Tears on his hollow cheek Told what no tongue could speak: Why did his master break? God's will be done! Doctor said air was best- BATTLE SONG. Day, like our souls, is fiercely dark; We sleep no more; the cock crows-hark! They come they come ! the knell is rung Of us or them; Wide o'er their march the pomp is flung Of gold and gem. What collared hound of lawless sway, To famine dear What pensioned slave of Attila, Leads in the rear? Come they from Scythian wilds afar, Our blood to spill? Wear they the livery of the Czar ? They do his will. Nor tasselled silk, nor epaulette, Nor plume, nor torse— No splendour gilds, all sternly met, Our foot and horse. But, dark and still, we inly glow, Condensed in ire! Strike, tawdry slaves, and ye shall know In vain your pomp, ye evil powers, Wrongs, vengeance, and the cause are ours, The wormy clod! Like fire, beneath their feet awakes Behind, before, above, below, They rouse the brave; Where'er they go, they make a foe, A POET'S EPITAPH. Stop, Mortal! Here thy brother lies, The Poet of the Poor. His books were rivers, woods, and skies, His teachers were the torn hearts' wail, The tyrant and the slave, The street, the factory, the jail, The palace and the grave! The meanest thing, earth's feeblest worm, He feared to scorn or hate; And honoured in a peasant's form The equal of the great. But if he loved the rich who make Ill could he praise the rich who take From plundered labour's store. A hand to do, a head to plan, A heart to feel and dare Tell man's worst foes, here lies the man THE THREE MARYS AT CASTLE HOWARD, IN 1812 AND 1837. The lifeless son--the mother's agony, And strength and joy had strung my soul with steel. A thing of life, that feels he lives in vain- To look on this, thy tale of tears, again; PLAINT. Dark, deep, and cold the current flows O'er its sad gloom still comes and goes Why shrieks for help yon wretch, who goes Though myriads go with him who goes, For all must go where no wind blows, Yet why should he who shrieking goes Alone with God, where no wind blows, Oh, shoreless Deep, where no wind blows! And, thou, oh, Land which no one knows! That God is All, His shadow shows. JOHN KEBLE1. [JOHN KEBLE was born on St. Mark's Day (April 25), 1792, at Fairford, in Gloucestershire. He was elected Scholar of Corpus, Oxford, in his fifteenth, and Fellow of Oriel in his nineteenth year. After a few years of tutorship at Oxford and curacy in the country, he became Vicar of Hursley in Hampshire in 1839, where he continued to minister till his death in 1866. He was with Dr. Newman and Dr. Pusey regarded as forming the Triumvirate of the Oxford Catholic movement. His prose works consist of an elaborate edition of Hooker, a careful Life of Bishop Wilson, and various theological treatises. But it is as a poet much more than a scholar or a controversialist that he is known; and of his poetical works, the Lyra Innocentium, the Translation of the Psalter, a posthumous volume of Poems, and The Christian Year (1827), it is by the last that he acquired an universal and undying fame in English literature. As Professor of Poetry at Oxford he wrote in Latin Praelections on Poetry, which are remarkable both for their subtlety and their exquisite Latinity. His Life was written by his friend Mr. Justice Coleridge.] Keble was not merely, like Isaac Watts or Charles Wesley, a writer of hymns. He was a real poet. Their works, no doubt, have occasional flashes of poetry, but their main object is didactic, devotional, theological. Not so the Christian Year, the Lyra Innocentinm, or the Psalter. Very few of his verses can be used in public worship. His hymns are the exception. His originality lies in the fact that whilst the subjects which he touches are for the most part consecrated by religious usage or Biblical allusion, yet he grasps them not chiefly or exclusively as a theologian, or a Churchman, but as a poet. The Lyra Innocentium, whilst its more limited range of subjects, and perhaps its more subtle turn of thought, will always exclude it from the rank occupied by the 1 The bulk of this notice appeared in the writer's Essays on Church and State. |