WYNDHAM TOWERS

     Before you reach the slender, high-arched bridge,
     Like to a heron with one foot in stream,
     The hamlet breaks upon you through green boughs—
     A square stone church within a place of graves
     Upon the slope; gray houses oddly grouped,
     With plastered gables set with crossed oak-beams,
     And roofs of yellow tile and purplish slate.
     That is The Falcon, with the swinging sign
     And rustic bench, an ancient hostelry;
     Those leaden lattices were hung on hinge
     In good Queen Bess's time, so old it is.
     On ridge-piece, gable-end, or dove-cot vane,
     A gilded weathercock at intervals
     Glimmers—an angel on the wing, most like,
     Of local workmanship; for since the reign
     Of pious Edward here have carvers thrived,
     In saints'-heads skillful and winged cherubim
     Meet for rich abbeys.  From yon crumbling tower,
     Whose brickwork base the cunning Romans laid—
     And now of no use else except to train
     The ivy of an idle legend on—
     You see, such lens is this thin Devon air,
     If it so chance no fog comes rolling in,
     The Torridge where its branching crystal spreads
     To join the Taw.  Hard by from a chalk cliff
     A torrent leaps: not lovelier Sappho was
     Giving herself all silvery to the sea
     From that Leucadian rock.  Beneath your feet
     Lie sand and surf in curving parallels.
     Off shore, a buoy gleams like a dolphin's back
     Dripping with brine, and guards a sunken reef
     Whose sharp incisors have gnawed many a keel;
     There frets the sea and turns white at the lip,
     And in ill-weather lets the ledge show fang.
     A very pleasant nook in Devon, this,

       Upon the height of old was Wyndham Towers,
     Clinging to rock there, like an eagle's nest,
     With moat and drawbridge once, and good for siege;
     Four towers it had to front the diverse winds:
     Built God knows when, all record being lost,
     Locked in the memories of forgotten men.
     In Caesar's day, a pagan temple; next
     A monastery; then a feudal hold;
     Later a manor, and at last a ruin.
     Such knowledge have we of it, vaguely caught
     Through whispers fallen from tradition's lip.
     This shattered tower, with crenellated top
     And loops for archers, alone marks the spot,
     Looming forlornly—a gigantic harp
     Whereon the invisible fingers of the wind
     Its fitful and mysterious dirges play.

       Here dwelt, in the last Tudor's virgin reign,
     One Richard Wyndham, Knight and Gentleman,
     (The son of Rawdon, slain near Calais wall
     When Bloody Mary lost her grip on France,)
     A lonely wight that no kith had nor kin
     Save one, a brother—by ill-fortune's spite
     A brother, since 't were better to have none—
     Of late not often seen at Wyndham Towers,
     Where he in sooth but lenten welcome got
     When to that gate his errant footstep strayed.
     Yet held he dear those gray majestic walls,
     Time-stained and crusted with the sea's salt breath;
     There first his eyes took color of the sea,
     There did his heart stay when fate drove him thence,
     And there at last—but that we tell anon.
     Darrell they named him, for an ancestor
     Whose bones were whitening in Holy Land,
     The other Richard; a crusader name,
     Yet it was Darrell had the lion-heart.
     No love and little liking served this pair,
     In look and word unpaired as white and black—
     Of once rich bough the last unlucky fruit.
     The one, for straightness like a Norland pine
     Set on some precipice's perilous edge,
     Intrepid, handsome, little past blown youth,
     Of all pure thought and brave deed amorous,
     Moulded the court's high atmosphere to breathe,
     Yet liking well the camp's more liberal air—
     Poet, soldier, courtier, 't was the mode;
     The other—as a glow-worm to a star—
     Suspicious, morbid, passionate, self-involved,
     The soul half eaten out with solitude,
     Corroded, like a sword-blade left in sheath
     Asleep and lost to action—in a word,
     A misanthrope, a miser, a soured man,
     One fortune loved not and looked at askance.
     Yet he a pleasant outward semblance had.
     Say what you will, and paint things as you may,
     The devil is not black, with horn and hoof,
     As gossips picture him: he is a person
     Quite scrupulous of doublet and demeanor,
     As was this Master Wyndham of The Towers,
     Now latterly in most unhappy case,
     Because of matters to be here set forth.

       A thing of not much moment, as life goes,
     A thing a man with some philosophy
     Had idly brushed aside, as 't were a gnat
     That winged itself between him and the light,
     Had, through the crooked working of his mind,
     Brought Wyndham to a very grievous pass.
     Yet 't was a grapestone choked Anacreon
     And hushed his song.  There is no little thing
     In nature: in a raindrop's compass lie
     A planet's elements.  This Wyndham's woe
     Was one Griselda, daughter to a man
     Of Bideford, a shipman once, but since
     Turned soldier; now in