The Poetical Works of Wilfrid Scawen Blunt :: :: University of Virginia Library

I like the blackbird's shriek, and his rush
From the turnips as I pass by,
And the partridge hiding her head in a bush,
For her young ones cannot fly.

V

I like these things, and I like to ride,
When all the world is in bed,
To the top of the hill where the sky grows wide,
And where the sun grows red.

VI

The beagles at my horse heels trot,
In silence after me;
There's Ruby, Roger, Diamond, Dot,
Old Slut and Margery,

VII

A score of names well used, and dear,
The names my childhood knew;
The horn, with which I rouse their cheer,
Is the horn my father blew.

VIII

I like the hunting of the hare
Better than that of the fox;
The new world still is all less fair
Than the old world it mocks.

IX

I covet not a wider range
Than these dear manors give;
I take my pleasures without change
And as I lived I live.

X

I leave my neighbours to their thought;
My choice it is, and pride,
On my own lands to find my sport,
In my own fields to ride.

XI

The hare herself no better loves
The field where she was bred,
Than I the habit of these groves,
My own inherited.

XII

I know my quarries every one,
The meuse where she sits low;
The road she chose to-day was run
A hundred years ago.

XIII

The lags, the gills, the forest ways,
The hedgerows one and all,
These are the kingdoms of my chase,
And bounded by my wall;

XIV

Nor has the world a better thing,
Though one should search it round,
Than thus to live one's own sole king,
Upon one's own sole ground.

XV

I like the hunting of the hare;
It brings me, day by day,
The memory of old days as fair,
With dead men past away.

XVI

To these, as homeward still I ply
And pass the churchyard gate,
Where all are laid as I must lie,
I stop and raise my hat.

XVII

I like the hunting of the hare;
New sports I hold in scorn.
I like to be as my fathers were,
In the days ere I was born.

WORTH FOREST

Come, Prudence, you have done enough to-day—
The worst is over, and some hours of play
We both have earned, even more than rest, from toil;
Our minds need laughter, as a spent lamp oil,
And after their long fast a recompense.
How sweet the evening is with its fresh scents
Of briar and fern distilled by the warm wind!
How green a robe the rain has left behind!
How the birds laugh!—What say you to a walk
Over the hill, and our long promised talk
About the rights and wrongs of infancy?
Our patients are asleep, dear angels, she
Holding the boy in her ecstatic arms,
As mothers do, and free from past alarms,
The child grown calm. If we, an hour or two,
Venture to leave them, 'tis but our hope's due.
My tongue is all agog to try its speed
To a new listener, like a long-stalled steed
Loosed in a meadow, and the Forest lies
At hand, the theme of its best flatteries.
See, Prudence, here, your hat, where it was thrown
The night you found me in the house alone
With my worst fear and these two helpless things.
Please God, that worst has folded its black wings,
And we may let our thoughts on pleasure run
Some moments in the light of this good sun.

They sleep in Heaven's guard. Our watch to-night
Will be the braver for a transient sight—
The only one perhaps more fair than they—
Of Nature dressed for her June holiday.

This is the watershed between the Thames
And the South coast. On either hand the streams
Run to the great Thames valley and the sea,
The Downs, which should oppose them, servilely
Giving them passage. Who would think these Downs,
Which look like mountains when the sea-mist crowns
Their tops in autumn, were so poor a chain?
Yet they divide no pathways for the rain,
Nor store up waters, in this pluvious age,
More than the pasteboard barriers of a stage.
The crest lies here. From us the Medway flows
To drain the Weald of Kent, and hence the Ouse
Starts for the Channel at Newhaven. Both
These streams run eastward, bearing North and South.
But, to the West, the Adur and the Arun
Rising together, like twin rills of Sharon,
Go forth diversely, this through Shoreham gap,
And that by Arundel to Ocean's lap.
All are our rivers, by our Forest bred,
And one besides which with more reverend heed
We need to speak, for her desert is great
Beyond the actual wealth of her estate.
For Spenser sang of her, the River Mole,
And Milton knew her name, though he, poor soul,
Had never seen her, as I think being blind,
And so miscalled her sullen. Others find
Her special merit to consist in this:
A maiden coyness, and her shy device
Of mole-like burrowing. And in truth her way
Is hollowed out and hidden from the day,

Under deep banks and the dark overgrowth
Of knotted alder roots and stumps uncouth,
From source to mouth; and once at Mickleham,
She fairly digs her grave, in deed and name,
And disappears. There is an early trace
Of this propensity to devious ways
Shown by the little tributary brook
Which bounds our fields, for lately it forsook
Its natural course, to burrow out a road
Under an ash tree in its neighbourhood.
But whether this a special virtue is,
Or like some virtues but a special vice,
We need not argue. This at least is true,
That in the Mole are trout, and many too,
As I have often proved with rod and line
From boyhood up, blest days of pins and twine!
How many an afternoon have our hushed feet
Crept through the alders where the waters meet,
Mary's and mine, and our eyes viewed the pools
Where the trout lay, poor unsuspecting fools,
And our hands framed their doom,—while overhead
His orchestra of birds the backbird led.
In those lost days, no angler of them all
Could boast our cunning with the bait let fall,
Close to their snouts, from some deceiving coigne,
Or mark more notches when we stopped to join
Our fishes head to tail and lay them out
Upon the grass, and count our yards of trout.
'Twas best in June, with the brook growing clear
After a shower, as now. In dark weather
It was less certain angling, for the stream
Was truly “sullen” then, so deep and dim.
'Tis thus in mountain lakes, as some relate,
Where the fish need the sun to see the bait.

The fly takes nothing in these tangled brooks,
But grief to fishermen and loss of hooks;
And all our angling was of godless sort,
With living worm,—and yet we loved the sport.

But wait. This path will lead us to the gill,
Where you shall see the Mole in her first rill,
Ere yet she leaves the Forest, and her bed
Is still of iron-stone, which stains her red,
Yet keeps her pure and lends a pleasant taste
To her young waters as they bubble past.
You hear her lapping round the barren flanks
Of these old heaps we call the “Cinder-banks,”
Where our forefathers forged their iron ore,
When Paul's was building. Now, the rabbits bore
In the still nights, beneath these ancient heaps,
A very honeycomb. See, where she peeps,
The infant river. You could hardly wet
Your ankles in her midmost eddy yet.
She has a pretty cunning in her look
Mixed with alarm, as in her secret nook
We find her out, half fugitive, half brave,
A look that all the Forest creatures have.
Let us away. Perhaps her guilelessness
Is troubled at a guilty human face,
(Mine, Prudence,—not your own).

I know a dell
Knee deep in fern, hard by, the very cell
For an elf hermit. Here stag-mosses grow,
Thick as a coverlet, and fox-gloves blow
Purple and white, and the wild columbine,
And here in May there springs that thing divine,
The lily of the valley, only here
Found in the Forest, blossoming year on year;

A place o'ershadowed by a low-crowned oak.
The enchanted princess never had been woke
If she had gone to sleep in such a spot,
In spite of fortune. Why, a corpse forgot
Might lie, with eyes appealing to the sky,
Unburied here for half a century.
And this the woodcocks, as I take it, knew,
Who stayed to breed here all the summer through,
When other birds were gone. I flushed a pair
On the longest day last year; the nest was there;
And found some egg-shells chipped among the moss.
The sight is rarer now than once it was.

There! We have gathered breath and climbed the hill,
And now can view the landscape more at will.
This is the Pilgrim road, a well-known track,
When folk did all their travelling on horseback,
Now long deserted, yet a right of way,
And marked on all our maps with due display.
Beneath this yew-tree, which perhaps has seen
Our fathers riding to St. Thomas' shrine,
(For this was once the way of pilgrimage
From the south-west for all who would engage
Their vows at Canterbury), we will sit,
As doubtless they too sat, and rest a bit.
I love this solitude of birch and fern,
These quags and mosses, and I love the stern
Black yew-trees and the hoary pastures bare,
Or tufted with long growths of withered hair
And rank marsh grass. I love the bell-heath's bloom,
And the wild wealth which passionate Earth's womb
Throws in the Forest's lap to clothe unseen
Its ancient barrenness with youth and green.
I love the Forest; 'tis but this one strip
Along the watershed that still dares keep

Its title to such name. Yet once wide grown
A mighty woodland stretched from Down to Down,
The last stronghold and desperate standing-place
Of that indigenous Britannic race
Which fell before the English. It was called
By Rome “Anderida,” in Saxon “Weald.”
Time and decay, and Man's relentless mood,
Have long made havock of the lower wood
With axe and plough; and now, of all the plain,
These breadths of higher ground alone remain,
In token of its presence. Who shall tell
How long, in these lost wilds of brake and fell,
Or in the tangled groves of oak below,
Gathering his sacred leaf, the mistletoe,
Some Druid priest, forgotten and in need,
May here have kept his rite and owned his creed
After the rest? For hardly yet less rude,
Here later dwelt that patron of our wood,
The Christian Hermit Leonard, he who slew
The last authentic dragon England knew;
A man of prayer and penitential vows,
Whose tale survives in many a forest house.
For, having slain his monster, he was given
To choose whate'er he would in gift from Heaven,
And took for his sole recompense this thing:
“Snakes should not bite, nor nightingales should sing
Within the Forest precincts.” Thus, thought he,
His orisons should unmolested be
By mundane joys and troubles.

Yonder ridge,
Cutting the sky-line at the horizon's edge,
Is the Surrey Hills. Beneath the chalk pit, set
Like a white cloud upon the face of it,

Lies Dorking, famed for fowls, and, further still,
Wotton and Shere. In front you have Leith Hill,
Which looks upon St. Paul's and on the sea,
A point of note in our geography.
All this is Evelyn's land, who long ago
Left us his record of the vale below
And wrote the “Silva” now to hands as good
Passed, the descendant's of his name and blood,
That doughty squire's, who lately stood in fight
With the new dragons of the Primrose rite,
And broke a lance for Ireland and the cause
Of freedom, flouted by coercion laws.
Strange change! For long in history these same hills
Were held as ominous of lowland ills,
A source of robber fear, in foul repute,
And natural fortress since the days of Knute,
And earlier still when Saxon Sussex stood
A home-ruled kingdom of primæval wood.
A camp, an eagle's nest, a foot set down
Into the Weald, and evil of renown
With the free dwellers of the plain, who saw
A menace brooding of imperial law.
Saxon or Dane or Norman, each in turn,
Set there his camp to pillage and to burn;
For history, just as now, was mainly then
A tale of wars 'twixt regiments and men.
We, forest dwellers, show with honest boast
Our Slaughter Bridge, where the Norse horde was lost,
Drowned in the red Mole waters, when the Dane
Fled from his eyrie, nor returned again.

The farthest point of all, and looking west,
Is the line of Hindhead, on whose triple crest,
With a good glass, a three-inch telescope,
You might make out the cross upon the top:

It used to be a gibbet. As a child
What tales I treasured of that headland wild,
With its three murderers, who in chains there hung,
Rocked by the winds and tempest-tossed and swung!
Three Portsmouth sailors were they who their mate
Murdered for gold and grog, which guineas get,
And in the “Punch Bowl” made their brute carouse,
Leaving him dead, in a lone public-house,
Where retribution seized them as was due,—
For in that age of simple faiths and true
Murder did always out,—and so apace
Brought them to justice in that self-same place;
And many years they hung. At last its sway
Humanity, that child of yesterday,
Asserted in their case, and craved their bones
For Christian sepulture and these trim stones.
I half regret the leniency thus lent:
Their gallows-tree was their best monument;
But ours is a trim age.

There, farther down,
Is a tower, or “folly,” built of late by one
We call in these parts “Chevalier de Malt,”
(The brewers love high places, and no fault).
Behind us the chief ridge. And, as I speak,
Out of its bowels, with an angry shriek,
And rushing down the valley at our feet,
The train has found us out in our retreat.
It came from Balcombe tunnel and is bound
To be in London ere an hour is round.
It scarcely scares our solitude away;
And yonder Royston crows, the black and grey,
Sit on unmoved upon their oak. This ridge
Is only thirty miles from London Bridge,

And, when the wind blows north, the London smoke
Comes down upon us, and the grey crows croak,
For the great city seems to reach about
With its dark arms, and grip them by the throat.
Time yet may prove them right. The wilderness
May be disforested, and Nature's face
Stamped out of beauty by the heel of Man,
Who has no room for beauty in his plan.

Such things may be, for things as strange have been.
This very place, where peace and sylvan green
And immemorial silence and the mood
Of solemn Nature, virgin and unwooed,
Seem as a heritage,—this very place
Was once the workshop of a busy race
Which dug and toiled and sweated. Here once stood,
Amid the blackened limbs of tortured wood,
And belching smoke and fury from its mouth,
A monstrous furnace, to whose jaws uncouth
A race as monstrous offered night and day
The Forest's fairest offspring for a prey.
Here stood a hamlet, black and populous,
With human sins and sorrows in each house,
A mining centre. Which of us could guess
Each yew-tree yonder marks a dwelling-place
Of living men and women?—nay, a tomb?
Of all the secrets hidden in Earth's womb,
None surely is more pitiful and strange
Than this of human death and human change
Amid the eternal greenness of the Spring.
All we may guess of what the years shall bring,
Is this: that about April every year,
White blossoms shall burst forth upon the pear
And pink upon the apple. Nothing else.
Earth has a silent mockery which repels

Our questioning. Her history is not ours,
And overlays it with a growth of flowers.

Ah, Prudence, you who wonder, being town bred,
What troubles grieve us in the lives we lead,
What cause we have for sorrow in these fields
Whose beauty girds us with its thousand shields,—
This is our tragedy. You cannot know,
In your bald cities, where no cowslips blow,
How dear life is to us. The tramp of feet
Brushes all older footsteps from the street,
And you see nothing of the graves you tread.
With us they are still present, the poor dead,
And plead with us each day of life, and cry
“Did I not love my life, I too, even I?”
You wonder!—Wonder rather we are not
All touched with madness and disease of thought,
Being so near the places where they sleep
Who sowed these fields we in their absence reap.
It were more logical. And here in truth
No few of our Weald peasants in their youth
Lose their weak wits, or in their age go mad,
Brooding on sights the world had deemed most glad.
I have seen many such. The Hammer Ponds,
So frequent in the Forest's outer bounds,
Have all their histories of despairing souls
Brought to their depths to find their true life's goals.
You see one in the hollow, where the light
Touches its blackness with a gleam of white,
Deep down, and over-browed with sombre trees
Shutting its surface primly from the breeze,
The landscape's innocent eye, set open wide
To watch the heavens,—yet with homicide
Steeped to the lids.

'Tis scarce a year ago
The latest sufferer from our rural woe
Found there his exit from a life too weak
To shield him from despairs he dared not speak.
A curious lad. I knew young Marden well,
Brought up, a farmer's son, at the plough's tail,
And used for all romance to mind the crows
At plain day-wages in his father's house.
A “natural” he, and weak in intellect,
His fellows said, nor lightly to be pricked
To industry at any useful trade;
His wits would go wool-gathering in the shade
At harvest time, when all had work on hand,
Nor, when you spoke, would seem to understand.
At times his choice would be for days together
To leave his work and idle in the heather,
Making his bed where shelter could be found
Under the fern-stacks or on open ground,
Or oftenest in the charcoal burners' hives,
When he could win that pity from their wives.
Poor soul! He needed pity, for his face,
Scarred by a burn, and reft of human grace,
And for his speech, which faltering in his head
Made a weak babble of the words he said.
His eyes too—what a monster's! did you ever
Watch a toad's face at evening by a river
And note the concentrated light which lies
In the twin topazes men call his eyes?
Like these were Marden's. From the square of clay
Which was his face, these windows of his day
Looked out in splendour, but with a fixed stare
Which made men start who missed the meaning there.
Yet he had thoughts. Not seldom he and I
Made in these woods discourse of forestry,

Walking together, I with dog and gun,
He as a beater, or, if game was none,
Marking the timber trees and underwoods.
He knew each teller in these solitudes,
And loved them with a quite unreasoned art,
Learned from no teacher but his own wild heart.
Of trees he quaintly talked in measured saws
Which seemed the decalogue of Nature's laws,
Its burden being as erst, “Thou shalt not kill”
Things made by God, which shall outlive thee still.
For larch and fir, newcomers from the North,
He pleaded scantly when their doom went forth,
Knowing they needs must die, and the birch stems,
Since Spring renews them, yet with stratagems
Framed to delay the moment of their fate.
For beech he battled with more keen debate
Of hand and eye, in deprecating tone,
Holding their rights coeval with our own.
But when we came to oak, good Sussex oak,
The flame burst forth, and all his being spoke
In words that jostled in his throat with tears,
“An oak which might outlive a thousand years.”
He held this sacrilege. Perhaps some strains
Of Druid blood were mingled in his veins,
Which gave authority to guard the tree
Sacred of yore, and thus he vanquished me.

How came he to his end, poor Marden? Well,
All stories have their reason, as some tell,
In Eves that give the fruit for which men grieve,
Or, what is often worse, refuse to give.
This last was Marden's unprotected case,
Whose virtue failed him, and his ugliness,
To escape the common fate of all mankind.
He fell in love egregious and purblind,

Just like the wisest. She who caused his flame
Was not, I think, in honesty to blame
If she was less than serious at his suit.
Marden, as lover, was grotesquely mute,
And his strange eyes were not the orbs to move
A maiden's fancy to a dream of love.
In truth they were scarce human. Still 'twas hard
His passion should be met, for sole reward,
With sermon phrases and such gospel talk
As preachers license for a Sunday walk,
Mixed with her laughter. This was all she gave,
An endless course of things beyond the grave,
Till he lost reckoning and, poor witless man,
Began to reason on the cosmic plan,
Which meted this scant mercy in his case,
And placed him in such straits for happiness.
Can you not see it? All our rustics live
In their small round of thoughts as in a hive,
Each cell they build resembling each each day,
Till their wits swarm, and then they are away.
Marden went mad, misled by his queen bee,
Through a deep slough of black theology,
Which ended in destruction and this pool,
With Hell beyond him for his poor dumb soul.
He sought her final pity for love lost.
She talked of Heaven, and sent him tracts by post.
He pleaded. She reproved. She prayed. He swore.
She bade him go. He went, and came no more.
Such was the history, no whit uncommon.
I neither blame the boy nor blame the woman,
Only the hardness of a fate which laid
Its iron flail upon too weak a head.
She watched him go, half doubting what would come,
Her last tract crushed betwixt his angry thumb
And his clenched fingers, and his lips grown white,

And his eyes gleaming with their maniac light,
And so towards the hill.

That afternoon,
The last of a late autumn, saw the sun
Set in unusual splendour (it is said
A disc of gold in a whole heaven of red),
The herald of a frost, the earliest
Known for a lifetime. There, for summer dressed,
The trees stood stiff and frozen in their green,
Belated revellers in some changing scene
Of sudden winter and June left behind.
In all the forest was no breath of wind
For a full fortnight, nor was a leaf shed
Long after Nature in her shroud lay dead,
A beautiful black frost which held the land
In unseen fetters, but with iron hand.
The pools were frozen over in the night,
Without a flaw or ripple; and their light
Reflected every stem of every tree
In perfect mirrors of transparency.
Boys, who a week before were in the field
With bat and ball, now ventured, iron-heeled,
On the ice skating, yet awhile in fear,
Seeing no footing on the water there.
And thus it fell about the corpse was found
(You will have guessed it) in the ice fast bound.
Two boys, the brothers of the girl he wooed,
Tired of their pastime stopped awhile and stood
Over a shallow place where rushes grow,
And peering down saw a man's face below
Watching their own (his eyes were open laid,
Fixed in that terrible stare poor Marden's had);
And thought they saw a vision. Running back,
Loud in their fear, with spectres on their track,

They spread the news through all the frightened farms,
Filling the cottagers with wild alarms,
Till some made bold with spades, and hewed away
The ice above to where the dead man lay.
There, sure enough, was Marden, his fool's mouth
Stuffed for all solace of his sad soul's drouth
With the girl's tracts. Thus primed, he had plunged in
And ended all, with a last deed of sin,
Grotesque and tragic as his life. No less
Let us persuaded be he rests in peace,
Or where were Heaven's justice?

One last tale,
As we walk back,—of worthy Master Gale,
Our house's founder, who in a dark age
Won us the lands we hold in heritage,
Working his forge here in the civil wars,
And welding fortunes out of iron bars.
A story with a moral too, at least,
For money makers, of how wealth increased,
And most of all for us, to whom his toil
Has proved a mine of ease and endless spoil,
Though of a truth we are unlineal heirs,
Not true descendants of his toils and cares.
His history stands recorded in a book
Himself achieved, ere Death his anvil broke,
A volume full of wisdom and God's praise,
Trust in himself, and scorn of human ways.

He was a blacksmith, born at Sevenoke
In Kent, the toilsome son of toilsome folk,
And honourable too, as honour then
Was understood among commercial men.
He paid his way through life. He owed to none
Beyond their will to let the debt run on,

Nor trusted any farther than he need.
He held the race of man a bastard breed,
An evil generation, bred of dust,
And prone to spending, idleness and lust.
God was his friend. Of Him he counsel took,
How he should make new ventures with new luck,
Praying each night continuance of health,
Increase of wisdom and increase of wealth;
Nor ever in his yearly balance sheet
Forgot to inscribe himself in Heaven's debt.
A virtuous man, and holding with good cause
The eternal justice of the social laws
Which give to industry its well-earned meed,
And leave the weak and idle to their need.
From childhood up, he clutched the staff of life,
As if it were a cudgel for the strife,
And wielded it throughout relentlessly.
His parents, brothers, all by God's decree,
Died of the plague when he was scarce sixteen.
The date, as I have reckoned, should have been
The very year the patriots raised their backs
To the new pressure of the shipping tax.
His first fight was a battle for the pence
Left by his father, when, at dire expense
Of lawyers' fees and charges without end,
He found himself with fifty pounds to spend,
And a small stock-in-trade of iron sows,
A fireless smithy and an empty house.
With these and God's compassion, and a man
To strike and blow for him, his trade began,
Till in four years his industry had grown
To a fair substance in his native town.

When he was twenty-one, an accident
Brought him to Sussex; and, as Saul was sent

To find his father's asses and therewith
Met with a kingdom, so this honest smith,
While chasing a bad debtor through the Weald,
Lit on his fortune in this very field.
For, failing of his money, in its stead
He took his debtor's forge and smelting shed;
Sold his goodwill at Sevenoke, and set
His smithy in the Forest next to it.
This brought him trade. The civil wars began
And each man's hand was set against each man,
And sword to sword. But, while his neighbours fought,
Gale, like a Gallio, cared for these things nought,
And sold his iron with indifferent zeal
To kings and Parliaments in need of steel;
Or, if a prejudice his thought divides,
It is for Cromwell and his Ironsides.
But God's be all the glory, His alone
Who to His servant Gale such grace had shown!

Thus, in an iron age, this thrifty man
Got gold and silver, and, while others ran
Out of their fortunes, he with pockets full
Bought up their lands and held the world a fool.
'Tis now two hundred years since Father Gale
Laid down his pick and hammer. He had won,
By forty years of toil beneath the sun,
The right to work no longer, for himself
And for his heirs for ever. This is Wealth!
He was a prudent buyer, and died possessed
Of some four thousand acres of the best
Land in the parish. His first purchases
Were in Worth Forest, to his vulgar eyes
I fear mere wood for burning. Pease-pottage
And Frog's-hole farms came next; and in his age,

Wishing, as he says, to have a good estate
And house to live in, though the day was late
To think of building, and he most abhorred
To waste his substance upon brick and board,
Holding with prudent minds that such intent
Is but at best a “sweet impoverishment”
And that the wise man doth more soundly hit
Who turns another's folly to his wit,
He purchased Caxtons, manor and domain,
To be the home of a new race of men.

His last words, as recorded by his son,
A man of taste and letters and who won
A seat in Parliament in William's reign,
Were uttered in the ancient Biblic strain
Dear to the age he lived in and to him.
They might be David's in their cadence grim.
“When I am dead and gone,” he said, “my son,
Trust in the Lord and in none other, none.
Be wary of thy neighbours. They are vile,
A brood of vipers, to oppose whose guile
I have been at constant charges all my life.
Take thee an honest woman for thy wife,
And get thee sons who shall inherit all
Thy God hath given thee, spite of Adam's fall.
Guard well thy rights, and cease not to pull down
All gates that block thy highway to the town,
Such as that man of Belial, Jacob Sears
Has set in Crawley Lane these thirty years.
Let no man venture to enclose the wastes.
Be on thy guard against such ribald priests
As Lee and Troughton. They are an ill brood,
A bastard generation, bone and blood.
Hold fast to thy religion. Go not thou
After lewd women and the worldly show

Of rich apparel. Keep thy substance close
In thy own chamber for the fear of loss,
And thy own counsel closer, lest men find
Their way to rob thee of thy peace of mind.
But, more than all, be quit of vain pretence,
And see thy income equal thy expense,
So shalt thou have thy God with thee alway.”

Thus runs the story. You have seen to-day
The latest shoot of his posterity,
The boy we left there sleeping. His shall be
One day the guardianship of this domain,
As other Gales have held it. It were vain
In me to speak of all the goodly fruit
Begotten on the stem of this old root,
This sour crab-apple, worthy master Gale.
This child perhaps. . . . But that will be a tale
For new historians.

Listen! Did you hear
Just now, down in the valley, someone cheer
Or hail us? Stop. Ay, there there comes a man,
Running and shouting loud as a man can.
He sees us too, and slowly through the fern
Now climbs to meet us. Something we shall learn
Without a doubt. God grant it be not ill!
And yet he seems to falter and stand still.
What is your message, Penfold? Why this haste?
A little closer. Speak man! Here at last
You have found us. Come. What is it that you said!
See, we have courage.

“Sir, the child is dead!”

“SED NOS QUI VIVIMUS”

I

How beautiful is life—the physical joy of sense and breathing;
The glory of the world which has found speech and speaks to us;
The robe which summer throws in June round the white bones of winter;
The new birth of each day, itself a life, a world, a sun!

II

I love all things that are young and happy and eternal,
Eternal in their change and growth as I too changing grow.
Old am I, and how many voices that I loved are heard not!
Yet the world lives, and in its life I live and laugh and love.

III

I woke to-day at daybreak, thrilled with a new sense of pleasure near me,
Because a bird sang at my window and had ceased, afraid.
A while I lay and listened conscious only of my being,
The same fool school-boy as in days gone by, nerve, sinew, vein.

IV

Who tells us we are changed, that we with our wise years grow older?
I am a poet, may be patriot, soldier, statesman, priest.
Yet none the less I lay to-day and watched in childish wonder
The flies tie and untie their knots, a mystery unrevealed.

V

The flies' way in the air perplexed me ever and perplexes
No less this hour than in old time. So Solomon the wise,
Spite of his wit, essayed in vain the riddle of the eagles;
And I a child to-day lay there, a child, less than a child.

VI

And I heard tones well-known and prudent words and phrases ventured
Gently to chide me for hours wasted thus in ease,
Till I too spoke and vowed aloud new ways of life amended,
And for the thousandth time in pain arraigned and blamed my dreams.

VII

Then I rose hastily, as one who hears and fears reproving,
Although, God help me, there is living none now dares to chide or blame,
And I broke through the curtain of the dusk, and from the Orient
The sun's face through the window smiled, the lord of a new day.

VIII

How dare I grieve in the fair presence of the lord of morning?
How dare I not rejoice who thus its king in Eden reign?
God's peace is on this place proclaimed, and named, and promised,
A sentient joy of living things which fills and thrills the Earth.

IX

Here all things joyous are. Birds breed in sedge and thicket;
Hares feed in pairs, and squirrels leap from spray to spray;
Dead limbs of elms make nests for the woodpeckers;
The coots' cry from the mere comes loud and tells of rain.

X

Naught here may harm or hurt. This is a sanctuary
For the world's weak, hedged in with love and fenced and sealed—
Man its sole outcast, the earth's mad disturber branded
Still with the mark of Cain and death from which life flees.

XI

Thus musing in my pride, and shame too somewhat, I descended,
Led by invisible hands towards the trees and fields below.
Along these self-same paths my childhood ran exulting,
Following the poor lost dead who loved them as I love.

XII

What was their pride then in their leafy fair possession,
Theirs in their day, who planned these glades and thickets round!
How has their presence vanished from the silent pastures,
The poor lost dead who held my hand and loved them as I love!

XIII

Yet not to mourn I came. No day of joy destroyed deserves our anguish.
Pleasure's whole soul is this, to feel the living stream which flows.
That which they did I do. In me they live unvanquished.
My voice is theirs to-day, my step their step, my soul their soul.

XIV

For them I live ungrieving, and ungrieved their fruit I gather
From trees they planted bravely in their pride of life and time.
They fashioned these old gardens. Let my soul their joy inherit,
Their passion heaped on passion, life on life, for my life's prize.

XV

Who were they all? Some names they bore well-known, some others fameless.
A box of parchments yellow lies in the dull dust of age;
A few poor letters, written by fond hands to fonder faces;
Through all the passionate love of home, this home of mine, once theirs.

XVI

The primæval tiller of the soil enjoyed, the soil ancestral,
Whence came he? What his lineage? Nay, 'tis hidden.
Some have told
Tales of high daring done, lands won, through lines remote descending
From old Norse sources and the potent loins of kings and gods.

XVII

Or, with less pomp, of armoured knights, when knights were held heroic,
Of prudent counsellors and priests and men revered for law,
Dim-featured ghosts of vanished names set in forgotten story,
Pleading for memory still of their last son through years of change.

XVIII

And yet I know not. Truth and fable here are strangely blended.
Nay, rather let me set before my face in fancy one
Like to myself, a clod of Sussex earth more kindly kneaded,
And mostly noble through the love of right, the sense of wrong.

XIX

I see him stand beneath these pollard oaks, the same, hardhanded,
With hook, and axe, and bill, a wrestler with the forest's green,
A man grave-featured, dull of thought and wit, slow-paced, unyielding,
Stern in his toil and niggard still of smile and sign and speech.

XX

The woodland round him a vast sea was then, whose scattered islands
Were these few acres conquered hardly by men whole of heart,

Spite of the demons and wild spectral elves that held the forest
And deadly dragons haunting still in guile the undrained morass.

XXI

Who knows? A servant he, may be, of our good saint and patron,
The cloistered friar, who for his life-long penance vowed and done,
And for some monsters slain, had claimed in sole reward and guerdon
The wood birds' silence round him while he made his prayer at noon.

XXII

How have the birds grown jubilant once more in song and godless,
In these unchastened days when men have ceased to kneel or pray!
This peasant knelt in faith. The world to him had nothing joyous.
Death, like a spectre, dogged him close with fears of Heaven and Hell.

XXIII

And yet he loved these lands. Here haply a strange breadth of freedom
Was from all lords and kings by reason of the forest fear.
What warrior dared to search these “antres vast and desarts idle”
For such poor scattered few freeholders as its fastness held?

XXIV

The Roman, Dane and Norman from the Down, their distant eyrie,
Looked forth, but only looked. The swamps of trackless mire
Clogged all their chariot wheels who dared by force of arms to venture
With horse and spear and rider through these perilous bogs accursed.

XXV

And thus he lived and died, unknown to all, untamed, unlorded,
This silent first forefather of the paternal woods reclaimed,
Holding his place beneath the sun with sullen desperate caution
On the square plot of up-turned acres that his spade had made.

XXVI

Lives there in me his son still something of his hardy sinew,
Something of his heroic soul? Still darkly arched o'erhead
The forest speaks to me, its child. I hoard and count and reckon
As my birth's right and prize these lands, and look askance at men.

XXVII

Deep in my soul he lies. Nor less the rest, the crew penurious
Of careful tillers holding gold achieved more dear than ease,
The covetous of farms still grimly set through generations
To add their store of value won to the ancestral fields.

XXVIII

The wealth they made that day is mine, the glades reclaimed, the hamlets,
The treasure of the earth deep delved in reigns Plantagenet,
The store of iron ore heaped high for needs of civil battle,
When men in armour trod the flying heels of armèd men.

XXIX

Some gathered fortune boldly daring. Truce then to the forest.
Some spent their store in lordly wassail, brawling and lewd wine.
What anger was twixt neighbours there, twixt sire and son what contest!
What bonds usurious countersigned enriched the hands of guile!

XXX

Still in their stubbornness of blood they stood, these my own fathers,
Through whom the thread of life, a feeble cord by fortune spun
And loosed upon Time's tempest, to their latest born descended,
And with the life the lands redeemed which thus unshorn he loves.

XXXI

Justice, and squire, and clerk, and graduate of humaner letters!
Here history spreads her written page for certain truth to record.
On these green lawns rose novel shapes, trim walks and classic gardens
Decked with Italian forms in stone of nymph and faun and god.

XXXII

Thus was I born. And lo, their golden leaves renewed each summer
The oak trees weave for me as them, sublimely, blindly dumb,
Holding their secrets closely shut, nor even to my cunning
Yielding a word but this, “Alas for thee! and woe for Man!”

XXXIII

Woe for his valour, woe for thine! Time still shall all things vanquish,
Folly and virtue, lusts of youth, mad griefs, sublime designs,
The courage of high manhood feebly striving and then failing.
Yonder behold the churchyard is, heaped high with thy own kind.

XXXIV

Here I broke off, in sudden exclamation loud disclaiming
This new insistence of my foolish soul's disease of grief.
The day's work calls me, to my soul I said, a day of labour,
Or only laboured idleness yet clear at least of tears.

XXXV

Therewith I turned the latch before me of the low cow's-stable,
Where, with her udders full and lowing loud to hear me near,
Stood my cow Myrtle, large-eyed, moon-faced, brindlehided, patient,
Waiting my footstep on the path which every morn she hears.

XXXVI

What does she meditate on all things, brute, divine and human,
This mild-eyed mother? She too loves the knee-deep fields she knows
With the same reasonless desire and natural greed of longing,
And this between us hidden deep is a strong bond of love.

XXXVII

Her pulses can beat wildly too with rage and subtle passion
When from her herd she strays. And once each Spring, with fortune cloyed,
For a brief month she knows all Heaven's love and rapturous pleasure,
Fondling the thing new born, which is her own, her soul, her joy.

XXXVIII

I love to touch the links of life between us, the blind kindness
Of joy unreasoned, solace in the sun, in shade delight.
The unhuman part of Man is still the best, his love of children,
His love of meads and vales at home, his fondness for his kind.

XXXIX

Let me extenuate naught in thought, nor set down aught in malice.
Here, Myrtle, is that thing thou lovest best, thy feed of corn.
Give me in turn thy peace of soul, peace passing understanding,
Thy trust each vain sweet day renewed sublime in Man thy god.

XL

How beautiful is life, the conscious power of thought in action,
The brain's imperious will commanding fate within its sphere!
Around it the world's forces, prisoned Jinns, obey the magician,
Tamed and constrained for his delight their allotted tasks to weave.

XLI

And what were life unlabouring, life even here in this dear Eden,
Were there no toil? Eternal perfectness in idle round
Is God's sole lot to taste, not ours whom rage of hope possesses
And Time disturbs with tales of change, and dark oblivion goads.

XLII

Our actions are our monument. The prince in slaughtered thousands
Carves his red name on fields of war that he may sounder sleep.
The Statesman fashions high his sluggard pride to patriot glories
That he may lie entombed with kings while kings and kingdoms grieve.

XLIII

The prophet as of old speaks, “Rise, ye mourners, from your bondage,
Get ye from hence and flee away afar lest evil come;

Behold, the Lord shall lead you forth through deserts to new pastures,
Thus shall ye do, and thus.” And he too sleeps his sleep with God.

XLIV

Nor less the poet. Chosen to sing of an eternal beauty,
Dares he be silent in his day and leave his tale untold?
How shall he wait on, idly, he a hireling without wages,
Lest in the night untried of toil he wake and cry aloud?

XLV

There is a record given him he must needs in deeds accomplish,
A tale of transient things his eyes have seen, his ears have heard;
And he a traitor were if dying dumb they too should vanish,
And fill the forgotten lapses lost of the unnumbered years;

XLVI

Memories of times departed, each hour filled to the brim with promise;
Voices how sweet of human souls whose dreams are with them laid;
Echoes of laughters fraught with tears, since joy has turned to sorrow;
Footsteps of dancing feet long gone to rest where grasses wave;

XLVII

Tender, sad vows of women, how passionately appealing
To eyes they loved, nor deeming day nor night itself too long

For their blest service, sieging heaven amain in vain for pity,
And holding earth and fate too strait for their wide arms of love;

XLVIII

Manly ambitions, vast as the high arch unspanned of heaven;
Schemes of impossible good for Man, made naught by human fraud;
Follies of valiant hearts cast forth upon the die of battle;
Hopes of a world destroyed, made void through human greed of gold.

XLIX

I too have dreamed a dream which I would fain essay to interpret,
A dream of infinite love, which, if my hour of wit were proved,
Should stand my message to the world, a voice of power for ever,
Binding the generations new to the past ages dumb.

L

How should I speak it best, in what high tones of fullvoiced reason
Holding the souls of all? No idle lapse of empty sounds
Should cloy the hearing of the earth grown deaf to alien passion,
No clamour of vain sobs, no throbs, no formless dirge of words.

LI

But the true sculpture of a thought, clean cut and plain of meaning,
Marble made life, with sinewy phrase and knotted argument,
And that deep-throated resonant voice which in the morn of Egypt
Spoke through her Memnon's lips to all, and all a nation heard.

LII

This should be prophecy—nay, judgment. But with less, if granted,
Well were I winged for song, and luminous so in thought should move
With the world's teachers, bards whose chosen strings have nobly chaunted
Hymns of heroic Heaven or only this of human love.

LIII

Only that tragedy of hope, which in its full expansion
Has never yet been told, the history of a human soul
From its first outlook with blank eyes upon a world of shadows
To its last blank farewell in tears upon a world of scorn;

LIV

The very truth of childhood, with its fears and tribulations,
Hushed into sudden smiles and sleep by what unreasoning change;
The wherefore and the why of its first bursts of causeless laughter;
The meaning of its griefs untold, the sense of its first pain;

LV

And boyhood's early trust, thrust forth to the chill winds of schooling,
Learning the bitterness of life through divers ways of loss,
Wasting the freshness of its joys on noise, its first compassion
On its own wounded back, till, turning, it too grasps the rod;

LVI

And youth's high hope, with painted dreams of all potential pleasure,
Doubting which way to spring, the paths of honour leading here,
There of delight, each robed with morning's virginal new vesture
And beautiful with tears of love, though who should call them tears?

LVII

And manhood with its wars; and middle life as yet unvanquished,
When strength is tried and, having learned through grief the nobler roads
Of the world's glory, he beholds life's settled purpose, standing
Calm with his fate, and seems to touch at last the ulterior goal;

LVIII

And then the pang which strikes, and the swift end. All these, in sequence,
Would I set forth in words, tragic, severe, and each should breathe

Of a new beauty, shade and light, blue skies, white clouds and tempests,
Mountain and vale and plain and stream, and, circling all, Death's sea.

LIX

How beautiful is life! The present sense of souls that love us;
The enfolding spirit of love, made known in divers silent ways;
The wife, the child, the man and maid, whose zeal and faith enthrone us
High in their temple niche enshrined! Thus angels serving stand.

LX

What need we of more love, of larger fields revealed of conquest,
Who all things have that heaven itself in its reward might deal?
What need we of new life, who touch the goal supreme of fortune,
Holding to-day for prize the perfect love that casts out fear?

LXI

Come with me, child, who art myself, only a self grown dearer,
One that I dare to love and without shame, for thou art mine.
What shall our pleasure be to-day, our daily task being ended?
Take thou a counsel of thy joy. Be thou my pleasure's guide.

LXII

Speak. Shall we make our visitation of the woods and forests?
The midsummer shoot is there; and in their nuptial robes of green
The oak trees murmur to the flies their tale of full-blown summer,
And, where the stems were felled in Spring, the foxgloves point their spears.

LXIII

Or to the paddocks, deep in green for grazing steer and heifer,
And, what we better love, those creatures of a nobler mould,
Which are fair Nature's masterpiece and last supreme perfection,
Mares with their unweaned foals high-souled in proud descent of blood.

LXIV

Or rather—let the indulgence to our idle souls be granted—
Lapped in the summer heat, without more toil than this of dreams,
On the lake's bosom moored, where birch and alder cast their shadows,
Sit we and woo, hours through, with rod and line the mistrustful bream.

LXV

Here the boat lies, half hidden she, where three weeks since we left her,
In her snug dog-wood nook. The rushes round have bound her in
Already in their net. But we will free and float and set her,
An ark for our new fortunes launched, to bear us where we will.

LXVI

See, there she swims. Our noise in loosing her has roused a heron,
And with him teals and lapwings, with a cry of swift alarm.
Ah Man! thy hated face disturbs once more thy natural fellows.
What is thy kingship worth to thee if all things fly thy hand?

LXVII

The evil done is done, alas! Let us indulge our laughter,
Dear Hester, sing to me that song the foolish fishes heard
When you deceived them to their hurt by your unreal assurance,
Telling of captive birds set free—the while the nets we spread.

LXVIII

Sing me a song, while I the happy oars in listless measure
Ply looking at your face, and presently, when it is done,
You shall hear stories told of far-off lands and strange adventures,
Things that your father saw ere you to give him joy were born;

LXIX

Tales of great mountains where he set his steps in early manhood,
Not hills like ours, but craggy pinnacles that pierce the clouds,
Abysmal valleys and white slopes of treacherous ice, whose foothold
Failed as in dreams men fail and urged him headlong down,

LXX

Falling for ever—ever—and yet saved by intervention,
On the extreme curve's edge, of a miraculous softer snow,
Wherein he bedded lay with beating heart till the slow rescue
Gravely descending came and bore him scathless home;

LXXI

Or of the unlimited fields revealed of grey Arabian desert,
Where are no streams or shade, but only the blind haze of noon,
And the sun strikes with might, and the skins shrink which hold his blessing,
The dole of water spared, his forfeit life if these be gone;

LXXII

Drear and untenanted. Yet see the sudden transformation
When the Spring rains have come! In every vale and hollow there
Cattle unnumbered pasture knee-deep down in purple blossoms,
And the calf-camels prance, and their dams roar like souls in pain.

LXXIII

Or of days spent alone and nights in far Brazilian forests,
Where sky and earth itself are lost in insolent depths of green.
High overhead the laden tree-tops touch the extremest heaven,
Leading through latticed walls of flowers and veils deepdripped with dew.

LXXIV

The impenetrable shadows dark of that shut place of silence
How are they broken by the sheen and glint of insect wings,
Bright coloured lamps slow flitting! Lo from the impervious thicket
A blaze of blue, a butterfly, bursts flashing through the trees.

LXXV

Or last, of the vast hum of a tumultuous Indian city,
Where street and bridge are thronged with men who sell and buy and cry,
And women with bright eyes half veiled pass bearing flowers and incense,
Through the tall temple gates set wide, to gods in ochreous shrines.

LXXVI

Strange wonderful and vast, till you forget the immediate beauty,
The home we love, our little raptures over joys well known,
This lake, these woods, this boat, the brook which tells of English summer
With its mad bubbles dancing and its hazel foam windborne,

LXXVII

And all that was and is to fill our souls with their contentment
From dawn to dusk. And so in joy this latest evening ends.
God grant us length of days, of days like these to be remembered
Till life's last night has come and we too gathered are in death!