“SPEAK! 1 speak! thou fearful guest!
Who, with thy hollow breast
Still in rude armor drest,
Comest to daunt me!
Wrapt not in Eastern balms,
But with thy fleshless palms
Stretched, as if asking alms,
Why dost thou haunt me?”
Then from those cavernous eyes
Pale flashes seemed to rise,
As when the Northern skies...
O’er a low couch the setting sun
Had thrown its latest ray,
Where in his last strong agony
A dying warrior lay,—
The stern old Baron Rudiger,
Whose frame had ne’er been bent
By wasting pain, till time and toil
Its iron strength had spent.
“They come around me here, and say
My days of life are o’er,
That...
From the German by Charles Timothy Brooks
“OLD man, God bless you! does your pipe taste sweetly?
A beauty, by my soul!
A red-clay flower-pot, rimmed with gold so neatly!
What ask you for the bowl?”
“O sir, that bowl for worlds I would not part with;
A brave man gave it me,
Who won it—now what think you?—of a bashaw...
There came a man, making his hasty moan
Before the Sultan Mahmoud on his throne,
And crying out, “My sorrow is my right,
And I will see the Sultan, and to-night.”
“Sorrow,” said Mahmoud, “is a reverend thing:
I recognize its right, as king with king;
Speak on.” “A fiend has got into my house,”
Exclaimed the staring man, “and tortures us...
In Sana, O, in Sana, God, the Lord,
Was very kind and merciful to me!
Forth from the Desert in my rags I came,
Weary and sore of foot. I saw the spires
And swelling bubbles of the golden domes
Rise through the trees of Sana, and my heart
Grew great within me with the strength of God
And I cried out, “Now shall I right myself,—
I,...
“ROOM for the leper! room!” And as he came
The cry passed on,—“Room for the leper! room!”* * * * *
And aside they stood,
Matron, and child, and pitiless manhood,—all
Who met him on his way,—and let him pass.
And onward through the open gate he came,
A leper with the ashes on his brow,
...
From “Jerusalem Delivered”
From the Italian by Edward Fairfax
“THOUGH gone, though dead, I love thee still; behold
Death wounds but kills not love: yet if thou live,
Sweet soul, still in his breast, my follies bold
Ah pardon, love’s desires and stealth forgive:
Grant me from his pale mouth some kisses cold,
Since death doth love of...
A Warrior so bold, and a virgin so bright,
Conversed as they sat on the green;
They gazed on each other with tender delight:
Alonzo the Brave was the name of the knight,—
The maiden’s, the Fair Imogine.
“And O,” said the youth, “since to-morrow I go
To fight in a far distant land,
Your tears for my absence soon ceasing to flow,...
It was a Moorish maiden was sitting by a well,
And what that maiden thought of, I cannot, cannot tell,
When by there rode a valiant knight, from the town of Oviedo—
Alphonso Guzman was he hight, the Count of Desparedo.
“O maiden, Moorish maiden! why sitt’st thou by the spring?
Say, dost thou seek a lover, or any other thing?
Why gazest thou...
From the Provençal by Harriet Waters Preston
From “Calendau”
AT Arles in the Carlovingian days,
By the swift Rhone water,
A hundred thousand on either side,
Christian and Saracen, fought till the tide
Ran red with the slaughter.
May God forefend such another flood
Of direful war!
The Count of...
