Читать книгу Lyra Celtica: An Anthology of Representative Celtic Poetry онлайн

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“In the highlands, in the country places,

Where the old plain men have rosy faces,

And the young fair maidens

Quiet eyes;

Where essential silence cheers and blesses

And forever in the hill-recesses

Her more lovely music

Broods and dies,

O to mount again where erst I haunted;

Where the old red hills are bird-enchanted,

And the low green meadows

Bright with sward;

And when even dies, the million tinted,

And the night has come, and planets glinted,

Lo, the valley hollow

Lamp-bestarred!

O to dream, O to awake and wander

There, and with delight to take and render,

Through the trance of silence,

Quiet breath;

Lo! for there, among the flowers, and grasses,

Only the mightier movement sounds and passes;

Only winds and rivers,

Life and death.”

Of course there is a certain poignant note common to all poetry, and he might be a zealous Celticist, but a poor worshipper of Apollo, who would try to limit this charm of exquisite regret and longing to Celtic poetry. It is an unfrontiered land, this pleasant country in the geography of the soul which we call Bohemia; and here all parochial and national, and even racial distinctions fall away, and Firdausi and Oisìn, Omar the Tentmaker and Colum the Saint, and all and every “Honey-Mouth” of every land and time, move in equal fellowship. Even in one of the most haunting quatrains by any modern Anglo-Celtic poet—