Studies in Song | Page 8

monstrous beasts,
Strong to lay waste the kingdom of the seed of
priests.
45.
He knew the high-souled humbleness, the mirth
And majesty of
meanest men born free,
That made with Luther's or with Hofer's birth

The whole world worthier of the sun to see:
The wealth of spirit
among the snows, the dearth
Wherein souls festered by the servile sea

That saw the lowest of even crowned heads on earth
Thronged
round with worship in Parthenope.

His hand bade Justice guide
Her child Tyrannicide,
Light winged
by fire that brings the dawn to be;
And pierced with Tyrrel's dart
Again the riotous heart
That mocked
at mercy's tongue and manhood's knee:
And oped the cell where
kinglike death
Hung o'er her brows discrowned who bare Elizabeth.
46.
Toward Spenser or toward Bacon proud or kind
He bared the heart of
Essex, twain and one,
For the base heart that soiled the starry mind

Stern, for the father in his child undone
Soft as his own toward
children, stamped and signed
With their sweet image visibly set on

As by God's hand, clear as his own designed
The likeness radiant out
of ages gone
That none may now destroy
Of that high Roman boy
Whom Julius
and Cleopatra saw their son
True-born of sovereign seed,
Foredoomed even thence to bleed,

The stately grace of bright Cæsarion,
The head unbent, the heart
unbowed,
That not the shadow of death could make less clear and
proud.
47.
With gracious gods he communed, honouring thus
At once by service
and similitude,
Service devout and worship emulous
Of the same
golden Muses once they wooed,
The names and shades adored of all
of us,
The nurslings of the brave world's earlier brood,
Grown gods
for us themselves: Theocritus
First, and more dear Catullus, names
bedewed
With blessings bright like tears
From the old memorial years,
And
loves and lovely laughters, every mood

Sweet as the drops that fell
Of their own oenomel
From living lips
to cheer the multitude
That feeds on words divine, and grows
More
worthy, seeing their world reblossom like a rose.
48.
Peace, the soft seal of long life's closing story,
The silent music that
no strange note jars,
Crowned not with gentler hand the years that
glory
Crowned, but could hide not all the spiritual scars
Time
writes on the inward strengths of warriors hoary
With much long
warfare, and with gradual bars
Blindly pent in: but these, being
transitory,
Broke, and the power came back that passion mars:
And at the lovely last
Above all anguish past
Before his own the
sightless eyes like stars
Arose that watched arise
Like stars in other skies
Above the strife
of ships and hurtling cars
The Dioscurian songs divine
That lighten
all the world with lightning of their line.
49.
He sang the last of Homer, having sung
The last of his Ulysses.
Bright and wide
For him time's dark strait ways, like clouds that
clung
About the day-star, doubtful to divide,
Waxed in his spiritual
eyeshot, and his tongue
Spake as his soul bore witness, that descried,

Like those twin towering lights in darkness hung,
Homer, and grey
Laertes at his side
Kingly as kings are none
Beneath a later sun,
And the sweet maiden
ministering in pride
To sovereign and to sage
In their more sweet old age:
These things
he sang, himself as old, and died.
And if death be not, if life be,
As
Homer and as Milton are in heaven is he.

50.
Poet whose large-eyed loyalty of love
Was pure toward all high poets,
all their kind
And all bright words and all sweet works thereof;

Strong like the sun, and like the sunlight kind;
Heart that no fear but
every grief might move
Wherewith men's hearts were bound of
powers that bind;
The purest soul that ever proof could prove
From
taint of tortuous or of envious mind;
Whose eyes elate and clear
Nor shame nor ever fear
But only pity
or glorious wrath could blind;
Name set for love apart,
Held lifelong in my heart,
Face like a
father's toward my face inclined;
No gilts like thine are mine to give,

Who by thine own words only bid thee hail, and live.
[1] Thy lifelong works, Napoleon, who shall write?
Time, in his children's blood who takes delight.
From the Greek of Landor.
NOTES.
6. See note to the Imaginary Conversation of Leofric and Godiva for
the exquisite first verses extant from the hand of Landor.
10. The Poems of Walter Savage Landor: 1795. Moral Epistle,
respectfully dedicated to Earl Stanhope: 1795. Gebir.
13. Count Julian: Ines de Castro: Ippolito di Este.
14, 15. Poems 'on the Dead.'
16. Imaginary Conversations: Lord Brooke and Sir Philip Sidney.
17, 18. Idyllia Nova Quinque Heroum atque Heroidum (1815):
Corythus; Dryope; Pan et Pitys; Coresus et Callirrhoe; Helena ad

Pudoris Aram.
19, 20. Imaginary Conversations: Oliver Cromwell and Walter Noble;
Æschines and Phocion; Kosciusko and Poniatowski; Milton and
Marvell; Roger Ascham and Lady Jane Grey; Tiberius and Vipsania.
21, 22, 23. Hellenics: To Corinth.
24. Hellenics: Regeneration.
25. The Hamadryad; Acon and Rhodope.
26. The Shades of Agamemnon and Iphigeneia.
27. Enallos and Cymodameia.
28. The Children of Venus.
29. Cupid and Pan.
30. The Death of Clytemnestra; The