No More Learning

Hurrah! it long ago was time!

XLVIII

Reader, whoever thou mayst be,
Foeman or friend, I do aspire
To part in amity with thee!
Adieu! whate'er thou didst desire
From careless stanzas such as these,
Of passion reminiscences,
Pictures of the amusing scene,
Repose from labour, satire keen,
Or faults of grammar on its page--
God grant that all who herein glance,
In serious mood or dalliance
Or in a squabble to engage,
May find a crumb to satisfy.
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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