The hand which brought the flame from Oriel to the Cambridge scholar was that of the Rev. Frederick William Faber, and a great number of the poems in _England's Trust_ are dedicated to him openly or secretly. Here is a sonnet addressed to Faber, which is very pleasant to read:
_Dear Friend! thou askest me to sing our loves, And sing them fain would I; but I do fear To mar so soft a theme; a theme that moves My heart unto its core. O friend most dear! No light request is thine; albeit it proves Thy gentleness and love, that do appear When absent thus, and in soft looks when near. Surely, if ever two fond hearts were, twined In a most holy, mystic knot, so now Are ours; not common are the ties that bind My soul to thine; a dear Apostle thou, I a young Neophyte that yearns to find The sacred truth, and stamp upon his brow The Cross, dread sign of his baptismal vow!_
The Apostle was only twelve months older than the Neophyte, who was in his twenty-third year, but he was a somewhat better as well as stronger poet. _The Cherwell Water-Lily_ is rather a rare book now, and I may perhaps be allowed to give an example of Faber's style. It is from one of many poems in which, with something borrowed too consciously from Wordsworth, who was the very Apollo of Young England, there Is yet a rendering of the beauty and mystery of Oxford, and of the delicate sylvan scenery which surrounds it, which is wholly original;
_There is a well, a willow-shaded spot. Cool in the noon-tide gleam, With rushes nodding in the little stream, And blue forget-me-not.
Set in thick tufts along the bushy marge With big bright eyes of gold; And glorious water-plants, like fans, unfold Their blossoms strange and large.
That wandering boy, young Hylas, did not find Beauties so rich and rare, Where swallow-wort and pale-bright maiden's hair And dog-grass richly twined.
A sloping bank ran round it like a crown, Whereon a purple cloud Of dark wild hyacinths, a fairy crowd, Had settled softly down.
And dreamy sounds of never-ending bells From Oxford's holy towers Came down the stream, and went among the flowers, And died in little swells_.
These two extracts give a fair notion of the Tractarian poetry, with its purity, its idealism, its love of Nature and its unreal conception of life, Faber also wrote an _England's Trust_, before Lord John Manners published his; and in this he rejoices in the passing away of all the old sensual confidence, and in the coming of a new age of humility and spirituality. Alas! it never came! There was a roll in the wave of thought, a few beautiful shells were thrown up on the shore of literature, and then the little eddy of Tractarianism was broken and spent, and lost in the general progress of mankind. We touch with reverend pity the volumes without which we should scarcely know that Young England had ever existed, and we refuse to believe that all the enthusiasm and piety and courage of which they are the mere ashes have wholly passed away. They have become spread over a wide expanse of effort, and no one knows who has been graciously affected by them. Who shall say that some distant echo of the Cherwell harp was not sounding in the heart of Gordon when he went to his African martyrdom? It is her adventurers, whether of the pen or of the sword, that have made England what she is. But if every adventurer succeeded, where would the adventure be?