Читать книгу Saint Abe and His Seven Wives - Buchanan Robert Williams - Страница 1

Maypole dance and Whitsun ale,

Sports of peasants in the dale,

Harvest mirth and junketting,

Fireside play and kiss-in-ring,

Ancient fun and wit and ease, —

Gone are one and all of these;

All the pleasant pastime planned

In the green old Mother-land:

Gone are these and gone the time

Of the breezy English rhyme,

Sung to make men glad and wise

By great Bards with twinkling eyes:

Gone the tale and gone the song

Sound as nut-brown ale and strong,

Freshening the sultry sense

Out of idle impotence,

Sowing features dull or bright

With deep dimples of delight!

Thro' the Motherland I went

Seeking these, half indolent:

Up and down, saw them not:

Only found them, half forgot.

Buried in long-darken'd nooks

With thy barrels of old books,

Where the light and love and mirth

Of the morning days of earth

Sleeps, like light of sunken suns

Brooding deep in cob-webb'd tuns!

Everywhere I found instead,

Hanging her dejected head,

Barbing shafts of bitter wit,

The pale Modern Spirit sit —

While her shadow, great as Gog's

Cast upon the island fogs,

In the midst of all things dim

Loom'd, gigantically grim.

Honest Chaucer, thee I greet

In a verse with blithesomefeet.

And ino' modern bards may stare,

Crack a passing joke with Care!

Take a merry song and true

Fraught with inner meanings too!

Goodman Dull may croak and scowl: —

Leave him hooting to the owl!

Tight-laced Prudery may turn

Angry back with eyes that burn,

Reading on from page to page

Scrofulous novels of the age!

Fools may frown and humbugs rail,

Not for them I tell the Tale;

Not for them,, but souls like thee.

Wise old English Jollity!