Sir Walter Raleigh and His Time by Charles Kingsley
page 75 of 107 (70%)
page 75 of 107 (70%)
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it as few prisoners have done. Many a good book has been written in
a dungeon--'Don Quixote,' the 'Pilgrim's Progress': beautiful each in its way, and destined to immortality: Raleigh begins the 'History of the World,' the most God-fearing and God-seeing history which I know of among English writings; though blotted by flattery of James in the preface: wrong: but pardonable in a man trying in the Tower to get out of that doleful prison. But all his writings are thirty years too late; they express the creed of a buried generation, of the men who defied Spain in the name of a God of righteousness,--not of men who cringe before her in the name of a God of power and cunning. The captive eagle has written with a quill from his own wing--a quill which has been wont ere now to soar to heaven. Every line smacks of the memories of Nombre and of Zutphen, of Tilbury Fort and of Calais Roads; and many a gray-headed veteran, as he read them, must have turned away his face to hide the noble tears, as Ulysses from Demodocus when he sang the song of Troy. So there sits Raleigh, like the prophet of old, in his lonely tower above the Thames, watching the darkness gather upon the land year by year, 'like the morning spread over the mountains,' the darkness which comes before the dawn of the Day of The Lord; which he shall never see on earth, though it be very near at hand; and asks of each newcomer, 'Watchman, what of the night?' But there is one bright point at least in the darkness; one on whom Raleigh's eyes, and those of all England, are fixed in boundless hope; one who, by the sympathy which attracts all noble natures to each other, clings to the hero utterly; Henry, the Crown Prince. 'No king but my father would keep such a bird in a cage.' The noble lad tries to open the door for the captive eagle; but in vain. At least he will make what use he can of his wisdom. He asks him for advice |
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