Scene, Bristol. Celmond, alone.
The world is dark with night; the winds are still,
Faintly the moon her pallid light makes gleam;
The risen sprites the silent churchyard fill,
With elfin fairies joining in the dream;
The forest shineth with the silver leme;
Now may my love be sated in its treat;
Upon the brink of some swift running stream,
At the sweet banquet I will sweetly eat.
This is the house; quickly, ye hinds, appear.
Enter a servant.
Cel. Go tell to Bertha straight, a stranger waiteth here.
The Rowley poems include, among other things, a number of dramatic or quasi-dramatic pieces, "Goddwyn," "The Tournament," "The Parliament of Sprites"; the narrative poem of "The Battle of Hastings," and a collection of "eclogues." These are all in long-stanza forms, mostly in the ten-lined stanza. "English Metamorphosis" is an imitation of a passage in "The Faërie Queene," (book ii. canto x. stanzas 5-19). "The Parliament of Sprites" is an interlude played by Carmelite friars at William Canynge's house on the occasion of the dedication of St. Mary Redcliffe's. One after another the antichi spiriti dolenti rise up and salute the new edifice: Nimrod and the Assyrians, Anglo-Saxon ealdormen and Norman knights templars, and citizens of ancient Bristol. Among others, "Elle's sprite speaks":
"Were I once more cast in a mortal frame,
To hear the chantry-song sound in mine ear,
To hear the masses to our holy dame,
To view the cross-aisles and the arches fair!
Through the half-hidden silver-twinkling glare
Of yon bright moon in foggy mantles dressed,
I must content this building to aspere,[23]
Whilst broken clouds the holy sight arrest;
Till, as the nights grow old, I fly the light.
Oh! were I man again, to see the sight!"
Perhaps the most engaging of the Rowley poems are "An Excelente Balade of Charitie," written in the rhyme royal; and "The Bristowe Tragedie," in the common ballad stanza, and said by Tyrwhitt to be founded on an historical fact: the excecution at Bristol, in 1461, of Sir Baldwin Fulford, who fought on the Lancastrian side in the Wars of the Roses. The best quality in Chatterton's verse is its unexpectedness,—sudden epithets or whole lines, of a wild and artless sweetness,—which goes far to explain the fascination that he exercised over Coleridge and Keats. I mean such touches as these:
"Once as I dozing in the witch-hour lay."
"Brown as the filbert dropping from the shell."
"My gorme emblanchèd with the comfreie plant."
"Where thou may'st here the sweetè night-lark chant,
Or with some mocking brooklet sweetly glide."