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Page 5
RESPONSE.
"'Tis God! who pours the living glow
Of light, creation's fountain-head:
Forgive the praise--too mean and low--
Or from the living or the dead.
No tongue thy peerless name hath spoken,
No space can hold that awful name;
The aspiring spirit's wing is broken;--
Thou wilt be, wert, and art the same!
Language is dumb. Imagination,
Knowledge, and science, helpless fall;
They are irreverent profanation,
And thou, O God! art all in all.
How vain on such a thought to dwell!
Who knows Thee--Thee the All-unknown?
Can angels be thy oracle,
Who art--who art Thyself alone?
None, none can trace Thy course sublime,
For none can catch a ray from Thee,
The splendour and the source of time--
The Eternal of eternity.
Thy light of light outpour'd conveys
Salvation in its flight elysian,
Brighter than e'en Thy mercy's rays;
But vainly would our feeble vision
Aspire to Thee. From day to day
Age steals on us, but meets thee never;
Thy power is life's support and stay--
We praise thee, sing thee, Lord! for ever."
CHORUS.
"Holy, holy, holy! Praise--
Praise be His in every land;
Safety in His presence stays;
Sacred is His high command!"
Dr. Bowring's version,--though a good one, if the difficulty be
considered of giving back a piece of poetry, whose every word is a poem
in itself, and by whose rhyme and accentuation a feeling of
indescribable awe is instilled into the most fastidious reader's
mind,--Dr. Bowring's version is but a feeble reverberation of the holy
fire pervading our Dutch poet's anthem. But still there rests enough in
his copy to give one a high idea of the original. I borrow the same
Englishman's words when I add:--
"The criticism that instructs, even though it instructs severely, is
most salutary and most valuable. It is of the criticism that
insults, and while it insults, informs not, that we have a right to
complain."--_Batavian Anthology_, p. 6.
JANUS DOUSA.
Manpadt House.
* * * * *{509}
A MYTH OF MIDRIDGE;
_Or, A Story anent a witless Wight's Adventures with the Midridge
Fairies in the Bishoprick of Durham; now more than two Centuries
ago._
Talking about fairies the other day to a nearly Octogenarian female
neighbour, I asked, had she ever seen one in her youthful days. Her
answer was in the negative; "but," quoth she, "I've heard my grandmother
tell a story, that Midridge (near Auckland) was a great place for
fairies when she was a child, and for many long years after that." A
rather lofty hill, only a short distance from the village, was their
chief place of resort, and around it they used to dance, not by dozens,
but by hundreds, when the gloaming began to show itself of the summer
nights. Occasionally a villager used to visit the scene of their gambols
in order to catch if it were but a passing glance of the tiny folks,
dressed in their vestments of green, as delicate as the thread of the
gossamer: for well knew the lass so favoured, that ere the current year
had disappeared, she would have become the happy wife of the object of
her only love; and also, as well ken'd the lucky lad that he too would
get a weel tochered lassie, long afore his brow became wrinkled with
age, or the snow-white blossoms had begun to bud forth upon his pate.
Woe to those, however, who dared to come by twos or by threes, with
inquisitive and curious eye, within the bounds of their domain; for if
caught, or only the eye of a fairy fell upon them, ill was sure to
betide them through life. Still more awful, however, was the result if
any were so rash as to address them, either in plain prose or rustic
rhyme. The last instance of their being spoken to, is thus still handed
down by tradition:--''Twas on a beautifully clear evening in the month
of August, when the last sheaf had crowned the last stack in their
master's hagyard, and after calling the "harvest home," the daytale-men
and household servants were enjoying themselves over massive pewter
quarts foaming over with strong beer, that the subject of the evening's
conversation at last turned upon the fairies of the neighbouring hill,
and each related his oft-told tale which he had learned by rote from the
lips of some parish grandame. At last the senior of the mirthful party
proposed to a youthful mate of his, who had dared to doubt even the
existence of such creatures, that he durst not go to the hill, mounted
on his master's best palfrey, and call aloud, at the full extent of his
voice, the following rhymes:
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