Felicia Hemans in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine Volume 35 1834/Old Church in an English Park

by Felicia Hemans

For other versions of this work, see Sonnets, Devotional and Memorial. XIV. Old Church in an English Park.

Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 35, Page 634

IX.

OLD CHURCH IN AN ENGLISH PARK.

Crowning a flowery slope it stood alone,
    In gracious sanctity;—a bright rill wound
    Caressingly about the holy ground,
And warbled, with a never-dying tone,
Amidst the tombs. A hue of ages gone
    Seem'd, from that ivied porch, that solemn gleam
    Of tower and cross, pale quivering on the stream,
O'er all th' ancestral woodlands to be thrown,
And something yet more deep. The air was fraught
With noble memories whispering many a thought
    Of England's Fathers;—awful and serene,
They who had toil'd, watch'd, struggled to secure,
Within such fabrics, worship free and pure,
    Reign'd there, th' o'ershadowing spirits of the scene.