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Home  »  The English Poets  »  Walter Pater

Thomas Humphry Ward, ed. The English Poets. 1880–1918.rnVol. V. Browning to Rupert Brooke

Lionel Johnson (1867–1902)

Walter Pater

GRACIOUS God rest him! he who toiled so well

Secrets of grace to tell

Graciously; as the awed rejoicing priest

Officiates at the feast,

Knowing how deep within the liturgies

Lie hid the mysteries.

Half of a passionately pensive soul

He showed us, not the whole:

Who loved him best, they best, they only, knew

The deeps they might not view;

That which was private between God and him;

To others, justly dim.

Calm Oxford autumns and preluding springs!

To me your memory brings

Delight upon delight, but chiefest one:

The thought of Oxford’s son,

Who gave me of his welcome and his praise,

When white were still my days;

Ere death had left life darkling, nor had sent

Lament upon lament:

Ere sorrow told me how I loved my lost

And bade me base love’s cost.

Scholarship’s constant saint, he kept her light

In him divinely white:

With cloistral jealousness of ardour strove

To guard her sacred grove,

Inviolate by worldly feet, nor paced

In desecrating haste.

Oh, sweet grave smiling of that wisdom, brought

From arduous ways of thought;

Oh, golden patience of that travailing soul

So hungered for the goal,

And vowed to keep, through subtly vigilant pain,

From pastime on the plain,

Enamoured of the difficult mountain air

Up beauty’s Hill of Prayer!

*****

Ended, his service: yet albeit farewell

Tolls the faint vesper bell,

Patient beneath his Oxford trees and towers

He still is gently ours:

Hierarch of the spirit, pure and strong,

Worthy Uranian song.

Gracious God keep him: and God grant to me

By miracle to see

That unforgettably most gracious friend,

In the never-ending end.