Читать книгу Poems - John L. Stoddard - Страница 14

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In Bordighera's groves of palm

I linger at the close of day,

And watch, beyond the ocean's calm,

A range of mountains far away.

Their snowy summits, white and cold,

Flush crimson like a tinted shell,

As sinks the sun in clouds of gold

Behind the peaks of Esterel.

No unsubstantial shapes are they—

The offspring of the mist and sea;

No splendid vision of Cathay,

Recalled in dreamful revery;

Their solid bastions—towering high

Though rooted in earth's primal plan—

Proclaim to every passer by

The cradle of the Corsican.

What martial soul there found rebirth,

When on those cliffs, then scarcely known,

There once more visited the earth

The spirit called Napoleon?

Three islands, like the sister Fates,

His life-thread wove upon their loom

From fair Ajaccio's silvered gates

To Saint Helena's mournful tomb;—

The first, his birthplace; whence appeared

His baleful star with lurid glow;

Next, Elba, where the world still feared

The fugitive from Fontainebleau;

Last, England's lonely prison-block,

Grim fragment 'neath a tropic sky,

Where, like Prometheus on his rock,

The captive Caesar came to die,

O Corsica, sublimely wild

And riven by the winds and waves,

Thy fame is deathless from thy child,

Whose glory filled a million graves.