But for a friend of thine;
We're seeking for sweet Jesus Christ,
To be our guide and thine."
"Go down, go down, to yonder town,
And sit in the gallery,
And there you'll see sweet Jesus Christ
Nailed to a big yew-tree."
So down they went to yonder town
As fast as foot could fall,
And many a grievous bitter tear
From the virgins' eyes did fall.
"O peace, Mother, O peace, Mother,
Your weeping doth me grieve:
I must suffer this," He said,
"For Adam and for Eve."
"O Mother, take you John Evangelist
All for to be your son,
And he will comfort you sometimes,
Mother, as I have done."
"O come, thou John Evangelist,
Thou'rt welcome unto me;
But more welcome my own dear Son,
Whom I nursèd on my knee."
Then he laid his head on His right shoulder,
Seeing death it struck Him nigh--
"The Holy Ghost be with your soul,
I die, Mother dear, I die."...
480 LULLY, LULLAY
Lully, lullay, lully, lullay;
The fawcon hath born my make[208] away.
He bare hym up, he bare hym down,
He bare hym in to an orchard browne.
In that orchard there was an halle
That was hangid with purpill and pall.
And in that hall there was a bede,[209]
Hit was hangid with gold so rede.
And yn that bede there lythe a knyght,
His woundis bledying day and nyght.
By that bede side kneleth a may,
And she wepeth both nyght and day.
And by that bedde side there stondith a ston,
_Corpus Christi_ wretyn ther'on.
481 BALME
... There grew a goodly tree him faire beside,
Loaden with fruit and apples rosie red,
As they in pure vermilion had beene dide,
Whereof great vertues over all were red:[210]
For happie life to all, which thereon fed,
And life eke everlasting did befall:
Great God it planted in that blessed sted
With his almightie hand, and did it call
_The tree of life_, the crime of our first father's fall.
In all the world like was not to be found,
Save in that soile, where all good things did grow,
And freely sprong out of the fruitfull ground,
As incorrupted Nature did them sow,
Till that dread Dragon all did overthrow.
Another like faire tree eke grew thereby,
Whereof who so did eat, eftsoones did know
Both good and ill: O mornefull memory:
That tree through one man's fault hath doen us all to dy.
From that first tree forth flowd, as from a well,
A trickling streame of Balme, most soveraine
And daintie deare, which on the ground still fell,
And overflowèd all the fertill plaine,
And it had deawèd bene with timely raine:
Life and long health that gratious ointment gave,
And deadly woundes could heale, and reare againe
The senselesse corse appointed for the grave.
Into that same he fell: which did from death him save....
EDMUND SPENSER
482 MY MASTER HATH A GARDEN
My master hath a garden, full-filled with divers flowers,
Where thou may'st gather posies gay, all times and hours,
Here nought is heard
But paradise-bird,
Harp, dulcimer, and lute,
With cymbal,
And timbrel,
And the gentle sounding flute.
Oh! Jesus, Lord, my heal and weal, my bliss complete,
Make thou my heart thy garden-plot, true, fair and neat
That I may hear
This music clear,
Harp, dulcimer, and lute,
With cymbal,
And timbrel,
And the gentle sounding flute.
483 THIS IS THE KEY
This is the Key of the Kingdom:
In that Kingdom is a city;
In that city is a town;
In that town there is a street;
In that street there winds a lane;
In that lane there is a yard;
In that yard there is a house;
In that house there waits a room;
In that room an empty bed;
And on that bed a basket--
A Basket of Sweet Flowers:
_Of Flowers, of Flowers;_
_A Basket of Sweet Flowers_.
Flowers in a Basket;
Basket on the bed;
Bed in the chamber;
Chamber in the house;
House in the weedy yard;
Yard in the winding lane;
Lane in the broad street;
Street in the high town;
Town in the city;
City in the Kingdom--
This is the Key of the Kingdom;
_Of the Kingdom this is the Key_.
[Illustration]
ABOUT AND ROUND ABOUT
ABOUT AND ROUNDABOUT
_In Mr. Nahum's_ The Other Worlde, _as I have said on page xxx, there
were many passages written about and roundabout the poems contained in
it. Some of these I copied out. With others that I have added since,
they appear in the following pages. If the reader prefer poems and
poems_ only _in such a collection as this, would he of his kindness and
courtesy ignore everything else? Otherwise, will he please forgive any
blunders he may discover?_
1. "THIS IS THE KEY."
This jingle (like Nos. 15, 16 and others) is one of hundreds of nursery
and dandling rhymes which I found in Mr. Nahum's book. Compared with
more formal poems they are like wild flowers--pimpernel, eyebright,
thyme, woodruff, and others even tinier, even quieter, but having their
own private and complete little beauty if looked at closely. Who made
them, how old they are; nobody knows. But when Noah's Ark stranded on
the slopes of Mount Ararat, maybe a blossoming weed or two was nodding
at the open third-storey window out of which over the waters of the
flood the dove had followed the raven, and there, rejoicing in the
sunshine and the green, sat Japheth's wife dandling little Magog on her
lap, and crooning him some such lullaby.
3.
On the one side is printed the old Scots, and on the other the best
I can do to put it into the English of our own time. According to
the dictionary the thistle-cock that cries shame on the sleepers
still drowsing in their beds is the corn-bunting-- a cousin of the
yellow-hammer. He has a small harsh monotonous voice as if for the very
purpose. Whereas the nightingale might seem to cry, "Nay, nay: it is in
dreams you wander. Happy ones! Sleep on; sleep on."
4. "I PASSED BY HIS GARDEN."
Whatever fate befell the Sluggard, I should like to have taken a walk
in his garden, among those branching thistles, green thorns and briers.
Maybe he sailed off at last to the Isle of Nightmare, or to the land
where it is always afternoon, or was wrecked in Yawning Gap. He must,
at any rate, have had an even heavier head than Dr. Watts supposed if
he never so much as lifted it from his pillow to brood awhile on that
still, verdurous scene. And the birds!
Indeed, to lie, between sleep and wake, when daybreak is brightening
of an April or a May morning, and so listen to the far-away singing
of a thrush or to the whistling of a robin or a wren is to seem to
be transported back into the garden of Eden. Dreamers, too, may call
themselves travellers.
Mr. Nahum's picture to this rhyme was of a man in rags looking into a
small round mirror or looking-glass, but at what you couldn't see.
6. "THE MERCHANT BOWS" (line 7)
--(as do the happy to the New Moon, for luck), for his merchandise is
being wafted over the sea under the guidance of the Seaman's, or Ship,
or Lode, or Pole Star. It shines in the constellation of the Little
Bear, and "is the cheefe marke whereby mariners governe their course in
saylings by nyghte." To find the "marke," look towards the north some
cloudless night for the constellation of Seven Stars called the Plough
or the Dipper or Charles's Wain (or Waggon), which "enclyneth his
ravisshinge courses abouten the soverein heighte of the worlde" day and
night throughout the year. Its hinder stars (Dubhe and Merak) are named
"the pointers," because if you follow the line of them with the eye
into the empty skies, the next brightish star it will alight on is the
Seaman's Star. Close beside the second of the seven is a mere speck of
a star. And that is called by country people Jack-by-the-middle-horse.
On this same star looked Shakespeare--as did the 1st Carrier in his
_Henry IV_.: "Heigh-ho, an't be not foure by the day, He be hanged.
Charles' waine is over the near Chimney, and yet our horse not packt";
and as did his 2nd Gentleman in _Othello_:
_Montano._ What from the Cape can you discerne at Sea?
_1st Gentleman._ Nothing at all, it is a high-wrought Flood:
I cannot 'twixt the Heaven, and the Maine
Descry a Saile....
_2nd Gentleman._ ... Do but stand upon the Foaming Shore,
The chidden Billow seemes to pelt the Clowds,
The wind-shaked-Surge, with high and monstrous
Maine,
Seemes to cast water on the burning Beare,
And quench the Guards of the ever-fixèd Pole.
I never did like mollestation view
On the enchafèd Flood....
Faintly shimmering, too, in the northern heavens is that other numerous
starry cluster, known the world over as _Seven_--to us as the Seven
Sisters or the Pleiades. A strange seven; for only six stars are
now clearly visible to the naked eye, one having vanished, it would
seem, within human memory. When? where?--none can tell. They play in
light as close together as dewdrops in a cobweb hung from thorn to
thorn. Nearby, on winter's cold breast burns the most marvellous of
the constellations--the huntsman Orion, with his Rigel and Bellatrix
and Betelgeuse; his dog Sirius at his heels. "Seek him that maketh
the Seven Stars and Orion, and turneth the shadow of death into the
morning, and maketh the day dark with night...."
9. "LIKE A CHILD, HALF IN TENDERNESS AND MIRTH."
At a first reading, perhaps, this line will not appear to flow so
smoothly as the rest. But linger an instant on the word _child_, and
you will have revealed to yourself one of Shelley's, and indeed one
of every poet's loveliest devices with words--to let the music of his
verse accord with its meaning, and at the same time to please and charm
the ear with a slight variation from the regular beat and accent of the
metre. So, too, in the middle lines of the next stanza. This variation,
which is called rhythm, is the very proof of its writer's sincerity.
For if the sound of his verse (or of his voice) rings false, he cannot
have completely realised what he was writing or saying. When a man says
what he means, he says it as _if he meant it_. The _tune_ of what he
says sounds right. When a man does _not_ mean what he says, he finds it
all but impossible to say it as if he did. The _tune_ goes wrong.
Just so with reading. So from a gay and tiny _Compendious English
Grammar_ of 1780 I have borrowed these four brief wholesome rules for
reading:
(1) ... Observe well the pauses, accents and emphases; and never stop
but where the sense will admit of it.
(2) Humour your voice a little, according to the subject....
(3) Do not read too fast, lest [in lip or mind] you get a habit
of stammering; adding or omitting words; and be sure that your
understanding keep pace with your tongue.
(4) In reading Verse, pronounce every word just as if it were prose,
observing the stops with great exactness, and giving each word its
proper accent; and if it be not harmonious, the Poet, and not the
Reader, is to blame."
Better, perhaps, be sure of your ear before you blame the poet. But in
general, if these rules are followed, there can be little danger of
reading like a parrot, or like a small boy in his first breeches at a
Dame's school. To _think_ while one reads; that is the main thing: so
as not to be, as Sidney says,--just
... like a child that some fair book doth find,
With gilded leaves or coloured vellum plays,
Or, at the most, on some fair pictures stays,
But never heeds the fruit of writer's mind.
13. "COMES DANCING FROM THE EAST."
I found a story about this dancing in Mrs. Wright's _Rustic Speech and
Folklore_. It is the story of a woman who lived in a district called
Hockley, in the parish of Broseley. She said that she had heard of such
"dancing" but did not believe it to be true, "till on Easter morning
last, I got up early, and then I saw the sun dance, and dance, and
dance, three times, and I called to my husband and said, '_Rowland,
Rowland, get up and see the sun dance!_' I used," she said, "not to
believe it, but now I can never doubt more." The neighbours agreed with
her that the sun did dance on Easter morning, and that some of them
had seen it. "Seeing," goes the old proverb, "is believing"--which is
true no less of the "inward eye." I once tried to comfort a very little
boy who was unhappy because there was a Bear under his bed. Candle in
hand, I talked and talked, and proved that there wasn't a real bear for
miles and miles around, not at any rate until we reached the Zoo, and
there--black, brown, sloth, spectacled, grizzly and polar alike--all
of them, poor creatures, were cabined, cribbed and shut up in barred
cages. He listened, tears still shining in his eyes, his small face
sharp and clear. "Why certainly, certainly _not_," I ended, "there
can't be a real bear for miles around!" He smiled as if pitying me. "Ah
yes, Daddie," he answered with a die-away sob, "but, you see, you's
talking of _real_ bears, and mine _wasn't_ real."
14. "US IDLE WENCHES."
It was a jolly bed in sooth,
Of oak as strong as Babel.
And there slept Kit and Sall and Ruth
As sound as maids are able.
Ay--three in one--and there they dreamed,
Their bright young eyes hid under;
Nor hearkened when the tempest streamed
Nor recked the rumbling thunder.
For marvellous regions strayed they in,
Each moon-far from the other--
Ruth in her childhood, Kit in heaven,
And Sall with ghost for lover.
But soon as ever sun shone sweet,
And birds sang, Praise for rain, O--
Leapt out of bed three pair of feet
And danced on earth again, O!
17. OLD MAY SONG.
This, like No. 2, and the next song must be as old as the dew-ponds
on the Downs. They were wont to be sung, I have read, by five or six
men, with a fiddle, or flute, or clarionet accompaniment. When I was
a boy I can remember one First of May seeing a Jack-in-the-Green in
the street--a man in a kind of wicker cage hung about with flowers
and leaves--with Maid Marian. Friar Tuck and the rest, dancing and
singing beside him. A great friend of mine, when she was a little girl
of eight, was so frightened at sight of this leafy prancing creature
on her way to school that she turned about and ran for a mile without
stopping.
19. THE DAISY.
There is far too little of Geoffrey Chaucer's--that most lovable,
shrewd, compassionate, and natural of poets--in this book. There was
much more of him, I noticed, in Mr. Nahum's Tome II. At first sight
his words look a little strange; but not for long; and if every dotted
letter is made a syllable of, his rhythm will flow like water over
bright green waterweed.
It is a curious, though little thing, that while, among the one hundred
and seventy varieties of flowers Shakespeare mentions, he has no less
than fifty-seven several references to the rose, twenty-one to the
green grass, eighteen to violets, and even to the serviceable but rank
nettle a round dozen, he has but a scant five to Chaucer's beloved
daisy. Flowers, it is true, as says Canon Ellacombe (who collected
all such references into his delight-full book, _Plant-lore and
Garden-craft of Shakespeare_), never sweeten the Plays for their own
sake alone, and there are no foxgloves, snowdrops or forget-me-nots
in them at all. Still, had he loved daisies as children do, he could
hardly have resisted them even for "their own sake alone." Is not
bairnwort another name for the daisy?
"A yellow cup, it hath," says Pliny, "and the same is crowned, as it
were with a garland, consisting of five and fifty little leaves, set
round about it in manner of fine pales. These be flowers of the meadow,
and most of such are of no use at all." No use at all, none--except
only to make skylark of every heart whose owner has eyes in his head
for a daisy's simple looks, its marvellous making, and the sheer
happiness of their multitudes wide open in the sun or round-headed and
adrowse in the evening twilight.
Chaucer's picture portrait is well known. So is that in his own words
in the _Canterbury Tales_. But here is another, less familiar, by
Robert Greene--of "Sir Jeffery Chaucer," as he calls him. Water chamlet
is a rich coloured silken plush, and a whittell is a knife:
His stature was not very tall,
Leane he was, his legs were small,
Hosed within a stock of red
A buttoned bonnet on his head,
From under which did hang, I weene,
Silver haires both bright and sheene,
His beard was white, trimmèd round,
His count'nance blithe and merry found,
A Sleevelesse Iacket large and wide,
With many pleights and skirts Side,
Of water Chamlet did he weare,
A whittell by his belt he beare,
His shooes were cornèd broad before,
His Inkhorne at his side he wore,
And in his hand he bore a booke,
Thus did this auntient Poet looke.
20. "BRAVE PRICK-SONG"
--which means, I gather, that while the nightingale was--even into the
dusk of dawn--yet singing her "_air_" or "_descant_," the lark joined
in as if reading her notes from the daybreak stars _pricking_ the sky.
21. "CUCKOO, JUG, JUG, PU WE, TO WITTA WOO!"
Four birds, I suppose, have part in this: cuckoo, nightingale (_yoog,
yoog_), green-finch (?) and owl.
I rose anon, and thought I wouldė gone
Into the woods, to hear the birdis sing,
When that the misty vapour was agone,
And cleare and fairė was the morrowing;
The dew, also, like silver in shining,
Upon the leaves, as any baumė sweet.
....
And in I went to hear the birdis song,
Which on the branches, both in plain and vale,
So loudly y-sang, that all the wood y-rang,
Like as it should shiver in pieces smale;
And as me thoughten that the nightingale
With so great might her voice began out-wrest,
Right as her heart for love would all to-brest.
JOHN LYDGATE
22. "THE JEALOUS TROUT."
Thou that desir'st to fish with line and hook,
Be it in pool, in river, or in brook,
To bless thy bait and make the fish to bite,
Lo, here's a means! if thou canst hit it right:
Take Gum of Life, fine beat, and laid in soak
In oil well drawn from that which kills the oak,
Fish where thou wilt, thou shalt have sport thy fill;
When twenty fail, thou shalt be sure to kill.
It's perfect and good,
If well understood;
Else not to be told
For silver or gold.
So advises Master Will. Lauson in the _Secrets of Angling_, which was
published in 1653; the ingredients (or _ingrediments_ as I used to
say when I was a child) of his "gum of life" being _Cocculus Juliæ_,
_Assafoetida_, Honey, and Wheat-flour. The "that which kills the oak,"
I suppose, is ivy. But it looks as if there may have been a wink in his
eye--to welcome the green in his reader's.
Here, on the same theme, are a few lines from a poem by Mr. Robert
Bridges:
... Sometimes an angler comes, and drops his hook
Within its hidden depths, and 'gainst a tree
Leaning his rod, reads in some pleasant book,
Forgetting soon his pride of fishery,
And dreams, or falls asleep,
While curious fishes peep
About his nibbled bait, or scornfully
Dart off and rise and leap....
And these are by J. Wolcot:
Why flyest thou away with fear?
Trust me there's naught of danger near,
I have no wicked hooke
All covered with a snaring bait,
Alas, to tempt thee to thy fate,
And dragge thee from the brooke....
Enjoy thy stream, O harmless fish;
And when an angler for his dish,
Through gluttony's vile sin,
Attempts, a wretch, to pull thee out,
God give thee strength, O gentle trout,
To pull the raskall in!
A less common and more skilful sport than fly, hook and bait, or even
"tickling" can afford is to share their watery chaos with the fish,
and catch them with the hands. This needs rare skill and cunning
and--a disguise! "For dyeing of your hairs," says Isaac Walton in _The
Compleat Angler_, "do it thus: Take a pint of strong ale, half a pound
of soot, and a little quantity of the juice of walnut-tree leaves, and
an equal quantity of alum; put these together, into a pot, pan, or
pipkin, and boil them half an hour; and having so done, let it cool;
and being cold, put your hair into it, and there let it lie; it will
turn your hair to be a kind of water or glass-colour or greenish; and
the longer you let it lie, the deeper coloured it will be. You might
be taught to make many other colours, but it is to little purpose; for
doubtless the water-colour or glass-coloured hair is the most choice
and the most useful for an angler, but let it not be too green."
"AND BIRDS HAD DRAWN THEIR VALENTINES." (line 4)
First thing in the early morning, if you go out on St. Valentine's Day,
which is the 14th day of February, you will meet, if you meet anybody,
your soon-to-be-loved one. So too the birds. In my young days, folks
sent the daintiest pictures to their sweethearts on this day. Mr. Nahum
had a drawer half full of them--with a few locks of hair and some
withered flowers. And one or two of these Valentines were of beaten
gold, with images of lovely things upon them, as if from another planet.
"This morning came up to my wife's bedside, I being up dressing myself,
little Will Mercer to be her Valentine; and brought her name writ upon
blue paper in gold letters, done by himself, very pretty...." Mr.
Samuel Pepys's _Diary_.
To-morrow is S. Valentine's day,
All in the morning betime,
And I a Maid at your Window
To be your Valentine!
_Ophelia's Song._
"JOAN STROKES A SILLABUB OR TWAIN."
If you would make a Lemon Sillabub (as advised by Mrs. Charlotte Mason,
"a Professed Housekeeper, who from about 1740 had upwards of Thirty
Years experience in Families of the First Fashion") take "a Pint of
cream, a pint of white wine, the rind of two lemons grated, and the
juice. Sugar to the taste. Let it stand some time; mill or whip it.
Lay the froth on a sieve; put the remainder into glasses. Lay on the
froth." Mr. Nahum must have had a fancy for Cookery Books; there
were dozens of them in his tower room. Indeed, the next best thing
to eating a good dish is to read how it is made; and somehow the old
"cookbook" writers learned to write a most excellent and appetising
English. Here is another recipe from _Delightes for Ladies_, of
1608--a dainty that would eat uncommonly well with a sillabub:--"_To
make a marchpane._--Take two poundes of almonds being blanched, and
dryed in a sieve over the fire, beate them in a stone mortar, and
when they bee small mixe them with two pounde of sugar beeing finely
beaten, adding two or three spoonefuls of rosewater, and that will
keep your almonds from oiling: when your paste is beaten fine, drive
it thin with a rowling pin, and so lay it on a bottom of wafers, then
raise up a little edge on the side, and so bake it, then yce it with
rosewater and sugar, then put it in the oven again, and when you see
your yce is risen up and drie, then take it out of the oven and garnish
it with pretie conceipts, as birdes and beasts being cast out of
standing moldes. Sticke long comfits upright in it, cast biskets and
carrowaies in it, and so serve it; guild it before you serve it: you
may also print of this _marchpane_ paste in your molds for banqueting
dishes. And of this paste our comfit makers at this day make their
letters, knots, armes, escutcheons, beasts, birds, and other fancies."
Also pygmy castles and suchlike, for dessert, which the guests would
demolish with sugar-plums.
"Good thou, save mee a piece of Marchpane, and as thou lovest
me, let the Porter let in Susan Grindstone and Nell...."
_Romeo and Juliet_
23. "THE SUN ARISING."
"What other fire could be a better image of the fire which is there,
than the fire which is here? Or what other earth than this, of the
earth which is there?" So said Plotinus, and "I know," said Blake,
"that this world is a world of imagination and vision. I see everything
I paint in this world, but everybody does not see alike. To the eye of
a miser a guinea is far more beautiful than the sun, and a bag worn
with the use of money has more beautiful proportions than a vine filled
with grapes. The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes
of others only a green thing which stands in the way.... Some scarce
see Nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, Nature is
Imagination itself. As a man is, so he sees. As the eye is formed, such
are its powers. You certainly mistake, when you say that the visions
of fancy are not to be found in this world. To me this world is all
one continued vision." ... Indeed, when Blake was a child, he saw on
Peckham Rye a tree, full, not of birds, but of angels; and his poems
show how marvellously clear were the eyes with which he looked at the
things of Nature.
In the year 1872, an old lady might have been seen driving across the
Rye in her silvery carriage; and she came to where, under a flowering
tree, sat a small boy--the locks of hair upon his head like sheaves
of cowslips, his eyes like speedwells, and he in very bright clothes.
And he was a-laughing up into the tree. She stopped her carriage and
said to him almost as if she were more angry than happy, "What are
you laughing at, child?" And he said, "At the sparrows, ma'am." "Mere
sparrows!" says she, "but why?" "Because they were saying," says he,
"here comes across the Rye a blind old horse, a blind old coachman,
and a blind old woman." "But I am not blind," says she. "Nor are they
not '_mere_ sparrows'," said the child. And at that the old lady was
looking out of her carriage at no child, but at a small bush, in bud,
of gorse.
24. "AND THANK HIM THEN"
--as does Robert Herrick's child, in his "Grace":
Here a little child I stand,
Heaving up my either hand;
Cold as Paddocks though they be,
Here I lift them up to Thee,
For a Benizon to fall
On our meat, and on us all. AMEN.
A paddock is a frog or a toad, it seems. To either small cold hand
there are four cold fingers and a thumb; and in old times, says
Halliwell, our ancestors had distinct names for each of the five
toes and for each of the five fingers. The fingers were called
thumb, toucher, longman, leche-man, little-man: leche-man being the
ring-finger, because in that "there is a sinew very tender and small
that reaches to the heart." In Essex they used to call them (and still
may)--Tom Thumbkin, Bess Bumpkin, Long Linkin, Bill Wilkin, and Little
Dick. In Scotland: Thumbkin, Lickpot, Langman, Berrybarn and Pirlie
Winkie.
And here are some more from Dr. Courtenay Dunn's _Natural History of
the Child_--a book which is graced with as handsome a frontispiece as
ever I've seen:
Thumb - Tommy Tomkins or Bill Milker.
Forefinger - Billy Wilkins " Tom Thumper.
Third finger - Long Larum " Long lazy.
Fourth finger Betsy Bedlam " Cherry Bumper.
Little finger - Little Bob " Tippity, Tippity-Town-end.
Toes:
Big toe - Tom Barker or Toe Tipe.
Toe 2 - - Long Rachel " Penny Wipe.
Toe 3 - - Minnie Wilkin " Tommy Tistle.
Toe 4 - - Milly Larkin " Billy Whistle.
Little toe - Little Dick " Tripping-go.
So (if you wish) you can secretly name not only your fingers, toes,
rooms, chairs and tables, etc., but also the stars in their courses,
the trees in your orchard, and have your own privy countersign for the
flowers you like best. "Give a dog a bad name, and hang him," says the
old proverb. Give anything a _good_ name, and it is yours for ever.
There is the tale of the unhappy gardener in the Isle of Rumm who
without ill intention called a snapdragon an antirrhinum. And there
arose out of the hillside a Monster named Zobj--but I haven't the space
for the rest. The gardener of course meant well; but when he heard the
Voice counting his last moments, not in common English, but in what
Wensleydale Knitters still remember of the Norse--Yahn, Jyahn, Tether,
Mether, Mumph, Hither, Lither, Auver, Dauver, Die--well, he died before
he was due, so to speak.
While we are on this subject, here is a Face Rhyme:
Bo Peeper
Nose Dreeper
Chin Chopper
White Lopper
Red Rag
And Little Gap.
This is another:
Here sits the Lord Mayor:
Here sit his men;
Here sits the cockadoodle;
Here sits the hen;
Here sits the little chickens;
Here they run in;
Chinchopper, chinchopper, chinchopper chin.
The next three are foot rhymes, very soothing at times to fractious
babies. The first is common in London, etc.:
This little pig went to market;
This little pig stayed at home;
This little pig had roast beef;
This little pig had the bone;
This little pig cried _Wee-wee-wee-wee-wee_!
_All_ the way home.
The second comes from the Isle of Wight:
This gurt pig zays, I wants meat;
T'other one zays, Where'll ye hay et?
This one zays, In gramfer's barn;
T'other one zays, Week! Week! I can't get over the dreshel.
And this is from Scotland:
This ain biggit the baurn,
This ain stealt the corn,
This ain stood and saw,
This ain ran awa',
An' wee Pirlie Winkie paid for a'.
And last; here is a dance-babbie-on-knee (or This-is-the-way) rhyme;
also from Scotland:
The doggies gaed to the mill,
This way and that way;
They took a lick out o' _this_ wife's poke
And they took a lick out o' _that_ wife's poke,
And a loup in the lead, and a dip in the dam,
And gaed walloping, walloping, walloping, HAME.
And no doubt came to the conclusion expressed in the sixth stanza of
Robert Herrick's _Ternary of Littles, upon a Pipkin of Jelly sent to a
Lady_:
A little Saint best fits a little Shrine,
A little Prop best fits a little Vine,
As my small Cruse best fits my little Wine.
A little Seed best fits a little Soyle,
A little Trade best fits a little Toyle,
As my small Jarre best fits my little Oyle.
A little Bin best fits a little Bread,
A little Garland fits a little Head,
As my small stuffe best fits my little Shed.
A little Hearth best fits a little Fire,
A little Chappell fits a little Quire,
As my small Bell best fits my little Spire.
A little streame best fits a little Boat,
A little lead best fits a little Float,
As my small Pipe best fits my little note.
A little meat best fits a little bellie,
As sweetly, Lady, give me leave to tell ye,
This little Pipkin fits this little Jellie.
And the fact that this or any other poem is printed at this end of
the book instead of at the other does not mean that I am any the less
thankful to have it or that Mr. Nahum left it out of his.
25. "I SING OF A MAIDEN."
Only the spelling of this lovely and ancient little carol has been
slightly changed.
29. "SLEEP STAYS NOT, THOUGH A MONARCH BIDS."
(line 11).
Why rather, sleep, liest thou in smoky cribs,
Upon uneasy pallets stretching thee,
And hushed with buzzing night-flies to thy slumber,
Than in the perfumed chambers of the great,
Under the canopies of costly state,
And lulled with sound of sweetest melody?
O thou dull god, why liest thou with the vile
In loathsome beds, and leavest the kingly couch
A watch-case or a common 'larum-bell?
Wilt thou upon the high and giddy mast
Seal up the ship-boy's eyes, and rock his brains
In cradle of the rude imperious surge,
And in the visitation of the winds,
Who take the ruffian billows by the top,
Curling their monstrous heads, and hanging them
With deafening clamour in the slippery clouds,
That, with the hurly, death itself awakes?
Canst thou, O partial sleep, give thy repose
To the wet sea-boy in an hour so rude;
And in the calmest and most stillest night,
With all appliances and means to boot,
Deny it to a king? Then happy low, lie down!
Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.
_Henry IV. Part ii._
30.
For many years I read this poem as if the accents in the first line
of each stanza fell on the first and third word--the two "I's." It
was stupid of me, for clearly the accent should fall (lightly) on the
second syllable of the "remembers." Apart from the accents or stresses
in a line of verse, there is the rise and fall of the voice, a kind of
tune in the _saying_ of it. If the right tune is not caught, then the
difference is as much as if one sniffed a wallflower and it smelt like
African mimosa. And to me, as to hundreds of thousands of Englishmen,
this poem is as familiar, long-endeared and refreshing as wallflower,
Sweet William, or Old Man. This is the second or third time I have made
remarks about the rhythm, lilt or tune of a poem; and it won't be the
last. May I be forgiven, for as Chaucer wrote to his small son Louis
when he was sharing with him his love of astronomy: "Soothly me seemeth
betre to writen unto a child twice a good sentence, then he forget it
ones." As for his elders, even thrice may be short commons.
"THOSE FLOWERS MADE OF LIGHT." (line 12)
Hold up a flower between eye and sun, or even candle-flame, and it
seems little but its own waxen hue and colour. Moonlight is too pale;
the petals remain opaque. In the moon's light, indeed, blueness is
scarcely distinguishable from shadowiness; red darkens but yellow
pales, and the fairest flowers of all wake in her beams--jasmine,
convolvulus, evening-primrose--as if they not only shared her radiance
but returned a glowwormlike fuminess of their own.
Once, long before I came to Thrae, having plucked for my mother a few
convolvulus flowers, I remember when I was just about to give them into
her hand I discovered that the beautiful cups of delight had enwreathed
themselves together, and had returned as it were to the bud, never to
reopen. I was but a child, and this odd little disappointment was so
extreme that I burst out crying.
32.
See just above, No. 30: and for proof of the curious obedience of words
to any bidden rhythm it is interesting to compare this poem with its
next neighbours. Mr. Frost's colt is called "a little Morgan," because
he was of a famous breed of horses of that name which are the pride of
the State of Vermont.
35.
Only a single copy of the old play, _Mundus et Infans_, from which
this fragment is taken, is known to be in existence. It was printed by
Wynkyn de Worde in 1522; and was written roundabout 1500.
The lines need a slow reading to get the run and lilt of them: and
even at that they jog and creak like an old farm-cart. But the boy,
Dalyaunce, if one takes a little pains, will come gradually out of them
as clear to the eye as if you had met him in the street to-day, on his
way to "schole" for yet another "docking."
Clothes, houses, customs, food a little, thoughts a little, knowledge,
too--all change as the years and centuries go by, but Dalyaunce under
a thousand names lives on. It never occurred to me when I was young
to think that the children in Rome talked Latin at their games, and
that Solomon and Caesar, Prester John and the Grand Khan knew in their
young days what it means to be homesick and none too easy to sit down.
Yet there are knucklebones and dolls in London that the infant subjects
of the Pharaohs played with, and at Stratford Grammar School, for all
to see, is Shakespeare's school desk. As for Dalyaunce, "dockings" are
not nowadays so harsh as once they were.
In proof of this, there is a passage from a book, telling of his own
life as a small boy, written by Guibert de Nogent. He is speaking of
his childhood, about the year when William the Conqueror landed at
Hastings:
'So, after a few of the evening hours had been passed in that study,
during which I had been beaten even beyond my deserts, I came and sat
at my mother's knees. She, according to her wont, asked whether I had
been beaten that day; and I, unwilling to betray my master, denied it;
whereupon, whether I would or no, she threw back my inner garment (such
as men call shirt), and found my little ribs black with the strokes
of the osier, and rising everywhere into weals. Then, grieving in her
inmost bowels at this punishment so excessive for my tender years,
troubled and boiling with anger, and with brimming eyes, she cried,
"Never now shalt thou become a clerk, nor shalt thou be thus tortured
again to learn thy letters!" Whereupon, gazing upon her with all the
seriousness that I could call to my face, I replied, "Nay, even though
I should die under the rod, I will not desist from learning my letters
and becoming a clerk!"'
Still, there were more merciful schoolmasters than Guibert de Nogent's,
even in days harsh as his; as this further extract from Mr. G. G.
Coulton's enticing _Medieval Garner_ shows:
'One day, when a certain Abbot, much reputed for his piety, spake with
Anselm concerning divers points of Monastic Religion, and conversed
among other things of the boys that were brought up in the cloister,
he added: "What, pray, can we do with them? They are perverse and
incorrigible; day and night we cease not to chastise them, yet they
grow daily worse and worse."
Whereat Anselm marvelled, and said, "Ye cease not to beat them? And
when they are grown to manhood, of what sort are they then?" "They are
dull and brutish," said the other.
Then said Anselm, "With what good profit do ye expend your substance in
nurturing human beings till they become brute beasts?... But I prithee
tell me, for God's sake, wherefore ye are so set against them? Are they
not human, sharing in the same nature as yourselves? Would ye wish
to be so handled as ye handle them? Ye will say, 'Yes, if we were as
they are.' So be it, then; yet is there no way but that of stripes and
scourges for shaping them to good? Did ye ever see a goldsmith shape
his gold or silver plate into a fair image by blows alone? I trow not.
What then? That he may give the plate its proper shape, he will first
press it gently and tap it with his tools; then again he will more
softly raise it with discreet pressure from below, and caress it into
shape. So ye also, if ye would see your boys adorned with fair manners,
ye should not only beat them down with stripes, but also raise their
spirits and support them with fatherly kindness and pity'...."
There was an old woodcut, hanging on Mr. Nahum's wall in his tower
room, showing a boy in the middle ages being whipped in a kind of
machine (something like a roasting-jack), and a schoolmaster standing
by, nicely smiling, in a gown. When Coleridge was a bluecoat boy at
Christ's Hospital with Charles Lamb, he seems to have had a headmaster
of this kind: "'Boy!' I remember Bowyer saying to me once when I was
crying the first day after my return after the holidays,--'Boy! the
school is your father! Boy! the school is your mother! Boy! the school
is your brother! the school is your sister! the school is your first
cousin, and your second cousin, and all the rest of your relations!
Let's have no more crying.' ...
"Mrs. Bowyer was no comforter, either. Val. Le Grice and I were
once going to be flogged for some domestic misdeed, and Bowyer was
thundering away at us, by way of prologue, when Mrs. B. looked in and
said, 'Flog them soundly, sir, I beg!' This saved us. Bowyer was so
nettled at the interruption that he growled out, 'Away, woman, away!'
and we were let off."
Coleridge tells of yet another schoolmaster, whose name, like Bowyer
and birch, also began with a B.: "Busby was the father of the English
public school system. He was headmaster of Westminster through the
reign of Charles I., the Civil War, the Protectorate, the reign of
Charles II., and the Revolution of 1688. Under him Westminster became
the first school in the kingdom. When Charles II. visited the school,
Busby stalked before the King with his hat upon his head, whilst his
most sacred majesty meekly followed him. In private Busby explained
that his conduct was due to the fact that he could not allow, for
discipline's sake, the boys to imagine there could be a greater man
than himself alive." Quite rightly, of course.
There is, too, the story of the little Lion that went to school to the
Bear. Being, though of royal blood, a good deal of a dunce, Master Lion
bore many sound cuffings from Dr. Bruin on the road to learning, and
found it hot and dusty. After such administrations, he would sometimes
sit in the sun under a window, learning his task and brooding on a day
when he would return to the school and revenge himself upon the Doctor
for having treated him so sore. But Master Lion was all this time
growing up, and so many were the cares of State when he had left his
books and become a Prince and Heir Apparent, that for a time he had no
thought for his old school. Being, however, in the Royal Gardens one
sunny morning, and seeing bees busy about their hive, he remembered
an old saying on the sweetness of knowledge and wisdom, and this once
more reminded him of his old Master. Bidding his servants sling upon
a rod half a dozen of the hives, he set out to visit Dr. Bruin. The
hives were taken into his study, and the bees, being unused to flitting
within walls out of the sunshine, angrily sang and droned about the
head of the old schoolmaster as he sat at his desk. Their stings were
of little account against his thick hide, but their molestation was a
fret, and he presently cried aloud, "Would that the Prince had kept
his gifts to himself!" The Prince, who was standing outside the door,
listening and smiling to himself, thereupon cried out: "Ah! Dr. Bruin,
when I was under your charge, you often heavily smit and cuffed me with
those long-clawed paws of yours. Now I am older, and have learned how
sweet and worthy is the knowledge they instilled. This too will be your
experience. My bees may fret and buzz and sting a little now, but you
will think of me more kindly when you shall be tasting their rich honey
in the Winter that is soon upon us." And Dr. Bruin, peering out at the
Prince from amid the cloud of the bees, when he heard him thus call Tit
for Tat, he couldn't help but laugh.
And last--to return to Coleridge once more, who, in the bad old days,
so far as food goes, never "had a belly full" at Christ's Hospital, and
whose appetite was only "damped, never satisfied,"--here is one of his
earliest letters (to his elder brother George), which _may_ have an
(indirect) reference to Dr. Bowyer's birch:
Dear Brother,--You will excuse me for reminding you that,
as our holidays commence next week, and I shall go out a
good deal, a good pair of breeches will be no inconsiderable
accession to my appearance. For though my present pair are
excellent for the purpose of drawing mathematical figures on
them, and though a walking thought, sonnet or epigram would
appear in them in very _splendid_ type, yet they are not
altogether so well adapted for a female eye--not to mention
that I should have the charge of vanity brought against me
for wearing a looking-glass. I hope you have got rid of your
cold--and I am
Your affectionate brother,
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
40.
This too should go to the lilt of its music, as then the accents would
come clearly. I think, in the reading of it, there should be four
stressed syllables to the first, second and fifth lines in each stanza:
"Whâr hae ye bêen a' day, mŷ boy Tâmmy"; and "The wêe thing gie's
her hând, and says, There, gâng and ask my Mâmmy." A line of verse like
this resembles a piece of elastic; if you leave it very slack you will
get no music out of it at all; stretch it a little too far, it snaps.
41. "ROSY APPLE, LEMON, OR PEAR."
This little jingle and Nos. 15, 16, 68, 75, etc., are Singing Game
Rhymes, of which scores have been collected from the mouths of
children near and far from all over the Kingdom, and are now to be
found in print in Lady Gomme's two stout engrossing volumes entitled
_Traditional Games_. In these more than seven hundred games are
described, including Rakes and Roans, Rockety Row, Sally Go Round
the Moon, Shuttlefeather, Spannims, Tods and Lambs, Whigmeleerie,
Allicomgreenaie, Bob-Cherry, Oranges and Lemons, Cherry Pit,
Thumble-bones, Lady on Yandor Hill, Hechefragy, and Snail Creep.
A good many of these games have singing rhymes to them. And the
words of them vary in different places. For the children in each
of twenty or more villages and towns may have their own particular
version of the same rhyme. As for the original from which all such
versions must once have come--_that_ may be centuries old. Like the
Nursery Rhymes, they were most of them in the world ages before our
great-great-great-grand-dams were babies in their cradles. The noble
game of Hop Scotch, for instance, Lady Gomme tells us, was in favour
before the year I.
The most mysterious rhymes of all are said to refer to ancient tribal
customs, rites and ceremonies--betrothals, harvest-homes, sowings,
reapings, well-blessings, dirges, divinations, battles, hunting, and
exorcisings--before even London was else than a few hovels by its
river's side. Rhymes such as these having been passed on from age to
age and from one piping throat to another, have grown worn and battered
of course, and become queerly changed in their words.
These from Mr. Nahum's book have their own differences too. He seems to
have liked best those that make a picture, or sound uncommonly sweet
and so carry the fancy away. Any little fytte or jingle or jargon of
words that manages _that_ is like a charm or a talisman, and to make
new ones is as hard as to spin silk out of straw, or to turn beech
leaves into fairy money. When one thinks, too, of the myriad young
voices that generation after generation have carolled these rhymes
into the evening air, and now are still--well, it's a thought no less
sorrowful for being strange, and no less strange for the fact that our
own voices too will some day be as silent.
Summer's pleasures they are gone like to visions every one,
And the cloudy days of autumn and of winter cometh on.
I tried to call them back, but unbidden they are gone
Far away from heart and eye and for ever far away.
Dear heart, and can it be that such raptures meet decay?
I thought them all eternal when by Langley Bush I lay,
I thought them joys eternal when I used to shout and play
On its bank at "clink and bandy," "chock" and "taw" and
"ducking stone,"
Where silence sitteth now on the wild heath as her own
Like a ruin of the past all alone....
JOHN CLARE
42. "IN PRAISE."
The loveliest and gayest song of praise and sweetness to a "young
thing" I have ever seen.
"Ielofler"--gelofer, gelofre, gillofre, gelevor, gillyvor, gillofer,
jerefloure, gerraflour--all these are ways of spelling Gillyflower,
gelofre coming nearest to its original French: _giroflée_--meaning
spiced like the clove. There were of old, I find, three kinds of
gillyflowers: the clove, the stock and the wall. It was the first
of these kinds that was meant in the earlier writers by the small
clove carnation (or Coronation, because it was made into chaplets or
garlands). Its Greek name was dianthus (the flower divine); and its
twin-sister is the Pink, so called because its edges are, as it were,
picked out, jagged, notched, scalloped. Country names for it are Sweet
John, Pagiants, Blunket and Sops-in-Wine, for it spices what it floats
in, and used to be candied for a sweetmeat. Blossoming in July, the
Gillyflower suggests July-flower, and if Julia is one's sweetheart,
it may also be a Julie-flower. So one name may carry many echoes.
It has been truly described as a gimp and gallant flower, and, says
Parkinson, who wrote _Paradisus Terrestris_, it was the chiefest of
account in Tudor gardens. By 1700 indeed there were 360 kinds and four
classes of clove gillyflower--the Flake, the Bizarre, the Piquette or
picotee (_picotée_ or pricketed), and the Painted Lady, the last now
gone. Its ancestor, the dianthus, seems to have crossed the Channel
with the Normans, for it flourishes on the battlements of Falaise,
the Conqueror's birthplace, and crowns the walls of many a Norman
Castle--Dover, Ludlow, Rochester, Deal--to this day.
43. "PYGSNYE"
must be Piggie's eye, or, from an old word, Twinkle-eye, just as we
nowadays call a child or loved-one Goosikins or Pussikins, or Lambkin
Pie, or Bunch-of-Roses, or Chickabiddy, or Come-kiss-me-quick. _Minion_
means anything small, minikin, delicate, dainty, darling. Look close,
for example, at the brown-green florets of a stalk of mignonette.
44. "A WORM'S LIGHT." (line 10)
Many years ago I had the curious pleasure of reading a little book--and
one in small print too (Alice Meynell's lovely _Flower of the
Mind_)--by _English_ glowworm light. The worm was lifting its green
beam in the grasses of a cliff by the sea, and shone the clearer the
while because it was during an eclipse of the moon. But see No. 93.
50. "BUT NEVER CAM' HE."
... "O wha will shoe my bonny foot?
And wha will glove my hand?
And wha will lace my middle jimp,
Wi' a lang, lang linen band?
"O who will kame my yellow hair,
With a haw bayberry kame?
And wha will be my babe's father,
Till Gregory come hame?"
"Thy father, he will shoe thy foot,
Thy brother will glove thy hand,
Thy mother will bind thy middle jimp
Wi' a lang, lang linen band!
"Thy sister will kame thy yellow hair,
Wi' a haw bayberry kame;
The Almighty will be thy babe's father,
Till Gregory come hame."...
"Haw" is an old English word meaning (?) blue or braw, and bayberry
is the all-spice tree; so this sad one's yellow hair had for comb an
uncommonly charming thing. In another version the comb is of "new
silver," and in a third it is a red river kame, which, thinks Mr.
Child, may be a corruption of red _ivory_. But give _me_ (for such
hair) the bayberry kind, and let it be haw.
51. "THE ORPHAN."
"The first sense of sorrow I ever knew," wrote Richard Steele, "was
upon the death of my father, at which time I was not quite five
years of age; but was rather amazed at what all the house meant than
possessed with a real understanding why nobody was willing to play with
me. I remember I went into the room where his body lay, and my mother
sat weeping alone by it. I had my battledore in my hand, and fell
a-beating the coffin, and calling, papa; for, I know not how, I had
some slight idea that he was locked up there. My mother catched me in
her arms, and transported beyond all patience of the silent grief she
was before in, she almost smothered me in her embraces; and told me
in a flood of tears, 'Papa could not hear me, and would play with me
no more, for they were going to put him under ground, whence he could
never come to us again.'"
53.
The first and third stanzas of this poem were (and are) my particular
favourites, and especially the second line in each. Such poems are like
wayside pools, or little well-springs of water. It does not matter how
many wayfarers come thither to quench their thirst, there is abundance
for all.
"THE PERISHING PLEASURES OF MAN." (line 18)
"But you mustn't imagine," said the old old Harper, "that I harp sad
memories on my harp-strings because, being an ancient I am envious of
my youth. Far from it. My only grief is that even if mine were the Harp
that hung in Tara, I could not express the joy it is to be of years an
hundred, and to remember that once I was nought--and all in the same
bar."
And for yet another look behind, I cannot leave out this little
rhyme from William Allingham, who made one of the happiest of all
anthologies, "Nightingale Valley":
Four ducks on a pond,
A grass-bank beyond,
A blue sky of spring,
White clouds on the wing;
What a little thing
To remember for years--
To remember with tears.
Or, last, this lovely scrap from the Scots--all distance and longing
for home:
O Alva hills is bonny,
Dalycoutry hills is fair,
But to think on the braes of Menstrie
It maks my heart fu' sair.
60.
Edward Thomas, who wrote this poem, knew by heart most of the villages,
streams, high roads, by-roads, hills, forests, woods and dales of the
southern counties of England, and came so to know them by the best of
all methods. He walked through them on his feet; and, when so inclined,
sat down by the wayside or leaned over a farm or field gate and gazed
and mused and day-dreamed. Here is another poem of his:
If I should ever by chance grow rich
I'll buy Codham, Cockridden, and Childerditch,
Roses, Pyrgo, and Lapwater,
And let them all to my elder daughter.
The rent I shall ask of her will be only
Each year's first violets, white and lonely,
The first primroses and orchises--
She must find them before I do, that is.
But if she finds a blossom on furze--
Without rent they shall all for ever be hers,
Codham, Cockridden, and Childerditch,
Roses, Pyrgo and Lapwater,--
I shall give them all to my elder daughter.
_Not_, of course, to find a blossom on furze or gorse as soon as any
sun is in the year's sky, is the rare feat; and if in your wanderings
over the hills and far away you should chance on secret hidden-away
Pyrgo or Childerditch, sweet with its fragrance, then enquire for
the beautiful, happy young Lady of the Manor. As a matter of fact,
the scent of the furze-blossom is not exactly sweet, but nutlike and
aromatic. This is what Edward Thomas's friend, W. H. Hudson, the great
naturalist, wrote about it: "The gorse is most fragrant at noon, when
the sun shines brightest and hottest. At such an hour when I approach
a thicket of furze, the wind blowing from it, I am always tempted to
cast myself down on the grass to lie for an hour drinking in the odour.
The effect is to make me languid; to wish to lie till I sleep and live
again in dreams in another world, in a vast open-air cathedral where a
great festival of ceremony is perpetually in progress, and acolytes, in
scores and hundreds with beautiful bright faces, in flame yellow and
orange surplices, are ever and ever coming toward me, swinging their
censers until I am ready to swoon in that heavenly incense!" ...
"A STOAT." (stanza 5)
It is the gentle custom of gamekeepers to slaughter at sight
(though not for food) the little preying beasts and birds of the
woodlands--owls, hawks, crows, jays, stoats, weasels, and such like.
They then nail up their carcases to a shed side, or to a barn door, or
on a field-gate, leaving them to rot in the wind for a warning to their
live mates--just as in the old days the precarious English kings spiked
the heads of traitors on the turrets of the Tower. Foxes you "hunt" to
death.
61. "THE HOWES OF THE SILENT VANISHED RACES"
are, I suppose, the mounds, barrows, tumuli or Fairie Hills, some of
them round, some of them long, some of them chambered, beneath which
the ancient races of Britain, centuries before the coming of the Saxons
and the Danes, buried their dead. So once slept the mummied Pharaohs
beneath their enormous Pyramids. Age hangs densely over these solitary
mounds, as over the Dolmens and Cromlechs--Stonehenge, the Whispering
Knights--and the single gigantic Menhirs--the Tingle Stone, the Whittle
Stone, the Bair-down-Man and the demoniac Hoar Stone.
These were utterly ancient and unintelligible marvels even when the
monk Ranulph Higden wrote his _Polychronicon_ in 1352: The second
wonder, he says, is at Stonehenge beside Salisbury. There great stones
marvellously huge, be a-reared up on high, as it were gates, so that
there seemeth gates to be set up upon other gates. Nevertheless it is
not clearly known nor perceived how and to what end they be so a-reared
up, and "so wonderlych yhonged." And yet, they are but as falling
apple-blossom compared with the age of the world and the antiquity of
the Universe:
_1st Gravedigger._ Come my spade; there is no ancient
Gentlemen but Gardiners, Ditchers
and Grave-makers; they hold up
_Adam_'s profession.
_2nd Gravedigger._ Was he a Gentleman?
_1st Gravedigger._ He was the first that ever bore Armes.
_Hamlet._
62. THE TWA BROTHERS
--and here is as romantic and tragic a tale of two friends:
O Bessie Bell and Mary Gray,
They war twa bonnie lasses;
They biggit a bower on yon Burn-brae,
And theekit it o'er wi' rashes.
They theekit it o'er wi' rashes green,
They theekit it o'er wi' heather;
But the pest cam' frae the burrows-town,
And slew them baith thegither.
They thought to lye in Methven kirkyard,
Amang their noble kin;
But they maun lye in Stronach haugh,
To biek forenent the sin.
O Bessie Bell and Mary Gray,
They war twa bonnie lasses;
They biggit a bower on yon Burn-brae,
And theekit it o'er wi' rashes.
_Biggit_ and _theekit_ means builded and thatched; and the twelfth line
is "to bask beneath the sun."
64.
A tragic tale is hidden, rather than told, in this old Scottish ballad.
It resembles a half ruinous house in a desolate country, dense green
with briar and bramble, echoing with wild voices--its memories gone.
Mr. Nahum's picture for it was of a figure in a woman's bright clothes
and scarlet hood, but with what looked to me like the head of his own
skeleton deep within the hood. And on a stone nearby sat a little
winged boy.
66. "HER HIGH-BORN KINSMAN."
... And there was a wind in the night as they fared onward, a wind in
the mid-air, playing from out the clouds. And presently after, the
twain descended into the valley, the one traveller's foot stumbling as
he went, against the writhen roots that jutted from between the stones
of the path they followed. And it seemed that the voice of one unseen
cried, Lo! And the traveller looked up from out of the valley of his
journey, and, behold, a wan moon gleamed between the ravelled clouds;
and the face of his companion showed for that instant clear against
the sky in the shadow of its cloak. And it was the face of a nobleman;
renowned for his patience; courteous and cold; whose name is Death....
68. "LONDON BRIDGE."
This is yet another singing-game rhyme. When London was nothing but
a cluster of beehive huts in the hill clearings of the great Forest
of Middlesex above the marshes and the Thames, there can have been no
bridge. There _may_ have been a bridge, it seems, in A.D. 44,
eighty-seven years after the death of Caesar; and for centuries there
was certainly a ferry, Audery the Shipwight being one of its ferrymen,
his oars the shape of shovels, and his boat like a young moon on her
back.
The rhyme appears to refer to the wooden bridge built in 994 at
Southwark, which was destroyed in 1008 by King Olaf, the Saint of
Norway, to whose glory four London churches are dedicated. Olaf had
become the ally of Ethelred (the Unready), and to defeat the Danes
who had captured the city he first screened his fighting ships with
frameworks of osier for the protection of his men, who then rowed them
up to the Bridge against the tide. They wapped and bound huge ropes
or hawsers round its timber piers, swept down with the slack with the
tide, and so brought the Bridge to ruin.
The first stone bridge, in building from 1196 to 1208, was partially
destroyed by fire four years afterwards. A picture of the entrancing
re-built Bridge of Elizabeth's time, with its chapel, its many-storied
gabled houses, its haberdashers', goldsmiths' and booksellers' shops,
its cut-waters or starlings and many narrow arches, its gate-house
with the spiked heads atop, its drawbridge and pillory, and that
strange timber mansion, with not a nail in its wood, called Nonesuch,
where perhaps lived the Lord Mayor--all this may be gloated over in
any old seventeenth-century map of London. (John Visscher's of 1616
shows a windmill in the Strand!) So narrow were those high arches, and
so vehemently flowed the tides beneath them, that even at ebb it was
dangerous for a novice to shoot them in a boat. But between Windsor and
Gravesend it is said there were forty thousand watermen and wherrymen
in Shakespeare's day, yelling "Eastward Ho!", or "Westward Ho!" for
passengers. The Bridge was the glory of London; as the Thames it
spanned was its main thoroughfare. Fire was its chief enemy; the Great
Fire in 1616 and that in 1633, after which it long continued to be used
though dark, dismal and dangerous. The present monster of granite, over
which the people of London stream to and fro throughout the day, like
ants at the flighting, was built thirty yards west of the old one and
began to span the river in 1832.
70. "THIS CITY."
London, thou art of townes _A per se_[211]
Soveraign of cities, seemliest in sight,
Of high renoun, riches and royaltie;
Of lordis, barons, and many a goodly knyght;
Of most delectable lusty ladies bright;
Of famous prelatis, in habitis clericall;
Of merchauntis full of substaunce and of myght:
London, thou art the flow'r of Cities all.
Strong be thy wallis that about thee standis;
Wise be the people that within thee dwellis;
Fresh is thy ryver with his lusty strandis;
Blith be thy chirches, wele sownyng be thy bellis;
Rich be thy merchauntis in substaunce that excellis;
Fair be their wives, right lovesom, white and small;
Clere be thy virgyns, lusty under kellis[212]!
London, thou art the flow'r of Cities all....
WILLIAM DUNBAR
71. "HE OPENED HOUSE TO ALL." (line 22)
The subject being good victuals, here is the "Bill of Fare at the
Christening of Mr. Constable's Child, Rector of Cockley Cley, in
Norfolk, January 2, 1682."
"A whole hog's head souc'd with carrots in the mouth, and
pendants in the ears, with guilded oranges thick sett.
2 Ox^s cheekes stewed with 6 marrow bones.
A leg of Veal larded with 6 pullets.
A leg of Mutton with 6 rabbits.
A chine of bief, chine of venison, chine of mutton, chine of
veal, chine of pork, supported by 4 men.
A Venison Pasty.
A great minced pye, with 12 small ones about it.
A gelt fat turkey with 6 capons.
A bustard with 6 pluver.
A pheasant with 6 woodcock.
A great dish of tarts made all of sweetmeats.
A Westphalia hamm with 6 tongues.
A Jowle of Sturgeon.
A great charg^r of all sorts of sweetmeats with wine, and all
sorts of liquors answerable."
And here is another from that inexhaustible Tom Tiddler's ground,
_Rustic Speech and Folklore_ for the "funeral meats" of a farmer who
died near Whitby in 1760: "Besides what was distributed to 1,000 poor
people who had 6d. each in money, there was consumed
110 dozen penny loaves,
9 large hams,
8 legs of veal,
20 stone of beef,
16 stone of mutton,
15 stone of Cheshire cheese, and
30 ankers of ale."
For me the "great dish of tarts," the "guilded oranges" and "the
great charger of sweetmeats"! But after all, fine fat feasts such as
these are but a Town Mouse's crumb of Wedding Cake compared to Mac
Conglinnes' Vision in No. 73, which is from the Gaelic of 1100/1200
A.D., as translated by Kuno Meyer. _Bragget_, line 33, appears
to have been a concoction or decoction of ale, honey, sugar and spice,
of which last ambrosial ingredients (according to the old rhyme) are
made little girls.
72. "AND BRING US IN GOOD ALE"
really _good_ ale, that is, before beer was made "so mortal small," 133
years before tea-leaves came from China (to be boiled and the decoction
stored in a barrel); 140 before the first coffee-house in London; and
even, one might be tempted to add, before milk came from the cow, for
as late as 1512 the two young sons of the fifth earl of Northumberland,
Lord Percy aged eleven (who afterwards loved Anne Boleyn), and his
younger brother, Maister Thomas Percy, were allowed for "braikfaste"
even on "Fysch," or fast Days: "Half a Loif of houshold Brede, a
Manchet, a Dysch of Butter, a Pece of Saltfish, a Dysch of Sproits or
iii White Herrynge," and a _Potell of Bere_, _i.e._ two quarts or Eight
mugfuls.
"Hores," or heres, means _hairs_--cow's or dairymaid's. Butter is less
hairy nowadays, though on the other hand we have margarine.
I thought perhaps "Godes good" referred to a "podinge" for Saturdays--a
hodge-podge of the scraps and pieces left over through the week; but I
find it is really an old phrase for yeast.
73.
"I' sooth a Feast of Fats" (from the Irish of the twelfth century)
like that dream of the rats in the "_Pied Piper of Hamelin_" as they
scuttled to their doom in the cold Weser. For a feast of _sweets_ there
is Porphyrio's in the "Eve of St. Agnes:
"And still she slept an azure-lidded sleep,
In blanchèd linen, smooth, and lavendered,
While he from forth the closet brought a heap
Of candied apple, quince, and plum, and gourd;
With jellies soother than the creamy curd,
And lucent syrops, tinct with cinnamon;
Manna and dates, in argosy transferred
From Fez; and spicèd dainties, every one,
From silken Samarcand to cedared Lebanon.
These delicates he heaped with glowing hand
On golden dishes and in baskets bright
Of wreathèd silver: sumptuous they stand
In the retirèd quiet of the night,
Filling the chilly room with perfume light...."
For a banquet of enchantment there is Lamia's, and of magical fruits,
poor Laura's in "_Goblin Market_"; Romeo too went feasting with the
Capulets--but only his eyes; so too Macbeth, but _his_ eyes betrayed
him. Bottom in his ass's ears asked only for a munch of your good dry
oats, a handfull of pease, and a bottle of hay, then fell asleep before
even Queen Titania could magick them up for him. As for the poor Babes,
blackberries and dewberries were _their_ last supper. These are but a
few of scores of banqueting delights in poetry--but to include them all
would need such a larder as Jack peeped into when he sat supping in the
Giant's kitchen.
74. "PIGEON HOLES, STOOL-BALL, BARLEY-BREAK."
This fragment is a patchwork of the half-forgotten. "Pigeon holes"
was a ball-game, played on the green, with wooden arches and little
chambers as in a dovecot--a kind of open-air bagatelle. "Stool-ball"
was popular with Nancies and Franceses on Shrove Tuesday. Barley-break
was in Scotland a kind of "I spy," played in a stackyard, and in
England a sort of "French and English," in three marked spaces or
compartments, the middle one of which was called hell. And here--while
we are on the subject of old and gallant pastimes--is a brief
exposition of our noble and National Game of Cricket in its _early_
days. It comes from a book with the queer title, "A Nosegay for the
Trouble of Culling; or, Sports of Childhood":
"Cricket is a game universally played in England, not by boys only,
for men of all ranks pique themselves on playing it with skill.
In Mary-le-bone parish there is a celebrated cricket ground much
frequented by noblemen and gentlemen.
The wicket consists of two pieces of wood fixed upright and kept
together by another piece which is laid across the top and is called a
bail; if either of these pieces of wood be thrown down by the ball the
person so hitting them becomes the winner.
The ball used in this game is stuffed exceedingly hard. Many windows
and valuable looking-glasses have been broken by playing cricket in a
room."
It was in a cricket match in the summer of 1775, when no less than
three "balls" had rolled in between a Mr. Small's two stumps without
stirring the bail, that it was decided to add stump iii.
As for "tansy" (line 5), here is a recipe for it (to go with the
sillabub on p. 506): "Take 15 eggs, and 6 of the whites; beat them very
well; then put in some sugar, and a little sack; beat them again, and
put about a pint or a little more of cream; then beat them again; then
put in the juice of spinage or of primrose leaves to make it green.
Then put in some more sugar, if it be not sweet enough; then beat it
again a little, and so let it stand till you fry it, when the first
course is in. Then fry it with a little sweet butter. It must be
stirred and fryed very tender. When it is fryed enough, then put it in
a dish, and strew some sugar upon it, and serve it in."
75. "MARY'S GONE A-MILKING."
And, according to Sir Thomas Overbury (who dipped his pen in nectar as
well as ink), _"A Fair and Happy Milk-maid_," is "a country wench, that
is so far from making herself beautiful by art, that one look of hers
is able to put all facephysic out of countenance....
"She doth not, with lying long abed, spoil both her complexion and
conditions, ... she rises, therefore, with chanticleer, her dame's
cock, and at night makes the lamb her curfew. In milking a cow, and
straining the teats through her fingers, it seems that so sweet a
milk-press makes the milk the whiter or sweeter; for never came almond
glove or aromatic ointment on her palm to taint it. The golden ears of
corn fall and kiss her feet when she reaps them, as if they wish to be
bound and led prisoners by the same hand that felled them. Her breath
is her own which scents all the year long of June, like a new made
haycock. She makes her hand hard with labour, and her heart soft with
pity: and when winter evenings fall early (sitting at her merry wheel),
she sings a defiance to the giddy wheel of fortune. She doth all things
with so sweet a grace, it seems ignorance will not suffer her to do
ill, being her mind is to do well.... She dares go alone and unfold
sheep in the night, and fears no manner of ill, because she means none:
yet to say truth, she is never alone, for she is still accompanied with
old songs, honest thoughts, and prayers, but short ones....
"Thus lives she, and all her care is she may die in the spring-time,
to have store of flowers stuck upon her winding-sheet."
76. "CYPRESSE BLACK AS ERE WAS CROW."
Cypresse (according to a memorandum from one of Mr. Nahum's books)
is the fine cobweblike stuff we now call crape. Peaking-stickes, or
poking-sticks, were gophering irons for frilling out linen, flounces,
etc., etc., and not, as one might guess, curling tongs (since a pointed
beard, and the V of hair on the forehead, used to be called peaks). A
quoife or coif is a lady's head-dress, such as is still worn by nuns;
while as for "maskes for faces," fine ladies in Shakespeare's day
customarily wore them (as old pictures show) when they went to see his
plays. Masks were useful too in disguising the faces of his players,
when--as was the custom in the London theatres up to 1629--boys took
women's parts; and in the streets eyes gleamed out of the holes in
them, worn _then_ for keeping the skin fair, untanned, and unfreckled,
as Julia says of herself in Shakespeare's _Two Gentlemen of Verona_:
But since she did neglect her looking-glasse,
And threw her Sun-expelling masque away,
The ayre hath starved the roses in her cheekes,
And pinched the lily-tincture of her face....
78. FAIRING. (line 5)
In this--the earliest known letter of Shelley's--he too asks for a
fairing--the kickshaws and gewgaws sold in the booths of a fair--and a
toothsome one; though I haven't yet been able to discover what he meant
by "hunting nuts":
Monday, July 18, 1803. (Horsham).
DEAR KATE,
We have proposed a day at the pond next Wednesday; and if you
will come to-morrow morning I would be much obliged to you;
and if you could any how bring Tom over to stay all night,
I would thank you. We are to have a cold dinner over at the
pond, and come home to eat a bit of roast chicken and peas at
about nine o'clock. Mama depends upon your bringing Tom over
to-morrow, and if you don't we shall be very much disappointed.
Tell the bearer not to forget to bring me a fairing--which is
some ginger-bread, sweetmeat, hunting-nuts, and a pocket book.
Now I end.
I am _not_,
Your obedient servant,
P. B. SHELLEY
Even before Mr. Nahum's tower-room, I loved the "bonny brown hair"
of this poem. Was it squirrel brown, or chestnut, or hazelnut, or
autumn-beech, or heather-brown, or walnut, or old hay colour, or
undappled-fawn, or dark lichen, or velvet brown, or marigold or pansy
or wallflower-brown--or yet another?--every one of which would look
charming beneath the rim of a round blue-ribanded "little straw hat."
80. "WIDDECOMBE FAIR."
To an eye looking down, the steeple of Widdecombe Church rises in the
midst of Dartmoor like a lovely needle of ivory; and hidden beneath the
turf around it lie, waiting, the bones of Tom Pearse, Bill Brewer ...
Old Uncle Tom Cobley and all.
83. "THERE WERE THREE GIPSIES"
--and they were of England (Somerset), though to judge from this old
ballad they may have padded it down from the Highlands:
There cam' Seven Egyptians on a day,
And wow, but they sang bonny!
And they sang sae sweet, and sae very complete,
Down cam' Earl Cassilis' lady.
She cam' tripping adown the stair,
And a' her maids before her;
As soon as they saw her weel-faur'd face
They cast the glamourie owre her;
They gave to her the nutmeg,
And they gave to her the ginger;
And she gave to them a far better thing,
The seven gold rings off her finger.
There was a small black cobbled-up book entitled _Glamourie_ in a red
leather case in Thrae, but, alas, it was in a writing I could not
easily decipher. On the fly-leaf was scrawled "H.B.", and beneath it
was the following:
See, with eyes shut.
Look seldom behind thee.
In secret of selfship
Free thee, not bind thee.
Mark but a flower:
'Tis of Eden. A fly
Shall sound thee a horn
Wooing Paradise nigh.
Think close. Unto love
Give thy heart's steed the rein;
So--course the World over:
Then homeward again.
84. "WHATEVER THEY FIND THEY TAKE IT." (line 21)
There was a robber met a robber
On a rig of beans;
Says a robber to a robber,
"Can a robber tell a robber
What a robber means?"
And if not; why not? I had never seen this scrap of jingle until Mr.
Ralph Hodgson gave it me. And the following version of an old game
rhyme (with its rare "wood") first met my eye by the kindness of
another friend, Mrs. Lyon:
"My Mother said that I never should
Play with the gypsies in the wood,
The wood was dark; the grass was green;
In came Sally with a tambourine.
I went to the sea--no ship to get across;
I paid ten shillings for a blind white horse;
I up on his back and was off in a crack,
Sally, tell my Mother I shall never come back."
86.
This lament for matchless Robin Hood, who should shine in a far better
place than between "Beggars" and "Gilderoy," is the only rhyme about
him in this collection. The fact is, try as I might, I could not make
up my mind which I liked best of his old greenwood ballads in Mr.
Nahum's book. The oldest and best were all in formidable spelling, the
most of them were long, and maybe I was at last a little lazy. They are
all to be found in Professor Child. And if leaving out the merry outlaw
will persuade anyone to get and read _English and Scottish Ballads_, I
shall have omitted him to good purpose.
87. "GILDEROY."
A pretty song about a monstrously ugly scoundrel, though handsome of
feature. Gilderoy was a highwayman, sparing for his prey neither man
nor woman, and if there were "roses" on his shoes, they were blood-red.
At last fifty armed avengers surrounded his house at night and set
on. He killed eight of them before he was captured; which, if true,
was bonnie fighting. Nevertheless, such a villain he was that he was
hanged, without trial, on a gibbet thirty feet high, and the bones of
him (despite the last stanza of the ballad) dangled in chains forty
feet above Leith Walk in Edinburgh for fifty years afterwards.
88. "AND HIS NAME WAS LITTLE BINGO."
In bounding health, it is said, a dog's nose and a woman's elbow are
always cold. The reason for which is explained in a legend (referred
to in Mrs. Wright's _Rustic Speech and Folk Lore_). It seems that in
the midst of its forty days' riding on the Flood, the Ark one black
night sprung a little leak. Father Noah having forgotten to bring
his carpenter's bag on board, was at his wits' end to plug the hole
in its timbers. In the beam of his rushlight he looked and he looked
and he looked; and still the water came rilling in and in. His dog,
Shafet, was of course standing by, head on one side, carefully watching
his master. And Noah, by good chance, at last casting his eye in his
direction, seized the faithful creature and, thrusting his nose into
the leak, for a while stopped the flow. But Noah, a merciful man,
and partial to animals, quickly perceived that in a few minutes poor
Shafet would perish of suffocation, and as, by this time, his wife
had descended into the fo'c'sle to see what he was about, he released
his dog's nose, and, instead of it, stuffed in her charming elbow.
Q.E.D.
But not all dogs are as ready--as Launce in _The Two Gentlemen of
Verona_ knew:
"_Launce_: 'Nay, 'twill bee this howre ere I have done weeping. All
the kinde of the _Launces_, have this very fault: I have received my
proportion, like the prodigious Sonne, and am going with Sir _Protheus_
to the Imperialls Court: I thinke _Crab_ my dog, be the sowrest natured
dogge that lives: My Mother weeping: my Father wayling: my Sister
crying: our Maid howling: our Catte wringing her hands, and all our
house in a great perplexitie, yet did not this cruell-hearted _Curre_
shedde one teare: he is a stone, a very pibble stone, and has no more
pitty in him then a dogge!"
90. "POOR OLD HORSE."
In the furrowed land
The toilsome and patient oxen stand.
Lifting the yoke-encumbered head,
With their dilated nostrils spread,
They silently inhale
The clover-scented gale,
And the vapours that arise
From the well-watered and smoking soil.
For this rest in the furrow after toil
Their large and lustrous eyes
Seem to thank the Lord,
More than man's spoken word.
H. W. LONGFELLOW
91. "AY ME, ALAS."
Messalina's monkey was, I should fancy, of the kind called a marmoset,
"blacke and greene." "Their agilitie and manner of doing is admirable,
for that they seeme to have reason and discourse to go upon trees,
wherein they seeme to imitate birds." There are so few of these far
fair cousins of ours in poetry that I cannot forbear adding a note of
Mr. Nahum's from Sir John Maundeville's _Travels_.
"... From that City, (that is to say Cassay--the City of Heaven), men
go by Water, solacing and disporting themselves, till they come to
an Abbey of Monks--that is fast by--that be good religious men after
their Faith and Law. In that Abbey is a great Garden and a fair, where
be many Trees of diverse manner of Fruits. And in this Garden, is a
little Hill, full of delectable Trees. In that Hill and in that Garden
be many divers Beasts, as of Apes, Marmosets, Baboons, and many other
divers Beasts. And every day, when the Monks of this Abbey have eaten,
the Almoner has the remnants carried forth into the Garden, and he
smiteth on the Garden Gate with a Clicket of Silver that he holdeth
in his hand, and anon all the Beasts of the Hill and of divers places
of the Garden, come out, a 3000 or a 4000 of them; they approach as
if they were poor men come a-begging; and the Almoner's servants give
them the remnants, in fair Vessels of Silver, clean over gilt. And when
they have eaten, the Monk smiteth eftsoons on the Garden Gate with the
Clicket; and then anon all the Beasts return again to their places that
they came from. And they say that these Beasts be Souls of worthy men,
that resemble in likeness the Beasts that be fair: and therefore they
give them meat for the love of God."
92. "O HAPPY FLY."
And here is another of these creatures--"a sleepy fly that rubs its
hands," in Mr. Hardy's words--William Blake's:
Little Fly,
Thy summer's play
My thoughtless hand
Has brushed away.
Am not I
A fly like thee?
Or art not thou
A man like me?
For I dance,
And drink, and sing,
Till some blind hand
Shall brush my wing.
If thought is life
And strength and breath,
And the want
Of thought is death;
Then am I
A happy fly,
If I live
Or if I die.
But the Happy Fly is nowadays gone so dismally out of favour that it
would perhaps be prudent to draw attention from him to Lovelace's
"Grasshopper":
O thou that swing'st upon the waving hair
Of some well-fillèd oaten beard,
Drunk every night with a delicious tear
Dropt thee from heaven, where thou wert reared!
The joys of earth and air are thine entire,
That with thy feet and wings dost hop and fly;
And when thy poppy works, thou dost retire
To thy carved acorn-bed to lie.
Up with the day, the Sun thou welcom'st then,
Sport'st in the gilt plaits of his beams,
And all these merry days mak'st merry men,
Thyself, and melancholy streams.
93. "LO, THE BRIGHT AIR ALIVE WITH DRAGONFLIES."
There is an old dialect children's rhyme about these lightlike
shimmering _stingless_ insects:
Snakestanger, snakestanger, vlee aal about the brooks;
Sting aal the bad bwoys that vor the fish looks,
Bút let the góod bwoys ketch aál the vish they can,
And car'm away whooam to vry 'em in a pan;
Bread and butter they shall yeat at zupper wi' their vish
While aal the littull bad bwoys shall only lick the dish.
And here is yet another rhyme on the _Firefly_ (from Du Bartas), which
I have borrowed (with other passages as curious) from a mine of such
things, _Animal Lore of Shakespeare's Time_, by Miss Emma Phipson:
"New-Spain's _cucuio_, in his forehead brings
Two burning lamps, two underneath his wings:
Whose shining rayes serve oft, in darkest night,
Th' imbroderer's hand in royall works to light:
Th' ingenious turner, with a wakefull eye,
To polish fair his purest ivory:
The usurer to count his glistring treasures:
The learned scribe to limn his golden measures."
"There is a kind of little animal of the size of prawnes," says
Champlain of these tiny winged things, "which fly by night, and make
such light in the air that one would say that they were so many little
candles. If a man had three or four of these little creatures, which
are not larger than a filbert, he could read as well at night as with a
wax light."
95. "THE SALE OF THE PET LAMB."
"The Pet Lamb" by William Wordsworth is certainly of a more delicate
light and colour and music than this poem. But it is much better known.
And there is a secret something in the words of Mary Howitt's that wins
one at once to love the writer of it.
98.
This is another translation by Kuno Meyer from the ancient Irish--just
the bare bones, that is, of a poem that in its original tongue must
have been many times more musical with rhyme and gentle echo and
cadence; for the craft of Gaelic verse was an exceedingly delicate one.
I like it for the sake of its cat, its monk, and its age, but chiefly
because it reminds me of my own far-away days at Thrae--brooding up
there in solitude and silence over Mr. Nahum's books.
As for "white Pangur" and his kind, "it is needlesse," says Topsell,
"to spend any time about [Puss's] loving nature to man, how she
flattereth by rubbing her skinne against ones legges, how she whurleth
with her voyce, having as many tunes as turnes; for she hath one voice
to beg and to complain, another to testifie her delight and pleasure,
another among her own kind by flattring, by hissing, by spitting,
insomuch as some have thought that they have a peculiar intelligible
language among themselves." So also John de Trevisa, in 1387: "The
catte is a beaste of uncerten heare (hair) and colour; for some catte
is white, some rede, some blacke, some skewed (piebald) and speckled
in the fete and in the face and in the eares. He is a beste in youth,
swyfte, plyaunte, and mery, and lepeth and reseth (rusheth) on all
thynge that is tofore him; and is led by a strawe and playeth
therwith. He is a right hevy beast in aege, and ful slepy, and lyeth
slily in wait for myce. And he maketh a ruthefull noyse and gastfull,
whan one proffreth to fyghte with another, and he falleth on his owne
fete whan he falleth out of hye places."
The writings of the ancient Egyptians show that, far from detesting to
wet his paws, he would then _swim_ in pursuit of fish. They painted
a cat for the sound "miaou" in their hieroglyphics; gazed into his
changing moon-like eyes and revered him; and embalmed him when dead.
Having borrowed him from Egypt, the Romans brought him to Britain
(though we already had a wilding of our own, _Felis Catus_'), with the
ass, the goat, the rabbit, the peacock, not to speak of the cherry, the
walnut, the crocus, the tulip, the leek, the cucumber, etc. The Monk's
Pangur, then, came of a long lineage.
So valuable were cats in _Wales_ in the eleventh century (two or three
hundred years after Pangur), that their price was fixed by law: for
a blind kitten a penny; for a kitten with its eyes open, twopence;
for a cat of one mouse, fourpence, and so on. And to kill one of the
Prince's granary cats meant payment of a fine of as much wheat as
would cover up its body when suspended by its tail. In Scotland there
has long been a complete Clan of Cats--apart from the witches. As for
the Cheshire Cat, he grins, I imagine, not because he has nine lives,
is said to be melancholy, may look at a king, and has nothing to do
with Catgut, Cat's cradle, and Cat-i'-the-pan, but because he has
read in a dictionary that Dick Whittington sailed off to the Isle of
Rats, not with a Cat, but with _acat_ or _achat_, meaning goods for
trading--Coals! Long may he grin! How but one country Gib or Tom may
befriend the brightfaced Heartsease (so sturdy a little dear that it
will bloom at burning noonday in a gravel path) Charles Darwin tells in
his "_Origin of Species_," p. 57.
His "loving nature" to creatures _other_ than man and the heartsease is
referred to in the following old Scots nursery rhyme:
There was a wee bit mousikie,
That lived in Gilberaty, O,
It couldna get a bite o' cheese,
For cheetie-poussie-cattie, O.
It said unto the cheesikie,
"Oh fain wad I be at ye, O,
If 't were na for the cruel paws
O' cheetie-poussie-cattie, O."
99. "ON WHAT WINGS DARE HE ASPIRE."
The verb _dare_ (I gather from Webster) was once used only in the past
tense, the preterite; for "dare he" therefore in this poem we should
now write _dared he_.
100.
Andrew Marvell has three rare charms--his poetry is wholly his own; it
is as delightful as the sound of his name; and the face in his portrait
is as enchanting as either.
101-2.
The Phillip of these two poems is, I suppose, the hedge-sparrow or
dunnock, that gentle and happy little cousin of the warblers--as light
and lovely in voice as they are on the wing. As everyone knows, a
bullfinch can be taught to whistle like a baker's boy, and will become
so jealous of his mistress that he will hiss and ruff with rage at
every stranger. Jackdaws and magpies, too, will become friends to a
friend. But a lady whom I have the happiness to know has a nightingale
that was hatched in captivity, and so has never shared either the
delights or the dangers of the wild. So easy is he in her company that
he will perch on her pen-tip as she sits at table, and sing as if out
of a garden in Damascus.
102. "HE WOULD CHIRP."
"... As she (St. Douceline) sat at meat, if anyone brought her a
flower, a bird, a fruit, or any other thing that gave her pleasure,
then she fell straightway into an ecstasy, and was caught up to Him Who
had made these fair creatures.... One day she heard a lonely sparrow
sing, whereupon she said to her companions, 'How lonely is the song of
that bird!' and in the twinkling of an eye she was in an ecstasy, drawn
up to God by the bird's voice...."
The above is from _A Medieval Garner_, and this, from a Note to "A
Saint's Tragedy," by Margaret L. Woods: When the blessed Elizabeth
"had been ill twelve days and more, one of her maids sitting by her
bed heard in her throat a very sweet sound, ... and saying, 'Oh, my
mistress, how sweetly thou didst sing!' she answered, 'I tell thee, I
heard a little bird between me and the wall sing merrily; who with his
sweet song so stirred me up that I could not but sing myself.'"
"LOVING REDBREASTS." (line 31)
My dear, do you know
How a long time ago,
Two poor little children,
Whose names I don't know,
Were stolen away
On a fine summer's day,
And left in a wood,
As I've heard people say.
And when it was night,
So sad was their plight,
The sun it went down,
And the moon gave no light!
They sobbed and they sighed,
And they bitterly cried,
And the poor little things,
They laid down and died.
And when they were dead,
The robins so red
Brought strawberry leaves,
And over them spread;
And all the day long,
They sang them this song,--
Poor babes in the wood!
Poor babes in the wood!
And don't you remember
The babes in the wood?
105. "'TIS A NOTE OF ENCHANTMENT."
It was a note of enchantment such as this that haunted the memory of
Edward Thomas when he was writing his poem called _The Unknown Bird._ I
give only a few lines, but the rest of the beautiful thing may be found
in his _Poems_:
Oftenest when I heard him I was alone,
Nor could I ever make another hear.
La-la-la! he called seeming far-off--
As if a cock crowed past the edge of the world,
As if the bird or I were in a dream....
... O wild-raving winds! if you ever do roar
By the house and the elms from where I've a-come,
Breathe up at the window, or call at the door,
And tell you've a found me a-thinking of home."
WILLIAM BARNES
107. "LIKE A LADY BRIGHT."
"They say," says Ophelia, "they say the owle was a Baker's daughter.
Lord, we know what we are, but know not what we may be. God be at your
Table." And thus runs the story:
Our Saviour being footsore, weary and hungry one darkening evening,
went into a baker's shop and asked for bread. The oven being then hot
and all prepared for the baking, the mistress of the shop cut off a
good-sized piece of the risen dough to bake for him. At this her fair,
greedy daughter, who sate watching what was forward from a little
window, upbraided her mother for this wasting of profit on such an
outcast; and taking the platter out of her hands, she chopped the piece
of dough into half, and half, and half again. Nevertheless when this
mean small lump was put into the oven, it presently began miraculously
to rise and swell until it exceeded a full quartern of wheaten bread.
In alarm at this strange sight the daughter--her round blue eyes
largely eyeing the stranger in the dim light--turned on her mother, and
cried out: "O Mother, Mother, _Heugh, heugh, heugh_." "As thou hast
spoken," said our Saviour, "so be thou: child of the Night." Whereupon,
the poor creature, feathered and in the likeness of an owl, fled forth
into the dark towards the woodside.
"109. THE WHITE OWL."
When night is o'er the wood
And moon-scared watch-dogs howl,
Comes forth in search of food
The snowy mystic owl.
His soft, white, ghostly wings
Beat noiselessly the air
Like some lost soul that hopelessly
Is mute in its despair.
But now his hollow note
Rings cheerless through the glade
And o'er the silent moat
He flits from shade to shade.
He hovers, swoops and glides
O'er meadows, moors and streams;
He seems to be some fantasy--
A ghostly bird of dreams.
Why dost thou haunt the night?
Why dost thou love the moon
When other birds delight
To sing their joy at noon?
Art thou then crazed with love,
Or is't for some fell crime
That thus thou flittest covertly
At this unhallowed time?
F. J. PATMORE
"111. HER SMALL SOUL." (line 23)
_Smallest_ of all shrill souls among the English birds is the wren, but
she has a remote relative that dwells in the dark and enormous forests
of South America, the Humming Bird, and simply for their own sakes I
cannot resist borrowing two more fragments from Miss Phipson's _Animal
Lore_. The first comes out of Purchas's _Pilgrimes_, and was written by
Antonia Galvano of New Spain:
"There be certaine small birds named _vicmalim_, their bil is small and
long. They live of the dew, and the juyce of flowers and roses. Their
feathers bee small and of divers colours. They be greatly esteemed
to worke gold with. They die or sleepe every yeere in the moneth of
October, sitting upon a little bough in a warme and close place: they
revive or wake againe in the moneth of April after that the flowers be
sprung, and therefore they call them the revived birds--_Vicmalim_."
The second is Gonzalo Ferdinando de Oviedo's--his very name a string of
gems:
"... I have seene that one of these birds with her nest put into a
paire of gold weights [scales] altogether, hath waide no more then a
_tomini_, which are in poise 24 graines, with the feathers, without
the which she would have waied somewhat less. And doubtlesse, when I
consider the finenesse of the clawes and feete of these birds, I know
not whereunto I may better liken them then to the little birds which
the lymners of bookes are accustomed to paint on the margent of church
bookes, and other bookes of divine service. Their feathers are of manie
faire colours, as golden, yellow, and greene, beside other variable
colours. Their beake is verie long for the proportion of their bodies,
and as fine and subtile as a sowing needle. They are verie hardy, so
that when they see a man clime the tree where they have their nests,
they fly at his face, and strike him in the eyes, comming, going, and
returning with such swiftnesse, that no man should lightly beleeve it
that had not seene it...."
"112. IT CAUGHT HIS IMAGE"
And Shelley:
... I cannot tell my joy, when o'er a lake
Upon a drooping bough with nightshade twined,
I saw two azure halcyons clinging downward
And thinning one bright bunch of amber berries,
With quick long beaks, and in the deep there lay
Those lovely forms imaged as in a sky....
Anyone so happy as to be able to remember Mary Coleridge as a friend,
will agree that to have seen her eyes is to have seen her own pool and
Shelley's lake, imaging such lovely flitting halcyons.
114. "KING PANDION HE IS DEAD."
A wild and dreadful legend is hidden here--of a King who wronged his
Queen and her sister, daughters of Pandion, and how they avenged
themselves upon him, sacrificing his son to their hatred. That Queen,
goes this old tale, became a nightingale, her sister a swallow (crimson
still dying the feathers of her throat), the evil king a hoopoe, and
the firstborn was raised to life again a pheasant.
115. "A SPARHAWK PROUD"
--a little bird but of a noble family. Listen, at least, to Auceps,
the Faulkner or Falconer, in "_The Compleat Angler_." [I have inserted
a few full stops in a sentence that has none] "... And first, for
the Element that I use to trade in, which is the Air, an Element of
more worth than weight, an Element that doubtless exceeds both the
Earth and Water; for though I sometimes deal in both; yet the Air is
most properly mine, I and my Hawks use that most, and it yields us
most recreation. It stops not the high soaring of my noble generous
_Falcon_; in it she ascends to such an height, as the dull eyes of
beasts and fish are not able to reach to; their bodies are too gross
for such high elevations. In the Air my troops of Hawks soar up on
high, and when they are lost in the sight of men, then they attend upon
and converse with the gods, therefore I think my _Eagle_ is so justly
styled, Joves servant in Ordinary. And that very Falcon, that I am now
going to see, deserves no meaner a title, for she usually in her flight
endangers her self, (like the son of _Daedalus_), to have her wings
scorched by the Suns heat, she flyes so near it. But her mettle makes
her careless of danger, for she then heeds nothing, but makes her
nimble Pinions cut the fluid air, and so makes her high way over the
steepest mountains and deepest rivers, and in her glorious carere looks
with contempt upon those high Steeples and magnificent Palaces which
we adore and wonder at; from which height I can make her to descend by
a word from my mouth (which she both knows and obeys), to accept of
meat from my hand, to own me for her Master, to go home with me, and be
willing the next day to afford me the like recreation...."
120. "COME WARY ONE."
... Tak any brid,[213] and put it in a cage,
And do al thyn entente and thy corage
To fostre it tendrely with mete and drinke,
Of allè deyntees that thou canst bithinke,
And keep it al-so clenly as thou may;
Al-though his cage of gold be never so gay,
Yet hath this brid, by twenty thousand fold,
Lever in a forest, that is rude and cold,
Gon eté wormés and seich wrecchednesse.
For ever this brid wol doon his bisinesse
To escape out of his cagė, if he may;
His libertee this brid desireth ay....
GEOFFREY CHAUCER
When I was a child of eight or nine I had a kind of passion for
sparrows, and used to set traps for them; but even if I succeeded in
taking one alive, which was not always, I could never persuade it to
live in a cage above a day or two, however much I pampered it. It
drooped and died. Then, like a young crocodile, I occasionally shed
tears. One fine morning, I remember, I visited a distant trap and, as
usual, all but stopped breathing at discovering that it was "down."
Very cautiously edging in my fingers towards the captive, I was
startled out of my wits by a sudden prodigious skirring of wings, and
lo and behold, I had caught--and lost--a starling. He fled away twenty
yards or so, and perched on a hillock. I see him now, his feathers
glistening in the sun, and his sharp head turned towards me, his eyes
looking back at me, as if foe at foe. And that reminds me of the
Griffons--the guardians of the mines of the one-eyed Arimaspians.
"... From that land go men toward the land of Bacharie, where be
full evil folk and full cruel.... In that country be many griffounes,
more plentiful than in any other country. Some men say that they have
the body upward as an eagle, and beneath as a lion; and truly they
say sooth that they be of that shape. But a griffoun hath the body
more great, and is more strong, than eight lions, of such lions as be
on this side of the world; and larger and stronger than an hundred
eagles, such as we have amongst us. For a griffoun there will bear
flying to his nest a great horse, if he may find him handy, or two
oxen yoked together, as they go at the plough. For he hath his talons
so long and so broad and great upon his feet, as though they were
homes of great oxen, or of bugles (bullocks), or of kine; so that men
make cups of them, to drink out of. And of their ribs, and the quills
of their wings, men make bows full strong, to shoot with arrows and
bow-bolts...."
But a griffoun is only a gigantic starling, so to speak; and it's a
pity mine and I were enemies. "If a sparrow come before my window,"
wrote John Keats in one of his letters, "I take part in its existence,
and pick about the gravel." Brick-traps are little help in this.
A Robin Redbreast in a cage
Puts all Heaven in a rage ...
A Skylark wounded in the wing,
A Cherubim does cease to sing ...
The wild Deer wandering here and there
Keeps the Human Soul from care ...
He who shall hurt the little Wren
Shall never be beloved by Men ...
The wanton Boy that kills the Fly
Shall feel the Spider's enmity ...
Kill not the Moth nor Butterfly,
For the Last Judgment draweth nigh ...
The Beggar's Dog and Widow's Cat,
Feed them, and thou wilt grow fat ...
To see a World in a Grain of Sand,
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,
And Eternity in an hour.
WILLIAM BLAKE
... What is heaven? a globe of dew,
Filling in the morning new
Some eyed flower whose young leaves waken
On an unimagined world:
Constellated suns unshaken,
Orbits measureless, are furled
In that frail and fading sphere,
With ten millions gathered there,
To tremble, gleam, and disappear.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
The men who wrote these words, truly and solemnly meant them. They are
not mere pretty flowers of the fancy, but the tough piercing roots of
the tree of life that grew within their minds.
126. "COME UNTO THESE YELLOW SANDS."
This poem and many others I copied out of Mr. Nahum's book in their
original spelling. At first I found the reading of some of them very
troublesome. It was like looking at a dried-up flower or beetle. But
there the things were; and after a good deal of trouble I not only
began to read them more easily, but grew to like them thus for their
own sake. First, because this was as they were actually written, before
our English printers agreed to spell alike; and next, because the old
words with their look of age became a pleasure to me in themselves. It
was like watching the dried-up flower or beetle actually and as if by a
magic of the mind coming to life. Besides, many of Shakespeare's small
poems were already known to me. It touched them with newness to see
them (though indeed _he_ never so saw them), as they appeared (seven
years after his death), in the pages of the famous folio volume of his
_Plays_ that was printed in 1623 by Isaac Jaggard and Edward Blount.
Not only that; for it is curious too to see how in the old days English
was constantly changing--its faded words falling like dead leaves from
a tree, and new ones appearing. In a book which William Caxton printed
as far back even as 1490, he says: "And certainly our language now
used varieth far from that which was used and spoken when I was born.
For we Englishmen be born under the domination of the moon, which is
never steadfast but ever wavering, waxing one season and waneth and
decreaseth another season." So in our own day words, like human beings,
come into the world and pass away: and many gradually change their
meanings.
For if the spelling of a word alters its effect on the eye, it must
also affect the _mind_ of the reader; and I must confess that "my
lovynge deare," looks to me to tell of somebody more lovable even than
"my loving dear." And what about shoogar-plummes, cleere greye eies,
the murrkie fogghe, the moones enravysshynge?
And what about--
"Let's goe to Bedde," says Sleepihed;
"Tarrie a while," says Slowe;
"Putte on the Panne," says Greedie Nanne,
"Wee'll suppe afore wee goe."
Not that I have _always_ kept to the old spellings. I have followed my
fancy; and if anyone would like to see an old poem in its first looks
that is here printed in our own way, all he need do is to go back to
the book in which it first appeared.
128. "SHEE CARRIES ME ABOVE THE SKIE."
... This palace standeth in the air,
By necromancy placèd there,
That it no tempest needs to fear,
Which way soe'er it blow it;
And somewhat southward toward the noon,
Whence lies a way up to the moon,
And thence the Fairy can as soon
Pass to the earth below it.
The walls of spiders' legs are made
Well mortisèd and finely laid;
He was the master of his trade
It curiously that builded:
The windows of the eyes of cats,
And for the roof, instead of slats,
Is covered with the skins of bats,
With moonshine that are gilded....
MICHAEL DRAYTON
129. "WHO CALLS?"
... Such a soft floating witchery of sound
As twilight Elfins make, when they at eve
Voyage on gentle gales from Fairy-Land,
Where Melodies round honey-dropping flowers,
Footless and wild, like birds of Paradise,
Nor pause, nor perch, hovering on untamed wing!...
S. T. COLERIDGE
133. "FOR FEAR OF LITTLE MEN."
"Terrestrial devils," says Robert Burton, "are those Lares, Genii,
Fauns, Satyrs, Wood-nymphs, Foliots, Fairies, Robin Goodfellows,
Trulli, etc., which as they are most conversant with men, so they do
them most harm.... These are they that dance on heaths and greens ...
and leave that green circle, which we commonly find in plain fields,
which others hold to proceed from a meteor falling, or some accidental
rankness of the ground, so nature sports herself; they are sometimes
seen by old women and children.... Paracelsus reckons up many places
in Germany, where they do usually walk in little coats, some two
feet long. A bigger kind there is of them called with us hobgoblins,
and Robin Goodfellows, that would in those superstitious times grind
corn for a mess of milk, cut wood, or do any manner of drudgery work.
They would mend old irons in those Aeolian isles of Lipari, in former
ages, and have been often seen and heard.... Dithmarus Bleskenius,
in his description of Iceland, reports for a certainty, that almost
in every family they have yet some such familiar spirits.... Another
sort of these there are, which frequent forlorn houses.... They will
make strange noises in the night, howl sometimes pitifully, and then
laugh again, cause great flame and sudden lights, fling stones, rattle
chains, shave men, open doors and shut them, fling down platters,
stools, chests, sometimes appear in the likeness of hares, crows, black
dogs, etc." ...
135.
So too with Hazel Dorn, in the following poem by Mr. Bernard Sleigh,
who has most kindly allowed me to print it here for the first time.
They stole her from the well beside the wood.
Ten years ago as village gossips tell;
One Beltane-eve when trees were all a-bud
In copse and fell.
Ominous, vast, the moon rose full and red
Behind dim hills; no leaf stirred in the glen
That breathless eve, when she was pixy-led
Beyond our ken.
For she had worn no rowan in her hair,--
Nor set the cream-bowl by the kitchen door,--
Nor whispered low the pagan faery prayer
Of ancient lore;
But trod that daisied ring in hose and shoon,
To hear entranced, their elf-bells round her ring;
The wizard spells about her wail and croon
With gathering string.
Swiftly her arms they bound in gossamer,
With elvish lures they held her soul in thrall;
With wizard sorceries enveloped her
Past cry or call.
A passing shepherd caught his breath to see
A golden mist of moving wings and lights
Swirl upwards past the red moon eeriely
To starlit heights.
While far off carollings half drowned a cry,
Mournful, remote, of "Mother, Mother dear,"
Floating across the drifting haze,--a sigh
"Farewell, Farewell!"
In the small hours of Beltane or May Day, vast fires have been wont to
be kindled on the hills of the Highlands--a custom old as the Druids.
Mr. Gilbert Sheldon tells me that as lately as 1899 he saw the hills
round Glengariff ablaze with them. They must be set a-flame with what
is called need-fire. And need-fire is made by nine men twisting a
wimble of wood in a balk of oak until the friction makes sparks fly.
With these they ignite dry agaric, a fungus that grows on birch-trees,
and soon the blaze is reddening the countryside under the night-sky.
Need-fire in a window-nook or carried in a lantern is--like iron--an
invincible defence against witches and witchcraft. Beltane cakes--to
be eaten whilst squatting on the hills, or dancing and watching the
fire--are made out of a caudle of eggs, butter, oatmeal and milk.
"NO ROWAN IN HER HAIR."
So potent is the flower or berry or wood of the rowan or witchwood
or quicken or whicken-tree or mountain ash against the wiles of the
elf-folk, that dairymaids use it for cream-stirrers and cowherds for a
switch.
Rowan-tree and red thread
Gar the Witches tyne their speed.
136. "TRUE THOMAS."
There are four copies in handwriting--two of them written about
1450--of a rhymed romance telling how Thomas in his youth, while
dreaming daydreams under the Eildon Tree, was met and greeted by the
Queen of fair Elfland. The ballad on p. 127 has been passed on from
mouth to mouth.
Up to our own grandmothers' day, at least, this Thomas Rhymour of
Ercildoune--a village nor far distant from where the Leader joins the
Tweed--was famous as a Wise One and a Seer (a See-er--with the inward
eye). He lived seven centuries ago, between 1210 and 1297. Years
after he had returned from Elfland--as the ballad tells--while he sat
feasting in his Castle, news was brought to him that a hart and a hind,
having issued out of the forest, were to be seen stepping fair and
softly down the stony street of the town, to the marvel of the people.
At this, Thomas at once rose from among his guests; left the table;
made down to the street; followed after these strange summoners: and
was seen again no more.
"Ilka tett," line 7, means every twist or plait; a "fairlie," stanza
II, is a wonder, mystery, marvel; and the "coat" in the last stanza,
being of "even cloth," was finer than the finest _napless_ damask.
So, too, Young Tamlane, when a boy "just turned of nine," was carried
off by the Elfin Queen:
Ae fatal morning I went out
Dreading nae injury,
And thinking lang, fell soun asleep
Beneath an apple tree.
Then by it came the Elfin Queen
And laid her hand on me;
And from that time since ever I mind
I've been in her companie....
He seems to have been an outlandish and unhuman creature--if this next
rhyme tells of him truly (_gait_, meaning road; _pin_, (?) knife;
_coft_, bought; _moss_, peat-bog; and _boonmost_--you can guess):
Tam o' the linn came up the gait,
Wi' twenty puddings on a plate,
And every pudding had a pin,
"We'll eat them a'," quo' Tam o' the linn.
Tam o' the linn had nae breeks to wear,
He coft him a sheep's-skin to make him a pair,
The fleshy side out, the woolly side in,
"It's fine summer cleeding," quo' Tam o' the linn.
Tam o' the linn he had three bairns,
They fell in the fire, in each others' arms;
"Oh," quo' the boonmost, "I've got a het skin;"
"It's better below," quo' Tam o' the linn.
Tam o' the linn gaed to the moss,
To seek a stable to his horse;
The moss was open, and Tam fell in,
"I've stabled mysel'," quo' Tam o' the linn.
138. "SABRINA."
This song is from "Comus," a masque written by Milton for the
entertainment of the Earl of Bridgewater, lord lieutenant of Wales, at
Ludlow Castle in 1634. That Castle's Hall is now open to the sky--"the
lightning shines there; snow burdens the ivy." From a neighbouring
room the two princes, Edward V. and his brother, went to their dark
death in the Tower. Below the ruinous Castle flow together the Terne
and the Corve, on their way to the great Severn--of which Sabrina, the
daughter of Estrildis, is the Nymph, she having been drowned in its
waters by Guendolen, the jealous queen of Locrine the son of Brut.
Estrildis herself, the daughter of King Humber, "so farre excelled in
bewtie, that none was then lightly found unto her comparable, for her
skin was so whyte that scarcely the fynest kind of Ivorie that might
be found, nor the snowe lately fallen downe from the Elament, nor the
Lylles did passe the same."
Milton's poems--_Lycidas_, for instance--frequently resemble bunches of
keys, each one of them fitting the lock of some ancient myth or legend.
In the lines I have omitted from No. 138 are many such locks awaiting
the reader--a reference to the following tale of Glaucus, for example:
There is a secret herb which, if nibbled by fish already gasping
to death in our air, gives them the power and cunning to slip back
through the grasses into their waters again. Of this herb Glaucus
tasted, and instantly his eyes dazzled in desire to share their green
transparent deeps. Whereupon the laughing divinities of the rivers gave
him sea-green hair, sleeking the stream, fins and a fish's tail, and
feasted him merrily. His story is told by Keats in the third book of
his _Endymion_, while Leucothea's, another reference, is to be found
in the fifth of the _Odyssey_. As for the Sirens, here is the counsel
Circe gave Ulysses, the while his seamen lay asleep the night after
they had returned in safety from Pluto's dismal mansions:
"... And then observe: They sit amidst a mead,
And round about it runs a hedge or wall
Of dead men's bones, their withered skins and all
Hung all along upon it; and these men
Were such as they had fawned into their fen,
And then their skins hung on their hedge of bones.
Sail by them therefore, thy companions
Beforehand causing to stop every ear
With sweet soft wax, so close that none may hear
A note of all their charmings...."
139.
These Songs are from the last act of "A Midsummer Night's Dream"--the
Duke and his guests are retired, and now sleep far from Life's Play;
and Puck and the fairies are abroad in his palace.
"I AM SENT WITH BROOME BEFORE."
When the cock begins to crow,
And the embers leave to glow,
And the owl cries, Tu-whit--Tu-whoo,
When crickets do sing
And mice roam about,
And midnight bells ring
To call the devout:
When the lazy lie sleeping
And think it no harm,
Their zeal is so cold
And their beds are so warm.
When the long--long lazy slut
Has not made the parlour clean,
No water on the hearth is put,
But all things in disorder seem;
Then we trip it round the room
And make like bees a drowsy hum.
Be she Betty, Nan, or Sue,
We make her of another hue
And pinch her black and blue.
But when the Puritans came in, it seems, the fairies fled away. And
Richard Corbet bewailed their exile:
"Farewell, rewards and fairies!"
Good housewives now may say,
For now foul sluts in dairies
Do fare as well as they.
And though they sweep their hearths no less
Than maids were wont to do,
Yet who of late, for cleanliness,
Finds sixpence in her shoe?...
At morning and at evening both
You merry were and glad;
So little care of sleep or sloth
These pretty ladies had;
When Tom came home from labour,
Or Ciss to milking rose,
Then merrily merrily went their tabour
And nimbly went their toes.
Witness those rings and roundelays
Of theirs, which yet remain,
Were footed in Queen Mary's days
On many a grassy plain;
But since of late, Elizabeth,
And later, James came in,
They never danced on any heath
As when the time hath been.
For times change, and with them changes the direction of man's
imagination. He turns his questing thoughts now this way, now that; and
though our learned dictionaries may maintain that fairy rings are but
brighter circles in green grass formed by "certain fungi, especially
_marasmius oreades_"--who knows?--
He that sees blowing the wild wood tree,
And peewits circling their watery glass,
Dreams about Strangers that yet may be
Dark to our eyes, Alas!
After all, Geoffrey Chaucer, even in _his_ distant day, lamented
that England was bereft of the Silent Folk. Whisper, and they will
return--bringing with them Prince Oberon, who "is of heyght but of III
fote, and crokyd shulderyd.... And yf ye speke to hym, ye are lost for
ever."
140. "AWM. 'WHO FEASTS TONIGHT?'"
Another mere fragment--from p. 182 of Mr. C. M. Doughty's Play,
entitled _The Cliffs_. For the complete "feast" bestowed on the world
by this great traveller and poet, the reader must seek out not only
this volume, but his _Arabia Deserta_, and his _Dawn in Britain_.
"ALL IN THEIR WATCHET CLOAKS." (line 15)
"Nan Page (my daughter) and my little sonne,
And three or foure more of their growth, wee'l dress
Like Urchins, Ouphes, and Fairies, greene and white,
With rounds of waxen Tapers on their heads,
And rattles in their hands ..."
_The Merry Wives of Windsor._
141. A HUNT'S-UP
was in old days the Tally-ho blared at daybreak to rouse the chase.
My houndes are bred of Southern kinde,
So flewed, so sanded they;
With crooked knees and dew-laps depe,
With eares the morning dew that sweepe
Slowly they chase their praye;
Their mouths, as tunable as belles
Each under each in concert swells.
_The hunte is up, the morne is bright and gray,
Hunting us hence with hunte's up to the day...._
Beyond all beastys poor timorous Wat
The hunter's skille doth trye,
See how the houndes, with many a doubte
The cold fault cleanly single out!
Hark to their merrie crie!
They spende their mouthes, echoe replies,
Another chase is in the skies.
_The hunte is up, the morne is bright and gray,
Hunting us hence with hunte's up to the day...._
These are two of the seven stanzas of a song richly larded with
Shakesperean allusions, to be found in _The Diary of Master William
Silence_.
In his book on English Poesy, Puttenham, who was born about 1520, says
that a poet of the name of Gray won the esteem of Henry VIII. and the
Duke of Somerset for "making certeine merry ballades, whereof one
chiefly was, 'the hunte is up, the hunte is up." Henry VIII., moreover,
was himself a versifier, and a musician, though, as I have read, a dull
one. Here is the first stanza of one of his poems:
As the holly groweth green,
And never changeth hue,
So I am, ever hath been
Unto my lady true....
which, with another equally surprising in sentiment, may be found in
full in that casket of antiquities, "Early English Lyrics, chosen by E.
K. Chambers and F. Sidgwick."
143. "WITH HIS COAT SO GRAY."
Though I be now a grey, grey friar,
Yet I was once a hale young knight,
The cry of my dogs was the only quoir
In which my spirit did take delight.
THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK
"D'YE KEN THAT A FOX WITH HIS LAST BREATH CURSED THEM ALL AS HE
DIED IN THE MORNING."
"'Hearken, Reynard, to my words,' (went on the King of Beasts). 'To-day
you shall answer with your life for these sins you have committed.'
... 'But nay, my lord,' (sighed the fox), 'I am innocent of all these
things. Your Majesty is great and mighty; I meagre and weak. If it
is the King's pleasure to kill me, I must die, for whether justly or
unjustly, I am your servant; my only strength is in your justice and
mercy. To these I appeal, as none has yet appealed in vain. Yea, if it
be your Majesty's will that I shall die, then do I accept it humbly. I
say no more. But yet I cannot think it a worthy thing for so great a
King to wreak his vengeance upon a subject so small.'"
148. "A FULLE FAYRE TYME."
What wonder May was welcome in medieval days--after the long winters
and the black cold nights when roads were all but impassable, and men,
"despisinge schetes" and nightgear, went to their naked beds with
nought but the stars or a dip for candle and maybe their own bones and
a scatter of straw for warmth. Is not "Loud sing Cuckoo!" our oldest
song?
149. "LUBBER BREEZE."
I suppose, is the prevalent wind in Lubberland or Cocaigne, where "the
pigs run about ready roasted, and cry, Come eat me!"
And here is a picture of another land of mill, that once long ago sang
to its waters, and dreamed above its image in the weir:
Only the sound remains
Of the old mill;
Gone is the wheel;
On the prone roof and walls the nettle reigns.
Water that toils no more
Dangles white locks
And, falling, mocks
The music of the mill-wheel's busy roar....
Only the idle foam
Of water falling
Changelessly calling,
Where once men had a work-place and a home.
EDWARD THOMAS
150. "THE AMPLE HEAVEN."
The unthrifty sun shot vital gold,
A thousand pieces;
And heaven its azure did unfold
Chequered with snowy fleeces;
The air was all in spice,
And every bush
A garland wore; thus fed my eyes,
But all the earth lay hush.
Only a little fountain lent
Some use for ears,
And on the dumb shades language spent--
The music of her tears.
HENRY VAUGHAN
"THE TIME SA TRANQUIL IS AND STILL." (line 13)
Clear had the day been from the dawn,
All chequered was the sky,
Thin clouds, like scarves of cobweb lawn,
Veiled heaven's most glorious eye.
The wind had no more strength than this,
--That leisurely it blew--
To make one leaf the next to kiss
That closely by it grew.
The rills, that on the pebbles played,
Might now be heard at will;
This world the only music made,
Else everything was still....
MICHAEL DRAYTON
153. "O FOR A BOOKE."
Nor--says John Bunyan:
Nor let them fall under Discouragement
Who at their Horn-book stick, and time hath spent
Upon (their) A, B, C while others do
Into their Primer, or their Psalter go.
Some boys with difficulty do begin
Who in the end, the Bays, and Lawrel win.
On the other hand;
Some Boys have Wit enough to sport and play,
Who at their Books are Block-heads day by day.
Some men are arch enough at any Vice,
But Dunces in the way to Paradice.
So much for the reader, but the writer, too, may fall under
discouragement. Listen to Colum Cille, an Irish scribe of the eleventh
century, in yet another translation from the Gaelic:
My hand is weary with writing,
My sharp quill is not steady,
My slender-beaked pen pours forth
A black draught of shining dark-blue ink.
A stream of the wisdom of blessed God
Springs from my fair-brown shapely hand;
On the page it squirts its draught
Of ink of the green-skinned holly.
My little dripping pen travels
Across the plain of shining books,
Without ceasing for the wealth of the great--
Whence my hand is weary with writing.
But to come back to the reader in his shadie nooke:
Tales of my Nursery! shall that still loved spot,
That window corner, ever be forgot,
Where through the woodbine--when with upward ray
Gleamed the last shadow of departing day--
Still did I sit, and with unwearied eye,
Read while I wept, and scarcely paused to sigh!
In that gay drawer, with fairy fictions stored,
When some new tale was added to my hoard,
While o'er each page my eager glance was flung,
'Twas but to learn what female fate was sung;
If no sad maid the castle shut from light,
I heeded not the giant and the knight.
Sweet Cinderella, even before the ball,
How did I love thee--ashes, rags, and all!
What bliss I deemed it to have stood beside,
On every virgin when thy shoe was tried!
How longed to see thy shape the slipper suit!
But, dearer than the slipper, loved the foot.
As for "_the streete cryes all about_": according to _London
Lickpenny_, among the street-cries in the fifteenth century were: Hot
Pease! Hot Fine Oatcakes! Whitings maids, Whitings! Have you any old
boots? Buy a mat! New Brooms, green brooms! with a general hullabaloo
of What d'ye lack? and now and again a bawling of Clubs! to summon the
tag, rag, and bobtail to a row.
Of singing cries, we may still hear in the sunny summer London streets
such sweet and doleful strains as Won't you buy my sweet blooming
lavender: Sixteen branches a penny! and in the dusks of November the
muffin-man's bell. Besides these, we have Rag-a'-bone! Milk-o! Any
scissors to grind? Clo' props! Water-creeses! and, as I remember years
ago,
Young lambs to sell, white lambs to sell;
If I'd as much money as I could tell
I wouldn't be crying, Young lambs to sell!
155. "WITH HEY! WITH HOW! WITH HOY."
In _Rustic Speech and Folk Lore_ Mrs. Wright gives the decoys with
which the country people all over England beguile their beasts and
poultry into "shippon, sty, or pen"; or holla them on their way, but
much, I have found, depends on him who hollas!
For _Cows_: Coop! Cush, cush!--while the milkmaid calls--Hoaf!
Hobe! Mull! Proo! Proochy! Prut!
For _Calves_: Moddie! Mog, mog, mog! Pui-ho! Sook, sook!
For _Sheep_: Co-hobe! Ovey!
For _Pigs_: Check-check! Cheat! Dack, dack! Giss! or Gissy!
Lix! Ric-sic! Shug, shug, shug! Tantassa, tantassa pig, tow a
row, a row! Tig, tig, tig!
For _Turkeys_: Cobbler! Peet, peet, peet! Pen! Pur, pur, pur!
For _Geese_: Fly-laig! Gag, gag, gag! Ob-ee! White-hoddy!
For _Ducks_: Bid, bid, bid! Diddle! Dill, dill! Wid! Wheetie!
For _Pigeons_: Pees! Pod!
And for _Rabbits_: Map!
"Yea, and I do vow unto thee," said the voice of the beautiful virgin
speaking out of the rock; "Call unto them but in their own names and
language, and the strong and delicate creatures of the countries of
the mind will flock into the living field of thy vision, and above the
waters will befall the secret singing of birds, and thou shalt be a
pilgrim. Mark how intense a shadow dwells upon this stone! Therein too
lurk marvels to be seen." The voice ceased, and I heard nothing but the
tapping of a fragment of dry lichen which in the draught of the hot air
caused by the burning sunlight stirred between rock and sand. And I
cried, "O unfortunate one, I thirst!"
156. "LAVENDER'S BLUE."
"A poor thing," as Audrey says, but homely and melodious and once
_some_body's own: such a somebody as inscribed on the walls of Burford
Church:
"... Love made me Poet
And this I writt,
My harte did do yt
And not my witt."
159. "THERE IS A GARDEN IN HER FACE."
Thomas Campion was "borne upon Ash Weddensday being the twelft day of
February. An. Rg. Eliz. nono"--1567. He had one sister, Rose. He was
educated at Peterhouse, Cambridge, and this was his yearly allowance
of clothes: A gowne, a cap, a hat, ii dubletes, ii payres of hose,
iiii payres of netherstockes, vi payre of shoes, ii shirts, and two
bandes. He was allowed also one quire of paper every quarter; and half
a pound of candles every fortnight from Michaelmas to Lady Day. He
studied law, may for a time have fought as a soldier in France, and
became a physician. He died on March 1, 1620, and was buried on the
same day at St. Dunstan's in the West, Fleet Street, the entry in the
register under that date being: "Thomas Campion, doctor of Phisicke,
was buried."
I have taken these particulars from Mr. S. P. Vivian's edition of
his poems, because it is pleasant to share even this little of what
is known of a man who is not only a rare and true poet--though for
two centuries a forgotten one--but also because he was one of the
chief song-writers in the great age of English Music. Like all
good craftsmen, he did his work "well, surely, cleanly, workmanly,
substantially, curiously, and sufficiently," as did the glaziers of
King's College Chapel, which is distant but a kingfisher's flight over
a strip of lovely water from his own serene Peterhouse. It seems a
little curious that being himself a lover of music he should have at
first disliked rhymes in verse, though he lived to write such delicate
rhymed poems as this.
In the preface to his _Book of Ayres_, he tells the secret of his
craft: "In these English Ayres," he says, "I have chiefely aymed to
couple my Words and Notes _lovingly_ together, which will be much for
him to doe that hath not power over both."
160. "WHAT IS THERE HID IN THE HEART OF A ROSE?"
There is a legend in _Sir John Mandeville's Travels_, which in our
spelling runs thus: "Bethlehem is a little city, long and narrow and
well walled, and on each side enclosed with good ditches. It was wont
to be called Ephrata.... And toward the east end of the city is a full
fair church and a gracious, and it hath many towers, pinnacles, and
corners, full strong, and curiously made; and within that church be
forty-four pillars of marble, massive and fair.
"And between the city and the church is the field _Floridus_, that is
to say, the 'Field of Flowers'; it being so named for this reason: A
fair maiden was blamed with wrong and slandered ... for which cause she
was demned to death and to be burnt in that place, to the which she was
led. And, as the fire began to crackle about her, she made her prayers
to our Lord,--that, as assuredly as she was not guilty of that sin,
He would help her and make it to be known to all men, of His merciful
grace. And when she had thus said, she entered into the fire, and anon
was the fire quenched and out; and the brands that were burning became
red rose-trees, and the brands that were not kindled became white
rose-trees, full of roses. And these were the first rose-trees and
roses, both white and red, that ever any man saw; and thus was this
maiden saved by the grace of God. And therefore is that field clept the
field of God, _Floridus_, for it is full of roses."
163. "THESE FLOWERS, AS IN THEIR CAUSES, SLEEP."
(line 4)
--while, also, flowers may themselves be the _causes_ of poems, as, in
a degree, a dewdrop in a buttercup is of the buttercup's causing. There
the rhodora, or rhododendron:
In May, when sea-winds pierced our solitudes,
I found the fresh Rhodora in the woods,
Spreading its leafless blooms in a damp nook,
To please the desert and the sluggish brook.
The purple petals, fallen in the pool,
Made the black water with their beauty gay;
Here might the red-bird come his plumes to cool,
And court the flower that cheapens his array.
Rhodora! Let the sages ask thee why
This charm is wasted on the earth and sky ...
Why thou wert there, O rival of the rose!
I never thought to ask, I never knew;
But, in my simple ignorance, suppose
The self-same Power that brought me there brought you....
R. W. EMERSON
And here anemone and cyclamen--in an enchanting little poem of but the
day before yesterday:
Long ago I went to Rome
As pilgrims go in Spring,
Journeying through the happy hills
Where nightingales sing,
And where the blue anemones
Drift among the pines
Until the woods creep down into
A wilderness of vines.
Now every year I go to Rome
As lovers go in dreams,
To pick the fragrant cyclamen
To bathe in Sabine streams,
And come at nightfall to the city
Across the shadowy plain,
And hear through all the dusty streets
The waterfalls again.
MARGARET CECILIA FURSE
"THE PHOENIX BUILDS HER SPICY NEST." (line 18)
The Phoenix, in faith rather than by sight, is thus described by
Pliny: "She is as big as an eagle, in colour yellow, and bright as
gold, namely all about the neck, the rest of the bodie a deepe red
purple; the taile azure blue, intermingled with feathers among of
rose carnation colour: and the head bravely adorned with a crest and
pennache finely wrought, having a tuft and plume thereupon right faire
and goodly to be seene."
Her life is but three hundred and nine years less in duration than
that of the many-centuried patriarch Methuselah. When the lassitude
of age begins to creep upon her, she wings across sea and land to the
sole Arabian Tree. There she builds a nest of aromatic twigs, cassia
and frankincense, and enkindling it with her own dying ardour she is
consumed to ashes. And yet--while still they are of a heat beyond the
tempering of the sun that shines down on them from the heavens, they
magically stir, take body and awaken; and she rearises to life renewed,
in her gold, her rose carnation, her purple and azure blue.
164. "THE BOWER OF BLISS."
This and No. 348 are but the merest fragments of the _Faerie Queene_;
but they show of what an echoing mutable music are its words. And
were ever light and colour so living, natural and crystal clear?
Reading this verse, hearing its sounds and seeing its sights in the
imagination, you cannot think Thomas Nash was too fantastical when he
wrote: "Poetry is the Honey of all Flowers, the Quintessence of all
Sciences, the Marrow of Art and the very Phrase of Angels." Indeed, as
Spenser's epitaph in Westminster Abbey says of him, he was the Prince
of Poets of his time, whose divine spirit needs no other witness than
the works which he left behind him. And poet of poets he has always
remained. John Keats, when he was a boy, used to sit in a little
summerhouse at Enfield with his schoolfellow Cowden Clarke, simply
drinking in this verse, and laying up store of purest English for his
own brief life's matchless work. So, too, Abraham Cowley:
"How this love (for poetry) came to be produced in me so early is a
hard question. I believe I can tell the particular little chance that
filled my head first with such chimes of verse as have never since left
ringing there. For I remember when I began to read, and to take some
pleasure in it, there was wont to lie in my mother's parlour (I know
not by what accident, for she herself never in her life read any book
but of devotion), but there was wont to lie Spenser's works; this I
happened to fall upon, and was infinitely delighted with the stories
of the knights and giants and monsters and brave houses which I found
everywhere there (though my understanding had little to do with all
this); and by degrees with the tinkling of the rhyme and dance of the
numbers, so that I think I had read him all over before I was twelve
years old...."
170.
The poems of Robert Herrick and of Thomas Campion though known well in
their own day remained for many years practically unread and forgotten.
Thomas Traherne's (who died in 1674) had an even more curious fate,
for they were discovered in manuscript and by chance on a bookstall so
lately as 1896, and were first taken to be the work of Henry Vaughan.
Here is a passage in prose from _Centuries of Meditation_, by the same
writer, repeating this reverie of his childhood in other words: "The
corn was orient and immortal wheat which never should be reaped nor
was ever sown. I thought it had stood from everlasting to everlasting.
The dust and stones of the street were as precious as gold; the gates
were at first the end of the world. The green trees when I saw them
first through one of the gates transported and ravished me; their
sweetness and unusual beauty made my heart to leap, and almost mad
with ecstasy, they were such strange and wonderful things. The men!
oh, what venerable and reverend creatures did the aged seem! Immortal
cherubims! And young men glittering and sparkling angels! and maids
strange seraphic pieces of life and beauty! Boys and girls tumbling in
the street were moving jewels: I knew not that they were born or should
die. But all things abided eternally as they were in their proper
places. Eternity was manifest in the light of the day, and something
infinite behind everything appeared, which talked with my expectation
and moved my desire...."
172. "BUT SILLY WE." (line 9)
This poem, I think carries with it the thought that in study of that
great book, that fair volume, called the World, there is no full
stop, no limit, pause, conclusion. Like bees, with their nectar and
honeycomb, man stores up his knowledge and experience in books. These
and his houses outlast him; the things he makes; and here and there a
famous or happy or tragic name is for a while remembered. Else, we have
our Spring and Summer--and dark cold skies enough, many of us--then
vanish away, seeming but restless phantoms in Time's enormous dream. So
far at least as this world is concerned. And generations of men--as of
the grasses and flowers--follow one upon the other.
Oh, yes, my dear, you have a Mother,
And she, when young, was loved by another,
And in that mother's nursery
Played _her_ mamma, like you and me.
When that mamma was tiny as you
She had a happy mother too:
On, on ... Yes, presto! Puff! Pee-fee!--
And Grandam Eve and the apple-tree.
O, into distance, smalling, dimming,
Think of that endless row of women,
Like beads, like posts, like lamps, they seem--
Grey-green willows, and life a stream--
Laughing and sighing and lovely; and, Oh,
You to be next in that long row!
And yet, "But silly we" is true of most of us and of most of our time
on earth. As Coventry Patmore says:
An idle Poet, here and there,
Looks round him, but, for all the rest,
The world, unfathomably fair,
Is duller than a witling's jest.
Love wakes men, once a life-time each;
They lift their heavy lids, and look;
And, lo, what one sweet page can teach
They read with joy, then shut the book:
And some give thanks, and some blaspheme,
And most forget; but, either way,
That and the Child's unheeded dream
Is all the light of all their day.
Or again, in the words of Sir John Davies--long since dead:
... I know my Soul hath power to know all things,
Yet is she blind and ignorant in all:
I know I am one of Nature's little kings,
Yet to the least and vilest things am thrall.
I know my life's a pain and but a span,
I know my sense is mocked with everything;
And, to conclude, I know myself a man
Which is a proud and yet a wretched thing.
175. "FOR SOLDIERS"
from an old book entitled, "A Posie of Gilloflowers, eche differing
from other in Colour and Odour, yet all sweete." There were pretty
and sonorous names for collections of poems in the days of Humfrey
Gifford (of whom nothing is known but that he made this Posie)--such as
_Wits Commonwealth_; _The Banket of Sapience_; _The Paradise of Dainty
Devices_; _A Gorgeous Gallery of Gallant Inventions_; and _A Handfull
of Pleasant Delights_.
"YE BUDS OF BRUTUS LAND"
sons of those, that is, who, according to the ancient myth were
descended from Brut or Brute, the Trojan, the conqueror of Albion and
its giants, the founder of London, after whom the land is named Britain.
"SOLDIERS ARE PREST" (stanza I)
that is, seized by the King's men, the press-gangs, and carried away by
force to fight in the wars.
"YOUR QUEEN."
"To the Most High, Mightie and Magnificent Empresse Renowmed for
Pietie, Vertue, and all Gratious Government ELIZABETH by the
Grace of God Queene of England Fraunce and Ireland and of Virginia."
So runs Spenser's dedication of "The Faerie Queene," while in "The
Shepheardes Calender" for April, are the lines:
See, where she sits upon the grassie greene,
(O seemely sight)
Yclad in Scarlot like a mayden Queene,
And Ermines white.
Upon her head a Cremosin coronet,
With Damaske roses and Daffadillies set:
Bayleaves betweene,
And Primroses greene
Embellish the sweete Violet.
In "A Midsummer Night's Dream," Oberon tells Puck how he saw that
"Faire Vestall" in danger of Love's sharp arrows--and "The Imperiall
Votresse passèd on In maiden meditation, fancy free." But Shakespeare,
if actually invited to Court, it is said, "was in paine."
176. "THE BATTLE-HYMN."
The writer of this magnificent Battle-Hymn died in 1910, at the age
of ninety-one. If Henry Carey, who wrote our own "National Anthem,"
had realised how much and how often _his_ fellow countrymen were to
be fated to use his words, he would perhaps have taken a little more
trouble with them (as much, at any rate, as Shelley and Flecker took
in _their_ versions of it), and would have found a pleasanter rhyme
than "over us" for "glorious," and than "voice" for "cause." If, on the
other hand, he had read the following _Grace_ which Ben Jonson made at
the moment's call before King James, he might perhaps have refrained
from rhyming altogether, and so, by sheer modesty, would have missed
being immortalized:
Our King and Queen the Lord God Blesse,
The Paltzgrave, and the Lady Besse.
And God blesse every living thing
That lives, and breathes, and loves the King.
God bless the Counsell of Estate,
And Buckingham the fortunate.
God blesse them all, and keep them safe,
And God blesse me, and God blesse Raph.
"The king," says John Aubrey, "was mighty enquisitive to know who
this Raph was. Ben told him 'twas the drawer at the _Swanne_ taverne,
by Charing-crosse, who drew him good Canarie. For this drollery his
majestie gave Ben an hundred poundes....
177.
"To those," it is said, "who have resided a long time by the falls
of Niagara, the lowest whisper is distinctly audible." Their hearing
accustoms itself to that unending and enormous roar, and becomes more
exquisite. This is untrue of those whose finer sense is lulled by the
roar of war: they become deafened, and cannot hear the voice of the one
soldier--of which human "ones" every army is composed. And so war may
poison even when its intention and its cause are honour and faith. In
this particular poem (No. 177), the soldier is one of those who fought
in the Transvaal in the years 1899-1901.
180.
Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen, Edward Thomas, Julian Grenfell, Charles
Sorley, Francis Ledwidge, Alan Seeger, Joyce Kilmer--these are the
names of but a few of the men, none of them old, many of them in the
heyday of their gifts and genius, who besides proving themselves
soldiers in the Great War had also proved themselves poets. Within his
powers, every true poet lives in his country's service. These in that
service died.
"... Old stairs wind upwards to a long corridor, the distant ends of
which are unseen. A few candles gutter in the draughts. The shadows
leap. The place is so still that I can hear the antique timbers
talking. But something is without which is not the noise of the wind. I
listen, and hear it again, the darkness throbbing; the badly adjusted
horizon of outer night thudding on the earth--the incessant guns of the
great war.
And I come, for this night at least, to my room. On the wall is a tiny
silver Christ on a crucifix; and above that the portrait of a child,
who fixes me in the surprise of innocence, questioning and loveable,
the very look of warm April and timid but confiding light. I sleep with
the knowledge of that over me, an assurance greater than that of all
the guns of all the hosts. It is a promise. I may wake to the earth I
used to know in the morning."
H. M. TOMLINSON
184.
The reader may speculate how it is that while room has been found here
for this entrancing rhyme, none has been made for Macaulay's longer
Lays, Browning's Cavalier Songs, and a host of poems equally gallant
and spirited. Perhaps he will forgive their absence if he will consider
what is said on page xxxiii, and if he will also remember that every
chooser must make his choice.
There is, too, the story of the Woodcutter's son. This fuzzheaded
boy, called Dick or Dickon, while playing on his elder pipe the
tune of "Over the Hills" one dappled sunshine morning in the woods,
fortuning to squinny his eye sidelong over his pipe, perceived a
crooked and dwarf old man to be standing beside him where before was
only a solitary bearded thistle. This old man, the twist of whose
countenance showed him to be one with an ear for woodland music,
invited the Woodcutter's son to descend with him into the orchards
of the Gnomes--and to help himself. This he did, and marvellously he
fared. On turning out his pockets that night--the next day being a
Sunday--his Mother found (apart from the wondrous smouldering heap of
fruits, amethyst, emerald, rubies and the topaz, which he had given
her) two or three strange unpolished stones, and these also from the
Old Man's orchards. And she climbed up with her candle, he being abed,
and asked him why he had burdened himself with such things of little
seeming value, when he might have carried off their weight in diamonds
big as dumplings. "Well, you see, mother dear," he drowsily replied, "I
chose of the best and brightest till my eyes dazzled; and then there
was a bird that called, Dick! Dick! Dick! Dick! and those magic pebbles
were among her eggs."
185. "WE BE THE KING'S MEN."
The Song of Soldiers from Act I., Scene I., Part i. of that mighty
play, _The Dynasts_. "The time is a fine day in March, 1805. A highway
crosses the ridge, which is near the sea, and the south coast is seen
bounding the landscape below, the open Channel extending beyond."
186. BUDMOUTH DEARS