晨读英语美文100篇 Passage 19. What Is Immortal

[00:00.54]Passage 19. What Is Immortal

[00:05.57]To see the golden sun and the azure sky, the outstretched ocean,

[00:10.61]to walk upon the green earth, and to be lord of a thousand creatures,

[00:16.19]to look down giddy precipices or over distant flowery vales,

[00:21.44]to see the world spread out under one’s finger in a map,

[00:26.15]to bring the stars near, to view the smallest insects in a microscope,

[00:31.62]to read history,and witness the revolutions of empires and the succession of generations,

[00:38.73]to hear of the glory of Sidon and Tyre, of Babylon and Susa, as of a faded pageant,

[00:46.49]and to say all these were, and are now nothing,

[00:50.22]to think that we exist in such a point of time,and in such a corner of space,

[00:56.12]to be at once spectators and a part of the moving scene,

[01:00.82]to watch the return of the seasons, of spring and autumn, to hear —

[01:06.85]The stock dove’s notes amid the forest deep,

[01:10.56]That drowsy forest rustles to the sighing gale.

[01:14.94]— to traverse desert wilderness,to listen to the dungeon's gloom,

[01:20.63]or sit in crowded theatres and see life itself mocked,

[01:25.77]to feel heat and cold, pleasure and pain, right and wrong, truth and falsehood,

[01:32.67]to study the works of art and refine the sense of beauty to agony,

[01:37.58]to worship fame and to dream of immortality,

[01:42.07]to have read Shakespeare and Beloit to the same species as Sir Isaac Newton;

[01:47.21]to be and to do all this, and then in a moment

[01:52.14]to be nothing,to have it all snatched from one

[01:55.43]like a juggler’ ball or a phantasmagoria...