The visions of England Lyrics on leading men and events in English history by Francis T. Palgrave |
A CHURCHYARD IN OXFORDSHIRE
|
The visions of England | ||
A CHURCHYARD IN OXFORDSHIRE
September: 1643
Of Midas-finger'd Autumn, massy-green;
Bird-haunted nooks between,
Where feathery ferns, a fairy palmgrove, stand,
An English-Eastern band:—
While e'en the stealthy squirrel o'er the grass
Beside 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 gray
Rest of God's house, each in his mounded bed
Sleep safe, nor reck how the great world runs on;
Peasant with noble here alike unknown.
Beneath one sky, one heaven-uplifted sign
Of love assured, divine:
While o'er each mound the quiet mosses creep,
The silent dew-pearls weep:
—Fit haven-home for thee, O gentlest heart
Of Falkland! all unmeet to find thy part
In those tempestuous times of canker'd hate
When Wisdom's finest touch, and, by her side,
Forbearance generous-eyed
To fix the delicate balance of the State
Were needed;—King or Nation, which should hold
Supreme supremacy o'er the kingdoms old.
Whom iron will cramps to one narrow road,
Driving him like a goad
Till all his heart decrees seem God's decree;
When self cheats self, and conscience at the wheel
Herself is steer'd by passion's blindfold zeal;
A nether-world archangel! Through whose eyes
Flame the red mandates of remorseless might;
A gloom of lurid light
That 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.
Where 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 cast
The 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 find
Man fights a losing fight who fights mankind!
Sphinx ranged by Sphinx, goes awestruck, nor may read
That ancient awful creed
Closed in their granite calm:—so dim the clue,
So tangled, tracking through
That labyrinthine soul which, day by day
Changing, 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.
Lay on his unlamented bier; his life
Wreck'd on that futile strife
To wed things alien by heaven's decree,
Sword-sway with liberty:—
Coercing, not protecting;—for the Cause
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.’
—Intolerant tolerance! Soul that could not trust
Its finer instincts; self-compell'd to run
The blood-path once begun,
And murder mercy with a sad ‘I must!’
Great lion-heart by 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.
By his own heat a hero warp'd and scarr'd.
Moan'd up from England, dungeon'd in that drear
Sectarian atmosphere,
With glory he gilt
Yet to readers, (if such readers there be) who can look with an undazzled eye on military success, or hear the still small voice of truth through the tempest of rhetoric, Cromwell's foreign policy, (excepting the isolated case of his interference with the then comparatively feeble powers of Savoy and the Papacy on behalf of the persecuted Waldenses), will be far from supporting the credit with which politico-theological partisanship has invested it.
Holland was beyond question the natural ally on political and religious grounds of puritan England. But a mischievous war against her in 1652–3 was caused by the arrogant restrictions of the Navigation Act of 1651. The successful English demand in 1653 that the Orange family, as connected closely with that of Stuart, should be excluded from the Stadtholdership, was in a high degree to the prejudice of the United Provinces.
In 1654 Cromwell was negotiating with France and Spain. From the latter he arrogantly asked wholly unreasonable terms, whilst Mazarin, on the part of France, offered Dunkirk as a bribe. News opportunely arriving that certain Spanish possessions in America were feebly armed, Cromwell at once declared war: and now, supplementing unscrupulous policy by false theology, announced ‘the Spaniards to be the natural and ordained enemies of England, whom to fight was a duty both to country and to religion:’ (Ranke: xii. 6).
The piratical war which followed, in many ways similar to that which the ‘wise Walpole’ tried to avert in 1739, was hardly less impolitic than immoral. It alienated Holland, it sanctioned French aggression on Flanders (xii. 7), it ended by giving Mazarin and Lewis XIV that supremacy in Western Europe for which England had to pay in the wars of William III and Anne; whilst, as soon as it was over, France naturally allied herself with Spain, on a basis which might have caused the union of the two crowns (xii. 8) and which allowed Spain at once to support Charles II. As the result of the Protector's ‘spirited policy’ England thus figured as the catspaw of France, and the enemy of European liberty.
It is satisfactory, however, to find that, in Ranke's judgment, the common modern opinion that Cromwell's despotism was favourably regarded in England because of his foreign enterprize, is exaggerated. Even against the conquest of Jamaica,—his single signal gain,—unanswerable arguments were popularly urged at the time: (xii. 4, 8)— But the Protectorate, in the light of modern research,—like the reign of Elizabeth,—still awaits its historian.
Flaunting 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 break
The 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!
Glorious, if this be glory!—o'er that shout
A small still voice breathes out
With subtle sweetness silencing the loud
Hoarse 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,
Crown'd with the bleeding thorn,
Down-trampled by man's heel as foes to man,
And whispering Eli, Eli! as they die,—
Martyrs of truth and Saint Humility.
Wing'd, from their grave: The hearts of men are turn'd
To 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 force
Of wisdom on her mid-way measured course
Gliding;—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 lea
In tranquil transit to the eternal sea.
Of vital change, your work seem incomplete,
Your conquest-hour defeat,
Won by mild compromise, by the invisible force
That 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 course
May lord it, Strength o'er Beauty; yet the Soul
Immortal, clasps the goal;
Fair Wisdom triumphs by her inborn force:
—Thus far on earth! . . . But, ah!—from mortal sight
The crowning glory veils itself in light!
Envoy
—Seal'd of that holy band,Rest here, beneath the foot-fall hushing sod,
While summer burns above thee; while the land
Disrobes; till pitying snow
Cover her bareness; till fresh Spring-winds blow,
And the sun-circle rounds itself again:—
Whilst England cries in vain
For thy wise temperance, Lucius!—But thine ear
The violent-impotent fever-restless cry,
The faction-yells of triumph, will not hear:
—Only the thrush on high
And 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.
The visions of England | ||