Читать книгу The Life, Travels, and Literary Career of Bayard Taylor онлайн

12 страница из 63

Book-learning gets the upper hand, and work is slow and slack,

And they that come long after us will find things gone to wrack.

Well—I suppose I’m old, and yet it is not long ago

When Reuben spread the swath to dry, and Jesse learned to mow,

And William raked, and Israel hoed, and Joseph pitched with me,

But such a man as I was then my boys will never be!

I don’t mind William’s hankering for lectures and for books,

He never had a farming knack—you’d see it in his looks;

But handsome is that handsome does, and he is well to do:

’Twould ease my mind if I could say the same of Jesse, too.

’Tis like my time is nearly out; of that I’m not afraid;

I never cheated any man, and all my debts are paid.

They call it rest that we shall have, but work would do no harm;

There can’t be rivers there, and fields, without some sort o’ farm.”

No description in prose can as well describe his occupation as a boy, as his own lines, in the poem of the “Holly Tree.”

“The corn was warm in the ground, the fences were mended and made,