Page images
PDF
EPUB

within our rights in assuming the female friend of his finest poetical effort to be that divinity. She was not his own, this lady -this Female-but another's. She was the accomplished wife of an eminent minister of the gospel.' But she was Mr. Whur's ideal: she fulfilled his conditions. She, of all the ladies with whom he drank tea, was the one chosen by him to be described as the perfect type.

In this imperfect, gloomy scene

Of complicated ill,

How rarely is a day serene,

The throbbing bosom still!
Will not a beauteous landscape bright,
Or music's soothing sound,
Console the heart, afford delight,

And throw sweet peace around?
They may, but never comfort lend,
Like an accomplish'd female friend!
With such a friend, the social hour
In sweetest pleasure glides;
There is in female charms a power
Which lastingly abides—
The fragrance of the blushing rose,
Its tints and splendid hue,
Will with the season decompose,

And pass as flitting dew;
On firmer ties his joys depend
Who has a polish'd female friend!

The pleasures which from thence arise
Surpass the blooming flower,
For though it opens to the skies,

It closes in an hour!

Its sweetness is of transient date,
Its varied beauties cease-
They can no lasting joys create,
Impart no lasting peace:
While both arise, and duly blend
In an accomplish'd female friend!

As orbs revolve and years recede,
As seasons onward roll,
The fancy may on beauties feed,

With discontented soul !

A thousand objects bright and fair
May for a moment shine,
Yet many a sigh and many a tear
But mark their swift decline;
While lasting joys the man attend
Who has a faithful female friend!

That is the poem-that is the Rev. Cornelius Whur's master

piece. It is sad to think that the lady remains unknown. One would like, with caution, to make inquiries as to her descendants. Her great-granddaughter or great-great-granddaughter may have a hockey-stick over her shoulder at this moment; may be in Holloway; or, atavism intervening, may be polished' too. We shall probably never know.

E. V. LUCAS.

BY THE HOAR APPLE TREE.

BY MAJOR G. F. MACMUNN, D.S.O., R.F.A.

Once upon a time I, Chuang Tzu, dreamed I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither. To all intents and purposes I was a butterfly. I was conscious only of following my senses as a butterfly. I was unconscious of my individu. ality as a man. Suddenly I awoke, and then I was myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming I am a man.

So wrote the famous 'Butterfly' Chuang, the Chinese philosopher of the fifth and fourth centuries before Christ, and so do I now write the following, wondering if I be John Nye, a gunner of the Cinque Ports Artillery, dreaming of the Great Conquest, or if I be John Nye the lame Saxon of the Sussex Weald, dreaming I am an artilleryman of the twentieth century.

The hoar apple tree still stands on Telham Down, and the great Roman road to London still passes through Silver Hill, and here lie I, Nye the Saxon, dreaming I am an artilleryman, or I Nye the artilleryman dreaming I am the Saxon peasant. If I be Nye the peasant, I spent last night sleeping by the gorse on Telham Down, and if I be the gunner, I lay out in bivouac alongside the forty-pounder train halfway from Silver Hill to Battle..

And this is what Nye the Saxon saw, musing under the gorse on the open down, looking over to Peofvensea and Bulverhythe, too lame to serve the Godwinsson as a soldier, so employed as a silent watch. It was mid-October, and the heavy dew that was almost frost glistened on his fair beard and on the hair of his woollen jerkin. And this is what he mused on, staring into the violet haze and the mist from off the sea. How for six dull months that summer had he seen King Harold keep his militia together on the Saxon shore, lest the Norman find wind to cross the Channel. For these same six months of western and northerly winds the English fleet had swept that Channel, and the militia had murmured, as militia will, at the time spent away from home and harvest, with never a fight to hearten them. How, weary at heart, King Harold had dismissed them to their crops, had set out himself to London by the Roman road, and had ordered his fleet to the Thames. Then as he got to London, lo! Harold Haardrada, the Norseman, another

claimant to the throne of England, with Tostig Godwinsson, the King's own brother, had landed in the North-so ran the newsno man quite knew where.

Since the prior evil is usually the more pressing, away north had tramped the King and his household troops, praying always that no south wind should blow till they marched down again, and all the time the Roman high street slipping away behind them.

The day after the town of York had surrendered to Harold of Norway, the victor at Fulford Fields, Harold of England and his South Saxons, with half the English Danes of the Danelagh, swept through York, to find the Norseman mustering his men on Stamford Flats to enter in triumph the surrendered town. As both the armies struggled into line, there came the parley from brother Tostig Godwinsson, the outlaw, that drew forth the answer that rang through the length and breadth of Merrie England: . . . ' The terms that Harold of England offers his cousin Harold Sigurdsson of Norway... seven foot of English soil, or since he be a tall man, as much more as he be taller than other men.'

Taking the invaders in some surprise, the English fell on them by the Derwent and Stamford Bridge, till the fight rolled up to the Landwaster, the ruthless banner of Harold of Norway, beneath which he fell, for all his pains, and with him outlaw Tostig.

And such of the Norsemen who escaped the English anger fled away to their ships at Recal, and were chased up and down the high seas by the English cruisers. Then, as Harold of England sat at banquet a day or two later in York, in honour of his victory and to rest his tired troops, news came that the wind had shifted south, and that William the Norman had landed on the Saxon shore, three days after the battle of Stamford Bridge.

So back to London, down the Roman road, hurried Harold and his housecarles and such of his levies as had enough discipline to follow him, and as he marched the local militia tailed in to his call. As he came south to London, with Gurth and Leofwine, stopping by the way to pray to his Holy Rood, many a tale of woe and alarm was brought to him. How the invaders, shipload on shipload, galley-crew on galley-crew, Breton and Norman, Frenchman and freelance, with all the borrowed trappings of Europe, had landed on the old flats at Peofvensea, where Julius Cæsar himself perhaps had landed over a thousand years before. Where, after him, had landed, men said, Ælle and Cissa and every Jute and Saxon raider that had now become the English.

Fast from Peofvensea had ridden an English thegn, with tales of the countless hordes of French and of all the ravaging of fair Sussex and the burning of the newly garnered crops. But Harold in London tarried perforce, tarried and swore-swore again by his Holy Rood, while his tardy militia gathered and his housecarles rested, too old a soldier to be tempted to the coast ere he was ready. And since Harold would not come, and William dared not leave his base and his entrenchment on Hastings heights, the Norman must needs try and draw the English down to him. And draw them he did, by more rape and raid and fire, till at last Harold, and Cedric and Gurth his brothers, marched south before their time for very anger. But the little Englanders Edwin and Morcar, the Eorles of the North, sat and sulked at home, so that the men of Kent and Sussex and the Danelagh alone met the storm-which was exactly as William had planned. Sore tried had been Harold the King, whom William and his enemies called Harold Godwinsson-though Godwinsson he was and lawful King as well-by a summons to vacate the throne, by specious offers of arbitration, and finally by tempting challenge to single combat. The which was so enticing that Harold near forgot his kingship.

So it had come about that by Friday, the 13th of October, the King and his South Saxons formed up on the heights on Senlac Down, which some men call Saint-lache, athwart the narrow isthmus followed by the Roman road, hard by the hoar apple tree that every south-west wind had swept year in, year out, for a hundred years and more. Then and there the English dug themselves in with ditch and fence and wattle. Seven miles away, the invaders sat in their fortified camp on Hastings Bluff, their way to march out and forage afield barred and blocked by the English across the Roman highway, whose flanks rested on the Peofvensea marsh to the west and the Rother fens to the east. Each leader had manoeuvred for the best grip, and the Englishman had won it, thanks to Harold's knowledge of war and country, so that the Norman could but attack an entrenched line or starve.

All this and more, or less, floated through the mind of Saxon Nye, too lame to join the Telham levy, but active and acute enough to be left to lie out the night through on Telham Down to watch for the coming Norman. And so Nye sat a-dreaming, a dream within a dream, in the hoar frost on the down, that early morning of the 14th of October, 1066. Away to the west and below stretched the white cliffs of Bulverhythe, as they stretch to this day, and

« PreviousContinue »