ondon, and the first words taught to their
youngest child were "Romany rye!" and these it was trained to address to
me. The little tot came up to me,--I had never heard her speak
before,--a little brown-faced, black-eyed thing, and said, "How-do, Omany
'eye?" and great was the triumph and rejoicing and laughter of the mother
and father and all the little tribe. To be familiar with these
wanderers, who live by dale and down, is like having the bees come to
you, as they did to the Dacian damsel, whose death they mourned; it is
like the attraction of the wild deer to the fair Genevieve; or if you
know them to be dangerous outlaws, as some are, it is like the affection
of serpents and other wild things for those whom nature has made their
friends, and who handle them without fear. They are human, but in their
lives they are between man as he lives in houses and the bee and bird and
fox, and I cannot help believing that those who have no sympathy with
them have none for the forest and road, and cannot be rightly familiar
with the witchery of wood and wold. There are many ladies and gentlemen
who can well-nigh die of a sunset, and be enraptured with "bits" of
color, and captured with scenes, and to whom all out-of-doors is as
perfect as though it were painted by Millais, yet to whom the bee and
bird and gypsy and red Indian ever remain in their true inner life
strangers. And just as strange to them, in one sense, are the scenes in
which these creatures dwell; for those who see in them only pictures,
though they be by Claude and Turner, can never behold in them the
fairy-land of childhood. Only in Ruysdael and Salvator Rosa and the
great unconscious artists lurks the spell of the Romany, and this spell
is unfelt by Mr. Cimabue Brown. The child and the gypsy have no words in
which to express their sense of nature and its charm, but they have this
sense, and there are very, very few who, acquiring culture, retain it.
And it is gradually disappearing from the world, just as the old
delicately sensuous, naive, picturesque type of woman's beauty--the
perfection of natural beauty--is rapidly vanishing in every country, and
being replaced by the mingled real and unreal attractiveness of
"cleverness," intellect, and fashion. No doubt the newer tend to higher
forms of culture, but it is not without pain that he who has been "in the
spirit" in the old Sabbath of the soul, and in its quiet, solemn sunset,
sees it all vanishing. It