COMPOSED UPON WESTMINSTER BRIDGE

SEPTEMBER 3, 1802

EARTH has not anything to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty:

This City now doth like a garment wear

The beauty of the morning: silent, bare,

Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie Open unto the fields, and to the sky; All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.

Never did sun more beautifully steep

In his first splendour valley, rock, or hill; Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!

The river glideth at his own sweet will: Dear God! the very houses seem asleep; And all that mighty heart is lying still!

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

IN WESTMINSTER ABBEY

"The Southern Transept, hardly known
by any other name but Poets' Corner."

DEAN STANLEY

TREAD Softly here; the sacredest of tombs

Are those that hold your Poets. Kings and queens

Are facile accidents of Time and Chance.

Chance sets them on the heights, they climb not there!
But he who from the darkling mass of men

Is on the wing of heavenly thought upborne
To finer ether, and becomes a voice

For all the voiceless, God anointed him:
His name shall be a star, his grave a shrine.

Tread softly here, in silent reverence tread.
Beneath those marble cenotaphs and urns
Lies richer dust than ever nature hid
Packed in the mountain's adamantine heart,
Or slyly wrapped in unsuspected sand-
The dross men toil for, and oft stain the soul.
How vain and all ignoble seems that greed
To him who stands in this dim claustral air
With these most sacred ashes at his feet!
This dust was Chaucer, Spenser, Dryden this
The spark that once illumed it lingers still.
O ever hallowed spot of English earth!
If the unleashed and happy spirit of man
Have option to revisit our dull globe,
What august Shades at midnight here convene
In the miraculous sessions of the moon,

When the great pulse of London faintly throbs,
And one by one the constellations pale!

THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH

WESTMINSTER BELLS

WITH dear old Devon's azure dome above,
And vernal earth beneath, and birds about,

In ecstasy I move and dearly love

All golden days, nor any lurking doubt Of omnipresent God e'er penetrates

The wide-flung windows of my happy soul, One with all nature royally I roll

Through soaring seasons . . .

But my spirit mates,

So harshly with grey chimney-pots and smoke And huddled houses and hot thoroughfares,

That awful aching wander-lust nigh wears

My heart out through the hurried hours that choke All silver chimes - till on the midnight clear

Westminster bells say: 'God is even here!'

ANITA DUDLEY

ST. JAMES'S STREET

ST. JAMES'S STREET, of classic fame,
For Fashion still is seen there:
St. James's Street? I know the name,
I almost think I've been there!
Why, that's where Sacharissa sigh'd
When Waller read his ditty;
Where Byron lived, and Gibbon died,
And Alvanley was witty.

A famous Street. To yonder Park
Young Churchill stole in class-time;
Come, gaze on fifty men of mark,
And then recall the past time.
The plats at White's, the play at Crock's
The bumpers to Miss Gunning;

The bonhomie of Charlie Fox,

And Selwyn's ghastly funning.

The dear old Street of clubs and cribs,
As north and south it stretches,
Still seems to smack of Rolliad squibs,
And Gillray's fiercer sketches;

The quaint old dress, the grand old style,
The mots, the racy stories;

The wine, the dice, the wit, the bile
The hate of Whigs and Tories.

At dusk, when I am strolling there,
Dim forms will rise around me;
Lepel flits past me in her chair,

And Congreve's airs astound me! And once Nell Gwynne, a frail young Sprite, Look'd kindly when I met her;

I shook my head, perhaps, but quite

Forgot to quite forget her.

The Street is still a lively tomb
For rich, and gay, and clever;

The crops of dandies bud and bloom,
And die as fast as ever.

Now gilded youth loves cutty pipes,
And slang that's rather scaring;
It can't approach its prototypes
In taste, or tone, or bearing.

In Brummell's day of buckle shoes,
Lawn cravats, and roll collars,

They'd fight, and woo, and bet and lose
Like gentlemen and scholars:

I'm glad young men should go the pace,
I half forgive Old Rapid;

These louts disgrace their name and race
So vicious and so vapid!

Worse times may come. Bon ton, indeed,
Will then be quite forgotten,

And all we much revere will speed

From ripe to worse than rotten:

Let grass then sprout between yon stones,
And owls then roost at Boodle's,
For Echo will hurl back the tones
Of screaming Yankee Doodles.

I love the haunts of old Cockaigne,
Where wit and wealth were squander'd;
The halls that tell of hoop and train,
Where grace and rank have wander❜d;
Those halls where ladies fair and leal
First ventured to adore me!
Something of that old love I feel

For this old Street before me.

FREDERICK LOCKER-LAMPSON

LONDON

THE shadowy slender footfalls of the past

Go on before me, down the square.

Slow speaking buildings, men out of old books Reach spirit fingers to me everywhere.