Beneath this airy sapphire’s brooding rest,
Its shadows overcast me with a chill
Like coming storm, that black calamity
Which struck and took our Darling from their charge
And mine.  Grief stupefied us all.  At once
The childless mother lost her wavering strength,
And lay prostrated; never tasting life
On earth again!  Beside her husband sat
And watched her fading; saw the last poor smile
Wane from her features; till the closing eyes
Lit into tearful rapture; when he knew
Love’s immortality to her revealed. 
With both her own she mutely clasped his hand,
And held it in most gentle pressures fixed: 
But when the tender grasp relaxed and fell,
The world closed round him to a stony blank.

And now was stricken down the mighty man;
As the ripe harvest levelled by a storm
At morningtide; which, ere sun warmth anew
Can flatter into strength, a second storm
O’erwhelms and scattereth to waste at even.

When that torpidity which follows pain
Through strangeness passed to natural regard
For daily wants; his vacant home he loathed: 
His spacious garden grounds; his lake; his woods;
The breezy air; the overhanging heaven,
He loathed:  he loathed them all.  When spring aroused
The amorous songsters of the copse and field
To seasonable joy, their music mocked
His sadness with its echoes, babbling tales
Of what had been:  and he, in bitterness,
Resolved to quit a place where every turn
Stood like a foe, whose settled leering eye
In silence gloared with hope to mark his fall;
He left our country.  Far, in Eastern climes,
His nation serving well, he fought and died: 
And never had a nobler man upheld
The majesty of England’s worth and name.

Long toil-devoted years have gloomed and shone
Since these events closed up my doors of life. 
Partly from choice, and part necessity,
With constancy have I sustained and urged
The work it was my duty to advance. 
For, when my vision cleared again, I looked
And saw how mean a thing was man, who used
The produce of his fellows’ energies
And gave back nothing.

Then my spirit saw
This Island race two thousand years ago
In simple savagery, controlled by priests
More fell and bloody than the wolves that howled
At midnight round their monstrous altar-stones,
Scenting the sacrificial human blood. 
Saw girt with legions lynx-eyed Caesar come
To taste of Briton’s valour.  When appeared
Legions succeeding legions, and the swarms
Marshalled by skilful discipline had fallen
To tributaries of all-conquering Rome. 
Saw when Rome’s grip, through fierce luxurious guilt,
Could hold no longer; and with tattered plume
Her eagles left her slaves to stem or tide
The hungry Pict incursions as they could. 
Next when a burly genial race here raised
The White Horse Standard:  men who wrought the