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Tears on his hollow cheek

Told what no tongue could speak:
Why did his master break?

God's will be done!

Doctor said air was best-
Food we had none;
Father, with panting breast,
Groaned to be gone:
Now he is with the blest-
Mother says death is best!
We have no place of rest—
Yes, we have one!

BATTLE SONG.

Day, like our souls, is fiercely dark;

What then? 'Tis day!

We sleep no more; the cock crows-hark! To arms! away!

They come ! they come! the knell is rung Of us or them;

Wide o'er their march the pomp is flung

Of gold and gem.

What collared hound of lawless sway,

To famine dear

What pensioned slave of Attila,

Leads in the rear?

Come they from Scythian wilds afar,

Our blood to spill?

Wear they the livery of the Czar ?

They do his will.

Nor tasselled silk, nor epaulette,

Nor plume, nor torse

No splendour gilds, all sternly met,

Our foot and horse.

But, dark and still, we inly glow,

Condensed in ire!

Strike, tawdry slaves, and ye shall know
Our gloom is fire.

In vain your pomp, ye evil powers,
Insults the land;

Wrongs, vengeance, and the cause are ours,
And God's right hand!
Madmen they trample into snakes

The wormy clod!

Like fire, beneath their feet awakes
The sword of God!
Behind, before, above, below,

They rouse the brave;

Where'er they go, they make a foe,
Or find a grave.

A POET'S EPITAPH.

Stop, Mortal! Here thy brother lies,

The Poet of the Poor.

His books were rivers, woods, and skies,
The meadow, and the moor;

His teachers were the torn hearts' wail,

The tyrant and the slave,

The street, the factory, the jail,

The palace and the grave!

The meanest thing, earth's feeblest worm, He feared to scorn or hate;

And honoured in a peasant's form

The equal of the great.

But if he loved the rich who make
The poor man's little more,

Ill could he praise the rich who take

From plundered labour's store.

A hand to do, a head to plan,

A heart to feel and dare

Tell man's worst foes, here lies the man
Who drew them as they are.

The Three Marys at Castle Howard, IN 1812 AND 1837.

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The lifeless son--the mother's agony,
O'erstrained till agony refused to feel-

That sinner too I then dry-eyed could see ;
For I was hardened in my selfish weal,

And strength and joy had strung my soul with steel

I knew not then what man may live to be,

A thing of life, that feels he lives in vain

A taper, to be quenched in misery!
Forgive me, then, Caracci! if I seek

To look on this, thy tale of tears, again;
For now the swift is slow, the strong is weak.
Mother of Christ! how merciful is pain!
But if I longer view thy tear-stained cheek,
Heart-broken Magdalen! my heart will break.

PLAINT.

Dark, deep, and cold the current flows
Unto the sea where no wind blows,
Seeking the land which no one knows.

O'er its sad gloom still comes and goes
The mingled wail of friends and foes,
Borne to the land which no one knows.

Why shrieks for help yon wretch, who goes
With millions, from a world of woes,
Unto the land which no one knows?

Though myriads go with him who goes,
Alone he goes where no wind blows,
Unto the land which no one knows.

For all must go where no wind blows,
And none can go for him who goes;
None, none return whence no one knows.

Yet why should he who shrieking goes
With millions, from a world of woes,
Reunion seek with it or those?

Alone with God, where no wind blows,
And Death, his shadow-doomed, he goes:
That God is there the shadow shows.

Oh, shoreless Deep, where no wind blows! And, thou, oh, Land which no one knows! That God is All, His shadow shows.

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[JOHN KEBLE was born on St. Mark's Day (April 25), 1792, at Fairford, in Gloucestershire. He was elected Scholar of Corpus, Oxford, in his fifteenth, and Fellow of Oriel in his nineteenth year. After a few years of tutorship at Oxford and curacy in the country, he became Vicar of Hursley in Hampshire in 1839, where he continued to minister till his death in 1866. He was with Dr. Newman and Dr. Pusey regarded as forming the Triumvirate of the Oxford Catholic movement. His prose works consist of an elaborate edition of Hooker, a careful Life of Bishop Wilson, and various theological treatises. But it is as a poet much more than a scholar or a controversialist that he is known; and of his poetical works, the Lyra Innocentium, the Translation of the Psalter, a posthumous volume of Poems, and The Christian Year (1827), it is by the last that he acquired an universal and undying fame in English literature. As Professor of Poetry at Oxford he wrote in Latin Praelections on Poetry, which are remarkable both for their subtlety and their exquisite Latinity.

His Life was written by his friend Mr. Justice Coleridge.]

Keble was not merely, like Isaac Watts or Charles Wesley, a writer of hymns. He was a real poet. Their works, no doubt, have occasional flashes of poetry, but their main object is didactic, devotional, theological. Not so the Christian Year, the Lyra Innocentium, or the Psalter. Very few of his verses can be used in public worship. His hymns are the exception. His originality lies in the fact that whilst the subjects which he touches are for the most part consecrated by religious usage or Biblical allusion, yet he grasps them not chiefly or exclusively as a theologian, or a Churchman, but as a poet. The Lyra Innocentium, whilst its more limited range of subjects, and perhaps its more subtle turn of thought, will always exclude it from the rank occupied by the

The bulk of this notice appeared in the writer's Essays on Church and State.

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