M. M.

     Who call her Mother and who calls her Wife
     Look on her grave and see not Death but Life.

     The lady C. M.

     To them that knew her, there is vital flame
     In these the simple letters of her name. 
     To them that knew her not, be it but said,
     So strong a spirit is not of the dead.

On the tombstone of James Christopher Wilson (d.  April 11, 1884) in Headley churchyard, Surrey

     Thou our beloved and light of Earth hast crossed
     The sea of darkness to the yonder shore. 
     There dost thou shine a light transferred, not lost,
     Through love to kindle in our souls the more.

     Gordon of Khartoum

     Of men he would have raised to light he fell: 
     In soul he conquered with those nerveless hands. 
     His country’s pride and her abasement knell
     The Man of England circled by the sands.

     J. C. M.

     A fountain of our sweetest, quick to spring
     In fellowship abounding, here subsides: 
     And never passage of a cloud on wing
     To gladden blue forgets him; near he hides.

     The emperor Frederick of our time

     With Alfred and St. Louis he doth win
     Grander than crowned head’s mortuary dome: 
     His gentle heroic manhood enters in
     The ever-flowering common heart for home.

     Islet the Dachs

     Our Islet out of Helgoland, dismissed
     From his quaint tenement, quits hates and loves. 
     There lived with us a wagging humourist
     In that hound’s arch dwarf-legged on boxing-gloves.

     On hearing the news from Venice
     (the death of Robert browning)

     Now dumb is he who waked the world to speak,
     And voiceless hangs the world beside his bier. 
     Our words are sobs, our cry of praise a tear: 
     We are the smitten mortal, we the weak. 
     We see a spirit on Earth’s loftiest peak
     Shine, and wing hence the way he makes more clear: 
     See a great Tree of Life that never sere
     Dropped leaf for aught that age or storms might wreak. 
     Such ending is not Death:  such living shows
     What wide illumination brightness sheds
     From one big heart, to conquer man’s old foes: 
     The coward, and the tyrant, and the force
     Of all those weedy monsters raising heads
     When Song is murk from springs of turbid source.

     December 13, 1889.

     Hawarden

     When comes the lighted day for men to read
     Life’s meaning, with the work before their hands
     Till this good gift of breath from debt is freed,
     Earth will not hear her children’s wailful bands
     Deplore the chieftain fall’n in sob and dirge;
     Nor they look where is darkness, but on high.