Professor Worsley's Lines to General Lee.
By J. William Jones.
As there has been some dispute as to the authorship of the following beautiful lines, which were first published by me in "Personal Reminiscences, Anecdotes, and Letters of General R. E. Lee," it may be well to settle the point, as well as to preserve in our Papers the feeling tribute of the gifted Englishman. I had frequently seen them in the fly leaf of Worsley's translation of the Iliad, which he presented to General Lee, and by permission of the family, not long after the General's death, my friend, Professor E. S. Joynes, copied them for me. I thus introduced them in my "Reminiscences":
The following inscription and poem accompanied the presentation of a perfect copy of the "Translation of the Iliad of Homer into Spencerian Stanza," by Philip Stanhope Worsley, Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford—a scholar and poet whose untimely death, noticed with deepest regret throughout the literary world, in England, has cut short a career of the brightest promise:
"To General R. E. Lee,—the most stainless of living commanders, and, except in fortune, the greatest,—this volume is presented with the writer's earnest sympathy and respectful admiration.
| The grand old bard that never dies, Receive him in our English tongue! I send thee, but with weeping eyes, The story that he sung. Thy Troy is fallen, thy dear land Is marred beneath the spoiler's heel. I cannot trust my trembling hand To write the things I feel. Ah, realm of tombs! But let her bear This blazon to the last of times:— No nation rose so white and fair, Or fell so pure of crimes. The widow's moan, the orphan's wail, Come round thee; yet in truth be strong! Eternal right, though all else fail, Can never be made wrong. An angel's heart, an angel's mouth, Not Homer's, could alone for me Hymn well the great Confederate South, Virginia first, and Lee. |
P. S. W." |
