p. 73‘THE TAVERN OF LAST TIMES’ (AT BOX HILL, SURREY) p. 73 (AT BOX HILL, SURREY) A modern hour from London (as we spin Into a silver thread the miles of space Between us and our goal), there is a place Apart from city traffic, dust, and din, Green with great trees, where hides a quiet Inn. Here Nelson last looked on the lovely face Which made his world; and by its magic grace Trailed rosy clouds across each early sin. And, leaning lawnward, is the room where Keats Wrote the last one of those immortal songs (Called by the critics of his day ‘mere rhymes’). A lark, high in the boxwood bough repeats Those lyric strains, to idle passing throngs, There by the little Tavern-of-Last-Times. p. 74THE TWO AGES p. 74 On a great cathedral window I have seen A Summer sunset swoon and sink away, Lost in the splendours of immortal art. Angels and saints and all the heavenly hosts, With smiles undimmed by half a thousand years, From wall and niche have met my lifted gale. Sculpture and carving and illumined page, And the fair, lofty dreams of architects, That speak of beauty to the centuries— All these have fed me with divine repasts. Yet in my mouth is left a bitter taste, The taste of blood that stained that age of art. Those glorious windows shine upon the black And hideous structure of the guillotine; Beside the haloed countenance of saints p. 75There hangs the multiple and knotted lash. The Christ of love, benign and beautiful, Looks at the torture-rack, by hate conceived And bigotry sustained. The prison cell, With blood-stained walls, where starving men went mad, Lies under turrets matchless in their grace. p. 75 God, what an age! How was it that You let Colossal genius and colossal crime Walk for a hundred years across the earth, Like giant twins? How was it then that men, Conceiving such vast beauty for the world, And such large hopes of heaven, could entertain Such hellish projects for their human kin? How could the hand that, with consummate skill And loving patience, limned the luminous page, Drop pen and brush, and seize the branding-rod, To scourge a brother for his differing faith? Not great this age in beauty or in art; Nothing is wrought to-day that shall endure For earth’s adornment, through long centuries; Not ours the fervid worship of a God That wastes its splendid opulence
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