Birds of Passage. Генри Уодсуорт Лонгфелло

Al Raschid

       King Trisanku

       A Wraith in the Mist

       The Three Kings

       Song: "Stay, Stay at Home, my Heart, and Rest."

       The White Czar

       Delia

      Black shadows fall

       From the lindens tall,

       That lift aloft their massive wall

       Against the southern sky;

      And from the realms

       Of the shadowy elms

       A tide-like darkness overwhelms

       The fields that round us lie.

      But the night is fair,

       And everywhere

       A warm, soft vapor fills the air,

       And distant sounds seem near,

      And above, in the light

       Of the star-lit night,

       Swift birds of passage wing their flight

       Through the dewy atmosphere.

      I hear the beat

       Of their pinions fleet,

       As from the land of snow and sleet

       They seek a southern lea.

      I hear the cry

       Of their voices high

       Falling dreamily through the sky,

       But their forms I cannot see.

      O, say not so!

       Those sounds that flow

       In murmurs of delight and woe

       Come not from wings of birds.

      They are the throngs

       Of the poet's songs,

       Murmurs of pleasures, and pains, and wrongs,

       The sound of winged words.

      This is the cry

       Of souls, that high

       On toiling, beating pinions, fly,

       Seeking a warmer clime,

      From their distant flight

       Through realms of light

       It falls into our world of night,

       With the murmuring sound of rhyme.

      Prometheus, or the Poet's Forethought

       Table of Contents

      Of Prometheus, how undaunted

       On Olympus' shining bastions

       His audacious foot he planted,

       Myths are told and songs are chanted,

       Full of promptings and suggestions.

      Beautiful is the tradition

       Of that flight through heavenly portals,

       The old classic superstition

       Of the theft and the transmission

       Of the fire of the Immortals!

      First the deed of noble daring,

       Born of heavenward aspiration,

       Then the fire with mortals sharing,

       Then the vulture,--the despairing

       Cry of pain on crags Caucasian.

      All is but a symbol painted

       Of the Poet, Prophet, Seer;

       Only those are crowned and sainted

       Who with grief have been acquainted,

       Making nations nobler, freer.

      In their feverish exultations,

       In their triumph and their yearning,

       In their passionate pulsations,

       In their words among the nations,

       The Promethean fire is burning.

      Shall it, then, be unavailing,

       All this toil for human culture?

       Through the cloud-rack, dark and trailing,

       Must they see above them sailing

       O'er life's barren crags the vulture?

      Such a fate as this was Dante's,

       By defeat and exile maddened;

       Thus were Milton and Cervantes,

       Nature's priests and Corybantes,

       By affliction touched and saddened.

      But the glories so transcendent

       That around their memories cluster,

       And, on all their steps attendant,

       Make their darkened lives resplendent

       With such gleams of inward lustre!

      All the melodies mysterious,

       Through the dreary darkness chanted;

       Thoughts in attitudes imperious,

       Voices soft, and deep, and serious,

       Words that whispered, songs that haunted!

      All the soul in rapt suspension,

       All the quivering, palpitating

       Chords of life in utmost tension,

       With the fervor of invention,

       With the rapture of creating!

      Ah, Prometheus! heaven-scaling!

       In such hours of exultation

       Even the faintest heart, unquailing,

       Might behold the vulture sailing

       Round the cloudy crags Caucasian!

      Though to all there is not given

       Strength for such sublime endeavor,

       Thus to scale the walls of heaven,

       And to leaven with fiery leaven

       All the hearts of men for ever;

      Yet all bards, whose hearts unblighted

       Honor and believe the presage,

       Hold aloft their torches lighted,

       Gleaming through the realms benighted,

       As they onward bear the message!

      Epimetheus, or the Poet's Afterthought

       Table of Contents

      Have I dreamed? or was it real,

       What I saw as in a vision,

       When to marches hymeneal

       In the land of the Ideal

       Moved my thought o'er Fields Elysian?

      What! are these the