"Smith, Clark Ashton - The Passing Of Aphrodite" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith Clark Ashton)

circlet or garland, crowned and clad only with the sunset, fair with the dreams
of man but fairer yet than all dreams: thus she waited, smiling tranquilly, who
in life or death, despair or rapture, vision or flesh, to gods and poets and
galaxies unknowable. But, filled with a wonder that was also love, or much more
than love, the poet could find no greeting.

'Farewell, O Phaniol,' she said, and her voice was the sighing of remote
waters, the murmur of waters moon-withdrawn, forsaking not without sorrow a
proud island tall with palms. 'Thou hast known me and worshipped all thy days
till now, but the hour of my departure is come: I go, and when I am gone, thou
shalt worship still and shalt not know me. For the destinies are thus, and not
forever to any man, to any world or to any god, is it given to possess me
wholly. Autumn and spring will return when I am past, the one with yellow
leaves, the other with yellow violets; birds will haunt the renewing myrtles;
and many little loves will be thine. Not again to thee or to any man will return
the perfect vision and the perfect flesh of the goddess.'

Ending thus, she stepped from that ashen strand to the dark prow of the
barge; and even as it had come, without wafture of wind or movement of oar, the
barge put out on a sea covered with the fallen fading petals of sunset. Quickly
it vanished from view, while the desert lost those ancient asphodels and the
deep verdure it had worn again for a little. Darkness, having conquered
Illarion, came slow and furtive on the path of Aphrodite; shadows mustered
innumerably to the grey hills and the heart of the poet Phaniol was an urn of
black jade overfraught by love with sodden ashes.