Brother is parting from brother; Maurice, a year younger than himself,—then in the companion ship Swallow, in which Rupert, by the devoted determination of his comrades, was ultimately saved. Maurice was not long after drowned in the West Indies.
Flame-pikes; Two ‘fire-pikes,’ it is stated, were burned as a signal just before the flag-ship sank. Three hundred and thirty-three was the estimate of the number drowned.
THE RETURN OF LAW
1660
At last the long darkness of anarchy lifts, and the dawn o’er the gray
In rosy pulsation floods; the tremulous amber of day:
In the golden umbrage of spring-tide, the dewy delight of the sward,
The liquid voices awake, the new morn with music reward.
Peace in her car goes up; a rainbow curves for her road;
Law and fair Order before her, the reinless coursers of God;—
Round her the gracious maids in circling majesty shine;
They are rich in blossoms and blessings, the Hours, the white, the divine!
Hands in sisterly hands they unite, eye calling on eye;
Smiles more speaking than words, as the pageant sweeps o’er the sky.
Plenty is with them, and Commerce; all gifts of all lands from her horn
Raining on England profuse; and, clad in the beams of the morn,
Her warrior-guardian of old the red standard rears in its might;
And the Love-star trembles above, and passes, light into light.
Many the marvels of earth, the more marvellous wonders on high,
Worlds past number on worlds, blank lightless abysses of sky;
But thou art the wonder of wonders, O Man! Thy impalpable soul,
Atom of consciousness, measuring the Infinite, grasping the whole:
Then, on the trivialest transiencies fix’d, or plucking for fruit
Dead-sea apples and ashes of sin, more brute than the brute.
Yet in thy deepest depths, filth-wallowing orgies of night,
Lust remorseless of blood, yet, allow’d an inlet for light:
As where, a thousand fathom beneath us, midnight afar
Glooms in some gulph, and we gaze, and, behold! one flash of one star!
For, ever, the golden gates stand open, the transit is free
For the human to mix with divine; from himself to the Highest to flee.
Lo on its knees by the bedside the babe:—and the song that we hear
Has been heard already in Heaven! the low-lisp’d music is clear:—
For, fresh from the hand of the Maker, the child still breathes the light air
Of the House Angelic, the meadow where souls yet unbodied repair,
Lucid with love, translucent with bliss, and know not the doom
In the Marah valley of life laid up for the sons of the womb.
—I speak not of grovelling hearts, souls blind and begrimed from the birth,
But the spirits of nobler strain, the elect of the children of earth:—
For the needle swerves from the pole; they cannot do what they would;
In their truest aim is falsehood, and ill out-balancing good.
Faith’s first felicities fade; the world-mists thicken and roll,
’Neath the heavens arching their heaven; o’er-hazing the eye of the soul.
Then the vision is pure no longer; refracted above us arise
The phantasmal figures of passion; earth’s mirage exhaled to the skies.
And they go as the castled clouds o’er the verge when the tempest is laid,
Towering Ambition, and Glory, and Self as Duty array’d:—
Idols no less than that idol whom lustful Ammon of yore
With the death-scream of children, a furnace of blood, was fain to adore!
So these, in the shrine of the soul, for a Moloch sacrifice cry,
The conscience of candid childhood, the pure directness of eye:—
Till the man yields himself to himself, accepting his will as his fate,
And the light from above within him is darkness; the darkness how great!
O Land whom the Gods,—loving most,—most sorely in wisdom have tried,
England! since Time was Time, thrice swept by the conqueror tide,
Why on thyself thrice turn, thrice crimson thy greenness in gore,
With the slain of thy children, as sheep, thy meadows whitening-o’er?
Race impatiently patient; tenacious of foe as of friend;
Slow to take flame; but, enflamed, that burns thyself out to the end:
Slow to return to the balance, once moved; not easily sway’d
From the centre, and, star-like, retracing thy orbit through sunlight and shade!
—Without hate, without party affection, we now look back on the fray,
Through the mellowing magic of time the phantoms emerging to day!
Grasping too much for self, unjust to his rival in strife,
Each foe with good conscience and honour advances; war to the knife!
Lo, where with feebler hand the Stuart essays him to guide
The disdainful coursers of Henry, the Tudor car in its pride!
For he saw not the past was past; nor the swirl and inrush of the tide,
A nation arising in manhood; its will would no more be denied.
They would share in the labour and peril of State; they must perish or win;
’Tis the instinct of Freedom that cries; a voice of Nature within!
Narrow the cry and sectarian oft: true sons of their age;
Justice avenged unjustly; yet more in sorrow than rage;
Till they drank the poison of power, the Circé-cup of command,
And the face of Liberty fail’d, and the sword was snatch’d from her hand.
Now Law ’neath the scaffold cowers, and,—shame engendering shame,—