Volume II Part 6 (1/2)

”They sewed him up in his shroud With a round-shot top and toe, To sink him under the salt sharp sea Where all good seamen go.

”They lowered him down in the deep, And there in the sunset light They boomed a broadside over his grave, As meanin' to say 'Good-night.'

”They sailed away in the dark To the dear little isle they knew; And they hung his drum by the old sea-wall The same as he told them to.

”Two hundred years went by, And the guns began to roar, And England was fighting hard for her life, As ever she fought of yore.

”'It's only my dead that count,'

She said, as she says to-day; 'It isn't the s.h.i.+ps and it isn't the guns 'Ull sweep Trafalgar's Bay.'

”D'you guess who Nelson was?

You may laugh, but it's true as true!

There was more in that pore little chawed-up chap Than ever his best friend knew.

”The foe was creepin' close, In the dark, to our white-cliffed isle; They were ready to leap at England's throat, When--O, you may smile, you may smile;

”But--ask of the Devons.h.i.+re men; For they heard in the dead of night The roll of a drum, and they saw _him_ pa.s.s On a s.h.i.+p all s.h.i.+ning white.

”He stretched out his dead cold face And he sailed in the grand old way!

The fishes had taken an eye and his arm, But he swept Trafalgar's Bay.

”Nelson--was Francis Drake!

O, what matters the uniform, Or the patch on your eye or your pinned-up sleeve, If your soul's like a North Sea storm?”

EDINBURGH

I

City of mist and rain and blown grey s.p.a.ces, Dashed with wild wet colour and gleam of tears, Dreaming in Holyrood halls of the pa.s.sionate faces Lifted to one Queen's face that has conquered the years, Are not the halls of thy memory haunted places?

Cometh there not as a moon (where the blood-rust sears Floors a-flutter of old with silks and laces), Gliding, a ghostly Queen, thro' a mist of tears?

II

Proudly here, with a loftier pinnacled splendour, Throned in his northern Athens, what spells remain Still on the marble lips of the Wizard, and render Silent the gazer on glory without a stain!

Here and here, do we whisper, with hearts more tender, Tusitala wandered thro' mist and rain; Rainbow-eyed and frail and gallant and slender, Dreaming of pirate-isles in a jewelled main.

III

Up the Canongate climbeth, cleft asunder Raggedly here, with a glimpse of the distant sea Flashed through a crumbling alley, a glimpse of wonder, Nay, for the City is throned on Eternity!