Old emperor Yew, fantastic sire, Girt with thy guard of dotard kings,-- What ages hast thou seen retire Into the dusk of alien things? What mighty news hath stormed thy shade, Of armies perished, realms unmade? Already wast thou great and wise, And solemn with exceeding eld, On that proud morn when England's rays, Wet with tempestuous joy, beheld Round her rough coasts the thundering main Strewn with the ruined dream of Spain. Hardly thou count'st them long ago, The warring faiths, the wavering land, The sanguine sky's delirious glow, And Cranmer's scorched, uplifted hand. Wailed not the woods their task of shame, Doomed to provide the insensate flame? Mourned not the rumouring winds, when she, The sweet queen of a tragic hour, Crowned with her snow-white memory The crimson legend of the Tower? Or when a thousand witcheries lay Felled with one stroke, at Fotheringay? Ah, thou hast heard the iron tread And clang of many an armoured age, And well recall'st the famous dead, Captains or counsellors brave or sage, Kings that on kings their myriads hurled, Ladies whose smile embroiled the world. The pilgrims' road, as I have tried to show elsewhere, separates from the Way again at Guildford. The old British track probably kept to the northern ridge; the pilgrims who visited Guildford may have left by the same road, but they turned away across the valley to the little chapel of St. Martha, which stands on a hill two miles south-east of the town. The pilgrim's track to the chapel, vanished in parts, becomes plain enough when it crosses the road which now runs from Guildford to Chilworth west of the chapel by perhaps half a mile. Here it is a wide smooth path of the finest down grass, cropped close by rabbits, with which all this breezy hill must be alive by night. Nearly at the top the path breaks into sand, which must have tested the less elastic of the travellers to the shrine pretty severely, but the sand breaks again into an open plateau of as fine grass as the path below. On this plateau stands the little church, alone in the sun and wind. [Illustration: _St. Catherine's Chapel, Guildford._]