Came studious Taste; and many a pensive stranger
Dreams on the banks, and to the river talks.
What change shall happen next to Nunnery Dell?
Canal, and viaduct, and railway, tell!

William Wordsworth.

Croyland.

KING WITLAF'S DRINKING-HORN.

WITLAF, a king of the Saxons,

Ere yet his last he breathed,

To the merry monks of Croyland
His drinking-horn bequeathed, -

That, whenever they sat at their revels,
And drank from the golden bowl,

They might remember the donor,

And breathe a prayer for his soul.

So sat they once at Christmas,
And bade the goblet pass;

In their beards the red wine glistened
Like dew-drops in the grass.

They drank to the soul of Witlaf,
They drank to Christ the Lord,
And to each of the Twelve Apostles,
Who had preached his holy word.

They drank to the saints and martyrs
Of the dismal days of yore,

And as soon as the horn was empty
They remembered one saint more.

And the reader droned from the pulpit,
Like the murmur of many bees,
The legend of good Saint Guthlac,
And Saint Basil's homilies;

Till the great bells of the convent,
From their prison in the tower,
Guthlac and Bartholomæus,

Proclaimed the midnight hour.

And the Yule-log cracked in the chimney,
And the abbot bowed his head,
And the flamelets flapped and flickered,
But the abbot was stark and dead.

Yet still in his pallid fingers

He clutched the golden bowl,
In which, like a pearl dissolving,
Had sunk and dissolved his soul.

But not for this their revels

The jovial monks forbore;

For they cried, "Fill high the goblet!
We must drink to one saint more!"

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

Culbone (Culborne).

CULBONE, OR KITNORE, SOMERSET.

CULBONE is a small village, embowered in lofty wooded hills, on the coast between Porlock and Linton. For three months in winter its inhabitants are unvisited by the sun.

ALF-WAY upon the cliff I musing stood

HA

O'er thy sea-fronting hollow, while the smoke
Curled from thy cottage chimneys through the wood
And brooded on the steeps of glooming oak;
Under a dark green buttress of the hill
Looked out thy lowly house of sabbath prayer;
The sea was calm below; only thy rill
Talked to itself upon the quiet air.

Yet in this quaint and sportive-seeming dell
Hath, through the silent ages that are gone,
A stream of human things been passing on,
Whose unrecorded story none may tell,

Nor count the troths in that low chancel given,
And souls from yonder cabin fled to heaven.

Henry Alford.

THE

Cumnor Hall.

CUMNOR HALL.

HE dews of summer night did fall;
The moon, sweet regent of the sky,

Silvered the walls of Cumnor Hall,

And many an oak that grew thereby.

Now naught was heard beneath the skies,
The sounds of busy life were still,
Save an unhappy lady's sighs,

That issued from that lonely pile.

'Leicester," she cried, "is this thy love
That thou so oft hast sworn to me,
To leave me in this lonely grove,

Immured in shameful privity?

"No more thou com'st with lover's speed Thy once belovéd bride to see;

But be she alive or be she dead,

I fear, stern Earl, 's the same to thee.

"Not so the usage I received
When happy in my father's hall;
No faithless husband then me grieved,
No chilling fears did me appall.

"I rose up with the cheerful morn,

No lark more blithe, no flower more gay;

And like the bird that haunts the thorn,
So merrily sung the livelong day.

"If that my beauty is but small, Among court ladies all despised, Why didst thou rend it from that hall

Where, scornful Earl, it well was prized?

"And when you first to me made suit, How fair I was! you oft would say; And, proud of conquest, plucked the fruit, Then left the blossom to decay.

"Yes! now neglected and despised,

The rose is pale, the lily 's dead; But he that once their charms so prized Is sure the cause those charms are fled.

"For know, when sickening grief doth prey, And tender love 's repaid with scorn,

The sweetest beauty will decay :

What floweret can endure the storm?

"At court, I'm told, is beauty's throne,
Where every lady 's passing rare,
That Eastern flowers, that shame the sun,
Are not so glowing, not so fair.

“Then, Earl, why didst thou leave the beds Where roses and where lilies vie,

To seek a primrose, whose pale shades Must sicken when those gauds are by?