His memory is Peace: and peace is here;-- The eternal lullaby of the level brook, With bird-like chirpings mingled, glassy-clear; The narrow pathway to the yew-clipp'd nook; Trim lawn, familiar to the pensive feet; The long gray walls he raised:--A household nest Where Hope and firm-eyed Faith and heavenly Love Made human love more sweet; While,--earth's rare visitant from the choirs above,-- Urania's holy steps the cottage blest. Peace there:--and peace upon the house of God, The little road-side church that room-like stands Crouching entrench'd in slopes of daisy sod, And duly deck'd by Herbert-honouring hands:-- Cell of detachment! Shrine to which the heart Withdraws, and all the roar of life is still; Then sinks into herself, and finds a shrine Within the shrine apart: Alone with God, as on the Arabian hill Man knelt in vision to the All-divine! --Thrice happy they,--and know their happiness,-- Who read the soul's star-orbit Heaven-ward clear; Not roving comet-like through doubt and guess, But 'neath their feet tread nescient pride and fear; Scan the unseen with sober certainty, God's hill above Himalah;--Love green earth With deeper, truer love, because the blue Of Heaven around they see;-- Who in the death-gasp hail man's second birth, And yield their loved ones with a brief adieu! --Thee, too, esteem I happy in thy death, Poet! while yet peace was, and thou might'st live Unvex'd in thy sweet reasonable faith, The gracious creed that knows how to forgive:-- Not narrowing God to self,--the common bane Of sects, each man his own small oracle; Not losing innerness in external rite; A worship pure and plain, Yet liberal to man's heaven-imbreathed delight In all that sound can hint, or beauty tell. A golden moderation!--which the wise Then highest rate, when fury-factions roar, And folly's choicest fools the most despise:-- --O happy Poet! laid in peace before Rival intolerants each 'gainst other flamed, And flames were slaked in blood, and all the grace Of life before that sad illiterate gloom Puritan, fled ashamed: While, as the red moon lifts her turbid face, Titanic features on the horizon loom! George Herbert's brief career as a parish priest was passed at Bemerton, a pretty village near Salisbury in the vale of the Avon. His parsonage, with its garden running down to the stream, and the little church across the road in which he lies buried, remain comparatively unchanged (March 26, 1880) since he lived and mused and wrote his Poems within these precincts. The justly-famous _Temple_ was published shortly after his death by his friend Nicholas Ferrar. _Arabian hill_; Mount Sinai. _Titanic features_; See _A Churchyard in Oxfordshire_, st. iii. PRINCESS ANNE November 5: 1640