George Herbert

“ The batch of letters here chosen was most fortunately preserved by Izaak Walton, who published the first of them in the life not of Donne but of George Herbert, while the rest were "added" to it in 1670. [94] The lady to whom they [130] were written, Magdalen Newport by maiden name, was mother not only of the pious and poetical George, but of Edward Lord Herbert of Cherbury, himself not a very bad poet but by no means in the usual sense pious, a very great coxcomb, and a hero chiefly by his own report. ”

“ He had become a great favourite with Herbert, as with everybody else. No one managed a boat so well, although Cadurcis prided himself also on his skill in this respect; and George was so frank and unaffected, and so used to his cousin's habits, that his presence never embarrassed Herbert and Cadurcis, and they read or conversed quite at their ease, as if there were no third person to mar, by his want of sympathy, the full communion of their intellect. The whole circle met at dinner, and never again parted until at a late hour of night. ”

“ It may be confessed without shame and without innuendo that Herbert has been on the whole a greater favourite with readers than with critics, and the reason is obvious. He is not prodigal of the finest strokes of poetry. To take only his own contemporaries, and undoubtedly pupils, his gentle moralising and devotion are tame and cold beside the burning glow of Crashaw, commonplace and popular beside the intellectual subtlety and, now and then, the inspired touch of Vaughan. ”

“ The famous "Sweet day so cool, so calm, so bright," and many short passages which are known to every one, express Herbert perfectly. The thought is obvious, usual, in no sense far fetched. The morality is plain and simple. The expression, with a sufficient touch of the daintiness of the time, has nothing that is extraordinarily or ravishingly felicitous whether in phrasing or versing. He is, in short, a poet whom all must respect; whom those that are in sympathy with his vein of thought cannot but revere ”

“ Her husband was created Baron Herbert of Lea, 15 Jan., 1801, held for some time the secretaryship of state for war, and died, 2 Aug., 1861. His elder brother died childless, and I^ady Herbert's eldest son, George Robert Charles, succeeded to the earldom of Pembroke in 1863. Lady Herbert has passed many years in the West Indies in philanthropic labors among the negroes, and came to this country in 1888 tie work among the colored people of the south, seeking their conversion to Roman Catholicism. — Her son. ”

“ These glaring factories working night and day, these glittering new vehicles swinging noiselessly along the roads, these flights of dragon-flies that swooped and soared and circled in the air, were indeed no more than the brightnesses of lamps and fires that gleam out when the world sinks towards twilight and the night. ”

“ Like Herbert, and in pretty obvious imitation of him, he set himself to bend the prevailing fancy for quips and quaintnesses into sacred uses, to see that the Devil should not have all the best conceits. But he is not so uniformly successful, though he has greater depth and greater originality of thought.
Lovelace and Suckling are inextricably connected together, not merely by their style of poetry, but by their advocacy of the same cause, their date, and their melancholy end. ”

“ And life died quite when died the living Word.
So lies this ruined city. She hath heard
The rush of foes brutal and strong and proud,
And felt their bolted fury. She is ploughed
With fire and steel, and all her grace is blurred. ”

“ For a long time I must have been insensible upon the machine. The blinking succession of the days and nights was resumed, the sun got golden again, the sky blue. I breathed with greater freedom. The fluctuating contours of the land ebbed and flowed. ”

“ ENDED the watches of the dark; oh hear the bugles blow—
The bugles blow Reveillé at the golden gates of morn;
A shudder moves the living East; the stars are burning low
Above the crystal cradle of a day that's newly born. ”

“ And then the clouds gathered, blotting out the vision of the sky, the thunder and lightning wove a garment round the world; all over the earth was such a downpour of rain as men had never before seen, and where the volcanoes flared red against the cloud canopy there descended torrents of mud. ”

“ The tangled summits of the Indian jungles were aflame in a thousand places, and below the hurrying waters around the stems were dark objects that still struggled feebly and reflected the blood-red tongues of fire. And in a rudderless confusion a multitude of men and women fled down the broad river-ways to that one last hope of men—the open sea. ”

“ Their symmetry to dazzling foam and flash,
We ride our horses, silken flanks ashine,
Spattered and soaked with flying drops of brine,
The sunny water tosses round their knees,
Their smooth tails shimmer in the singing breeze. ”

“ Larger grew the star, and larger, hotter, and brighter with a terrible swiftness now. The tropical ocean had lost its phosphorescence, and the whirling steam rose in ghostly wreaths from the black waves that plunged incessantly, speckled with storm-tossed ships. ”

“ Far and wide nothing was visible in the white glare through the haze of dust that drove before a screaming gale but tumbled masses of earth and heaps of inchoate ruins, no trees, no houses, no familiar shapes, only a wilderness of disorder vanishing at last into the darkness beneath the whirling columns and streamers, the lightnings and thunderings of a swiftly rising storm. ”

“ I go to London and see the busy multitudes in Fleet Street and the Strand, and it comes across my mind that they are but the ghosts of the past, haunting the streets that I have seen silent and wretched, going to and fro, phantasms in a dead city, the mockery of life in a galvanised body. ”

“ Then weep mine eyes, the God of love doth grieve:
Weep foolish heart,
And weeping live:
For death is drie as dust. Yet if ye part,
End as the night, whose sable hue
Your sinnes expresse; melt into dew. ”

“ Barbara the beautiful had praise of lute and pen,
Her hair was like a summer night, dark and desired of men,
Her feet like birds from far away that linger and light in doubt,
And her face was like a window where a man's first love looked out. ”

“ So the star, with the wan moon in its wake, marched across the Pacific, trailed the thunderstorms like the hem of a robe, and the growing tidal wave that toiled behind it, frothing and eager, poured over island and island and swept them clear of men. ”

“ There were no gauds tacked to that simple name,
But every naked blade leapt out like flame,
And every blue-blood warrior bowed his head—
"I am a Belgian," this was all he said.
Men's cheering echoed thro' the battle's Hell. ”

“ Beyond the pit stood the little wedge of people with the white flag at its apex, arrested by these phenomena, a little knot of small vertical black shapes upon the black ground. As the green smoke rose, their faces flashed out pallid green, and faded again as it vanished. Then slowly the hissing passed into a humming, into a long, loud, droning noise. Slowly a humped shape rose out of the pit, and the ghost of a beam of light seemed to flicker out from it.
Forthwith flashes of actual flame, a bright glare leaping from one to another, sprang from the scattered group of men. ”

“ The water of the downpour would have rushed by us, muddy with the spoils of the rocks, coming together into torrents, cutting deep gorges and canyons as they hurried past to deposit their sediment in the earliest seas. Through the clouds we should have glimpsed a great sun moving visibly across the sky, and in its wake and in the wake of the moon would have come a diurnal tide of earthquake and upheaval. ”

“ And then athwart this whirling rush of aerial duels that swooped and locked and dropped in the void between the lamp-lights and the stars, came a great wind and a crash louder than thunder, and first one and then a score of lengthening fiery serpents plunged hungrily down upon the Dutchmen's dykes and struck between land and sea and flared up again in enormous columns of glare and crimsoned smoke and steam.
And out of the darkness leapt the little land, with its spires and trees, aghast with terror, still and distinct, and the sea, tumbled with anger, red-foaming like a sea of blood. ”

“ Saint George he was a fighting man, he's here and fighting still
While any wrong is yet to right or Dragon yet to kill,
And faith! he's finding work this day to suit his war-worn sword,
For he's strafing Huns in Flanders to the glory of the Lord.
Saint George he is a fighting man, but when the fighting's past,
And dead among the trampled fields the fiercest and the last
Of all the Dragons earth has known, beneath his feet lies low,
Oh, his heart will turn to England—
⁠To England, April England—
He'll come home to rest in England where the golden willows blow! ”

“ Thy clay that weeps, thy dust that calls.
Thou art the Lord of glorie;
The deed and storie
Are both thy due: but I a silly flie,
That live or die
According as the weather falls.
Art thou all justice, Lord? ”

“ It was a world with a different quality, a warmer, more penetrating and mellower light, with a faint clear gladness in its air, and wisps of sun-touched cloud in the blueness of its sky. And before me ran this long wide path, invitingly, with weedless beds on either side, rich with untended flowers, and these two great panthers. ”

“ It was only when they were embarked upon cups of tea and had a little refreshed themselves, that she carried the talk further.
"Does it mean that you must leave the church?" she asked.
"It seemed so at first," he said. "But now I do not know. I do not know what I ought to do."
She awaited his next thought.
"It is as if one had lived in a room all one's life and thought it the world—and then suddenly walked out through a door and discovered the sea and the mountains and stars. So it was with me and the Anglican Church. ”

“ It is amazing how they splash light about here; the Capitol shines all night like a full moon, an endless stream of light pours down the Washington Obelisk, light blinks and glitters and spins about and spills all over the city. ”

“ Gaze haggard south; for yet another thrust
And higher hills must heap, ere they may stand
To feed their eyes upon the promised land.
One barrow, born of women, lifts them high,
Built up of many a thousand human dead. ”

“ The dishes of thy ballance seem'd to gape,
Like two great pits;
The beam and scape
Did like some tort'ring engine show:
Thy hand above did burn and glow,
Danting the stoutest hearts, the proudest wits. ”

“ On wandering water, where the black squall blows
Less danger than the bright wave ambushes,
She bears it out. All the long day she bears,
And the sudden hour of instant challenges
To act, that searches all men, no man spares. ”

“ Faces of thin shadow, faces of gaseous tenuity. Faces like those faces that glare with intolerable strangeness upon the sleeper in the evil hours of his dreams. Evil, greedy eyes that were full of a covetous curiosity, faces with knit brows and snarling, smiling lips; their vague hands clutched at Mr Bessel as he passed, and the rest of their bodies was but an elusive streak of trailing darkness. ”

“ It is but a yesterday in the endlessness of time that life was a dreaming thing, dreaming so deeply that it forgot itself as it dreamt, its lives, its individual instincts, its moments, were born and wondered and played and desired and hungered and grew weary and died. ”

“ The alternations of night and day grew slower and slower, and so did the passage of the sun across the sky, until they seemed to stretch through centuries. At last a steady twilight brooded over the earth, a twilight only broken now and then when a comet glared across the darkling sky. ”

“ The law that rules the stars, our stay,
Our compass through the world's wide sea,
The one sure light, the one sure way,
The one firm base of Liberty;
The one firm road that men have trod
Through Chaos to the throne of God. ”

“ And shall the dew out-strip thy dove?
The dew, for which grasse cannot call,
Drop from above.
Death is still working like a mole,
And digs my grave at each remove:
Let grace work too, and on my soul
Drop from above. ”

“ A squat black beetle-body, sole witness in that wide scene
Of the silent, incredible war with the vanishing submarine;
And was wrapt in the air divine that is unto the body as wings,
And unto the soul quintessence of glad, unspeakable things. ”

“ We stood by trench and steel and gun,
For now the indignant flight was done.
We ploughed their shaken ranks with fire.
We trod their masses into mire.
Our sabres drove through their retreat,
As drives the whirlwind through young wheat.
At last, at last we flung them back
Along their drenched and smoking track.
We hurled them back, in blood and flame,
The reeking ways by which they came. ”

“ Across the pit on its farther lip, flat and vast and strange, lay the great flying-machine with which they had been experimenting upon our denser atmosphere when decay and death arrested them. Death had come not a day too soon. At the sound of a cawing overhead I looked up at the huge fighting-machine that would fight no more forever, at the tattered red shreds of flesh that dripped down upon the overturned seats on the summit of Primrose Hill. ”

“ And then I realised a growing stress upon me, a feeling as though some huge human magnet was drawing me upward out of my body. The stress grew and grew. I seemed an atom for which monstrous forces were fighting. For one brief, terrible moment sensation came back to me. That feeling of falling headlong which comes in nightmares, that feeling a thousand times intensified, that and a black horror swept across my thoughts in a torrent. ”