The oracles are dumb; 18

No voice or hideous hum

Runs through the arched roof in words deceiving. Apollo from his shrine

Can no more divine,

With hollow shriek the steep of Delphos leaving.

No nightly trance, or breathed spell,

Inspires the pale-eyed priest from the prophetic cell.

The lonely mountains o'er,

And the resounding shore,

A voice of weeping heard and loud lament; From haunted spring, and dale

Edged with poplar pale,

The parting Genius is with sighing sent:

With flower-inwoven tresses torn

The Nymphs in twilight shade of tangled thickets mourn.

In consecrated earth,

And on the holy hearth,

The Lars 19 and Lemures moan with midnight plaint;

In urns, and altars round,

A drear and dying sound

Affrights the Flamens 20 at their service quaint;

And the chill marble seems to sweat,

While each peculiar Power foregoes his wonted seat.

Peor and Baälim 21

Forsake their temples dim,

With that twice-battered God of Palestine ;

And moonèd Ashtaroth,

Heaven's queen and mother both,

Now sits not girt with tapers' holy shine:

The Libyc Hammon shrinks his horn;

In vain the Tyrian maids their wounded Thammuz mourn.

And sullen Moloch, fled,

Hath left in shadows dread

His burning idol all of blackest hue; In vain with cymbal's ring

They call the grisly king,

In dismal dance about the furnace blue; The brutish gods of Nile as fast,

Isis, and Orus, and the dog Anubis, haste.

Nor is Osiris seen

In Memphian grove or green,

Trampling the unshowered grass with lowings loud; Nor can he be at rest

Within his sacred chest ;

Nought but profoundest Hell can be his shroud; In vain with timbrelled anthems dark

The sable-stoled sorcerers bear his worshipt ark.

He feels from Juda's land

The dreaded Infant's hand;

The rays of Bethlehem blind his dusky eyn; Nor all the gods beside

Longer dare abide;

Not Typhon huge ending in snaky twine: Our Babe, to show His Godhead true,

Can in His swaddling bands control the damnèd crew.

So, when the sun in bed,

Curtained with cloudy red,

Pillows his chin upon an orient wave,

The flocking shadows pale

Troop to the infernal jail,

Each fettered ghost slips to his several grave;

And the yellow-skirted fays

Fly after the night steeds, leaving their moon-loved

maze,

But see, the Virgin blest

Hath laid her Babe to rest.

Time is our tedious song should here have ending: Heaven's youngest-teemèd star 22

Hath fixed her polished car,

Her sleeping Lord with handmaid lamp attending: And all about the courtly stable

Bright-harnessed Angels sit in order serviceable.

Milton.

XXX.

TO MILTON.

MILTON! thou shouldst be living at this hour:
England hath need of thee: she is a fen
Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen,
Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower,
Have forfeited their ancient English dower

Of inward happiness. We are selfish men;
Oh! raise us up, return to us again;
And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power.
Thy soul was like a star, and dwelt apart;
Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea;
Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free,
So didst thou travel on life's common way,
In cheerful godliness; and yet thy heart
The lowliest duties on herself did lay.

W. Wordsworth.

XXXI.

GREEN GRASS.*

I DELIGHT in the long, straight, formal alleys of an old-fashioned garden, with clipped hedges on either side, and green grass under foot, and a summer-house at the end, out of all rule and order. of architecture, partly Chinese, partly Grecian. Or let me lead you by hedgerow elms and hillocks green, where the grassy banks are all thickly set with the delicate enamelling of the trailing groundivy and the wood-sorrel, its petals freaked and pencilled with lines of light, and the rose-coloured crane's bill, and the germander, as brightly blue as the azure of heaven, and the unsullied white of the stellaria and the pearl-wort, and many other brilliant flowers common to our climate. And then we will climb the high and breezy downs, where the golden blossoms of the dwarf cistus grow side by side with the rich smalt-like blue of the milkwort, where the sheep are scattered over the pale green pasture, and the rarefied and bracing atmosphere is scented by beds of fragrant wild thyme. Or let us leave the uplands for the wide heath of my favourite Surrey. There, in the midst of an almost boundless waste of purple heather, we suddenly drop down into a shallow glen of the greenest grass, never discovered till we come at once upon

* From Personal Recollections by the Rev. C. B. Taylor, by kind permission of the Religious Tract Society.

it, but stretching away for miles and miles towards the west, with here and there a low cottage built upon its sloping sides, and a few birch trees hanging their graceful branches round the neatly-cultivated garden. Herds of cows and heath ponies are grouped, as a painter loves to see them, all along the level margin of the limpid stream that flows through the midst of the glen; and, perchance, a country girl, with hair as wild and sunburnt as the manes of the colts around her, is kneeling on the broad slab of stone, the only bridge across the babbling water, to dip her mother's pitcher.

Let us follow the stream a little way to the east, and just beyond that mass of ironstone and sandrock, covered with so many tufts of the delicate blue harebell trembling in the light breeze, the valley turns, and the stream sweeps round with it ; and there you will see-yes, you see it now-the broad calm waters of the lesser Frensham Lake. The last time I came hither a tall heron was standing on that little patch of greensward stretching forth like a peninsula just where the stream flows into the lake. I see him now at some distance, and here are the prints of his feet upon the shining sand. Is not the grass beautiful here? How softly the waters meet the green shore, glassing their crystal surface, and flowing and curling so gently, that the place where their approaches cease is only marked by a slight line of silver surf resting and trembling on the slender-bladed grass. Now, let us pass through the fields where the hay-making is begun, and the cool green depths of the meadow