In Westminster Abbey

The Sisters' Tragedy

by Thomas Bailey Aldrich

"The Southern Transept,
hardly known by any other name but
Poet's Corner."

DEAN STANLEY.

TREAD softly here; the sacredest of tombs
Are those that
hold your Poets. Kings and queens
Are facile accidents of Time
and Chance.
Chance sets them on the heights, they climb not
there!
But he who from the darkling mass of men
Is on the
wing of heavenly thought upborne
To finer ether, and becomes a
voice
For all the voiceless, God anointed him:
His name shall
be a star, his grave a shrine.

Tread softly here, in silent reverence tread.
Beneath those
marble cenotaphs and urns
Lies richer dust than ever nature
hid
Packed in the mountain's adamantine heart,
Or slyly wrapt
in unsuspected sand--
The dross men toil for, and oft stain the
soul.
How vain and all ignoble seems that greed
To him who
stands in this dim claustral air
With these most sacred ashes at
his feet!
This dust was Chaucer, Spenser, Dryden this--
The
spark that once illumed it lingers still.
O ever-hallowed spot of
English earth!
If the unleashed and happy spirit of man
Have
option to revisit our dull globe,
What august Shades at midnight
here convene
In the miraculous sessions of the moon,
When the
great pulse of London faintly throbs,
And one by one the stars in
heaven pale!