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- COLONUS' PRAISE
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- i{Chorus.} Come praise Colonus' horses, and come praise
- The wine-dark of the wood's intricacies,
- The nightingale that deafens daylight there,
- If daylight ever visit where,
- Unvisited by tempest or by sun,
- Immortal ladies tread the ground
- Dizzy with harmonious sound,
- Semele's lad a gay companion.
- And yonder in the gymnasts' garden thrives
- The self-sown, self-begotten shape that gives
- Athenian intellect its mastery,
- Even the grey-leaved olive-tree
- Miracle-bred out of the living stone;
- Nor accident of peace nor war
- Shall wither that old marvel, for
- The great grey-eyed Athene stareS thereon.
- Who comes into this countty, and has come
- Where golden crocus and narcissus bloom,
- Where the Great Mother, mourning for her daughter
- And beauty-drunken by the water
- Glittering among grey-leaved olive-trees,
- Has plucked a flower and sung her loss;
- Who finds abounding Cephisus
- Has found the loveliest spectacle there is.
- because this country has a pious mind
- And so remembers that when all mankind
- But trod the road, or splashed about the shore,
- Poseidon gave it bit and oar,
- Every Colonus lad or lass discourses
- Of that oar and of that bit;
- Summer and winter, day and night,
- Of horses and horses of the sea, white horsffes.
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