But times and things are alter'd now, and Englishmen begin To class the beggar with the knave, and poverty with sin, III. We shut them up from tree and flower, and from the blesséd sun; We tear in twain the hearts that God in wedlock had made one The hearts that beat so faithfully, reposing side by side, nigh, With ghostly strength and holy love, to close the poor man's eye; But the corpse is thrown into the ground, when the prayers are hurried o'er, To rest in peace a little while, and then make way for more! IV. We mourn not for abbey lands, e'en pass they as they may ! But we mourn because the tyrant found a richer spoil than they; He cast away, as a thing defiled, the remembrance of the just, And the relics of the martyrs he scattered to the dust ; hand; And S. Cuthbert and S. Edward might alone redeem a land! And still our children, duly plunged in the baptismal flood And many an earnest prayer ascends from many a hidden spot; And England's Church is Catholic, though England's self be not! England of Saints! the hour is come-for nigher it may be Than yet I deem, albeit that day I may not live to see, VI. When all thy commerce, all thy arts, and wealth, and power, and fame, Shall melt away at thy most need, like wax before the flame; Then shalt thou find thy truest strength, thy martyrs' prayers above: Then shalt thou find thy truest wealth, their holy deeds of love; And thy Church, awaking from her sleep, come glorious forth at length, And in sight of angels and of men, display her hidden strength. Again shall long processions sweep through Lincoln's Minster pile; Again shall banner, cross, and cone, gleam through the incensed aisle. VII. And the faithful dead shall claim their part in the Church's thoughtful prayer, And the daily sacrifice to God be duly offered there; And tierce, and nones, and matins, shall have each their holy lay; And the Angelus at Compline shall sweetly close the day. England of Saints, the peace will dawn, but not without the fight; So, come the contest, when it may, and God defend the right! REV. J. M. NEALE 49. MARYLAND. [Mr. Reed was a brilliant lawyer and eloquent orator of Maryland. The following extract is from an impressive address delivered on the anniversary of the landing of Lord Baltimore and his colony on the green shores of the St. Mary's River.] THE HE land of Mary, so named at the instance of Henrietta Maria, was to receive, in its sheltered seclusion, the suffering brethren in the faith of the youthful queen. But the exactions of the Penal Code so impoverished the Catholics of England and Ireland, from among whom the first emigrants were collected, that it was only at an immense expense, out of his private fortune, which had, as yet, through causes already alluded to, remained intact, that the proprietary was enabled to equip, under the conduct of his brother, who seems to have been eminently fitted for the trust, an expedition of about two hundred gentlemen, including their domestics. 2. With equal piety and taste, he denominates "The Ark," the stout ship that was to bear this family from the devastation of the ancient world, with the sacred traditions of primeval times, to the green bosom of a new earth. Her light consort is named "The Dove," and the voyagers prepare to leave their home. 3. Their home! What a tale of sorrow is concentrated in that single word! a sensual utilitarianism had not then subdued the best feelings of the heart and philosophized the expa triation of a family, down to the cold calculations of expediency that direct the migration of a commercial firm. The country had trampled and spurned them, but it was reserved for modern times to hear, that "to make us love our country, our country must be lovely." Oh no! such is not the language of truth and nature. 4. We love our country, because it is our country, maugre the malice or misrule of man! God has, for wise purposes, implanted in our bosoms the principle of attachment. We love through the blest necessity of loving, ere we can well dis tinguish good from evil. Like the climbing plants, our affec tions must cling to something, and they twine around the objects of our early associations with a tenacity that no violence can ever tear away. They may wither through neglect; they may be blighted by unkindness; but the tender grasp of their first luxuriance only stiffens in death. 5. And the Pilgrims of Maryland, what had they to leave? They were mostly, as I have stated, of the well-born of the land, honorable through long descent, and the constancy with which themselves had adhered to the faith of their fathers. They and their progenitors had sealed their devotion to it, not always, perhaps, in that physical martyrdom which rouses manhood, which is sustained by the countenance and prayers of admiring and sympathizing friends, or the proud consciousness that its firmness animates some fainting brother; no! like those unheeded and unpitied martyrs, who bleed and burn in the secret cells of the heart, cut off from all earthly sources of synpathy and consolation, they had endured in poverty and distress, in contempt and obscurity; but still they failed not -“Unshaken, unseduced, unterrified, Their constancy they kept, their love, their zeal ; To swerve from truth, or change their constant mind.” And dear to them was the fair land they were to leave, with its hallowed associations, its old family recollections, its memorials of the friendship strong as death, that had suffered with them, often in spite of temptation or prejudice. 6. Above all, it was England with her white cliffs, her verdant meads, her "mossed trees that had outlived the eagle;" her ocean breezes, vocal with the language of Chaucer and Spenser, of Dryden and Shakespeare, and "all-accomplished Surrey," the "royal throne of Alfred," and the sainted Edward; the nursing land of chivalry; of a third Edward, of a Black Prince, of the men of Crecy, Poictiers, and Agincourt, the Nevilles, the Chandos, the Staffords, the Cliffords, the Spencers, the Talbots-the men who sought the shock of nations as they did the fierce pastime of the tourney-who bowed in confession, and knelt at Mass, and received their incarnate God, sheathed in the armor that might coffin their corpses ere the sun went down; England, rich in monuments of the free jurisprudence of her early Catholic times-the work of her Brac tons, her Britons, her Fortescues; rich in the monuments of her old Catholic charity-her churches, before which modern imitation sits down abashed and despairing; her cities of colleges, whose scholars once were armies; richer in the virtue of her saints, her Beckets, her Mores, her Fishers, and the countless array whose names, though unhonored on earth, are registered in the Book of Life, and whose blood pleads louder to heaven than the prayers of her Sibthorpes and her Spencers, for the return to Christian unity of the beautiful land it has made holy ! WM. GEO. REED. 50. THE FEMALE MARTYR. [Mary G, aged eighteen, a "Sister of Charity," died in one of our Atlantic cities during the prevalence of the Asiatic cholera, while in voluntary attendance on the sick.] OR thou wast one in whom the light FOR Of Heaven's own love was kindled well, Enduring with a martyr's might, Through every day and wakeful night, Gentle, and meek, and lowly, and unknown- 2. Where many hearts were failing,—where Poison with every breath, Yet shrinking not from offices of dread For the wrung dying, and the unconscious dead. |