BAYARD TAYLOR: The Mystic Summer MRS. JAMESON: Two of the Old Masters FREDERICK TENNYSON: The Poet's Heart YANKEE GYPSIES. BY JOHN G. WHITTIER. I "Here's to budgets, packs, and wallets, Here's to all the wandering train." — BURNS. CONFESS it, I am keenly sensitive to "skyey influ ences. 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 moccasoned feet on glittering ice-pavements; bright eyes glancing above the uplifted muff like a sultana's behind the folds of her yashmack; school-boys 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 Thina Circle, where the infernal Priessnitz 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 Thompsonian steam-box 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 water-ducts, 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. 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 the keyhole; they peer through the dripping panes; they insinuate themselves through the crevices of the casement, or plump down chimney astride of the rain-drops. I rise and throw open the door. A tall, shambling, loosejointed figure; a pinched, shrewd face, sunbrown and winddried; small, quick-winking black eyes. There he stands, the water dripping from his pulpy hat and ragged elbows. I speak to him; but he returns no answer. With a dumb show of misery quite touching he hands me a soiled |