Part 5

A WOOF reversed the fatal shuttles weave, How slow! but never once they slip the thread. Hither, upon the Georgian idlers' tread, Up spacious ways the lindens interleave, Clouding the royal air since yester-eve, Come men bereft of time and scant of bread, Loud, who were dumb, immortal, who were dead, Through the cowed world their kingdom to retrieve.

What ails thee, England? Altar, mart, and grange Dream of the knife by night; not so, not so The clear Republic waits the general throe, Along her noonday mountains' open range. God be with both! for one is young to know The other's rote of evil and of change.

V. _Changes in the Temple_

THE cry is at thy gates, long-lovèd ground, Again: for oft ere now thy children went Beggared and wroth, and parting greeting sent Some old red alley with a dial crowned; Some house of honour, in a glory bound With lives and deaths of spirits excellent; Some tree rude-taken from his kingly tent Hard by a little fountain's friendly sound.

Oh, for Virginius' hand, if only that Maintain the whole, and spoil these spoilings soon! Better the scowling Strand should lose, alas, Her walled oasis, and where once it was All mournful in the cleared quadrangle sat Echo and ivy, and the loitering moon.

VI. _The Lights of London_

THE evenfall, so slow on hills, hath shot Far down into the valley's cold extreme, Untimely midnight; spire and roof and stream Like fleeing spectres, shudder and are not. The Hampstead hollies, from their sylvan plot Yet cloudless, lean to watch as in a dream, From chaos climb with many a hasty gleam, London, one moment fallen and forgot.

Her booths begin to flare; and gases bright Prick door and window; every street obscure Sparkles and swarms with nothing true nor sure, Full as a marsh of mist and winking light: Heaven thickens over, Heaven that cannot cure Her tear by day, her fevered smile by night.

VII. _Doves_

AH, if man's boast and man's advance be vain, And yonder bells of Bow, loud-echoing home, And the lone Tree, foreknow it, and the Dome, That monstrous island of the middle main; If each inheritor must sink again Under his sires, as falleth where it clomb Back on the gone wave the disheartened foam?-- I crossed Cheapside, and this was in my brain.

What folly lies in forecasts and in fears! Like a wide laughter sweet and opportune, Wet from the fount, three hundred doves of Paul's Shook their warm wings, drizzling the golden noon, And in their rain-cloud vanished up the walls. "God keeps," I said, "our little flock of years."

VIII. _In the Reading-Room of the British Museum_

PRAISED be the moon of books! that doth above A world of men, the sunken Past behold, And colour spaces else too void and cold To make a very heaven again thereof; As when the sun is set behind a grove, And faintly unto nether ether rolled, All night his whiter image and his mould Grows beautiful with looking on her love.

Thou, therefore, moon of so divine a ray, Lend to our steps both fortitude and light! Feebly along a venerable way They climb the infinite, or perish quite: Nothing are days and deeds to such as they, While in this liberal house thy face is bright.

IX. _Sunday Chimes in the City_

ACROSS the bridge, where in the morning blow The wrinkled tide turns homeward, and is fain Homeward to drag the black sea-goer's chain, And the long yards by Dowgate dipping low; Across dispeopled ways, patient and slow, Saint Magnus and Saint Dunstan call in vain: From Wren's forgotten belfries, in the rain, Down the blank wharves the dropping octaves go.

Forbid not these! Though no man heed, they shower A subtle beauty on the empty hour, From all their dark throats aching and outblown; Aye in the prayerless places welcome most, Like the last gull that up some naked coast Deploys her white and steady wing, alone.

X. _A Porch in Belgravia_

WHEN, after dawn, the lordly houses hide Till you fall foul of it, some piteous guest (Some girl the damp stones gather to their breast, Her gold hair rough, her rebel garment wide, Who sleeps, with all that luck and life denied Camped round, and dreams how, seaward and southwest, Blue over Devon farms the smoke-rings rest, And sheep and lambs ascend the lit hillside),

Dear, of your charity, speak low, step soft, Pray for a sinner. Planet-like and still, Best hearts of all are sometimes set aloft Only to see and pass, nor yet deplore Even Wrong itself, crowned Wrong inscrutable, Which cannot but have been, for evermore.

XI. _York Stairs_

MANY a musing eye returns to thee, Against the formal street disconsolate, Who kept in green domains thy bridal state, With young tide-waters leaping at thy knee; And lest the ravening smoke, and enmity, Corrode thee quite, thy lover sighs, and straight Desires thee safe afar, too graceful gate; Throned on a terrace of the Boboli.

Nay, nay, thy use is here. Stand queenly thus Till the next fury; teach the time and us Leisure and will to draw a serious breath: Not wholly where thou art the soul is cowed, Nor the fooled capital proclaims aloud Barter is god, while Beauty perisheth.

XII. _In the Docks_

WHERE the bales thunder till the day is done, And the wild sounds with wilder odours cope; Where over crouching sail and coiling rope, Lascar and Moor along the gangway run; Where stifled Thames spreads in the pallid sun, A hive of anarchy from slope to slope; Flag of my birth, my liberty, my hope, I see thee at the masthead, joyous one!

O thou good guest! So oft as, young and warm, To the home-wind thy hoisted colours bound, Away, away from this too thoughtful ground, Sodden with human trespass and despair, Thee only, from the desert, from the storm, A sick mind follows into Eden air.

NOTES

_The Kings_: P. 3.

II Kings, VI, 15, 16, 17.

_His Angel to his Mother_: P. 21.

One line of the refrain is taken from an old love song, "Sweet, if you Love me, Let me Go," set to a charming melody in D major, and to be found in Chappell's Popular Music of the Olden Time.

_Beside Hazlitt's Grave_: P. 47.

St. Anne's, Soho, boasts the "sorry steeple," one of London's architectural absurdities. Hazlitt's grave is grassed over and unmarked, but the epitaph which has now for some years stood in place of the interesting original one, may be read on the headstone set against the outer west wall of the church.

_The Vigil-at-Arms_: P. 48.

Suggested by the very simple but soldierly melody in Mendelssohn's Lied ohne Worte in A, Book I, Opus 19, No. 4, the last two lines coming in for repetitions.

_A Friend's Song for Simoisius_: P. 49.

Having to do with Iliad IV, 473-489.

_The Inner Fate_: P. 64.

It is perhaps too daring to force into Greek forms any sentiment so dead against the Greek spirit of determinism.

_The Acknowledgment_: P. 66.

"The Prætor." Brutus in Shakespeare, if not the historical Brutus.

_The Cherry Bough_: P. 70.

"Si quis adhuc isthic meminit Nasonis adempti, Et superest sine me nomen in urbe meum." _Tristia_, Lib. III, El. X.

"Atque aliquis vestrum, Nasonis nomine dicto, Deponat lacrymis pocula mista suis." _Idem_, Lib. V, El. IV.

_A Talisman_: P. 87.

Many years after these lines were in print, it was pointed out to the author by a friend, a student of St. Bernard, how they have managed to echo in part a saying of that great Doctor, in his _De Consideratione_, Lib. I, Cap. VIII, Sec. 9:

"Prudentia item est quae inter voluptates et necessitates media, quasi quaedam arbitra sedens ... disterminat fines ... ex alterutris tertiam formans virtutem quam dicunt Temperantiam."

_Fifteen Epitaphs_: P. 91.

It may be well to state (as these have often been taken for translations), that they are only pseudo-Alexandrian.

_A Footpath Morality_: P. 121.

A sort of floral log-book of a walk from Oxford to Appleton in Berkshire, May, 1908.

OXFORD

_Ad Antiquarium_: P. 146.

This is Wood's disinterested helper, John Aubrey, F.R.S., 1626-1697. Never was a truer lover of what he calls "that most ingeniose Place!"

_Martyrs' Memorial_: P. 147.

The only monument in the streets of Oxford was put up by the local Low Church party in 1841, not really so much to commemorate Cranmer, Ridley, and Latimer, all Cambridge men, as to register a protest against Hurrell Froude (then dead), Newman, and Keble, who all showed frank disrespect to the heroes of the Reformation in England. The reference in the sestet is of course to Cardinal Newman, and was written barely a month before his rather sudden death on August 11, 1890.

_Tom_: P. 149.

The College is a century and a half older than the upper part of its chief entrance gate, and the once monastic bell is much older than either. "The Tom Tower [was] finished in November, 1682. In this was hung the bell called Great Tom of Christ Church, which had originally belonged to Osney Abbey.... From that time to this, it has rung its one hundred and one strokes every night at nine, as a signal that all students should be within their College walls. It need hardly be said that the signal is not obeyed!"

J. WELLS, M.A., 1901. _Oxford and its Colleges_: Christ Church, pp. 205-206.

_The Old Dial of Corpus_: P. 153.

The great Dial in the quadrangle of Corpus Christi College was not put up until 1605,--too late to have been contemporary with either Erasmus or Pole. The author discovered the error several years ago, but has never known how to correct it except by this caution. "Osney Bell" is Great Tom (see just above): Christ Church being next neighbour to Corpus; but Tom may or may not have been in place and condition to ring for curfew in the second year of Queen Elizabeth's reign. The closing line is meant to refer to the motto of the University, _Dominus illuminatio mea_, taken from the opening of Psalm XXVII.

_Undertones at Magdalen_: P. 156.

"The priestless Pulpit" was an accurate description when this sonnet was written (1895), though it is so no longer. From the open-air Pulpit of Magdalen, disused since the Reformation, a Sermon is once again delivered annually on St. John Baptist's Day.

LONDON

_St. Peter-ad-Vincula_: P. 161.

St. Peter-ad-Vincula is the ancient and sadly appropriate dedication of the Church near the Beauchamp Tower and the site of the scaffold. The vaults are under the chancel.

_York Stairs_: P. 169.

Inigo Jones' Water Gate, standing on the Embankment at the foot of Villiers Street, Strand, now a long way from the river, is still called York Stairs. It is the sole surviving appanage of the great town-house of the seventeenth-century Dukes of Buckingham.

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