ll this?" It is that if one has a soul, and does
not live entirely reflected from the little thoughts and little ways of a
thousand other little people, it is well to have at all times in his
heart some strong hold of nature. No matter how much we may be lost in
society, dinners, balls, business, we should never forget that there is
an eternal sky with stars over it all, a vast, mysterious earth with
terrible secrets beneath us, seas, mountains, rivers, and forests away
and around; and that it is from these and what is theirs, and not from
gas-lit, stifling follies, that all strength and true beauty must come.
To this life, odd as he is, the gypsy belongs, and to be sometimes at
home with him by wood and wold takes us for a time from "the world." If
I express myself vaguely and imperfectly, it is only to those who know
not the charm of nature, its ineffable soothing sympathy,--its life, its
love. Gypsies, like children, feel this enchantment as the older grown
do not. To them it is a song without words; would they be happier if the
world brought them to know it as words without song, without music or
melody? I never read a right old English ballad of sumere when the
leaves are grene or the not-broune maid, with its rustling as of sprays
quivering to the song of the wode-wale, without thinking or feeling
deeply how those who wrote them would have been bound to the Romany. It
is ridiculous to say that gypsies are not "educated" to nature and art,
when, in fact, they live it. I sometimes suspect that aesthetic culture
takes more true love of nature out of the soul than it inspires. One
would not say anything of a wild bird or deer being deficient in a sense
of that beauty of which it is a part. There are infinite grades, kinds,
or varieties of feeling of nature, and every man is perfectly satisfied
that his is the true one. For my own part, I am not sure that a rabbit,
in the dewy grass, does not feel the beauty of nature quite as much as
Mr. Ruskin, and much more than I do.

No poet has so far set forth the charm of gypsy life better than Lenau
has done, in his highly-colored, quickly-expressive ballad of "Die drei
Zigeuner," of which I here give a translation into English and another
into Anglo-American Romany.

THE THREE GYPSIES.

I saw three gypsy men, one day,
Camped in a field together,
As my wagon went its weary way,
All over the sand and heather.

And one of the three w