History, it may be said with reasonable confidence, records no hero more unselfish, no one less stained with human error and frailty, than George Washington.
The years unknown; It is to Odin, whatever date be thereby signified, that our royal genealogy runs back.
SANDRINGHAM
1871
In the drear November gloom
And the long December night,
There were omens of affright,
And prophecies of doom;
And the golden lamp of life burn’d spectre-dim,
Till Love could hardly mark
The little sapphire spark
That only made the dark
More dark and grim.
There not around alone
Watch’d sister, brother, wife,
And she who gave him life,
White as if wrought in stone
Unheard, invisible, by the bed of death
Stood eager millions by;
And as the hour drew nigh,
Dreading to see him die,
Held their breath.
Where’er in world-wide skies
The Lion-Banner burns,
A common impulse turns
All hearts to where he lies:—
For as a babe the heir of that great throne
Is weak and motionless;
And they feel the deep distress
On wife and mother press,
As ’twere their own.
O! not the thought of race
From Asian Odin drawn
In History’s mythic dawn,
Nor what we downward trace,
—Plantagenet, York, Edward, Elizabeth,—
Heroic names approved,—
The blood of the people moved;
But that, ’mongst those he loved,
He fought with death.
And if the Reason said
‘’Gainst Nature’s law and death
Prayer is but idle breath,’—
Yet Faith was undismayed,
Arm’d with the deeper insight of the heart:—
Nor can the wisest say
What other laws may sway
The world’s apparent way,
Known but in part.