As men's have grown from sudden fears: My limbs are bow'd, though not with toil, But rusted with a vile repose, But this was for my father's faith Proud of Persecution's rage; Three were in a dungeon cast, Of whom this wreck is left the last. There are seven pillars of Gothic mould, Dim with a dull imprison'd ray, And in each ring there is a chain; For in these limbs its teeth remain, With marks that will not wear away, Till I have done with this new day, Which now is painful to these eyes, Which have not seen the sun so rise For years I cannot count them o'er, I lost their long and heavy score When my last brother droop'd and died, And I lay living by his side. They chain'd us each to a column stone, But even these at length grew cold. not full and free As they of yore were wont to be; It might be fancy · but to me They never sounded like our own. WILLIAM KNOX. 1789-1825. [A YOUNG poet of considerable talent, who died at Edinburgh in 1825, age 36. Author of The Lonely Hearth, Songs of Israel, The Harp of Zion, etc. His father was a respectable yeoman, and he himself succeeding to good farms under the Duke of Buccleuch, became too soon his own master, and plunged into dissipation and ruin. His talent then showed itself in a fine strain of pensive poetry. Knox spent his later years in Edinburgh under his father's roof, and amidst all his errors was admirably faithful to the domestic affections, a kind and respectful son, and an attached brother. The poem here quoted was much admired by Abraham Lincoln, who often repeated and referred to it.] They grieved, but no wail from their slumbers will come; They joyed, but the tongue of their gladness is dumb. They died, ah! they died; we, things that are now, That walk on the turf that lies over their brow, And make in their dwelling a transient abode, Meet the things that they met on their pilgrimage road. Are mingled together in sunshine and rain: And the smile and the tear, and the song and the dirge, Still follow each other like surge upon surge. 'Tis the wink of an eye; 'tis the draught of a breath From the blossom of health to the paleness of death, From the gilded saloon to the bier and the shroud; Yea, hope and despondency, pleasure O, why should the spirit of mortal be and pain, proud? REV. CHARLES WOLFE. 1791-1823. [YOUNGEST Son of Theobald Wolfe, Esq. Born in Dublin, 14th Dec., 1791; entered Dublin University, 1809. Attained a high rank for his classical attainments and for his poetic talent. Before he left the university he wrote a number of pieces that were truly beautiful, but especially that one on which his fame chiefly rests, The Lines on the Burial of Sir John Moore. In 1817 he was ordained as Curate of the Church of Ballyclog in Tyrone and afterwards of Donoughmore. He died of consumption, Feb. 21, 1823, in the thirty-second year of his age.] [JOHN KEBLE was born on St. Mark's Day (April 25), 1792, at Fairford, in Gloucestershire. He was elected Scholar of Corpus, Oxford, in his fifteenth, and Fellow of Oriel in his nineteenth year. After a few years of tutorship at Oxford and curacy in the country, he became Vicar of Hursley in Hampshire in 1839, where he continued to minister till his death in 1866. He was with Dr. Newman and Dr. Pusey regarded as forming the Triumvirate of the Oxford Catholic movement. His prose works consist of an elaborate edition of Hooker, a careful Life of Bishop Wilson, and various theological treatises. But it is as a poet much more than a scholar or a controversialist that he is known; and of his poetical works, the Lyra Innocentium, the Translation of the Psalter, a posthumous volume of Poems, and The Christian Year (1827), it is by the last that he acquired an universal and undying fame in English literature. As Professor of Poetry at Oxford he wrote in Latin Praelections on Poetry, which are remarkable both for their subtlety and their exquisite Latinity. His Life was written by his friend Mr. Justice Coleridge.] |