Poetical Fragments from Ethel Churchill Volume II/The Coronation

by Letitia Elizabeth Landon

CHAPTER I.

THE CORONATION.

What memories haunt the venerable pile!
It is the mighty treasury of the past,
Where England garners up her glorious dead.
The ancient chivalry are sleeping there—
Men who sought out the Turk in Palestine,
And laid the crescent low before the cross.
    The sea has sent her victories: those aisles
Wave with the banners of a thousand fights.
There, too, are the mind's triumphs—in those tombs
Sleep poets and philosophers, whose light
Is on the heaven of our intellect.
The very names inscribed on those old walls
Make the place sacred.

In Blanchard