C.D. Warner, et al., comp. The Library of the World’s Best Literature.
An Anthology in Thirty Volumes. 1917.
From ‘On a Slab of Rose Marble’
By Alfred de Musset (1810–1857)
Y
Other destiny was thine:
Far away from cloudy France,
Where a warmer sun doth shine,
Near some temple, Greek or Latin;
The fair daughters of the clime,
With the scent of heath and thyme
Clinging to their sandaled feet
Beating thee in rhythmic dance,
Were a burden far more sweet
Than court ladies shod with satin.
Could it be for this alone
Nature formed thee in the earth,
In whose beauteous virgin stone
Genius might have wrought a birth
Every age had joyed to own?…
Some new-born divinity.
When the marble-cutters hewed
Through thy noble block their way,
They broke in with footsteps rude
Where a Venus sleeping lay,
And the goddess’s wounded veins
Colored thee with roseate stains.
Alas! and must we hold it truth
That every rare and precious thing
Flung forth at random without ruth
Trodden under foot may lie?
The crag where, in sublime repose,
The eagle stoops to rest his wing,
No less than any wayside rose,
Dropped in the common dust to die?
Can the mother of us all
Leave her work, to fullness brought,
Lost in the gulf of chance to fall,
As oblivion swallows thought?
Torn away from ocean’s rim
To be fashioned by a whim,
Does the briny tempest whirl
To the workman’s feet the pearl?
Shall the vulgar, idle crowd
For all ages be allowed
To degrade earth’s choicest treasure
At the arbitrary pleasure
Of a mason or a churl?