ts100100.YankeeGypsies(美国吉普赛人).JohnGreenleafWhittier(约翰·格林里夫·惠蒂埃).pdf

Yankee Gypsies
Yankee Gypsies
John Greenleaf Whittier

1
Yankee Gypsies
"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 asined 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 plain 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, suggestin