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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.
