vain!
We bore the bluff many-wived king, rough rival and victor of Rome;
We bore the stern despot-protector, whose dawning and sunset were gloom;
For they temper'd the self of the tyrant with love of the land,
Some touch of the heart, some remorse, refraining the grip of the hand.
But John's was blackness of darkness, a day of vileness and shame;
Shrieks of the tortured, and silence, and outrage the mouth cannot name.
--O that cry of the helpless, the weak that writhe under the foe,
Wrong man-wrought upon man, dumb unwritten annals of woe!
Cry that goes upward from earth as she rolls through the peace of the
skies
'How long? Hast thou forgotten, O God!' . . . and silence replies!
Silence:--and then was the answer;--the light o'er Windsor that broke,
The Meadow of Law--true Avalon where the true Arthur awoke!
--Not thou, whose name, as a seed o'er the world, plume-wafted on air,
Britons on each side sea,--Caerlleon and Cumbria,--share,
Joy of a downtrod race, dear hope of freedom to-be,
Dream of poetic hearts, whom the vision only can see! . . .
For thine were the fairy knights, fair ideals of beauty and song;
But ours, in the ways of men, walk'd sober, and stumbling, and strong;--
Stumbling as who in peril and twilight their pathway trace out,
Hard to trace, and untried, and the foe above and about;
For the Charter of Freedom, the voice of the land in her Council secure
All doing, all daring,--and, e'en when defeated, of victory sure!
Langton, our Galahad, first, stamp'd Leader by Rome unaware,
Pembroke and Mowbray, Fitzwarine, Fitzalan, Fitzwalter, De Clare:--
--O fair temple of Freedom and Law!--the foundations ye laid:--
But again came the storm, and the might of darkness and wrong was
array'd,
A warfare of years; and the battle raged, and new heroes arose