Have felt that moment in its fullest power
Sink o’er the earth, so beautiful and soft!
As swung the deep bell in the distant tower,
And the faint dying day-hymn stole aloft:
While not a breath crept thro’ the rosy air,
Yet all the forest leaves seem’d stirred with prayer!”
Perhaps, too, we were even more impressed by a single stanza in another canto of the same poem, where, in his description of Norman Abbey (his own Newstead), he recalls a solitary Madonna-and-Child which had been standing amid the ruins:
“But in a higher niche—alone, but crown’d—
The Virgin-Mother of the God-born Child,
With her Son in her blessed arms, look’d round: