"George Bidder - Merlin's Youth" - читать интересную книгу автора (Bidder George)

To learn her spells. The meteors at play
Cried round us as we sat upon the hills,
The lightning flowed in lucid gentle rills
To bathe her feet; and strange tongues spake anon
Thundering, and red streamers through the welkin shone.

Sometime we pored o'er mystic written signs
Tangled with pictured horrors, wrapt designs
That first were stains of blood upon the page,
And then were men, writhing in pain and rage,
And then shone forth a face in hate and fear,
And grew, until the eyeballs stared as near

As beat her heart to mine. And as we gazed
Sense became dim, and sight and thought amazed:
The walls fell back from out that narrow room,
The world lay wide before us in its gloom,
Strange swift things sped on wings of livid light,
And round about us closed the forces of the night.

16

Sometime from out the shadows of the grave
We called the old Fenickian; who, when wave
Curled o'er his ship to sink it in the deep,
Bade there its mountainous waters hang, asleep
(And still men show it, from the quiet sea
A long white rock, o'erhanging treacherously):

And he would teach us how in Orient land
Great toiling sprites weave cables from the sand;
And he that holds them may chain back the hours
Till his proud life, in ever-waxing powers,
Stretch on a thousand years, and time is tired,
And all lies in his hand that ever he desired:

And how within the bowels of the earth
A fiery race awaits its coming birth,
And they that master mighty spells have care
To say nought that shall break their fetters there;
Else all our world should vanish in a breath,
One fierce and fearsome flame, and long eternal death.

17

And sometime we would pass into the skies
Till the near stars gleamed hotly in her eyes;
And we would look behind the Milky Veil
Where watch the drowsy fates, weary and pale,
Till planets cease to rule. And we would fall