Yon holly marks the village lawyer's grave,
Those oaks the patriot's ashes canopy,
The laurels o'er the sleeping warrior wave,

And yonder spring flowers shelter infancy.
Lady! when in the dust this form shall lie,
If then thy breast my memory would recall,
Let the dark cypress tell my destiny,
And the green ivy form my funeral pall.

Gideon Algernon Mantell.

Donnerdale.

THE PLAIN OF DONNERDALE.

HE old inventive poets, had they seen,

THE

Or rather felt, the entrancement that detains
Thy waters, Duddon ! mid these flowery plains,
The still repose, the liquid lapse serene,
Transferred to bowers imperishably green,
Had beautified Elysium! But these chains
Will soon be broken; -a rough course remains,
Rough as the past; where thou, of placid mien,
Innocuous as a firstling of the flock,

And countenanced like a soft cerulean sky,
Shalt change thy temper, and, with many a shock
Given and received in mutual jeopardy,

Dance, like a Bacchanal, from rock to rock.
Tossing her frantic thyrsus wide and hi

Wills

WHO

Dorchester.

DORCHESTER HILLS.

HO may misprize Dorchestrian hills? What though
They tower to no such height as looks with scorn
Over a dwindled plain; what though no crags
Be there to fortify; no forest belts

To gird them midway round; yet theirs, instead,
Are graceful slopes with shadowy dips between,
And theirs are breezy summits, not too high
To recognize familiar sights, and catch

Familiar sounds of life,

the ploughman's call,
Or tinkling from the fold. Yet thence the eye
Feeds on no stinted landscape, sky and earth
And the blue sea; and thence may wingéd thought,
Which ever loves the vantage-ground of hills,
Launch amid buoyant air, and soar at will.

Fair, amid these, art thou, camp-crested Mount,
In some far time, for some forgotten cause,
Named of the Maiden.1

Nor doth surer lore

Attest if Briton or if Roman wound

These triple trenches round thee; regular

As terraces, by architect upbuilt

For princely pleasure-ground, or those, far-famed,

By ancient hunters made

so some have deemed·

Or else by Nature's self in wild Glenroy.

Along thy sides they stretch, ring above ring,

1 Maiden Castle is a hill, with a camp on it, near Dorchester.

Marking thee from afar; then vanish round
Like the broad shingly banks which ocean heaves
In noble curves along his winding shore.
The passing wayfarer with wonder views,
E'en at imperfect distance, their bold lines,
And asks the who, the wherefore, and the when;
Wafting his spirit back into far times,

And dreaming as he goes. But whoso stays,
And climbs the turf-way to thy tabled top,
Shall reap a fuller wonder; shall behold

Thy girdled area, of itself a plain,

Where widely feeds the scattered flock; shall mark
Thy trenches, complicate with warlike art,
And deep almost as natural ravine

Cut in the mountain; or some startling rent
In the blue-gleaming glacier; or as clefts,
Severing the black and jagged lava-walls,
Which old Vesuvius round his crater flings,
Outworks, to guard the mysteries within.

But these are smooth and verdant. Tamed long since,
Breastwork abrupt and palisaded mound

Are, now, but sloping greensward; as if Nature,
Who vainly her mild moral reads to man,
Still strove to realize the blessed days,

By seers avouched, by statesmen turned to dreams,
When war shall be no more.

As who had failed to muse?

So mused I there!

But now the sun,

Silently sunken, with departing light

Had fused the whole horizon; not alone

His western realm, but flooded refluent gold

Back to the southern hills, along whose tops
Are seen to stretch, in far continuous line,
Sepulchral barrows. Brightly-verdant cones
I marked them rise beneath his earlier ray;
But now they stood against that orange light
Each of a velvet blackness, like the bier
Before some high-illumined altar spread
When a king lies in state; and well might seem
To twilight fantasy like funeral palls,

Shrouding the bones of aboriginal men,

Who there had lived and died, long ere our tribes
Had heard the name or felt the conquering arms
Of Rome or Roman; or as yet had seen,
Mocking their hearths of clay and turf-built huts,
The prætor's quaint mosaic or tiled bath;

Or heard our hard school-task, the phrase of Terence
Baudied in common parlance round the land.

*

John Kenyon.

WRITTEN UPON

Doulting.

LINES

DOULTING SHEEP-SLATE, NEAR SHEPTON
MALLET, SOMERSETSHIRE.

KNELT down as I poured my spirit forth by that

gray gate,

In the fulness of my gratitude and with a joy sedate; Alone on that wild heath I stood, and offered up apart The frankincense of love that, fount-like, gushed from my deep heart.

And while I breathed that thankfulness, and felt its holy

glow,

And my heart gathered gladness in its calm and equal flow,

While the sun shone within me, and the air elastic played, And to and fro the wheat-field like the wavy ocean swayed;

And while the black firs tossed their boughs against the intense blue,

Light glinting on the grassy sward as broken rays flashed through,

I felt that Nature answered like an angel from her throne, And echoed back the rapture of my bosom from her own.

I saw the rich red pathway in the opening distance rolled, As if it led through vistas to some throne or shore of gold, And while the light breeze murmured there like sighs of love suppressed,

My heart poured forth its blessing on the loveliness it blessed.

I felt I stood on sacred ground that hallowed was to me, To boyhood's years far faded on the verge of memory: Sacred to me the gray-haired man who drank God's blessed air,

Though thirty years had rolled away since last I entered there!

The oak drooped o'er that gate, a withered thing in dead repose,

Gray Doulting's spire above the waste a sheeted spectre

rose;