ear,
But well I ween the dead are near;
For though, in feudal strife, a foe
Hath laid our Lady's Chapel low,
Yet still beneath the hallowed soil,
The peasant rests him from his toil,
And, dying, bids his bones be laid
Where erst his simple fathers prayed."

And last take the same note of sorrow--with Burns's finger on the fall
of it:

"Mourn, ilka grove the cushat kens,
Ye hazly shaws and briery dens,
Ye burnies, wimplin' down your glens
Wi' toddlin' din,
Or foamin' strang wi' hasty stens
Frae lin to lin."

62. As you read, one after another, these fragments of chant by the
great masters, does not a sense come upon you of some element in their
passion, no less than in their sound, different, specifically, from that
of "Parching summer hath no warrant"? Is it more profane, think you--or
more tender--nay, perhaps, in the core of it, more true?

For instance, when we are told that

"Wharfe, as he moved along,
To matins joined a mournful voice,"

is this disposition of the river's mind to pensive psalmody quite
logically accounted for by the previous statement, (itself by no means
rythmically dulcet,) that

"The boy is in the arms of Wharfe,
And strangled by a merciless force"?

Or, when we are led into the improving reflection,

"How sweet were leisure, could it yield no more
Than 'mid this wave-washed churchyard to recline,
From pastoral graves extracting thoughts divine!"

--is the divinity of the extract assured to us by its being made at
leisure, and in a reclining attitude--as compared with the meditations
of otherwise active men, in an erect one? Or are we perchance, many of
us, still erring somewhat in our notions alike of Divinity and
Humanity,--poetical extraction, and moral position?

63. On the chance of its being so, might I ask hearing for just a few
words more of the school of Belial?

Their occasion, it must be confessed, is a quite unjustifiable one. Some
very wicked people--mutineers, in fact--have retired, misanthropically,
into an unfrequented part of the country, and there find themselves safe
indeed, but extremely thirsty. Whereupon Byron thus gives them to drink:

"A little stream came tumbling from the height
And straggling into ocean as it might.
Its bounding crystal frolicked in the ray
And gushed from cliff to crag with saltless spray,
Close on the wild wide ocean,--yet as pure
And fresh a