【老路灯的故事】老路灯读后感_老路灯作者

The old people were very hard-working; they never wasted a moment. Sunday afternoon, the old watchman would take down a book and read aloud. He preferred travel books, especially ones about Africa. He liked to read about the great tropical forests where the elephants roamed. His wife would glance up at the window ledges where the two clay elephants were and say, "I can almost see it all." How much the old street lamp wished he had a lighted candle inside him! Then the old people would be able to see it all just as he envisioned it. He saw the tall trees growing so close together that their branches intertwined; the naked natives riding on horses; and herds of elephants tramping through the underbrush, crushing reeds and breaking saplings with their great broad feet.

"What is the good of my gift if they have no wax candles?" sighed the street lamp. "They cannot afford them; they are too poor to own anything but tallow candles or oil."

But one day a whole handful of wax candle stumps arrived in the cellar. The old couple used the larger ones for light, but it never occurred to them to put one in the old street lamp. With the smaller pieces of candle the woman waxed her thread for sewing.

"Here I sit, possessing a rare gift," complained the lamp. "I have a whole world within me, and I cannot share it with the old couple. They don't know that I could decorate these whitewashed walls with the most splendid tapestries. They could see the richest forest. . . . They could see anything they desired; but alas! they do not know it."

The lamp had been polished and cleaned and now stood in a comer where all the visitors could see it. Most of them thought it was a piece of old rubbish, but the night watchman and his wife truly loved the lamp.

It was the night watchman's birthday. The old woman stood before the lamp and said with a smile, "I think that you ought to be illuminated in his honor." Hopefully, the lamp thought, "A light has dawned on them. Now they will give me a wax candle." The old woman filled the lamp once more with oil and he burned all evening. And now he felt certain that the gift the stars had given him--the best present he had ever received--would remain a useless, hidden treasure during the rest of his life. That night he dreamed--and anyone who possesses a talent as great as the lamp's really can dream--that the old couple had died and that he had been sent to the foundry to be melted down. He was just as frightened as he had been on the day that the six and thirty men had inspected him. But even though he had the ability to rust and disappear into dust, he didn't make use of it. When he had been melted down, the iron was used to make the most beautiful candlestick, which was cast in the shape of an angel holding a bouquet of flowers. In the center, among the flowers, there was a hole for a wax candle. The candlestick was placed on a green writing desk that stood in a very cozy room, which was filled with books and had many paintings hanging on the walls. It was the room of a poet. All that the poet thought, imagined, and wrote down seemed to exist within the room. The dark solemn woods, the sunlit meadows where the stork strode, even the deck of a ship sailing on the billowy sea.