Читать книгу Come Hither: A Collection of Rhymes and Poems for the Young of All Ages онлайн

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So what I then read has remained a clear and single remembrance, as if I myself had seen it in a world made different, or in a kind of vision or dream. And I think Mr. Nahum had chosen such poems in Volume I. as carried away the imagination like that; either into the past, or into another mind, or into the all-but-forgotten; at times as if into another world. And this kind has been my choice in this book.

Not that his picture to a particular poem was always the picture I should have made of it. Take for example another nursery jingle in his book:

'How many miles to Babylon?'

'Three score and ten.'

'Can I get there by candle-light?'

'Ay, and back again.'

Mr. Nahum's corresponding picture was not of Babylon or of a candle, or of a traveller at all, but of a stone tomb, On its thick upper slab he had drawn-in an old earthen lamp, with a serpent for handle—its wick alight, and shining up on a small owl perched in the lower branches of the thick tree above.

That is one of the pleasures of reading—you may make any picture out of the words you can and will; and a poem may have as many different meanings as there are different minds.