Page:The collected works of Henrik Ibsen (Volume 4).djvu/146

 AN
 * Oh ay, 'tis the guiltless must smart, said the devil;
 * his mother boxed his ears when his father was drunk!

[She trudges off into the thicket with THE BRAT, who throws the flagon at PEER GYNT.] PEER [after a long silence].
 * The Boyg said, "Go roundabout!"-so one must here.-
 * There fell my fine palace, with crash and clatter!
 * There's a wall around her whom I stood so near,
 * of a sudden all's ugly-my joy has grown old.-
 * Roundabout, lad! There's no way to be found
 * right through all this from where you stand to her.
 * Right through? Hm, surely there should be one.
 * There's a text on repentance, unless I mistake.
 * But what? What is it? I haven't the book,
 * I've forgotten it mostly, and here there is none
 * that can guide me aright in the pathless wood.-
 * Repentance? And maybe 'twould take whole years,
 * ere I fought my way through. 'Twere a meagre life, that.
 * To shatter what's radiant, and lovely, and pure,
 * and clinch it together in fragments and shards?
 * You can do it with a fiddle, but not with a bell.
 * Where you'd have the sward green, you must mind not to trample.
 * 'Twas nought but a lie though, that witch-snout business!
 * Now all that foulness is well out of sight.-
 * Ay, out of sight maybe, not out of mind.
 * Thoughts will sneak stealthily in at my heel.