There many a brown-winged kestrel swoops or hovers There, as the primal earth was-all is glorious Of that great heaven through which we rise victorious No nation yet has risen o'er earth's first nature; Still on the standards of the great World-Powers By war's red evolution we have risen Far, since fierce Erda chose her conquering few, And out of Death's red gates and Time's grey prison They burst, elect from battle, tried and true, Tempered like sword-blades; but life's vast procession Goes hurrying down the broad and hopeless way. For now Death mocks at youth and love and glory, With meaner murderous lips War tells her story, And here to us the eternal charge is given To rise and make our low world touch God's high: To hasten God's own kingdom, Man's own heaven, And teach Love's grander army how to die. No kingdom then, no long-continuing city Shall e'er again be stablished by the sword; No blood-bought throne defy the powers of pity, No despot's crown outweigh one helot's word. Imperial England, breathe thy marching orders: Princedoms and peoples rise and flash and perish Hasten the Kingdom, England, the days darken; We would not have thee slacken watch or ward, Nor doff thine armour till the whole world hearken, Nor till Time bid thee lay aside the sword. Hasten the Kingdom; hamlet, heath, and city, We are all at war, one bleeding bulk of pain; Little we know; but one thing-by God's pityWe know, and know all else on earth is vain. We know not yet how much we dare, how little; Of Love's last law go past thee without heed. Who saves his life shall lose it! The great ages England, by God's grace set apart to ponder Waken the God within thee, while the sorrow Of battle surges round a distant shore, Little we know-but though the advancing sons Though tortured mouths must chant the world's great pæans, And martyred souls proclaim the world's desire; Though war be nature's engine of rejection, Hasten the Kingdom, England, queen and mother; But to keep this one stormy banner flying In this one faith that none shall e'er disprove, Then drive the embattled world before thee, crying, There is one Emperor, whose name is Love. ALFRED NOYES. “MADAM”: A LADY OF THE MOORLAND. WE will, if you please, first look out of this little bowwindow. The prospect is famous. Has not the wizard among English painters laid his wand more than once upon it? But Turner had an awkward habit of arranging a picture before he painted it. To an eye that knows and loves "the Terrace view some familiar objects seem certainly to have moved. I prefer to see the picture for myself. We are perched high on the sharp eastern edge of a ridge of hill, whose shell-like contour has shaped the calm, ancient face of an historic English borough. I see again "the Keep," the towers, the racing river far below, the russet woods, the timeless moors, the blue ranges that melt upon the pale soft English sky. Broad Yorkshire meets her ancient friends, morning sun and western shadow, with that steadfast and tender gravity that only an aged face knows how to wear. And for me, with this worn grey book open upon my knee, thoughts belonging to-day seem to drop away from this window-sill as does the hill's steep side. For what I look on has become also the landscape of a woman's life. To "Madam," ob. 1707, æt. suce 81, and lately grown my intimate friend, this wide champaign, despite some childish suæ I. memories, may well have stood for the world. To rise from the old book and go out into grey, ancient, up-and-down Richmond, with the names of its seventeen religious foundations still persisting; to stand in the roomy irregular market-place by the town cross, where men and maids but lately stood to be hired; to meet buffeting winds under the ragged castle wall that holds the grandest donjon tower in England,—all this is to see a vision that is scarcely a dream. Down this narrow street,-still enshrining a departed hospital in its tender name, "Maison Dieu,”—out of the stormy past, clad in worn, good clothes and inalienable breeding, comes tripping to meet me a clear-eyed, handsome girl in the maiden_dignity of her teens. With "Dafeny," or "Ralfe Ianson," her man, behind her, straight, serious Alice Wandesford, daughter to my late Lord Deputy of Ireland and his honoured lady of Hipswell House hard by, turns out of kind Aunt and Godmother Norton's house of "St Nickolas," across the next field. She glances with a little catching of the heart at old Swale below there, who very lately did his best to drown her, and the said Ralfe, on her way to be "witness to Sister Danby's first Francis, borne at Midlam Castle," then held by my Lord Loftus for the king. Into these irregular streets she fled, running all the way from Hipswell, when she so turned the head of young Captain Innes of the Scots army, that he almost forgot he was a gentleman. Among the massed trees in the mid-distance lies Kirklington, her birthplace. Her stormy girlhood in the old gabled house across the river, where she wedded the man of her mother's choice, and more or less, perhaps rather less, her own; the growing oft-bereaved nursery; the other home under the Hambledon Hills, where, full of years, honour, and sorrow, the aged widow sleeps beside her husband in "their owne ally" in Stonegrave Church, we know them all, and all about them. For, on one of the long, long country days of that non-locomotive age, it seemed good to "Madam Thornton," relict of William Thornton of East Newton in Ryedale, and still administering his estate and her own, a lady "looked on by rich and poor, of good learning and a deep piety, to set down in writing some of the facts of her life. "Three small volumes bound in brown leather, closely written in a small hand, not always easy to decipher, two of them five inches by three, the third seven inches by five"such is the priceless legacy she has left us. Transcribed by a kind Surtees Society and two laborious editors, we read it still in her own words and spelling. In a document of the past is priceless: it contains what would otherwise be unobtainable. But in a higher sense the words are true. An old lease, musty churchwardens' and stewards' accounts, a parish register with its columns of long-dead names, its crabbed script-these things are priceless, as Life is priceless. Dead and brown now, once they were of Life itself : born of long silent days, when the sun rose over the same good red earth, the same brown hills; but when old names in yellowing ink were men and women, warm-blooded, young, loving, fighting, yielding up eager lives; when they, not we, possessed, ruled, rejoiced, wept bitter tears over dead babes. If such as these be precious, what shall we say of the Farming-Book," where a careful father records for his sons the yearly history and seasonable duties, the wise sowings, reapings, spendings, hirings, of his square of upland England? of dusty stacks of brown letters in old sun - warmed attics, passed on to us by the reverent hands of a Lady Verney? There is a charm, too, in such reading that does not come of age, a fine literary flavour, to which no literature meant to be literature can attain. One does not turn Johnsonian sentences in one's recipe-book, nor count clauses and epithets over а record of crops and lambing. One tells a tale unconscious, and such a tale is alive. Besides, all said and done, and for whatever reason, our forebears were unquestionably racier sense, every genuine people than we are. Dare I |