Читать книгу Who Goes There! - Chambers Robert William - Страница 1

Joseph! I've known you now for many years;

You are the Hero of this pretty story;

In him your every virtue reappears

Lighting his way along the road to glory.

All you possess adorns this Hero gay,

Your fatal beauty, curly hair, and so forth;

Like you he's always ready, night or day,

To pack his doggy clothes and ties and go forth.

No winsome maid beneath a summer sky,

Innured to prudence, modesty, and duty

Would dare demur or hesitate to fly

With such a manly specimen of beauty.

Accept, my friend, this tribute to your worth

As publisher, explorer, lover, fighter,

For men like you were destined from their birth

To make a millionaire of any writer.

Not with indifferent or with flippant hand

Draw the curtain's corner to disclose

A rose, a leaf, a path through this sad land

Untrampled yet by foes.

Out of the Past – the Heart's last Hermitage —

A wistful Phantom glides to me again

Here where I pace that solitary cage

They call, The World of Men.

In vain she mirrors me the Golden Age;

Vain is her Voice of Spring in wood and glen;

The winter sunlight falls across my page

Gilding a broken pen.

Withered the magic gardens which were mine;

Eden, in embers, blackens in the sun;

Rooting amid crushed roses the Wild Swine

Still root, and spare not one.

Village and spire and scented forest path,

Pastures and brooks, meadows and hills and fens

Heard not the secret whispering in Gath

There where the Gray Boar dens,

Till burst his dreadful clamour on the Rhine

And all the World shrank deafened by the roar

Aghast before the out-rush of Wild Swine

Led by the great Gray Boar.

Fallen the cloud-capped castles which were mine;

Cities in ashes whiten in the sun;

Rending the ruined shrines, the Rhenish Swine

Still rend, and spare not one.