September: 1588
Let them come, come never so proudly,O’er the green waves as giants ride;Silver clarions menacing loudly,‘All the Spains’ on their banners wide;High on deck of the gilded galleysOur light sailers they scorn below:—We will scatter them, plague, and shatter them,Till their flag hauls down to their foe!For our oath we swearBy the name we bear,By England’s Queen, and England free and fair,—Her’s ever and her’s still, come life, come death:—God save Elizabeth!
Sidonía, Recalde, and LeyvaWatch from their Castles in swarthy scorn,Lords and Princes by Philip’s favour;—We by birthright are noble born!Freemen born of the blood of freemen,Sons of Crecy and Flodden are we!We shall sunder them, fire, and plunder them,—English boats on an English sea!And our oath we swear,By the name we bear,By England’s Queen, and England free and fair,—Her’s ever and her’s still, come life, come death!God save Elizabeth!
Drake and Frobisher, Hawkins, and Howard,Raleigh, Cavendish, Cecil, and Brooke,Hang like wasps by the flagships tower’d,Sting their way through the thrice-piled oak:—Let them range their seven-mile crescent,Giant galleons, canvas wide!Ours will harry them, board, and carry them,Plucking the plumes of the Spanish pride.For our oath we swearBy the name we bear,By England’s Queen, and England free and fair,—Her’s ever and her’s still, come life, come death!God save Elizabeth!
—Hath God risen in wrath and scatter’d?Have His tempests smote them in scorn?Past the Orcadés, dumb and tatter’d,’Mong sea-beasts do they drift forlorn?We were as lions hungry for battle;God has made our battle His own!God has scatter’d them, sunk, and shatter’d them:Give the glory to Him alone!While our oath we swear,By the name we bear,By England’s Queen, and England free and fair,—Her’s ever and her’s still, come life, come death!God save Elizabeth!
1630-1633
Sick with the strife of tongues, the blustering hateOf frantic Party raving o’er the realm,Sonorous insincerities of debate,And jealous factions snatching at the helm,And Out o’er-bidding In with graceless strife,Selling the State for votes:—O happy fields,I cried, where Herbert, by the world misprized,Found in his day the lifeThat no unrest or disappointment yields,Vergilian vision here best realized!
His memory is Peace: and peace is here;—The eternal lullaby of the level brook,With bird-like chirpings mingled, glassy-clear;The narrow pathway to the yew-clipp’d nook;Trim lawn, familiar to the pensive feet;The long gray walls he raised:—A household nestWhere Hope and firm-eyed Faith and heavenly LoveMade human love more sweet;While,—earth’s rare visitant from the choirs above,—Urania’s holy steps the cottage blest.
Peace there:—and peace upon the house of God,The little road-side church that room-like standsCrouching entrench’d in slopes of daisy sod,And duly deck’d by Herbert-honouring hands:—Cell of detachment! Shrine to which the heartWithdraws, and all the roar of life is still;Then sinks into herself, and finds a shrineWithin the shrine apart:Alone with God, as on the Arabian hillMan knelt in vision to the All-divine!
—Thrice happy they,—and know their happiness,—Who read the soul’s star-orbit Heaven-ward clear;Not roving comet-like through doubt and guess,But ’neath their feet tread nescient pride and fear;Scan the unseen with sober certainty,God’s hill above Himalah;—Love green earthWith deeper, truer love, because the blueOf Heaven around they see;—Who in the death-gasp hail man’s second birth,And yield their loved ones with a brief adieu!
—Thee, too, esteem I happy in thy death,Poet! while yet peace was, and thou might’st liveUnvex’d in thy sweet reasonable faith,The gracious creed that knows how to forgive:—Not narrowing God to self,—the common baneOf sects, each man his own small oracle;Not losing innerness in external rite;A worship pure and plain,Yet liberal to man’s heaven-imbreathed delightIn all that sound can hint, or beauty tell.
A golden moderation!—which the wiseThen highest rate, when fury-factions roar,And folly’s choicest fools the most despise:——O happy Poet! laid in peace beforeRival intolerants each ’gainst other flamed,And flames were slaked in blood, and all the graceOf life before that sad illiterate gloomPuritan, fled ashamed:While, as the red moon lifts her turbid face,Titanic features on the horizon loom!
George Herbert’s brief career as a parish priest was passed at Bemerton, a pretty village near Salisbury in the vale of the Avon. His parsonage, with its garden running down to the stream, and the little church across the road in which he lies buried, remain comparatively unchanged (March 26, 1880) since he lived and mused and wrote his Poems within these precincts. The justly-famousTemplewas published shortly after his death by his friend Nicholas Ferrar.
Arabian hill; Mount Sinai.
Titanic features; SeeA Churchyard in Oxfordshire, st. iii.
November 5: 1640
Harsh words have been utter’d and written on her, Henrietta the Queen:She was young in a difficult part, on a cruel and difficult scene:—Was it strange she should fail? that the King overmuch should bow down to her will?—So of old with the women, God bless them!—it was, so will ever be still!Rash in counsel and rash in courage, she aided and marr’dThe shifting tides of the fight, the star of the Stuarts ill-starr’d.In her the false Florentine blood,—in him the bad strain of the Guise;Suspicion against her and hate, all that malice can forge and devise;—As a bird by the fowlers o’ernetted, she shuffles and changes her ground;No wile unlawful in war, and the foe unscrupulous round!Woman-like overbelieving Herself and the Cause and the Man,Fights with two-edged intrigue, suicidal, plan upon plan;Till the law of this world had its way, and she fled,—like a frigate unsail’d,Unmasted, unflagg’d,—to her land; and the strength of the stronger prevail’d.
But it was not thus, not thus, in the years of thy springtide, O Queen,When thy children came in their beauty, and all their future unseen:When the kingdom had wealth and peace, one smile o’er the face of the land:England, too happy, if thou could’st thy happiness understand!As those over Etna who slumber, and under them rankles the fire.At her side was the gallant King, her first-love, her girlhood’s desire,And around her, best jewels and dearest to brighten the steps of the throne,Three golden heads, three fair little maids, in their nursery shone.‘As the mother, so be the daughters,’ they say:—nor could mother wish moreFor her own, than men saw in the Queen’s, ere the rosebud-dawning was o’er,Heart-wise and head-wise, a joy to behold, as they knelt for her kiss,—Best crown of a woman’s life, her true vocation and bliss!—But the flowers were pale and frail, and the mother watch’d them with dread,As the sunbeams play’d round the room on each gay, glistening head.
Anne in that garden of childhood grew nearest Elizabeth: sheTenderly tended and loved her, a babe with a babe on her knee:Slight and white from the cradle was Anne; a floweret bornRathe, out of season, a rose that peep’d out when the hedge was in thorn.‘Why should it be so with us?’ thought Elizabeth oft; for in herThe soul ’gainst the body protesting, was but more keenly astir:‘As saplings stunted by forest around o’ershading, we two:What work for our life, my mother,’ she said, ‘is left us to do?Or is’t from the evil to come, the days without pleasure, that GodIn mercy would spare us, over our childhood outstretching the rod?’—So she, from her innocent heart; in all things seeing the bestWith the wholesome spirit of childhood; to God submitting the rest:Not seeing the desolate years, the dungeon of Carisbrook drear;Eyes dry-glazed with fever, and none to lend even a tear!Now, all her heart to the little one goes; for, day upon day,As a rosebud in canker, she pales and pines, and the cough has its way.And the gardens of Richmond on Thames, the fine blythe air of the valeStay not the waning pulse, and the masters of science fail.Then the little footsteps are faint, and a child may take her with ease;As the flowers a babe flings down she is spread on Elizabeth’s knees,Slipping back to the cradle-life, in her wasting weakness and pain:And the sister prays and smiles and watches the sister in vain.
So she watch’d by the bed all night, and the lights were yellow and low,And a cold blue blink shimmer’d up from the park that was sheeted in snow:And the frost of the passing hour, when souls from the body divide,The Sarsar-wind of the dawn, crept into the palace, and sigh’d.And the child just turn’d her head towards Elizabeth there as she lay,And her little hands came together in haste, as though she would pray;And the words wrestled in her for speech that the fever-dry mouth cannot frame,And the strife of the soul on the delicate brow was written in flame:And Elizabeth call’d ‘O Father, why does she look at me so?Will it soon be better for Anne? her face is all in a glow’:—But with womanly speed and heed is the mother beside her, and slipsHer arm ’neath the failing head, and moistens the rose of the lips,Pale and sweet as the wild rose of June, and whispers to prayTo the Father in heaven, ‘the one she likes best, my baby, to say’:And the soul hover’d yet o’er the lips, as a dove when her pinions are spread,And the light of the after-life came again in her eyes, and she said;‘For my long prayer it is not time; for my short one I think I have breath;Lighten mine eyes, O Lord, that I sleep not the sleep of death.’—O! into life, fair child, as she pray’d, her innocence slept!‘It is better for her,’ they said:—and knelt, and kiss’d her, and wept.
In her; Henrietta’s mother was by birth Mary de’ Medici; the great-grandmother of Charles was Mary of Guise.
‘With Charles I,’ says Ranke, ‘nothing was more seductive than secrecy. The contradictions in his conduct entangled him in embarrassments, in which his declarations, if always true in the sense he privately gave them, were only a hair’s-breadth removed from actual, and even from intentional, untruth.’—Whether traceable to descent, or to the evil influence of Buckingham and the intriguing atmosphere of the Spanish marriage-negotiations, this defect in political honesty is, unquestionably, the one serious blot on the character of Charles I.—Yet, whilst noting it, candid students will regretfully confess that the career of Elizabeth and her counsellors is defaced by shades of bad faith, darker and more numerous.
When the kingdom; See Clarendon’s description of England during this period, ‘enjoying the greatest calm and the fullest measure of felicity that any people in any age for so long time together have been blessed with.’
Three golden heads; Mary, the second child of Charles and Henrietta, was born Nov. 4, 1631: Elizabeth, Dec. 28, 1635: Anne, Mar. 17, 1637. The last two were feeble from infancy. Consumption soon showed itself in Anne, and her short life, passed at Richmond, closed in November, 1640. For her last words, we are indebted to Fuller, who adds: ‘This done, the little lamb gave up the ghost.’
The affection and care of the royal parents is well attested. ‘Their arrival,’ when visiting the nursery, ‘was the signal of a general rejoicing.’
In the latter portion of this piece I have ventured, it will be seen, on an ideal treatment. The main facts, and the words of the dear child, are historical:—for the details I appeal to any mother who has suffered similar loss whether they could have been much otherwise.
Not seeing; See theCaptive Child.
The frost; It is noticed that death, theSarsar-windof Southey’sThalaba, often occurs at the turn between night and day, when the atmosphere is wont to be at the coldest.
June 18: 1643
Flags crape-smother’d and arms reversed,With one sad volley lay him to rest:Lay him to rest where he may not seeThis England he loved like a lover accursedBy lawlessness masking as liberty,By the despot in Freedom’s panoply drest:—Bury him, ere he be made duplicity’s tool and slave,Where he cannot see the land that he could not save!Bury him, bury him, bury himWith his face downward!
Chalgrove! Name of patriot pain!O’er thy fresh fields that summer pass’dThe brand of war’s red furnace blast,Till heaven’s soft tears wash’d out the blackening stain;—Wash’d out and wept;—But could not so restoreEngland’s gallant son:Ere the fray was doneThe stately head bow’d down; shatter’d; his warfare o’er.
Bending to the saddle-bowWith leaden arm that idle hangs,Faint with the lancing torture-pangs,He drops the rein; he lets the battle go:—There, where the wife of his first love he woo’dTurning for retreat;—Memories bitter-sweetThrough death’s fast-rising mist in youth’s own light renew’d.
Then, as those who drown, perchance,And all their years, a waking dream,Flash pictured by in lightning gleam,His childhood home appears, the mother’s glance,The hearth-side smile; the fragrance of the fields:—Now, war’s iron knellWakes the hounds of hell,Whilst o’er the realm her scourge the rushing Fury wields!
Doth he now the day lamentWhen those who stemm’d despotic mightO’erstrode the bounds of law and right,And through the land the torch of ruin sent?Or that great rival statesman as he stoodLion-faced and grim,Hath he sight of him,Strafford—the meteor-axe—the fateful Hill of Blood?
—Heroes both! by passion led,In days perplex’d ’tween new and old,Each at his will the realm to mould;This, basing sovereignty on the single head,This, on the many voices of the Hall:—Each for his own creedPrompt to die at need:His side of England’s shield each saw, and took for all.
Heroes both! For Order oneAnd one for Freedom dying!—WeMay judge more justly both, than yeCould, each, his brother, ere the strife was done!—O Goddess of that even scale and weight,In whose awful eyesTruest mercy lies,This hero-dirge to thee I vow and dedicate!
—Slanting now,—the foe is by,—Through Hazeley mead the warrior goes,And hardly fords the brook that flowsBearing to Thame its cool, sweet, summer-cry.Here take thy rest; here bind the broken heart!By death’s mercy-doomHid from ills to come,Great soul, and greatly vex’d, Hampden!—in peace depart!
In the heart of the fields he loved and the hills,Look your last, and lay him to rest,With the faded flower, the wither’d grass;Where the blood-face of war and the myriad illsOf England dear like phantoms passAnd touch not the soul that is with the Blest.Bury him in the night and peace of the holy grave,Where he cannot see the land that he could not save!Bury him, bury him, bury himWith his face downward!
John Hampden met his death at Chalgrove in an attempt to check the raids which Prince Rupert was making from Oxford. Struck at the onset in the shoulder by two carabine balls, he rode off before the action was ended by Hazeley towards Thame, finding it impossible to reach Pyrton, the home of his father-in-law. The body was carried to his own house amid the woods and hills of the Chiltern country, and buried in the church close by.
With his face downward; This was the dying request of some high-minded Spaniard of old, unwilling, even in the grave, as it were, to look on the misfortunes of his country.
O’erstrode the bounds; ‘After every allowance has been made,’ says Hallam, speaking of the Long Parliament from a date so early as August, 1641, ‘he must bring very heated passions to the records of those times, who does not perceive in the conduct of that body a series of glaring violations, not only of positive and constitutional, but of those higher principles which are paramount to all immediate policy’: (Const. Hist. ch. ix).
The axe; A clear and impartial sketch of Stafford’s trial will be found in Ranke (B. viii): who deals dispassionately and historically with an event much obscured by declamation in popular narratives. Even in Hallam’s hand the balance seems here to waver a little.
Heroes both;—Each his side; SeeAppendixB.
September: 1643
Sweet air and fresh; glades yet unsear’d by handOf Midas-finger’d Autumn, massy-green;Bird-haunted nooks between,Where feathery ferns, a fairy palmglove, stand,An English-Eastern band:—While e’en the stealthy squirrel o’er the grassBeside me to the beech-clump dares to pass:—In this still precinct of the happy dead,The sanctuary of silence,—Blessed they!I cried, who ’neath the grayPeace of God’s house, each in his mounded bedSleep safe, nor reck how the great world runs on;Peasant with noble here alike unknown.
Unknown, unnamed beneath one turf they sleep,Beneath one sky, one heaven-uplifted signOf love assured, divine:While o’er each mound the quiet mosses creep,The silent dew-pearls weep:—Fit haven-home for thee, O gentlest heartOf Falkland! all unmeet to find thy partIn those tempestuous times of canker’d hateWhen Wisdom’s finest touch, and, by her side,Forbearance generous-eyedTo fix the delicate balance of the StateWere needed;—King or Nation, which should holdSupreme supremacy o’er the kingdoms old.
—God’s heroes, who? . . . Not most, or likeliest, heWhom iron will cramps to one narrow road,Driving him like a goadTill all his heart decrees seem God’s decree;That worst hypocrisyWhen self cheats self, and conscience at the wheelHerself is steer’d by passion’s blindfold zeal;A nether-world archangel! Through whose eyesFlame the red mandates of remorseless might;A gloom of lurid lightThat holds no commerce with the crystal skies;Like those rank fires that o’er the fen-land flee,Or on the mast-head sign the wrath to be.
As o’er that ancient weird Arlesian plainWhere Zeus hail’d boulder-stones on the giant crew,And changed to stone, or slew,No bud may burgeon in Spring’s gracious rain,No blade of grass or grain:—So bare, so scourged, a prey to chaos castThe wisest despot leaves his realm at last!Though for the land he toil’d with iron will,Earnest to reach persuasion’s goal through power,The fruit without the flower!And pray’d and wrestled to charm good from ill;Waking perchance, or not, in death,—to findMan fights a losing fight who fights mankind!
And as who in the Theban avenue,Sphinx ranged by Sphinx, goes awestruck, nor may readThat ancient awful creedClosed in their granite calm:—so dim the clue,So tangled, tracking throughThat labyrinthine soul which, day by dayChanging, yet kept one long imperious way:Strong in his weakness; confident, yet forlorn;Waning and waxing; diamond-keen, or dull,As that star Wonderful,Mira, for ever, dying and reborn:—Blissful or baleful, yet a Power throughout,Throned in dim altitude o’er the common rout.
Alas, great Chief! The pity of it!—For heLay on his unlamented bier; his lifeWreck’d on that futile strifeTo wed things alien by heaven’s decree,Sword-sway with liberty:—Coercing, not protecting;—for the CauseSmiting with iron heel on England’s laws:—Intolerant tolerance! Soul that could not trustIts finer instincts; self-compell’d to runThe blood-path once begun,And murder mercy with a sad ‘I must!’Great lion-heart by guile and coarseness marr’d;By his own heat a hero warp’d and scarr’d.
Despot despite himself!—And when the cryMoan’d up from England, dungeon’d in that drearSectarian atmosphere,With glory he gilt her chains; in Spanish skyFlaunting the Red Cross high;—Wars, just or unjust, ill or well design’d,Urged with the will that masters weak mankind.—God’s hammer Thou!—not hero!—Forged to breakThe land,—salve wounds with wounds, heal force by force;Sword-surgeon keen and coarse:—To all who worship power for power’s own sake,—Strength for itself,—Success, the vulgar test,—Fit idol of bent knee, and servile breast!
—O in the party plaudits of the crowdGlorious, if this be glory!—o’er that shoutA small still voice breathes outWith subtle sweetness silencing the loudHoarse vaunting of the proud,—A song of exaltation for the vale,And how the mountain from his height shall fail!How God’s true heroes, since this earth began,Go sackcloth-clad through scourge and sword and scorn,Crown’d with the bleeding thorn,Down-trampled by man’s heel as foes to man,And whisperingEli,Eli! as they die,—Martyrs of truth and Saint Humility.
These conquer in their fall: Persuasion fliesWing’d, from their grave: The hearts of men are turn’dTo worship what they burn’d:Owning the sway of Love’s long-suffering eyes,Love’s sweet self-sacrifice;The might of gentleness; the subduing forceOf wisdom on her mid-way measured courseGliding;—not torrent-like with fury spilt,Impetuous, o’er Himalah’s rifted side,To ravage blind and wide,And leave a lifeless wreck of parching silt;—Gliding by thorpe and tower and grange and leaIn tranquil transit to the eternal sea.
—Children of Light!—If, in the slow-paced courseOf vital change, your work seem incomplete,Your conquest-hour defeat,Won by mild compromise, by the invisible forceThat owns no earthly source;Yet to all time your gifts to man endure,God being with you, and the victory sure!For though o’er Gods the Giants in the courseMay lord it, Strength o’er Beauty; yet the SoulImmortal, clasps the goal;Fair Wisdom triumphs by her inborn force:—Thus far on earth! . . . But, ah!—from mortal sightThe crowning glory veils itself in light!
Envoy
—Seal’d of that holy band,Rest here, beneath the foot-fall hushing sod,Wrapt in the peace of God,While summer burns above thee; while the landDisrobes; till pitying snowCover her bareness; till fresh Spring-winds blow,And the sun-circle rounds itself again:—Whilst England cries in vainFor thy wise temperance, Lucius!—But thine earThe violent-impotent fever-restless cry,The faction-yells of triumph, will not hear:—Only the thrush on highAnd wood-dove’s moaning sweetness make reply.
Lucius Cary, second Viscount Falkland, may perhaps be defined as at once the most poetically chivalrous and the most philosophically moderate amongst all who took part in the pre-restoration struggles. He was killed in the royal army at the first battle of Newbury, Sep. 20, 1643, aged but 33 years, and buried, without mark or memorial, in the church of Great Tew (North Oxfordshire), the manor of which he owned.
English Eastern; The common brake-fern and its allies seem to betray tropical sympathies by their late appearance and sensitiveness to autumnal frost.
That Arlesian plain; Now named theCrau. It lies between Aries and the sea—a bare and malarious tract of great size covered with shingle and boulders. Aeschylus describes it as a ‘snow-shower of round stones,’ which Zeus rained down in aid of Heracles, who was contending with the Ligurians.
Mira; A star in theWhale, conspicuous for its singular and rapid changes of apparent size.
The Cause; After passing through several phases this word, in Cromwell’s mouth, with the common logic of tyranny, became simply a synonym for personal rule.
Smiting with iron heel; The terrorism of the Protector’s government, and the almost universal hatred which it inspired, are powerfully painted by Hallam. ‘To govern according to law may sometimes be an usurper’s wish, but can seldom be in his power. The protector abandoned all thought of it. . . . All illusion was now (1655) gone, as to the pretended benefits of the civil war. It had ended in a despotism, compared to which all the illegal practices of former kings, all that had cost Charles his life and crown, appeared as dust in the balance.’
The blood-path; The trials under which Gerard and Vowel were executed in 1654, Slingsby and Hewit in 1658, are the most flagrant instances of Cromwell’s perversion of justice, and contempt for the old liberties of England. But they do not stand alone.
Guile and coarseness; ‘A certain coarse good nature and affability that covered the want of conscience, honour, and humanity: quick in passion, but not vindictive, and averse to unnecessary crimes,’ is the deliberate summing-up of Hallam,—in the love of liberty inferior to none of our historians, and eminent above all for courageous impartiality,—iustissimus unus.
With glory he gilt; SeeAppendixC.
Success, the vulgar test; See Matthew Arnold’s finely discriminativeEssayon Falkland.
July 2: 1644
O, summer-high that day the sunHis chariot drove o’er Marston wold:A rippling sea of amber wheatThat floods the moorland vale with gold.
With harvest light the valley laughs,The sheaves in mellow sunshine sleep;—Too rathe the crop, too red the swathesEre night the scythe of Death shall reap!
Then thick and fast o’er all the moorThe crimson’d sabre-lightnings fly;And thick and fast the death-bolts dash,And thunder-peals to peals reply.
Where Evening arched her fiery domeWent up the roar of mortal foes:—Then o’er a deathly peace the moonIn silver silence sailing rose.
Sweet hour, when heaven is nearest home,And children’s kisses close the day!O disaccord with nature’s calm,Unholy requiem of the fray!
White maiden Queen that sail’st above,Thy dew-tears on the fallen fling,—The blighted wreaths of civil strife,The war that can no triumph bring!
—O pale with that deep pain of thoseWho cannot save, yet must foresee,—Surveying all the ills to flowFrom that too-victor victory;
When ’gainst the unwisely guided KingThe dark self-centred Captain stood,And law and right and peace went downIn that red sea of brothers’ blood;—
O long, long, long the years, fair Maid,Before thy patient eye shall viewThe shrine of England’s law restored,Her homes their native peace renew!
That day; The actual fight lay between 7 and 9 p.m.
Too-victor victory; At Naseby, says Hallam,—and the remark, (though Charles was not personally present), is equally true of Marston Moor—‘Fairfax and Cromwell triumphed, not only over the king and the monarchy, but over the parliament and the nation.’
Unwisely guided; ‘Never would it have been wiser, in Rupert,’ remarks Ranke, ‘to avoid a decisive battle than at that moment. But he held that the king’s letter not only empowered, but instructed him to fight.’
Red sea; ‘The slaughter was deadly, for Cromwell had forbidden quarter being given’: (Ranke, ix: 3).
August 7: 1645
Cold blue cloud on the hill-tops,Cold buffets of hill-side rain:—As a bird that they hunt on the mountains,The king, he turns from Rhôs lane:A writing of doom on his forehead,His eyes wan-wistful and dim;For his comrades seeking a shelter:But earth has no shelter for him!
Gray silvery gleam of armour,White ghost of a wandering king!No sound but the iron-shod footfallAnd the bridle-chains as they ring:Save where the tears of heaven,Shed thick o’er the loyal hills,Rush down in the hoarse-tongued torrent,A roar of approaching ills.
But now with a sweeping curtain,In solid wall comes the rain,And the troop draw bridle and hide themIn the bush by the stream-side plain.King Charles smiled sadly and gently;‘’Tis the Beggar’s Bush,’ said he;‘For I of England am beggar’d,And her poorest may pity me.’
—O safe in the fadeless fir-treeThe squirrel may nestle and hide;And in God’s own dwelling the sparrowSafe with her nestlings abide:—But he goes homeless and friendless,And manlike abides his doom;For he knows a king has no refugeBetwixt the throne and the tomb.
And the purple-robed braes of Alban,The glory of stream and of plain,The Holyrood halls of his birthrightCharles ne’er will look on again:—And the land he loved well, not wisely,Will almost grudge him a grave:Then weep, too late, in her folly,The dark Dictator’s slave!
This incident occurred during the attempt made by Charles, in the dark final days of his struggle, to march from South Wales with the hope of joining Montrose in Scotland. He appears to have halted for the night of Aug. 6, 1645, at Old Radnor and ‘the name ofRails Yat, (Royal gate) still points out the spot where, on the following morning, he left the Rhôs Lane for the road which brought him to shelter at Beggar’s Bush’: a name which is reported to be still preserved.
September 8: 1650
Child in girlhood’s early grace,Pale white rose of royal race,Flower of France, and England’s flower,What dost here at twilight hourCaptive bird in castle-hold,Picture-fair and calm and cold,Cold and still as marble stoneIn gray Carisbrook alone?—Fold thy limbs and take thy rest,Nestling of the silent nest!
Ah fair girl! So still and meek,One wan hand beneath her cheek,One on the holy texts that tellOf God’s love ineffable;—Last dear gift her father gaveWhen, before to-morrow’s grave,By no unmanly grief unmann’d,To his little orphan bandIn that stress of anguish soreHe bade farewell evermore.
Doom’d, unhappy King! Had heKnown the pangs in store for thee,Known the coarse fanatic rageThat,—despite her flower-soft age,Maidenhood’s first blooming fair,—Fever-struck in the imprison’d airAs rosebud on the dust-hill thrownCast a child to die alone,—He had shed, with his last breath,Bitterer tears than tears of death!
As in her infant hour she tookIn her hand the pictured bookWhere Christ beneath the scourger bow’d,Crying ‘O poor man!’ aloud,And in baby tender painKiss’d the page, and kiss’d again,While the happy father smiledOn his sweet warm-hearted child;—So now to him, in Carisbrook lone,All her tenderness has flown.
Oft with a child’s faithful heartShe has seen him act his part;Nothing in his life so wellGracing him as when he fell;Seen him greet his bitter doomAs the mercy-message Home;Seen the scaffold and the shame,The red shower that fell like flame;Till the whole heart within her died,Dying in fancy by his side.
—Statue-still and statue-fairNow the low wind may lift her hair,Motionless in lip and limb;E’en the fearful mouse may skimO’er the window-sill, nor stirFrom the crumb at sight of her;Through the lattice unheard floatSummer blackbird’s evening note;—E’en the sullen foe would blessThat pale utter gentleness.
—Eyes of heaven, that pass and peep,Do not question, if she sleep!She has no abiding here,She is past the starry sphere;Kneeling with the children sweetAt the palm-wreathed altar’s feet;—Innocents who died like thee,Heaven-ward through man’s cruelty,To the love-smiles of their LordBorne through pain and fire and sword.
Elizabeth, second daughter of Charles I. and Henrietta Maria, was born on Innocents’ Day, 1635. The incident accounted in Stanza iv occurred in 1637. She had been taken on a visit to Hampton Court to her mother, who wished her to be present at her own vesper-service, when Elizabeth, not yet two years old, became very restless. To quiet her a book of devotion was shown to her.’ The King, when the Queen drew his attention, said, ‘She begins young!’
This tale is told by Mrs. Green, in her excellentPrincesses of England, (London, 1853),—a book deserving to be better known,—on the authority of the Envoy Con.
The first grief of a very happy and promising childhood may have been the loss of her sister Anne in 1640. But by 1642, the evils of the time began to press upon Princess Elizabeth; her mother’s departure from England, followed by her own capture by order of the Parliament; her confinement under conditions of varying severity; and the final farewell to her father, Jan. 29, 1649.
From that time her life was overshadowed by the sadness of her father’s death, her own isolation, and her increasing feebleness of health. She seems to have been a singularly winning and intelligent girl, and she hence found or inspired affection in several of the guardians successively appointed to take charge of her. But if she had not been thus marked by beauty of nature, our indignant disgust would hardly be less at the brutal treatment inflicted by the Puritan-Independent authorities upon this child:—at the refusal of her prayer to be sent to her elder sister Mary, in Holland; at the captivity in Carisbrook; at the isolation in which she was left to die.—Yet it is not she who most merits pity!
In this poem, written before the plan of the book had been formed, I find that some slight deviation from the best authorities has been made. Elizabeth’s young brother Henry, Duke of Gloster, shared her prison: and although her own physician, Mayerne, had been dismissed, yet some medical attendance was supplied.—Henry Vaughan has described the patience of the young sufferer in two lovely lines:
Thou didst not murmur, nor revile,And drank’st thy wormwood with a smile.—Olor Iscanus; 1651.
Thou didst not murmur, nor revile,And drank’st thy wormwood with a smile.
—Olor Iscanus; 1651.
A TALE OF PRINCE RUPERT
September 30: 1651
Seventy league from Terceira they layIn the mid Atlantic straining;And inch upon inch as she settles they knowThe leak on the Admiral gaining.
Below them ’tis death rushes greedily in;But their signal unheeded is waving,For the shouts by their billow-toss’d consort unheardAre lost in the tempest’s wild raving.
For Maurice in vain o’er the bulwark leant forth,While Rupert to rescue was crying;And the voice of farewell on his face is flung backWith the scud on the billow-top flying!
But no time was for tears, save for duty no thought,When brother is parting from brother;For Rupert the brave and his high-hearted crew,They must die, as they lived, by each other.
Unregarded the boat, for none care from their postTo steal off while the Prince is beside them,All, all, side by side with his comrades to shareTill the death-plunge at last shall divide them.
Ah, sharp in his bosom meanwhile is the smart,He alone for his king is contending!And the brightness and blaze of his youth in its primeMust here in mid-waves have their ending!
—The seas they break over, the seas they press inFrom fo’csle to binnacle streaming;And a ripple runs over the Admiral’s deck,With blue cold witch-fire gleaming.
O then in a noble rebellion they rise;They may die, but the Prince shall o’erlive them!With a loving rough force to the boat he is thrust,And he must be saved and forgive them!
Now their flame-pikes they lift, the last signal for life,Flaring wild in the wild rack above them:—And each breast has one prayer for the Mercy on high,And one for the far-off who love them.
O high-beating hearts that are still’d in the deepUnknown treasure-caverns of Ocean!There, where storms cannot vex, the three hundred are laidIn their silent heroic devotion.
Rupert, nephew to Charles through his sister Elizabeth, wife to the Elector Palatine, after the ruin of his uncle’s cause, carried on the struggle at sea. The incident here treated occurred on one of his last voyages, when cruising in the Atlantic near the Canaries: it is told at full length in E. Warburton’s narrative of Rupert’s life.
Brother is parting from brother; Maurice, a year younger than himself,—then in the companion shipSwallow, in which Rupert, by the devoted determination of his comrades, was ultimately saved. Maurice was not long after drowned in the West Indies.
Flame-pikes; Two ‘fire-pikes,’ it is stated, were burned as a signal just before the flag-ship sank. Three hundred and thirty-three was the estimate of the number drowned.
1660
At last the long darkness of anarchy lifts, and the dawn o’er the grayIn rosy pulsation floods; the tremulous amber of day:In the golden umbrage of spring-tide, the dewy delight of the sward,The liquid voices awake, the new morn with music reward.Peace in her car goes up; a rainbow curves for her road;Law and fair Order before her, the reinless coursers of God;—Round her the gracious maids in circling majesty shine;They are rich in blossoms and blessings, the Hours, the white, the divine!
Hands in sisterly hands they unite, eye calling on eye;Smiles more speaking than words, as the pageant sweeps o’er the sky.Plenty is with them, and Commerce; all gifts of all lands from her hornRaining on England profuse; and, clad in the beams of the morn,Her warrior-guardian of old the red standard rears in its might;And the Love-star trembles above, and passes, light into light.
Many the marvels of earth, the more marvellous wonders on high,Worlds past number on worlds, blank lightless abysses of sky;But thou art the wonder of wonders, O Man! Thy impalpable soul,Atom of consciousness, measuring the Infinite, grasping the whole:Then, on the trivialest transiencies fix’d, or plucking for fruitDead-sea apples and ashes of sin, more brute than the brute.Yet in thy deepest depths, filth-wallowing orgies of night,Lust remorseless of blood, yet, allow’d an inlet for light:As where, a thousand fathom beneath us, midnight afarGlooms in some gulph, and we gaze, and, behold! one flash of one star!For, ever, the golden gates stand open, the transit is freeFor the human to mix with divine; from himself to the Highest to flee.Lo on its knees by the bedside the babe:—and the song that we hearHas been heard already in Heaven! the low-lisp’d music is clear:—For, fresh from the hand of the Maker, the child still breathes the light airOf the House Angelic, the meadow where souls yet unbodied repair,Lucid with love, translucent with bliss, and know not the doomIn the Marah valley of life laid up for the sons of the womb.—I speak not of grovelling hearts, souls blind and begrimed from the birth,But the spirits of nobler strain, the elect of the children of earth:—For the needle swerves from the pole; they cannot do what they would;In their truest aim is falsehood, and ill out-balancing good.Faith’s first felicities fade; the world-mists thicken and roll,’Neath the heavens arching their heaven; o’er-hazing the eye of the soul.Then the vision is pure no longer; refracted above us ariseThe phantasmal figures of passion; earth’s mirage exhaled to the skies.And they go as the castled clouds o’er the verge when the tempest is laid,Towering Ambition, and Glory, and Self as Duty array’d:—Idols no less than that idol whom lustful Ammon of yoreWith the death-scream of children, a furnace of blood, was fain to adore!So these, in the shrine of the soul, for a Moloch sacrifice cry,The conscience of candid childhood, the pure directness of eye:—Till the man yields himself to himself, accepting his will as his fate,And the light from above within him is darkness; the darkness how great!
O Land whom the Gods,—loving most,—most sorely in wisdom have tried,England! since Time was Time, thrice swept by the conqueror tide,Why on thyself thrice turn, thrice crimson thy greenness in gore,With the slain of thy children, as sheep, thy meadows whitening-o’er?Race impatiently patient; tenacious of foe as of friend;Slow to take flame; but, enflamed, that burns thyself out to the end:Slow to return to the balance, once moved; not easily sway’dFrom the centre, and, star-like, retracing thy orbit through sunlight and shade!—Without hate, without party affection, we now look back on the fray,Through the mellowing magic of time the phantoms emerging to day!Grasping too much for self, unjust to his rival in strife,Each foe with good conscience and honour advances; war to the knife!Lo, where with feebler hand the Stuart essays him to guideThe disdainful coursers of Henry, the Tudor car in its pride!For he saw not the past was past; nor the swirl and inrush of the tide,A nation arising in manhood; its will would no more be denied.They would share in the labour and peril of State; they must perish or win;’Tis the instinct of Freedom that cries; a voice of Nature within!Narrow the cry and sectarian oft: true sons of their age;Justice avenged unjustly; yet more in sorrow than rage;Till they drank the poison of power, the Circé-cup of command,And the face of Liberty fail’d, and the sword was snatch’d from her hand.Now Law ’neath the scaffold cowers, and,—shame engendering shame,—The hell-pack of war is laid close on the land for ruin and flame.For as things most holy are worst, from holiness when they decline,So Law, in the name of law once outraged, demon-divine,Swoops back as Anarchy arm’d, and maddens her lovers of yore,Changed from their former selves, and clothed in the chrisom of gore.Then Falkland and Hampden are gone; and darker counsels arise;Vane with his tortuous soul, through over-wisdom unwise;Pym, deep stately designer, the subtle in simple disguised,Artist in plots, projector of panics he used, and despised!—But as, in the mountain world, where the giants each lift up their hornTo the skies defiant and pale, and our littleness measure and scorn,Frowning-out from their far-off summits: and eye and mind may not knowWhich is hugest, where all are huge: But, as from the region we goReceding, the Titan of Titans comes forth, and above him the skyIs deepest: and lo!—’tis the White One, the Monarch!—He mounts, as we fly!Or as over the sea the gay ships and the dolphins glisten and flit,And then that Leviathan comes, and takes his pastime in it;And wherever he ploughs his dark road, they must sink or follow him still,For his is the bulkiest strength, the proud and paramount will!—Thou wast great, O King! (for we grudge not the style thou didst yearn-for in vain,But a river of blood was between and an ineffaceable stain),Great with an earth-born greatness; a Titan of awe, not of love;’Twas strength and subtlety balanced; the wisdom not from above.For he leant o’er his own deep soul, oracular; over the pitAs the Pythia throned her of old, where the rock in Delphi was split;And the vapour and echo within he mis-held for divine; and the landHeard and obey’d, unwillingly willing, the voice of command.—Soaring enormous soul, that to height o’er the highest aspires;All that the man can seize being nought to what he desires!And as, in a palace nurtured, the child to courtesy grows,Becoming at last what it acts; so man on himself can impose,Drill and accustom himself to humility, till, like an art,The lesson the fingers have learn’d appears the command of the heart;Whilst pride, as the snake at the charmer’s command, coils low in its place,And he wears to himself and his fellows the mask that is almost a face.Truest of hypocrites, he!—in himself entangled, he thinksEarth uprising to Heaven, while earth-ward the heavenly sinks:Conscience, we grant it, his guide; but conscience drugg’d and deceived;Conscience which all that his self-belief whisper’d as duty believed.And though he sought earnest for God, in life-long wrestle and prayer,Yet the sky by a veil was darken’d, a phantom flitting in air;For a cloud from that seething cavernous heart fumed out in his youth,And whatever he will’d in the strength of the soul was imaged as truth:—Grew with his growth: And now ’tis Ambition, disguised in success;And he walks with the step assured, that cares not its issue to guess,Clear in immediate purpose: and moulding his party at will,He thrones it o’er obstinate sects, his ideal constrain’d to fulfil.Cool in his very heat, self-master, he masters the realm:God and His glory the flag; but King Oliver lord of the helm!As he needs, steers crooked or straight: with his eye controlling the proud,While blandness runs from his tongue, as the candidate fawns on the crowd;Sagest of Titans, he stands; dark, ponderous, muddy-profound,Greatness untemper’d, untuned; no song, but a chaos of sound:—Yet the key-note is ever beneath: ‘Mere humble instruments! See!Poor weak saints, at the best: but who has triumph’d as we?’Thanks the Lord for each massacre-mercy, His glory, for His is the Cause:Catlike he bridles, and purrs about God: but within are the claws,The lion-strength is within!—Vane, Ludlow, Hutchinson, knew,When the bauble of Law disappear’d, and the sulky senate withdrew:When the tyrannous Ten sword-silenced the land, and the necks of the strongBy the heel of their great Dictator were bruised, wrong trampling on wrong.Least willing of despots! and fain the fair temple of Law to restore,Sheathing the sword in the sceptre: But lo! as in legends of yore,Once drawn, once redden’d, it may not return to the scabbard!—and straightOn that iron-track’d path he had framed to the end he is goaded by Fate.And yet, as a temperate man, to flavour some exquisite dish,Without stint pours forth the red wine, thus only can compass his wish;Upon Erin the death-mark he brands, the Party and Cause to secure;Not bloodthirsty by birth; just, liquor ’twas needful to pour;Only the wine of man’s blood! . . . But the horrible sacrament thrill’dRight through the heart of a nation; nor yet is the memory still’d;E’en yet the dim spectre returns, the ghost of the murderous years,Blood flushing out in hatred; or blood transmuted to tears!—Ah strange drama of Fate! what motley pageantries riseOn the stage of this make-shift world! what irony silenced in sighs!For as when the Switzer looks down on the dell, from the pass and the snow,Sees the peace of the fields, the white farms, the clear equable streamlet below,And before him the world unknown, the blaze of the shadowless Line,Riches ill-purchased in exile, the toiling plantation and mine;And the horn floats up the faint music of youth from his forefathers’ fold,And he sighs for the patient life, the peace more golden than gold:—So He now looks back on the years, and groans ’neath the load he must bear,Loving this England that loathed him, and none the burden to share!Gagging not gaining souls: to the close he wonders in vainWhy he cannot win hearts: why ’tis only the will that resigns to his reign.As that great image in Dura, the land perforce must obey,Unloved, unlovely,—and not the feet only of iron and clay,—Atlas of this wide realm! in himself he summ’d up the whole;Its children the Cause had devour’d: the sword was childless and sole.
—Ah strange drama of Fate! what motley pageantries riseOn the stage of this make-shift world! what irony silenced in sighs!In the strait beneath Etna for as the waves ebb, and Scylla betraysThe monster below, foul scales of the serpent and slime,—could we gazeOn Tyranny stript of her tinsel, what vision of dool and dismay!Terror in confidence clothed, and anarchy biding her day:Selfishness hero-mask’d; stage-tricks of the shabby-sublime;Impotent gaspings at good; and the deluge after her time!
—Is it war that thunders o’er England, and bursts the millennial oakFrom his base like a castle uprooted, and shears with impalpable strokeThe sails from the ocean, the houses of men, while the Conqueror layOn the morn of his crowning mercy, and life flicker’d down with the day?Is it war on the earth, or war in the skies, or Nature who tollsHer passing-bell as from earth they go up, her imperial souls?—He rests:—’Tis a lion-sleep: and the sternness of Truth is reproved:The sleep of a leader of men; unhuman, to watch him unmoved!In the stillness of pity and awe we remember his troublesome years,For man is the magnet to man, and mortal failure has tears.—He rests:—On the massive brows, as a rock by the sunrise is crown’d,His passionate love for the land, in a glory-coronal bound!And Mercy dawns fast o’er the dead, from the bier as we turn and depart,England for England’s sake clasp’d firm as a child to his heart.—He rests:—And the storm-clouds have fled, and the sunshine of Nature repress’dBreaks o’er the realm in smiles, and the land again has her rest.He rests: the great spirit is hid where from heaven the veil is unroll’d,And justice merges in love, and the dross is purged from the gold.
The general point of view from which this subject is here approached is given in the following passages:—‘The whole nation,’ says Macaulay (1659), ‘was sick of government by the sword, and pined for government by the law.’ Hence, when Charles landed, ‘the cliffs of Dover were covered by thousands of gazers, among whom scarcely one could be found who was not weeping with delight . . . Every where flags were flying, bells and music sounding, wine and ale flowing in rivers to the health of him whose return was the return of peace, of law, and of freedom.’ Nor was this astonishing: the name of the Commonwealth, a greater than Macaulay remarks, ‘was grown infinitely odious: it was associated with the tyranny of ten years, the selfish rapacity of the Rump, the hypocritical despotism of Cromwell, the arbitrary sequestrations of committee-men, the iniquitous decimations ofmilitary prefects, the sale of British citizens for slavery in the West Indies, the blood of some shed on the scaffold without legal trial, . . . the persecution of the Anglican Church, the bacchanalian rant of sectaries, the morose preciseness of puritans . . . It is universally acknowledged that no measure was ever more national, or has ever produced more testimonies of public approbation, than the restoration of Charles II. . . . For the late government, whether under the parliament or the protector, had never obtained the sanction of popular consent, nor could have subsisted for a day without the support of the army. The King’s return seemed to the people the harbinger of a real liberty, instead of that bastard Commonwealth which had insulted them with its name’ (Hallam:Const. Hist. ch. x and xi).
Peace in her car; It will be seen that the RospigliosiAurora, Guido’s one inspired work, has been here before the writer’s memory.
On thyself thrice turn; The civil wars of the Barons, the Roses, and the Commonwealth.
He saw not; Ranke’s dispassionate summary of the attempted ‘arrest of five members,’ which has been always held one of the King’s most arbitrary steps, as it was, perhaps, the most fatal, illustrates the view here taken: ‘The prerogative of the Crown,in the sense of the early kings’ (unconditional right of arrest, in cases of treason), ‘and the privilege of Parliament,in the sense of coming times, were directly contradictory to each other’: (viii: 10).
Till they drank the poison; A sentence weighty with his judicial force may be here quoted from Hallam:—‘The desire of obtaining or retaining power, if it be ever sought as a means, is soon converted into an end.’ The career of the Long Parliament supports this judgment: of it ‘it may be said, I think, with not greater severity than truth, that scarce two or three public acts of justice, humanity, or generosity, and very few of political wisdom and courage, are recorded of them from their quarrel with the King to their expulsion by Cromwell’: (Const. Hist. ch. x: Part i).
The chrisom; Name for the white cloth in which babes were veiled immediately after Baptism.
Artist in plots; See Ranke (viii: 5) for Pym’s skilful use of a supposed plot, (the main element in which was known by himself to be untrue), in older to terrify the House and ensure the destruction of Stafford; and Hallam (ch. ix).—Admiration of Pym may be taken as a proof that a historian is ignorant of, or faithless to, the fundamental principles of the Constitution:—as the worship of Cromwell is decisive against any man’s love of liberty, whatever his professions.
O King; ‘Cromwell, like so many other usurpers, felt his positiontoo precarious, or his vanity ungratified, without the name which mankind have agreed to worship.’ The conversations recorded by Whitelock are conclusive on this point: ‘and, though compelled to decline the crown, he undoubtedly did not lose sight of the object for the short remainder of his life’ (Hallam).
The sky by a veil; SeeAppendixD.
And he walks; ‘He said on one occasion,He goes furthest who knows not whither he is going’: (Ranke: xii: 1).
Purrs about God; Examples, (the tone of which justifies this phrase, and might deserve a severer), may be found by the curious in the frailties of poor human nature,passim, in Cromwell’s ‘Letters and Speeches,’ for which, (although not always edited with precise accuracy), we are indebted to Mr. T. Carlyle. But the view which he takes of his ‘hero,’ whether in regard of many particular facts alleged or neglected, or of the general estimate of Cromwell as a man,—as it appears to the author plainly untenable in face of proved historical facts, is here rejected.
The familiar figure of the Tyrant, too long known to the world,—with the iron, the clay, and the little gold often interfused also in the statue,—has been always easily recognisable by unbiassed eyes in Oliver Cromwell. His tyranny was substantially that of his kind, before his time and since, in its actions, its spirit, its result. Fanaticism and Paradox may come with their apparatus of rhetoric to blur, as they whitewash, the lineaments of their idol. Such eulogists may ‘paint an inch thick’: yet despots,—political, military, ecclesiastical,—will never be permanently acknowledged by the common sense of mankind as worthy the great name of Hero.
The tyrannous Ten; The Major-Generals, originally ten, (but the number varied), amongst whom, in 1655, the Commonwealth was divided. They displayed ‘a rapacity and oppression beyond their master’s’ (Hallam): a phrase amply supported by the hardly-impeachable evidence of Ludlow.
The horrible sacrament; SeeAppendixD.
Why he cannot win hearts; ‘In the ascent of this bold usurper to greatness . . . he had encouraged the levellers and persecuted them; he had flattered the Long Parliament and betrayed it; he had made use of the sectaries to crush the Commonwealth; he had spurned the sectaries in his last advance to power. These, with the Royalists and Presbyterians, forming in effect the whole people . . . were the perpetual, irreconcilable enemies of his administration’ (Hallam ch. x).
Stage-tricks; See the curious regal imitations and adaptations of theProtector during his later years, in matters regarding his own and his family’s titles and state, or the marriage of his daughters.
Mortal failure; SeeAppendixD.
November: 1674
Cloked in gray threadbare poverty, and blind,Age-weak, and desolate, and beloved of God;High-heartedness to long repulse resign’d,Yet bating not one jot of hope, he trodThe sunless skyless streets he could not see;By those faint feet made sacrosanct to me.
Yet on that laureate brow the sign he woreOf Phoebus’ wrath; who,—for his favourite child,When war and faction raised their rancorous roar,Leagued with fanatic frenzy, blood-defiled,To the sweet Muses and himself untrue,—Around the head he loved thick darkness threw.
—He goes:—But with him glides the Pleiad throngOf that imperial line, whom Phoebus ownsHis ownest: for, since his, no later songHas soar’d, as wide-wing’d, to the diadem’d thronesThat, in their inmost heaven, the Muses highSet for the sons of immortality.
Most loved, most lovely, near him as he went,Vergil: and He, supremest for all time,In hoary blindness:—But the sweet lamentOf Lesbian love, the Parian song sublime,Follow’d:—and that stern Florentine apartCowl’d himself dark in thought, within his heart
Nursing the dream of Church and Caesar’s State,Empire and Faith:—while Fancy’s favourite child,The myriad-minded, moving up sedateBeckon’d his countryman, and inly smiled:—Then that august Theophany paled from view,To higher stars drawn up, and kingdoms new.
The last ten years of Milton’s life were passed at his house situate in the (then) ‘Artillery Walk,’ Bunhill, near Aldersgate. He is described as a spare figure, of middle stature or a little less, who walked, generally clothed in a gray camblet overcoat, in the streets between Bunhill and Little Britain.
Vergil; placed first as most like Milton in consummate art and permanent exquisiteness of phrase. It is to him, also, (if to any one), that Milton is metrically indebted.—The other poets classed as ‘Imperial’ are Homer, Sappho, Archilochus, Dante, Shakespeare. The supremacy in rank which the writer has here ventured to limit to these seven poets, (though with a strong feeling of diffidence in view of certain other Hellenic and Roman claims), is assigned to Sappho and Archilochus, less on account of the scanty fragments, though they be ‘more golden than gold,’ which have reached us, than in confidence that the place collateral with Homer, given them by their countrymen (who criticized as admirably as they created), was, in fact, justified by their poetry.
The dream; Dante’s political wishes and speculations, wholly opposed to Milton’s, are, however, like his in their impracticable originality.
Theophany; Vision of the Gods.
February 11: 1655
As when the King of old’Mid Babylonian gold,And picture-woven walls, and lamps that gleam’dUnholy radiance, sate,And with some smooth slave-mateToy’d, and the wine laugh’d round, and music stream’dVoluptuous undulation, o’er the hall,—Till on the palace-wall
Forth came a hand divineAnd wrote the judgment-sign,And Babylon fell!—So now, in that his placeOf Tudor-Stuart pride,The golden gallery wide,’Mid venal beauty’s lavish-arm’d embrace,And hills of gambler-gold, a godless KingMoved through the revelling
With quick brown falcon-eyeAnd lips of gay reply;Wise in the wisdom not from Heaven!—as oneWho from his exile-daysHad learn’d to scorn the praiseOf truth, the crown by martyr-virtue won:Below ambition:—Grant him regal ease!The rest, as fate may please!
—O royal heir, restoredNot by the bitter sword,But when the heart of these great realms in free,Full, triple, unison beatThe Martyr’s son to greet,Her ancient law and faith and flag with theeRethroned,—not thus!—in this inglorious hallOf harem-festival,
Not thus!—For even now,The blaze is on thy browScored by the shadowy hand of him whose wingKnows neither haste nor rest;Who from the board each guestIn season calling,—knight and kerne and king,—Where Arthur lies, and Alfred, signs the way;——We know him, and obey.
Lord Macaulay’s lively description of this scene (Hist. Ch iv) should be referred to. ‘Even then,’ he says, ‘the King had complained that he did not feel well.’
Tudor-Stuart; This famous Gallery was of sixteenth-century date.
When the heart; The weariness of England under the triple yoke of Puritanism, the Independents, and the Protector, has been already noticed: (Note on p. 125).
‘The Restoration,’ says Professor Seeley, in an able essay on current perversions of seventeenth-century-history, ‘was not a return to servitude, but the precise contrary. It was a great emancipation, an exodus out of servitude into liberty . . . As to the later Stuarts, I regard them as pupils of Cromwell: . . . it was their great ambition to appropriate his methods,’ (and, we may add, to follow his foreign policy in regard to France and Holland), for the benefit of the old monarchy. They failed where their model had succeeded, and the distinction of having enslaved England remained peculiar to Cromwell.’