Зображення сторінки
PDF
ePub

THE BOY OF EGREMOND.

249

THE BOY OF EGREMOND.* — Rogers.

66

SAY, what remains when hope is fled?
She answered, "Endless weeping!"
For in the herdsman's eye she read
Who in his shroud lay sleeping.

At Embsay rung the matin-bell,
The stag was roused on Barden-fell;
The mingled sounds were swelling, dying,
And down the Wharfe a hern was flying;
When near the cabin in the wood,
In tartan clad and forest-green,

With hound in leash and hawk in hood,
The Boy of Egremond was seen.
Blithe was his song, a song of yore;
But where the rock is rent in two,
And the river rushes through,
His voice was heard no more!

'T was but a step! the gulf he past;

But that step,

it was his last!

As through the mist he winged his way
(A cloud that hovers night and day),

The hound hung back, and back he drew
The master and his merlin too.

* In the twelfth century, William Fitz-Duncan laid waste the valleys of Craven with fire and sword, and was afterwards established there by his uncle, David of Scotland.

He was the last of the race; his son, commonly called the Boy of Egremond, dying before him in the manner here related; when a priory was removed from Embsay to Bolton, that it might be as near as possible to the place where the accident happened. That place is still known by the name of the Strid; and the mother's answer, as given in the fire stanza, is to this day often repeated in Wharfedale. Whitaker's History of Craven.

[ocr errors]

250

LIFE AND DEATH.

That narrow place of noise and strife
Received their little all of life!

There now the matin-bell is rung,
The "Miserere!" duly sung;
And holy men in cowl and hood
Are wandering up and down the wood.
But what avail they? Ruthless Lord,
Thou didst not shudder when the sword
Here on the young its fury spent,
The helpless and the innocent.
Sit now and answer groan for groan;
The child before thee is thy own.
And she who wildly wanders there,
The mother in her long despair,
Shall oft remind thee, waking, sleeping,
Of those who by the Wharfe were weeping;
Of those who would not be consoled,
When red with blood the river rolled.

LIFE AND DEATH. — R. C. Trench.

A PARABLE, FROM THE GERMAN OF RÜCKERT.

THERE went a man through Syrian land,
Leading a camel by the hand.

The beast, made wild by some alarm,
Began to threaten sudden harm,
So fiercely snorting, that the man
With all his speed escaping ran ;-
He ran, and saw a well that lay,
As chance would have it, by the way.
He heard the camel snort so near,
As almost maddened him with fear,

LIFE AND DEATH.

And crawled into the well,

yet there

Fell not, but dangled in mid ai:
For from a fissure in the stone,

Which lined its sides, a bush had grown;
To this he clung with all his might,
From thence lamenting his sad plight.
He saw, what time he looked on high,
The beast's head perilously nigh,
Ready to drag him back again;
He looked into the bottom then,
And there a dragon he espied,
Whose horrid jaws were yawning wide,
Agape to swallow him alive,

As soon as he should there arrive.
But as he hung two fears between,
A third by that poor wretch was seen;
For, where the bush by which he clung
Had from the broken wall outsprung,
He saw two mice precisely there,
One black, one white, a stealthy pair;-
He saw the black one and the white,
How at the root by turns they bite,
They gnaw, they pull, they dig; and still
The earth that held its fibres spill,
Which, as it rustling downward ran,
The dragon to look up began,
Watching how soon the shrub and all
Its burden would together fall.

The man in anguish, fear, despair,
Beleaguered, threatened everywhere,
In state of miserable doubt,
In vain for safety gazed about.
But as he looked around him so,
A twig he spied, and on it grow

251

252

LIFE AND DEATH.

Ripe berries from their laden stalk;
Then his desire he could not balk.
When these did once his eye engage,
He saw no more the camel's rage,
Nor dragon in the underground,
Nor game the busy mice had found.
The beast above might snort and blow,
The Dragon watch his prey below,
The mice gnaw near him as they pleased, -
The berries eagerly he seized;

They seemed to him right good to eat;
A dainty mouthful, welcome treat,
They brought him such a keen delight,
His danger was forgotten quite.

But who, you ask, is this vain man,
Who thus forget his terror can ?

Then learn, O friend, that man art thou!

Listen and I will tell thee how.

The dragon in the well beneath,

That is the yawning gulf of death.
The camel threatening overhead
Is life's perplexity and dread.

'Tis thou who, life and death between,
Hangest on this world's sapling green ;
And they who gnaw the root, the twain
Who thee and thy support would fain
Deliver unto death a prey,

These names the mice have, Night and Day.
From morn to evening gnaws the white,
And would the root unfasten quite;
From evening till the morn comes back,
In deepest stillness gnaws the black;
And yet, in midst of these alarms,
The berry, Pleasure, has such charms,

FOURTH SUNDAY AFTER TRINITY

That thou, the camel of life's woe,
That thou, the dragon death below,
That thou, the two mice, Night and Day,
And all forgettest, save the way
To get most berries in thy power,
And on the grave's cleft side devour.

253

BY GRECIAN ANNALS IT REMAINED UNTOLD.— R. C. Trench.

By Grecian annals it remained untold,
But may be read in Eastern legend old,
How, when great Alexander died, he bade
That his two hands uncovered might be laid
Outside the bier, for men therewith to see-
Men who had seen him in his majesty —
That he had gone the common way of all,
And nothing now his own in death might call
Nor of the treasures of two empires aught

;

Within those empty hands unto the grave had brought.

FOURTH SUNDAY AFTER TRINITY. — Keble.

It was not, then, a poet's dream,

An idle vaunt of song,

Such as beneath the moon's soft gleam

On vacant fancies throng,

Which bids us see in heaven and earth,
In all fair things around,

Strong yearnings for a blest new birth

With sinless glories crowned;

« НазадПродовжити »