Francis Turner Palgrave

“ Now the basnets of France o’er the palisade frown;
The shield-fort is shatter’d; the Dragon is down.
O then there was dashing and dinting of axe and of broad-sword and spear:
Blood crying out to blood: and Hatred that casteth out fear!
Loud where the fight is the loudest, the slaughter-breath hot in the air,
O what a cry was that!—the cry of a nation’s despair!
—Hew down the best of the land!
Down them with mace and with brand!
The fell foreign arrow has crash’d to the brain;
England with Harold the Englishman slain!
Yet they fought on for their England! ”

“ O’er the green waves as giants ride;
Silver clarions menacing loudly,
‘All the Spains’ on their banners wide;
High on deck of the gilded galleys
Our light sailers they scorn below:—
We will scatter them, plague, and shatter them,
Till their flag hauls down to their foe!
For our oath we swear
By the name we bear,
By England’s Queen, and England free and fair,—
Her’s ever and her’s still, come life, come death:—
God save Elizabeth!
Sidonía, Recalde, and Leyva
Watch from their Castles in swarthy scorn,
Lords and Princes by Philip’s favour;—
We by birthright are noble born! ”

“ O King Hyperion, o’er the Delphic dale
Reigning meanwhile in glory, Ocean know
Thine absence, and outstretch’d an icy veil,
A marble pavement, o’er his waters blue;
Past the Varangian fiord and Zembla hoar,
And from Petsora north to dark Arzina’s shore:—
An iron ridge o’erhung with toppling snow
And giant beards of icicled cascade:—
Where, frost-imprison’d as the long mouths go,
The Good Hope and her mate-ship lay embay’d;
And those brave crews knew that all hope was gone;
England be seen no more; no more the living sun.
A store that daily lessens ’neath their eyes ”

“ One in his pride, in his subtlety one, mocking England and God.
Then tyranny’s draught—once only—we drank to the dregs!—and the stain
Went crimson and black through the soul of the land, for all time, not in vain!
We bore the bluff many-wived king, rough rival and victor of Rome;
We bore the stern despot-protector, whose dawning and sunset were gloom;
For they temper’d the self of the tyrant with love of the land,
Some touch of the heart, some remorse, refraining the grip of the hand. ”

“ Enlightening, bless’d the years of England’s Queen.
Freedom of England! from thy sacred source
Where Alfred arm’d in Athelney, welling pure,
With hero-blood dyed in thy widening course,
—What loyaler hand than her’s to guide thy force
Down ancient channels sure?
Honour of England! in what bosom stirs
Thy soul more quick than her’s?
Yet in her days . . . O greater grief, than when
In years of woe, the years of happiness
Flash o’er us,—to behold,—and no redress,—
Some deed of shame we cannot cure nor stay! ”

“ Crimson o’er Trafalgar?
Such another day never
England will look on again,
When the battle fought was the hottest,
And the hero of heroes was slain!
For the fleet of France and the force of Spain were gather’d for fight,
A greater than Philip their lord, a new Armada in might:—
And the sails were aloft once more in the deep Gaditanian bay,
Where Redoubtable and Bucentaure and great Trinidada lay;
Eager-reluctant to close; for across the bloodshed to be
Two navies beheld one prize in its glory,—the throne of the sea! ”

“ Spare us henceforth such pangs, spare England’s Queen
O much enduring, much revered! To thee
Bring sun-dyed millions love more sweet than fame,
And happy isles that star the purple sea
Homage;—and children at the mother’s knee
With her’s unite thy name;
And faithful hearts, that throb ’neath palm and pine,
From East to West, are thine.
For as some pillar-star o’er sea and storm
Whole fleets to haven guides, so from that height
One great example points the path of Right,
And purifies the home; with gracious aid
Lifting the fallen form.
See Death by finer skill delay’d ”

“ Like childhood’s prayer springs heaven-ward unrepress’d,
To Thames march’d legion-like, and at their tread
The sullen despot fled,
And Law and Freedom fair,—so late restored,
And to so-perilous life,
While Stuart craft replaced the Usurper’s sword,—
Broke forth, as sunshine from the breaking sky,
When vernal storm-wings fly!
That day was thine, great Chief, from sea to sea:
The whole land’s welcome seem’d
The welcome of one man! a realm by thee
Deliver’d!—But the crowning hour of fame,
The zenith of a name
Is ours once only: and he, too just, too stern,
p. ”

“ Better that Harold should bleed!
To the souls I appeal, not the dust of the tomb:—
King chosen of Edward and England, I come!’
Over Heathland surge banners and lances, three armies; William the last,
Clenching his mace; Rome’s gonfanon round him Rome’s majesty cast:
O’er his Bretons Fergant, o’er the hireling squadrons Montgomery lords,
Jerkin’d archers, and mail-clads, and horsemen with pennons and swords:—
—England, in threefold array,
Anchor, and hold them at bay,
Firm set in your own wooden walls! and the wave
Of high-crested Frenchmen will break on their grave. ”

“ The Vision of the Eternal Throne:—
With them, ’tis well!—But thou,
Strong through submission, to His will dost bow,
Till God renew the home in that far realm unseen,
And bless with all her lost ones England’s Queen.
Yet in great Nature’s changeful mystic dance
Joy circles grief, gay dawn outsmiles the night:
’Tis meet our song should build its radiance
Like some high palace-porch, and walls that glance
With gold and marble light:
Now fifty suns ’neath one firm patriot sway
Have whirl’d their shining way. ”

“ On Tyranny stript of her tinsel, what vision of dool and dismay!
Terror in confidence clothed, and anarchy biding her day:
Selfishness hero-mask’d; stage-tricks of the shabby-sublime;
Impotent gaspings at good; and the deluge after her time!
—Is it war that thunders o’er England, and bursts the millennial oak
From his base like a castle uprooted, and shears with impalpable stroke
The sails from the ocean, the houses of men, while the Conqueror lay
On the morn of his crowning mercy, and life flicker’d down with the day? ”

“ Crawl’d out a plague-mist and sheeted the plain,
A hydra of hell and of night.
—Whence upon men has that horror past?
From Cathaya westward it stole to Byzance,—
The City of Flowers,—the vineyards of France;—
O’er the salt-sea ramparts of England, last,
Reeking and rank, a serpent’s breath:—
What is this, men cry in their fear, what is this that cometh?
’Tis the Black Death, they whisper:
The black black Death! ”

“ Crescia, Gonzaga, del Vasto,—world-famous names of affright,
Veterans of iron and blood, insatiate engines of fight:—
But ours were Norris and Essex and Stanley and Willoughby grim,
And the waning Dudley star, and the star that will never be dim,
Star of Philip the peerless,—and now at height of his noon,
Astrophel!—not for thyself but for England extinguish’d too soon!
4
Red walls of Zutphen behind; before them, Spain in her might:—
O! ’tis not war, but a game of heroic boyish delight! ”

“ He who from Ganges to Rhine
p. 142Traced o’er the world his red line
Irresistible; while in the breast
Reign’d devotedness utter, and self for England suppress’d!
O names that enhearten the soul,
Blenheim and Waterloo!
In no vain worship of glory
The poet turns him to you!
O sung by worthier song than mine,
If the day of a nation’s weakness rise,
Of the little counsels that dare not dare,
Of a land that no more on herself relies,—
O breath of our great ones that were,
Burn out this taint in the air! ”

“ Grasping too much for self, unjust to his rival in strife,
Each foe with good conscience and honour advances; war to the knife!
Lo, where with feebler hand the Stuart essays him to guide
The disdainful coursers of Henry, the Tudor car in its pride!
For he saw not the past was past; nor the swirl and inrush of the tide,
A nation arising in manhood; its will would no more be denied.
They would share in the labour and peril of State; they must perish or win;
’Tis the instinct of Freedom that cries; a voice of Nature within! ”

“ And Mercy dawns fast o’er the dead, from the bier as we turn and depart,
England for England’s sake clasp’d firm as a child to his heart.
—He rests:—And the storm-clouds have fled, and the sunshine of Nature repress’d
Breaks o’er the realm in smiles, and the land again has her rest.
He rests: the great spirit is hid where from heaven the veil is unroll’d,
And justice merges in love, and the dross is purged from the gold. ”

“ SIDNEY AT ZUTPHEN
October 2: 1586
1
Where Guelderland outspreads
Her green wide water-meads
Laced by the silver of the parted Rhine;
Where round the horizon low
The waving millsails go,
And poplar avenues stretch their pillar’d line;
That morn a clinging mist uncurl’d
Its folds o’er South-Fen town, and blotted out the world.
2
There, as the gray dawn broke,
Cloked by that ghost-white cloke,
The fifty knights of England sat in steel;
Each man all ear, for eye
Could not his nearest spy ”

“ Friend mix’d with foe in stormy disarray:
Once more the Northern charge asserts its right,
As with the driving rain
They drive them down the plain:
That star alone before Drummossie gilds the night.
16
—Ah! No more!—let others tell
The agony of the mortal moor;
Death’s silent sheepfold dotted o’er
With Scotland’s best, sleet-shrouded as they fell!
There on the hearts, once mine, the snow-wreaths drift;
Night’s winter dews at will
In bitter tears distil,
And o’er the field the stars their squadrons coldly shift.
17
Faithful in a faithless age! ”

“ Rose from her ancient hills, and peace shone o’er her again,
Sunlike chasing the plagues wherewith the land was defiled;
And the leprosy fled, and her flesh came again, as the flesh of a child.
—They were stern and stark, the three children of Rolf, the first from Anjou:
For their own sake loving the land, mayhap, but loving her true;
France the wife, and England the handmaid; yet over the realm
Their eyes were in every place, their hands gripp’d firm on the helm. ”

“ In mercy would spare us, over our childhood outstretching the rod?’
—So she, from her innocent heart; in all things seeing the best
With the wholesome spirit of childhood; to God submitting the rest:
Not seeing the desolate years, the dungeon of Carisbrook drear;
Eyes dry-glazed with fever, and none to lend even a tear!
Now, all her heart to the little one goes; for, day upon day,
As a rosebud in canker, she pales and pines, and the cough has its way.
And the gardens of Richmond on Thames, the fine blythe air of the vale
Stay not the waning pulse, and the masters of science fail. ”

“ Smiles more speaking than words, as the pageant sweeps o’er the sky.
Plenty is with them, and Commerce; all gifts of all lands from her horn
Raining on England profuse; and, clad in the beams of the morn,
Her warrior-guardian of old the red standard rears in its might;
And the Love-star trembles above, and passes, light into light.
Many the marvels of earth, the more marvellous wonders on high,
Worlds past number on worlds, blank lightless abysses of sky ”

“ And they charge the foe in his fastness, home:—
As one long wave when the wind
Urges an ocean behind,
One line, they sweep on the foe,
And France from our battle recoils, and Victory edges the blow.
As a rock by blue lightning divided
Down the hillside scatters its course,
So in twain their army is parted
By the sabres sabring in force:
They have striven enough for honour! . . . and now
Crumble and shatter, and sheer o’er the bank
Where torrent Danube hisses and swirls
Slant and hurry in rankless rank:—
There are sixty thousand the morn
’Gainst the Lions marching in scorn ”

“ On that deep soil great Rome was sown;
Our England her foundations laid:—
Hence, while the nations, change-dismay’d,
To tyrant or to quack repair,
A healthier heart we own,
And the plant Man grows stronger than elsewhere.
Should changeful commerce shun the shore,
And newer, mightier races meet
To push us from our empire-seat,
England will round her call her own,
And as in days of yore
The sea-girt Isle be Freedom’s central throne. ”

“ King Harold mows horseman and horse at his feet.
O vainly the whirlwind of France up the turf to the palisade swept:
Shoulder to shoulder the Englishmen stand, and the shield-wall is kept:—
As, in a summer to be, when England and she yet again
Strove for the sovranty, firm stood our squares, through the pitiless rain
Death rain’d o’er them all day;
—Happier, not braver than they
Who on Senlac e’en yet their still garrison keep,
Sleeping a long Marathonian sleep! ”

“ Love, o’er palms in triumph strown
Passing, through the crowd alone,—
Silent ’mid the exulting cry,—
At Jerusalem to die:
Thou, foreknowing all, didst know
How Thy blood in vain would flow!
How our madness oft would prove
Recreant to the law of love:
Wrongs that men from men endure
Doing Thee to death once more!
‘On the 29th of March 1461 the two armies encountered one another at Towton Field, near Tadcaster. In the numbers engaged, as well as in the terrible obstinacy of the struggle, no such battle had been seen in England since the field of Senlac. ”

“ As o’er that ancient weird Arlesian plain
Where Zeus hail’d boulder-stones on the giant crew,
And changed to stone, or slew,
No bud may burgeon in Spring’s gracious rain,
No blade of grass or grain:
—So bare, so scourged, a prey to chaos cast
The wisest despot leaves his realm at last!
Though for the land he toil’d with iron will,
Earnest to reach persuasion’s goal through power,
The fruit without the flower!
And pray’d and wrestled to charm good from ill;
Waking perchance, or not, in death,—to find
Man fights a losing fight who fights mankind! ”

“ Making the fleet two spears, to thrust at the foe, any way, . . .
‘Anyhow!—without orders, each captain his Frenchman may grapple perforce:
Collingwood first’ (yet the Victory ne’er a whit slacken’d her course)
‘Signal for action! Farewell! we shall win, but we meet not again!’
—Then a low thunder of readiness ran from the decks o’er the main,
And on,—as the message from masthead to masthead flew out like a flame,
England expects every man will do his duty,—they came. ”

“ E’en so it was on the morn
When France with Spain, in one realm
Welded, one thunderbolt, stood,
With one stroke the world to o’erwhelm.
p. 140—They have pass’d the great stream, they have stretch’d their white camp
Above the protecting morass and the dell,
Blenheim to Lutzingen, where the long wood
In summer-thick leafage rounds o’er the fell:
—England! in nine-fold advance
Cast thy red flood upon France;
Over marsh over beck ye must go,
Wholly together! or, Danube to Rhine, all slides to the foe!
As the lava thrusts onward its wall,
One mass down the valley they tramp ”

“ How Stanley to the fore
The citadel rush’d to guard,
With that old Albuera cry
Fifty-seventh! Die hard!
Yet saw not how his lads clear the crest,
And, each one confronting five,
The stubborn squadrons rive,
And backward, downward, drive,—
—Death-call’d to rest!
p. 162—O proud and sad for thee!
And proud and sad for those
Who on that stern foreign field
Not seeking, found repose,
As for England dear their life they gladly shed! ”

“ Till the man yields himself to himself, accepting his will as his fate,
And the light from above within him is darkness; the darkness how great!
O Land whom the Gods,—loving most,—most sorely in wisdom have tried,
England! since Time was Time, thrice swept by the conqueror tide,
p. 119Why on thyself thrice turn, thrice crimson thy greenness in gore,
With the slain of thy children, as sheep, thy meadows whitening-o’er?
Race impatiently patient; tenacious of foe as of friend;
Slow to take flame; but, enflamed, that burns thyself out to the end:
Slow to return to the balance, once moved ”