August 26: 1346
At Crecy by Somme in PonthieuHigh up on a windy hillA mill stands out like a tower;King Edward stands on the mill.The plain is seething belowAs Vesuvius seethes with flame,But O! not with fire, but gore,Earth incarnadined o’er,Crimson with shame and with fame!—To the King run the messengers, crying‘Thy Son is hard-press’d to the dying!’—‘Let alone: for to-day will be written in storyTo the great world’s end, and for ever:So let the boy have the glory.’
Erin and Gwalia thereWith England are one against France;Outfacing the oriflamme redThe red dragons of Merlin advance:—As harvest in autumn renew’dThe lances bend o’er the fields;Snow-thick our arrow-heads whiteLevel the foe as they light;Knighthood to yeomanry yields:—Proud heart, the King watches, as higherGoes the blaze of the battle, and nigher:—‘To-day is a day will be written in storyTo the great world’s end, and for ever!Let the boy alone have the glory.’
Harold at Senlac-on-SeaBy Norman arrow laid low,—When the shield-wall was breach’d by the shaft,—Thou art avenged by the bow!Chivalry! name of romance!Thou art henceforth but a name!Weapon that none can withstand,Yew in the Englishman’s hand,Flight-shaft unerring in aim!As a lightning-struck forest the foemenShiver down to the stroke of the bowmen:——‘O to-day is a day will be written in storyTo the great world’s end, and for ever!So, let the boy have the glory.’
Pride of Liguria’s shoreGenoa wrestles in vain;Vainly Bohemia’s KingKinglike is laid with the slain.The Blood-lake is wiped-out in blood,The shame of the centuries o’er;Where the pride of the Norman had swayThe lions lord over the fray,The legions of France are no more:——The Prince to his father kneels lowly;—‘His is the battle! his wholly!For to-day is a day will be written in storyTo the great world’s end, and for ever:—So, let him have the spurs, and the glory!’
Erin and Gwalia; Half of Edward’s army consisted of light armed footmen from Ireland and Wales—the latter under their old Dragon-flag.
Chivalry; The feudal idea of an army, resting ‘on the superiority of the horseman to the footman, of the mounted noble to the unmounted churl,’ may be said to have been ruined by this battle: (Green, B. IV: ch. iii).
Liguria; 15,000 cross-bowmen from Genoa were in Philip’s army.
The Blood-lake; Senlac; Hastings.
1348-9
Blue and ever more blueThe sky of that summer’s spring:No cloud from dawning to night:The lidless eyeball of lightGlared: nor could e’en in darkness the dewHer pearls on the meadow-grass string.As a face of a hundred years,Mummied and scarr’d, for the heartIs long dry at the fountain of tears,Green earth lay brown-faced and torn,Scarr’d and hard and forlorn.And as that foul monster of LernaWhom Héraclés slew in his might,But this one slaying, not slain,From the marshes, poisonous, white,Crawl’d out a plague-mist and sheeted the plain,A hydra of hell and of night.—Whence upon men has that horror past?From Cathaya westward it stole to Byzance,—The City of Flowers,—the vineyards of France;—O’er the salt-sea ramparts of England, last,Reeking and rank, a serpent’s breath:—What is this, men cry in their fear, what is this that cometh?’Tis the Black Death, they whisper:The black black Death!
The heart of man at the nameTo a ball of ice shrinks in,With hope, surrendering life:—The husband looks on the wife,Reading the tokens of doom in the frame,The pest-boil hid in the skin,And flees and leaves her to die.Fear-sick, the mother beholdsIn her child’s pure crystalline eyeA dull shining, a sign of despair.Lo, the heavens are poison, not air;And they fall as when lambs in the pastureWith a moan that is hardly a moan,Drop, whole flocks, where they stand;And the mother lays her, alone,Slain by the touch of her nursing hand,Where the household before her is strown.—Earth, Earth, open and cover thy dead!For they are smitten and fall who bearThe corpse to the grave with a prayerless prayer,And thousands are crush’d in the common bed:——Is it Hell that breathes with an adder’s breath?Is it the day of doom, men cry, the Judge that cometh?—’Tis the Black Death, God help us!The black black Death.
Maid Alice and maid MargaretIn the fields have built them a bowerOf reedmace and rushes fine,Fenced with sharp albespyne;Pretty maids hid in the nest; and yetYours is one death, and one hour!Priest and peasant and lordBy the swift, soft stroke of the air,By a silent invisible sword,In plough-field or banquet, fall:The watchers are flat on the wall:—Through city and village and valleyThe sweet-voiced herald of prayerIs dumb in the towers; the throngTo the shrine pace barefoot; and whereBlazed out from the choir a glory of song,God’s altar is lightless and bare.Is there no pity in earth or sky?The burden of England, who shall say?Half the giant oak is riven away,And the green leaves yearn for the leaves that die.Will the whole world drink of the dragon’s breath?It is the cup, men cry, the cup of God’s fury that cometh!’Tis the Black Death, Lord help us!The black black Death.
In England is heard a moan,A bitter lament and a sore,Rachel lamenting her dead,And will not be comfortedFor the little faces for ever gone,The feet from the silent floor.And a cry goes up from the land,Take from us in mercy, O God,Take from us the weight of Thy hand,The cup and the wormwood of woe!’Neath the terrible barbs of Thy bowThis England, this once Thy beloved,Is water’d with life-blood for rain;The bones of her children are white,As flints on the Golgotha plain;Not slain as warriors by warriors in fight,By the arrows of Heaven slain.We have sinn’d: we lift up our souls to Thee,O Lord God eternal on high:Thou who gavest Thyself to die,Saviour, save! to Thy feet we flee:—Snatch from the hell and the Enemy’s breath,From the Prince of the Air, from the terror by night that cometh:—From the Black Death, Christ save us!The black black Death!
That foul monster; The Lernaean Hydra of Greek legend.
From the marshes; The drought which preceded the plague in England, and may have predisposed to its reception, was followed by mist, in which the people fancied they saw the disease palpably advancing.
From Cathaya; The plague was heard of in Central Asia in 1333; it reached Constantinople in 1347.
The City of Flowers; Florence, where the ravages of the plague were immortalized in theDecameroneof Boccaccio.
The pest boil; Seems to have been the enlarged and discharging gland by which the specific blood-poison of the plague relieved itself. A ‘muddy glistening’ of the eye is noticed as one of the symptoms.
The common bed; More than 50,000 are said to have been buried on the site of the Charter House.
Albespyne; Hawthorn.
Half the giant oak; ‘Of the three or four millions who then formed the population of England, more than one-half were swept away’: (Green, B. IV: ch. iii).
1382
It is a dream, I know:—Yet on the pastOf this dear England if in thought we gaze,About her seems a constant sunshine cast;In summer calm we see and golden hazeThe little London of Plantagenet days;Quaint labyrinthine knot of toppling lanes,And thorny spires aflame with starlike vanes.
Our silver Thames all yet unspoil’d and clear;The many-buttress’d bridge that stems the tide;Black-timber’d wharves; arcaded walls, that rearLong, golden-crested roofs of civic pride:—While flaunting galliots by the gardens glide,And on Spring’s frolic air the May-song swells,Mix’d with the music of a thousand bells.
Beyond the bridge a mazy forest swims,Great spars and sails and flame-tongued flags on high,Wedged round the quay, a-throng with ruddy limbsAnd faces bronzed beneath another sky:And ’mid the press sits one with aspect shyAnd downcast eyes of watching, and, the while,The deep observance of an inward smile.
In hooded mantle gray he smiled and sate,With ink-horn at his knees and scroll and pen.And took the toll and register’d the freight,’Mid noise of clattering cranes and strife of men:And all that moved and spoke was in his ken,With lines and hues like Nature’s own design’dDeep in the magic mirror of his mind.
Thence oft, returning homeward, on the book,—His of Certaldo, or the bard whose laysWere lost to love in Scythia,—he would lookTill his fix’d eyes the dancing letters daze:Then forth to the near fields, and feed his gazeOn one fair flower in starry myriads spread,And in her graciousness be comforted:—
Then, joyous with a poet’s joy, to drawWith genial touch, and strokes of patient skill,The very image of each thing he saw:—He limn’d the man all round, for good or ill,Having both sighs and laughter at his will;Life as it went he grasp’d in vision true,Yet stood outside the scene his pencil drew.
—Man’s inner passions in their conscience-strife,The conflicts of the heart against the heart,The mother yearning o’er the infant’s life,The maiden wrong’d by wealth and lecherous art,The leper’s loathsome cell from man apart,War’s hell of lust and fire, the village-woe,The tinsel chivalry veiling shame below,—
Not his to draw,—to see, perhaps:—Our eyesHold bias with our humour:—His, to paintWith Nature’s freshness, what before him lies:The knave, the fool; the frolicsome, the quaint:His the broad jest, the laugh without restraint,The ready tears, the spirit lightly moved;Loving the world, and by the world beloved.
So forth fared Chaucer on his pilgrimageThrough England’s humours; in immortal songBodying the form and pressure of his age,Tints gay as pure, and delicate as strong;Still to the Tabard the blithe travellers throng,Seen in his mind so vividly, that weKnow them more clearly than the men we see.
Fair France, bright Italy, those numbers train’d;First in his pages Nature wedding ArtOf all our sons of song; yet he remain’dTrue English of the English at his heart:—He stood between two worlds, yet had no partIn that new order of the dawning dayWhich swept the masque of chivalry away.
O Poet of romance and courtly gleeAnd downcast eager glance that shuns the sky,Above, about, are signs thou canst not see,Portents in heaven and earth!—And one goes byWith other than thy prosperous, laughing eye,Framing the rough web of his rueful lays,The sorrow and the sin—with bitter gaze
As down the Strand he stalks, a sable shadeOf death, while, jingling like the elfin train,In silver samite knight and dame and maidRide to the tourney on the barrier’d plain;And he must bow in humble mute disdain,And that worst woe of baffled souls endure,To see the evil that they may not cure.
For on sweet Malvern Hill one morn he lay,Drowsed by the music of the constant stream:—Loud sang the cuckoo, cuckoo!—for the MayBreathed summer: summer floating like a dreamFrom the far fields of childhood, with a gleamOf alien freshness on her forehead fair,And Heaven itself within the common air.
Then on the mead in vision Langland sawA pilgrim-throng; not missal-bright as thoseWhom Chaucer’s hand surpass’d itself to draw,Gay as the lark, and brilliant as the rose;—But such as dungeon foul or spital shows,Or the serf’s fever-den, or field of fight,When festering sunbeams on the wounded smite.
No sainted shrine the motley wanderers seek,Pilgrims of life upon the field of scorn,Mocking and mock’d; with plague and hunger weak,And haggard faces bleach’d as those who mourn,And footsteps redden’d with the trodden thorn;Blind stretching hands that grope for truth in vain,Across a twilight demon-haunted plain.
A land whose children toil and rot like beasts,Robbers and robb’d by turns, the dreamer sees:—Land of poor-grinding lords and faithless priests,Where wisdom starves and folly thrones at ease’Mid lavishness and lusts and knaveries;Times out of joint, a universe of lies,Till Love divine appear in Ploughman’s guise
To burn the gilded tares and save the land,Risen from the grave and walking earth again:——And as he dream’d and kiss’d the nail-pierced hand,A hundred towers their Easter voices rainIn silver showers o’er hill and vale and plain,And the air throbb’d with sweetness, and he wokeAnd all the dream in light and music broke.
—He look’d around, and saw the world he leftWhen to that visionary realm of songHis spirit fled from bonds of flesh bereft;And on the vision he lay musing long,As o’er his soul rude minstrel-echoes throng,Old measures half-disused; and grasp’d his pen,And drew his cottage-Christ for homely men.
Thus Langland also took his pilgrimage;Rough lone knight-errant on uncourtly ways,And wrong and woe were charter’d on his page,With some horizon-glimpse of sweeter days.And on the land the message of his laysSmote like the strong North-wind, and cleansed the skyWith wholesome blast and bitter clarion-cry,
Summoning the people in the Ploughman’s name.—So fought his fight, and pass’d unknown away;Seeking no other praise, no sculptured fameNor laureate honours for his artless lay,Nor in the Minster laid with high array;—But where the May-thorn gleams, the grasses wave,And the wind sighs o’er a forgotten grave.
Langland, whom I have put here in contrast with Chaucer, is said to have lived between 1332 and 1400. HisVision of Piers the Plowman(who is partially identified with our blessed Saviour), with some added poems, forms an allegory on life in England, in Church and State, as it appeared to him during the dislocated and corrupt age which followed the superficial glories of Edward the Third’s earlier years.
Took the toll; Amongst other official employments, Chaucer was Comptroller of the Customs in the Port of London. See hisHouse of Fame; and the beautiful picture of his walks at dawning in the daisy-meadows: Prologue to theLegend of Good Women.
His of Certaldo, . . . in Scythia; Boccaccio:—and Ovid, who died in exile at Tomi:—to both of whom Chaucer is greatly indebted for the substance of his tales.
Picture-like; ‘It is chiefly as a comic poet, and a minute observer of manners and circumstances, that Chaucer excels. In serious and moral poetry he is frequently languid and diffuse, but he springs like Antaeus from the earth when his subject changes to coarse satire or merry narrative’ (Hallam,Mid. Ages: Ch. IX: Pt. iii).
The Tabard; Inn in Southwark whence the pilgrims to Canterbury start.
Down the Strand; It is thus that Langland describes himself and his feelings of dissatisfaction with the world.
That worst woe; Literature, even ancient literature, has no phrase more deeply felt and pathetic than the words which the Persian nobleman at the feast in Thebes before Plataea addressed to Thersander of Orchomenus:—[ Εχθιστη οδυνη των εν ανθρωποισι, πολλα φρονεοντα μηδενος κρατεειν]: (Herodotus, IX: xvi).
One morn he lay; TheVisionopens with a picture of the poet asleep on Malvern Hill: the last of the added poems closing as he wakes with the Easter chimes.
Old measures; Langland’s metre ‘is more uncouth than that of his predecessors’ (Hallam,Mid. Ag. Ch. IX: Pt. iii).
In the Minster; Chaucer was buried at the entrance of S. Benet’s Chapel in Westminster Abbey.
1424
So many stars in heaven,—Flowers in the meadow that shine;—This little one of Domremy,What special grace is thine?By the fairy beech and the fountainWhat but a child with thy brothers?Among the maids of the valleyArt more than one among others?
Chosen darling of Heaven,Yet at heart wast only a child!And for thee the wild things of NatureSot aside their nature wild:—The brown-eyed fawn of the forestCame silently glancing upon thee;The squirrel slipp’d down from the fir,And nestled his gentleness on thee.
Angelusbell andAve,Like voices they follow the maidAs she follows her sheep in the valleyFrom the dawn to the folding shade:—For the world that we cannot seeIs the world of her earthly seeing;From the air of the hills of GodShe draws her breath and her being.
Dances by beech tree and fountain,They know her no longer:—apartSitting with thought and with visionIn the silent shrine of the heart.And a voice henceforth and for everWithin, without her, is sighing‘Pity for France, O pity,France the beloved, the dying!’
—Now between church-wall and cottageWhat comes in the blinding light,—Rainbow plumes and armour,Face as the sun in his height . . .‘Angel that pierced the red dragon,Pity for France, O pity!Holy one, thou shalt save her,Vineyard and village and city!’
Poor sweet child of Domremy,In thine innocence only strong,Thou seest not the treason before thee,The gibe and the curse of the throng,—The furnace-pile in the marketThat licks out its flames to take thee;—For He who loves thee in heavenOn earth will not forsake thee!
Poor sweet maid of Domremy,In thine innocence secure,Heed not what men say of thee,The buffoon and his jest impure!Nor care if thy name, young martyr,Be the star of thy country’s story:—Mid the white-robed host of the heavensThou hast more than glory!
Angel that pierced; ‘Shehad pity, to use the phrase for ever on her lip,on the fair realm of France. She saw visions; St. Michael appeared to her in a flood of blinding light’: (Green, B. IV: ch. vi).
The buffoon; Voltaire.
Palm Sunday: 1461
Love,Who from the throne aboveCam’st to teach the law of love,Who Thy peaceful triumph hastLed o’er palms before Thee cast,E’en in highest heaven Thine eyesTurn from this day’s sacrifice!Slaughter whence no victor hostCan the palms of triumph boast;Blood on blood in rivers spilt,—English blood by English guilt!
From the gracious Minster-towersOf York the priests behold afarThe field of Towton shimmer like a starWith light of lance and helm; while both the powersMisnamed from the fair rose, with one fell blow,—In snow-dazed, blinding airMass’d on the burnside bare,—Each army, as one man, drove at the opposing foe.
Ne’er since then, and ne’er before,On England’s fields with English handsHave met for death such myriad myriad bands,Such wolf-like fury, and such greed of gore:—No natural kindly touch, no check of shame:And no such bestial rageBlots our long story’s page;Such lewd remorseless swords, such selfishness of aim
—Gracious Prince of Peace! Yet ThouMay’st look and bless with lenient eyesWhen trodden races ’gainst their tyrant rise,And the bent back nomore will deign to bow:Or when they crush some old anarchic feud,And found the throne anewOn Law to Freedom true,Cleansing the land they love from guilt of blood by blood.
Nor did Heaven unmoved beholdWhen Hellas, for her birthright freeDappling with gore the dark Saronian sea,The Persian wave back, past Abydos, roll’d:—But in this murderous match of chief ’gainst chiefNo chivalry had part,No impulse of the heart;Nor any sigh for Right triumphant breathes relief.
—Midday comes: and no release,No carnage-pause to blow on blow!While through the choir the palm-wreathed children go,And gay hosannas hail the Prince of Peace:—And evening falls, and from the Minster heightThey see the wan Ouse streamBlood-dark with slaughter gleam,And hear the demon-struggle shrieking through the night.
Love, o’er palms in triumph strownPassing, through the crowd alone,—Silent ’mid the exulting cry,—At Jerusalem to die:Thou, foreknowing all, didst knowHow Thy blood in vain would flow!How our madness oft would proveRecreant to the law of love:Wrongs that men from men endureDoing Thee to death once more!
‘On the 29th of March 1461 the two armies encountered one another at Towton Field, near Tadcaster. In the numbers engaged, as well as in the terrible obstinacy of the struggle, no such battle had been seen in England since the field of Senlac. The two armies together numbered nearly 120,000 men’: (Green, B. IV: ch. vi).
Saronian sea; Scene of the battle of Salamis,b.c.480.
They see the wan Ouse stream; Mr. R. Wilton, of Londesborough, has kindly pointed out to me thatWharfe, which from a brook received the bloodshed of Towton, does not discharge intoOuseuntil about ten miles south of York. Thegleamis, therefore, visionary: (1889).
THE ENGLISH RENAISSANCE
1491
As she who in some village-child unknown,With rustic grace and fantasy bedeck’dAnd in her simple loveliness alone,A sister finds;—and the long years’ neglectEffaces with warm love and nursing care,And takes her heart to heart,And in her treasured treasures bids her freely share,
And robes with radiance new, new strength and grace:—Hellas and England! thus it was with ye!Though distanced far by centuries and by space,Sisters in soul by Nature’s own decree.And if on Athens in her glory-dayThe younger might not look,Her living soul came back, and reinfused our clay.
—It was not wholly lost, that better light,Not in the darkest darkness of our day;From cell to cell, e’en through the Danish night,The torch ran on its firefly fitful way;And blazed anew with him who in the valeOf fair Aosta sawThe careless reaper-bands, and pass’d the heavens’ high pale,
And supp’d with God, in vision! Or with him,Earliest and greatest of his name, who gaveHis life to Nature, in her caverns dimTracking her soul, through poverty to the grave,And left his Great Work to the barbarous ageThat, in its folly-love,With wizard-fame defamed his and sweet Vergil’s page.
But systems have their day, and die, or changeTransform’d to new: Not now from cloister-cellAnd desk-bow’d priest, breathes out that impulse strange’Neath which the world of feudal Europe fell:—Throes of new birth, new life; while men despair’dOr triumph’d in their pride,As in their eyes the torch of learning fiercely flared.
For now the cry of Homer’s clarion firstAnd Plato’s golden tongue on English earsAnd souls aflame for that new doctrine burst,As Grocyn taught, when, after studious years,He came from Arno to the liberal wallsThat welcomed me in youth,And nursed in Grecian lore, long native to her halls.
O voice that spann’d the gulf of vanish’d years,Evoking shapes of old from night to light,Lo at thy spell a long-lost world appears,Where Rome and Hellas break upon our sight:—The Gothic gloom divides; a glory burnsBehind the clouds of Time,And all that wonder-past in beauty’s glow returns.
—For when the Northern floods that lash’d and curl’dAround the granite fragments of great RomeOutspread Colossus-like athwart the world,Foam’d down, and the new nations found their home,That earlier Europe, law and arts and arms,Fell into far-off shade,Or lay like some fair maid sleep-sunk in magic charms.
And as in lands once flourishing, now forlorn,And desolate capitals, the traveller seesWild tribes, in ruins from the ruins tornHutted like beasts ’mid marble palaces,Unknowing what those relics mean, and whoseThe goblets gold-enchasedAnd images of the gods the broken vaults disclose;
So in the Mid-age from the Past of ManThe Present was disparted; and they stoodAs on some island, sever’d from the planOf the great world, and the sea’s twilight floodAround them, and the monsters of the unknown;Blind fancy mix’d with fact;Faith in the things unseen sustaining them alone.
Age of extremes and contrasts!—where the goodWas more than human in its tendernessOf chivalry;—Beauty’s self the prize of blood,And evil raging round with wild excessOf more than brutal:—A disjointed time!Doubt with Hypocrisy pair’d,And purest Faith by folly, childlike, led to crime.
O Florentine, O Master, who aloneFrom thy loved Vergil till our Shakespeare cameDidst climb the long steps to the imperial throne,With what immortal dyes of angry flameHast blazon’d out the vileness of the day!What tints of perfect loveRosier than summer rose, etherealize thy lay!
—Now, as in some new land when night is deepThe pilgrim halts, nor knows what round him liesAnd wakes with dawn, and finds him on the steep,While plains beneath and unguess’d summits rise,And stately rivers widening to the sea,Cities of men and towers,Abash’d for very joy, and gazing fearfully;—
New worlds, new wisdom, a new birth of thingsOn Europe shine, and men know where they stand:The sea his western portal open flings,And bold Sebastian strikes the flowery land:Soon, heaven its secret yields; the golden sunEnthrones him in the midst,And round his throne man and the planets humbly run.
New learning all! yet fresh from fountains old,Hellenic inspiration, pure and deep:Strange treasures of Byzantine hoards unroll’d,And mouldering volumes from monastic sleep,Reclad with life by more than magic art:Till that old world renew’dHis youth, and in the past the present own’d its part.
—O vision that ye saw, and hardly saw,Ye who in Alfred’s path at Oxford trod,Or in our London train’d by studious lawThe little-ones of Christ to Him and God,Colet and Grocyn!—Though the world forgetThe labours of your love,In loving hearts your names live in their fragrance yet.
O vision that our happier eyes have seen!For not till peace came with ElizabethDid those fair maids of holy HippocreneCross the wan waves and draw a northern breath:Though some far-echoed strain on Tuscan lyresOur Chaucer caught, and sangLike her who sings ere dawn has lit his Eastern fires;—
Herald of that first splendour, when the skyWas topaz-clear with hope, and life-blood-redWith thoughts of mighty poets, lavishlyRound all the fifty years’ horizon shed:—Now in our glades the Aglaian Graces gleam,Around our fountains throng,And change Ilissus’ banks for Thames and Avon stream.
Daughters of Zeus and bright Eurynomé,She whose blue waters pave the Aegaean plain,Children of all surrounding sky and sea,A larger ocean claims you, not in vain!Ye who to Helicon from Thessalia wideWander’d when earth was young,Come from Libethrion, come; our love, our joy, our pride!
Ah! since your gray Pierian ilex-grovesFelt the despoiling tread of barbarous feet,This land, o’er all, the Delian leader loves;Here is your favourite home, your genuine seat:—In these green western isles renew the throneWhere Grace by Wisdom shines;—We welcome with full hearts, and claim you for our own!
If, looking at England, one point may be singled out in that long movement, generalized under the name of the Renaissance, as critical, it is the introduction of the Greek and Latin literature:—which has remained ever since conspicuously the most powerful and enlarging element, the most effectively educational, among all blanches of human study.
In the vale Of fair Aosta; See Anselm’s youthful vision of the gleaners and the palace of heaven (Green:History, B. II: ch. ii).
His Great Work; Roger Bacon’s so-namedOpus Majus: ‘At once,’ says Whewell, ‘the Encyclopaedia and the Novum Organum of the thirteenth century.’ Like Vergil, Bacon passed at one time for a magician.
That new doctrine; Grocyn was perhaps the first Englishman who studied Greek under Chalcondylas the Byzantine at Florence; certainly the first who lectured on Greek in England. This was in the Hall of Exeter College, Oxford, in 1491. To him Erasmus (1499) came to study the language.—See the brilliant account of the revival of learning in Green,Hist. B. V: ch. ii.
Master, who alone; SeeThe Poet’s Euthanasia.
Sebastian; Cabot, who, in 1497, sailed from Bristol, and reached Florida.
The golden sun; Refers to Copernicus; whose solar system was, however, not published till 1543.
The little-ones; Colet, Dean of S. Paul’s, founded the school in 1510.‘The bent of its founder’s mind was shown by the image of the Child Jesus over the master’s chair, with the wordsHear ye Himgraven beneath it’ (Green: B. V: ch. iv).
Fifty years; Between 1570 and 1620 lies almost all the glorious production of our so-called Elizabethan period.
From Libethrion;—Nymphae, noster amor, Libethrides! . . . What a music is there in the least little fragment of Vergil’s exquisite art!
PROTHALAMION
1503
Love who art above us all,Guard the treasure on her way,Flower of England, fair and tall,Maiden-wise and maiden-gay,As her northward path she goes;Daughter of the double rose.
Look with twofold grace on herWho from twofold root has grown,Flower of York and Lancaster,Now to grace another throne,Rose in Scotland’s garden set,—Britain’s only Margaret.
Exile-child from childhood’s bower,Pledge and bond of Henry’s faith,James, take home our English flower,Guard from touch of scorn and skaith;Bearing, in her slender hands,Palms of peace to hostile lands.
Safe by southern smiling shires,Many a city, many a shrine;By the newly kindled firesOf the black Northumbrian mine;Border clans in ambush set;Carry thou fair Margaret.
—Land of heath and hill and linn,Land of mountain-freedom wild,She in heart to thee is kin,Tudor’s daughter, Gwynedd’s child!In her lively lifeblood shareGwenllian and Anghárad fair.
East and West, from Dee to Yare,Now in equal bonds are wed:Peace her new-found flower shall wear,Rose that dapples white with red;North and South, dissever’d yet,Join in this fair Margaret!
Ocean round our Britain roll’d,Sapphire ring without a flaw,When wilt thou one realm enfold,One in freedom, one in law?Will that ancient feud be sped,Brothers’ blood by brothers shed?
—Land with freedom’s struggle sore,Land to whom thy children clingWith a lover’s love and more,Take the gentle gift we bring!Pearl in thy crown royal set;Scotland’s other Margaret.
Margaret Tudor, daughter to Henry VII, married in 1502 to James IV, and afterwards to Lord Angus, was thus great-grandmother on both sides to James I of England.
Gwynedd’s child; The Tudors intermarried with the old royal familyof North Wales, in whose pedigree occur the girl-names Gwenllian and Angharad.
Other Margaret; Sister to Edgar the Etheling, and wife to Malcolm. Her life and character are in contrast to the unhappy and unsatisfactory career of Margaret Tudor, whom I have here only treated as at once representing and uniting England, Scotland, and Wales.
July 6: 1535
The midnight moaning streamDraws down its glassy surface through the bridgeThat o’er the current casts a tower’d ridge,Dark sky-line forms fantastic as a dream;And cresset watch-lights on the bridge-gate gleam,Where ’neath the star-lit dome gaunt masts upbuoyNo flag of festive joy,But blanching spectral heads;—their heads, who diedVictims to tyrant-pride,Martyrs of Faith and Freedom in the dayOf shame and flame and brutal selfish sway.
And one in black arrayVeiling her Rizpah-misery, to the gateComes, and with gold and moving speech sedateBuys down the thing aloft, and bears awaySnatch’d from the withering wind and ravens’ prey:And as a mother’s eyes, joy-soften’d, shedTears o’er her young child’s head,Golden and sweet, from evil saved; so sheO’er this, sad-smilingly,Mangled and gray, unwarm’d by human breath,Clasping death’s relic with love passing death.
So clasping now! and soWhen death clasps her in turn! e’en in the graveNursing the precious head she could not save,Tho’ through each drop her life-blood yearn’d to flowIf but for him she might to scaffold go:—And O! as from that Hall, with innocent goreSacred from roof to floor,To that grim other place of blood he went—What cry of agony rentThe twilight,—cry as of an Angel’s pain,—My father, O my father! . . . and in vain!
Then, as on those who lieCast out from bliss, the days of joy come back,And all the soul with wormwood sweetness rack,So in that trance of dreadful ecstasyThe vision of her girlhood glinted by:—And how the father through their garden stray’d,And, child with children, play’d,And teased the rabbit-hutch, and fed the doveBefore him from aboveAlighting,—in his visitation sweet,Led on by little hands, and eager feet.
Hence among those he stands,Elect ones, ever in whose ears the wordHe that offends these little ones. . . is heard,With love and kisses smiling-out commands,And all the tender hearts within his hands;Seeing, in every child that goes, a flowerFrom Eden’s nursery bower,A little stray from Heaven, for reverence hereSent down, and comfort dear:All care well paid-for by one pure caress,And life made happy in their happiness.
He too, in deeper loreThan woman’s in those early days, or yet,—Train’d step by step his youthful Margaret;The wonders of that amaranthine storeWhich Hellas and Hesperia evermoreLavish, to strengthen and refine the race:—For, in his large embrace,The light of faith with that new light combinedTo purify the mind:—A crystal soul, a heart without disguise,All wisdom’s lover, and through love, all-wise.
—O face she ne’er will see,—Gray eyes, and careless hair, and mobile lipsFrom which the shaft of kindly satire slipsHealing its wound with human sympathy;The heart-deep smile; the tear-concealing glee!O well-known furrows of the reverend brow!Familiar voice, that nowShe will not hear nor answer any more,—Till on the better shoreWhere love completes the love in life begun,And smooths and knits our ravell’d skein in one!
Blest soul, who through life’s courseDidst keep the young child’s heart unstain’d and whole,To find again the cradle at the goal,Like some fair stream returning to its source;—Ill fall’n on days of falsehood, greed, and force!Base days, that win the plaudits of the base,Writ to their own disgrace,With casuist sneer o’erglossing works of blood,Miscalling evil, good;Before some despot-hero falsely namedGrovelling in shameful worship unashamed.
—But they of the great raceLook equably, not caring much, on foeAnd fame and misesteem of man below;And with forgiving radiance on their face,And eyes that aim beyond the bourn of space,Seeing the invisible, glory-clad, go upAnd drink the absinthine cup,Fill’d nectar-deep by the dear love of HimSlain at JerusalemTo free them from a tyrant worse than this,Changing brief anguish for the heart of bliss.
Envoy
—O moaning stream of Time,Heavy with hate and sin and wrong and woeAs ocean-ward dost go,Thou also hast thy treasures!—Life, sublimeIn its own sweet simplicity:—life for love:Heroic martyr-death:—Man sees them not: but they are seen above.
One in black array; Sir T. More’s daughter, Margaret Roper.
That Hall; Westminster, where More was tried:That other place; Tower Hill.
The vision of her girlhood; More taught his own children, and was like a child with them. He ‘would take grave scholars and statesmen into the garden to see his girls’ rabbit-hutches. . . .I have given you kisses enough, he wrote to his little ones,but stripes hardly ever’: (Green, B. V: ch. ii).
The wonders; See first note toGrocyn at Oxford.
In his large embrace; More may be said to have represented the highest aim and effort of the ‘new learning’ in England. He is the flower of our Renaissance in genius, wisdom, and beauty of nature. ‘When ever,’ says Erasmus in a famous passage, ‘did Nature mould a character more gentle, endearing, and happy, than Thomas More’s?’
1539-1862
Blest hour, as on green happy slopes I lie,Gray walls around and high,While long-ranged arches lessen on the view,And one high gracious curveOf shaftless window frames the limpid blue.
—God’s altar erst, where wind-set rowan nowWaves its green-finger’d bough,And the brown tiny creeper mounts the boleWith curious eye alert,And beak that tries each insect-haunted hole,
And lives her gentle life from nest to nest,And dies undispossess’d:Whilst all the air is quick with noise of birdsWhere once the chant went up;Now musical with a song more sweet than words.
Sky-roof’d and bare and deep in dewy sod,Still ’tis the house of God!Beauty by desolation unsubdued:—And all the past is here,Thronging with thought this holy solitude.
I see the taper-stars, the altars gay;And those who crouch and pray;The white-robed crowd in close monastic stole,Who hither fled the worldTo find the world again within the soul.
Yet here the pang of Love’s defeat, the prideOf life unsatisfied,Might win repose or anodyne; here the weak,Armour’d against themselves,Exchange true guiding for obedience meek.
Through day, through night, here, in the fragrant air,Their hours are struck by prayer;Freed from the bonds of freedom, the distressOf choice, on life’s storm-seaThey gaze unharm’d, and know their happiness.
Till o’er this rock of refuge, deem’d secure,—This palace of the poor,Ascetic luxury, wealth too frankly shown,—The royal robber sweptHis lustful eye, and seized the prey his own.
—Ah, calm of Nature! Now thou hold’st againThy sweet and silent reign!And, as our feverish years their orbit roll,This pure and cloister’d peaceIn its old healing virtue bathes the soul.
1539 is the year when the greater monasteries, amongst which Fountains in Yorkshire held a prominent place, were confiscated and ruined by Henry VIII.
The tiny creeper; Certhia Familiaris; the smallest of our birds after the wren. It belongs to a class nearly related to the woodpecker.
White-robed; The colour of the Cistercian order, to which Fountains belonged.
1553-4
Two ships upon the steel-blue Arctic seasWhen day was long and night itself was day,Forged heavily before the South West breezeAs to the steadfast star they curved their way;Two specks of man, two only signs of life,Where with all breathing things white Death keeps endless strife.
The Northern Cape is sunk: and to the crewThis zone of sea, with ice-floes wedged and rough,Domed by its own pure height of tender blue,Seems like a world from the great world cut off:While, round the horizon clasp’d, a ring of white,Snow-blink from snows unseen, walls them with angry light.
Now that long day compact of many daysBreaks up and wanes; and equal night beholdsTheir hapless driftage past uncharted bays,And in her chilling, killing arms enfolds:While the near stars a thousand arrowy dartsBend from their diamond eyes, as the low sun departs.
Or the weird Northern Dawn in idle playMocks their sad souls, now trickling down the skyIn many-quivering lines of golden spray,Then blazing out, an Iris-arch on high,With fiery lances fill’d and feathery bars,And sheeny veils that hide or half-reveal the stars.
A silent spectacle! Yet sounds, ’tis said,On their forlornness broke; a hissing cryOf mockery and wild laugh, as, overhead,Those blight fantastic squadrons flaunted by:—And that false dawn, long nickering, died away,And the Sun came not forth, and Heaven withheld the day.
O King Hyperion, o’er the Delphic daleReigning meanwhile in glory, Ocean knowThine absence, and outstretch’d an icy veil,A marble pavement, o’er his waters blue;Past the Varangian fiord and Zembla hoar,And from Petsora north to dark Arzina’s shore:—
An iron ridge o’erhung with toppling snowAnd giant beards of icicled cascade:—Where, frost-imprison’d as the long mouths go,TheGood Hopeand her mate-ship lay embay’d;And those brave crews knew that all hope was gone;England be seen no more; no more the living sun.
A store that daily lessens ’neath their eyes;A little dole of light and fire and food:—While Night upon them like a vampyre liesBleaching the frame and thinning out the blood;And through the ships the frost-bit timbers groan,And the Guloine prowls round, with dull heart-curdling moan.
Then sometimes on the soul, far off, how far!Came back the shouting crowds, the cannon-roar,The latticed palace glittering like a star,The buoyant Thames, the green, sweet English shore,The heartful prayers, the fireside blaze and bliss,The little faces bright, and woman’s last, last kiss.
—O yet, for all their misery, happy souls!Happy in faith and love and fortitude:—For you, one thought of England dear controlsAll shrinking of the flesh at death so rude!Though long at rest in that far Arctic grave,True sailor hero hearts, van of our bravest brave.
And one by one the North King’s searching lanceTouch’d, and they stiffen’d at their task, and died;And their stout leader glanced a farewell glance;‘God is as close by sea as land,’ he cried,‘In His own light not nearer than this gloom,’—And look’d as one who o’er the mountains sees his home.
Home!—happy sound of vanish’d happiness!—But when the unwilling sun crept up again,And loosed the sea from winter and duresse,The seal-wrapt race that roams the Lapland mainSaw in Arzina, wondering, fearing more,The tatter’d ships, in snows entomb’d and vaulted o’er:
And clomb the decks, and found the gallant crew,As forms congeal’d to stone, where frozen fateTook each man in his turn, and gently slew:—Nor knew the heroic chieftain, as he sate,English through every fibre, in his place,The smile of duty done upon the steadfast face.
Sir Hugh Willoughby, in theBona Esperanza, with two other vessels, sailed May 10, 1553, saluting the palace of Greenwich is they passed. By September 18 he, with one consort, reached the harbour of Arzina, where all perished early in 1554. His will, dated in January of that year, was found when the ships were discovered by the Russians soon after.
Willoughby has been taken here as the representative of the great age of British naval adventure and exploration.
Arzinais placed near the western headland of the White Sea, east of the Waranger Fiord, and west of Nova Zembla and the mouth of the Petchora.
May 16: 1568
Blow from the North, thou bitter North wind,Blow over the western bay,Where Nith and Eden and Esk run inAnd fight with the salt sea spray,And the sun shines high through the sailing skyIn the freshness of blue Mid-may.
Blow North-North-West, and hollow the sailsOf a Queen who slips over the seaAs a hare from the hounds; and her covert afar;And now she can only flee;And death before and the sisterly shoreThat smiles perfidiously.
O Mid-may freshness about her cheekAnd piercing her poor attire,The sting of defeat thou canst not allay,The fever of heart and the fire,The death-despair for the days that were,And famine of vain desire!
—On Holyrood stairs an iron-heel’d clankCame up in the gloaming hour:And iron fingers have bursten the barOf the palace innermost bower:And fiend-like on her the Douglas and KerAnd spectral Ruthven glower.
She hears the shriek as the Morton hordeHurry the victim beneath;And she feels their dead man’s grasp on her skirtIn the frenzy-terror of death;And the dastard King at her bosom clingWith a serpent’s poison-breath.
O fair girl Queen, well weep for the friendTo his faith too faithful and thee;For a brother’s hypocrite tears; for the flightTo the Castle set by the sea;—Where thy father’s tomb lay and gaped in the gloom’Twere better for thee to be!
O better at rest where the crooning doveMay sing requiem o’er thy bed,Sweet Robin aflame with love’s sign on his breastWith quick light footstep tread;While over the sod the Birds of GodTheir guardian feathers outspread!
Too womanly sweet, too womanly frail,Alone in thy faith and thy need;In the homeless home, in the poisonous airOf spite and libel and greed;Mid perfidy’s net thy pathway is set,And thy feet in the pitfalls bleed.
—O lightnings, not lightnings of Heaven, that flareThrough the desolate House in the Field!Craft that the Fiend had envied in vain;Till the terrible Day unreveal’d,—Till the Angels rejoice at the Verdict-voice,And Mary’s pardon is seal’d!
As a bird from the mesh of the fowler freedWith wild wing shatters the air,From shelter to shelter, betray’d, she flees,Or lured to some treacherous lair,And the vulture-cry of the enemy nigh,And the heavens dark with despair!
Bright lily of France, by the storm stricken low,A sunbeam thou seest through the shadeWhere Order and Peace are throned ’neath the smileOf a royal sisterly Maid:—For hope in the breast of the girl has her nest,Ever trusting, and ever betray’d.
Brave womanly heart that, beholding the shore,Beholds her own grave unaware,—Though the days to come their shame should unveilYet onward she still would dare!Though the meadows smile with statesmanly guile,And the cuckoo’s call is a snare!
Turn aside, O Queen, from the cruel land,From the greedy shore turn away;From shame upon shame:—But most shame for thoseOn their passionate captive who playWith a subtle net, hope enwoven with threat,Hung out to tempt her astray!
Poor scape-goat of crimes, where,—her part what it may,—So tortured, so hunted to die,Foul age of deceit and of hate,—on her headLeast stains of gore-guiltiness lie;To the hearts of the just her blood from the dustNot in vain for mercy will cry.
Poor scape-goat of nations and faiths in their strifeSo cruel,—and thou so fair!Poor girl!—so, best, in her misery named,—Discrown’d of two kingdoms, and bare;Not first nor last on this one was castThe burden that others should share.
—When the race is convened at the great assizeAnd the last long trumpet-call,If Woman ’gainst Man, in her just appeal,At the feet of the Judge should fall,O the cause were secure;—the sentence sure!—But she will forgive him all!—
O keen heart-hunger for days that were;Last look at a vanishing shore!In two short words all bitterness summ’d,ThatHas beenandNevermore!Nor with one caress will Mary bless,Nor look on the babe she bore!
Blow, bitter wind, with a cry of death,Blow over the western bay:The sunshine is gone from the desolate girl,And before is the doomster-day,And the saw-dust red with the heart’s-blood shedIn the shambles of Fotheringay.
Mary of Scotland is one of the five or six figures in our history who rouse an undying personal interest. Volumes have been and will be written on her:—yet if we put aside the distorting mists of national and political and theological partisanship, the common laws of human nature will give an easy clue to her conduct and that of her enemies.
Her flight from Scotland, as the turning-point in Mary’s unhappy and pathetic career, has been here chosen for the moment whence to survey it.
On Holyrood stairs; Riccio was murdered on March 9, 1566. Mary’s exclamation when she heard of his death next day,No more tears;I will think upon a revenge, is the sufficient explanation,—in a great degree should be the sufficient justification, with those who still hold her an accomplice in the death of Darnley and the marriage with Bothwell,—(considering the then lawless state of Scotland, the complicity of the leading nobles, the hopelessness of justice)—of her later conduct whilst Queen.
The friend; In Riccio’s murder the main determinant was his efficiency in aiding Mary towards a Roman Catholic reaction, which might have deprived a large body of powerful nobles of the church lands. The death of Riccio (Mary’s most faithful friend) prevented this: the death of Darnley became necessary to secure the position gained.
A brother’s hypocrite tears; Murray, in whose interest Riccio was murdered, and whose privity to the murder (as afterwards to that of Darnley) is reasonably, though indirectly, proved, affected to shed tears on seeing his sister. Next day she learned the details of the plot, and her half-brother’s share in it.
The flight; Mary then fled by a secret passage from Holyrood Palacethrough the Abbey Church, the royal tombs which had been broken open by the revolutionary mob of 1559.
The Castle; Dunbar.
Till the terrible Day unreveal’d; SeeAppendixA.
October 2: 1586
1
Where Guelderland outspreadsHer green wide water-meadsLaced by the silver of the parted Rhine;Where round the horizon lowThe waving millsails go,And poplar avenues stretch their pillar’d line;That morn a clinging mist uncurl’dIts folds o’er South-Fen town, and blotted out the world.
2
There, as the gray dawn broke,Cloked by that ghost-white cloke,The fifty knights of England sat in steel;Each man all ear, for eyeCould not his nearest spy;And in the mirk’s dim hiding heart they feel,—Feel more than hear,—the signal soundOf tramp and hoof and wheel, and guns that bruise the ground.
3
—Sudden, the mist gathers up like a curtain, the theatre clear;Stage of unequal conflict, and triumph purchased too dear!Half our boot treasures of gallanthood there, with axe and with glaive,One against ten,—what of that?—We are ready for glory or grave!There, Spain and her thousands nearing, with lightning-tongued weapons of war;—Ebro’s swarthy sons, and the bands from Epirus afar;Crescia, Gonzaga, del Vasto,—world-famous names of affright,Veterans of iron and blood, insatiate engines of fight:—But ours were Norris and Essex and Stanley and Willoughby grim,And the waning Dudley star, and the star that will never be dim,Star of Philip the peerless,—and now at height of his noon,Astrophel!—not for thyself but for England extinguish’d too soon!
4
Red walls of Zutphen behind; before them, Spain in her might:—O! ’tis not war, but a game of heroic boyish delight!For on, like a bolt-head of steel, go the fifty, dividing their way,Through and over the brown mail-shirts,—Farnese’s choicest array;Over and through, and the curtel-axe flashes, the plumes in their prideSink like the larch to the hewer, a death-mown avenue wide:While the foe in his stubbornness flanks them and bars them, with merciless aimShooting from musket and saker a scornful death-tongue of flame.As in an autumn afar, the Six Hundred in Chersonese hew’dTheir road through a host, for their England and honour’s sake wasting their blood,Foolishness wiser than wisdom!—So these, since Azincourt morn,First showing the world the calm open-eyed rashness of Englishmen born!
5
Foes ere the cloud went up, black Norris and Stanley in onePledge iron hands and kiss swords, each his mate’s, in the face of the sun,Warm with the generous wine of the battle; and Willoughby’s mightTo the turf bore Crescia, and lifted again,—knight honouring knight;All in the hurry and turmoil:—where North, half-booted and rough,Launch’d on the struggle, and Sidney struck onward, his cuisses thrown off,Rash over-courage of poet and youth!—while the memories, howAt the joust long syne She look’d on, as he triumph’d, were hot on his brow,‘Stella! mine own, my own star!’—and he sigh’d:—and towards him a flameShot its red signal; a shriek!—and the viewless messenger came;Found the unguarded gap, the approach left bare to the prey,Where through the limb to the life the death-stroke shatter’d a way.
6
—Astrophel! England’s pride!O stroke that, when he died,Smote through the realm,—our best, our fairest ta’en!For now the wound accurstLights up death’s fury-thirst;—Yet the allaying cup, in all that pain,Untouch’d, untasted he gives o’erTo one who lay, and watch’d with eyes that craved it more:—
7
‘Take it,’ he said, ‘’tis thine;Thy need is more than mine’;—And smiled as one who looks through death to life:—Then pass’d, true heart and brave,Leal from birth to grave:—For that curse-laden roar of mortal strife,With God’s own peace ineffable fill’d,—In that eternal Love all earthly passion still’d.
In 1585 Elizabeth, who was then aiding the United Provinces in their resistance to Spain, sent Sir Philip Sidney (born 1554) as governor of the fortress of Flushing in Zealand. The Earl of Leicester, chosen by the Queen’s unhappy partiality to command the English force, named Sidney (his nephew) General of the horse. He marched thence to Zutphen in Guelderland, a town besieged by the Spaniards, in hopes of destroying a strong reinforcement which they were bringing in aid of the besiegers. The details of the rash and heroic charge which followed may be read in Motley’sHistory of the United Netherlands, ch. ix.
St. 1Guelderland; in this province the Rhine divides before entering the sea: ‘gliding through a vast plain.’—South-Fen; Zutphen, on the Yssel (Rhine).
St. 3The bands from Epirus; Crescia, the Epirote chief, commanded a body of Albanian cavalry.—The waning Dudley star; Leicester, who was near the end of his miserable career.—Astrophel; Sidney celebrated his love for Penelope Devereux, Lady Rich, in the series of Sonnets and Lyrics namedAstrophel and Stella:—posthumously published in 1591.—After, or with Shakespeare’s Sonnets, this series seems to me to offer the most powerful picture of the passion of love in the whole range of our poetry.
St. 4Saker; early name for field-piece.—The Six Hundred; The Crimea in ancient days was namedChersonesus Taurica.
St. 5Black Norris; had been at variance with Sir W. Stanley before the engagement. Morris was one of twelve gallant brothers, whosecomplexion followed that of their mother, named by Elizabeth ‘her own crow.’—North; was lying bedrid from a wound in the leg, but could not resist volunteering at Zutphen, and rode up ‘with one boot on and one boot off.’—Cuisses;
I saw young Harry, with his beaver on,His cuisses on his thighs: (Henry IV, Part I: A. iv: S. i):—
I saw young Harry, with his beaver on,His cuisses on his thighs: (Henry IV, Part I: A. iv: S. i):—
Sidney flung off his ‘in a fit of chivalrous extravagance.’—At the joust; In Sonnets 41 and 53 ofAstrophel and StellaSidney describes how the sudden sight of his lady-love dazzled him as he rode in certain tournaments. In Son. 69 he cries:
I, I, O, I, may say that she is mine.
I, I, O, I, may say that she is mine.