rate, when fury-factions roar,
And folly's choicest fools the most despise:--
--O happy Poet! laid in peace before
Rival intolerants each 'gainst other flamed,
And flames were slaked in blood, and all the grace
Of life before that sad illiterate gloom
Puritan, fled ashamed:
While, as the red moon lifts her turbid face,
Titanic features on the horizon loom!

George Herbert's brief career as a parish priest was passed at Bemerton,
a pretty village near Salisbury in the vale of the Avon. His parsonage,
with its garden running down to the stream, and the little church across
the road in which he lies buried, remain comparatively unchanged (March
26, 1880) since he lived and mused and wrote his Poems within these
precincts. The justly-famous _Temple_ was published shortly after his
death by his friend Nicholas Ferrar.

_Arabian hill_; Mount Sinai.

_Titanic features_; See _A Churchyard in Oxfordshire_, st. iii.

PRINCESS ANNE

November 5: 1640

Harsh words have been utter'd and written on her, Henrietta the Queen:
She was young in a difficult part, on a cruel and difficult scene:--
Was it strange she should fail? that the King overmuch should bow down to
her will?
--So of old with the women, God bless them!--it was, so will ever be
still!
Rash in counsel and rash in courage, she aided and marr'd
The shifting tides of the fight, the star of the Stuarts ill-starr'd.
In her the false Florentine blood,--in him the bad strain of the Guise;
Suspicion against her and hate, all that malice can forge and devise;--
As a bird by the fowlers o'ernetted, she shuffles and changes her ground;
No wile unlawful in war, and the foe unscrupulous round!
Woman-like overbelieving Herself and the Cause and the Man,
Fights with two-edged intrigue, suicidal, plan upon plan;
Till the law of this world had its way, and she fled,--like a frigate
unsail'd,
Unmasted, unflagg'd,--to her land; and the strength of the stronger
prevail'd.

But it was not thus, not thus, in the years of thy springtide, O
Queen,
When thy children came in their beauty, and all their future unseen:
When the kingdom had wealth and peace, one smile o'er the face of the
land:
England, too happy, if thou could'st thy happiness understand!
As those over Etna who slumber, and under them rankles the fire.
At her side was the gallant King, her first-love, her girlhood's desire,
And around her, best jewels and dearest to brighten the steps of the
throne,
T