Вильгельм фон Шмиц (3 перевода и оригинал)

The travelers, each buried in his own thoughts, paced in silence down the steep, save when an unusually sharp stone, or an unexpected dip in the road, produced one of those involuntary exclamations of pain, which so triumphantly demonstrate the connection between Mind and Matter. At length the young traveler, rousing himself with an effort from his painful reverie, broke upon the meditations of his companion with the unexpected question, "Think you she will be much altered in feature? I trust me not." "Think who?" testily rejoined the other: then hastily correcting himself, with an exquisite sense of grammar, he substituted the expressive phrase, "Who's the she you're after?" "Forget you then," asked the young man, who was so intensely poetical in soul that he never spoke in ordinary prose, "forget you the subject we conversed on but now? Trust me, she hath dwelt in my thoughts ever since." "But now!" his friend repeated, in sarcastic tone, "it is an hour good since you spoke last." The young man nodded assent; "An hour? true, true. We were passing Lyth, as I bethink me, and lowly in thine ear was I murmuring that touching sonnet to the sea I writ of late, beginning, 'Thou roaring, snoring, heaving, grieving main which ——" "For pity's sake!" interrupted the other, and there was real earnestness in that pleading tone, "don't let us have it all again! I have heard it with patience once already."

"Thou hast, thou hast," the baffled poet replied: "well then, she shall again be the topic of my thoughts," and he frowned and bit his lip, muttering to himself such words as cooky, hooky, and crooky, as if he were trying to find a rhyme to something. And now the pair were passing near a bridge, and shops were on their left and water on their right; and from beneath uprose a confused hubbub of sailors' voices, and, wafted on the landward breeze, came an aroma, dimly suggestive of salt herring, and all things from the heaving waters in the harbour to the light smoke that floated gracefully above the housetops, suggested nought but poetry to the mind of the gifted youth.

Chapter II

"And I, for One"

(Old Play)

"But about she," resumed the man of prose, "what's her name? You never told me that yet." A faint flush crossed the interesting features of the youth; could it be that her name was unpoetical, and did not consort with his ideas of the harmony of nature? He spoke reluctantly and indistinctly; "Her name", he faintly gasped, "is Sukie."

A long, low whistle was the only reply; thrusting his hands deep in his pockets, the elder speaker turned away, while the unhappy youth, whose delicate nerves were cruelly shaken by his friend's ridicule, grasped the railing near to him to steady his tottering feet. Distant sounds of melody from the cliff at this moment reached their ears, and while his unfeeling comrade wandered in the direction of the music, the distressed poet hastily sought the Bridge, to give his pent-up feelings vent, unnoticed by the passers-by.

The Sun was setting as he reached the spot, and the still surface of the waters below, as he crossed on to the Bridge, calmed his perturbed spirit, and sadly leaning his elbows on the rail, he pondered. What visions filled that noble soul, as, with features that would have beamed with intelligence, had they only possessed an expression at all, and a frown that only needed dignity to be appalling, he fixed upon the sluggish tide those fine though bloodshot eyes?

Visions of his early days; scenes from the happy time of pinafores, treacle, and innocence; through the long vista of the past came floating spectres of long-forgotten spelling-books, slates scrawled thick with dreary sums, that seldom came out at all, and never came out right; tingling and somewhat painful sensations returned to his knuckles and the roots of his hair; he was a boy once more.

"Now, young man there!" so broke a voice upon the air, "tak whether o' the two roads thou likes, but thou ca'n't stop in't middle!" The words fell idly on his ears, or served but to suggest new trains of reverie; "Roads, aye, roads," he whispered low, and then louder, as the glorious idea burst upon him, "Aye, and am I not the Colossus of Rhodes?" he raised his manly form erect at the thought, and planted his feet with a firmer stride.

…Was it but a delusion of his heated brain? or stern reality? slowly, slowly yawned the bridge beneath him, and now his footing is already grown unsteady, and now the dignity of his attitude is gone: he recks not, come what may; is he not a Colossus?

…The stride of a Colossus is possibly equal to any emergency; the elasticity of fustian is limited; it was at this critical juncture that "the force of nature could no further go", and therefore deserted him, while the force of gravity began to operate in its stead.

In other words, he fell.