The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Volume 05

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THE PILGRIM BEFORE ST. JUST'S[60 - Translator: Lord Lindsay. From Ballads, Songs and Poems.] (1819)

'Tis night, and tempests whistle o'er the moor;
Oh, Spanish father, ope the door!
Deny me not the little boon I crave,
Thine order's vesture, and a grave!
Grant me a cell within thy convent-shrine—
Half of this world, and more, was mine;
The head that to the tonsure now stoops down
Was circled once by many a crown;
The shoulders fretted now with shirt of hair
Did once the imperial ermine wear.
Now am I as the dead, e'er death is come,
And sink in ruins like old Rome.

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THE GRAVE OF ALARIC[61 - Translators: Bayard Taylor and Lilian Bayard Taylor Kiliani. From A Sheaf of Poems, permission R.G. Badger, Boston.] (1820)

On Busento's grassy banks a muffled chorus echoes nightly,
While the swirling eddies answer and the wavelets ripple lightly.

Up and down the river, shades of Gothic warriors watch are keeping,
For they mourn their people's hero, Alaric, with sobs of weeping.

All too soon and far from home and kindred here to rest they laid him,
While in youthful beauty still his flowing golden curls arrayed him.

And along the river's bank a thousand hands with eager striving
Labored long, another channel for Busento's tide contriving.

Then a cavern deep they hollowed in the river-bed depleted,
Placed therein the dead king, clad in proof, upon his charger seated.

O'er him and his proud array the earth they filled, and covered loosely,
So that on their hero's grave the water-plants would grow profusely.

And again the course they altered of Busento's waters troubled;
In its ancient channel rushed the current—foamed, and hissed, and bubbled.

And the Goths in chorus chanted: "Hero, sleep! Tiny fame immortal
Roman greed shall ne'er insult, nor break thy tomb's most sacred portal!"

Thus they sang, and paeans sounded high above the fight's commotion;
Onward roll, Busento's waves, and bear them to the farthest ocean!

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REMORSE[62 - Translator: Henry W. Longfellow. From Representative German Poems, Henry Holt & Co., New York.] (1820)

How I started up in the night, in the night,
Drawn on without rest or reprieval!
The streets with their watchmen were lost to my sight,
As I wandered so light
In the night, in the night,
Through the gate with the arch medieval.

The mill-brook rushed from its rocky height;
I leaned o'er the bridge in my yearning;
Deep under me watched I the waves in their flight,
As they glided so light
In the night, in the night,
Yet backward not one was returning.

O'erhead were revolving, so countless and bright,
The stars in melodious existence;
And with them the moon, more serenely bedight;
They sparkled so light
In the night, in the night,
Through the magical, measureless distance.

And upward I gazed in the night, in the night,
And again on the waves in their fleeting;
Ah woe! thou hast wasted thy days in delight;
Now silence, thou light,
In the night, in the night,
The remorse in thy heart that is beating.

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WOULD I WERE FREE AS ARE MY DREAMS[63 - Translator: Percy Mackaye.] (1822)

Would I were free as are my dreams,
Sequestered from the garish crowd
To glide by banks of quiet streams
Cooled by the shadow-drifting cloud!

Free to shake off this weary weight
Of human sin, and rest instead
On nature's heart inviolate—
All summer singing o'er my head!

There would I never disembark,
Nay, only graze the flowery shore
To pluck a rose beneath the lark,
Then go my liquid way once more,