I
\nNot where th’ Atlantic sighs upon the shore
\nOf the most sacred station of a saint;-
\nNot where uprises Ocean’s ceaseless plaint
\nOr swells its fury to tempestuous roar;
\nNot near God’s acre, which he loved so well,
\nWhere sunbeams creep athwart Morwenna’s shrine,
\nWhere Sacrament is shed, and signs divine
\nSpeak of a time when seas shall no more swell;
\nBut near the confines of his boyhood’s home,
\n(Now work is done and stormy skies grow black,
\nChanges too rude; more dangerous the track;)
\nCame the short summons of his Master, “Come,
\nO faithful servant blest.” That Garden grows
\nHeaven-sunned the Mystic Sharon’s blood-red Rose.<\/p>\n
II
\nSo, on the day when Blessed Mary slept,
\nBut lived, by grace encircling Her to stand
\nIn golden vesture, Queen at God’s Right Hand,
\nHer client likewise closed his eyes. Friends wept,
\nBecause of separation round his bed;
\nThen joyed, with deepening thankfulness, that he
\nShould pass the waves of Earth’s sore-troubled sea
\nWith pleading mother’s smile above him shed.
\nFret not. Our Inn, the Church, hath rooms diverse:
\nHe passed from one to another here. Then on
\nWhere angel-guardians, sheltering, wait to guide
\nGod’s servants to the Valley’s other side,
\nScaring all demons, smit with eternal curse
\nTo their dark lairs. Soon upward towards God’s throne.<\/p>\n
Good Jesus, mercy.\u00a0 Mary help.\u00a0 That way *\u00a0 *\u00a0 *\u00a0 *\u00a0 *<\/p>\n This poem appears on pages 645-46\u00a0 of The Life and Letters of R. S. Hawker<\/em>, edited by C. E. Byles. Dr. Frederick George Lee was the author of Memorials of the Late Rev. Robert Stephen Hawker, M. A., <\/em>the second biography of Hawker to be published. Piers Brendon, in his book Hawker of Morwenstow: Portrait of a Victorian Eccentric<\/em>, compares Lee’s biography with that of the notoriously unreliable work by Sabine Baring-Gould and comments that Lee ‘did nothing to present [Hawker] in a more realistic light. Indeed, he added a mythical accretion of his own’.<\/p>\n In his Preface to The Life and Letters, <\/em>C. E. Byles includes a biographical footnote on Lee: ‘Dr. Lee was, like Hawker, a man of original stamp and strong personality. Born in 1832, he won the Newdigate Prize at Oxford in 1854. From 1859 to 1864 he lived at Aberdeen, where he founded the Church of St. Mary the Virgin. In 1867 he became Vicar of All Saints, Lambeth, and worked there for thirty-two years. He died in 1902. He was a man of many-sided interests, poet, antiquary, controversialist, in politics a High Tory, and a prolific writer on ecclesiastical subjects. He was one of the founders of the Asociation for the Promotion of the Unity of Christendom, the English Church Union, and the Order of Corporate Re-Union, and was said to have been one of three Bishops mysteriously consecrated at sea in connection with the last-named body. About a month before his death he was received into the Roman Catholic Church.’<\/p>\n A Google search shows that Lee’s Order of Corporate Reunion still has some supporters, and also provides the promising information that a collection of his papers in the Pitts Theology Library at Emory University includes ‘a bound volume which appears to be a scrapbook that Lee maintained on the subject of nudity in art’.<\/a><\/p>\n Despite Dr Lee’s oddities (and his awful poem) he clearly provided Hawker’s widow, Pauline, with some much-needed support and comfort in the wretched weeks after her husband’s death. Byles quotes a letter that he wrote to her, dated 25 August, 1875, which reads:<\/p>\n ‘You may perhaps know me by name as one who had the high privilege of your husband’s friendship for a quarter of a century. Every scrap of letter he wrote me I have from the first carefully preserved. His death gave me a severe shock. I lived in hope of seeing him again. I should be deeply grateful if you would give me a line with regard to his end. There was no single clergyman in the Church of England for whom I had a deeper or heartier reverence, and I pray God that we may meet in a better world. With every respectful sympathy for you and an apology for this intrusion…’<\/p>\n Pauline’s reply, in which she thanks him for the poem, and which begins, ‘In a position such as mine is now, when so many are ready to cast a stone at one to whom they were not worthy to hold a candle…’ is touching. Mythical accretions aside, it’s a relief to think that the second published account of her husband’s life may have provided some compensation for the hurt caused to her by Baring-Gould’s hasty and inaccurate memoir.<\/p>\n
\nMost surely brightens to a perfect day.<\/em><\/p>\n