My hope and heart is with thee-thou wilt be
A latter Luther, and a soldier-priest

To scare church-harpies from the master's feast;
Our dusted velvets have much need of thee:
Thou art no sabbath-drawler of old saws,
Distilled from some worm-cankered homily;
But spurred at heart with fieriest energy
To embattail and to wall about thy cause
With iron-worded proof, hating to hark
The humming of the drowsy pulpit-drone

Half God's good sabbath, while the worn-out clerk
Brow-beats his desk below. Thou from a throne
Mounted in heaven will shoot into the dark

32

82

LAMB

ON CHRISTIAN NAMES

(Written in the album of Edith Southey)

IN Christian world Mary the garland wears !
Rebecca sweetens on a Hebrew's ear;
Quakers for pure Priscilla are more clear;
And the light Gaul by amorous Ninon swears.
Among the lesser lights how Lucy shines!
What air of fragrance Rosamond throws around!
How like a hymn doth sweet Cecilia sound!

Of Marthas, and of Abigails, few lines

Have bragged in verse.

Of coarsest household stuff

Should homely Joan be fashioned. But can
You Barbara resist, or Marian?

And is not Clare for love excuse enough?

Yet, by my faith in numbers, I profess,
These all, than Saxon Edith, please me less.

C. LAMB.

SHELLEY

83

OZYMANDIAS

I MET a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, king of kings :
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

P. B. SHELLEY.

THERE is a silence where hath been no sound,
There is a silence where no sound may be,
In the cold grave-under the deep deep sea,
Or in wide desert where no life is found,

Which hath been mute, and still must sleep profound;

No voice is hushed-no life treads silently,

But clouds and cloudy shadows wander free,
That never spoke, over the idle ground:
But in green ruins, in the desolate walls
Of antique palaces, where Man hath been,
Though the dun fox, or wild hyena, calls,

And owls, that flit continually between,
Shriek to the echo, and the low winds moan,
There the true Silence is, self-conscious and alone.

T. HOOD.

SIR A. DE VERE

85

THE ROCK OF CASHEL

ROYAL and saintly Cashel! I would gaze
Upon the wreck of thy departed powers
Not in the dewy light of matin hours,
Nor the meridian pomp of summer's blaze,
But at the close of dim autumnal days,

When the sun's parting glance, through slanting showers,

Sheds o'er thy rock-throned battlements and

towers

Such awful gleams as brighten o'er Decay's

Prophetic cheek. At such a time, methinks, There breathes from thy lone courts and voiceless aisles

A melancholy moral, such as sinks

On the lone traveller's heart, amid the piles
Of vast Persepolis on her mountain stand,
Or Thebes half buried in the desert sand.

SIR A. DE VERE.