Explore "In an Old Art Gallery" by Ella Wheeler Wilcox on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Before the statue of a giant Hun, / There stood a dwarf, misshapen and uncouth. / His lifted eyes seemed asking: ‘Why, in sooth, / Was I not fashioned like this mighty one? / Would God show favour to an older son / Like earthly kings, and beggar without ruth / Another, who sinned only by his youth? / Why should two lives in such divergence run?'
Strange, as he gazed, that from a vanished past / No memories revived of war and strife, / Of misused prowess, and of broken law. / That old Hun's spirit, in the dwarf re-cast, / Lived out the sequence of an earthly life. / _It was the statue of himself he saw_!