"Lord Dunsany - Fifty-one Tales" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dunsany Lord)

lovely gates in Florence that I fear he will carry away.
We have tried to bind him with song and with old customs,
but they only held him for a little while, and he has always
smitten us and mocked us.
When he is blind he shall dance to us and make sport.
Great clumsy time shall stumble and dance, who liked to
kill little children, and can hurt even the daisies no
longer.
Then shall our children laugh at him who slew Babylon's
winged bulls, and smote great numbers of the gods and
fairies -- when he is shorn of his hours and his years.
We will shut him up in the Pyramid of Cheops, in the
great chamber where the sarcophagus is. Thence we will lead
him out when we give our feasts. He shall ripen our corn
for us and do menial work.
We will kiss they painted face, O Sphinx, if thou wilt
betray to us Time.
And yet I fear that in his ultimate anguish he may take
hold blindly of the world and the moon, and slowly pull down
upon him the House of Man.
 The Hen




All along the farmyard gables the swallows sat a-row,
twittering uneasily to one another, telling of many things,
but thinking only of Summer and the South, for Autumn was
afoot and the North wind waiting.
And suddenly one day they were all quite gone. And
everyone spoke of the swallows and the South.
"I think I shall go South myself next year," said a hen.
And the year wore on and the swallows came again, and the
year wore on and they sat again on the gables, and all the
poultry discussed the departure of the hen.
And very early one morning, the wind being from the
North, the swallows all soared suddenly and felt the wind in
their wings; and a strength came upon them and a strange old
knowledge and a more than human faith, and flying high they
left the smoke of our cities and small remembered eaves, and
saw at last the huge and homeless sea, and steering by grey
sea-currents went southward with the wind. And going South
they went by glittering fog-banks and saw old islands
lifting their heads above them; they saw the slow quests of
the wandering ships, and divers seeking pearls, and lands at
war, till there came in view the mountains that they sought
and the sight of the peaks they knew; and they descended
into an austral valley, and saw Summer sometimes sleeping
and sometimes singing song.
"I think the wind is about right," said the hen; and she