Was ever such a crowd?Here Turks and Jews and Gypsies,
There Persians haughty-browed;
With silken-robed Celestials,
And Frenchmen from the Seine,
And Khivans and Bokhariotes,—
Heirs of the Oxus plain.
Here stalk Siberian hunters;
There tents a Kirghiz clan
By mournful-eyed Armenians
From wave-girt Astrakhan;
And Russ and Pole and Tartar,
And mounted Cossack proud,
Now, by the Tower of Babel,
Was ever such a crowd?
The Fair of Nijni-Novgorod
Edna Dean Proctor (1829–1923)
