1382

It is a dream, I know:--Yet on the past
Of this dear England if in thought we gaze,
About her seems a constant sunshine cast;
In summer calm we see and golden haze
The little London of Plantagenet days;
Quaint labyrinthine knot of toppling lanes,
And thorny spires aflame with starlike vanes.

Our silver Thames all yet unspoil'd and clear;
The many-buttress'd bridge that stems the tide;
Black-timber'd wharves; arcaded walls, that rear
Long, golden-crested roofs of civic pride:--
While flaunting galliots by the gardens glide,
And on Spring's frolic air the May-song swells,
Mix'd with the music of a thousand bells.

Beyond the bridge a mazy forest swims,
Great spars and sails and flame-tongued flags on high,
Wedged round the quay, a-throng with ruddy limbs
And faces bronzed beneath another sky:
And 'mid the press sits one with aspect shy
And downcast eyes of watching, and, the while,
The deep observance of an inward smile.

In hooded mantle gray he smiled and sate,
With ink-horn at his knees and scroll and pen.
And took the toll and register'd the freight,
'Mid noise of clattering cranes and strife of men:
And all that moved and spoke was in his ken,
With lines and hues like Nature's own design'd
Deep in the magic mirror of his mind.

Thence oft, returning homeward, on the book,--
His of Certaldo, or the bard whose lays
Were lost to love in Scythia,--he would look
Till his fix'd eyes the dancing letters daze:
Then forth to the near fields, and feed his gaze
On one fair flower in starry myriads spread,
And in her graciousness be comforted:--

Then, joyous with a poet's joy, to draw
With genial touch, and strokes of patient skill,
The very image of each thing he saw:--
He limn'd the man all round, for good or ill,
Having both sighs and laughter at his will;
Life as it went he grasp'd in vision true,
Yet stood outside the scene his pencil drew.

--Man's inner passions in their conscience-strife,
The conflicts of the heart against the heart,
The mother yearning o'er the infant's life,
The maiden wrong'd by wealth and lecherous art,
The leper's loathsome cell from man apart,
War's hell of lust and fire, the village-woe,
The tinsel chivalry veiling shame below,--

Not his to draw,--to see, perhaps:--Our eyes
Hold bias with our humour:--His, to paint
With Nature's freshness, what before him lies:
The knave, the fool; the frolicsome, the quaint:
His the broad jest, the laugh without restraint,
The ready tears, the spirit lightly moved;
Loving the world, and by the world beloved.

So forth fared Chaucer on his pilgrimage
Through England's humours; in immortal song
Bodying the form and pressure of his age,
Tints gay as pure, and delicate as strong;
Still to the Tabard the blithe travellers throng,
Seen in his mind so vividly, that we
Know them more clearly than the men we see.

Fair France, bright Italy, those numbers train'd;
First in his pages Nature wedding Art
Of all our sons of song; yet he remain'd
True English of the English at his heart:--
He stood between two worlds, yet had no part
In that new order of the dawning day
Which swept the masque of chivalry away.

O Poet of romance and courtly glee
And downcast eager glance that shuns the sky,
Above, about, are signs thou canst not see,
Portents in heaven and earth!--And one goes by
With other than thy prosperous, laughing eye,
Framing the rough web of his rueful lays,
The sorrow and the sin--with bitter gaze

As down the Strand he stalks, a sable shade
Of death, while, jingling like the elfin train,
In silver samite knight and dame and maid
Ride to the tourney on the barrier'd plain;
And he must bow in humble mute disdain,
And that worst woe of baffled souls endure,
To see the evil that they may not cure.

For on sweet Malvern Hill one morn he lay,
Drowsed by the music of the constant stream:--
Loud sang the cuckoo, cuckoo!--for the May
Breathed summer: summer floating like a dream
From the far fields of childhood, with a gleam
Of alien freshness on her forehead fair,
And Heaven itself within the common air.

Then on the mead in vision Langland saw
A pilgrim-throng; not missal-bright as those
Whom Chaucer's hand surpass'd itself to draw,
Gay as the lark, and brilliant as the rose;--
But such as dungeon foul or spital shows,
Or the serf's fever-den, or field of fight,
When festering sunbeams on the wounded smite.

No sainted shrine the motley wanderers seek,
Pilgrims of life upon the field of scorn,
Mocking and mock'd; with plague and hunger weak,
And haggard faces bleach'd as those who mourn,
And footsteps redden'd with the trodden thorn;
Blind stretching hands that grope for truth in vain,
Across a twilight demon-haunted plain.

A land whose children toil and rot like beasts,
Robbers and robb'd by turns, the dreamer sees:--
Land of poor-grinding lords and faithless priests,
Where wisdom starves and folly thrones at ease
'Mid lavishness and lusts and knaveries;
Times out of joint, a universe of lies,
Till Love divine appear in Ploughman's guise

To burn the gilded tares and save the land,
Risen from the grave and walking earth again:--
--And as he dream'd and kiss'd the nail-pierced hand,
A hundred towers their Easter voices rain
In silver showers o'er hill and vale and plain,
And the air throbb'd with sweetness, and he woke
And all the dream in light and music broke.

--He look'd around, and saw the world he left
When to that visionary realm of song
His spirit fled from bonds of flesh bereft;
And on the vision he lay musing long,
As o'er his soul rude minstrel-echoes throng,
Old measures half-disused; and grasp'd his pen,
And drew his cottage-Christ for homely men.

Thus Langland also took his pilgrimage;
Rough lone knight-errant on uncourtly ways,
And wrong and woe were charter'd on his page,
With some horizon-glimpse of sweeter days.
And on the land the message of his lays
Smote like the strong North-wind, and cleansed the sky
With wholesome blast and bitter clarion-cry,

Summoning the people in the Ploughman's name.
--So fought his fight, and pass'd unknown away;
Seeking no other praise, no sculptured fame
Nor laureate honours for his artless lay,
Nor in the Minster laid with high array;--
But where the May-thorn gleams, the grasses wave,
And the wind sighs o'er a forgotten grave.