Изображения страниц
PDF
EPUB

Stole with soft step its shining archway through,

Built up its idle door,

Stretched in his last-found home, and knew the

old no more.

Thanks for the heavenly message brought by thee,

Child of the wandering sea,

Cast from her lap forlorn!

From thy dead lips a clearer note is born
Than ever Triton blew from wreathed horn!

While on mine ear it rings,

21

Through the deep caves of thought I hear a voice that sings:

Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul,
As the swift seasons roll!

Leave thy low-vaulted past!

Let each new temple, nobler than the last,
Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast,
Till thou at length art free,

28

[blocks in formation]

WEE, modest, crimson-tippèd flower,

Thou 's met me in an evil hour;

For I maun crush amang the stoure
Thy slender stem:

To spare thee now is past my power,
Thou bonnie gem.

Alas! it 's no thy neebor sweet,
The bonnie lark, companion meet,
Bending thee 'mang the dewy weet,
Wi' spreckled breast!

When upward-springing, blithe, to greet
The purpling east.

Cauld blew the bitter-biting north
Upon thy early, humble birth;
Yet cheerfully thou glinted forth
Amid the storm,

Scarce reared above, the parent-earth
Thy tender form,

The flaunting flowers our gardens yield,

High sheltering woods and wa's maun shield; But thou, beneath the random bield

O'clod or stane,

Adorns the histie stibble-field,

Unseen, alane.

There, in thy scanty mantle clad,
Thy snawie bosom sun-ward spread,
Thou lifts thy unassuming head
In humble guise;

But now the share uptears thy bed,

And low thou lies!

12

18

24

30

Such is the fate of artless maid,
Sweet floweret of the rural shade!
By love's simplicity betrayed,

And guileless trust;

Till she, like thee, all soiled, is laid
Low i' the dust..

Such is the fate of simple Bard,

On Life's rough ocean luckless starred!
Unskilful he to note the card

Of prudent lore,

Till billows rage, and gales blow hard,
And whelm him o'er!

Such fate to suffering Worth is given,
Who long with wants and woes has striven,
By human pride or cunning driven

To misery's brink;

Till, wrenched of every stay but Heaven,
He, ruined, sink!

Even thou who mourn'st the Daisy's fate,
That fate is thine-no distant date;
Stern Ruin's ploughshare drives elate,
Full on thy bloom,

Till crushed beneath the furrow's weight

Shall be thy doom!

1786.

Robert Burns.

54

48

42

36

THE SMALL CELANDINE

THERE is a Flower, the lesser Celandine, That shrinks, like many more, from cold and

rain;

And, the first moment that the sun may shine, Bright as the sun himself, 't is out again!

When hailstones have been falling, swarm on

swarm,

Or blasts the green field and the trees

distrest,

Oft have I seen it muffled up from harm,
In close self-shelter, like a Thing at rest.

But lately, one rough day, this Flower I passed And recognised it, though an altered form, Now standing forth an offering to the blast. And buffeted at will by rain and storm.

12

I stopped, and said with inly-muttered voice, "It doth not love the shower, not seek the cold: This neither is its courage nor its choice, But its necessity in being old.

"The sunshine may not cheer it, nor the dew; It cannot help itself in its decay;

16

4

Stiff in its members, withered, changed of hue." And, in my spleen, I smiled that it was grey. 20

To be a Prodigal's Favourite-then, worse

truth,

A Miser's Pensioner-behold our lot!

O Man, that from thy fair and shining youth Age might but take the things Youth needed

not!

1804. 1807.

William Wordsworth.

24

THE WILD HONEYSUCKLE

FAIR FLOWER, that dost so comely grow,
Hid in this silent, dull retreat,
Untouched thy honied blossoms blow,
Unseen thy little branches greet:

No roving foot shall crush thee here,
No busy hand provoke a tear.

By Nature's self in white arrayed,
She bade thee shun the vulgar eye,
And planted here the guardian shade,
And sent soft waters murmuring by;
Thus quietly thy summer goes,
Thy days declining to repose.

Smit with those charms, that must decay,
I grieve to see your future doom;

They died, nor were those flowers more gay,
The flowers that did in Eden bloom;

12

« ПредыдущаяПродолжить »