis was taken as a husband
By a great lady.“You wish to know who was the lady:
’Twas the lady from whom he stole the purse;
The Gipsy had a black and witching eye,
And on account of that she followed him
Across the great water.”
Smart and Crofton, speaking poetically and romantically of Gipsy life, say as follows:—
“With the first spring sunshine comes the old longing to be off, and soon is seen, issuing from his winter quarters, a little cavalcade, tilted cart, bag and baggage, donkeys and dogs, rom, romni, and tickni, chavis, and the happy family is once more under weigh for the open country. With dark, restless eye and coarse, black hair fluttered by the breeze, he slouches along, singing as he goes, in heart, if not in precise words—
“I loiter down by thorpe and town,
For any job I’m willing;
Take here and there a dusty brown,
And here and there a shilling.
No carpet can please him like the soft green turf, and no
curtains compare with the snow-white blossoming hedgerow thereon. A child of Nature, he loves to repose on the bare breast of the great mother. As the smoke of his evening fire goes up to heaven, and the savoury odour of roast hotchi witchi or of canengri soup salutes his nostrils, he sits in the deepening twilight drinking in with unconscious delight all the sights and sounds which the country affords; with his keen senses alive to every external impression he feels that
“’Tis sweet to see the evening star appear,
’Tis sweet to listen as the night winds creep
From leaf to leaf.
He dreamily hears the distant bark of the prowling fox, and the melancholy hootings of the wood owls; he marks the shriek of the night-wandering weasel, and the rustle of the bushes as some startled forest creature darts into deep coverts; or, perchance, the faint sounds from a sequestered hamlet of a great city. Cradled from infancy in such haunts as these ‘places of nestling green for poets made,’ and surely for Gipsies too, no wonder if, after the fitful fever of town life, he sleeps well, with the unforgotten and dearly-loved lullabies of his childhood soothing him to rest.”