The marble image thrilled with life,
The stone began to quiver;
She drank my kisses' burning flame
With fierce convulsive shiver.

She almost drank my breath away;
And, to her passion bending,
She clasped me close, with her lion claws
My hapless body rending.

Delicious torture, rapturous pang!
The pain, the bliss, unbounded!
Her lips, their kiss was heaven to me,
Her claws, oh, how they wounded.

The nightingale sang: "O beauteous Sphinx!
O love, love! say, why this is,
That with the anguish of death itself
Thou minglest all thy blisses?

"Oh beauteous Sphinx, oh, answer me,
That riddle strange unloosing!
For many, many thousand years
Have I on it been musing!"


GERMANY[44] (1842)

Germany's still a little child,
But he's nursed by the sun, though tender;