Читать книгу Story-Telling Ballads. Selected and Arranged for Story-Telling and Reading Aloud and for the Boys' and Girls' Own Reading онлайн

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Can hold no sympathy with mine.

“These sparkling eyes, so wild and gay,

They swim not in the light of love:

The beauteous Maid of Colonsay,

Her eyes are milder than the dove!

“Even now, within the lonely isle,

Her eyes are dim with tears for me;

And canst thou think that siren smile

Can lure my soul to dwell with thee?”

An oozy film her limbs o’erspread;

Unfolds in length her scaly train:

She tossed, in proud disdain, her head,

And lashed, with webbed fin, the main.

“Dwell here, alone!” the Mermaid cried,

“And view far off the Sea-nymphs play;

Thy prison-wall, the azure tide,

Shall bar thy steps from Colonsay.

“Whene’er, like Ocean’s scaly brood,

I cleave, with rapid fin, the wave,

Far from the daughter of the flood,

Conceal thee in this coral cave.

“I feel my former soul return;

It kindles at thy cold disdain:

And has a mortal dared to spurn

A daughter of the foamy main!”—

She fled; around the crystal cave

The rolling waves resume their road

On the broad portal idly rave,

But enter not the Nymph’s abode.