United States or Monaco ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Behold me, a lonely, ruined, wifeless, childless wretch! I made all the world my foe! But the poor, my Saxon countrymen, they had suffered, and were safe! "One dark twilight thou hast heard the tale, every village minstrel sets it to his viol a majestic woman, a hunted fugitive, crossed my path; she led a boy in her hand, a year or so younger than my murdered child.
"Never another pilgrim toiled along the road to Rome feeling such a heavy weight of sin to be forgiven as the minstrel knight. He does not talk with the others or lighten the way as they do with holy songs. He knows not how to suffer enough for his guilt, and to seek out punishments for himself is his only content.
Nature had to reflect the pleasant indolence of man; the song of the minstrel moved through a perpetual May-time; the grass was ever green; the music of the lark and the nightingale rang out from field and thicket.
She withdrew to her own rooms with her attendants and wept and mourned for her absent lord until she fell asleep. When the minstrel had finished his song, the suitors began to be noisy and riotous again. Telemachos could no longer restrain himself. "Ye insolent suitors of my mother," he said to them, "cease your uproar. Your lawlessness knows no bounds.
"He measures with a golden rule," agreed Kai Lung. "Left to himself, Shan Tien is a just, if superficial, judge." The knowledge of this boast, Hwa-mei continued to relate, had spread to the inner chambers of the yamen, where the lesser ones vied with each other in proclaiming the merit of the captive minstrel.
I think I see him and hear him in the silver twilight, in the court of some chateau of Picardy, while the ladies around sit listening on silken cushions, and their lovers, fettered with silver chains, lie at their feet. They listen, and look, and do not think of the minstrel with his gray head, and his green heart; but we think of him. It is an old man's work, and a weary man's work.
But then there is more beauty in a heaven visioned by a congregation of worshipers than in the bluest heaven sung by the minstrel of landscapes. They are not worshipers. They are poets. It is not God they are speaking to. It is a sublime image. It is not their Creator. It is their poetic creation."
So spake he, and the minstrel, being stirred by the god, began and showed forth his minstrelsy.
Julien, an English Queen who never set foot in England. Loud were the lamentations of the troubadours of Aquitaine over their minstrel King, Bertrand de Born especially, bewailing him as "le roi des courtois, l'empereur des preux," and declaring that barons, troubadours, jongleurs, had lost their all.
At the intercession of a relation Mr Browning now did his best, and the minstrel, satisfied at last, repeated his conviction of his superiority to the authors of The Angel in the House and Beau Brocade. Probably no man, not even Mr Gladstone, ever suffered so much from minstrels as Tennyson. He did not suffer them gladly. In 1846 the Poems reached their fourth edition.
Word Of The Day