Continued

     ’Tis true the wisdom that my mind exacts
     Through contemplation from a heart unbent
     By many tempests may be stained and rent: 
     The summer flies it mightily attracts. 
     Yet they seem choicer than your sons of facts,
     Which scarce give breathing of the sty’s content
     For their diurnal carnal nourishment: 
     Which treat with Nature in official pacts. 
     The deader body Nature could proclaim. 
     Much life have neither.  Let the heavens of wrath
     Rattle, then both scud scattering to froth. 
     But during calms the flies of idle aim
     Less put the spirit out, less baffle thirst
     For light than swinish grunters, blest or curst.

     On the danger of war

     Avert, High Wisdom, never vainly wooed,
     This threat of War, that shows a land brain-sick. 
     When nations gain the pitch where rhetoric
     Seems reason they are ripe for cannon’s food. 
     Dark looms the issue though the cause be good,
     But with the doubt ’tis our old devil’s trick. 
     O now the down-slope of the lunatic
     Illumine lest we redden of that brood. 
     For not since man in his first view of thee
     Ascended to the heavens giving sign
     Within him of deep sky and sounded sea,
     Did he unforfeiting thy laws transgress;
     In peril of his blood his ears incline
     To drums whose loudness is their emptiness.

     To cardinal manning

     I, wakeful for the skylark voice in men,
     Or straining for the angel of the light,
     Rebuked am I by hungry ear and sight,
     When I behold one lamp that through our fen
     Goes hourly where most noisome; hear again
     A tongue that loathsomeness will not affright
     From speaking to the soul of us forthright
     What things our craven senses keep from ken. 
     This is the doing of the Christ; the way
     He went on earth; the service above guile
     To prop a tyrant creed:  it sings, it shines;
     Cries to the Mammonites:  Allay, allay
     Such misery as by these present signs
     Brings vengeance down; nor them who rouse revile.

     To colonel Charles (dying general C.B.B.)

     I

     An English heart, my commandant,
     A soldier’s eye you have, awake
     To right and left; with looks askant
     On bulwarks not of adamant,
     Where white our Channel waters break.

     II

     Where Grisnez winks at Dungeness
     Across the ruffled strip of salt,
     You look, and like the prospect less. 
     On men and guns would you lay stress,
     To bid the Island’s foemen halt.

     III

     While loud the Year is raising cry
     At birth to know if it must bear
     In history the bloody dye,
     An English heart, a soldier’s eye,
     For the old country first will care.