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Wilfrid Scawen Blunt - Worth Forest
Work rating: Low

Come, Prudence, you have done enough to--day--
 The worst is over, and some hours of play
 We both have earned, even more than rest, from toil;
 Our minds need laughter, as a spent lamp oil,
 And after their long fast a recompense.
 How sweet the evening is with its fresh scents
 Of briar and fern distilled by the warm wind!
 How green a robe the rain has left behind!
 How the birds laugh!--What say you to a walk
 Over the hill, and our long promised talk
 About the rights and wrongs of infancy?
 Our patients are asleep, dear angels, she
 Holding the boy in her ecstatic arms,
 As mothers do, and free from past alarms,
 The child grown calm. If we, an hour or two,
 Venture to leave them, `tis but our hope`s due.
 My tongue is all agog to try its speed
 To a new listener, like a long--stalled steed
 Loosed in a meadow, and the Forest lies
 At hand, the theme of its best flatteries.
 See, Prudence, here, your hat, where it was thrown
 The night you found me in the house alone
 With my worst fear and these two helpless things.
 Please God, that worst has folded its black wings,
 And we may let our thoughts on pleasure run
 Some moments in the light of this good sun.
 They sleep in Heaven`s guard. Our watch to--night
 Will be the braver for a transient sight--
 The only one perhaps more fair than they--
 Of Nature dressed for her June holiday.

 This is the watershed between the Thames
 And the South coast. On either hand the streams
 Run to the great Thames valley and the sea,
 The Downs, which should oppose them, servilely
 Giving them passage. Who would think these Downs,
 Which look like mountains when the sea--mist crowns
 Their tops in autumn, were so poor a chain?
 Yet they divide no pathways for the rain,
 Nor store up waters, in this pluvious age,
 More than the pasteboard barriers of a stage.
 The crest lies here. From us the Medway flows
 To drain the Weald of Kent, and hence the Ouse
 Starts for the Channel at Newhaven. Both
 These streams run eastward, bearing North and South.
 But, to the West, the Adur and the Arun
 Rising together, like twin rills of Sharon,
 Go forth diversely, this through Shoreham gap,
 And that by Arundel to Ocean`s lap.
 All are our rivers, by our Forest bred,
 And one besides which with more reverend heed
 We need to speak, for her desert is great
 Beyond the actual wealth of her estate.
 For Spenser sang of her, the River Mole,
 And Milton knew her name, though he, poor soul,
 Had never seen her, as I think being blind,
 And so miscalled her sullen. Others find
 Her special merit to consist in this:
 A maiden coyness, and her shy device
 Of mole--like burrowing. And in truth her way
 Is hollowed out and hidden from the day,
 Under deep banks and the dark overgrowth
 Of knotted alder roots and stumps uncouth,
 From source to mouth; and once at Mickleham,
 She fairly digs her grave, in deed and name,
 And disappears. There is an early trace
 Of this propensity to devious ways
 Shown by the little tributary brook
 Which bounds our fields, for lately it forsook
 Its natural course, to burrow out a road
 Under an ash tree in its neighbourhood.
 But whether this a special virtue is,
 Or like some virtues but a special vice,
 We need not argue. This at least is true,
 That in the Mole are trout, and many too,
 As I have often proved with rod and line
 From boyhood up, blest days of pins and twine!
 How many an afternoon have our hushed feet
 Crept through the alders where the waters meet,
 Mary`s and mine, and our eyes viewed the pools
 Where the trout lay, poor unsuspecting fools,
 And our hands framed their doom,--while overhead
 His orchestra of birds the backbird led.
 In those lost days, no angler of them all
 Could boast our cunning with the bait let fall,
 Close to their snouts, from some deceiving coigne,
 Or mark more notches when we stopped to join
 Our fishes head to tail and lay them out
 Upon the grass, and count our yards of trout.
 `Twas best in June, with the brook growing clear
 After a shower, as now. In dark weather
 It was less certain angling, for the stream
 Was truly ``sullen`` then, so deep and dim.
 `Tis thus in mountain lakes, as some relate,
 Where the fish need the sun to see the bait.
 The fly takes nothing in these tangled brooks,
 But grief to fishermen and loss of hooks;
 And all our angling was of godless sort,
 With living worm,--and yet we loved the sport.

 But wait. This path will lead us to the gill,
 Where you shall see the Mole in her first rill,
 Ere yet she leaves the Forest, and her bed
 Is still of iron--stone, which stains her red,
 Yet keeps her pure and lends a pleasant taste
 To her young waters as they bubble past.
 You hear her lapping round the barren flanks
 Of these old heaps we call the ``Cinder--banks,``
 Where our forefathers forged their iron ore,
 When Paul`s was building. Now, the rabbits bore
 In the still nights, beneath these ancient heaps,
 A very honeycomb. See, where she peeps,
 The infant river. You could hardly wet
 Your ankles in her midmost eddy yet.
 She has a pretty cunning in her look
 Mixed with alarm, as in her secret nook
 We find her out, half fugitive, half brave,
 A look that all the Forest creatures have.
 Let us away. Perhaps her guilelessness
 Is troubled at a guilty human face,
(Mine, Prudence,--not your own).  I know a dell
 Knee deep in fern, hard by, the very cell
 For an elf hermit. Here stag--mosses grow,
 Thick as a coverlet, and fox--gloves blow
 Purple and white, and the wild columbine,
 And here in May there springs that thing divine,
 The lily of the valley, only here
 Found in the Forest, blossoming year on year;
 A place o`ershadowed by a low--crowned oak.
 The enchanted princess never had been woke
 If she had gone to sleep in such a spot,
 In spite of fortune. Why, a corpse forgot
 Might lie, with eyes appealing to the sky,
 Unburied here for half a century.
 And this the woodcocks, as I take it, knew,
 Who stayed to breed here all the summer through,
 When other birds were gone. I flushed a pair
 On the longest day last year; the nest was there;
 And found some egg--shells chipped among the moss.
 The sight is rarer now than once it was.

 There! We have gathered breath and climbed the hill,
 And now can view the landscape more at will.
 This is the Pilgrim road, a well--known track,
 When folk did all their travelling on horseback,
 Now long deserted, yet a right of way,
 And marked on all our maps with due display.
 Beneath this yew--tree, which perhaps has seen
 Our fathers riding to St. Thomas` shrine,
 (For this was once the way of pilgrimage
 From the south--west for all who would engage
 Their vows at Canterbury), we will sit,
 As doubtless they too sat, and rest a bit.
 I love this solitude of birch and fern,
 These quags and mosses, and I love the stern
 Black yew--trees and the hoary pastures bare,
 Or tufted with long growths of withered hair
 And rank marsh grass. I love the bell--heath`s bloom,
 And the wild wealth which passionate Earth`s womb
 Throws in the Forest`s lap to clothe unseen
 Its ancient barrenness with youth and green.
 I love the Forest; `tis but this one strip
 Along the watershed that still dares keep
 Its title to such name. Yet once wide grown
 A mighty woodland stretched from Down to Down,
 The last stronghold and desperate standing--place
 Of that indigenous Britannic race
 Which fell before the English. It was called
 By Rome ``Anderida,`` in Saxon ``Weald.``
 Time and decay, and Man`s relentless mood,
 Have long made havock of the lower wood
 With axe and plough; and now, of all the plain,
 These breadths of higher ground alone remain,
 In token of its presence. Who shall tell
 How long, in these lost wilds of brake and fell,
 Or in the tangled groves of oak below,
 Gathering his sacred leaf, the mistletoe,
 Some Druid priest, forgotten and in need,
 May here have kept his rite and owned his creed
 After the rest? For hardly yet less rude,
 Here later dwelt that patron of our wood,
 The Christian Hermit Leonard, he who slew
 The last authentic dragon England knew;
 A man of prayer and penitential vows,
 Whose tale survives in many a forest house.
 For, having slain his monster, he was given
 To choose whate`er he would in gift from Heaven,
 And took for his sole recompense this thing:
 ``Snakes should not bite, nor nightingales should sing
 Within the Forest precincts.`` Thus, thought he,
 His orisons should unmolested be
By mundane joys and troubles.  Yonder ridge,
 Cutting the sky--line at the horizon`s edge,
 Is the Surrey Hills. Beneath the chalk pit, set
 Like a white cloud upon the face of it,
 Lies Dorking, famed for fowls, and, further still,
 Wotton and Shere. In front you have Leith Hill,
 Which looks upon St. Paul`s and on the sea,
 A point of note in our geography.
 All this is Evelyn`s land, who long ago
 Left us his record of the vale below
 And wrote the ``Silva`` now to hands as good
 Passed, the descendant`s of his name and blood,
 That doughty squire`s, who lately stood in fight
 With the new dragons of the Primrose rite,
 And broke a lance for Ireland and the cause
 Of freedom, flouted by coercion laws.
 Strange change! For long in history these same hills
 Were held as ominous of lowland ills,
 A source of robber fear, in foul repute,
 And natural fortress since the days of Knute,
 And earlier still when Saxon Sussex stood
 A home--ruled kingdom of primaeval wood.
 A camp, an eagle`s nest, a foot set down
 Into the Weald, and evil of renown
 With the free dwellers of the plain, who saw
 A menace brooding of imperial law.
 Saxon or Dane or Norman, each in turn,
 Set there his camp to pillage and to burn;
 For history, just as now, was mainly then
 A tale of wars `twixt regiments and men.
 We, forest dwellers, show with honest boast
 Our Slaughter Bridge, where the Norse horde was lost,
 Drowned in the red Mole waters, when the Dane
 Fled from his eyrie, nor returned again.

 The farthest point of all, and looking west,
 Is the line of Hindhead, on whose triple crest,
 With a good glass, a three--inch telescope,
 You might make out the cross upon the top:
 It used to be a gibbet. As a child
 What tales I treasured of that headland wild,
 With its three murderers, who in chains there hung,
 Rocked by the winds and tempest--tossed and swung!
 Three Portsmouth sailors were they who their mate
 Murdered for gold and grog, which guineas get,
 And in the ``Punch Bowl`` made their brute carouse,
 Leaving him dead, in a lone public--house,
 Where retribution seized them as was due,--
 For in that age of simple faiths and true
 Murder did always out,--and so apace
 Brought them to justice in that self--same place;
 And many years they hung. At last its sway
 Humanity, that child of yesterday,
 Asserted in their case, and craved their bones
 For Christian sepulture and these trim stones.
 I half regret the leniency thus lent:
 Their gallows--tree was their best monument;
But ours is a trim age.  There, farther down,
 Is a tower, or ``folly,`` built of late by one
 We call in these parts ``Chevalier de Malt,``
 (The brewers love high places, and no fault).
 Behind us the chief ridge. And, as I speak,
 Out of its bowels, with an angry shriek,
 And rushing down the valley at our feet,
 The train has found us out in our retreat.
 It came from Balcombe tunnel and is bound
 To be in London ere an hour is round.
 It scarcely scares our solitude away;
 And yonder Royston crows, the black and grey,
 Sit on unmoved upon their oak. This ridge
 Is only thirty miles from London Bridge,
 And, when the wind blows north, the London smoke
 Comes down upon us, and the grey crows croak,
 For the great city seems to reach about
 With its dark arms, and grip them by the throat.
 Time yet may prove them right. The wilderness
 May be disforested, and Nature`s face
 Stamped out of beauty by the heel of Man,
 Who has no room for beauty in his plan.

 Such things may be, for things as strange have been.
 This very place, where peace and sylvan green
 And immemorial silence and the mood
 Of solemn Nature, virgin and unwooed,
 Seem as a heritage,--this very place
 Was once the workshop of a busy race
 Which dug and toiled and sweated. Here once stood,
 Amid the blackened limbs of tortured wood,
 And belching smoke and fury from its mouth,
 A monstrous furnace, to whose jaws uncouth
 A race as monstrous offered night and day
 The Forest`s fairest offspring for a prey.
 Here stood a hamlet, black and populous,
 With human sins and sorrows in each house,
 A mining centre. Which of us could guess
 Each yew--tree yonder marks a dwelling--place
 Of living men and women?--nay, a tomb?
 Of all the secrets hidden in Earth`s womb,
 None surely is more pitiful and strange
 Than this of human death and human change
 Amid the eternal greenness of the Spring.
 All we may guess of what the years shall bring,
 Is this: that about April every year,
 White blossoms shall burst forth upon the pear
 And pink upon the apple. Nothing else.
 Earth has a silent mockery which repels
 Our questioning. Her history is not ours,
 And overlays it with a growth of flowers.

 Ah, Prudence, you who wonder, being town bred,
 What troubles grieve us in the lives we lead,
 What cause we have for sorrow in these fields
 Whose beauty girds us with its thousand shields,--
 This is our tragedy. You cannot know,
 In your bald cities, where no cowslips blow,
 How dear life is to us. The tramp of feet
 Brushes all older footsteps from the street,
 And you see nothing of the graves you tread.
 With us they are still present, the poor dead,
 And plead with us each day of life, and cry
 ``Did I not love my life, I too, even I?``
 You wonder!--Wonder rather we are not
 All touched with madness and disease of thought,
 Being so near the places where they sleep
 Who sowed these fields we in their absence reap.
 It were more logical. And here in truth
 No few of our Weald peasants in their youth
 Lose their weak wits, or in their age go mad,
 Brooding on sights the world had deemed most glad.
 I have seen many such. The Hammer Ponds,
 So frequent in the Forest`s outer bounds,
 Have all their histories of despairing souls
 Brought to their depths to find their true life`s goals.
 You see one in the hollow, where the light
 Touches its blackness with a gleam of white,
 Deep down, and over--browed with sombre trees
 Shutting its surface primly from the breeze,
 The landscape`s innocent eye, set open wide
 To watch the heavens,--yet with homicide
Steeped to the lids.  `Tis scarce a year ago
 The latest sufferer from our rural woe
 Found there his exit from a life too weak
 To shield him from despairs he dared not speak.
 A curious lad. I knew young Marden well,
 Brought up, a farmer`s son, at the plough`s tail,
 And used for all romance to mind the crows
 At plain day--wages in his father`s house.
 A ``natural`` he, and weak in intellect,
 His fellows said, nor lightly to be pricked
 To industry at any useful trade;
 His wits would go wool--gathering in the shade
 At harvest time, when all had work on hand,
 Nor, when you spoke, would seem to understand.
 At times his choice would be for days together
 To leave his work and idle in the heather,
 Making his bed where shelter could be found
 Under the fern--stacks or on open ground,
 Or oftenest in the charcoal burners` hives,
 When he could win that pity from their wives.
 Poor soul! He needed pity, for his face,
 Scarred by a burn, and reft of human grace,
 And for his speech, which faltering in his head
 Made a weak babble of the words he said.
 His eyes too--what a monster`s! did you ever
 Watch a toad`s face at evening by a river
 And note the concentrated light which lies
 In the twin topazes men call his eyes?
 Like these were Marden`s. From the square of clay
 Which was his face, these windows of his day
 Looked out in splendour, but with a fixed stare
 Which made men start who missed the meaning there.
 Yet he had thoughts. Not seldom he and I
 Made in these woods discourse of forestry,
 Walking together, I with dog and gun,
 He as a beater, or, if game was none,
 Marking the timber trees and underwoods.
 He knew each teller in these solitudes,
 And loved them with a quite unreasoned art,
 Learned from no teacher but his own wild heart.
 Of trees he quaintly talked in measured saws
 Which seemed the decalogue of Nature`s laws,
 Its burden being as erst, ``Thou shalt not kill``
 Things made by God, which shall outlive thee still.
 For larch and fir, newcomers from the North,
 He pleaded scantly when their doom went forth,
 Knowing they needs must die, and the birch stems,
 Since Spring renews them, yet with stratagems
 Framed to delay the moment of their fate.
 For beech he battled with more keen debate
 Of hand and eye, in deprecating tone,
 Holding their rights coeval with our own.
 But when we came to oak, good Sussex oak,
 The flame burst forth, and all his being spoke
 In words that jostled in his throat with tears,
 ``An oak which might outlive a thousand years.``
 He held this sacrilege. Perhaps some strains
 Of Druid blood were mingled in his veins,
 Which gave authority to guard the tree
 Sacred of yore, and thus he vanquished me.

 How came he to his end, poor Marden? Well,
 All stories have their reason, as some tell,
 In Eves that give the fruit for which men grieve,
 Or, what is often worse, refuse to give.
 This last was Marden`s unprotected case,
 Whose virtue failed him, and his ugliness,
 To escape the common fate of all mankind.
 He fell in love egregious and purblind,
 Just like the wisest. She who caused his flame
 Was not, I think, in honesty to blame
 If she was less than serious at his suit.
 Marden, as lover, was grotesquely mute,
 And his strange eyes were not the orbs to move
 A maiden`s fancy to a dream of love.
 In truth they were scarce human. Still `twas hard
 His passion should be met, for sole reward,
 With sermon phrases and such gospel talk
 As preachers license for a Sunday walk,
 Mixed with her laughter. This was all she gave,
 An endless course of things beyond the grave,
 Till he lost reckoning and, poor witless man,
 Began to reason on the cosmic plan,
 Which meted this scant mercy in his case,
 And placed him in such straits for happiness.
 Can you not see it? All our rustics live
 In their small round of thoughts as in a hive,
 Each cell they build resembling each each day,
 Till their wits swarm, and then they are away.
 Marden went mad, misled by his queen bee,
 Through a deep slough of black theology,
 Which ended in destruction and this pool,
 With Hell beyond him for his poor dumb soul.
 He sought her final pity for love lost.
 She talked of Heaven, and sent him tracts by post.
 He pleaded. She reproved. She prayed. He swore.
 She bade him go. He went, and came no more.
 Such was the history, no whit uncommon.
 I neither blame the boy nor blame the woman,
 Only the hardness of a fate which laid
 Its iron flail upon too weak a head.
 She watched him go, half doubting what would come,
 Her last tract crushed betwixt his angry thumb
 And his clenched fingers, and his lips grown white,
 And his eyes gleaming with their maniac light,
And so towards the hill.  That afternoon,
 The last of a late autumn, saw the sun
 Set in unusual splendour (it is said
 A disc of gold in a whole heaven of red),
 The herald of a frost, the earliest
 Known for a lifetime. There, for summer dressed,
 The trees stood stiff and frozen in their green,
 Belated revellers in some changing scene
 Of sudden winter and June left behind.
 In all the forest was no breath of wind
 For a full fortnight, nor was a leaf shed
 Long after Nature in her shroud lay dead,
 A beautiful black frost which held the land
 In unseen fetters, but with iron hand.
 The pools were frozen over in the night,
 Without a flaw or ripple; and their light
 Reflected every stem of every tree
 In perfect mirrors of transparency.
 Boys, who a week before were in the field
 With bat and ball, now ventured, iron--heeled,
 On the ice skating, yet awhile in fear,
 Seeing no footing on the water there.
 And thus it fell about the corpse was found
 (You will have guessed it) in the ice fast bound.
 Two boys, the brothers of the girl he wooed,
 Tired of their pastime stopped awhile and stood
 Over a shallow place where rushes grow,
 And peering down saw a man`s face below
 Watching their own (his eyes were open laid,
 Fixed in that terrible stare poor Marden`s had);
 And thought they saw a vision. Running back,
 Loud in their fear, with spectres on their track,
 They spread the news through all the frightened farms,
 Filling the cottagers with wild alarms,
 Till some made bold with spades, and hewed away
 The ice above to where the dead man lay.
 There, sure enough, was Marden, his fool`s mouth
 Stuffed for all solace of his sad soul`s drouth
 With the girl`s tracts. Thus primed, he had plunged in
 And ended all, with a last deed of sin,
 Grotesque and tragic as his life. No less
 Let us persuaded be he rests in peace,
Or where were Heaven`s justice?  One last tale,
 As we walk back,--of worthy Master Gale,
 Our house`s founder, who in a dark age
 Won us the lands we hold in heritage,
 Working his forge here in the civil wars,
 And welding fortunes out of iron bars.
 A story with a moral too, at least,
 For money makers, of how wealth increased,
 And most of all for us, to whom his toil
 Has proved a mine of ease and endless spoil,
 Though of a truth we are unlineal heirs,
 Not true descendants of his toils and cares.
 His history stands recorded in a book
 Himself achieved, ere Death his anvil broke,
 A volume full of wisdom and God`s praise,
 Trust in himself, and scorn of human ways.

 He was a blacksmith, born at Sevenoke
 In Kent, the toilsome son of toilsome folk,
 And honourable too, as honour then
 Was understood among commercial men.
 He paid his way through life. He owed to none
 Beyond their will to let the debt run on,
 Nor trusted any farther than he need.
 He held the race of man a bastard breed,
 An evil generation, bred of dust,
 And prone to spending, idleness and lust.
 God was his friend. Of Him he counsel took,
 How he should make new ventures with new luck,
 Praying each night continuance of health,
 Increase of wisdom and increase of wealth;
 Nor ever in his yearly balance sheet
 Forgot to inscribe himself in Heaven`s debt.
 A virtuous man, and holding with good cause
 The eternal justice of the social laws
 Which give to industry its well--earned meed,
 And leave the weak and idle to their need.
 From childhood up, he clutched the staff of life,
 As if it were a cudgel for the strife,
 And wielded it throughout relentlessly.
 His parents, brothers, all by God`s decree,
 Died of the plague when he was scarce sixteen.
 The date, as I have reckoned, should have been
 The very year the patriots raised their backs
 To the new pressure of the shipping tax.
 His first fight was a battle for the pence
 Left by his father, when, at dire expense
 Of lawyers` fees and charges without end,
 He found himself with fifty pounds to spend,
 And a small stock--in--trade of iron sows,
 A fireless smithy and an empty house.
 With these and God`s compassion, and a man
 To strike and blow for him, his trade began,
 Till in four years his industry had grown
 To a fair substance in his native town.

 When he was twenty--one, an accident
 Brought him to Sussex; and, as Saul was sent
 To find his father`s asses and therewith
 Met with a kingdom, so this honest smith,
 While chasing a bad debtor through the Weald,
 Lit on his fortune in this very field.
 For, failing of his money, in its stead
 He took his debtor`s forge and smelting shed;
 Sold his goodwill at Sevenoke, and set
 His smithy in the Forest next to it.
 This brought him trade. The civil wars began
 And each man`s hand was set against each man,
 And sword to sword. But, while his neighbours fought,
 Gale, like a Gallio, cared for these things nought,
 And sold his iron with indifferent zeal
 To kings and Parliaments in need of steel;
 Or, if a prejudice his thought divides,
 It is for Cromwell and his Ironsides.
 But God`s be all the glory, His alone
 Who to His servant Gale such grace had shown!

 Thus, in an iron age, this thrifty man
 Got gold and silver, and, while others ran
 Out of their fortunes, he with pockets full
 Bought up their lands and held the world a fool.
 `Tis now two hundred years since Father Gale
 Laid down his pick and hammer. He had won,
 By forty years of toil beneath the sun,
 The right to work no longer, for himself
 And for his heirs for ever. This is Wealth!
 He was a prudent buyer, and died possessed
 Of some four thousand acres of the best
 Land in the parish. His first purchases
 Were in Worth Forest, to his vulgar eyes
 I fear mere wood for burning. Pease--pottage
 And Frog`s--hole farms came next; and in his age,
 Wishing, as he says, to have a good estate
 And house to live in, though the day was late
 To think of building, and he most abhorred
 To waste his substance upon brick and board,
 Holding with prudent minds that such intent
 Is but at best a ``sweet impoverishment``
 And that the wise man doth more soundly hit
 Who turns another`s folly to his wit,
 He purchased Caxtons, manor and domain,
 To be the home of a new race of men.

 His last words, as recorded by his son,
 A man of taste and letters and who won
 A seat in Parliament in William`s reign,
 Were uttered in the ancient Biblic strain
 Dear to the age he lived in and to him.
 They might be David`s in their cadence grim.
 ``When I am dead and gone,`` he said, ``my son,
 Trust in the Lord and in none other, none.
 Be wary of thy neighbours. They are vile,
 A brood of vipers, to oppose whose guile
 I have been at constant charges all my life.
 Take thee an honest woman for thy wife,
 And get thee sons who shall inherit all
 Thy God hath given thee, spite of Adam`s fall.
 Guard well thy rights, and cease not to pull down
 All gates that block thy highway to the town,
 Such as that man of Belial, Jacob Sears
 Has set in Crawley Lane these thirty years.
 Let no man venture to enclose the wastes.
 Be on thy guard against such ribald priests
 As Lee and Troughton. They are an ill brood,
 A bastard generation, bone and blood.
 Hold fast to thy religion. Go not thou
 After lewd women and the worldly show
 Of rich apparel. Keep thy substance close
 In thy own chamber for the fear of loss,
 And thy own counsel closer, lest men find
 Their way to rob thee of thy peace of mind.
 But, more than all, be quit of vain pretence,
 And see thy income equal thy expense,
 So shalt thou have thy God with thee alway.``

 Thus runs the story. You have seen to--day
 The latest shoot of his posterity,
 The boy we left there sleeping. His shall be
 One day the guardianship of this domain,
 As other Gales have held it. It were vain
 In me to speak of all the goodly fruit
 Begotten on the stem of this old root,
 This sour crab--apple, worthy master Gale.
 This child perhaps. . . . But that will be a tale
For new historians.  Listen! Did you hear
 Just now, down in the valley, someone cheer
 Or hail us? Stop. Ay, there there comes a man,
 Running and shouting loud as a man can.
 He sees us too, and slowly through the fern
 Now climbs to meet us. Something we shall learn
 Without a doubt. God grant it be not ill!
 And yet he seems to falter and stand still.
 What is your message, Penfold? Why this haste?
 A little closer. Speak man! Here at last
 You have found us. Come. What is it that you said!
See, we have courage.  ``Sir, the child is dead!``
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