Charles Godfrey Leland

“ An average German peasant was a genius compared to these fresh, rosy-fair, well-clad Hollanders. It was to me a new phase of human happiness in imbecility, or rather in undisturbed routine; for it is written that no bird can fly like a bullet and doze or sleep sweetly at the same time. Yet, as from the Huns, the most hideous wretches in the world, there arose by intermixture the Hungarians, who are perhaps the handsomest, so from the Knickerbocker Dutch sprang the wide-awake New Yorkers! The galleries in Holland and Belgium were to me joys unutterable and as the glory of life itself. ”

“ It was Diana who did come to me,
All in the night in a dream, and said to me:
"If thou would'st keep all evil folk afar,
Then ever keep the vervain and the rue
Safely beside thee!"
Great Diana! thou
Who art the queen of heaven and of earth,
And of the infernal lands--yea, thou who art
Protectress of all men unfortunate,
Of thieves and murderers, and of women too
Who lead an evil life, and yet hast known
That their nature was not evil, thou, Diana,
Hast still conferred on them some joy in life. ”

“ No one can say what is hidden in every memory; it is like the sounding ocean with its buried cities, and treasures and wondrous relics of the olden time. This much we may assume to know, that every image or idea or impression whichever reached us through any of our senses entered a cell when it was ready for it, where it sleeps or wakes, most images being in the former condition. In fact, every brain is like a monastery of the Middle Ages, or a beehive. ”

“ So the two kept flying round and round the edge of heaven, and at first all the gods roared with laughter, but when they understood the case, they grew serious, and asked one another how it was to end.
Then the great father-god said:--
"Behold the earth, which is in darkness and gloom! I will change the sister into a moon, and her brother into a sun. And so shall she ever escape him, yet will he ever catch her with his light, which shall fall on her from afar; for the rays of the sun are his hands, which reach forth with burning grasp, yet which are ever eluded." ”

“ For the seed sprouting from the ground is as strange a truth as though we saw the hosts of heaven sweeping onward in glory, or could commune with fairies, or raise from his grave the master magician of song who laid a curse on all who should dig his dust. But like children who go to sleep in the grand opera, and are wild with delight at Punch, we turn aside from the endless miracle of nature to be charmed and bewildered with the petty thaumaturgy of guitars in the dark, cigarettes, and rope-tying, because it corresponds to and is miracle enough for us. ”

“ The roaring waves they came,
Like water into fire all gone,
For the sea was all of a flame.
Now I have often seen by dark the sea a-burning bright,
But nothing did I yet remark like what it was that night,
And the wake we left behind us as we sailed for many an hour,
Was like a fiery serpent who was chasing to devour.
And then the captain made a speech to us a-standing round,
And said: “ ’Fore I’ll be taken I’ll be damned if I don’t be drowned;
Yet if you will be plucky, men, and likewise well behaved,
We’ve got one chance in a thousand yet, but what we may be saved. ”

“ But when in the morning he found that he lay by his sister, and that light had been conquered by darkness, Lucifer was extremely angry; but Diana sang to him a spell, a song of power, and he was silent, the song of the night which soothes to sleep; he could say nothing. So Diana with her wiles of witchcraft so charmed him that he yielded to her love. This was the first fascination, she hummed the song, it was as the buzzing of bees (or a top spinning round) , a spinning-wheel spinning life. She spun the lives of all men; all things were spun from the wheel of Diana. Lucifer turned the wheel. ”

“ It is not merely in the absolute out-of-doors independence of the old-fashioned Gipsy, freer than any wild beast from care for food, that his resemblance to a “philosopher” consists, or rather to the ideal man, free from imaginary cares. For more than this, be it for good or for evil, the real Gipsy has, unlike all other men, unlike the lowest savage, positively no religion, no tie to a spiritual world, no fear of a future, nothing but a few trifling superstitions and legends, which in themselves indicate no faith whatever in anything deeply seated. ”

“ There are people who believe there is no mystery, that an analysis of the gypsy sorceress would have shown an ignorant outcast; but while nature gives chiaro-oscuro and beauty, and while God is the Unknown, I believe that the more light there is cast by science the more stupendous will be the new abysses of darkness revealed. These natures must be taken with the life in them, not dead,—and their life is mystery. The Hungarian gypsy lives in an intense mystery, yes, in true magic in his singing. You may say that he cannot, like Orpheus, move rocks or tame beasts with his music. ”

“ Glooskap is the Norse god intensified. He is, however, more of a giant; he grows to a more appalling greatness than Thor or Odin in his battles; when a Kiawaqu', or Jotun, rises to the clouds to oppose him, Glooskap's head touches the stars, and scorning to slay so mean a foe like an equal, he kills him contemptuously with a light tap of his bow. But in the family circle he is the most benevolent of gentle heroes, and has his oft-repeated little standard jokes. Yet he never, like the Manobozho-Hiawatha of the Chippewas, becomes silly, cruel, or fantastic. ”

“ No one had threatened the new Southern Government, and at this stage the North would have suffered it to withdraw in peace from the Union, so great was the dread of a civil war. But the South did not want peace. Every Southern newspaper, every rebel orator, was now furiously demanding of the North the most humiliating concessions, and threatening bloodshed as the alternative. While President Lincoln, in his Inaugural Address, spoke with the most Christian forbearance of the South, Jefferson Davis, in his, assumed all the horrors of civil war as a foregone conclusion. ”

“ What genius is, physiology, with all the vast flood of light spread by FRANCIS GALTON on hereditary gifts, cannot as yet explain. It is an absolute thing of itself, and a "miracle." Sometimes this wonderful power of prediction and of reading thought and quickly finding and applying rules falls into the hands of a genius. Then all our explanations of "humbug" and "trickery" and juggling fall to the ground, because he or she works what are absolutely as much miracles as if the artist had raised the dead. Such geniuses are the prophets of old; sometimes they are poets. ”

“ Such a stream, which I traced yesterday in an ancient gorge in the heart of the Apennines, where the grey tower of Rocca looks down on the mysterious Ponte del Diavolo of the twelfth century—the most picturesque bridge in Italy—forcibly reminds me of the human stream of old tradition which once, as marvellous mythology or grand religion, roared and often raged over all this region, driving before it, and rending away, all the mighty rocks of human will, now tearing down and anon forming stupendous cliffs of observances, and vast monoliths of legend and faith. ”

“ Conjuration of Diana. I do not bake the bread, nor with it salt,
Nor do I cook the honey with the wine,
I bake the body and the blood and soul,
The soul of (great) Diana, that she shall
Know neither rest nor peace, and ever be
In cruel suffering till she will grant
What I request, what I do most desire,
I beg it of her from my very heart!
And if the grace be granted, O Diana! ”

“ To Diana. Lovely Goddess of the bow!
Lovely Goddess of the arrows!
Of all hounds and of all hunting
Thou who wakest in starry heaven
When the sun is sunk in slumber
Thou with moon upon thy forehead,
Who the chase by night preferrest
Unto hunting in the daylight,
With thy nymphs unto the music
Of the horn — thyself the huntress,
And most powerful: I pray thee
Think, although but for an instant,
Upon us who pray unto thee! [2]
Then Virgil taught them also the Scongiurazione or spell to be uttered when good fortune or aught is specially required. ”

“ The quivering, mysteriously beautiful light of the moon, which seems to cast a spirit of intelligence or emotion over silent Nature, and dimly half awaken it--raising shadows into thoughts and causing every tree and rock to assume the semblance of a living form, but one which, while shimmering and breathing, still sleeps in a dream--could not escape the Greeks, and they expressed it as Diana embracing Endymion. ”

“ He who wills it sincerely can govern his Will, and he who can govern his Will is a thousand times more fortunate than if he could govern the world. For to govern the Will is to be without fear, superior and indifferent to all earthly follies and shams, idols, cants and delusions, it is to be lord of a thousand isles in the sea of life, and absolutely greater than any living mortal, as men exist. Small need has that man to heed what his birth or station in society may be who has mastered himself with the iron will; for he who has conquered death and the devil need fear no shadows. ”

“ When we think of what we might be if we could master ourselves, and call on the vast sea of knowledge which is in the brain of every one who reads these lines, to give strict reckoning of its every wave and every drop of water, and every shell, pebble, wreck, weed, or grain of sand over which it rolls, and withal master the forces which make its tides and storms, then we may comprehend that all the wonder-working power attributed to all the sorcerers of olden time was nothing compared to what we really have within us. ”

“ I could speak a little German—not much—but the degree to which I felt, sympathised with, and understood everything Deutsch, passeth all words and all mortal belief. Sit verbo venia! But I do not believe that any human being ever crossed the frontier who had thought himself down, or rather raised himself up, into Teutonism as I had on so slight a knowledge of the language, even as a spider throweth up an invisible thread on high, and then travels on it. ”

“ I have never listened to the singing or playing of any distinguished artist—and certainly never of any far-famed amateur—without realizing that neither words nor melody was of the least importance, but that the man’s manner of performance or display was everything. Now, in enjoying gypsy singing, one feels at once as if the vocalists had entirely forgotten self, and were carried away by the bewildering beauty of the air and the charm of the words. There is no self-consciousness, no vanity,—all is real. ”

“ In the Legends of Florence there is one of the Via del Corno, in which the hero, falling into a vast tun or tina of wine, is saved from drowning by sounding a horn with tremendous power. At the sound, which penetrates to an incredible distance, even to unknown lands, all come rushing as if enchanted to save him. In this conjuration, Diana, in the depths of heaven, is represented as rushing at the sound of the horn, and leaping through doors or windows to save the vintage of the one who blows. ”

“ Donatello died when he was eighty-three, in the Street of the Melon, and it was he himself who cried, ‘Speak then—speak!’ to his statue, as it was carried through the city. But whether true or false, this fact is surely true, that it is well—nobly and purely well—with a people when the men amongst it who ply for hire on its public ways think caressingly of a sculptor dead five hundred years ago, and tell such a tale, standing idly in the noonday sun, feeling the beauty and the pathos of it all. ”

“ Then Diana went to the fathers of the Beginning, to the mothers, the spirits who were before the first spirit, and lamented unto them that she could not prevail with Lucifer. And they praised her for her courage, they told her that to rise she must fall; to become the chief of goddesses she must become a mortal.
And in the ages, in the course of time, when the world was made, Diana went on earth, as did Lucifer,
who had fallen, and Diana taught magic and sorcery, whence came witches and fairies and goblins--all that is like man, yet not mortal. ”

“ Now the aim of Art is to interest or please, by gratifying the sense or taste for the beautiful or human genius in making; also to instruct and refine; and it is evident that Science is going to fulfill all these conditions on such a grand scale in so many new ways, that, when man shall be once engaged in them, all that once gratified him in the past will seem as childish things, to be put away before pursuits more worthy of manly dignity. If Art in all forms has of late been quiet, it has been because it has drawn back like the tiger in order to make the greater bound. ”

“ Considering that the dream-power has millions of experiences or images at its command, that it flits over them all like lightning, that it can combine, abstract, compare, and deduct, that it being, so to speak, more of a thaumaturgical artist than anything else, excels waking wisdom in subtle trickery, the wonder is, not that we so often hear of marvellous, magical, inexplicable wonders, but that they are not of daily or hourly occurrence. ”

“ After the freedom of student life in Heidelberg and Munich and Paris, and having been among the few who had carried out a great revolution, and much familiarity with the most cosmopolite type of characters in Europe, and existing in literature and art, I was settled down to live, move, and have all being henceforth and perhaps for ever in Philadelphia! Of which city, at that time, there was not one in the world of which so little evil could be said, or so much good, yet of which so few ever spoke with enthusiasm. ”

“ The ghost walks—always when the rent fails to come in, and there is no money in the treasury—cammina, cammina per un fil di spada—walks as straight as an acrobat on a rope. But I cannot give you a walking ghost of a rascal to every house, Signore. If all the knaves who made fortunes by trickery were to take to haunting our houses in Florence, they would have to lie ten in a bed, or live one hundred in a room, and ghosts, as you know, love to be alone. ”

“ They are human, but in their lives they are between man as he lives in houses and the bee and bird and fox, and I cannot help believing that those who have no sympathy with them have none for the forest and road, and cannot be rightly familiar with the witchery of wood and wold. There are many ladies and gentlemen who can well-nigh die of a sunset, and be enraptured with “bits” of color, and captured with scenes, and to whom all out-of-doors is as perfect as though it were painted by Millais, yet to whom the bee and bird and gypsy and red Indian ever remain in their true inner life strangers. ”

“ When the artist thinks too little he lacks sense, when he thinks too much he loses fire. In the very highest and most strangely mysterious poetical flights of SHELLEY and KEATS, or WORDSWORTH, I find the very same Instinct which inspires the skylark and nightingale, but more or less allied to and strengthened by Thought or Consciousness. If human Will or Wisdom alone directed all our work, then every man who had mere patience might be a great original genius, and it is indeed true that Man can do inconceivably more in following and imitating genius than has ever been imagined. ”

“ I believe myself that there is something in the gypsy eye which is inexplicable, and which enables its possessor to see farther through that strange mill-stone, the human soul, than I can explain. Any one who has ever seen an old fortune-teller of “the people” keeping some simple-minded maiden by the hand, while she holds her by her glittering eye, like the Ancient Mariner, with a basilisk stare, will agree with me. ”

“ But by bending low to earth, or seeking among the people, we may hear the murmur of a hidden stream of legend and song which, small and shrunken as it may be, is still the veritable river of the olden time. Many such streams are running in many lands, and that full openly on the earth’s surface, but this to which I specially refer is strangely occult and deeply hidden, for to find it we must seek among the strege and stregoni, or witches and sorcerers, who retain as dark secrets of their own, marvellous relics of the myths of the early ages. ”

“ He who can control his own mind by an iron will, and say to the Thoughts which he would banish, "Be ye my slaves and begone into outer darkness," or to Peace "Dwell with me forever, come what may," and be obeyed, that man is a mighty magician who has attained what is worth more than all that Earth possesses. Absolute self-control under the conditions before defined—since our happiness to be true must agree with that of others—is absolutely essential to happiness. There can be no greater hero than the man who can conquer himself and think exactly as he pleases. ”

“ It is, in truth, not until one sees the Romany translated to an entirely new form of existence, and under circumstances inconsistent with their ordinary lives, that one realizes how completely different they are from the rest of mankind in form and feature. Instead of disguising, the garb of civilization only enhances the type, and renders it the more apparent. No matter what dress they may assume, no matter what may be their calling, no matter whether they are dwellers in tents or houses, it is impossible for gypsies to disguise their origin. ”

“ Every line ever read in print, every picture and face and house is there. Many an experiment has shown this to be true; also that by mesmerizing or hypnotizing processes the most hidden images or memories can be awakened. In fact, the idea has lost much of its wonder since the time of Coleridge, now that every sound can be recorded, laid away and reproduced, and we are touching closely on an age when all that lies perdu in any mind can or will be set forth visibly, and all that a man has ever seen be shown to the world. ”

“ Now, if she was indifferent to the young signore, the dark maid-servant was not, for she had fallen as much in love with him as an evil, selfish nature would permit her, and she planned and plotted with her mother by night and by day to bring about what she desired. Now, the old woman, unknown to all, was a witch, as all wicked women really are—they rot away with vanity and self-will and evil feelings till their hearts are like tinder or gunpowder, and then some day comes a spark of the devil’s fire, and they flash out into witches of some kind. ”

“ There is a deep, strange element in the gypsy character, which finds no sympathy or knowledge in the German, and very little in other Europeans, but which is so much in accord with the Slavonian and Hungarian that he who truly feels it with love is often disposed to mingle them together. It is a dreamy mysticism; an indefinite semi-supernaturalism, often passing into gloom; a feeling as of Buddhism which has glided into Northern snows, and taken a new and darker life in winter-lands. It is strong in the Czech or Bohemian, whose nature is the worst understood in the civilized world. ”

“ It may begin in imagining or fancy, but as the veriest dream is material and may be repeated till we see it visibly and can then copy it, so can we create in ourselves a being, a segregation of our noblest thoughts, a superb abstraction of soul which looks from its sunny mountain height down on the dark and noisome valley which forms our worldly common intellect or mind, or the only one known to by far the majority of mankind, albeit they may have therein glimpses of light and truth. ”

“ The Welsh gypsy played well, and his sister touched the harp and sang, the ale circulated, and the villagers, assembling, gazed in a crowd into the hall. Then the girl danced solo, just as I have seen her sisters do in Egypt and in Russia, to her brother’s fiddling. Even so of old, Syrian and Egyptian girls haunted gardens and taverns, and danced pas seul all over the Roman empire, even unto Spain, behaving so gypsily that wise men have conjectured that they were gypsies in very truth. ”

“ To be true we must be far more familiar with Nature than with scene painting or photographs, and to do this we must, so to speak, fascinate ourselves with pictures in life, glad memories of golden hours, rock and river and greenwood tree. We must also banish resolutely from our past all recollections of enemies and wrongs, troubles and trials, and throw all our heart into doing so. Forgive and forget all enmities—those of Misfortune and Fate being included. Depend upon it that the brighter you can make your Past the pleasanter will be your Future. ”

“ The most beautiful spot for miles around Williamsport, in Pennsylvania, a river dell, which any artist would give a day to visit, is the favorite camping-ground of the Romany. Woods and water, rocks and loneliness, make it lovely by day, and when, at eventide, the fire of the wanderers lights up the scene, it also lights up in the soul many a memory of tents in the wilderness, of pictures in the Louvre, of Arabs and of Wouvermanns and belated walks by the Thames, and of Salvator Rosa. ”

“ It is not of good or of evil, or of culture, which is both; it is all and only of nature, and it does not know itself.
As the wagonette stopped I greeted the young man at first in English, then in Romany. When he heard the gypsy tongue he started, his countenance expressing the utmost surprise and delight. As if he could hardly believe in such a phenomenon he inquired, “Romany?” and as I nodded assent, he clasped my hand, the tears coming into his eyes. Such manifestations are not common among gypsies, but I can remember how one, the wife of black Ben Lee, was thus surprised and affected. ”