IN WILD WALES.
Dwarfing the town that to the hillside clings
On terraced slopes, the castle, nobly planned
And noble in its ruined greatness, flings
Its double challenge to the sea and land.
Oh, if the ancient spirit of the place
Could win free utterance in articulate tones,
What tales to hearten and inspire and brace
Would issue from these grey and lichened stones!
Once manned and held by paladin and peer,
Now tenanted by jackdaws, bats and owls,
Save when the casual tourist through its drear
And grass-grown courts disconsolately prowls.
Once famous as the scene of Border fights,
Now watching, in the greatest war of all,
Old men, with their bilingual acolytes,
Beating, outside its gates, a little ball;
While on the crumbling battlements on high,
Where mail-clad men-at-arms kept watch and ward,
Adventurous sheep amaze the curious eye
Instead of grazing on the level sward.
But though such incongruities may jar
The sense of fitness in a mind fastidious,
Modernity has wholly failed to mar
The face of Nature here, or make it hideous.
Inland the amphitheatre of hills
Sweeps round with Snowdon as their central crest,
And murmurs of innumerable rills
Blend with the heaving of the ocean's breast.
Already Autumn's fiery finger laid
On heath and marsh and woodland far and wide
In all their gorgeous pageantry has arrayed
The tranquil beauties of the countryside.
Here every prospect pleases, and the spot,
Unspoilt, unvulgarised by man, remains,
Thanks largely to a System which has not
Accelerated or improved its trains.
Yet even here, amid untroubled ways,
Far from the city's fevered, tainted breath,
Yon distant plume of yellow smoke betrays
The ceaseless labours of the mills of death.
"William Arthur Fletcher, ship's apprentice, of South Shields, was remanded for a week on a charge of being absent from his ship. His captain alleged that he had found Fletcher asleep on the bridge."—Daily Dispatch.
It must have been his mind that was absent.
"At St. Peter's, Vere Street, where he is going to preach from the 30th of this month to the end of this year, the Rev. R.J. Campbell will speak from the pulpit of Frederick Denison Maurice, like himself a convert to the Church of England ... To hear him was an experience never forgotten."—Guardian.
And this although MAURICE rarely preached for more than one month on end.
