MOUNT VERNON
October 5: 1860
Before the hero’s grave he stood,
—A simple stone of rest, and bare
To all the blessing of the air,—
And Peace came down in sunny flood
From the blue haunts of heaven, and smiled
Upon the household reconciled.
—A hundred years have hardly flown
Since in this hermitage of the West
’Mid happy toil and happy rest,
Loving and loved among his own,
His days fulfill’d their fruitful round,
Seeking no move than what they found.
Sweet byways of the life withdrawn!
Yet here his country’s voice,—the cry
Of man for natural liberty,—
That great Republic in her dawn,
The immeasurable Future,—broke;
And to his fate the Leader woke.
Not eager, yet, the blade to bare
Before the Father-country’s eyes,—
—E’en if a parent’s rights, unwise,
With that bold Son he grudged to share,
In manhood strong beyond the sea,
And ripe to wed with Liberty!
—Yet O! when once the die was thrown,
With what unselfish patient skill,
Clear-piercing flame of changeless will,
The one high heart that moved alone
Sedate through the chaotic strife,—
He taught mankind the hero-life!
As when the God whom Pheidias moulds,
Clothed in marmoreal calm divine,
Veils all that strength ’neath beauty’s line,
All energy in repose enfolds;—
So He, in self-effacement great,
Magnanimous to endure and wait.
O Fabius of a wider world!
Master of Fate through self-control
And utter stainlessness of soul!
And when war’s weary sign was furl’d,
Prompt with both hands to welcome in
The white-wing’d Peace he warr’d to win!
Then, to that so long wish’d repose!
The liberal leisure of the farm,
The garden joy, the wild-wood charm;
Life ebbing to its perfect close
Like some white altar-lamp that pales
And self-consumed its light exhales.
No wrathful tempest smote its wing
Against life’s tender flickering flame;
No tropic gloom in terror came;
Slow waning as a summer-spring
The soul breathed out herself, and slept,
And to the end her beauty kept.
Then, as a mother’s love and fears
Throng round the child, unseen but felt,
So by his couch his nation knelt,
Loving and worshipping with her tears:—
Tears!—late amends for all that debt
Due to the Liberator yet!
For though the years their golden round
O’er all the lavish region roll,
And realm on realm, from pole to pole,
In one beneath thy stars be bound:
The far-off centuries as they flow,
No whiter name than this shall know!
—O larger England o’er the wave,
Larger, not greater, yet!—With joy
Of generous hearts ye hail’d the Boy
Who bow’d before the sacred grave,
With Love’s fair freight across the sea
Sped from the Fatherland to thee!
And Freedom on that Empire-throne
Blest in his Mother’s rule revered,
On popular love a kingdom rear’d,
And rooted in the years unknown,—
Land rich in old Experience’ store
And holy legacies of yore,
And youth eternal, ever-new,—
From the high heaven look’d out:—and saw
This other later realm of Law,
Of that old household first-born true,
And lord of half a world!—and smiled
Upon the nations reconciled.
The date prefixed is that of the visit which the Prince of Wales paid to the tomb of Washington: carrying home thence, as one of the most distinguished of his hosts said, ‘an unwritten treaty of amity and alliance.’
Mount Vernon on the Potomac, named after the Admiral, was the family seat of Augustine, father to George Washington, and the residence of the latter from 1752. But all his early years also had been spent in that neighbourhood, in those country pursuits which formed his ideal of life: and thither, on resigning his commission as Commander-in-Chief, he retired in 1785; devoting himself to farming and gardening with all the strenuousness and devoted passion of a Roman of Vergil’s type. And there (Dec. 1799) was he buried.
Not eager; When the ill-feeling between England and America deepened after 1765, Washington ‘was less eager than some others in declaring or declaiming against the mother country;’ (Mahon: Hist. ch. lii).
Ripe to wed with Liberty; See Appendix G.
And to the end; See Petrarch’s beautiful lines: Trionfo della Morte, cap. I.
Due to the Liberator; Compare the epitaph by Ennius on Scipio:
Hic est ille situs, cui nemo civi’ neque hostis
Quivit pro factis reddere opis pretium.
History, it may be said with reasonable confidence, records no hero more unselfish, no one less stained with human error and frailty, than George Washington.
The years unknown; It is to Odin, whatever date be thereby signified, that our royal genealogy runs back.
SANDRINGHAM
1871
In the drear November gloom
And the long December night,
There were omens of affright,
And prophecies of doom;
And the golden lamp of life burn’d spectre-dim,
Till Love could hardly mark
The little sapphire spark
That only made the dark
More dark and grim.
There not around alone
Watch’d sister, brother, wife,
And she who gave him life,
White as if wrought in stone
Unheard, invisible, by the bed of death
Stood eager millions by;
And as the hour drew nigh,
Dreading to see him die,
Held their breath.
Where’er in world-wide skies
The Lion-Banner burns,
A common impulse turns
All hearts to where he lies:—
For as a babe the heir of that great throne
Is weak and motionless;
And they feel the deep distress
On wife and mother press,
As ’twere their own.
O! not the thought of race
From Asian Odin drawn
In History’s mythic dawn,
Nor what we downward trace,
—Plantagenet, York, Edward, Elizabeth,—
Heroic names approved,—
The blood of the people moved;
But that, ’mongst those he loved,
He fought with death.
And if the Reason said
‘’Gainst Nature’s law and death
Prayer is but idle breath,’—
Yet Faith was undismayed,
Arm’d with the deeper insight of the heart:—
Nor can the wisest say
What other laws may sway
The world’s apparent way,
Known but in part.
Nor knew we on that life
What burdens may be cast;
What issues wide and vast
Dependent on that strife:—
This only:—’Twas the son of those we loved!
That in his Mother’s hand
Peace set her golden wand;
’Mid heaving realms, one land
Law-ruled, unmoved.
—He fought, and we with him!
And other Powers were by,
Courage, and Science high,
Grappling the spectre grim
On the battle-field of quiet Sandringham:
And force of perfect Love,
And the will of One above,
Chased Death’s dark squadrons off,
And overcame.
—O soul, to life restored
And love, and wider aim
Than private care can claim,
—And from Death’s unsheath’d sword!
By suffering and by safety dearer made:—
O may the life new-found
Through life be wisdom-crown’d,—
Till in the common ground
Thou too art laid!