Explore "Ivàn Ivànovitch" by Robert Browning on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
"They tell me, your carpenters," quoth I to my friend the Russ, / "Make a simple hatchet serve as a tool-box serves with us. / Arm but each man with his axe, 'tis a hammer and saw and plane / And chisel, and -- what know I else? We should imitate in vain / The mastery wherewithal, by a flourish of just the adze, / He cleaves, clamps, dovetails in, -- no need of our nails and brads, -- / The manageable pine: 'tis said he could shave himself / With the axe, -- so all adroit, now a giant and now an elf, / Does he work and play at once!"
Quoth my friend the Russ to me, / "Ay, that and more beside on occasion! It scarce may be / You never heard tell a tale told children, time out of mind, / By father and mother and nurse, for a moral that's behind, / Which children quickly seize. If the incident happened at all, / We place it in Peter's time when hearts were great not small, / Germanized, Frenchified. I wager 'tis old to you / As the story of Adam and Eve, and possibly quite as true."