Excerpt from Lays and Legends When on the West broke light from out the East, Then from the splendour and the shame of Rome Renouncing wealth and pleasure, game and feast, And all the joys of his polluted home, Desiring not the gifts his world could give, If haply he might save his soul and live Into the desert's heart a man had come. His God had died for love of him, and he For love of God would die to all of these Sweet sins he had not known for sins, and be Estranged for evermore from rest and ease His days in penance spent might half atone For the iniquity of days bygone, And in the desert might his soul find peace. Crossing wide seas, he reached an alien land By mighty harbours and broad streams he passed Into an arid, trackless waste Of sand, And journeying ever faster and more fast, Left men behind, and onward still did press To a ruined city in the wilderness, And there he stayed his restless feet at last. There stood long lines of columns richly wrought, Colossal statues of forgotten kings, Vast shadowy temples, court within dim court, Great shapes of man-faced beasts with wide firm wings And in and out each broken colonnade The bright-eyed, swift, green-gleaming lizards played, In that still place the only living things. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.