X. Peace

Call not our mission exile; who shall dare
To carp at independence, or to rail
Because his fate suffers him not to share
The nippings and the throngings of the mart,
The wrestlings of our overcrowded home—
That other far-off home beyond the seas?
Oh, ’tis the poor man’s Paradise to know,
That day succeeding day shall still provide
Its never-failing sustenance for those
His heart is knit to; and to feel that heart,
Uncheck’d by old Convention, freely beat
And thrill with generous thoughts that link mankind,
And worship its own God, nor be coerced
Hither and thither with prescriptions hard,
And oft-resolved tenacious usages,
That loosen’d cling again at every turn
In that maternal isle.
Oh, proudly swell,
Thou breast of every free man—proudly rise,
Thou voice—for none shall check thine utterance;
And though thy hearers may seem few to thee,
Know, that the aftertime may warm thy words,
Till some of them shall ripen into deeds:
Know this in faith, and it shall be to thee
For an abiding sense of deathlessness.
And yet one would not die here; none can be
Without some vision of a cottage home,
Or in the pastures of the fields, or where
The tide of civilised life is eddying round
Some quiet nook, where men of thought repose,
Nursing the labours of their younger brains,
In great, imperial London.
Mine should be
Some rural spot, whence I could see afar
The cloud that rests for ever over her;
And the black towers of that minster old,
Where kings and poets (kings of their own souls),
Sown by the sedulous hand of Goodman Death,
Await the harvest-time HE will not see.
And I would have the immemorial Thames
To sparkle through my tall, surrounding trees;
And I would have the village church hard by,
That I might see the undulating green,
Where I and some of those I loved should lie.
Ah, foolish heart, that it should better thee
To know, that when thy flutterings shall have still’d—
The first repose that they shall ever know—
Thou shouldst rot here or there; the time shall come
(Ay, and is now), when thoughts like these shall be
Less vivid, less important than the dreams
Of long-forgotten slumbers, than the thoughts
Of prememorial childhood—almost less
Than the faint echoes of a former birth;
And thou, O heart, shall be like one of these,
Or as thou hadst been never—Peace, O Peace!

H. G. K.