--Heroes both! by passion led,
In days perplex'd 'tween new and old,
Each at his will the realm to mould;
This, basing sovereignty on the single head,
This, on the many voices of the Hall:--
Each for his own creed
Prompt to die at need:
His side of England's shield each saw, and took for all.

Heroes both! For Order one
And one for Freedom dying!--We
May judge more justly both, than ye
Could, each, his brother, ere the strife was done!
--O Goddess of that even scale and weight,
In whose awful eyes
Truest mercy lies,
This hero-dirge to thee I vow and dedicate!

--Slanting now,--the foe is by,--
Through Hazeley mead the warrior goes,
And hardly fords the brook that flows
Bearing to Thame its cool, sweet, summer-cry.
Here take thy rest; here bind the broken heart!
By death's mercy-doom
Hid from ills to come,
Great soul, and greatly vex'd, Hampden!--in peace depart!

In the heart of the fields he loved and the hills,
Look your last, and lay him to rest,
With the faded flower, the wither'd grass;
Where the blood-face of war and the myriad ills
Of England dear like phantoms pass
And touch not the soul that is with the Blest.
Bury him in the night and peace of the holy grave,
Where he cannot see the land that he could not save!
Bury him, bury him, bury him
With his face downward!

John Hampden met his death at Chalgrove in an attempt to check the raids
which Prince Rupert was making from Oxford. Struck at the onset in the
shoulder by two carabine balls, he rode off before the action was ended
by Hazeley towards Thame, finding it impossible to reach Pyrton, the home
of his father-in-law. The body was carried to his own house amid the
woods and hills of the Chiltern country, and buried in the church close
by.

_With his face downward_; This was the dying request of some high-minded
Spaniard of old, unwilling, even in the grave, as it were, to look on the
misfortunes of his country.

_O'erstrode the bounds_; 'After every allowance has been made,' says
Hallam, speaking of the Long Parliament from a date so early as August,
1641, 'he must bring very heated passions to the records of those times,
who does not perceive in the conduct of that body a series of glaring
violations, not only of positive and constitutional, but of those hi