POETRY.
GLIMPSES OF ENGLAND.
Orme looking downward from an attic high Above the roaring street, I wondered long If this were England's dim reverberant sigh. That floated upward from the dusk-lit throng ? Trade chanted ever to her cold machine, And there were men who had no hope to own, And gray unending hovels line on line Beneath the smokebank, shadowed by a frown.
There grows an ancient tree that comes to bloom But once a hundred years: in that great hour Death conies to weeds that perish in the light: Then o'er the woodland, drifting into flow'r, Her old awakened splendour breaks the gloom. Standing alone, queen of the forest night.
The clouds roll back; the breadth of heaven clears; Those tired and darkening waters in the lock Foam out, a flood of silver, down the weirs And tear the moss from faces of the rock!
She is become the calm that once was ours; A ray above the havoc; hope; a friend; A blessed quietude, when battles end; An old house rising, like a cliff, from flow'rs;
A vagrant beauty round the world that blows, Awander with her sons; a pulse that thrills : So men have seen among far Polar snows Helvellyn's misty shape and glistening gliylls: Beside the brown Euphrates Avon flows, And Bredon shines beyond Aegean hills.
The river flowing calm beneath her swallows Sucking the king-cup downward at her brink; The trout that dart and shudder through the shallows, And eddying weeds that rise, and swirl, and sink; Cloud-shadows floating over wide hill-faces; Pastures of England; light on wohl and fell: By shell-starred battlements, in desert places, All these they love, who have loved England well!
These will remain : they will not be outworn; A mother's eyes, they fail not nor depart! Beyond this world's dominion thou art borne, Who sway the misty channels of the heart! Mother of men! To what dim estuary? To what far bay? To what uncharted sea?
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