The Sail

THE SAIL

A lone white sail shows for an instant
Where gleams the sea, an azure streak.
What left it in its homeland distant?
In alien parts what does it seek?
The billows play, the mast bends, creaking,
The wind, impatient, moans and sighs...
It is not joy that it is seeking,
Nor is't from happiness it flies.
The blue waves dance, they dance and tremble,
The sun's bright rays caress the seas.
And yet for storm it begs, the rebel,
As if in storm lurked calm and peace!...

A Hero Of Our Own Times - Closing

I couldn't get any more out of him. He doesn't like metaphysical discussions.

A Hero Of Our Own Times - pg. 153

'I don't agree, You're all the more interesting because you haven't so far got your commission. You don't know how to derive the best advantage from a favorable situation. A sensitive young lady cannot but feel that since you wear a private's cloak you must be something between a hero and a martyr.'

A Hero Of Our Own Times - pg. 131

He spoke quickly and affectedly, being one of those who have high-falutin phrases which they consider appropriate for every contingency, while they have no appreciation of beauty unadorned. Pompously they feign unusual emotions, sublime passions, and exceptional suffering. They love to produce an effect, and romantically minded provincial girls are apt to adore them. As they approach middle age, they may become respectable country gentlemen or else take to drink, or even aspire to both vocations. Such men may have excellent qualities, but they never have a poetic vein.

A Hero Of Our Own Times - 57

It became plain to me that neither fame nor happiness depend in any way on a mastery of the sciences: for really happy people are apt to be nit-wits; as for fame, it comes to be successful you need merely have a keen eye for the main chance.

A Hero Of Our Own Times - pg. 35

"Believe me, Allah is for all races one and the same, and if it be His will that I should love you, what can forbid you to love me in return?" She looked at him fixedly, as if struck by this new idea. Her expression was diffident, and showed a desire to be convinced. What eyes she had, eyes like stars, like burning coals.

A Hero Of Our Own Times - pg. 3

It was a glorious place, that valley. Mountains on all sides, inaccessible reddish cliffs, hung with green ivy and crowned with clumps of oriental plane; yellow slopes streaked with ravines; and there, at a great height, the golden fringe of the snows; while below was the Aragva (joined here by another river whose name I cannot recall),thundering forth from a black gorge filled with mist, to become a silver thread which glittered like the scales of a snake's skin.

A Hero Of Our Own Times - Opening

BELA

I WAS posting from Tiflis. The baggae in my cart considered of one portmanteau, half filled with notes of my Georgian travels. The greater part of these notes, luckily for you, had been lost; but the trunk with the rest of my things, luckily for me, was safe and sound.

Mikhail Yurevich Lermontov

Translated from the Russian
by
EDEN AND CEDAR PAUL

With an Introduction
by

SIR MAURICE BOWRA

LONDON
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
NEW YORK TORONTO
1958

A Hero of Our Own Times, first published in 1840
was included in The World's Classics in 1956

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, OXFORD
BY CHARLES BATEY, PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY