Honour to those whose words or deeds

Thus help us in our daily needs,
And by their overflow

Raise us from what is low!

Thus thought I, as by night I read
Of the great army of the dead,

The trenches cold and damp,

The starved and frozen camp,—

The wounded from the battle-plain,
In dreary hospitals of pain,
The cheerless corridors,
The cold and stony floors.

Lo in that house of misery
A lady with a lamp I see

Pass through the glimmering gloom,
And flit from room to room.

And slow, as in a dream of bliss,
The speechless sufferer turns to kiss
Her shadow, as it falls
Upon the darkening walls

As if a door in heaven should be
Opened and then closed suddenly,
The vision came and went,
The light shone and was spent

On England's annals, through the long
Hereafter of her speech and song,

That light its rays shall cast
From portals of the past.

A Lady with a Lamp shall stand
In the great history of the land,
A noble type of good,

Heroic womanhood.

Nor even shall be wanting here
The palm, the lily, and the spear,
The symbols that of yore

Saint Filomena bore.

THE DISCOVERER OF THE NORTH CAPE

A LEAF FROM KING ALFRED'S OROSIUS

OTHERE, the old sea-captain,

Who dwelt in Helgoland,

To King Alfred, the Lover of Truth,
Brought a snow-white walrus-tooth,

Which he held in his brown right hand

His figure was tall and stately,
Like a boy's his eye appeared;

His hair was yellow as hay,
But threads of a silvery gray
Gleamed in his tawny beard

Hearty and hale was Othere,

His cheek had the colour of oak;
With a kind of laugh in his speech,
Like the sea-tide on a beach,

As unto the King he spoke.

And Alfred, King of the Saxons,
Had a book upon his knees,

And wrote down the wondrous tale
Of him who was first to sail

Into the Arctic seas.

"So far I live to the northward,

No man lives north of me;

To the east are wild mountain-chains,
And beyond them meres and plains;
To the westward all is sea.

So far I live to the northward,

From the harbour of Skeringes-hale, If you only sailed by day,

With a fair wind all the way,

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More than a month would you

I own six hundred reindeer, With sheep and swine beside; I have tribute from the Finns, Whalebone and reindeer skins, And ropes of walrus-hide.

sail.

"I ploughed the land with horses,

But heart was ill at ease,
my

For the old seafaring men

Came to me now and then,

With their sagas of the seas;

"Of Iceland and of Greenland,
And the stormy Hebrides,
And the undiscovered deep;-
I could not eat nor sleep

For thinking of those seas.

"To the northward stretched the desert, How far I fain would know;

So at last I sallied forth,

And three days sailed due north,

As far as the whale-ships go.

"To the west of me was the ocean,

To the right the desolate shore,
But did not slacken sail
For the walrus or the whale,
Till after three days more.

"The days grew longer and longer,
Till they became as one,
And southward through the haze
I saw the sullen blaze

"The sea was rough and stormy, The tempest howled and wailed, And the sea-fog, like a ghost, Haunted that dreary coast,

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But onward still I sailed.

Four days I steered to eastward,
Four days without a night:

Round in a fiery ring

Went the great sun, O King,

With red and lurid light."

Here Alfred, King of the Saxons,
Ceased writing for a while;
And raised his eyes from his book,
With a strange and puzzled look,
And an incredulous smile.

But Othere, the old sea-captain,

He neither paused nor stirred, Till the King listened, and then Once more took up his pen,

And wrote down every word

"And now the land," said Othere, "Bent southward suddenly, And I followed the curving shore And ever southward bore

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Into a nameless sea.

And there we hunted the walrus,

The narwhale, and the seal;

Ha! 't was a noble game!

And like the lightning's flame
Flew our harpoons of steel.

"There were six of us all together,

Norsemen of Helgoland;

In two days and no more

We killed of them threescore,

And dragged them to the strand!"

Here Alfred the Truth-Teller
Suddenly closed his book,
And lifted his blue eyes,
With doubt and strange surmise
Depicted in their look.

And Othere the old sea-captain
Stared at him wild and weird,
Then smiled, till his shining teeth
Gleamed white from underneath

His tawny, quivering beard.