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Title: King Charles The Martyr
Author: John Keble [
More Titles by Keble]
[This is thankworthy, if a man for conscience
toward God endure grief, suffering wrongfully.
---1 St. Peter ii. 19.]
Praise to our pardoning God! though silent now
The thunders of the deep prophetic sky,
Though in our sight no powers of darkness bow
Before th' Apostles' glorious company;
The Martyrs' noble army still is ours,
Far in the North our fallen days have seen
How in her woe this tenderest spirit towers
For Jesus' sake in agony serene.
Praise to our God! not cottage hearths alone,
And shades impervious to the proud world's glare,
Such witness yield; a monarch from his throne
Springs to his Cross and finds his glory there.
Yes: whereso'er one trace of thee is found,
As in the Sacred Land, the shadows fall:
With beating hearts we roam the haunted ground,
Lone battle-field, or crumbling prison hall.
And there are aching solitary breasts,
Whose widowed walk with thought of thee is cheered
Our own, our royal Saint: thy memory rests
On many a prayer, the more for thee endeared.
True son of our dear Mother, early taught
With her to worship and for her to die,
Nursed in her aisles to more than kingly thought,
Oft in her solemn hours we dream thee nigh.
For thou didst love to trace her daily lore,
And where we look for comfort or for calm,
Over the self-same lines to bend, and pour
Thy heart with hers in some victorious psalm.
And well did she thy loyal love repay;
When all forsook, her Angels still were nigh,
Chained and bereft, and on thy funeral way,
Straight to the Cross she turned thy dying eye
And yearly now, before the Martyrs' King,
For thee she offers her maternal tears,
Calls us, like thee, to His dear feet to cling,
And bury in His wounds our earthly fears.
The Angels hear, and there is mirth in Heaven,
Fit prelude of the joy, when spirits won
Like those to patient Faith, shall rise forgiven,
And at their Saviour's knees thy bright example own.
[The end]
John Keble's poem: King Charles The Martyr
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