Page images
PDF
EPUB

Ere my tongue lisped, amid your dewy bowers,
Its first glad hymn to mercy's sunny showers
And air and day;

When in my mother's arms, an infant frail,
Along your windings borne,

My blue eye caught your glimmer in the vale,
Where halcyons darted o'er your willows pale,
On wings like morn.

Ye saw my feelings round that mother grow,
Like green leaves round the root!

Then thought, with danger came, and flowered like woe!
But deeds, the fervent deeds that blush and glow,
Are virtue's fruit.

*

Ebenezer Elliott.

Rugby.

RUGBY CHAPEL, NOVEMBER, 1857.

COLDLY, sadly descends

The autumn evening. The field
Strewn with its dank yellow drifts
Of withered leaves, and the elms,
Fade into dimness apace,

Silent; - hardly a shout

From a few boys late at their play!
The lights come out in the street,

In the school-room windows; but cold,

Solemn, unlighted, austere,

Through the gathering darkness, arise
The Chapel walls, in whose bound
Thou, my father! art laid.

There thou dost lie, in the gloom
Of the autumn evening. But ah!
That word gloom to my mind
Brings thee back in the light
Of thy radiant vigor again!

In the gloom of November we passed
Days not of gloom at thy side;
Seasons impaired not the ray
Of thine even cheerfulness clear.
Such thou wast; and I stand
In the autumn evening, and think
Of bygone autumns with thee.

Fifteen years have gone round

Since thou arosest to tread,
In the summer morning, the road
Of death, at a call unforeseen,
Sudden. For fifteen years,

We who till then in thy shade
Rested as under the boughs
Of a mighty oak, have endured
Sunshine and rain as we might,
Bare, unshaded, alone,
Lacking the shelter of thee.

O strong soul, by what shore

Tarriest thou now? For that force,

Surely, has not been left vain!
Somewhere, surely, afar,

In the sounding labor-house vast
Of being, is practised that strength,
Zealous, beneficent, firm!

Yes, in some far-shining sphere,
Conscious or not of the past,
Still thou performest the word
Of the Spirit in whom thou dost live,
Prompt, unwearied, as here!

Still thou upraisest with zeal
The humble good from the ground,
Sternly repressest the bad.

Still, like a trumpet, dost rouse
Those who with half-open eyes
Tread the border-land dim
"Twixt vice and virtue; reviv❜st,
Succorest; - this was thy work,
This was thy life upon earth.

*

*

Matthew Arnold.

Runnimede.

THE BARONS AT RUNNIMEDE.

WITH what an awful grace those barons stood

In presence of the king at Runnimede ! .

Their silent finger to that righteous deed

O'er which, with cheek forsaken of its blood,
He hung, still pointing with stern hardihood,

And brow that spake the unuttered mandate, "Read! Sign! He glares round. — Never! though thousands

[ocr errors]

وو

bleed

He will not! Hush,—low words, in solemn mood,
Are murmured; and he signs. Great God! were these
Progenitors of our enfeebled kind?

Whose wordy wars are waged to thwart or please
Minions, not kings; who stoop with grovelling mind
To weigh the pauper's dole, scan right by rule,
And plunder churches to endow a school!

Sir Aubrey de Vere.

Rydal.

LINES

WRITTEN WITH A SLATE-PENCIL UPON A STONE, THE LARGEST

OF A HEAP LYING NEAR A DESERTED QUARRY, UPON ONE OF THE ISLANDS AT RYDAL.

STRANG

TRANGER! this hillock of misshapen stones
Is not a ruin spared or made by time,
Nor, as perchance thou rashly deem'st, the cairn
Of some old British chief: 't is nothing more
Than the rude embyro of a little dome
Or pleasure-house, once destined to be built
Among the birch-trees of this rocky isle.
But, as it chanced, Sir William having learned

That from the shore a full-grown man might wade,
And make himself a freeman of this spot
At any hour he chose, the prudent knight
Desisted, and the quarry and the mound
Are monuments of his unfinished task.

The block on which these lines are traced, perhaps,
Was once selected as the corner-stone

Of that intended pile, which would have been
Some quaint odd plaything of elaborate skill,
So that, I guess, the linnet and the thrush,
And other little builders who dwell here,
Had wondered at the work. But blame him not,
For old Sir William was a gentle knight,
Bred in this vale, to which he appertained
With all his ancestry. Then peace to him,
And for the outrage which he had devised,
Entire forgiveness! But if thou art one
On fire with thy impatience to become
An inmate of these mountains, if, disturbed
By beautiful conceptions, thou hast hewn
Out of the quiet rock the elements

[ocr errors]

Of thy trim mansion destined soon to blaze

-

In snow-white splendor, think again; and, taught
By old Sir William and his quarry, leave
Thy fragments to the bramble and the rose;
There let the vernal slow-worm sun himself,
And let the redbreast hop from stone to stone.

William Wordsworth.

« PreviousContinue »