Line 92:  the paperweight

 

The image of those old-fashioned horrors strangely haunted our poet.  I have clipped from a newspaper that recently reprinted it an old poem of his where the souvenir shop also preserves a landscape admired by the tourist:

 

          MOUNTAIN VIEW

Between the mountain and the eye

The spirit of the distance draws

A veil of blue amorous gauze,

The very texture of the sky.

A breeze reaches the pines, and I

Join in the general applause.

 

But we all know it cannot last,

The mountain is too weak to wait—

Even if reproduced and glassed

In me as in a paperweight.

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