Читать книгу The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell - James Russell Lowell - Страница 203

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I had a little daughter,

And she was given to me

To lead me gently backward

To the Heavenly Father's knee,

That I, by the force of nature.

Might in some dim wise divine

The depth of his infinite patience

To this wayward soul of mine.

I know not how others saw her,

But to me she was wholly fair,

And the light of the heaven she came from

Still lingered and gleamed in her hair;

For it was as wavy and golden,

And as many changes took,

As the shadows of sun-gilt ripples

On the yellow bed of a brook.

To what can I liken her smiling

Upon me, her kneeling lover,

How it leaped from her lips to her eyelids,

And dimpled her wholly over,

Till her outstretched hands smiled also,

And I almost seemed to see

The very heart of her mother

Sending sun through her veins to me!

She had been with us scarce a twelvemonth,

And it hardly seemed a day,

When a troop of wandering angels

Stole my little daughter away;

Or perhaps those heavenly Zingari

But loosed the hampering strings,

And when they had opened her cage-door.

My little bird used her wings.

But they left in her stead a changeling

A little angel child,

That seems like her bud in full blossom,

And smiles as she never smiled:

When I wake in the morning, I see it

Where she always used to lie,

And I feel as weak as a violet

Alone 'neath the awful sky.

As weak, yet as trustful also;

For the whole year long I see

All the wonders of faithful Nature

Still worked for the love of me;

Winds wander, and dews drip earthward,

Rain falls, suns rise and set,

Earth whirls, and all but to prosper

A poor little violet.

This child is not mine as the first was,

I cannot sing it to rest,

I cannot lift it up fatherly

And bliss it upon my breast:

Yet it lies in my little one's cradle

And sits in my little one's chair,

And the light of the heaven she's gone to

Transfigures its golden hair.