Whether from India's burning plains,
Or wild Bohemia's domains
Your steps were first directed:--
Or whether ye be Egypt's sons,
Whose stream, like Nile's for ever runs
With sources undetected,--
Arab's of Europe! Gipsy race!
Your Eastern manners, garb, and face
Appear a strange chimera;
None, none but you can now be styled
Romantic, picturesque, and wild,
In this prosaic era.
Ye sole freebooters of the wood
Since Adam Bell and Robin Hood--
Kept every where asunder
From other tribes--King, Church, and State
Spurning, and only dedicate
To freedom, sloth, and plunder.
Your forest-camp--the forms one sees
Banditti like amid the trees,
The ragged donkies grazing,
The Sibyl's eye prophetic, bright
With flashes of the fitful light,
Beneath the caldron blazing,--
O'er my young mind strange terrors threw:
Thy history gave me Moore Carew!
A more exalted notion
Of Gipsy life, nor can I yet
Gaze on your tents, and quite forget
My former deep emotion.
For "auld lang syne" I'll not maltreat
Yon pseudo-Tinker, though the Cheat,
Ay sly as thievish Reynard,
Instead of mending kettles, prowls
To make foul havock of my fowls,
And decimate my hen-yard.
Come thou, too, black-eyed lass, and try
That potent skill in palmistry.
Which sixpences can wheedle;
Mine is a friendly cottage--here
No snarling mastiff need you fear,
No Constable or Beadle.
'Tis yours, I know, to draw at will
Upon Futurity a bill,
And Plutus to importune:--
Discount the bill--take half yourself
Give me the balance of the pelf.
And both may laugh at fortune.
_Ibid_.
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