The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Volume 06

To and fro beside the fountain
Where the waters whitely murmured,
Walked the Sultan's lovely daughter.

And a youth, a slave, was standing
Every evening by the fountain
Where the waters whitely murmured;
And his cheek grew pale and paler.

Till one eve the lovely princess
Paused and asked him on a sudden:
"I would know thy name and country;
I would know thy home and kindred."

And the slave replied, "Mohammed
Is my name; my home is Yemen;
And my people are the Asras;
When they love, they love and die."

* * * * *

THE PASSION FLOWER[48 - Translator: Charles Wharton Stork.] (1856)

I dreamt that once upon a summer night
Beneath the pallid moonlight's eerie glimmer
I saw where, wrought in marble dimly bright,
A ruin of the Renaissance did shimmer.

Yet here and there, in simple Doric form,
A pillar like some solitary giant
Rose from the mass, and, fearless of the storm,
Reared toward the firmament its head defiant.

O'er all that place a heap of wreckage lay,
Triglyphs and pediments and carven portals,
With centaur, sphinx, chimera, satyrs gay—
Figures of fabled monsters and of mortals.

A marble-wrought sarcophagus reposed
Unharmed 'mid fragments of these fabled creatures;
Its lidless depth a dead man's form inclosed,
The pain-wrung face now calm with softened features.

A group of straining caryatides
With steadfast neck the casket's weight supported,
Along both sides whereof there ran a frieze
Of chiseled figures, wondrous ill-assorted.

First one might see where, decked in bright array,
A train of lewd Olympians proudly glided,
Then Adam and Dame Eve, not far away,
With fig-leaf aprons modestly provided.

Next came the people of the Trojan war—
Paris, Achilles, Helen, aged Nestor;
Moses and Aaron, too, with many more—
As Judith, Holofernes, Haman, Esther.

Such forms as Cupid's one could likewise see,
Phoebus Apollo, Vulcan, Lady Venus,
Pluto and Proserpine and Mercury,
God Bacchus and Priapus and Silenus.

Among the rest of these stood Balaam's ass—
A speaking likeness (if you will, a braying)—
And Abraham's sacrifice, and there, alas!
Lot's daughters, too, their drunken sire betraying.

Near by them danced the wanton Salome,
To whom John's head was carried in a charger;
Then followed Satan, writhing horribly,
And Peter with his keys—none e'er seemed larger

Changing once more, the sculptor's cunning skill
Showed lustful Jove misusing his high power,
When as a swan he won fair Leda's will,
And conquered Danaë in a golden shower.

Here was Diana, leading to the chase
Her kilted nymphs, her hounds with eyeballs burning;
And here was Hercules in woman's dress,
His warlike hand the peaceful distaff turning.

Not far from them frowned Sinai, bleak and wild,
Along whose slope lay Israel's nomad nation;
Next, one might see our Savior as a child
Amid the elders holding disputation.

Thus were these opposites absurdly blent—
The Grecian joy of living with the godly
Judean cast of thought!—while round them bent
The ivy's tendrils, intertwining oddly.

But—wonderful to say!—while dreamily
I gazed thereon with glance returning often,
Sudden methought that I myself was he,
The dead man in the splendid marble coffin.

Above the coffin by my head there grew
A flower for a symbol sweet and tragic,