O Elements at strife
With this poor human life,
Stern laws of Nature fair!
By flame constrain’d to fly
The treacherous stream they try,—
And those dark Ganges waves suck down the souls they bear!—
Ah, crowning anguish! Dawn of hope in sight;
Then, final night!
And now, Four heads, no more,
Life’s flotsam flung ashore,
They lie:—But not as they
Who o’er a dreadful past
The heart’s-ease sigh may cast!
Too worn! too tried!—their lives but given them as a prey!
Whilst all seems now a dream, a nought of nought,
For which they fought!
—O stout Fourteen, who bled
O’erwhelm’d, not vanquishéd!
In those dark days of blood
How many dared, and died,
And others at their side
Fresh heroes, sprang,—a race that cannot be subdued!
—Like them who pass’d Death’s vale, and lived;—the Four
Saved from Cawnpore!
The English garrison at Cawnpore, with a large number of sick, women, and children, were besieged in their hastily made and weak earthworks by Nana Sahib from June 6 to June 25, 1857. Compelled to surrender, under promise of safe convoy down the Ganges, on the 27th they were massacred by musketry from the banks; the thatch of the river-boats being also fired. The survivors were murdered and thrown into the well upon Havelock’s approach on July 15.
One boat managed to escape unburnt on June 27. It was chased through the 28th and 29th, by which time the crowd on board was reduced to fourteen men, one of whom, Mowbray-Thomson, has left a narrative equally striking from its vividness and its modesty. Seven escaped from the small temple in which they defended themselves; four only finally survived to tell the story.
A dusky wall; ‘After a little time they stood behind a rampart of black and bloody corpses, and fired, with comparative security, over this bulwark:’ (Kaye: Sepoy War: B. V: ch. ii).
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.