MACAULAY IN WESTMINSTER ABBEY.
January 9, 1860.
Among the men whose words and deeds
He best has taught our time to prize;
Macaulay’s honoured coffin lies,
Mid hush of jarring cliques and creeds.
A shadow falls upon his grave
When morning lights the eastern pane;
And one, when sunset splendours rain
Though the west window of the nave:
That by his recent marble thrown,
Who sang of Nelson and the North,
And “England’s mariners” rang forth
In music like a trumpet-tone.
This, by his earlier statue flung,
Who in the lettered reign of Anne
Stands out, serenest type of man,
Best wielder of our English tongue-
Addison, Campbell – such the guards
At our Macaulay’s head and feet:
And what companionship more meet-
Of Essayists and Lyric bards -
For him, whose almost boyish breath
The battle-ballad’s clarion blew,
And thence heroic war-notes drew,
To breathe a soul through ribs of death-
When the Armada’s march he sang,
Along the guarded English steep,
While leaping watch-fires lit the deep,
And village-bells defiance rang?
For him, whose later essays taught
To narrative fresh arts of grace:
Gave to old truths a novel face,
And new to crystal-clearness wrought?
If with the genial English life
That in Sir Roger charms the mind,
Drawing us closer to our kind,
His brilliant pages were not rifle,
Yet let us own the Art that threw
Concentred light on giant men:
Made Clive and Hastings breathe again,
and Laud and Strafford strive anew.
Fitly his resting-place is given
With these great dead he loved so well.
Stand on his grave, and you may tell
The chief start of our English heaven.
From Chaucer’s glad May-morning beam,
To Spenser’s planet rays that warm
Cold Allegory with a charm
Of life, seld given to Fancy’s dream-
And Camden’s steady light, that falls
In each dim nook of England’s past,
Now on some worn inscription cast,
Now on grey tower or minister walls-
And Johnson’s, Beaumont’s, changing stars,
One moment glad as Hesper’s glow
With light of mirth:- to tragic woe,
Shifting, the next, like blood-red Mars-
And all the galaxy that fused
Their lesser splendours into one,
When William ceased, and Anne begun,
And state-craft writer-craft abused.
Who knew and treasured of all these
What was worth treasuring, more than he
Who to their silent company
Has last gone down, from life and ease?
Yet love and skill of letters give
But half his claim to take his state
In our Valhalla, with the great,
Whose names in lettered memories live-
With our historic worthies, too,
He shared state-life: their measure gauged
With rule, where strife of party raged,
Perchance not always just or true;
Yet, granting error, and an eye
Too prone to wink excuse for friends,
Too sharp for flaw in means or ends
Of those whose camps o’erthwart him lie,
Who shall deny his pen has cast
New life in all wherewith it deals;
That light from his bright pages steals,
Between the clouds that wreathe the past?-
Who shall gainsay his tight to sleep
With those whom England honours most:
Whom, while they live, we loudest boast,
Whom, when they die, we truliest weep?
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