THE POET’S EUTHANASIA
November: 1674
Cloked in gray threadbare poverty, and blind,
Age-weak, and desolate, and beloved of God;
High-heartedness to long repulse resign’d,
Yet bating not one jot of hope, he trod
The sunless skyless streets he could not see;
By those faint feet made sacrosanct to me.
Yet on that laureate brow the sign he wore
Of Phoebus’ wrath; who,—for his favourite child,
When war and faction raised their rancorous roar,
Leagued with fanatic frenzy, blood-defiled,
To the sweet Muses and himself untrue,—
Around the head he loved thick darkness threw.
—He goes:—But with him glides the Pleiad throng
Of that imperial line, whom Phoebus owns
His ownest: for, since his, no later song
Has soar’d, as wide-wing’d, to the diadem’d thrones
That, in their inmost heaven, the Muses high
Set for the sons of immortality.
Most loved, most lovely, near him as he went,
Vergil: and He, supremest for all time,
In hoary blindness:—But the sweet lament
Of Lesbian love, the Parian song sublime,
Follow’d:—and that stern Florentine apart
Cowl’d himself dark in thought, within his heart
Nursing the dream of Church and Caesar’s State,
Empire and Faith:—while Fancy’s favourite child,
The myriad-minded, moving up sedate
Beckon’d his countryman, and inly smiled:—
Then that august Theophany paled from view,
To higher stars drawn up, and kingdoms new.
The last ten years of Milton’s life were passed at his house situate in the (then) ‘Artillery Walk,’ Bunhill, near Aldersgate. He is described as a spare figure, of middle stature or a little less, who walked, generally clothed in a gray camblet overcoat, in the streets between Bunhill and Little Britain.
Vergil; placed first as most like Milton in consummate art and permanent exquisiteness of phrase. It is to him, also, (if to any one), that Milton is metrically indebted.—The other poets classed as ‘Imperial’ are Homer, Sappho, Archilochus, Dante, Shakespeare. The supremacy in rank which the writer has here ventured to limit to these seven poets, (though with a strong feeling of diffidence in view of certain other Hellenic and Roman claims), is assigned to Sappho and Archilochus, less on account of the scanty fragments, though they be ‘more golden than gold,’ which have reached us, than in confidence that the place collateral with Homer, given them by their countrymen (who criticized as admirably as they created), was, in fact, justified by their poetry.
The dream; Dante’s political wishes and speculations, wholly opposed to Milton’s, are, however, like his in their impracticable originality.
Theophany; Vision of the Gods.
WHITEHALL GALLERY
February 11: 1655
As when the King of old
’Mid Babylonian gold,
And picture-woven walls, and lamps that gleam’d
Unholy radiance, sate,
And with some smooth slave-mate
Toy’d, and the wine laugh’d round, and music stream’d
Voluptuous undulation, o’er the hall,—
Till on the palace-wall
Forth came a hand divine
And wrote the judgment-sign,
And Babylon fell!—So now, in that his place
Of Tudor-Stuart pride,
The golden gallery wide,
’Mid venal beauty’s lavish-arm’d embrace,
And hills of gambler-gold, a godless King
Moved through the revelling
With quick brown falcon-eye
And lips of gay reply;
Wise in the wisdom not from Heaven!—as one
Who from his exile-days
Had learn’d to scorn the praise
Of truth, the crown by martyr-virtue won:
Below ambition:—Grant him regal ease!
The rest, as fate may please!
—O royal heir, restored
Not by the bitter sword,
But when the heart of these great realms in free,
Full, triple, unison beat
The Martyr’s son to greet,
Her ancient law and faith and flag with thee
Rethroned,—not thus!—in this inglorious hall
Of harem-festival,
Not thus!—For even now,
The blaze is on thy brow
Scored by the shadowy hand of him whose wing
Knows neither haste nor rest;
Who from the board each guest
In season calling,—knight and kerne and king,—
Where Arthur lies, and Alfred, signs the way;—
—We know him, and obey.
Lord Macaulay’s lively description of this scene (Hist. Ch iv) should be referred to. ‘Even then,’ he says, ‘the King had complained that he did not feel well.’
Tudor-Stuart; This famous Gallery was of sixteenth-century date.
When the heart; The weariness of England under the triple yoke of Puritanism, the Independents, and the Protector, has been already noticed: (Note on p. 125).
‘The Restoration,’ says Professor Seeley, in an able essay on current perversions of seventeenth-century-history, ‘was not a return to servitude, but the precise contrary. It was a great emancipation, an exodus out of servitude into liberty . . . As to the later Stuarts, I regard them as pupils of Cromwell: . . . it was their great ambition to appropriate his methods,’ (and, we may add, to follow his foreign policy in regard to France and Holland), for the benefit of the old monarchy. They failed where their model had succeeded, and the distinction of having enslaved England remained peculiar to Cromwell.’
THE BALLAD OF KING MONMOUTH
1685
Fear not, my child, though the days be dark,
Never fear, he will come again,
With the long brown hair, and the banner blue,
King Monmouth and all his men!
The summer-smiling bay
Has doff’d its vernal gray;
A peacock breast of emerald shot with blue:
Is it peace or war that lands
On these pale quiet sands,
As round the pier the boats run-in their silent crew?
Bent knee, and forehead bare;
That moment was for prayer!
Then swords flash out, and—Monmouth!—is the cry:
The crumbling cliff o’erpast,
The hazard-die is cast,
’Tis James ’gainst James in arms! Soho! and Liberty!
—Fear not, my child, though he come with few;
Alone will he come again;
God with him, and his right hand more strong
Than a thousand thousand men!
They file by Colway now;
They rise o’er Uplyme brow;
And faithful Taunton hails her hero-knight:
And girlhood’s agile hand
Weaves for the patriot band
The crown-emblazon’d flag, their gathering star of fight.
—Ah flag of shame and woe!
For not by these who go,
Scythe-men and club-men, foot and hunger-worn,
These levies raw and rude,
Can England be subdued,
Or that ancestral throne from its foundations torn!
Yet by the dour deep trench
Their mettle did not blench,
When mist and midnight closed o’er sad Sedgemoor;
Though on those hearts of oak
The tall cuirassiers broke,
And Afric’s tiger-bands sprang forth with sullen roar:
Though the loud cannon plane
Death’s lightning-riven lane,
Levelling that unskill’d valour, rude, unled:
—Yet happier in their fate
Than whom the war-fiends wait
To rend them limb from limb, the gibbet-withering dead!
—Yet weep not, my child, though the dead be dead,
And the wounded rise not again!
For they are with God who for England fought,
And they bore them as Englishmen.
Stout hearts, and sorely tried!
—But he, for whom they died,
Skulk’d like the wolf in Cranborne, torn and gaunt:—
Till, dragg’d and bound, he knelt
To one no prayers could melt,
Nor bond of blood, nor fear of fate, from vengeance daunt.
—O hill of death and gore,
Fast by the tower’d shore,
What wealth of precious blood is thine, what tears!
What calmly fronted scorn;
What pangs, not vainly borne!
For heart beats hot with heart, and human grief endears!
—Then weep not, my child, though the days be dark;
Fear not; He will come again,
With Arthur and Harold and good Saint George,
King Monmouth and all his men!
Monmouth’s invasion forms one of the most brilliant,—perhaps the most brilliant,—of Lord Macaulay’s narratives. But many curious details are added in the History by Mr. G Roberts (1844).
The belief, which this poem represents, that ‘King Monmouth,’ as he was called in the West, would return, lasted long. He landed in Lyme Bay, June 11, 1685, between the Cobb (Harbour-pier) and the beginning of the Ware cliffs: marching north, after a few days, by the road which left the ruins of Colway House on the right and led over Uplyme to Axminster.
Soho; the watch-word on Monmouth’s side at Sedgemoor; his London house was in the Fields, (now Square), bearing that name.
Faithful Taunton; here the Puritan spirit was strong; and here Monmouth was persuaded to take the title of king (June 20), symbolized by the flag which the young girls of Taunton presented to him. It bore a crown with the cypher J B.—Monmouth’s own name being James.
Dour deep trench; Sedgemoor lies in a marshy district near Bridgewater, much intersected by trenches or ‘Rhines.’ One, the Busses Rhine, lay between the two armies as they fought, July 6. Monmouth was caught hiding in Cranborne Chase, July 8; executed, after a vain attempt to move the heart of his uncle the king, July 15, on Tower Hill.
Afric’s tiger-bands; Kirke savage troops from Tangier.
WILLELMUS VAN NASSAU
Yes! we confess it! ’mong the sons of Fate,
Earth’s great ones, thou art great!
As that tall peak which from her silver cone
Of maiden snow unstain’d
All but the bravest scares, and reigns alone
In glacier isolation: Thus wert thou,
With that pale steadfast brow,
Gaunt aquiline: Thy whole life one labouring breath,
Yet the strong soul untamed;
France bridled, England saved, thy task ere death!
—O day of triumph, when thy bloodless host
From Devon’s russet coast
Through the fair capital of the garden-West,
And that, whose gracious spire
Like childhood’s prayer springs heaven-ward unrepress’d,
To Thames march’d legion-like, and at their tread
The sullen despot fled,
And Law and Freedom fair,—so late restored,
And to so-perilous life,
While Stuart craft replaced the Usurper’s sword,—
Broke forth, as sunshine from the breaking sky,
When vernal storm-wings fly!
That day was thine, great Chief, from sea to sea:
The whole land’s welcome seem’d
The welcome of one man! a realm by thee
Deliver’d!—But the crowning hour of fame,
The zenith of a name
Is ours once only: and he, too just, too stern,
Too little Englishman,
A nation’s gratitude did not care to earn,
On wider aims, not worthier, set:—A soul
Immured in self-control;
Saving the thankless in their own despite:—
Then turning with a gasp
Of joy, to his own land by native right;
Changing the Hall of Rufus and the Keep
Of Windsor’s terraced steep
For Guelderland horizons, silvery-blue;
The green deer-twinkling glades,
And long, long, avenues of the stately Loo.
‘William,’ says his all too zealous panegyrist, ‘never became an Englishman. He served England, it is true; but he never loved her, and he never obtained her love. To him she was always a land of exile, visited with reluctance and quitted with delight. . . . Her welfare was not his chief object. Whatever patriotic feeling he had was for Holland. . . . In the gallery of Whitehall he pined for the familiar House in the Wood at the Hague, and never was so happy as when he could quit the magnificence of Windsor for his humbler seat at Loo:’ (Macaulay: Hist. ch. vii)
One labouring breath; William throughout life was tortured by asthma.
Demon’s russet coast; Torbay.—Capital of the garden-West; Exeter.—Gracious spire; Salisbury.—Hall of Rufus; The one originally built by William II at Westminster.
THE CHILDLESS MOTHER
1700-1702
Oft in midnight visions
Ghostly by my bed
Stands a Father’s image,
Pale discrownéd head:—
—I forsook thee, Father!
Was no child to thee!
Child-forsaken Mother,
Now ’tis so with me.
Oft I see the brother,
Baby born to woe,
Crouching by the church-wall
From the bloodhound-foe.
Evil crown’d of evil,
Heritage of strife!
Mine, an heirless sceptre:
His, an exile life!
—O my vanish’d darlings,
From the cradle torn!
Dewdrop lives, that never
Saw their second morn!
Buds that fell untimely,—
Till one blossom grew;
As I watch’d its beauty,
Fading whilst it blew.
Thou wert more to me, Love,
More than words can tell:
All my remnant sunshine
Died in one farewell.
Midnight-mirk before me
Now my life goes by,
For the baby faces
As in vain I cry.
O the little footsteps
On the nursery floor!
Lispings light and laughter
I shall hear no more!
Eyes that gleam’d at waking
Through their silken bars;
Starlike eyes of children,
Now beyond the stars!
Where the murder’d Mary
Waits the rising sign,
They are laid in darkness,
Little lambs of mine.
Only this can comfort:
Safe from earthly harms
Christ the Saviour holds them
In His loving arms:—
Spring eternal round Him,
Roses ever fair:—
Will His mercy set them
All beside me there?
Will their Angels guide me
Through the golden gate?
—Wait a little, children!
Mother, too, must wait!
I forsook thee; Marlborough, desirous to widen the breach between Anne and William III, influenced her to write to her Father, ‘supplicating his forgiveness, and professing repentance for the part she had taken.’
Now ’tis so; Anne ‘was said to attribute the death of her children to the part she had taken in dethroning her father:’ (Lecky, History of the Eighteenth Century).
The brother; The infant son of James, known afterwards as the ‘Old Pretender,’ or as James III. He was carried as an infant from the
Palace (Dec. 1688) to Lambeth, where he was in great peril of discovery. The story is picturesquely told by Macaulay.
One blossom; The Duke of Gloucester, who grew up to eleven years, dying in July 1700. After his death Anne signed, in private letters, ‘your unfortunate’ friend.
Anne’s character, says the candid Lecky, ‘though somewhat peevish and very obstinate, was pure, generous, simple, and affectionate; and she displayed, under bereavements far more numerous than fall to the share of most, a touching piety that endeared her to her people.’
Where the murder’d Mary; ‘Above and around, in every direction,’ says Dean Stanley, describing the vault beneath the monument of Mary of Scotland in Henry the Seventh’s Chapel,—‘crushing by the accumulated weight of their small coffins the receptacles of the illustrious dust beneath, lie the eighteen children of Queen Anne, dying in infancy or stillborn, ending with William Duke of Gloucester, the last hope of the race:’ (Historical Memorials of Westminster Abbey, ch. iii).