The Lay of the Minstrel’s Heart
It was the time when Spring on Earth
Gives Eden to the young;
On Provence shone the Vesper star;
Beneath fair Marguerite’s lattice-bar
The Minstrel, Aymer, sung—
“The year may take a second birth,
But May is swift of wing;
The Heart whose sunshine lives in thee
One May from year to year shall see;
Thy love, eternal spring!”
The Ladye blush’d, the Ladye sighed,
All Heaven was in that Hour!
The Heart he pledged was leal and brave—
And what the pledge the Ladye gave?—
Her hand let fall a flower!
And when shall Aymer claim his Bride?
It is the hour to part!
He goes to guard the Saviour’s grave;—
Her pledge, a flower, the Maiden gave,
And his—the Minstrel’s heart!
Behold, a Cross, a Grave, a Foe!
What else—Man’s Holy Land?
High deeds, that level Rank to Fame,
Have bought young Aymer’s right to claim
The high-born Maiden’s hand.
High deeds should ask no meed below—
Their meed is in the sky.
The poison-dart, in Victory’s hour,
Has pierced the Heart where lies the flower,
And hers its latest sigh!
It is the time when Spring on Earth
Gives Eden to the young,
And harp and hymn proclaim the Bride,
Who smiles, Count Raimond, by thy side,—
The Maid whom Aymer sung!
And, darkly through the wassail mirth,
A pale procession see!—
Turn, Marguerite, from the bridegroom turn—
Thine Aymer’s heart—the funeral urn—
His pledge, comes back to thee!
Lo, on the Urn how wither’d lies
Thy gift—the scentless flower!
Amid those garlands, fresh and fair,
That prank the hall and glad the air,
What does that wither’d flower?
One tear bedew’d the Ladye’s eyes,
No tears beseem the day.
The dead can ne’er to life return
“A marble tomb shall grace the Urn,”
She said, and turn’d away.
The marble rose the Urn above,
The World went on the same;
The Ladye smiled. Count Raimond’s bride,
And flowers, like hers, that bloom’d and died,
Each May returning came.
The faded flower, the dream of love,
The poison and the dart,
The tearful trust, the smiling wrong,
The tomb,—behold, O Child of Song,
The History of thy Heart!
Narrative Lyrics. Or, The Parcæ; in Six Leaves From the Sibyl’s Book
The Parcæ — Leaf the First
Napoleon at Isola Bella
In the Isola Bella, upon the Lago Maggiore, where the richest vegetation of the tropics grows in the vicinity of the Alps, there is a lofty laurel-tree (the bay), tall as the tallest oak, on which, a few days before the battle of Marengo, Napoleon carved the word “BATTAGLIA.” The bark has fallen away from the inscription, most of the letters are gone, and the few left are nearly effaced.
I.
O fairy island of a fairy sea,
Wherein Calypso might have spell’d the Greek,
Or Flora piled her fragrant treasury,
Cull’d from each shore her Zephyr’s wings could seek.—
From rocks, where aloes blow.
Tier upon tier, Hesperian fruits arise;
The hanging bowers of this soft Babylon;
An India mellows in the Lombard skies,
And changelings, stolen from the Lybian sun,
Smile to yon Alps of snow.
II.
Amid this gentlest dream-land of the wave,
Arrested, stood the wondrous Corsican;
As if one glimpse the better angel gave
Of the bright garden-life vouschafed to man
Ere blood defiled the world.
He stood—that grand Sesostris of the North—
While paused the car to which were harness’d kings;
And in the airs, that lovingly sigh’d forth
The balms of Araby, his eagle-wings
Their sullen thunder furl’d.
III.
And o’er the marble hush of those large brows,
Dread with the awe of the Olympian nod,
A giant laurel spread its breathless boughs,
The prophet-tree of the dark Pythian god,
Shadowing the doom of thrones!
What, in such hour of rest and scene of joy,
Stirs in the cells of that unfathom’d brain?
Comes back one memory of the musing boy,
Lone gazing o’er the yet unmeasured main,
Whose waifs are human bones?
IV.
To those deep eyes doth one soft dream return?
Soft with the bloom of youth’s unrifled spring,
When Hope first fills from founts divine the urn,
And rapt Ambition, on the angel’s wing,
Floats first through golden air?
Or doth that smile recall the midnight street,
When thine own star the solemn ray denied,
And to a stage-mime,A for obscure retreat
From hungry Want, the destined Cæsar sigh’d?—
Still Fate, as then, asks prayer.
V.
Under that prophet tree, thou standest now;
Inscribe thy wish upon the mystic rind;
Hath the warm human heart no tender vow
Link’d with sweet household names?—no hope enshrined
Where thoughts are priests of Peace.
Or, if dire Hannibal thy model be,
Dread lest, like him, thou bear the thunder home!
Perchance ev’n now a Scipio dawns for thee,
Thou doomest Carthage while thou smitest Rome—
Write, write “Let carnage cease!”
VI.
Whispers from heaven have strife itself inform’d;—
“Peace” was our dauntless Falkland’s latest sigh,
Navarre’s frank Henry fed the forts he storm’d.
Wild Xerxes wept the Hosts he doom’d to die!
Ev’n War pays dues to Love!
Note how harmoniously the art of Man
Blends with the Beautiful of Nature! see
How the true Laurel of the Delian
Shelters the Grace!—Apollo’s peaceful tree
Blunts ev’n the bolt of Jove.
VII.
Write on the sacred bark such votive prayer,
As the mild Power may grant in coming years,
Some word to make thy memory gentle there;—
More than renown, kind thought for men endears
A Hero to Mankind.
Slow moved the mighty hand—a tremour shook
The leaves, and hoarse winds groan’d along the wood;
The Pythian tree the damning sentence took,
And to the sun the battle-word of blood
Glared from the gashing rind.
VIII.
So thou hast writ the word, and sign’d thy doom:
Farewell, and pass upon thy gory way,
The direful skein the pausing Fates resume!
Let not the Elysian grove thy steps delay
From thy Promethean goal.
The fatal tree the abhorrent word retain’d,
Till the last Battle on its bloody strand
Flung what were nobler had no life remain’d,—
The crownless front and the disarmèd hand
And the’ foil’d Titan Soul;
IX.
Now, year by year, the warrior’s iron mark
Crumbles away from the majestic tree,
The indignant life-sap ebbing from the bark
Where the grim death-word to Humanity
Profaned the Lord of Day.
High o’er the pomp of blooms, as greenly still,
Aspires that tree—the Archetype of Fame,
The stem rejects all chronicle of ill;
The bark shrinks back—the tree survives the same—
The record rots away.
Baveno, Oct. 8, 1845.
The Parcæ — — Leaf the Second
Mazarin
Farewell to the Beautiful, Without
“I was walking, some days after, in the new apartments of his palace. I recognized the approach of the cardinal (Mazaria) by the sound of his slippered feet, which he dragged one after the other, as a man enfeebled by a mortal malady. I concealed myself behind the tapestry, and I heard him say, ‘Il faut quitter tout cela!’ (‘I must leave all that!’) He stopped at every step, for he was very feeble, and casting his eyes on each object that attracted him, he sighed forth, as from the bottom of his heart, ‘II faut quitter tout cela! What pains have I taken to acquire these things! Can I abandon them without regret? I shall never see them more where I am about to go!’” &c.—Mémoires Inédits de Louis Henri, Comte de Brienne, Barrière’s Edition, vol. ii. p. 115.
Serene the Marble Images
Gleam’d down, in lengthen’d rows;
Their life, like the Uranides,
A glory and repose.
Glow’d forth the costly canvas spoil
From many a gorgeous frame;
One race will starve the living toil,
The next will gild the name.
That stately silence silvering through,
The steadfast tapers shone
Upon the Painter’s pomp of hue,
The Sculptor’s solemn stone.
Saved from the deluge-storm of Time,
Within that ark, survey
Whate’er of elder Art sublime
Survives a world’s decay!
There creeps a foot, there sighs a breath,
Along the quiet floor;
An old man leaves his bed of death
To count his treasures o’er.
Behold the dying mortal glide
Amidst the eternal Art;
It were a sight to stir with pride
Some pining Painter’s heart!
It were a sight that might beguile
Sad Genius from the Hour,
To see the life of Genius smile
Upon the death of Power.
The ghost-like master of that hall
Is king-like in the land;
And France’s proudest heads could fall
Beneath that spectre hand.
Veil’d in the Roman purple, preys
The canker-worm within;
And more than Bourbon’s sceptre sways
The crook of Mazarin.
Italian, yet more dear to thee
Than sceptre, or than crook,
The Art in which thine Italy
Still charm’d thy glazing look!
So feebly, and with wistful eyes,
He crawls along the floor;
A dying man, who, ere he dies,
Would count his treasures o’er.
And, from the landscape’s soft repose,
Smiled thy calm soul, Lorraine;
And, from the deeps of Raphael, rose
Celestial Love again.
In pomp, which his own pomp recalls,
The haggard owner sees
Thy cloth of gold and banquet halls,
Thou stately Veronese!
While, cold as if they scorn’d to hail
Creations not their own,
The Gods of Greece stand marble-pale
Around the Thunderer’s throne.
There, Hebè brims the urn of gold;
There, Hermes treads the skies;
There, ever in the Serpent’s fold,
Laocoon deathless dies.
There, startled from her mountain rest,
Young Dian turns to draw
The arrowy death that waits the breast
Her slumber fail’d to awe.
There, earth subdued by dauntless deeds,
And life’s large labours done,
Stands, sad as Worth with mortal meeds,
Alcmena’s mournful son.B
They gaze upon the fading form
With mute immortal eyes;—
Here, clay that waits the hungry worm;
There, children of the skies.
Then slowly as he totter’d by,
The old Man, unresign’d,
Sigh’d forth: “Alas! and must I die,
And leave such life behind?
“The Beautiful, from which I part,
Alone defies decay!”
Still, while he sigh’d, the eternal Art
Smiled down upon the clay.
And as he waved the feeble hand,
And crawl’d unto the porch,
He saw the Silent Genius stand
With the extinguish’d torch!
The world without, for ever yours,
Ye stern remorseless Three;
What, from that changeful world, secures
Calm Immortality?
Nay, soon or late decays, alas!
Or canvass, stone, or scroll;
From all material forms must pass
To forms afresh, the soul.
’Tis but in that which doth create,
Duration can be sought;
A worm can waste the canvass;—Fate
Ne’er swept from Time, a Thought.
Lives Phidias in his works alone?—
His Jove returns to air:
But wake one godlike shape from stone,
And Phidian thought is there!
Blot out the Iliad from the earth,
Still Homer’s thought would fire
Each deed that boasts sublimer worth,
And each diviner lyre.
Like light, connecting star to star,
Doth Thought transmitted run;—
Rays that to earth the nearest are,
Have longest left the sun.
The Parcæ — Leaf the Third
André Chénier
Farewell to the Beautiful, Within
“André Chénier, the original of whatever is truest to nature and genuine passion, in the modern poetry of France, died by the guillotine, July 27, 1794. In ascending the scaffold, he cried, ‘To die so young!’ ‘And there was something here!’ he added, striking his forehead, not in the fear of death, but the despair of genius!”—See Thiers, vol. iv. p. 83.
Within the prison’s dreary girth,
The dismal night, before
That morn on which the dungeon Earth
Shall wall the soul no more,
There stood serenest images
Where doomèd Genius lay,
The ever young Uranides
Around the Child of Clay.
On blacken’d walls and rugged floors
Shone cheerful, thro’ the night,
The stars—like beacons from the shores
Of the still Infinite.
From Ida to the Poet’s cell
The Pain-beguilers stole;
Apollo tuned his silver shell
And Hebè brimm’d the bowl.
To grace those walls he needed nought
That tint or stone bestows;
Creation kindled from his thought:
He call’d—and gods arose.
The visions Poets only know
Upon the captive smiled,
As bright within those walls of woe
As on the sunlit child;
He saw the nameless, glorious things
Which youthful dreamers see,
When Fancy first with murmurous wings
O’ershadows bards to be;
Those forms to life spiritual given
By high creative hymn;
From music born—as from their heaven
Are born the Seraphim.C
Forgetful of the coming day,
Upon the dungeon floor
He sate to count, poor child of clay,
The wealth of genius o’er;
To count the gems, as yet unwrought,
But found beneath the soil;
The bright discoveries claim’d by thought,
As future crowns for toil.
He sees The Work his breath should warm
To life, from out the air:
The Shape of Love his soul should form,
Then leave its birthright there!
He sees the new Immortal rise
From her melodious sea;
The last descendant of the skies
For man to bend the knee—
He sees himself within your shrine
O hero gods of Fame!
And hears the praise that makes divine
The human holy name.
True to the hearts of men shall chime
The song their lips repeat;
When heroes chant the strain, sublime;
When lovers breathe it, sweet.
Lo, from the brief delusion given,
He starts, as through the bars
Gleams wan the dawn that scares from Heaven
And Thought alike—its stars.
Hark to the busy tramp below!
The jar of iron doors!
The gaoler’s heavy footfall slow
Along the funeral floors!
The murmur of the crowd that round
The human shambles throng;
That muffled sullen thunder-sound—
The Death-cart grates along!
“Alas, so soon!—and must I die,”
He groan’d forth unresign’d;
“Flit like a cloud athwart the sky,
And leave no wrack behind!
“And yet my Genius speaks to me;
The Pythian fires my brain;
And tells me what my life should be;
A Prophet—and in vain!
“O realm more wide, from clime to clime,
Than ever Cæsar sway’d;
O conquests in that world of time
My grand desire survey’d!”—
Blood-red upon his loathing eyes
Now glares the gaoler’s torch:
“Come forth, the day is in the skies,
The Death-cart at the porch!”
Pass on!—to thee the Parcæ give
The fairest lot of all;—
In golden poet-dreams to live,
And ere they fade—to fall!
The shrine that longest guards a Name
Is oft an early tomb;
The Poem most secure of fame
Is—some wrong’d poet’s doom!
The Parcæ — Leaf the Fourth
Mary Stuart and Her Mourner
“Mary Stuart perished at the age of forty-four years and two months. Her remains were taken from her weeping servants, and a green cloth, torn in haste from an old billiard table, was flung over her once beautiful form. Thus it remained unwatched and unattended, except by a poor little lap-dog, which could not be induced to quit the body of its mistress. This faithful little animal was found dead two days afterwards; and the circumstance made such an impression even on the hard-hearted minister of Elizabeth, that it was mentioned in the official despatches.”
Mrs. Jamieson’s Female Sovereigns—Mary Queen of Scots.
The axe its bloody work had done;
The corpse neglected lay;
This peopled world could spare not one
To watch beside the clay.
The fairest work from Nature’s hand
That e’er on mortals shone,
A sunbeam stray’d from fairy land
To fade upon a throne;—
The Venus of the TombD whose form
Was destiny and death;
The Siren’s voice that stirr’d a storm
In each melodious breath;—
Such was, what now by fate is hurl’d
To rot, unwept, away.
A star has vanish’d from the world;
And none to miss the ray!
Stern Knox, that loneliness forlorn
A harsher truth might teach
To royal pomps, than priestly scorn
To royal sins can preach!
No victims now that lip can make!
That hand how powerless now!
O God! and what a King—but take
A bauble from the brow?
The world is full of life and love;
The world methinks might spare
From millions, one to watch above
The dust of monarchs there.
And not one human eye!—yet lo
What stirs the funeral pall?
What sound—it is not human woe—
Wails moaning through the hall?
Close by the form mankind desert
One thing a vigil keeps;
More near and near to that still heart
It wistful, wondering creeps.
It gazes on those glazèd eyes,
It hearkens for a breath—
It does not know that kindness dies,
And love departs from death.
It fawns as fondly as before
Upon that icy hand.
And hears from lips, that speak no more,
The voice that can command.
To that poor fool, alone on earth,
No matter what had been
The pomp, the fall, the guilt, the worth,
The Dead was still a Queen.
With eyes that horror could not scare,
It watch’d the senseless clay:—
Crouch’d on the breast of Death, and there
Moan’d its fond life away.
And when the bolts discordant clash’d,
And human steps drew nigh,
The human pity shrunk abash’d
Before that faithful eye;
It seem’d to gaze with such rebuke
On those who could forsake;
Then turn’d to watch once more the look,
And strive the sleep to wake.
They raised the pall—they touch’d the dead,
A cry, and both were still’d,—
Alike the soul that Hate had sped,
The life that Love had kill’d.
Semiramis of England, hail!
Thy crime secures thy sway:
But when thine eyes shall scan the tale
Those hireling scribes convey;
When thou shalt read, with late remorse,
How one poor slave was found
Beside thy butcher’d rival’s corse,
The headless and discrown’d;
Shall not thy soul foretell thine own
Unloved, expiring hour,
When those who kneel around the throne
Shall fly the falling tower;
When thy great heart shall silent break,
When thy sad eyes shall strain
Through vacant space, one thing to seek
One thing that loved—in vain?
Though round thy parting pangs of pride
Shall priest and noble crowd;
More worth the grief, that mourn’d beside
Thy victim’s gory shroud!
The Parcæ — Leaf the Fifth
The Last Days of Elizabeth
“Her delight is to sit in the dark, and sometimes, with shedding tears, to bewail Essex.”
—Contemporaneous Correspondence.
“She refused all consolation; few words she uttered, and they were all expressive of some hidden grief which she cared not to reveal. But sighs and groans were the chief vent which she gave to her despondency, and which, though they discovered her sorrows, were never able to ease or assuage them. Ten days and nights she lay upon the carpet leaning on cushions which her maids brought her,” &c.
—Hume.
I.
Rise from thy bloody grave,
Thou soft Medusa of the Fated LineE
Whose evil beauty look’d to death the brave;—
Discrownèd Queen, around whose passionate shame
Terror and Grief the palest flowers entwine,
That ever veil’d the ruins of a Name
With the sweet parasites of song divine!—
Arise, sad Ghost, arise,
And if Revenge outlive the Tomb,
Behold the Doomer brought to doom!
Lo, where thy mighty Murderess lies,
The sleepless couch—the sunless room,—
Through the darkness darkly seen
Rests the shadow of a Queen;
Ever on the lawns below
Flit the shadows to and fro,
Quick at dawn, and slow at noon,
Halving midnight with the moon:
In the palace, still and dun,
Rests that shadow on the floor;
All the changes of the sun
Move that shadow nevermore.
II.
Yet oft she turns from face to face,
A keen and wistful gaze,
As if the memory seeks to trace
The sign of some lost dwelling-place
Beloved in happier days;—
Ah, what the clue supplies
In the cold vigil of a hireling’s eyes?
Ah, sad in childless age to weep alone,
Look round and find no grief reflect our own!—
O Soul, thou speedest to thy rest away,
But not upon the pinions of the dove;
When death draws nigh, how miserable they
Who have outlived all love!
As on the solemn verge of Night
Lingers a weary Moon,
Thou wanest last of every glorious light
That bathed with splendour thy majestic noon:—
The stately stars that clustering o’er the isle
Lull’d into glittering rest the subject sea;—
Gone the great Masters of Italian wile,
False to the world beside, but true to thee!—
Burleigh, the subtlest builder of thy fame,—
The serpent craft of winding Walsingham;—
They who exalted yet before thee bow’d:
And that more dazzling chivalry—the Band
That made thy Court a Faëry Land,
In which thou wert enshrined to reign alone—
The Gloriana of the Diamond Throne;—
All gone,—and left thee sad amidst the cloud.
III.
To their great sires, to whom thy youth was known,
Who from thy smile, as laurels from the sun
Drank the immortal greenness of renown,
Succeeds the cold lip-homage scantly won
From the new race whose hearts already bear
The Wise-man’s offerings to th’ unworthy Heir.
Watching the glass in which the sands run low,—
Hovers keen Cecil with his falcon eyes,
And musing BaconF bends his marble brow.—
But deem not fondly there
To weep the fate or pour th’ averting prayer
Attend those solemn spies!
Lo, at the Regal Gate
The impatient couriers wait;
To speed from hour to hour the nice account
That registers the grudged unpitied sighs
Vexing the friendless void, before
The Stuart’s step shall reeling mount
Tudor’s steep throne, red with his Mother’s gore!
IV.
O piteous mockery of all pomp thou art,
Poor Child of Clay, worn out with toil and years!
As, layer by layer, the granite of the heart
Dissolving, melteth to the weakest tears
That ever Village Maiden shed above
The grave that robb’d her quiet world of love.
Ten days and nights upon that floor
Those weary limbs have lain;
And every hour has added more
Of heaviness to pain.
As gazing into dismal air
She sees the headless phantom there,
The victim round whose image twined
The last wild love of womankind;
That lightning flash’d from stormy hearts,
Which now reveals the deeps of Heaven,
And now remorseless, earthward darts,
Rives, and expires on what its stroke hath riven!
’Twere sad to see from those stern eyes
Th’ unheeded anguish feebly flow;
And hear the broken word that dies
In moanings faint and low;—
But sadder still to mark the while,
The vacant stare—the marble smile,
And think, that goal of glory won.
How slight a shade between
The idiot moping in the sun
And England’s giant Queen!G
V.
Call back the joyous Past!
Lo, England white-robed for a holyday!
While, choral to the clarion’s kingly blast,
Shout peals on shout along the Virgin’s way,
As through the swarming streets rolls on the long array.
Mary is dead!—Look from your fire-won homes,
Exulting Martyrs!—on the mount shall rest
Truth’s ark at last! th’ avenging Lutheran comes
And clasps the Book ye died for to her breast!H
With her, the flower of all the Land,
The high-born gallants ride,
And ever nearest of the band,
With watchful eye and ready hand,
Young Dudley’s form of pride!I
Ah, ev’n in that exulting hour,
Love half allures the soul from Power,—
To that dread brow in bending down
Throbs up, beneath the manlike crown,
The woman’s heart wild beating,
While steals the whisper’d worship, paid
Not to the Monarch, but the Maid,
Through tromps and stormy greeting.
VI.
Call back the gorgeous Past!
The lists are set, the trumpets sound,
Still as the stars, when to the breeze
Sway the proud crests of stately trees,
Bright eyes, from tier on tier around,
Look down, where on its famous ground
Murmurs and moves the bristling life
Of antique Chivalry!
“Forward!”J—the signal word is given—
Like cloud on cloud by tempest driven;
Steel lightens, and arm’d thunders close!
How plumes descend in flakes of snows;
How the ground reels, as reels a sea,
Beneath the inebriate rapture-strife
Of jocund Chivalry!
Who is the Victor of the Day?
Thou of the delicate form and golden hair
And Manhood glorious in its midst of May;—
Thou who, upon thy shield of argent, bearest
The bold device, “The Loftiest is the Fairest!”
As bending low thy stainless crest,
“The Vestal thronèd by the West”
Accords the old Provençal crown
Which blends her own with thy renown;—
Arcadian Sidney—Nursling of the Muse,
Flower of divine Romance,K whose bloom was fed
By daintiest Helicon’s most silver dews,
Alas! how soon thy lovely leaves were shed—
Thee lost, no more were Grace and Force united,
Grace but some flaunting Buckingham unmann’d,
And Force but crush’d what Freedom vainly righted—
Behind, lo Cromwell looms, and dusks the land
With the swart shadow of his giant hand.
VII.
Call back the Kingly Past!
Where, bright and broadening to the main,
Rolls on the scornful River,—
Stout hearts beat high on Tilbury’s plain,—
Our Marathon for ever!
No breeze above, but on the mast
The pennon shook as with the blast.
Forth from the cloud the day-god strode;
Flash’d back from steel, the splendour glow’d,—
Leapt the loud joy from Earth to Heaven,
As through the ranks asunder riven,
The Warrior-Woman rode!
Hark, thrilling through the armèd Line
The martial accents ring,
“Though mine the Woman’s form—yet mine,
“The Heart of England’s King!”L
Woe to the Island and the Maid!
The Pope has preach’d the New Crusade,M
His sons have caught the fiery zeal;
The Monks are merry in Castile;
Bold Parma on the Main;
And through the deep exulting sweep
The Thunder-Steeds of Spain.—
What meteor rides the sulphurous gale?
The Flames have caught the giant sail!
Fierce Drake is grappling prow to prow;
God and St. George for Victory now!
Death in the Battle and the Wind—
Carnage before and Storm behind—
Wild shrieks are heard above the hurtling roar
By Orkney’s rugged strands, and Erin’s ruthless shore.
Joy to the Island and the Maid!
Pope Sextus wept the Last Crusade!
His sons consumed before his zeal,—
The Monks are woeful in Castile;
Your Monument the Main,
The glaive and gale record your tale,
Ye Thunder-Steeds of Spain!
VIII.
Turn from the idle Past;
Its lonely ghost thou art!
Yea, like a ghost, whom charms to earth detain
(When, with the dawn, its kindred phantom train
Glide into peaceful graves)—to dust depart
Thy shadowy pageants; and the day unblest,
Seems some dire curse that keeps thee from thy rest.
Yet comfort, comfort to thy longing woe,
Thou wistful watcher by the dreary portal;
Now when most human, since most feeble, know,
That in the Human struggles the Immortal.
Flash’d from the steel of the descending shears,
Oft sacred light illumes the parting soul;
And our last glimpse along the woof of years,
First reads the scheme that disinvolves the whole.
Yet, then, recall the Past!
Is reverence not the child of sympathy?
To feel for Greatness we must hear it sigh:
On mortal brows those halos longest last
Which blend for one the rays that verge from all.
Few reign, few triumph; millions love and grieve:
Of grief and love let some high memory leave
One mute appeal to life, upon the stone—
That tomb from Time shall votive rites receive
When History doubts what ghost once fill’d a throne.
So,—indistinct while back’d by sunlit skies—
But large and clear against the midnight pall,
Thy human outline awes our human eyes.
Place, place, ye meaner royalties below,
For Nature’s holiest—Womanhood and Woe!
Let not vain youth deride the age that still
Loves as the young,—loves on unto the last;
Grandest the heart when grander than the will—
Bow we before the soul, which through the Past,
Turns no vain glance towards fading heights of Pride,
But strains its humbled tearful gaze to see,
Love and Remorse—near Immortality,
And by the yawning Grave, stand side by side.
The Parcæ — Leaf the Sixth
Cromwell’s Dream
The conception of this Ode originated in a popular tradition of Cromwell’s earlier days. It is thus strikingly related by Mr. Forster, in his very valuable Life of Cromwell:—“He laid himself down, too fatigued in hope for sleep, when suddenly the curtains of his bed were slowly withdrawn by a gigantic figure, which bore the aspect of a woman, and which, gazing at him silently for a while, told him that he should, before his death, be the greatest man in England. He remembered when he told the story, and the recollection marked the current of his thoughts, that the figure had not made mention of the word King.” Alteration has been made in the scene of the vision, and the age of Cromwell.
I.
The Moor spread wild and far,
In the sharp whiteness of a wintry shroud;
Midnight yet moonless; and the winds ice-bound:
And a grey dusk—not darkness—reign’d around,
Save where the phantom of a sudden star
Peer’d o’er some haggard precipice of cloud:—
Where on the wold, the triple pathway cross’d,
A sturdy wanderer wearied, lone, and lost,
Paused and gazed round; a dwarf’d but aged yew
O’er the wan rime its gnome-like shadow threw;
The spot invited, and by sleep oppress’d,
Beneath the boughs he laid him down to rest.
A man of stalwart limbs and hardy frame,
Meet for the ruder time when force was fame,
Youthful in years—the features yet betray
Thoughts rarely mellow’d till the locks are grey:
Round the firm lips the lines of solemn wile
Might warn the wise of danger in the smile;
But the blunt aspect spoke more sternly still
That craft of craft—the Stubborn Will:
That which,—let what may betide—
Never halts nor swerves aside;
From afar its victim viewing,
Slow of speed, but sure-pursuing;
Through maze, up mount, still hounding on its way,
Till grimly couch’d beside the conquer’d prey!
II.
The loftiest fate will longest lie
In unrevealing sleep;
And yet unknown the destined race,
Nor yet his Soul had walk’d with Grace;
Still, on the seas of Time
Drifted the ever-careless prime,—
But many a blast that o’er the sky
All idly seems to sweep,—
Still while it speeds, may spread the seeds
The toils of autumn reap:—
And we must blame the soil, and not the wind,
If hurrying passion leave no golden grain behind.
III.
Seize—seize—seize!N
Bind him strong in the chain,
On his heart, on his brain,
Clasp the links of the evil Sleep!
Seize—seize—seize—
Ye fiends that dimly sweep
Up from the Stygian deep,
Where Death sits watchful by his brother’s side!
Ye pale Impalpables, that are
Shadows of Truths afar,
Appearing oft to warn, but ne’er to guide,—
Hover around the calm, disdainful Fates,
Reveal the woof through which the spindle gleams:—
Open, ye Ebon gates!
Darken the moon—O Dreams!
Seize—seize—seize—
Bind him strong in the chain,
On his heart, on his brain,
Clasp the links of the evil Sleep!
Awakes or dreams he still?
His eyes are open with a glassy stare,
On the fix’d brow the large drops gather chill,
And horror, like a wind, stirs through the lifted hair.
Before him stands the Thing of Dread—
A giant shadow motionless and pale!
As those dim Lemur-Vapours that exhale
From the rank grasses rotting o’er the Dead,
And startle midnight with the mocking show
Of the still, shrouded bones that sleep below—
So the wan image which the Vision bore
Was outlined from the air, no more
Than served to make the loathing sense a bond
Between the world of life, and grislier worlds beyond.
IV.
“Behold!” the Shadow said, and lo,
Where the blank heath had spread, a smiling scene;
Soft woodlands sloping from a village green,O
And, waving to blue Heaven, the happy cornfields glow:
A modest roof, with ivy cluster’d o’er,
And Childhood’s busy mirth beside the door.
But, yonder, sunset sleeping on the sod,
Bow Labour’s rustic sons in solemn prayer;
And, self-made teacher of the truths of God,
The Dreamer sees the Phantom-Cromwell there!
“Art thou content, of these the greatest Thou,”
Murmur’d the Fiend, “the Master and the Priest?”
A sullen anger knit the Dreamer’s brow,
And from his scornful lips the words came slow,
“The greatest of the hamlet, Demon, No!”
Loud laugh’d the Fiend—then trembled through the sky,
Where haply angels watch’d, a warning sigh;—
And darkness swept the scene, and golden Quiet ceased.
V.
“Behold!” the Shadow said—a hell-born ray
Shoots through the Night, up-leaps the unholy Day,
Spring from the earth the Dragon’s armèd seed,
The ghastly squadron wheels, and neighs the spectre-steed.
Unnatural sounded the sweet Mother-tongue,
As loud from host to host the English war-cry rung;
Kindred with kindred blent in slaughter show
The dark phantasma of the Prophet-Woe!
A gay and glittering band!
Apollo’s lovelocks in the crest of Mars—
Light-hearted Valour, laughing scorn to scars—
A gay and glittering band,
Unwitting of the scythe—the lilies of the land!
Pale in the midst, that stately squadron boasts
A princely form, a mournful brow;
And still, where plumes are proudest, seen,
With sparkling eye and dauntless mien,
The young AchillesP of the hosts.
On rolls the surging war—and now
Along the closing columns ring—
“Rupert” and “Charles”—“The Lady of the Crown,”Q
“Down with the Roundhead Rebels, down!”
“St. George and England’s king.”
A stalwart and a sturdy band,—
Whose souls of sullen zeal
Are made, by the Immortal Hand
Invulnerable steel!
A kneeling host,—a pause of prayer,
A single voice thrills through the air
“They come. Up, Ironsides!
For Truth and Peace unsparing smite!
Behold the accursed Amalekite!”
The Dreamer’s heart beat high and loud,
For, calmly through the carnage-cloud,
The scourge and servant of the Lord,
This hand the Bible—that the sword—
The Phantom-Cromwell rides!
A lurid darkness swallows the array,
One moment lost—the darkness rolls away,
And, o’er the slaughter done,
Smiles, with his eyes of love, the setting Sun;
Death makes our foe our brother;
And, meekly, side by side,
Sleep scowling Hate and sternly smiling Pride,
On the kind breast of Earth, the quiet Mother!
Lo, where the victor sweeps along,
The Gideon of the gory throng,
Beneath his hoofs the harmless dead—
The aureole on his helmèd head—
Before him steel-clad Victory bending,
Around, from earth to heaven ascending
The fiery incense of triumphant song.
So, as some orb, above a mighty stream
Sway’d by its law, and sparkling in its beam,—
A power apart from that tempestuous tide,
Calm and aloft, behold the Phantom-Conqueror ride!
“Art thou content—of these the greatest Thou,
Hero and Patriot?” murmur’d then the Fiend.
The unsleeping Dreamer answer’d, “Tempter, nay,
My soul stands breathless on the mountain’s brow
And looks beyond!” Again swift darkness screen’d
The solemn Chieftain and the fierce array,
And armèd Glory pass’d, like happier Peace, away.
VI.
He look’d again, and saw
A chamber with funereal sables hung,
Wherein there lay a ghastly, headless thing
That once had been a king—
And by the corpse a living man, whose doom,
Had both been left to Nature’s gradual law,
Were riper for the garner-house of gloom.R
Rudely beside the gory clay were flung
The Norman sceptre and the Saxon crown;S
So, after some imperial Tragedy
August alike with sorrow and renown,
We smile to see the gauds that moved our awe,
Purple and orb, in dusty lumber lie,—
Alas, what thousands, on the stage of Time,
Envied the baubles, and revered the Mine!
Placed by the trunk—with long and whitening hair
By dark-red gouts besprent, the sever’d head
Up to the Gazer’s musing eyes, the while,
Look’d with its livid brow and stony smile.
On that sad scene, his gaze the Dreamer fed,
Familiar both the Living and the Dead;
Terror, and hate, and strife concluded there,
Calm in his six-feet realm the monarch lay;
And by the warning victim’s mangled clay
The Phantom-Cromwell smiled,—and bending down
With shadowy fingers toy’d about the shadowy crown.
“Art thou content at last?—a Greater thou
Than one to whom the loftiest bent the knee.
First in thy fierce Republic of the Free,
Avenger and Deliverer?”
“Fiend,” replied
The Dreamer, “who shall palter with the tide?—
Deliverer! Pilots who the vessel save
Leave not the helm while winds are on the wave.
The Future is the Haven of the Now!”
“True,” quoth the Fiend—Again the darkness spread,
And night gave back to air the Doomsman and the Dead!
VII.
“See,” cried the Fiend;—he views
A lofty Senate stern with many a form
Not unfamiliar to the earlier strife;
Knit were the brows—and passion flush’d the hues,
And all were hush’d!—that, hush which is in life
As in the air, prophetic of a storm.
Uprose a shapeT with dark bright eye;
It spoke—and at the word
The Dreamer breathed an angry sigh;
And starting—clutch’d his sword;
An instinct bade him hate and fear
That unknown shape—as if a foe were near—
For, mighty in that mien of thoughtful youth,
Spoke Fraud’s most deadly foe—a soul on fire with Truth;
A soul without one stain
Save England’s hallowing tears;—the sad and starry Vane.
There enter’d on that conclave high
A solitary Man!
And rustling through the conclave high
A troubled murmur ran;
A moment more—loud riot all—
With pike and morion gleam’d the startled hall:
And there, where, since the primal date
Of Freedom’s glorious morn,
The eternal People solemn sate,
The People’s Champion spat his ribald scorn!
Dark moral to all ages!—Blent in one
The broken fasces and the shatter’d throne;
The deed that damns immortally is done;
And Force, the Cain of Nations-reigns alone!
The veil is rent—the crafty soul lies bare!
“Behold,” the Demon cried, “the Future Cromwell, there!
Art thou content, on earth the Greatest thou,
Apostate and Usurper?”—From his rest
The Dreamer started with a heaving breast,
The better angels of the human heart
Not dumb to his,—The Hell-Born laugh’d aloud,
And o’er the Evil Vision rush’d the cloud!
Footnotes
A Talma.
B Certainly the sculptor of the Farnese Hercules well conceived that ideal character of the demi-god, which makes Aristotle (Prob. 30) class the grand Personification of Labour amongst the Melancholy. It is the union of mournful repose with colossal power, which gives so profound a moral sentiment to that masterpiece of art.
[C] “Aus den Saiten, wie aus ihren Himmeln,
Neugebor’ne Seraphim.”
—Schiller.
D Libitina, the Venus who presided over funerals.
E Mary Stuart—“the soft Medusa” is an expression strikingly applied to her in her own day.
F See the correspondence maintained by Francis Bacon and Robert Cecil (the sons of Elizabeth’s most faithful friends) with the Scottish court, during the Queen’s last illness.
G “It was after labouring for nearly three weeks under a morbid melancholy, which brought on a stupor not unmixed with some indications of a disordered fancy, that the Queen expired.”—Aikin’s translation of a Latin letter (author unknown) to Edmund Lambert.
Robert Carey, who was admitted to an interview with Elizabeth in her last illness, after describing the passionate anguish of her sighs, observes, “that in all his lifetime before, he never knew her fetch a sigh but when the Queen of Scots was beheaded.” Yet this Robert Carey, the well-born mendicant of her bounty, was the first whose eager haste and joyous countenance told James that the throne of the Tudors was at last vacant.
H “When she (Elizabeth) was conducted through London amidst the joyful acclamations of her subjects, a boy, who personated Truth, was let down from one of the triumphal arches, and presented to her a copy of the Bible. She received the book with the most gracious deportment, placed it next her bosom,” &c.—Hume.
I Robert Dudley, afterwards the Leicester of doubtful fame, attended Elizabeth in her passage to the Tower. The streets, as she passed along, were spread with the finest gravel; banners and pennons, hangings of silk, of velvet, of cloth of gold, were suspended from the balconies; musicians and singers were stationed amidst the populace, as she rode along in her purple robes, preceded by her heralds, &c.
J The customary phrase was “Laissez aller.”
K “The Life of Sir Philip Sidney,” as Campbell finely expresses it, “was Poetry put in action.” With him died the Provençal and the Norman—the Ideal of the Middle Ages.
L “I know I have but the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart of a king, and of a king of England, too.”
She rode bareheaded through the ranks, a page bearing her helmet, mounted on a war-horse, clad in steel, and wielding a general’s truncheon in her hand.
M “Sextus Quintus, the present Pope, famous for his capacity and his tyranny, had published a crusade against England, and had granted plenary indulgences to every one engaged in the present invasion.”—Hume. This Pope was, nevertheless, Elizabeth’s admirer as well as foe, and said, “If a son could be born from us two, he would be master of the world.”
N Λαϐε, λαϐε, λαϐε, λαϐε, (seize, seize, seize).—Æschyl. Eumen., 125.
O The farm of St. Ives, where Cromwell spent three years, which he afterwards recalled with regret—though not unafflicted with dark hypochondria and sullen discontent. Here, as Mr. Forster impressively observes, “in the tenants that rented from him, in the labourers that served under him, he sought to sow the seeds of his after troop of Ironsides.... All the famous doctrines of his later and more celebrated years were tried and tested in the little farm of St. Ives.... Before going to their field-work in the morning, they (his servants) knelt down with their master in the touching equality of prayer; in the evening they shared with him again the comfort and exaltation of divine precepts.”—Forster’s Cromwell.
P Prince Rupert.
Q Henrietta Maria was the popular battle-cry of the Cavaliers.
R The reader will recall the well-known story of Cromwell opening the coffin of Charles with the hilt of a private soldier’s sword, and, after gazing on the body for some time, observing calmly, that it seemed made for long life,—
“Had Nature been his executioner,
He would have outlived me!”—Cromwell, a MS. tragedy.
S King Alfred’s crown was actually sold after the execution of Charles the First.
T When Cromwell came down (leaving his musketeers without the door) to dissolve the Long Parliament, Vane was in the act of urging, through the last stage, the Bill that would have saved the republic—See Forster’s spirited account of this scene, Life of Vane, p. 152.