The poetical works of William Lisle Bowles :: :: University of Virginia Library

Introduction—Retrospect—General view—Cave—Bones—Brief sketch of events since the deposit—Egypt—Druid—Roman—Saxon—Dane—Norman —Hill—Campanula—Bleadon—Weston—Steep Holms—Solitary flower on Steep Holms, the Peony—Flat Holms—Three unknown graves—Sea—Sea treacherous in its tranquillity—Mr Elton's children—Packet-boat sunk.

If, gazing from this eminence, I wake,
With thronging thoughts, the harp of poesy
Once more, ere night descend, haply with tones
Fainter, and haply with a long farewell;
If, looking back upon the lengthened way
My feet have trod, since, long ago, I left
Those well-known shores, and when mine eyes are filled
With tears, I take the pencil in its turn,
And shading light the landscape spread below,
So smilingly beguile those starting tears;
Something, the feelings of the human heart—
Something, the scene itself, and something more—
A wish to gratify one generous mind—
May plead for pardon.

To this spot I came
To view the dark memorials of a world

Perished at the Almighty's voice, and swept
With all its noise away! Since then, unmarked,
In that rude cave those dark memorials lay,
And told no tale!

Spirit of other times,
Sad shadow of the ancient world, come forth!
Thou who has slept four thousand years, awake!
Rise from the cavern's last recess, and say,
What giant cleft in twain the neighbouring rocks,
Then slept for ages in vast Ogo's Cave,
And left them rent and frowning from that hour;
Say, rather, when the stern Archangel stood,
Above the tossing of the flood, what arm
Shattered this mountain, and its hollow chasm
Heaped with the mute memorials of that doom!

Spirit of other times, thou speakest not!
Yet who could gaze a moment on that wreck
Of desolation, but must pause to think
Of the mutations of the globe—of time,
Hurrying to onward spoil—of his own life,
Swift passing, as the summer light, away—
Of Him who spoke, and the dread storm went forth.

The surge came, and the surge went back, and there—
There—when the black abyss had ceased to roar,
And waters, shrinking from the rocks and hills,
Slept in the solitary sunshine—there
The bones that strew the inmost cavern lay:
And when forgotten centuries had passed,
And the gray smoke went up from villages,
And cities, with their towers and temples, shone,
And kingdoms rose and perished—there they lay!

The crow sailed o'er the spot; the villager

Plodded to morning toil, yet undisturbed
They lay:—when, lo! as if but yesterday
The Archangel's trump had thundered o'er the deep,
The mighty shade of ages that are passed
Towers into light! Say, Christian, is it true,
That dim recess, that cavern, heaped with bones,
Will echo to thy Bible!

But a while
Here let me stand, and gaze upon the scene;
That headland, and those winding sands, and mark
The morning sunshine, on that very shore
Where once a child I wandered. Oh! return,
(I sigh) return a moment, days of youth,
Of childhood,—oh, return! How vain the thought,
Vain as unmanly! yet the pensive Muse,
Unblamed, may dally with imaginings;
For this wide view is like the scene of life,
Once traversed o'er with carelessness and glee,
And we look back upon the vale of years,
And hear remembered voices, and behold,
In blended colours, images and shades
Long passed, now rising, as at Memory's call,
Again in softer light.

I see thee not,
Home of my infancy—I see thee not,
Thou fane that standest on the hill alone,
The homeward sailor's sea-mark; but I view
Brean Down beyond; and there thy winding sands,
Weston; and, far away, one wandering ship,
Where stretches into mist the Severn sea.
There, mingled with the clouds, old Cambria draws
Its stealing line of mountains, lost in haze;
There, in mid-channel, sit the sister holms,

Secure and tranquil, though the tide's vast sweep,
As it rides by, might almost seem to rive
The deep foundations of the earth again,
Threatening, as once, resistless, to ascend
In tempest to this height, to bury here
Fresh-weltering carcases!

But, lo, the Cave!
Descend the steps, cut rudely in the rock,
Cautious. The yawning vault is at our feet!
Long caverns, winding within caverns, spread
On either side their labyrinths; all dark,
Save where the light falls glimmering on huge bones,
In mingled multitudes. Ere yet we ask
Whose bones, and of what animals they formed
The structure, when no human voice was heard
In all this isle; look upward to the roof
That silent drips, and has for ages dripped,
From which, like icicles, the stalactites
Depend: then ask of the geologist,
How nature, vaulting the rude chamber, scooped
Its vast recesses; he with learning vast
Will talk of limestone rock, of stalactites,
And oolites, and hornblende, and graywacke—
With sounds almost as craggy as the rock
Of which he speaks—feldspar, and gneis, and schorl!
But let us learn of this same troglodyte,
Who guides us through the winding labyrinth,
The erudite “Professor” of the cave,
Not of the college; stagyrite of bones.
He leads, with flickering candle, through the heaps
Himself has piled, and placed in various forms,
Grotesque arrangement, while the cave itself

Seems but his element of breathing! Look!
This humereus is that of the wild ox.
The very candle, as with sympathy,
Flares while he speaks, in glimmering wonderment!

But who can mark these visible remains,
Nor pause to think how awful, and how true,
The dread event they speak! What monuments
Hath man, since then, the lord, the emmet, raised
On earth! He hath built pyramids, and said,
Stand there! and in their solitude they stood,
Whilst, like the camel's shadow on the sands
Beneath them years and ages passed. He said,
My name shall never die! and like the God
Of silence, with his finger on his lip,
Oblivion mocked, then pointed to a tomb,
'Mid vast and winding vaults, without a name.
Where art thou, Thebes? The chambers of the dead
Echo, Behold! and twice ten thousand men,
Even in their march of rapine and of blood,
Involuntary halted, at the sight
Of thy majestic wreck, for many a league—
Sphynxes, colossal fanes, and obelisks—
Pale in the morning sun! Ambition sighed
A moment, and passed on. In this rude isle,
The Druid altars frowned; and still they stand,
As silent as the barrows at their feet,
Yet tell the same stern tale. Soldier of Rome,
Art thou come hither to this land remote
Hid in the ocean-waste? Thy chariot wheels
Rung on that road below!—Cohorts, and turms,
With their centurions, in long file appear,
Their golden eagles glittering to the sun,

O'er the last line of spears; and standard-flags
Wave, and the trumpets sounding to advance,
And shields, and helms, and crests, and chariots, mark
The glorious march of Cæsar's soldiery,
Firing the gray horizon! They are passed!
And, like a gleam of glory, perishing,
Leave but a name behind! So passes man,
An armed spectre o'er a field of blood,
And vanishes; and other armed shades
Pass by, red battle hurtling as they pass.
The Saxon kings have strewed their palaces
From Thames to Tyne. But, lo! the sceptre shakes;
The Dane, remorseless as the hurricane
That sweeps his native cliffs, harries the land!
What terror strode before his track of blood!
What hamlets mourned his desultory march,
When on the circling hills, along the sea,
The beacon-flame shone nightly! He has passed!
Now frowns the Norman victor on his throne,
And every cottage shrouds its lonely fire,
As the sad curfew sounds. Yet Piety,
With new-inspiring energies, awoke,
And ampler polity: in woody vales,
In unfrequented wilds, and forest-glens,
The towers of the sequestered abbey shone,
As when the pinnacles of Glaston-Fane
First met the morning light. The parish church,
Then too, exulting o'er the ruder cross,
Upsprung, till soon the distant village peal
Flings out its music, where the tapering spire
Adds a new picture to the sheltered vale.
Uphill, thy rock, where sits the lonely church,
Above the sands, seems like the chronicler
Of other times, there left to tell the tale!

But issuing from the cave, look round, behold
How proudly the majestic Severn rides
On to the sea; how gloriously in light
It rides! Along this solitary ridge,
Where smiles, but rare, the blue campanula,
Among the thistles and gray stones that peep
Through the thin herbage, to the highest point
Of elevation, o'er the vale below,
Slow let us climb. First look upon that flower,
The lowly heath-bell, smiling at our feet.
How beautiful it smiles alone! The Power
That bade the great sea roar, that spread the heavens,
That called the sun from darkness, decked that flower,
And bade it grace this bleak and barren hill.
Imagination, in her playful mood,
Might liken it to a poor village maid,
Lowly, but smiling in her lowliness,
And dressed so neatly as if every day
Were Sunday. And some melancholy bard
Might, idly musing, thus discourse to it:—
Daughter of Summer, who dost linger here,
Decking the thistly turf, and arid hill,
Unseen, let the majestic dahlia
Glitter, an empress, in her blazonry
Of beauty; let the stately lily shine,
As snow-white as the breast of the proud swan
Sailing upon the blue lake silently,
That lifts her tall neck higher as she views
Her shadow in the stream! Such ladies bright
May reign unrivalled in their proud parterres!
Thou wouldst not live with them; but if a voice,
Fancy, in shaping mood, might give to thee,
To the forsaken primrose thou wouldst say—
Come, live with me, and we two will rejoice:

Nor want I company; for when the sea
Shines in the silent moonlight, elves and fays,
Gentle and delicate as Ariel,
That do their spiritings on these wild holts,
Circle me in their dance, and sing such songs
As human ear ne'er heard! But cease the strain,
Lest wisdom and severer truth should chide.

Behind that windmill, sailing round and round,
Like days on days revolving, Bleadon lies,
Where first I pondered on the grammar-lore,
Sad as the spelling-book, beneath the roof
Of its secluded parsonage; Brean Down
Emerges o'er the edge of Hutton Hill,
Just seen in paler light! And Weston there,
Where I remember a few cottages
Sprinkling the sand, uplifts its tower, and shines,
As if in conscious beauty, o'er the scene.
And I have seen a far more welcome sight,
The living line of population stream—
Children, and village maids, and gray old men—
Stream o'er the sands to church: such change has been
In the brief compass of one hastening life!
And yet that hill, the light, is to my eyes
Familiar as those sister isles that sit
In the mid channel! Look, how calm they sit,
As listening each to the tide's rocking roar!
Of different aspects—this, abrupt and high,
And desolate, and cold, and bleak, uplifts
Its barren brow—barren, but on its steep
One native flower is seen, the peony;
One flower, which smiles in sunshine or in storm,
There sits companionless, but yet not sad:
She has no sister of the summer-field,
None to rejoice with her when spring returns,

None that, in sympathy, may bend its head,
When evening winds blow hollow o'er the rock,
In autumn's gloom! So Virtue, a fair flower,
Blooms on the rock of Care, and, though unseen,
So smiles in cold seclusion; while, remote
From the world's flaunting fellowship, it wears,
Like hermit Piety, one smile of peace,
In sickness or in health, in joy or tears,
In summer days or cold adversity;
And still it feels Heaven's breath, reviving, steal
On its lone breast; feels the warm blessedness
Of Heaven's own light about it, though its leaves
Are wet with evening tears!

Yonder island
Seems not so desolate, nor frowns aloof,
As if from human kind. The lighthouse there,
Through the long winter night, shows its pale fire;
And three forgotten mounds mark the rude graves,
None knows of whom; but those of men who breathed,
And bore their part in life, and looked to Heaven,
As man looks now!—they died and left no name!
Fancy might think, amid the wilderness
Of waves, they sought to hide from human eyes
All memory of their fortunes. Till the trump
Of doom, they rest unknown. But mark that hill—
Where Kewstoke seems to creep into the sea,
Thy abbey, Woodspring, rose. Wild is the spot;
And there three mailed murderers retired,

To the last point of land. There they retired,
And there they knelt upon the ground, and cried,
Bury us 'mid the waves, where none may know
The whispered secret of a deed of blood!
No stone is o'er those graves:—the sullen tide,
As it flows by and sounds along the shore,
Seems moaningly to say, Pray for our souls!
Nor other “Miserere” have they had
At eve, nor other orison at morn.

Thou hast put on thy mildest look to-day,
Thou mighty element! Solemn, and still,
And motionless, and touched with softer light,
And without noise, lies all thy long expanse.
Thou seemest now as calm, as if a child
Might dally with thy playfulness, and stand,
The weak winds lifting gently its light hair,
Upon thy margin, watching one by one
The long waves, breaking slow, with such a sound
As Silence, in her dreamy mood, might love,
When she more softly breathed, fearing a breath
Might mar thy placidness!

Oh, treachery!
So still, and like a giant in his strength
Reposing, didst thou lie, when the fond sire
One moment looked, and saw his blithsome boys
Gay on the sands, one moment, and the next,
Heart-stricken and bereft, by the same surge,
Stood in his desolation;—for he looked,
And thought how he had blessed them in their sleep,
And the next moment they were borne away,
Snatched by the circling surge, and seen no more;

While morning shone, and not a ripple told
How terrible and dark a deed was done!

And so the seas were hushed, and not a cloud
Marred the pale moonlight, save that, here and there,
Wandering far off, some feathery shreds were seen,
As the sole orb, above the lighthouse, held
Its course in loveliness; and not a sound
Came from the distant deep, save that, at times,
Amid the noise of human merriment,
The ear might seem to catch a low faint moan,
A boding sound, as of a dying dirge,
From the sunk rocks; while all was still beside,
And every star seemed listening in its watch;
When the gay packet-bark, to Erin bound,
Resounding with the laugh and song, went on!
Look! she is gone! O God! she is gone down,
With her light-hearted company; gone down,
And all at once is still, save, on the mast,
Just peering o'er the waters, the wild shrieks
Of three, at times, are heard! They, when the dead
Were round them, floating on the moonlight wave,
Kept there their dismal watch till morning dawned,
And to the living world were then restored!