Читать книгу Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 - Various - Страница 12

Curtain thy heavens, thou Jove, with clouds and mist,

And, like a boy that moweth thistles down,

Unloose thy spleen on oaks and mountain-tops;

Yet canst thou not deprive me of my earth,

Nor of my hut, the which thou didst not build,

Nor of my hearth, whose little cheerful flame

Thou enviest me!

I know not aught within the universe

More slight, more pitiful than you, ye Gods!

Who nurse your majesty with scant supplies

Of offerings wrung from fear, and mutter’d prayers,

And needs must starve, were’t not that babes and beggars

Are hope-besotted fools!

When I was yet a child, and knew not whence

My being came, nor where to turn its powers,

Up to the sun I bent my wilder’d eye,

As though above, within its glorious orb,

There dwelt an ear to listen to my plaint,

A heart, like mine, to pity the oppress’d.

Who gave me succour

Against the Titans in their tyrannous might?

Who rescued me from death—from slavery?

Thou!—thou, my soul, burning with hallow’d fire,

Thou hast thyself alone achieved it all!

Yet didst thou, in thy young simplicity,

Glow with misguided thankfulness to him

That slumbers on in idlesse there above!

I reverence thee?

Wherefore? Hast thou ever

Lighten’d the sorrows of the heavy-laden?

Thou ever stretch’d thy hand to still the tears

Of the perplex’d in spirit?

Was it not

Almighty Time, and ever-during Fate—

My lords and thine—that shaped and fashion’d me

Into the man I am?

Belike it was thy dream,

That I should hate life—fly to wastes and wilds,

For that the buds of visionary thought

Did not all ripen into goodly flowers?

Here do I sit, and mould

Men after mine own image—

A race that may be like unto myself,

To suffer, weep; to enjoy, and to rejoice;

And, like myself, unheeding all of thee!