will all be gone in a few years. I doubt very
much whether it will be possible for the most unaffectedly natural writer
to preserve any of its hieroglyphics for future Champollions of sentiment
to interpret. In the coming days, when man shall have developed new
senses, and when the blessed sun himself shall perhaps have been
supplanted by some tremendous electrical light, and the moon be expunged
altogether as interfering with the new arrangements for gravity, there
will doubtless be a new poetry, and art become to the very last degree
self-conscious of its cleverness, artificial and impressional; yet even
then weary scholars will sigh from time to time, as they read in our
books of the ancient purple seas, and how the sun went down of old into
cloud-land, gorgeous land, and then how all dreamed away into night!

Gypsies are the human types of this vanishing, direct love of nature, of
this mute sense of rural romance, and of _al fresco_ life, and he who
does not recognize it in them, despite their rags and dishonesty, need
not pretend to appreciate anything more in Callot's etchings than the
skillful management of the needle and the acids. Truly they are but rags
themselves; the last rags of the old romance which connected man with
nature. Once romance was a splendid mediaeval drama, colored and gemmed
with chivalry, minnesong, bandit-flashes, and waving plumes; now there
remain but a few tatters. Yes, we were young and foolish then, but there
are perishing with the wretched fragments of the red Indian tribes
mythologies as beautiful as those of the Greek or Norseman; and there is
also vanishing with the gypsy an unexpressed mythology, which those who
are to come after us would gladly recover. Would we not have been
pleased if one of the thousand Latin men of letters whose works have been
preserved had told us how the old Etruscans, then still living in
mountain villages, spoke and habited and customed? But oh that there had
ever lived of old one man who, noting how feelings and sentiments
changed, tried to so set forth the souls of his time that after-comers
might understand what it was which inspired their art!

In the Sanskrit humorous romance of "Baital Pachisi," or King Vikram and
the Vampire, twenty-five different and disconnected trifling stories
serve collectively to illustrate in the most pointed manner the highest
lesson of wisdom. In this book the gypsies, and the scenes which
surround them, are inte