CHAPTER XII.

FORTUNE-TELLING (continued).--ROMANCE BASED ON CHANCE, OR HOPE, AS REGARDS THE FUTURE--FOLK- AND SORCERY-LORE--AUTHENTIC INSTANCES OF GYPSY PREDICTION. It would seem to all who now live that life would be really intolerably dry were it utterly deprived of mystery, marvel, or romance. This latter is the sentiment of hopeful chance allied to the beautiful. Youth is willing or eager to run great risks if the road to or through them passes by dark ravines, under castled rocks-- "o'er dewy grass And waters wild and fleet" --and ever has been from the beginning. Now, it is a matter of serious importance to know whether this romance is so deeply inherent in man that it can never be removed. For, rightly viewed, it means current religion, poetry, and almost all art--as art at least was once understood--and it would seem as if we had come, or are coming, to a time when science threatens to deprive us of it all. Such is the hidden fear of many a priest and poet--it may be worth while to consider whether it is all to pass away into earnest prose or assume new conditions. Has the world been hitherto a child, or a youth, were poetry and supernaturalism its toys, and has the time come when it is to put away childish things? We can only argue from what we are, and what we clearly know or understand. And we know that there are in Nature, though measured by the senses alone, phenomena which awake delightful or terrible, sublime or beautiful, grave or gay feelings, or emotions, which inspire corresponding thoughts. There is for us "an elf-home glory-land," far over setting suns, mysterious beauty in night and stars in their eternal course, grandeur of God in the ocean, loveliness in woman, chiaroscuro in vapoury valleys and the spray of waterfalls by moonlight, exciting emotions which are certainly not within the domain of science--as yet--and which it is impossible for us, as we are at present constituted, to imagine as regarded entirely from the standpoint of chemical and physical analysis. To see in all this--as we are--only hydro-carbons, oxygen, silex and aluminium, atoms, molecules, and "laws"--that is to say, always the parts and combinations and no sense as regards man that he is, with his emotional sense of beauty, anywhere in the game or of any account--is going far too far. Setting teleology and theology entirely aside, Man, as the highest organism, has a right to claim that, as the highest faculties which have been as yet developed in him were caused by natural phenomena, therefore there is in the phenomena a certain beauty which is far more likely to lead to more advanced enjoyment of form, colour, or what we call the æsthetic sense, than to shrink away and disappear. And it seems to me that the most extended consideration of science leads to the result or conclusion that under its influence we shall find that the chemical and physical analyses of which I have spoken are only the dry A B C of a marvellously grand literature, or of a Romance and Poetry and Beauty--perhaps even of a wondrous "occult" philosophy, of whose beginning even we have, as yet, no idea. But, great as it may be, those who will make it must derive their summary of facts or bases of observation from the past, and therefore I urge the importance of every man who can write doing what he can to collect all that illustrates Humanity as it is and as it was in by-gone ages. It hath not entered into the heart of man to conceive what a Folk-lore or ethnological society in ancient Greece, Rome, or Egypt might not have collected and preserved for the delight of every civilized human being of the present day. It is very true that the number of persons, as yet, who understand this--still less of those who take a real interest in it--is extremely limited, and they do not extend in England, America, or any other country, to more than a few hundreds. To the vast multitude, even of learned men, Folk-lore is only a "craze" for small literary bric-à-brac, a "fancy" which will have its run, and nothing more. To its earnest devotees it is the last great development of the art of learning and writing history, and a timely provision for future social science. It sets forth the most intimate inner life of people as they were, and the origins of our life as it is. In Folk-lore, Philology, Ethnology, and the study of Mythology or Religion find their greatest aid. The amount of Red Indian Folk-lore which has been suffered to perish in the United States without exciting the least interest is beyond all belief. Thoreau could find in the Algonkin legends of New England nothing but matter for feeble-minded ridicule. But there are men coming, or a generation rising, to whom every record of the past will be of value, for they are beginning to perceive that while the collector is doing work of value the mere theorist, who generally undervalues if he does not actually oppose the collector, will with his rubbish be swept away "down the back-entry of time," to be utterly forgotten. Gypsy sorcery-lore is of great value because all over the Aryan world gypsies have in ancient or modern times been, so to speak, the wandering priests of that form of popular religion which consists of a faith in fortune-telling. This is really a very important