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

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“In clay the statue stood complete,

As beautiful a form, and fair,

As ever walked a Roman street

Or breathed the blue Athenian air:

The perfect limbs, divinely bare,

Their old, heroic freedom kept,

And in the features, fine and rare,

A calm, immortal sweetness slept.

O’er common men it towered, a god,

And smote their meaner life with shame,

For while its feet the highway trod,

Its lifted brow was crowned with flame

And purified from touch of blame:

Yet wholly human was the face,

And over them who saw it came

The knowledge of their own disgrace.

It stood, regardless of the crowd,

And simply showed what men might be:

Its solemn beauty disavowed

The curse of lost humanity.

Erect and proud, and pure and free,

It overlooked each loathsome law

The life, travels, and literary career of Bayard Taylor

Whereunto others bend the knee,

And only what was noble saw.”

The blameless spirit of a lofty aim

Sees not a line that asks to be concealed

By dextrous evasion; but, revealed

As truth demands, doth Nature smite with shame