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

53 страница из 63

“Through some familiar tone, retrieving

My thoughts from torment, led me on,

And sweet, clear echoes came, deceiving

A faith bequeathed from childhood’s dawn,

Yet now I curse whate’er entices

And snares the soul with visions vain;

With dazzling cheats and dear devices

Confines it in this cave of pain!

Cursed be, at once, the high ambition.

Wherewith the mind itself deludes!

Cursed be the glare of apparition,

That on the finer sense intrudes.”

We cannot forbear to add another quotation from the same Act, so illustrative is it of Bayard’s note-taking life:—

“No need to tell me twice to do it!

I think, how useful ’tis to write;

For what one has in black and white,

One carries home and then goes through it.”

His visit to the Brocken was one of the most fascinating trips of his whole pedestrian tour, notwithstanding his narrow escape from death in the snow, and from destruction by falling into the partially concealed caves that beset his way to the summit. He mentioned long afterward the view he had from the summit-house, through the rifts in the clouds, of the plains and cities of Germany. Thirty cities and several hundred villages lay within sight, and all of them more or less closely interwoven with the literature of Germany. The plains of Brunswick and Magdeburg stretch away for seventy miles, with all the various shadings of green intermingled with the sparkling silver of stream and lake. It is a scene so grand that no pen could portray its sublimity and no tongue accurately convey an idea of its varied beauty. With that romantic persistency which no amount of fatigue overcame, Bayard descended the mountain by that rugged and nerve-shaking path up which Faust was said to have ascended with Mephistopheles (scene XXI. of Taylor’s translation) who says:—