Oliver Basselin.[53]

In the Valley of the Vire Still is seen an ancient mill, With its gables quaint and queer, And beneath the window-sill, On the stone, These words alone: “Oliver Basselin lived here.”

Far above it, on the steep, Ruined stands the old Château; Nothing but the donjon-keep Left for shelter or for show. Its vacant eyes Stare at the skies, Stare at the valley green and deep.

Once a convent, old and brown, Looked, but ah! it looks no more, From the neighbouring hill-side down On the rushing and the roar Of the stream Whose sunny gleam Cheers the little Norman town.

In that darksome mill of stone, To the water’s dash and din, Careless, humble, and unknown, Sang the poet Basselin Songs that fill That ancient mill With a splendour of its own.

Never feeling of unrest Broke the pleasant dream he dreamed; Only made to be his nest, All the lovely valley seemed; No desire Of soaring higher Stirred or fluttered in his breast.

True, his songs were not divine; Were not songs of that high art, Which, as winds do in the pine, Find an answer in each heart; But the mirth Of this green earth Laughed and revelled in his line.

From the alehouse and the inn, Opening on the narrow street, Came the loud, convivial din, Singing and applause of feet, The laughing lays That in those days Sang the poet Basselin.

In the castle, cased in steel, Knights, who fought at Agincourt, Watched and waited, spur on heel; But the poet sang for sport Songs that rang Another clang, Songs that lowlier hearts could feel.

In the convent, clad in grey, Sat the monks in lonely cells, Paced the cloisters, knelt to pray, And the poet heard their bells; But his rhymes Found other chimes, Nearer to the earth than they.

Gone are all the barons bold, Gone are all the knights and squires, Gone the abbot stern and cold, And the brotherhood of friars; Not a name Remains to fame, From those mouldering days of old!

But the poet’s memory here Of the landscape makes a part; Like the river, swift and clear, Flows his song through many a heart; Haunting still That ancient mill, In the Valley of the Vire.

Oliver Basselin, the “Père joyeux du Vaudeville,” flourished in the fifteenth century, and gave to his convivial songs the name of his native valleys, in which he sang them, Vaux-de-Vire. This name was afterwards corrupted into the modern Vaudeville.

THE JEWISH CEMETERY AT NEWPORT.

How strange it seems! These Hebrews in their graves, Close by the street of this fair seaport town, Silent beside the never-silent waves, At rest in all this moving up and down.

The trees are white with dust, that o’er their sleep Wave their broad curtains in the south wind’s breath, While underneath these leafy tents they keep The long mysterious Exodus of Death.

And these sepulchral stones, so old and brown, That pave with level flags their burial-place, Seem like the tablets of the Law, thrown down And broken by Moses at the mountain’s base.

The very names recorded here are strange, Of foreign accent, and of different climes; Alvares and Rivera interchange With Abraham and Jacob of old times.

“Blessed be God! for he created Death!” The mourner said, “and Death is rest and peace;” Then added, in the certainty of faith, “And giveth Life that never more shall cease.”

Closed are the portals of their Synagogue, No Psalms of David now the silence break, No Rabbi reads the ancient Decalogue In the grand dialect the Prophets spake.

Gone are the living, but the dead remain, And not neglected; for a hand unseen, Scattering its bounty, like a summer-rain, Still keeps their graves and their remembrance green.

How came they here? What burst of Christian hate, What persecution, merciless and blind, Drove o’er the sea—that desert desolate— These Ishmaels and Hagars of mankind?

They lived in narrow streets and lanes obscure, Ghetto and Judenstrass, in mirk and mire; Taught in the school of patience to endure The life of anguish and the death of fire.

All their lives long, with the unleavened bread And bitter herbs of exile and its fears, The wasting famine of the heart they fed, And slaked its thirst with Marah of their tears.

Anathema maranatha! was the cry That rang from town to town, from street to street; At every gate the accursed Mordecai Was mocked and jeered, and spurned by Christian feet.

Pride and humiliation hand in hand Walked with them through the world where’er they went, Trampled and beaten were they as the sand, And yet unshaken as the continent.

For in the background figures vague and vast Of patriarchs and of prophets rose sublime, And all the great traditions of the past They saw reflected in the coming time.

And thus for ever with reverted look The mystic volume of the world they read, Spelling it backward, like a Hebrew book, Till life became a Legend of the Dead.

But ah! what once has been shall be no more! The groaning earth in travail and in pain Brings forth its races, but does not restore, And the dead nations never rise again.