No More Learning

Now we must separate. Good-bye!

XLIX

And farewell thou, my gloomy friend,
Thou also, my ideal true,
And thou, persistent to the end,
My little book. With thee I knew
All that a poet could desire,
Oblivion of life's tempest dire,
Of friends the grateful intercourse--
Oh, many a year hath run its course
Since I beheld Eugene and young
Tattiana in a misty dream,
And my romance's open theme
Glittered in a perspective long,
And I discerned through Fancy's prism
Distinctly not its mechanism.

L

But ye to whom, when friendship heard,
The first-fruits of my tale I read,
As Saadi anciently averred--(86)
Some are afar and some are dead.
Without them Eugene is complete;
And thou, from whom Tattiana sweet;
Was drawn, ideal of my lay--
Ah! what hath fate not torn away!
Happy who quit life's banquet seat
Before the dregs they shall divine
Of the cup brimming o'er with wine--
Who the romance do not complete,
But who abandon it--as I
Have my Oneguine--suddenly.

[Note 86: The celebrated Persian poet. Pushkin uses the passage
referred to as an epigraph to the "Fountain of Baktchiserai. " It
runs thus: "Many, even as I, visited that fountain, but some of
these are dead and some have journeyed afar. " Saadi was born in
1189 at Shiraz and was a reputed descendant from Ali, Mahomet's
son-in-law. In his youth he was a soldier, was taken prisoner by
the Crusaders and forced to work in the ditches of Tripoli,
whence he was ransomed by a merchant whose daughter he subsequently
married. He did not commence writing till an advanced age. His
principal work is the "Gulistan," or "Rose Garden," a work which
has been translated into almost every European tongue.
]


End of Canto The Eighth


The End



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