IN WESTMINSTER ABBEY

IN WESTMINSTER ABBEY

"The Southern Transept, hardly known by any other name but Poet's Corner."

DEAN STANLEY.

  TREAD softly here; the sacredest of tombs
  Are those that hold your Poets. Kings and queens
  Are facile accidents of Time and Chance.
  Chance sets them on the heights, they climb not there!
  But he who from the darkling mass of men
  Is on the wing of heavenly thought upborne
  To finer ether, and becomes a voice
  For all the voiceless, God anointed him:
  His name shall be a star, his grave a shrine.

  Tread softly here, in silent reverence tread.
  Beneath those marble cenotaphs and urns
  Lies richer dust than ever nature hid
  Packed in the mountain's adamantine heart,
  Or slyly wrapt in unsuspected sand—
  The dross men toil for, and oft stain the soul.
  How vain and all ignoble seems that greed
  To him who stands in this dim claustral air
  With these most sacred ashes at his feet!
  This dust was Chaucer, Spenser, Dryden this—
  The spark that once illumed it lingers still.
  O ever-hallowed spot of English earth!
  If the unleashed and happy spirit of man
  Have option to revisit our dull globe,
  What august Shades at midnight here convene
  In the miraculous sessions of the moon,
  When the great pulse of London faintly throbs,
  And one by one the stars in heaven pale!