November 17.
Hugh,
Bishop of Lincoln.
His name is in the church of England calendar and almanacs on this day, which was ordained his festival by the Romish church, wherein he is honoured as a saint.
St. Hugh was born in Burgundy in 1140, educated in a convent, took the habit of the Chartreuse near Grenoble before he was of age, was ordained priest, and, at the end of ten years, the procuratorship of the monastery was intrusted to him. Henry II. of England, confiding in his prudence and sanctity, induced him to come over and regulate the new monastery of Carthusians, founded by the king at Witham in Somersetshire, which was the first of that order established in England. He was consecrated bishop of Lincoln, 21st September, 1186, exerted his episcopal authority to restore ecclesiastical discipline, especially amongst his clergy, and maintained the claims of the church against the crown itself. In quality of ambassador from king John, he went to France and negotiated a peace; on his return he was seized with a fever, presumed to have been occasioned by his abstemiousness, and died at London, on blessed ashes strewed on the floor, as he directed, in the form of a cross, on the 17th of November, 1200. His body was embalmed, and conveyed with great pomp to Lincoln, where it was met by king John of England and king William of Scotland, with three archbishops, fourteen bishops, above a hundred abbots, and a great number of earls and barons. The two kings put their shoulders under the bier as it was carried into the church.
Alban Butler, from whom these particulars are derived, affirms that three paralytic persons, and some others, recovered their health at St. Hugh’s tomb. He further relates, that, during the saint’s life time, Henry II., being on his way from Normandy to England, in a furious storm, prayed for mercy, through the merits and intercession of St. Hugh, whereon a calm ensued, and the voyage was made in safety.
The Untombed Mariners.
An incident really witnessed in
the Bay of Biscay.
The waves roll’d long and high
In the fathomless Biscay,
And the rising breeze swept sullen by,
And the day closed heavily.
Our ship was tight and brave,
Well trimm’d and sailing free,
And she flew along on the mountain wave,
An eagle of the sea.
The red cross fluttering yet,
We lower’d the noble sign,
For the bell had struck, it was past sunset,
And the moon began to shine.
Her light was fitful, flung
From a sky of angry gloom,
Thick hurrying clouds o’er the waters hung,
Their hue was of the tomb.
Yet now and then a gleam
Broke through of her silent ray,
And lit around with her soften’d beam
Some spot of that plumbless bay.
O’er the bulwark’s side we heard
The proud ship break the spray,
While her shrouds and sheets by the wild winds stirr’d,
Made music mournfully.
And we talk’d of battles past,
Of shipwreck, rock, and shore,
Of ports where peril or chance had cast
Our sail the wide world o’er.
The watch look’d by the lee,
A shapeless log was seen,
A helmless ship it appear’d to be,
And it lay the waves between.
Oh ’twas a fearful sight
That helpless thing to see,
Swimming mastless and lone at high midnight
A corps on the black, black sea!
There were souls, perchance, on board,
And heaving yet their breath,
Men whose cry, amid their despair, was heard
Not to meet ocean-death.
Our chief on deck up sprung,
We lay too in that hollow deep—
Below, as our voices and trampling rung,
The sleepers sprang from sleep.
The boat we loosed and lower’d,
There were gallant hearts to go,
The dark clouds broke that the moon embower’d,
And her lights shone cheering through.
And we watch’d that little boat
Pull up the mountain wave,
Then sink from view, like a name forgot,
Within an ancient grave.
They go—they climb the hull,
As the waters wash the deck,
They shout, and they hear but the billows dull
Strike on that lonely wreck.
The skeletons of men
Lay blanch’d and marrowless there,
But clothed in their living garb, as when
That ’reft ship was their care.
Lash’d to their planks they lay,
The ropes still round them tied,
Though drifted long leagues in that stormy bay,
Since they hoped, despaired, and died.
Tombless in their decay,
Mid the watery solitude,
Days dawn’d upon them and faded away,
Cold moons their death-sleep view’d.
Their names no trace may tell,
Nor whither their passage bound,
And our seamen leave the desolate hull
With death and darkness round.
They tread their deck again,
And silent hoist their boat—
They think of the fate of the unknown men
Who for years may wildly float.
Those bones, that ocean bier,
They well may sadly see,
For they feel that the gallant ship they steer,
Their sepulchre may be.
There is grief for beauty’s woe,
Laurels strew the hero’s hearse—
Are there none will the generous tear bestow
For those untomb’d mariners![502]