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.