THE

CARILLON.

IN the ancient town of Bruges,
In the quaint old Flemish city,
As the evening shades decended,
Low and loud and sweetly blended,
Low at times and loud at times,
And changing like a poet's rhymes,
Rang the beautiful wild chimes
From the Belfry in the market
Of the ancient town of Bruges
Then with deep sonorous clangour
Calmly answering their sweet anger,
When the wrangling bells had ended,
Slowly struck the clock eleven,
And, from out the silent heaven,
Silence on the town descended,
Silence, silence everywhere,
On the earth and in the air,
Save that footsteps here and there
Of some burgher home returning,
By the street lamps faintly burning,
For a moment woke the echoes
Of the ancient town of Bruges.
But amid my broken slumbers
Still I heard those magic numbers,
As they loud proclaimed the flight
And stolen marches of the night;
Till their chimes in sweet collision
Mingled with each wandering vision,
Mingled with the fortune-telling
Gipsy-bands of dreams and fancies,
Which amid the vast expanses
Of the silent land of trances
Have their solitary dwelling,
All else seemed asleep in Bruges,
In the quaint old Flemish city.

And I thought how like these chime
Are the poet's airy rhymes,
All his rhymes and roundelays,
His concefts, and songs and ditties,
From the belfry of his brain,
Scattered downward, though in vain,
On the roofs and stones of cities!
For by night the drowsy car
Under its curtains cannot hear,
And by day men go their ways,
Hearing the music as they pass,
But deeming it no more, alas!
Than the hollow sound of brass.
Yet perchance a sleepless wight,
Lodging at some humble inn
In the narrow lanes of life,
When the dusk and hush of night
Shut out the incessant din

Of daylight and its toils and strife,
May listen with a calm delight
To the poet's melodies,

Till he hears, or dreams he hears,
Intermingled with the song,

Thoughts that he has cherished long;
Hears amid the chime and singing
The bells of his own village ringing,

And wakes and finds his slumberous eyes
Wet with most delicious tears

Thus dreamed I, as by niga lay
In Bruges at, the Fleur-de-Blé,
Listening with a wild delight

To the chimes that through the night,
Rang their changes from the Belfry
Of that quaint old Flemish city.

THE BELFRY OF BRUGES.

IN the market-place of Bruges stands the belfry old and brown:

Thrice consumed and thrice rebuilded, still it watches o'er the town.

As the summer morn was breaking, on that lofty tower I stood,

And the world threw off the darkness, like the weeds of widowhood.

Thick with towns and hamlets studded, and with streams and vapours grey.

Like a shield embossed with silver, round and vast the landscape lay.

At my feet the city slumbered. From its chimneys here and there,

Wreaths of snow-white smoke, ascending, vanished, ghost-like into air.

Not a sound rose from the city at the early morn

ing hour,

But I heard a heart of iron beating in the an

cient tower.

From their nests beneath the rafters sang the swallows wild and high;

And the world, beneath me sleeping, seemed more distant than the sky.

Then most musical and solemn, bringing back the olden times,

With their strange, unearthly changes rang the melancholy chimes,

Like the psalms from some old cloister, when the nuns sing in the choir:

And the great bell tolled among them, like the chanting of a friar.

Visions of the days departed, shadowy phantoms filled my brain,

They who live in history only seem to walk the earth again;

All the Foresters of Flanders,3-mighty Baldwin Bras de Fer.

Lyderick du Bucq and Cressy, Philip, Guy de Dampierre.

I beheld the pageants splendid, that adorned those days of old:

Stately dames, like queens attended,4 knights who bore the Fleece of Gold;5

Lombard and Venetian merchants with deepladen argosies:

Ministers from twenty nations; more than royal pomp and ease.

I beheld proud Maximilian, kneeling humbly on the ground;

I beheld the gentle Mary,6 hunting with her hawk and hound;

And her lighted bridal-chamber, where a duke slept with the queen,

And the armed guard around them, and the sword unsheathed between

I beheld the Flemish weavers, with Namur and Juliers bold,

Marching homeward from the bloody battle of the Spurs of Gold;7

Saw the fight at Minnewater,8 saw the White Hoods moving west,

Saw great Artevelde victorious scale the Golden Dragons nest 9

A GLEAM OF SUNSHINE.

THIS is the place. Stand still, my steed,
Let me review the scene,
And summon from the shadowy Past
The forms that once have been.

The Past and Present here unite
Beneath Time's flowing tide,
Like footprints hidden by a brook,
But seen on either side.

Here runs the highway to the town;
There the green lane descends,

Through which I walked to church with thee,
O gentlest of my friends!

The shadow of the linden-trees

Lay moving on the grass:

Between them and the moving boughs,
A shadow, thou didst pass.
Thy dress was like the lilies,

And thy heart as pure as they;
One of God's holy messengers
Did walk with me that day.

I saw the branches of the trees
Bend down thy touch to meet,
The clover-blossoms in the grass
Rise up to kiss thy feet.

gleep, sleep to-day, tormenting cares,
Of earth and folly born!"
Solemnly sang the village choir

On that sweet Sabbath morn.

Through the closed blinds the golden sun
Poured in a dusty beam,

Like the celestial ladder seen
By Jacob in his dream.

And ever and anon, the wind,

Sweet-scented with the hay,

Turned o'er the hymn-book's flattering leaves,
That on the window lay.

Long was the good man's sermon,
Yet it seemed not so to mo:

For he spake of Ruth the beautiful,
And still I thought of thee.

Long was the prayer he uttered,

Yet it seemed not so to me;

For in my heart I prayed with him,
And still I thought of thee.

But now, alas! the place seems changed;
Thou art no longer here.

Part of the sunshine of the scene

With thee did disappear.

Though thoughts, deep-rooted in my heart,
Like pine-trees dark and high,

Subdue the light of noon, and breathe
A low and ceaseless sigh;

This memory brightens o'er the past,
As when the sun, concealed

Behind some cloud that near us hangs
Shines on a distant field.

THE ARSENAL AT SPRINGFIELD THIS is the Arsenal. From floor to ceiling,

Like a huge organ, rise the burnished arms; But from their silent pipes no anthem pealing Startles the villages with strange alarms.

Ah! what a sound will rise, how wild and dreary,

When the death-angel touches those swift keys!

What loud lament and dismal Miserere

Wilt mingle with their awful symphonies!

I hear even now the infinite fierce chorus,
The cries of agony, the endless groan,
Which, through the ages that have gone before

us,

In loug reverberations reach our own.

On helm and harness rings the Saxon hammer, Through Cimbric forest roars the Norseman's song,

And loud, amid the universal clamour,

O'er distant deserts sounds the Tartar gong.

I hear the Florentine, who from his palace Wheels out his battle-bell with dreadful din, And Aztec priests upon their teocallis

Beat the wild war-drums made of serpent's skin;

The tumult of each sacked and burning village; The shout that every prayer for inercy

drowns;

The soldiers' revels in the midst of pillage;
The wall of famine in beleaguered towns;

The bursting shell, the gateway wrenched asunder,

The rattling musketry, the clashing blade ;
And ever and anon, in tones of thunder,
The diapason of the cannonade.

Is it, O man, with such discordant noises,
With such accursed instruments as these,
Thou downest Nature's sweet and kindly voices,
And jarrest the celestial harmonies?

Were half the power, that fills the world with

terror,

Were half the wealth, bestowed on camps and

courts,

Given to redeem the human miud from error,
There were no need of arsenals nor forts.

The warrior's name would be a name abhorred!
And every nation, that should lift again
Its band against a brother on its forehead
Would wear for evermore the curse of Cain!
Down the dark future, through long genera-
tions,

The echoing sounds grow fainter and then

cease;

And like a bell, with solemn, sweet vibrations,
I hear once more the voice of Christ say

"Peace!"

Rise the blue Franconian mountains, Nuremberg, the ancient, stands.

Quaint old town of toil and traffic, quaint old town of art and song,

Memories haunt thy pointed gables, like the rooks that round them throng:

Memories of the Middle Ages, when the emperors, rough and bold,

Had their dwelling in thy castle, time-defying, centuries old;

And thy brave and thrifty burghers boasted, in their uncouth rhyme,

That their great imperial city stretched its hand through every clime.10

In the court-yard of the castle, bound with many au iron band,

Stands the mighty linden planted by Queen Cunigunde's hand;

On the square the oriel window, where in old heroic days

Sat the poet Melchior singing Kaiser Maximilian's praise.11

Everywhere I see around me rise the wondrous world of Art:

Fountains wrought with richest sculpture standing in the common mart;

And above cathedral doorways saints and bishops carved in stone,

By a former age commissioned as apostles to our

own.

In the church of sainted Sebald sleeps enshrined his holy dust,12 And in bronze the Twelve Apostles guard from age to age their trust;

In the church of sainted Lawrence stands a pix of sculpture rare, 13

Like the foamy sheaf of fountains, rising through the painted air.

Here, when Art was still religion, with a simple, reverent heart,

Lived and laboured Albrecht Durer, the Evangelist of Art;

Hence in silence and in sorrow, toiling still with

busy hand,

Like an emigrant he wandered, seeking for the Better Land.

Emigrarit is the inscription on the tomb-stone where he lies;

Dead he is not,-but departed,-for the artist never dies.

Fairer seems the ancient city, and the sunshine seems more fair,

That he once had trod its pavement, that he once had breathed its air;

Through these streets so broad and stately, these obscure and dismal lanes,

Walked of yore the Master singers, chanting rude poetic strains.

From remote and sunless suburbs, came they to

the friendly guild,

Building nests in Fame's great Temple, as in spouts the swallows build.

As the weaver plied the shuttle, wovo he too the mystic rhyme,

And the smith his iron measures hammered to the anvil's chime;

Thanking God, whose boundless wisdow makes the flowers of poesy bloom

In the forge's dust and cinders, in the tissues of the loom.

Here Hans Sachs, the cobler-poet, laureate of the gentle craft, Wisest of the Twelve Wise Masters, 14 in huge folios sang and laughed.

But his house is now an ale-house, with a nicely sanded floor,

And a garland in the window, and his face above the door;

Painted by some humble artists, as in Adam Puschman's song,15

As the old man grey and dove-like, with his great white beard and long.

And at night the swart mechanic comes to drown his cark and care,

Quaffing ale from pewter tankards, in the master's antique chair

Vanished is the ancient splendour, and before my dreamy eye

Wave these mingling shapes and figures, like a faded tapestry.

Not thy Councils, not thy Kaisers, win for thee the world's regard:

But thy painter, Albrecht Dürer, and Hans Sachs, thy cobbler bard.

Thus, O Nuremberg, a wanderer from a region far away,

As he paced thy streets and court-yards, sang in thought his careless lay;

Gathering from the pavement's crevice, as a floweret of the soil,

The nobility of labour,-the long pedigree of toil.

THE NORMAN BARON.

Dans les moments de la vie où la réflexion devient plus calme et plus profonde, ou l'intérêt et l'avarice parlent moins haut que la raison, dans les instants de chagrin domestique, de maladie, et de péril de mort, les nobles se repentirent de posséder des serfs, comme d'une chose pen agréable à Dieu, qui avait créé tous les hommes à son image.

THIERRY: CONQUETE DE L'ANGLETERRE.

IN his chamber, weak and dying,
Was the Norman baron lying:
Loud, without, the tempest, thundered,
And the castle-turret shook.

In this fight was Death the gainer,
Spite of vassal and retainer,
And the lands his sires had plundered,
Written in the Doomsday Book.

By his bed a monk was seated,
Who in humble voice repeated
Many a prayer and pater-noster,
From the missal on his knee:

And, amid the tempest pealing,
Sounds of bells came faintly stealing,
Bells, that, from the neighbouring kloster.
Rang for the Nativity.

In the hall, the serf and vassal
Held, that night, their Christmas wassail;
Many a carol, old and saintly,

Sang the minstrels and the waits.

And so loud these Saxon gleemen
Sang to slaves the songs of freemen,
That the storm was heard but faintly
Knocking at the castle-gates.

Till at length the lays they chaunted
Reached the chamber terror-haunted,
Where the monk, with accents holy,

Whispered at the baron's ear.
Tears upon his eyelids glistened,
As he paused awhile and listened,
And the dying baron slowly

Turned his weary head to hear.
"Wassall for the kingly stranger
Born and cradled in a manger!
King, like David, priest, like Aaron,
Christ is born to set us free!"

And the lightning showed the sainted
Figures on the easement painted,
And exclaimed the shuddering baron,
"Miserere, Domine!"

In that hour of deep contrition,
He beheld, with clearer vision,
Through all outward show and fashion
Justice, the Avenger, rise.

All the pomp of earth had vanished,
Falsehood and deceit were banished,
Reason spake more loud than passion,
And the truth wore no disguise.

Every vassal of his banner,
Every serf born to his manor,

All those wronged and wretched creatures
By his hand were freed again.

And, as on the sacred missal
He recorded their dismissal,
Death relaxed his iron features,

And the monk replied "Amen!"
Many centuries have been numbered
Since in death the baron slumbered
By the convent's sculptured portal,

Mingling with the common dust:
But the good deed, through the ages
Living in historic pages,
Brighter grows and gleams immortal,
Unconsumed by moth or rust.

In the country, on every side
Where far and wide,

Like a leopard's tawny and spotted hide,
Stretches the plain,

To the dry grass and the drier grain
How welcome is the rain!

In the furrowed land

The toilsome and patient oxen stand;
Lifting the yoke-encumbered head,
With their dilated nostrils spread,
They silently inhale

The clover-scented gale,

And the vapours that arise

From the well-watered and smoking soil.
For this rest in the furrow after toil
Their large and lustrious eyes
Seem to thank the Lord,

More than man's spoken word.