The political and occasional poems of Winthrop Mackworth Praed ::

“His mighty genius prompted him to undertake a most great and necessary work, which he is said to have executed in as masterly a manner;—no less than to new model the Constitution,—to rebuild it on a plan that should endure for ages.”—History of England.

I saw in a dream, on a summer day,
The tomb where the Saxon Solon lay;
And thither the prince of the land was led,
With the robe on his shoulder, the crown on his head;
And they bade him draw from its secret nook
The volume of law, King Alfred's Book.

141

He held the tome in his feeble grasp;
He broke the seals, and he snapped the clasp.
Long years had marred on the dim, dim page
The treasured truth of the Chief and Sage;
And whose were the hands that undertook
To write new words in the holy book?

A laurelled warrior thither came;
How the deep heart thrilled as they named his name!
He gazed on the volume of right and law,
And he turned away from the sight he saw,
Falsehood and blame he would rather brook,
Than sully one page of the time-worn book.

A statesman came, and through the crowd
The murmur of hope was heard aloud;
“Let him trace but a line, and the peril is o'er,
And the leaves shall sleep where they slept before.”
Power and praise his heart forsook;
He turned away from the fearful book.

I saw a hoary dotard stand,
And grasp the pen in his feeble hand;
He had written a rare bold text, they said,
Ere the white snows fell on his plotting head;

142

But now he was grey, and his fingers shook,
As he scrawled and scrawled on the sacred book.

“I have brought,” quoth a schoolboy, “this ruler of mine,
To rule for the letters a fair straight line.”
He babbled of parish, he babbled of town,
And the ruler went up, and the ruler went down;
So crooked was never the crookedest crook
As the line he drew on the wondrous book.

There came a sallow penman now,
With a sneer on his lip and a scowl on his brow;
So quick was his hand, that you saw at a glance
He had learned of the cunning scribes of France:
“Might” for “right” his haste mistook,
And “treason” for “reason” he wrote in the book.

And there was a schoolmaster, tall and thin,
With a solemn smile on his nose and chin;
He smoothed the leaf, and he mended the pen,
And he rapped the knuckles now and then;
“How scared,” quoth he,” the dolts will look
If ever they read what they write in the book!”

“Oh, write what ye may, or write what ye will,”
Said the cry of a mob from a cotton-mill;

143

“The words may be grave, and the wit may be good;
But we're building the gallows, and lighting the wood:
The bird to the snare, and the fish to the hook,
And a rope for the clerks, and a fire for the book!”

University of Virginia Library

VI. KING ALFRED'S BOOK.