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| HOME of the Percys’ high-born race, | |
| Home of their beautiful and brave, | |
| Alike their birth and burial-place, | |
| Their cradle and their grave! | |
| Still sternly o’er the castle gate | 5 |
| Their house’s Lion stands in state, | |
| As in his proud departed hours; | |
| And warriors frown in stone on high, | |
| And feudal banners flout the sky | |
| Above his princely towers. | 10 |
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| A gentle hill its side inclines, | |
| Lovely in England’s fadeless green, | |
| To meet the quiet stream which winds | |
| Through this romantic scene | |
| As silently and sweetly still, | 15 |
| As when at evening on that hill, | |
| While summer’s wind blew soft and low, | |
| Seated by gallant Hotspur’s side, | |
| His Katherine was a happy bride | |
| A thousand years ago. | 20 |
| |
| Gaze on the Abbey’s ruined pile: | |
| Does not the succoring ivy, keeping | |
| Her watch around it, seem to smile, | |
| As o’er a loved one sleeping? | |
| One solitary turret gray | 25 |
| Still tells, in melancholy glory, | |
| The legend of the Cheviot day, | |
| The Percys’ proudest border story. | |
| That day its roof was triumph’s arch; | |
| Then rang from isle to pictured dome | 30 |
| The light step of the soldier’s march, | |
| The music of the trump and drum; | |
| And babe and sire, the old, the young, | |
| And the monk’s hymn and minstrel’s song, | |
| And woman’s pure kiss, sweet and long, | 35 |
| Welcomed her warrior home. | |
| |
| Wild roses by the Abbey towers | |
| Are gay in their young bud and bloom; | |
| They were born of a race of funeral-flowers | |
| That garlanded, in long-gone hours, | 40 |
| A templar’s knightly tomb. | |
| He died, the sword in his mailed hand, | |
| On the holiest spot of the Blessed land, | |
| Where the Cross was damped with his dying breath, | |
| When blood ran free as festal wine, | 45 |
| And the sainted air of Palestine | |
| Was thick with the darts of death. | |
| |
| Wise with the lore of centuries, | |
| What tales, if there “be tongues in trees,” | |
| Those giant oaks could tell, | 50 |
| Of beings born and buried here; | |
| Tales of the peasant and the peer, | |
| Tales of the bridal and the bier, | |
| The welcome and farewell, | |
| Since on their boughs the startled bird | 55 |
| First, in her twilight slumbers, heard | |
| The Norman’s curfew-bell! | |
| |
| I wandered through the lofty halls | |
| Trod by the Percys of old fame, | |
| And traced upon the chapel walls | 60 |
| Each high heroic name,— | |
| From him who once his standard set | |
| Where now, o’er mosque and minaret, | |
| Glitter the Sultan’s crescent moons, | |
| To him who, when a younger son, | 65 |
| Fought for King George at Lexington, | |
| A major of dragoons. | |
| |
| That last half stanza—it has dashed | |
| From my warm lips the sparkling cup; | |
| The light that o’er my eyebeam flashed, | 70 |
| The power that bore my spirit up | |
| Above this bank-note world—is gone; | |
| And Alnwick ’s but a market town, | |
| And this, alas! its market day, | |
| And beasts and borderers throng the way; | 75 |
| Oxen and bleating lambs in lots, | |
| Northumbrian boors and plaided Scots, | |
| Men in the coal and cattle line; | |
| From Teviot’s bard and hero land, | |
| From royal Berwick’s beach of sand, | 80 |
| From Wooller, Morpeth, Hexham, and | |
| Newcastle-upon-Tyne. | |
| |
| These are not the romantic times | |
| So beautiful in Spenser’s rhymes, | |
| So dazzling to the dreaming boy: | 85 |
| Ours are the days of fact, not fable, | |
| Of knights, but not of the round table, | |
| Of Bailie Jarvie, not Rob Roy: | |
| ’T is what “our President” Monroe | |
| Has called “the era of good feeling”: | 90 |
| The Highlander, the bitterest foe | |
| To modern laws, has felt their blow, | |
| Consented to be taxed, and vote, | |
| And put on pantaloons and coat, | |
| And leave off cattle-stealing: | 95 |
| Lord Stafford mines for coal and salt, | |
| The Duke of Norfolk deals in malt, | |
| The Douglas in red herrings; | |
| And noble name and cultured land, | |
| Palace, and park, and vassal-band, | 100 |
| Are powerless to the notes of hand | |
| Of Rothschild or the Barings. | |
| |
| The age of bargaining, said Burke, | |
| Has come: to-day the turbaned Turk | |
| (Sleep, Richard of the lion heart! | 105 |
| Sleep on, nor from your cerements start) | |
| Is England’s friend and fast ally; | |
| The Moslem tramples on the Greek, | |
| And on the Cross and altar-stone, | |
| And Christendom looks tamely on, | 110 |
| And hears the Christian maiden shriek, | |
| And sees the Christian father die; | |
| And not a sabre-blow is given | |
| For Greece and fame, for faith and heaven, | |
| By Europe’s craven chivalry. | 115 |
| |
| You ’ll ask if yet the Percy lives | |
| In the armed pomp of feudal state? | |
| The present representatives | |
| Of Hotspur and his “gentle Kate” | |
| Are some half-dozen serving-men | 120 |
| In the drab coat of William Penn; | |
| A chambermaid, whose lip and eye, | |
| And cheek, and brown hair, bright and curling, | |
| Spoke Nature’s aristocracy; | |
| And one, half groom, half seneschal, | 125 |
| Who bowed me through court, bower, and hall, | |
| From donjon-keep to turret wall, | |
| For ten-and-sixpence sterling. | |
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