amazed and affrayed:
Yea, hearts that had never been molten with pity were molten with
fear as with flame,
And the priests of the Godhead whose temple is hell, and his heart
is of iron and fire,
And the swordsmen that served and the seamen that sped them, whom
peril could tame not or tire,
Were as foam on the winds of the waters of England which tempest
can tire not or tame.

III

They were girded about with thunder, and lightning came forth of
the rage of their strength,
And the measure that measures the wings of the storm was the
breadth of their force and the length:
And the name of their might was Invincible, covered and clothed
with the terror of God;
With his wrath were they winged, with his love were they fired,
with the speed of his winds were they shod;
With his soul were they filled, in his trust were they comforted:
grace was upon them as night,
And faith as the blackness of darkness: the fume of their balefires
was fair in his sight,
The reek of them sweet as a savour of myrrh in his nostrils: the
world that he made,
Theirs was it by gift of his servants: the wind, if they spake in
his name, was afraid,
And the sun was a shadow before it, the stars were astonished with
fear of it: fire
Went up to them, fed with men living, and lit of men's hands for a
shrine or a pyre;
And the east and the west wind scattered their ashes abroad, that
his name should be blest
Of the tribes of the chosen whose blessings are curses from
uttermost east unto west.

II

I

Hell for Spain, and heaven for England,--God to God, and man to
man,--
Met confronted, light with darkness, life with death: since time
began,
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