Classic Poem

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:

Arabs 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 everywhere 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 donkeys grazing,
The Sybil'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,
As sly as thievish Reynard,
Instead of mending kettles, prowls,
To make foul havoc 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.