Naught living meets the eye or ear,
But well I ween the dead are near;
For though, in feudal strife, a foe
Hath laid our Lady's Chapel low,
Yet still beneath the hallowed soil,
The peasant rests him from his toil,
And, dying, bids his bones be laid
Where erst his simple fathers prayed.'
And last take the same note of sorrow—with Burns's finger on the fall of it:
'Mourn, ilka grove the cushat kens,
Ye hazly shaws and briery dens,
Ye burnies, wimplin' down your glens
Wi' toddlin' din,
Or foamin' strang wi' hasty stens
Frae lin to lin.'
As you read, one after another, these fragments of chant by the great masters, does not a sense come upon you of some element in their passion, no less than in their sound, different, specifically, from that of 'Parching summer hath no warrant'? Is it more profane, think you—or more tender—nay, perhaps, in the core of it, more true?
For instance, when we are told that
'Wharfe, as he moved along,
To matins joined a mournful voice,'
is this disposition of the river's mind to pensive psalmody quite logically accounted for by the previous statement (itself by no means rhythmically dulcet,) that
'The boy is in the arms of Wharfe,
And strangled by a merciless force'?
Or, when we are led into the improving reflection,
'How sweet were leisure, could it yield no more
Then 'mid this wave-washed churchyard to recline,
From pastoral graves extracting thoughts divine!'