The Country Town and Other Poems By the late William John Courthope ... With a Memoir by A. O. Prickard |
The Country Town and Other Poems | ||
[Within these woods of Arcadie]
Within these woods of ArcadieHe chiefe delight and pleasure tooke,
And on the mountain Parthenie,
Upon the chrystall liquid brooke,
The Muses met him ev'ry day
That taught him sing, to write, and say.
THE COUNTRY TOWN
A REVERIE
A single field which I have looked upon,
Both of them speak of something that is gone.
Wordsworth.
I
1
All outward forms immutable abide,And in my heart a thousand memories spring:
The shepherd sings on yon green barrow's side,
As thirty summers past I heard him sing:
I hear, I hear the same lark answering:
I scent the old, remembered, warm perfume
Of the wild thyme: I tread the Fairy ring;
And welcome, each in their familiar room,
That far-off climbing flock, those shadows in the combe.
2
And calm within the bosom of the down,As though no Time could waste, no Fortune fret
Her ancient peace, I see my own fair Town,
Girdled with golden sunbeams, changeless yet;
Her Tudor roofs; her spires Plantagenet;
Her Castle walls, where many a springing tree,
Elder and ash, their roots have strongly set:
Beneath, the River, o'er the level lea,
Through countless scattered herds winds softly to the sea.
3
Say, do I gaze upon a painted scene,Or linger, still a child, on fairy ground,
While Fancy wafts from every deep ravine
Some sight of marvel, some romantic sound?
Here, many a morn, I've heard the distant hound;
Or watched the leveret scudding far away
With her lone shadow; or rejoicing found
Where in the turf-built trap, the shepherd's prey,
Noosed in the hairy springe, the captive wheat-ear lay.
4
Lo, at my side I see Another stand;I hear a voice that breathes a tender tone;
I follow o'er the vale a pointing hand,
To mill, and spire, and yonder roof, our own.
Alas! The Image fades. I am alone.
Whatever Feeling wrought or Memory gave,
The Voice, the Hand, the Vision, all are gone;—
Viewless and trackless as yon river's wave,
That yesterday rolled down beneath my Father's grave!
5
Sweet Valley! once the scene of boyhood's mirth,And still of dust beloved the sacred shrine,
If e'er, in other days, thy fostering earth
Mingled its ancient memories with mine,
So that in thee my spirit might divine
Some note of hidden harmony unsung;—
Breathe in me, Genius of the Place! refine
Imagination's sense, and teach my tongue
The music of the soil on which my childhood sprung!
6
By stream, and hill, and dale, beneath, around,I see the reliques of the Ages spread;
Where peaceful lies rude Freedom's funeral mound
By turf-grown camps of conquering Empire dead;
And fallen seats of Knighthood's high control.
Fair Spirit! o'er the scene thy influence shed,
And in each lifeless form, with living soul,
Reveal the Nation's course; its birth, its growth, its goal!
II
7
As flows the life-blood from the Heart's deep wellsWith still renewing still destroying tide,
And every moment wastes and builds the cells
Wherein its ceaseless circling currents glide:
So runs the dream-like tale of human pride.
The Nations come; they lay foundations vast,
Creed, Custom, Law; awhile their works abide;
Then vanish; or new Times old Forms re-cast,
Taught by their master Change, God's chief Iconoclast.
8
Perhaps yon swelling barrow buries deepSome chief, once ranger of Andreda's waste:
He sits, his forehead bent, as though in sleep,
His bow and flinty barb beside him placed,
And meal, by pious hands prepared in haste,
That the lone spirit, from the mortal clay
Released, might find the well-known cup, and taste
The charitable food, then speed his way,
Through more enchanting scenes to urge a swifter prey.
9
Vain Creed! Let Science rob the roofless tomb,To vaunt the growing glories of our kind;
And from the relics of his art assume
His soul debased, his half inhuman mind!
Yet was he Man! His simpler heart enshrined
An image of the Unseen. Erect he trod;
Since in the waves, the stars, the sun, the wind,
He saw the Maker's hand; and on the sod
He reared the turfy pile, and bent the knee to God.
10
From mystic Eld his dim religion came:Untouched to keep the Father's sacred powers;
To save the Household Gods from household shame;
And seal with holy awe the Marriage bowers.
Seems then his Instinct less refined than ours?
Or what avails our Reason's high discourse,
Whose hearth each day the adulterous wife deflowers,
Unpitied leaves her babe, nor feigns remorse,
While Law the wanton speeds, and grants the glad Divorce?
11
Nor foreign seemed to his untutored breastThe thoughts that Fatherland could once inspire;
Of social hope, and hate, and joint desire.
Doubt not that in his heart the patriot fire
Full often glowed! Perhaps Cassivelan
Called him to arms; perhaps the priestly choir
Inflamed his spirit, when, from clan to clan,
To heal Bonduca's woes, the word of vengeance ran!
12
Yes, he was Man! And we, who o'er him boastOur arts, our eloquence, what are we more?
Whose eloquence hath too, too dearly cost
Our country, all distraught with Faction's roar;
Who, while our arts adventurous explore
The shrine of Nature, in self-love too fond,
Now, raised to heaven, in boundless rapture soar,
Now, earthward dashed, with coward hearts despond,
And, blind with present cares, have lost the Hope beyond!
III
13
Whoe'er thou art that, Man's primaeval stateBelittling, seek'st to magnify thine own,
Forecasting for thy race a boundless date,
Go, view the Roman's villa overthrown!
There, on some few Mosaics brightly shown,
Lingers the radiant Venus' conquering smile;
There Cupid Gladiators strive in stone,
Fresh-tinted, as when fountains flashed erewhile
In the wide Court, or cheered the marble Peristyle.
14
Of those proud walls, with splendour once alive,The rain, the spade, the battle, and the mole,
All else have wasted: only these survive,
The ironic whimsy of some Roman droll.
Yet these had power to sap a Nation's soul!
Not Arms could tame the British freeman's pride,
But all-corrupting Art his fancy stole:
Luxurious Science fought on Slavery's side;
And, as his Culture grew, his manly Virtue died.
15
Petronius! was the subtle mockery thine,That tells for ever, on this marble floor,
For what vain dust and ashes men resign
Those natural boons no Science can restore?
Well did the crafty tyrant judge thy lore,
Who bade thee leave thy Baiae's languid wave,
To brood awhile beside a barbarous shore,
And teach the rude, the generous, and the brave,
How poor a thing is life, how sweet to be a slave!
16
Thou monstrous spawn of Rome's imperial fateA fiery fancy in a heart of ice!
'Twas thine, when Public Virtue left the state,
To rule the Arbiter of polished vice:
Of base desires to fix the point device;
For Lust and Sloth to twine the laurel wreath;
To publish nameless deeds in terms precise;
Ev'n for thine emptied vein and failing breath
Lingering the sweets of Song —the Epicure of death!
17
Strange fate, if here thy wit a weapon foundTo lash the falsehood of thy falling age;
Its puny warfare with mock triumph crowned,
Its hearths profaned, its prostituted stage!
Thy sounder judgement scorned the Euphuist rage
Of honeyed words that ever blind the young:
And, while Conceit obscured the Stoic's page,
False Taste the poet's harp too highly strung—
The Satyr's lecherous art kept pure the Latin tongue.
18
No less I deem not that the Roman PeaceOur island fathers' hearts subdued in vain;
Whose iron hand bade tribal feuds to cease,
Paved the long road, and strewed the golden grain.
Thy equitable rule no orgies stain,
Agricola! no foul Proconsul's greed:
In thee Rome's Rural Genius lived again,
And Sacramental Duty; noble seed,
Henceforth on British soil nursed by a purer Creed!
IV
19
‘Not of this world my kingdom!’ Heard I notThe Evangel word descend from Heaven's blue dome,
And hover, dove-like, o'er the shrines where rot
The Art, the Lust, the Majesty of Rome?
‘Not of this world!’ Once more the echoes come,
In these green hills of quiet Christendom,
And o'er his head the skylark shakes his wings,
And from the vale below the slender steeple springs!
20
Such sounds of old in many a Northman's breastPrevailed, nor least in thine, Gundrada's Lord!
Whether thy spirit fled its own unrest,
Or conscience goaded with some crime abhorred,
Here, at God's shrine, thy lavish gifts were poured;
And hence the priory rose. Magnificent
Swelled the round Arch; the glowing Window soared;
And, at the Altar, meek the Warrior bent
Before the cloistered Priest who bade his soul ‘Repent!’
21
And sure if e'er, in Faith's exalted mood,The visions that in Bethlehem came to cheer
Saint Jerome's cell, the strains that solitude
Drew earthwards for Theresa's ravished ear,
Could bring the soul the balm of Heaven —'twere here;
With rural sights to Contemplation dear,
And fainter breathes the fame of human ills,
As yon far clouds whose shadows fleck the silent hills!
22
Why roofless then remain these ivied pilesOf pinnacle and arch, the owl's abode?
The shrineless choirs, the desolated aisles,
O'er which proud Commerce drives her iron road?
What means the Monastery's fall? Has God
Stamped with this signet of His high disdain
The path that first the Saint of Nursia trod?
Springs there no Grace from penitential Pain?
Did Bernard keep his watch, did Francis fast, in vain?
23
Not so! The saints for their own ages wrought,Sweetening the gross world with a purer leaven:
But, when the times were full, the Almighty taught
That on this earth is found no cloistered Heaven.
Few are the souls that Solitude hath shriven!
‘Love beareth all!’ And happier those abide,
And unto them Perfection's palm is given,
Who, in Temptation's fiery furnace tried,
Still in their daily walk confess the Crucified!
24
Church of our Fathers, to thy fame be true!Not claiming haughty powers to loose and bind;
But like thy gentle Priest our Chaucer drew,
Mild, social, active, charitable, kind;
Not all unheedful of the People's mind,
Nor on the People's pleasure forced to wait;
Simple in Faith, by Wisdom's lore refined,
For rich for poor fulfil thine ample fate,
And breathe from age to age, the Conscience of the State!
25
Forbid it, Heaven, our eyes should see the day,When from the hallowed Throne Religion flung
By envious sects shall lie the tortured prey
Of Priesthood's dogma, or of Faction's tongue!
That day the knell of Liberty were rung!
The State should toil with feebler heart and brain,
And all the fibres of its soul unstrung;
And Science sink; and Superstition reign:—
Then these Monastic walls perhaps should rise again!
V
26
But lo! his front the castle proudly rears,And with unguarded rampire seems to frown,
As, o'er the gulf of twice three hundred years,
He watched the battle rolling from the down.
See, see the breathless, trembling, gazing town!
De Montfort! here, the might of Henry's Crown!
They close, they perish! these for sceptred Sway,
For chartered Freedom those; and doubtful hangs the day.
27
'Tis past, 'tis gone! the sounds of conflict end:And in the level sunlight, calm and sweet,
The grey romantic bulwarks gently blend
With the red roofs that nestle at their feet.
Faint sounds the murmuring commerce of the street;
Along the vale the train's far echoes roll,
Lingering; and sometimes, at the Lover's Seat,
Low laughter rises from the ash-crowned knoll;
And in the evening silence clicks the peaceful bowl.
28
Fair looks the Ruin in his calm decline;But what red annals line his hoary stone,
Whose very moss breathes heriot and fine,
The liege's tallage and the vassal's moan!
On such a rugged soil was Freedom sown!
From civil conflict sprung the Realm's accord;
The armèd Manor checked the lawless Throne:
Home truth spoke once yon Castle's haughty lord,
‘If titles rust in peace, the rust is on a sword!’
29
Stout-hearted chief of England's warlike peers,Be every noble's accent clear as thine!
Breathe thou thy spirit from the far-off years
To where unbroken runs thy lordly line!
Still in thy keep Fitzalan's heirs combine
Their banners old; still on their jewelled shields
Familiar crest, ancestral motto shine;
And quartered Cheque, on or and azure fields,
Claims for Earl Warren's race the tribute Fealty yields!
30
‘Ne vile velis!’ ‘Look thou upward still!’‘Invicta virtus!’ ‘Manly then remain!’
‘Jour de ma vie!’ ‘Thy day's high task fulfil!’
With words like these can England's Noblesse wane?
O you, the scions of each vigorous strain,
Whose sires on sea and shore have fought and bled,
Or for their country toiled with statesman's brain,
Still lead the sons of those your fathers led,
Who hear in yours the footsteps of the famous dead!
31
Should blood like yours degenerate, better farTo blot the memory of each manful deed!
How vain the lustre of a Cross or Star
On bosoms bursting with a placeman's greed!
See now, how Lies, Dishonour, Treason, speed!
Yet nerveless drifts the ermined demagogue,
Heading the maddened crowd he dares not laed;
And leaves the Throne to sink, a foundering log,
Where Faction spreads around her vast unfathomed bog!
32
By Gold and Envy thrust from Britain's shore,Sad Chivalry, with slow departing flight,
Claims a last refuge where she rose of yore,
And finds on German ground one patriot Knight.
O! for a voice like his with manly might,
To plead, a later Pitt, our Sovereign's right,
Our Country's cause! —Vain Fancy, check thy range,
And paint in homelier haunts the broadening stream of change!
VI
33
That house was Delia's, last of all her name,To her lone hand bequeathed through many sires;
There seventy years she dwelt in virgin fame,
Fair daughter of a race of ruddy squires.
Few were their tastes, and artless their desires;
A stock deep-rooted like their forest oak;
Remote from foreign customs of the shires,
And foemen by their blood to outland folk,
Who scorned not wooden shoes, nor Christian English spoke.
34
Not yet had London taught the rural ThaneTo sigh for charms across the county bound.
Content they watched, like old Verona's swain,
Sunrise and sunset on their fathers' ground.
Yet sometimes, resting from the horn and hound,
Or loosed from business of the sylvan sphere,
More social joys in yonder walls they found;
Here would they swell the gay Assembly, here
Would greet the welcome spring, or speed the waning year.
35
Of wider worlds beyond their ingle's nookBut little did they hear, and nothing read;
Yet mightier fame at time their bosoms shook,
Of Lisbon ruined, or of Robespierre dead;
And when, with patriot laurels garlanded,
From north to south the Mail exultant flew,
And east and west the fiery message sped,
Belfrey to belfry pealed the county through,
And Albuera roared, or thundered Waterloo!
36
And Delia's self? Methinks I see the Maid,Even in her winter wrinkles kind and fair;
Her silver snuff-box; and her powdered hair.
Much could she tell of each presumptive heir
In every County House; nor would forget
The name of one tenth cousin in her prayer;
On Heaven and Heraldry her soul was set;
And each by heart she knew her Bible and Debrett.
37
Long has she vanished with her pride of birth,And vanished, too, her far descended race.
Hushed are the scenes of once familiar mirth;
Of all those genial hours of courtly grace
No memory lingers. To what uses base
The scutcheoned Parlour turns! With drudging quill
The Legal Genius grimly rules the place;
And, on the tables sacred to Quadrille,
Drones o'er the mouldered Deed, or drafts the dying Will.
VII
38
To all their ashes peace! And peace to thine,Proud Crier, huge in triple cape bedight,
And thee, whose voice gave wakeful ears the sign
Of each slow hour that wore the weary night!
Gone, too, I know, is old Manorial Right.
Can Fur and Chain thy fancy more delight
Than Borough, Reeve and Constable? Forbear!
Nor pray the scornful Muse to celebrate a—Mayor!
39
Her rather urge in elegiac layTo mourn forgotten Feasts; when Twelfth Night's been
Proclaimed the Revel's Monarch; or May Day
Decked the gay sweep, and chose the floral Queen.
Few were thy maids at Midsummer, I ween,
But with propitious hemp seed strewed the ground.
Or watched the burning nuts on Hallowe'en:
No swain but Christmas Eve with lamb's wool crown'd;
And shivered in the sun when Candlemas came round.
40
Nor has it pleased thy sons to quite unlearnAll festal records of their fathers' fame.
Still, when November's misty Nones return,
Thy streets at midnight leap with joyous flame:
The shadowed hills a lurid landscape frame,
Now rises from the crowd the wild acclaim,
While thy grave Bishop, girt with crook and cope,
Exhorts on fiery pile an unrecanting Pope.
41
But more poetic scenes of pastoral careAre thine, when all the Weald has ceased to reap,
And Autumn brings the Equinoctial Fair.
Then every downland farm and valley deep,
Thousands on thousands drive their banded sheep;
A wattled camp blockades the green hill-side,
Where each his charge the serge-clad shepherds keep;
A lone, religious race, dark-haired, sad-eyed;
And near, with upward gaze, their ready dogs abide.
42
There may you Damon see with Thyrsis stand,To sell and buy, if Fortune hit the mean,
Probing the woolly backs with critic hand,
One quick to glory, one to censure keen.
This way and that the vantage seems to lean;
But still the doubtful sixpence hangs between;
Once more the part, return, debate, compare—
Then close, and joyful toast the bargain at the ‘Bear’.
VIII
43
Genius of Local Life, on whom the firstThe links of feudal charity depend;
Whose generous soil our early freedom nursed,
And mutual faith of master, servant, friend!
Once 'twas the Briton's pride, the patriot's end,
To see rich harvests whiten at his door,
Fair profits, made at home, at home to spend,
And feed the English realm from English store,
No parasite or slave of any foreign shore.
44
Time was! But lo! a loftier age succeeds,Refined with art, in luxury grown old;
The world itself scarce sates our pampered needs;
Gain all our tillage, all our harvest Gold!
Therefore no more the rural year is told
By Calendar and Saint: more rare the swains,
That tend the rusted plough, the dwindling fold:
Deep in their bosoms smoulder sullen pains:
Their native fields they leave: the Feudal Order wanes.
45
To various climes their Fortune bids them roam;Yet is not Love nor old Remembrance dead;
And oft some pensive spirit turns to Home;
Whether by Burma's shrines in arms he tread;
Or keep, in Athabasca's pine-built shed,
Find 'neath the Southern Cross a wandering bed;
Then comes some vision of his far-off town;
And in his dreams he hears the voices of the Down.
46
Once more, the long unbroken lonely line,With rain-beat corn-rick dark against the sky,
His prospect bounds; he breathes the Channel brine;
And, wind-like, hears the plover's wail float by.
Hark! did some watch-dog send a far reply
From homestead hid remote in yonder combe?
He starts from slumber. 'Twas the dingo's cry:
The yellow gorse is gone; and, in its room,
The gum-tree towers above; the giant nettles bloom.
47
Transformed, not dead, from generations goneBy Memory brought, we know not how nor whence,
The Soul of Feudal Liberty lives on,
The Nation's shield, the Empire's ‘cheap defence’.
Victoria's vassals lo !—a league immense—
Who of their Mother, England, hold in fee,
Bound by one Crown, one Tongue, one Patriot Sense;
Thrice happy! Happier yet, if time shall see
One Federated Realm, the Empire of the Free!
48
Warmed by their fire, old Town, thy kindred bloodShall through thy shrunken veins more swiftly play,
And rouse again thy youth's green lustihood
In Sydney's art, in Melbourne's growing sway.
Thine is the sunset, theirs the coming day;
Yet in their ears thy worn memorials say—
The living cradle of their buried past—
That Death, howe'er he halt, to all must come at last.
49
As when, up-welling from his fountain deeps,The Infant River leaves his native snows,
And down the rocks in sun-bright freedom leaps,
While from a thousand streams his volume grows.
Now distant seem the mountains where he rose;
Now slow he lingers on the pleasant lea;
Now through the busy town majestic flows;
Then, sudden, feels the tide by wharf and quay,
And hears far off the murmur of the mighty Sea.
These birds were, in times that the writer can remember, caught in great numbers by the shepherds on the South Downs. The trap was cut in the form of a T, with a noose of wool or horse-hair. The wheat-ear was popularly supposed to run under the raised turf for shelter when a cloud passed over the sun. It is now a rare bird in this district.
The great Forest of Anderida, named by the Saxons Andred's Wald, which spread over what is still called the ‘Weald’ of Sussex. The downs in the neighbourhood are covered with tumuli.
Ethnologists and optimists endeavour to represent barbarous Man as little superior to the beast, in order to conclude that the human race has reached the half-way house on the road to Utopia. (See, for instance, Sir J. Lubbock's Prehistoric Times.) This is surely as unwarrantable as Rousseau's extravagant exaltation of savage life. Sir H. Maine has recently shown very conclusively how superficial are the differences between Men in the primitive and in the refined stages of national growth. (See Popular Government, p. 143.)
A writer in the Quarterly Review for January (p. 197) shows from Caesar (De Bell. Gall. vi. 19) that the law of the Celtic races was founded on Patria potestas.
These designs, perfectly preserved, were found under the South Downs in 1811. They still remain on the spot; but it is much to be desired that some steps be taken for securing them against the inevitable destruction that awaits them from natural causes.
The fascination exercised by Roman Culture on the British imagination is vividly described by Tacitus:
‘Iam vero Principum filios liberalibus artibus erudire, et ingenia Britannorum studiis Gallorum anteferre, ut qui modo linguam Romanam abnuebant, eloquentiam concupiscerent. Inde etiam habitus nostri honor et frequens toga: paulatimque discessum ad delenimenta vitiorum, porticus et balnea et conviviorum elegantiam; idque apud imperitos humanitas voca. batur, cum pars servitutis esset.’— Agricola, 21.
A very admirable and ingenious paper by the Rev. Thomas Debary, in the Sussex Archaelogical Collections (vol. xxx), gives us some grounds for supposing that the Villa was the work of Petronius Turpilianus, who was certainly one of the earliest Governors of Britain, being sent by Nero to succeed Suetonius Paulinus, ‘tamquam exorabilior’ (Agricola, 16). From the glimpses Tacitus gives of his character and public position as one of the favourites of Nero, it seems most probable that he is the same as Caius Petronius of whose death the historian draws so graphic a picture. Everything, again, seems to identify the latter with Petronius Arbiter. We may, therefore, at least please our imaginations with supposing that the writer who so admirably described Trimalchio's Dinner was the inventor of these designs, the graceful simplicity of which is quite characteristic of his taste. About the time of Petronius' governorship, we are told, ‘Didicere iam barbari quoque ignoscere vitiis blandientibus’ (Agricola, 16).
Tacitus says of him (Annals, xvi. 18): ‘His own vices, or his imitation of the vices of others, procured for him, as a judge of taste, the closest intimacy with Nero, who, satiated as he was, thought nothing agreeable or refined till it had received the approval of Petronius.’
‘Illi dies per somnum, nox officiis et oblectamentis vitae transigebatur; utque alios industria, ita hunc ignavia ad famam protulerat.’— Annals, xvi. 18.
‘To linger’ is used transitively by Shakespeare, Midsummer Night's Dream, Act i, sc. I, v. 4; Richard II, Act ii, sc. 2, v. 72.
For the account of Petronius' suicide see Tacitus, Annals, xvi. 19: ‘Far from dispatching himself instantaneously, he made an incision in his veins, binding them up and opening them at pleasure while he conversed with his friends, though in no serious mood, nor with any attempt to gain a reputation for fortitude. He listened in turn while they discoursed, not on the immortality of the soul or the reasonings of philosophers, but in light song and flowing verse. . . . He feasted and indulged in sleep; so that the death which he was forced to undergo might seem to come upon him unawares.
Petronius was himself granted a Triumph by the Senate at the instigation of Nero.—Tacitus, Annals, xv. 72.
He laughs at the ‘mellitos verborum globulos’ so much in favour with the writers of his age, as they are with those of our own. The sound critical judgement shown in Petronius Arbiter is what we should expect after reading the account Tacitus gives of his character.
The great Cluniac Monastery, founded by William de Warren in 1072, and dedicated to St. Pancras. It was most richly endowed by the Earl and his descendants, and with its walls and enclosures covered over thirty acres, on the outskirts of the town here described.
Gundrada's epitaph says:
‘Stirps Gundrada ducum, decus aevi, nobile germen, intulit ecclesiis Anglorum balsama morum.’
She died in childbirth, the 27th of May 1085, and was buried within the walls of the Priory.
The Monastery of St. Pancras was surrendered by the Prior to Henry VIII in 1538, and was granted by the King to Cromwell. A few ruined arches are now all that remains of what must once have been one of the grandest monasteries in England. The London, Brighton and South Coast Railway runs over the site.
Alluding to the great and stubbornly contested battle fought on the spot in 1264 between Henry III and his Barons under Simon de Montfort; one result of which was the direct representation of the people in Parliament. De Montfort made his soldiers mark their breasts with white crosses.
The Castle precincts are now converted to the peaceful purposes here described. The Bowling Green is in fact one of the old institutions of the Town.
A speech attributed to John de Warren, seventh Lord of the Town, when Edward I employed Commissioners to make inquiry through the kingdom by what title or warrant (‘quo warranto’) the landowners held their estates. Holinshed tells the story: ‘Many were thus called to answer, till at length the Lord John Warren, Earle of Surrey, a man greatly beloved of the people, perceyving the Kynge to have caste his net for a preye, and that there was not one whyche spake against those so bitter and cruell proceedings; and, therefore, being called afore the Justices about this matter, and being asked by what right he held his landes? he sodenly drawing forth an old rusty sword, “By this instrument”, sayde he, “doe I holde my landes, and by the same I entende to defende them.” ’ It was after this speech that the Warren family assumed their motto of ‘Tenebo’.
Two of the present Lords of the Town have rights over threefourths of the Castle, Town, and Lordship, by direct inheritance, through the marriage of their ancestors with Joanna and Margaret, heiresses in 1415 of Thomas Fitzalan, Earl of Arundel, whose grandfather derived his right from Alice, sister of John, eighth and last Earl of Warren, who died without lawful issue in 1347. A title, dating from the Conquest, of nearly thirty generations! Sir Richard Sackville, ancestor of the third Lord in the present day, and father of Thomas Sackville, famous as a statesman and a poet, who was created Baron of Buckhurst in Sussex, obtained the remaining fourth of the lordship, either by grant or purchase, in the reign of Elizabeth. His descendants became Dukes of Dorset.
The mottoes of the present Lords of the Town. It is almost needless to add that what follows is meant to apply to the historic English aristocracy generally.
‘In ordinary circumstances,’ said Prince Bismarck in the Prussian Diet on January 28th, [1886] ‘I should be no advocate of such a policy; but when the cause of the Fatherland is imperilled, I will not hesitate to give the Emperor [William I] becoming advice. That minister would be a miserable coward who did not risk his head to save his country in despite even of the will of a majority.’ In England politicians seem to have forgotten the existence of such an institution as the Crown. With us ‘all are for the Party, none are for the State’.
Old folk in Sussex still speak of the inhabitants of other counties as ‘foreigners’, and have a proper contempt for the ‘sheres’.
The two points of inferiority in the French nation generally insisted on by English writers in the early part of the eighteenth century were the want of political liberty and the wooden shoes of the peasantry.
metiturque suo rusticus orbe diem.
Claudian, De Sene Veronensi. [see pp. 96-7].
A friend of mine tells me he has often heard one of his aunts speak of the profound emotion aroused in the neighbourhood of her home—she was a girl of fourteen at the time—when the Portsmouth coach passed on its way to London with the tidings that ‘Robert Spires’ was dead. Wordsworth, in the Prelude, also describes the tremendous effect produced by the news.
A common transformation. The Town is full of fine old houses of pleasure, now converted into houses of business.
The last of the old Watchmen lingered on, an institution of his native Town, till quite recently. Besides crying the hour, he announced, for the benefit of those comfortably housed, the state of things out of doors: ‘Ten of the clock! 'Tis a fine starry night!’
Like many other ancient boroughs, the Town, not long since, exchanged a feudal Constitution, dating from the Conquest, and truly Venetian in its character, for a commonplace Mayor and Corporation.
A common countryside belief, curiously encouraged by the experience of the present year [1886], is preserved in the old rhyming hexameters:
‘Si sol splendescat Maria purificante,maior erit glacies post festum quam fuit ante.’
Sixteen persons in all were burned in the Town in three years under Bloody Mary. Its inhabitants have never forgotten these tragedies, which they commemorate every year, on the Fifth of November, with a zest beyond any place in England, by burning the Pope, in the manner described, on the spot where the martyrs suffered. The ‘Bishop’ who officiates at the function is attired in full ecclesiastical costume, and, as the whole town is in masquerade, the scene is extraordinarily picturesque.
A great Sheep Fair for the South Down district is held on the heights above the Town on the last two Tuesdays of every September. The number of sheep collected is very large. I have myself seen over thirty thousand penned there, but formerly the number was much greater.
AN EVENING IN SUSSEX
From silences to silences,
As when a diver drops at ease
Far down the waters to the halls
Of Thetis and her silver seas,
Beholding through the delicate mist
The colours shifting by degrees
From purple into amethyst.
The shingled spire so darkly stands
Against the gold and crimson bands,
Methinks it were not hard to tell
How points the clock his brazen hands,
Or if the arrow warns us well,
The vane that looks across the lands
The rising winds to sentinel.
Of bell, or bird, or rustling tree?
It is the children, homeward bound,
Some little comrade they have crowned
The monarch of their revelry;
Their laughter floats along the hill,
The laughter dies, and all is still.
The solitary stages? Now
His hoofs are on the steep hill-side,
Now loud and full upon the brow,
Now faintly dying down the hollow:
How many a mile the moon has shown,
Fast dwindling on the friendly stone,
And yet and yet his steed must follow
The road that runs, so white and lone,
Between dark avenues of trees,
Towards the southern villages.
In some unfathomable sea,
Where with majestic sail the moon
Sweeps, like a galleon, to the tune
Of oarsmen bending silently.
Her full bright face is clear and cold,
As silver touched with palest gold;
Her liveried henchmen of the night,
Rose-tinged and gold, and chrysolite,
Move on her errands manifold,
And come and pass and ply their wings
In sweet ethereal wanderings.
So sweet a sight, so strange, so rare,
Or fruit, or flower, or lady fair?
Around her, in a girdling band,
White companies of clouds are spread,
As in the North snow mountains stand,
Encompassing a silver land
Upon a blue lake islanded;
Or moving now before her face,
About their mother's feet, nor less
As goats around their shepherdess
In most delightful pastures stray.
With such a glow it seems to fall
Upon the gables and the eaves,
It looks so pure, so chaste, so holy,
That I could half believe the Hall
Were some old convent mystical,
Haunted by cloistered melancholy.
That hast not any part or name
In this our mortal world,—divine
And yet most tender; come the same
As I have seen thee when the beams
Grew softer in the silent grace
Of thy sweet coming; with the face
That I have worshipped in my dreams,
Come to me! 'Tis the hour; and now
There's something tells me thou art near;
It is thy footfall I can hear;
Thy lips are pressed upon my brow;
Thy breath is in the garden scents
That float so softly in the air;
And all of nature seems to wear
The impress of thy lineaments.
Whose leaves the soulless breezes stir
Amid the beech-wood! Come to me!
It is thy voice that bids me be
Or if indeed in yon white star,
Where love and life and beauty are
More true, more tender, more intense,
Thy spiritual home I see,
Stretch out thine hand and bear me hence!
O blessèd Lady, take me far
Unto the haunts of innocence!
So for a little space I flee
From my false self, and dwell with thee
HOP-PICKING
Thine outlines rise, fair Harbour of the Year;
As the white cliffs, seen faintly o'er the foam,
To wave-worn sailors promise rest at home;
Season not only felt by tree and flower,
The Man, the State, the Muse, confess thy power,
Each owns thy influence. Not to thee belong
The youth of Spring, the burst of lyric song,
Nor all the blended harmonies that tune
The softened strength of Manhood's summer noon:
Yet though the fire must sink; though now are gone
The flowers that once in Fancy's garden shone;
Though the heart leap not to the amorous dance,
And visionary dream of young Romance;
Some balms thou hast, to soothe approaching Age,
More than the Spring can give; Experience sage,
The penetrating Mind, the judging Soul,
The skill to measure Life's proportioned whole;
And if the songs of Love thou must resign,
The ethic Ode, the Elegy, are thine;
To reap these fields thy Muse may still avail,
Though late the harvest. Genial Autumn, hail
Her infant, born with travail and with tears;
As joys the poet, who beholds his scheme
Rise from the dim conception of a dream,
In form proportioned, in expression sure;
So when our weary Mother, Earth, has run
An eight months' journey round the ripening Sun,
Poised on the autumn's verge, she seems to rest,
And views, well-pleased, the offspring of her breast.
Hushed in the woodland boughs, the birds are still;
Scarce murmurs through the copse the dwindled rill;
The sap more faintly circles through the leaves,
Just tinged with gold; and many a wain receives
From many a subject soil the tributary sheaves.
Barley, and oats, and wheat have stored their grain,
Alone untouched the ripened hops remain,
Though, thick with flower, the tendrils upward trend,
And golden clusters from the twine depend.
Speed then your gathering bands, ye farmers, speed!
Let oast and bin the reaper's toil succeed;
Lest, while ye still delay, the linnet's beak
A swift destruction in your garden wreak;
Or sudden tempest make Occasion slip,
And dash the brimming goblet from your lip!
In the low sun a garden glow serene:
With scarce a breeze each heavy cluster fanned,
Seemed but to wait to-morrow's gathering hand.
In crowns of gold I watched the hop-poles rise,
And Eldorado gleamed before my eyes.
Then on the helpless rows a midnight wind
From ambush sprang, with torrent rains combined,
And lo! at morn, where flamed that dream of gold,
A waste of withered flowers and cankered mould!
So, reared like Babel on foundations frail,
Sinks human pride, so man's ambitions fail:
And twelve months' labour in a night expires.
Pours from the city's heart the pilgrim throng.
To Canterbury still their way they wend
Through Southwark streets—but with what different end.
With mien how different, from the Tabard's door
Rode forth that joyous pilgrimage of yore!
Though scarce less various seem each motley kind,
For these no bridles jingle in the wind;
No hospitable Host, with converse gay,
No Miller's bagpipe cheers them on their way;
But Hunger with his sunken cheek is there,
To-day's Resourcelessness, To-morrow's Care;
From many a dreary haunt of dwindled Trade,
Of sweated Labour and of Crafts decayed,
They quit their alleys, and, with fitful joy,
In Kent's fair gardens snatch a month's employ.
His weary frame! mark well his pensive brow!
Two hundred autumns have been told by Time,
Since first his fathers fled their sunny clime,
To claim the chartered boons this land bestowed—
The equal-measured tax, the safe abode,
The right for each to seek his chosen good,
And worship Heaven whatever way he would;
To reap secure the harvest of his skill.
To these 'neath Southern skies they left their loom,
And wove their silken web in London's gloom;
Their homes forsook, and camped on alien ground,
Nor mourned their loss—for Freedom here they found.
Oh! had those fathers dreamed what deeds of shame
Should yet be done in English Freedom's name;
Had seen Free Trade their children's rights deny;
Heard a free City's universal cry,
‘Freedom is to be rich! Be rich or die!’—
Sure, with such foresight, they had ne'er removed
Their habitation from the land they loved;
Thus free, in chains they had preferred to dance,
And born to slavery, died as slaves in France.
To watch where opened once his garden-gate;
Where 'neath the rose-clad porch, at fall of eve,
His homeward steps his cottage would receive.
Him, of safe toil and weekly wage assured,
The golden promise of the Town allured;
High on her crest a wave of Fortune bore,
Then left him stranded on a barren shore.
Familiar things, to Memory, ah, how sweet!
Gaze where he will, his longing vision greet.
Unchanged he sees, against the evening skies,
The lofty spire, the red-roofed gables, rise.
No axe has touched the consecrated glade,
Where through the wood his childish footsteps strayed:
Along each hedge he numbers every tree;
All things have kept their station—all but he.
His birthright's gone; another fills his place.
For him no more that cheerful hearth shall burn,
That lighted casement hail his glad return,
To share the well-earned meal, the wholesome sleep:
Those boons were his—he turns his head to weep.
The farmer's eye his marshalled host surveys:
In equal shares he parts the garden lines;
Each rank distributes, and each post assigns;
But, no less just than wise, leaves every plot
Among th' expectant hands to fall by lot.
Were his the choice, the tongue of envious blame,
Methinks, might blot his equitable fame;
Since loud they triumph who, by Fortune's scheme,
Obtain their portion near the running stream.
More deeply fertile there they know the soil,
Washed from the hillside slope; there easier toil
Brings to the swelling bin a more abundant spoil.
By lot of old, at Moses' wise command,
The tribes of Israel share the Promised Land;
Else half Manasseh would, he knew, ascribe
Their brethren's western luck to Joshua's bribe.
Fair is the social scene: away, repose!
Time, Weather, Mood, Occasion, Sun, and Sky,
Bid every roof the household task lay by;
And all alike, the matron and the maid,
Join son or lover and the harvest aid.
Shrouded at first in deep pavilions green,
Proceeds the toil, not silent, though unseen;
Blue skirt, red bodice, fleck the brightening field,
As the strong hinds, in each deplenished row.
Lay the stripped poles, like captive standards, low;
Then for their eager troops fresh booty win,
Measure each brimming, feed each empty bin,
Within whose bosom, thick as Danaë's shower,
Descends the golden cluster, flower by flower.
A grateful odour floats upon the breeze,
And lulls the labourer's sense with soothing ease;
Or spreads its soft narcotic influence round,
Where cradled babes lie fast in slumber bound;
Above their heads glad talk and rustic mirth resound.
High in the oast the drier plies his art,
To feed the kiln, and keep an even flame
In the round stove, a wight of peerless fame;
Through all the neighbouring dales renowned as much
For certain judgement as for finer touch.
The loaded wains arrived, he bids them pour
The yellow affluence on the topmost floor,
Heavy with dews of heaven. Anon, below,
He stirs the furnace to a tempered glow,
And feeds the flame with sulphur's brightening blend:
From the moist flowers the drowsy fumes ascend,
Rush through the cowl to mingle with the day,
And in blue vapour breathe their weight away.
Then, hour by hour, amid the dwindled heap,
For the last proof his feeling fingers creep;
And as the shrivelling stalks show hard and dry,
The cooling chamber claims the rich supply.
With varied skill, but kindly brotherhood.
The oast's last yield is in the canvas pressed;
The last red embers in the kiln expire;
The last tired labourer's hand receives his hire:
To Labour and to Wealth alike be given
Exchange of thanks; from both the praise to Heaven:
Then, with glad hearts, let all united come,
And at the Landlord's feast sing Harvest Home.
Must slow disease waste all these charms away?
These viewless links, by Nature's kindly plan
Uniting Earth to Heaven, and man to man,
Dissolve in soulless elements, decayed
By the long rot of too luxuriant Trade,
Lost in the welter of oblivious Time,
And unlamented in one poet's rhyme?
Borne on the breeze of thy ‘dull Devonshire’,
Once more in ‘noble numbers’ to record
The harvest gathering and the festive board!
Since, among British bards, alone in thee,
Herrick, was found his ‘choice felicity’,
Whose verse enshrined Bandusia's crystal charm,
And the plain dainties of the Sabine farm.
Thou couldst command thy lord, on his own ground,
Come with his hinds to see the Hock-cart crowned,
Breathe the fine fancies of a poet's soul
O'er Twelfth-Night revel, and o'er wassail bowl,
And tune, on ‘curious unfamiliar’ string,
The feast of Mab and of the Fairy King.
Scarce saw the lingering Feudal Age depart;
To praise a world by all believed divine.
Then every Saint could claim his festal day,
By faith made holy, and by custom gay;
By stream and fountain Legend wandered free,
And on each hill Tradition marked her tree.
As in the Golden Age, the genial soil
Offered, unasked, poetic wine and oil;
Fancy put forth her swift unlabouring hand,
And plucked the fruit—for all was Fairyland.
Of life's experience, and of learning less.
Far from the clash of civil conflict, far
From factious Senate and from wrangling Bar,
Of Nature's busy universal scene,
The labour of the fields, that lay between
Their saffron daybreak and their sunset glow,
Was all they knew, and all they cared to know;
Like foreign kingdoms seemed each neighbouring shire,
And the world's centre was their village spire.
Yet could their faith on loftier pinnion soar,
And worlds unknown to our dull sense explore.
If smaller seemed their starry system, Space
For them was peopled with the Angel race;
If to their earth too narrow bounds were given,
The larger prospect they enjoyed of Heaven.
In starry distance or in hermit's cell.
To rule the busy world she gave good heed,
And curbed th' excess of individual greed:
The realms of toil, and in each ordered Trade
Labour and Wealth alike her equal laws obeyed:
Whether a simpler faith their souls refined,
Or local kinship made their hearts more kind,
With louder voice (for each was bound to each
By mutual service and by daily speech)
Fair Mercy spoke; and lives unused to roam
More dearly prized the charities of Home.
Though in her scales proud Science weigh the sun,
Though swift electric streams our bodies bear
Through depths of ocean and through heights of air,
Say if Life's deep our plummet farther sounds,
Than his who scarcely crossed his parish bounds?
Mere Number, born earth's produce to consume,
Can Home or Country in our hearts find room,
Who to our soil confess no binding tie,
Save to sell dearly what we cheaply buy,
And free from household, family, and clan,
No more our neighbour love, but Abstract Man?
What serves, in times when nothing may abide,
Except to drift upon Opinion's tide,
Seize each impression ere it fade away,
Adore to-morrow what we burn to-day,
And vainly struggling from ourselves to flee,
Call our perpetual motion—Liberty?
To destinies like these? Is this her end?
Thou, whose wise foresight Church and State allied,
And bade them rule as equals, side by side,
Was then, imperial Charles, thy labour vain?
Of this thy Vision could the ages save
No rack or remnant from Oblivion's wave,
But all must vanish, like that land of yore
By Ocean severed from the Cornish shore?
There as they tell, when Britain's life was young,
Glittered the castle, and the steeple sprung;
There Saints wrought miracles, there rode the Knight,
For love of Ladies and defence of Right;
Till, swift as thought, th' Atlantic rose to whelm
The living scene, and sunk so deep the realm,
That now its ancient limits none may guess,
And say with surety: ‘This was Lyonnesse!’
Save when, becalmed, with all his nets afloat,
Some Celtic fisher, dreaming in his boat,
Looks through the wave, and deems he can behold
Far shining spires and battlements of gold.
Then on his charmèd ear, up-surging, swells
The blare of trumpet, or the chime of bells,
And bids him ponder, in believing vein,
What worlds shall rise when Arthur comes again.
For lack of nurture wither from the earth!
Such do not die; but when Ideas descend
From God, with earthly elements they blend.
Condensed like stars, awhile men's steps they guide,
But mix their life with Sloth, Ambition, Pride;
Till, home returning on their heavenly way,
They burst their robe of perishable clay:
The shattered Form surrounding Nature feeds,
And scatters through the earth celestial seeds.
Antique Religion from the world took wing,
But with the Image that her soul enshrined
Touched, ere she passed, the Conscience of mankind.
Time, Avarice, Order, Commerce, banished hence
Fair Chivalry, ‘the nations' cheap defence’;
Yet when the soul of Knighthood sought the sky,
To raise our lives was left us—Loyalty.
And leaps impetuous down the mountain side;
Soon, with a thousand tributaries fed,
Through the low plain it sinks a deeper bed;
Anon by town and tower its waters roll,
And bear whole navies to their ocean goal;
Yet ever, as its mighty volume grows,
It feels the impulse of its cradling snows;—
So, from mixed races and a hundred strains,
Continuous Freedom fills our English veins;
To shores remote its branching currents run,
Yet Blood and Story keep the nation One:
No self-ruled race, through all th' imperial course,
But owns the heart of Britain for its source.
To waste the manors of some neighbour lord;
Nor sovereign ‘Benefice’, nor knightly ‘Fee’,
Exact the ‘Homage’ of his bended knee?
Yet Kinship, common Speech, and old Renown,
Claim from afar due service for the Crown;
And if in peril England call the ‘Ban’,
From many an Ocean Freedom sends her ‘Man’
A happier age of purged Feudality!
A hundred Kingdoms but a single King,
Whose will, by no compulsion, all obey,
A patriot Monarch he, free Liegemen they;
Thence, sent from torrid suns, from polar snow,
From Austral skies with alien stars a-glow,
To Thames' far shores the chosen statesmen come,
To guard the glory of their ancient Home.
Each of his country's inmost mind possessed,
They meet their peers, the Council of the Best.
Called by their Sovereign, by their States elect,
They serve no Faction, they advance no Sect:
Domestic bounds their lofty thoughts surpass;
Wealth strives no more with Labour, Class with Class.
Unfettered forethought, free debate is theirs,
Confederate counsels, and imperial cares;—
How through the tangled maze a way to find
What Blood unites by Interest to bind;
With even weight to bid the taxes fall;
To make the Wealth of each the Health of all;
The Empire's tolls in ordered scheme to range;
Fix in her rival Marts the just exchange;
Protect the poor man's toil; rich Greed control;
Guard th' Individual, and defend the Whole.
In thoughts like these I rashly quit my theme.
Party is Britain's bane. As Faction dies,
The patriot soul shall from the ashes rise:
That soul our hearts and tillage shall restore,
With that our vanished Gardens bloom once more.
The great storm alluded to happened more than twenty years ago, but the foregoing lines, written last spring, illustrate with unfortunate accuracy the destruction wrought in the hop-gardens by the disastrous gales and rains of August in the present year [1908].
See Claudian, De Sene Veronensi qui suburbium nunquam egressus est, from which poem the above lines are freely imitated [see pp. 96-7].
THE CHANCELLOR'S GARDEN
[AT SALISBURY]
III
But now must I of that same Goddess sing,How through the wearie worlde her Empire sprad;
And wheresoever waved her shadowie wing
She turned the minds of men and drave them mad.
Not Venus' selfe so manie altars had,
Nor faithful worshippers that flocked thereto;
Where in her shrine, with rainbows all y-clad,
Her image rose in ever-varying hue,
Which they with vows and prayers by day and night did sue.
IV
Above the rest she had a chosen bower,A certain island sett in western wave,
Which whilome long withstood her fatall power,
And to ancestral laws unchanging clave:
There Freedom dwelt with reverend Order grave,
And holie Churche with hallowed State agreed,
And Mutabilitie did long outbrave,
While yet of Statesmen sprang a valiant breede,
Who in their Sovereign's eare delivered honest rede.
V
But soon her minion, hight Democracie,With new-found arts the conquest did assay:
No land, she taught, with kings was ever free;
Change bringeth all good things: then, madly, they
The memory of past times put farre away,
And quite forgot their countrie's old renowne,
Living from hand to mouth, from daye to daye,
And from the throne did thrust Religion down,
And to foul swine would cast the jewels of the Crown.
VI
Yet though their madness many a man divined,No shepherd of the people them withstood,
Nor dared outright to speake his honest minde,
But glozed with sophis rie, and as he could
From public ill eche sought his private good,
And to the sovereign Crowde would lowlie crawl,
Cozening their soules with lyes and hardihood,
Nay many a time whyte black black whyte miscall:
So fast did knavish Greede his faith and honour thrall.
VII
But some there were that liked not that bad art,Nor to the Titanesse would bow the knee;
But from the shifting world dwelt farre apart
In quiet haunts to olde Religion free.
On these no power had Mutabilitie,
Nor with her planetary raye malign
Might them molest; but Faith and Charitie
Did guide their steps, and on their constant eyne
Full clere the changelesse Starre of Bethlehem did shine.
VIII
Of whom a certain Chancellor there wasIn S--- known, a holie reverend wight;
Full oft was he in Minster seen, whenas
His office, at the change of moon, him plight
To preche, or doe his part in ordered rite;
What time at matins, in sweet chaunt and psalme,
The full-voyced quiristers men's soules delight,
Or sounds at even the deep organ calme,
And o'er the bruisèd spirit breathes celestiall balme.
IX
Ne yet did he, though loving quiet well,His cloystered dayes with Contemplation crown,
But wheresoe'er Disease and Hunger dwell
His steps were still on Mercy's message boune:
Most like that holie clerke whose fayre renowne
Is in Dan Geoffrey's page for ever clere,
Was any sick or sorrie in the towne,
To doe him good he ran with wordes of cheare;
To all men vexed by Change he was both friend and fere.
X
A house he had built to his hearte's desire,With many a rambling roofe, and gable old:
Hard by the Minster with an arrowie spire
Sprang from a verdant turfe y-tinct with gold;
Stone saints it had, and sculptures manifold;
Which often to admire the pilgrims' feete
Were stayde, whom never he with welcome cold
Would harbour, but did courtisely entreat,
And always them refreshed with foode and converse swete.
XI
And when with joyous hearte they gan prepareRenewe their pilgrimage, then, one by one,
This clerke would have them to his garden fayre:
So swete a pleasaunce in that lande was none:
Secure it lay towards the setting sunne;
And right from ende to ende a narrow way
Of velvet swarde did to a river runne,
Whose chrystall face shot back the dazzling day,
And 'neath the gliding streame you saw the green reedes sway.
XII
Ah! how the pleasures of that path to sing?Whose close soft turfe might hide no uglie weede;
But on eche side through all the months of spring
He bade the race of passing flowers succeede,
Most rare of scent and sight, from bulb or seede;
The crocus coming at the March wind's call,
Jonquils that after hyacinths make speede,
The fayre Narcissus, whyte and sweet withal,
And tulips gay, and eke Saint Bruno's lily tall.
XIII
Beneath a northern walle in happie nooke,Warmed with the sun, and sheltered from the winde,
Where he might easie come from bed or booke,
He had of mountayn plantes all manner kinde;
Such as with paines the curious searchers finde,
Remote, on rugged crag, in deepe ravine,
Some once in Chimborazo's clifts entwined,
And some on heights of Himalaya greene,
Or Jura's birch-clad rocks, or valley Engadine.
XIV
There noble Edelweiss was seene to drinkFrom alien ayres her hues of fadeless whyte,
With Saxifrage whose blossoms to the brink
Of perlous cliff oft tempt botanic wight;
Twin-flow'r, her head low hiding from the light;
The bearded Hare-bell; and the Alpine rose,
Adventurous climber of the rockie height;
And Soldanella, hardie nymphe, who shows
Her modest bosom first above the melting snows.
XV
And there was seene the bright Forget-me-not,Flashing through all her beads Lake Leman's blue;
Matched with her peere Androsace, who shot
From many-clustering blooms a rosie hue;
May-Lily, bashfull, peeped her mantle through;
And Dryas fair, with modest shining gem
In eight soft petals set, yet lowly grew;
And Gentian of the snow whose single stem
Gleams deeply through the grass with sapphire diadem.
XVI
To wean these plants the clerke with mickle careWould kindlie soile from moor and mountaine bring,
And mix with buried sherd and broken shaft
From antique niche whereto their rootes might cling,
Rock-like, and watered from the coldest spring:
Also, when winds blew soure or winters froze,
Boughs would he fetch to be their covering:
Well so he deemed his nurselings might suppose
Their heads were safe and warm beneath their native snows.
XVII
Them too would he his tender children call,And in their fortunes many an emblem see
Of human life, and types angelicall:
‘For lo! as with a father's hand,’ quoth he,
‘I guard these flowers from Mutabilitie,
And rear them in strange soil and foreign ayre,—
Ev'n so than grasse of field what more are we,
Who must through mortall world full briefely fare?
Yet is each planted soule our Heavenly Father's care.’
XVIII
Thrice happie they, yea happie they alone,Who in Religion's breast fayre haven finde:
To whom the rural deities are known,
And Nature's hearte, and all the laws of Kinde!
They fear not Change, nor greedie Death behind;
No lust of Praise, nor perishable reign
To mad Ambition moves their quiet minde;
Though Customs die, Tongues vanish, Empires wane,
For them the Throne of God, the changelesse Heavens remayne!
IN MEMORY OF ARTHUR EDEN
For 57 years Vicar of Ticehurst, Sussex. Buried in the Churchyard of St. Mary's, Ticehurst, 21st November, 1908.
Dear was the earth with which his ashes blend.
Here, through his life, he never made a foe;
Here, till his death, he never lost a friend.
Or closed their dying eyes, in hallowed ground
The Shepherd lies, and waits his call from sleep
Among his folded flock that slumber round.
For half a hundred years his face was known:
Their upward steps in Duty's paths he led,
Shared all their joys, and made their griefs his own.
Fresh as the flowers his Spirit breathes above,
Shrined in the memories Faith and Friendship leave
Safe in the bosom of Eternal Love.
NINETEEN HUNDRED
A New Year's Greeting from the British People to the Troops of the British Empire in South Africa.
And other seasons roll
Round your far tents and mountain beds,
Yet present in the soul,
O valiant hearts, in absence near,
With you we hail the dawning year.
The lightning current brings:
Hope, triumph, gloom, each hour succeeds:
But swifter are the wings,
The pride, the pain, each moment new,
That speed our spirits south to you.
And mount the crimsoned hill,
Nurse with our prayers your failing breath,
And steel your dauntless will.
All the calm fury of your fight
Is fed from Britain's distant might.
You bend beside the bier,
That holds the young, the gay, the brave,
And shed a comrade's tear;
O'er twice ten hundred leagues of foam
You hear the answering sob at home.
Through all the tale of time
Look backward, and behold our Race
The path of glory climb.
Still onwards lies the goal. Afar
We follow Freedom's guiding star.
Proclaim our land's decay,
Like wolves around a watch-fire prowl,
And wait, but dread their prey—
Fight on; nor fear their banded powers:
The hearts of Agincourt are ours.
Your blood be called to run;
Not vain the sacrifice:—your blood
Shall make the Empire one.
Bow down to Heaven; then, with good cheer,
Arise, and hail the dawning year.
A REQUIEM
When the red storms of Death shall cease,And on each Belgic plain
We note the fruitful year's increase
By waves of golden grain,
And watch once more old scenes of peace
In ravaged field or lane;
What voice from your ensanguined bed
Shall wake your lives, ye glorious Dead?
Though now in Belgic grave concealed,
And bathed in bloody dew,
How bounteous is the harvest's yield
From seeds broadcast by you,
Who fought and died from Zutphen field
Till stedfast Waterloo!
'Neath Sidney's captaincy ye bled,
Who fell by Mons, unnumbered Dead!
From age to age your legions came
Chivalric, true, and brave,
To fight for Freedom and for Fame,
And Britain's cause to save:
Your battle-ground was still the same,
The Belgic soil your grave:
Your Marlborough's glory crowns each head
Laid low but late, illustrious Dead!
From many a far self-governed sphere,
Where other stars control
The changes of th' inverted year,
Men make your tombs their goal;
Till, by your blood united here
In cause and heart and soul,
All sons of Liberty are led
To form one realm, imperial Dead!
TERCENTENARY OF SHAKESPEARE'S DEATH, 1916
And we shall shock them. Nought shall make us rue,
If England to itself do rest but true.’
King John, Act v, sc. 7.
With hearts enduring, hands outstretched to save
That civil world the foe would fain devour,
The whelming rush of barbarous hosts we brave;
And trusting to the safe, well-guarded wave,
Confront the battle. Mighty is the power
Of Freedom, Britain's heirloom, sacred dower,
By Flanders' blood secured, and Suvla's grave!
A nobler Unity our souls confess,
Felt in each Briton's heart ev'n while unsung,
Alike in torrid air and frozen zone:
A free-born Empire's patriot consciousness,
Tuned to the music of our Shakespeare's tongue.
AN EPISTLE OF THANKS TO THE REV. H. MONTAGU BUTLER, D.D.
On receiving a copy of his Address (to the Classical Association) ‘On the Value of Translations from the Classics’
The Gothic deluge on her confines burst,
And, her free virtues sapped by long decay,
The dykes of old civility gave way,
So wide around the waste of waters spread,
To the blind sense the world below seemed dead,
And Memory's self above could hardly trace
One rising relic of the vanished grace.
Made the wild flood in gradual ebb subside,
The wandering conquerors with joy and awe
Ris'n from the waves a world of wonder saw;
Nor dully were content t'admire alone,
But with the bygone fashions fused their own;
Till, from the barbarous chaos framed anew,
Customs to Laws and Tribes to Kingdoms grew:
From arts exhausted fresh inventions sprung,
And antique science tuned each infant tongue.
The buried life of Greece and Rome revived.
On stocks of Attic taste and Latin lore
The wild barbaric graft new offsping bore.
And the just limits of the Arts discerned;—
The life of every subject to express,
In every theme to shun the more or less,
And show, in utterance of each inward thought,
Not how the phrase might stand, but how it ought.
Glad to escape his guardian's hateful care,
And all his long minority forget,
We scorn our teachers, and deny our debt.
Proud of th' imperial speech we call our own,
We leave the laws our sires revered unknown,
And set, in savage ignorance, at nought
What Sophocles approved and Horace taught.
Their very memories banished from our head,
We deem the Greek, the Roman, language dead.
Barred from young souls, whose access once was free,
In durance pines divine Antigone,
And sweet Alcestis, to our ears unsung,
Embalmed reposes in an alien tongue.
With arrogant conceit the past t'explore;
But, with the generous faith of boyhood's heart,
At the pure fountains of Hellenic art
You drank; your debt for every ancient's aid
Acknowledged; and in kind the loan repaid.
Old tongues with new harmoniously you link;
You teach the English Muse in Greek to think;
And many a British bard, inspired by you,
Drinks in just ‘quantities’ Castalian dew,
And, clothed in Latin numbers, charms anew.
And Wellesley's art unites with Addison's.
Our duties to past days you call to mind;
And, since the ancient oracles are dumb,
You bid the moderns to the rescue come,
And what they can of olden treasure save
From barbarism's black resurgent wave.
Though to reanimate in English strain
The life of Grecian form be labour vain,
Wisely you urge that from a former date
The spirit of the age we may translate.
Not Bembo's art and imitative hand
Plutocracy's dire plague can now withstand;
But, with the modern blood you would infuse,
You, like Erasmus, may preserve the Muse,
And though ungrateful Oxford spurn the Greek,
An English Plato may in Jowett speak.
The swift contagion of the classic thought;
The times are changed, but, as your words I read,
The intervening years afar recede:
Once more in school, I take my customed seat,
A student at the loved Gamaliel's feet,
And note how well the records of old wit
The various fortunes of our age befit;
See in the vigour of my Crawley's page,
How still Corcyra's factions waste our age;
Sit sympathetic, while the ‘merry Greek’
Proceeds the coats of Radicals to dust,
And dubs the Lib'ral argument ‘Unjust’.
Again on Herga's Hill I seem to hear
The Attic music of Etonian Frere,
While Epops, mourning the May midnight long,
Awakes his nightingale in English song.
The Vision fades, the brief Illusion flies!
Of all that early band, inspired by you
To feel and act, alas! remain how few!
Yet when I hear the truths you taught of yore
Revived with ageless vigour at fourscore,
And the clear accents of the well-known voice
Proclaim the ancient gospel, I rejoice,
And thanks sincere for your prized gift commend
To these poor rhymes, dear Master and old Friend!
The writer's friend, the late Richard Crawley, Fellow of Worcester College, Oxford, author of an admirable translation of Thucydides—which, in point of fact, appeared, alas! many years after the present writer had passed out of the status pupillaris.
This allusion will be readily intelligible at least to all old Harrovians whose schooltime fell about the middle of the last century, when for the Sixth Form the single school of Tuesday was devoted to the study of Aristophanes.
John Hookham Frere, the friend of Canning, and author of the most characteristic translation of Aristophanes into English verse.
THE COUNTRY
Rus in Urbe: Julius Martialis at Home
My Julius' bounded pleasances,More rich in their abundant ease
Than gardens of th' Hesperides,
Rise o'er Janiculum's long hill
In deep recesses, wide and still:
With gentle slope the hill-top fair
Enjoys an always milder air,
And when the mists the valleys hide
Spreads its own sunshine far and wide.
The lofty roofs I fondly love
See only the clear stars above;
Hence one may look from Julius' home
On all Seven Hills, and value Rome,
Tusculum's height and Alba's glow,
And the cool spots that lie below,
Fidenae old and Rubrae small,
The apple-orchards that recall
Anna Perenna, and the wood
That revelled once in virgin's blood.
Who watches from that high abode
The Salt or the Flaminian Road,
With distant chariots, need not feel
The jarring of a noisy wheel,
Nor spoil his slumbers with the rout
Of bargemen or the boatswain's shout,
And all that fares on Tiber's tide.
This Seat (or House, if so best known)
Its lord makes free; 'twill seem your own;
So open, frank, ungrudging, he,
In courteous hospitality,
You'd fancy Fate did here restore
Alcinoüs' house-gods, or the door
Of good Molorchus, poor no more.
You millionaires! who, having all,
Consider what you have too small,
Go! with a hundred mattocks till
Praeneste's plain or Tibur's hill;
Or swallow all the hanging charm
Of Setia in one monstrous farm!
How much do I prefer to these
My Julius' bounded pleasances!
CLAUDIAN'S ‘OLD MAN OF VERONA’
Blest man, who in his boyhood's home has passedFrom youth to age, and finds that home his last!
Who, where he crawled a babe, with staff-propped hand
Scores still his farm's long annals in the sand!
No dupe of vain Ambition's swelling dreams;
No wandering waif who drinks of far-off streams;
Scared by no shipwreck, no alarm of war;
Vexed with no wranglings of the clamorous Bar;
He, letting town and politics pass by,
Enjoys the large horizon of his sky.
The years by crops, not consuls, he computes,
And spring and autumn marks by flowers or fruits.
One field at morning, and at evening one,
His dials, span the pathway of his sun.
He set the acorn germ of that tall tree,
And minds when yonder wood was young as he.
Verona seems like India to explore;
Benacus' lake is as the Red Sea shore.
No less the grandsons of his sons admire
His vigorous limbs and unabated fire.
Rush round the world, to earth's last limits roam!
Life's longest travels still are made at home.
[As the bird, whose clarion gay]
Sounds before the dawn is grey,
Christ, who brings the spirit's day,
Calls us, close at hand:
‘Wake!’ He cries, ‘and for My sake,
From your eyes dull slumber shake!
Sober, righteous, chaste, awake!
At the door I stand!’
Fervent prayer and bitter cry:
Hearts aroused to pray and sigh
May not slumber more:
Break the sleep of Death and Time,
Forged by Adam's ancient crime;
And the light of Eden's prime
To the world restore!
Ask, upon our bended knee,
That this blessing granted be,
And Thy grace implore;
Unto God the Father, Son,
Holy Spirit, Three in One,
One in Three, be glory done,
Now and evermore.
[Celestial Word, to this our earth]
Sent down from God's eternal clime,
To save mankind by mortal birth
Into a world of change and time;
And in Thy love's consuming fire
Fill all the soul with heavenly joy,
And melt the dross of low desire.
Shall bid this awful summons come,
To whelm the guilty soul with dread,
And call the blessèd to their home,
For evermore to us be given
To share the feast of saintly bliss
And see the face of God in heaven.
LABUNTUR ANNI
By track of wing or furry foot, and rarely sings the bird:
The air is still; the springs are low; and in the glimmering light
Hang undisturbed the autumn leaves, and wait the winter's night.
The sunlight warms; the streamlets dance; and chants each wingèd thing;
And all the wood with life is filled, as in the joyous prime
When we were young—Ah, miracle of memory and time
LAC D'OO—July 24th, 1868
Found in her sacred place,
And bound me for my trespass' sake
Beneath the mountain base,
And bade me ply my pencil craft, and paint her face.
Her upper fountains bright,
That leapt like meteors of the snow
Sheer o'er the dizzy height,
She bade give me their coloured spray, the leap, the light.
Beneath the cataract's roar,
With surfaces of blue and green,
And opal by the shore;
And in the calm the torrent white I saw no more.
She fetched a sudden breeze,
And ridged with gold her furrowing face,
And—‘Quick! the moment seize!
This calm befits not art,’ she said, ‘whims better please.’
By motions strange and new:
The peaks, whose burning solitudes
Breasted the freckless blue,
Eternal granite, took fresh forms even while I drew.
The central image keep:
But lighted upon glittering springs,
The cloud, the moth, the sheep,
Whose bells in the high mountain walks persuaded sleep.
And let my fancy range:
But half she smiled and half she sighed
And said—‘Nay, else ’twere strange,
Like mates with like: my like is not; my name is Change.
These are my brief device
To hush the footsteps of the hours;
Like you I pay the price,
Even I, for my long summer days, with snow and ice.
But now in this your prime
The thoughts I move within your heart,
Go! cast them into rhyme:
And this a memory among men shall vanquish Time.’
[These verses are written on the margin of a small water-colour sketch by Paul F. Willert, an intimate and lifelong friend of Mr. Courthope, the same to whom the lines on p. 102 were inscribed. It is possible that both verses and picture came from the same accomplished hand.]
[Feast of Feasts! To-day we tell]
Copy of some verses found written on a sheet of notepaper in the handwriting of W. J. Courthope, probably a translation.
How before Christ's triumph fell
The dread Powers of Death and Hell!
Ransomed, purified, forgiven,
Let us grateful praises bring
Unto Thee, Redeemer, King:
Join the songs on earth we sing
To Thine angels' songs in heaven.
Thou, who, in Thy plenteous grace,
Grieving for our death-doomed race,
Hast Thyself death's pathway trod:
Past is now thy Cross's pain,
Burst Hell's gate and Satan's chain;
Thou o'er all the world shalt reign,
Risen Saviour! Son of God!
The Country Town and Other Poems | ||