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قراءة كتاب The Quadrupeds' Pic-Nic
تنويه: تعرض هنا نبذة من اول ١٠ صفحات فقط من الكتاب الالكتروني، لقراءة الكتاب كاملا اضغط على الزر “اشتر الآن"
اللغة: English
الصفحة رقم: 6
“But I will not detain you with tales of the north,
Of the riches and beauties that nature brings forth;
I should fail in describing what flowers abound,
Rhododendrons and kalmias empurpling the ground;
How the laurels’ gay berries, of deep coral red,
Hang far out from their cones on a bright silver thread;
How white lilies, azalias, enliven the green,
But will speak of the south, which will vary the scene.
Tell their tales of the Mexican gardens and state;
That in midst of a lake those bright swimming isles float,
Which are paddled about like a raft or a boat;
Then they boast of the flowers, the pepper, and maize,
And give one accounts of the natives’ strange ways:
If a man be annoy’d by his neighbour, they say,
He will take his plantation and row it away.
The trees are luxuriant, the mora, whose size
Fills the wanderer’s mind with delight and surprise;
The ebony, green-heart, and letter-wood tree,
The locust and parasite fig you may see;
On the Concourite’s branch Ara parrots assemble,
Whose blue and red feathers the rainbow resemble.
There the trumpeter’s sounds and the goatsucker’s moans
Are mistaken sometimes for the dying man’s groans:
And faintly is heard near the Essequibo
The sad ‘whip-poor-will,’ and the ‘willy-come-go.’”
Here a seal shuffled up, and, just waving his fin,
Requested permission a word to put in.
Yet who can describe all the wonders below?
On a soft bed of sponge in the deep sea I lie,
And watch the huge shark and the grampus glide by;
Or amidst groves of coral I play at bo-peep,
Or I float where the porpoise and flying-fish leap.
I have seen the thin nautilus trimming her sail,
And the Geyser-like waterspout made by the whale;
To this lord of the ocean there clung a whole bevy
Of parasite barnacles waiting his ‘levée.’
I have seen the small soldier-crab coated in red,
With the shell of a whelk for a home overhead;
And the limpet, who, cased in a house of his own,
Shuts out all the air, and sticks fast to a stone;
And the fights of the quarrelsome swordfish and shark,
Which have lasted from morning until it was dark.
“Bright clusters of zoophite flowers I’ve seen,
Sea anemonies, purple, red, orange, and green,
That with petal-like fingers waylay the small fry
Who gaze on their hues, but gaze only to die;
They draw in their feelers, and swallow them up.
One day, after lingering long in that place,
The cuttlefish spurted some ink in my face,
As it enter’d my eyes, for a time I was blind,
From a fish with three hearts this was very unkind.
“In the course of my travels I often have seen
Th’ effects of the dreadful electric machine;
Of the gymnotus eel, with one stroke of his tail
He would make the stout African elephant quail,
Or the heart of the horny rhinoceros