Never earth nor sea beheld so great a stake before them set,

Save when Athens hurled back Asia from the lists wherein they met;

Never since the sands of ages through the glass of history ran

Saw the sun in heaven a lordlier day than this that lights us yet.

II

For the light that abides upon England, the glory that rests on her godlike name,

The pride that is love and the love that is faith, a perfume dissolved in flame,

Took fire from the dawn of the fierce July when fleets were scattered as foam

And squadrons as flakes of spray; when galleon and galliass that shadowed the sea

Were swept from her waves like shadows that pass with the clouds they fell from, and she

Laughed loud to the wind as it gave to her keeping the glories of Spain and Rome.

[Pg 190]

III

Three hundred summers have fallen as leaves by the storms in their season thinned,

Since northward the war-ships of Spain came sheer up the way of the south-west wind:

Where the citadel cliffs of England are flanked with bastions of serpentine,

Far off to the windward loomed their hulls, an hundred and twenty-nine,

All filled full of the war, full-fraught with battle and charged with bale;

Then store-ships weighted with cannon; and all were an hundred and fifty sail.

The measureless menace of darkness anhungered with hope to prevail upon light,

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