Yankee Gypsies | Page 3

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Prepared by: Anthony J. Adam email: [email protected]
Yankee Gypsies
by John Greenleaf Whittier

"Here's to budgets, packs, and wallets; Here's to all the wandering
train." BURNS.(1)

I CONFESS it, I am keenly sensitive to "skyey influences." (2) I
profess no indifference to the movements of that capricious old
gentleman known as the clerk of the weather. I cannot conceal my
interest in the behavior of that patriarchal bird whose wooden
similitude gyrates on the church spire. Winter proper is well enough.
Let the thermometer go to zero if it will; so much the better, if thereby
the very winds are frozen and unable to flap their stiff wings. Sounds of
bells in the keen air, clear, musical, heart-inspiring; quick tripping of
fair moccasined feet on glittering ice pavements; bright eyes glancing
above the uplifted muff like a sultana's behind the folds of her
*yashmak;*(3) schoolboys coasting down street like mad Greenlanders;
the cold brilliance of oblique sunbeams flashing back from wide
surfaces of glittering snow, or blazing upon ice jewelry of tree and roof:
there is nothing in all this to complain of. A storm of summer has its
redeeming sublimities,--its slow, upheaving mountains of cloud
glooming in the western horizon like new-created volcanoes, veined

with fire, shattered by exploding thunders. Even the wild gales of the
equinox have their varieties,--sounds of wind- shaken woods and
waters, creak and clatter of sign and casement, hurricane puffs, and
down-rushing rain-spouts. But this dull, dark autumn day of thaw and
rain, when the very clouds seem too spiritless and languid to storm
outright or take themselves out of the way of fair weather; wet beneath
and above, reminding one of that rayless atmosphere of Dante's Third
Circle, where the infernal Priessnitz(4) administers his hydropathic
torment,--
"A heavy, cursed, and relentless drench,-- The land it soaks is putrid;"
or rather, as everything animate and inanimate is seething in warm mist,
suggesting the idea that Nature, grown old and rheumatic, is trying the
efficacy of a Thomsonian steam-box(5) on a grand scale; no sounds
save the heavy plash of muddy feet on the pavements; the monotonous,
melancholy drip from trees and roofs; the distressful gurgling of
waterducts, swallowing the dirty amalgam of the gutters; a dim, leaden-
colored horizon of only a few yards in diameter, shutting down about
one, beyond which nothing is visible save in faint line or dark
projection; the ghost of a church spire or the eidolon of a
chimney-pot,--he who can extract pleasurable emotions from the
alembic of such a day has a trick of alchemy with which I am wholly
unacquainted.
(1) From the closing air in *The Jolly Beggars,* a cantata. (2) "A
breath thou art Servile to all the skyey influences, That dost this
habitation, where thou keep'st Hourly afflict." Shakespeare: *Measure
for Measure,* act III. scene 1. (3) "She turns and turns again, and
carefully glances around her on all sides, to see that she is safe from the
eyes of Mussulmans, and then suddenly withdrawing the yashmak she
shines upon your heart and soul with all the pomp and might of her
beauty." Kinglake's *Eothen,* chap. iii. In a note to *Yashmak*
Kinglake explains that it is not a mere semi- transparent veil, but
thoroughly conceals all the features except the eyes: it is withdrawn by
being pulled down. (4) Vincenz Priessnitz was the originator of the
water-cure. After experimenting upon himself and his neighbors he
took up the profession of hydropathy and established baths at his native
place, Grafenberg in Silesia, in 1829. He died in 1851. (5) Dr. Samuel
Thomson, a New Hampshire physician, advocated the use of the steam

bath as a restorer of system when diseased. He died in 1843 and left
behind an autobiography (*Life and Medical Discoveries*) which
contains a record of the persecutions he underwent.
Hark! a rap at my door. Welcome anybody just now. One gains nothing
by attempting to shut out the sprites of the weather. They come in at