September:  1643

Sweet air and fresh; glades yet unsear’d by hand
Of Midas-finger’d Autumn, massy-green;
Bird-haunted nooks between,
Where feathery ferns, a fairy palmglove, stand,
An English-Eastern band:—­
While e’en the stealthy squirrel o’er the grass
Beside me to the beech-clump dares to pass:—­
In this still precinct of the happy dead,
The sanctuary of silence,—­Blessed they! 
I cried, who ’neath the gray
Peace of God’s house, each in his mounded bed
Sleep safe, nor reck how the great world runs on;
Peasant with noble here alike unknown.

Unknown, unnamed beneath one turf they sleep,
Beneath one sky, one heaven-uplifted sign
Of love assured, divine: 
While o’er each mound the quiet mosses creep,
The silent dew-pearls weep: 
—­Fit haven-home for thee, O gentlest heart
Of Falkland! all unmeet to find thy part
In those tempestuous times of canker’d hate
When Wisdom’s finest touch, and, by her side,
Forbearance generous-eyed
To fix the delicate balance of the State
Were needed;—­King or Nation, which should hold
Supreme supremacy o’er the kingdoms old.

—­God’s heroes, who? . . .  Not most, or likeliest, he
Whom iron will cramps to one narrow road,
Driving him like a goad
Till all his heart decrees seem God’s decree;
That worst hypocrisy
When self cheats self, and conscience at the wheel
Herself is steer’d by passion’s blindfold zeal;
A nether-world archangel!  Through whose eyes
Flame the red mandates of remorseless might;
A gloom of lurid light
That holds no commerce with the crystal skies;
Like those rank fires that o’er the fen-land flee,
Or on the mast-head sign the wrath to be.

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!

And as who in the Theban avenue,
Sphinx ranged by Sphinx, goes awestruck, nor may read
That ancient awful creed
Closed in their granite calm:—­so dim the clue,
So tangled, tracking through
That labyrinthine soul which, day by day
Changing, yet kept one long imperious way: 
Strong in his weakness; confident, yet forlorn;
Waning and waxing; diamond-keen, or dull,
As that star Wonderful,
Mira, for ever, dying and reborn:—­
Blissful or baleful, yet a Power throughout,
Throned in dim altitude o’er the common rout.