160 SHAKSPEARE ODE. O thou! to whose creative power We dedicate the festal hour, While Grace and Goodness round the altar stand; Learning's anointed train, and Beauty's rose-lipped band Realms yet unborn, in accents now unknown, Our Roman-hearted fathers broke Thy parent empire's galling yoke, But thou, harmonious monarch of the mind, And what her mighty Lion lost her mightier Swan shall ALNWICK CASTLE. BY F. G. HALLECK. HOME of the Percy's highborn race, A gentle hill its side inclines, Lovely in England's fadeless green, To meet the quiet stream which winds Through this romantic scene As silently and sweetly still, As when, at evening, on that hill, While summer's wind blew soft and low, Seated by gallant Hotspur's side, His Katherine was a happy bride, A thousand years ago. Gaze on the Abbey's ruined pile : Does not the succouring Ivy, keeping Her watch around it seem to smile, As o'er a loved one sleeping? ALNWICK CASTLE. 163 One solitary turret gray Still tells, in melancholy glory, The legend of the Cheviot day, The Percy's proudest border story. The music of the trump and drum; Wild roses by the Abbey towers Are gay in their young bud and bloom: They were born of a race of funeral flowers That garlanded, in long-gone hours, A Templar's knightly tomb. He died, the sword in his mailed hand, On the holiest spot of the Blessed Land, Where the Cross was damped with his dying breath; When blood ran free as festal wine, And the sainted air of Palestine Was thick with the darts of death. Wise with the lore of centuries, What tales, if there be "tongues in trees," Those giant oaks could tell, 164 ALNWICK CASTLE. Of beings born and buried here; The welcome and farewell, Since on their boughs the startled bird I wandered through the lofty halls From him who once his standard set Where now, o'er mosque and minaret, Glitter the Sultan's crescent moons; To him who, when a younger son, That last half stanza—it has dashed And Alnwick's but a market-town, And this, alas! its market-day, And beasts and borderers throng the way; |