'Consummatum est!' quoth Christ and comsed1 for to swoon Piteously and pale as prisoner that dieth. The Lord of life and of light then laid His eyes together, the one for-doth the other, who shall have the mastery Ere Sunday, about sun-rising' and sank with that to earth. Lo! how the sun gan lock her light in her-self, When she saw Him suffer death Lo! the earth, for heaviness 8 sons . who sun and sea made! that He would death suffer, and al to-quashed the rocks! Lo hell might not hold but opened, when God tholed', all that be against Him, of them that Him liketh. 'Suffer we,' said Truth 'I hear and see both A Spirit speak to hell and bids unspar the gates; A voice loud in that light to Lucifer cried, 'Princes of this palace prest 12 undo the gates, For here cometh with crown the king of all glory.' 'Such a light, against our leave Lazarus it fetched; Cold care and cumbrance is come to us all. 10 In the apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus, two sons of Simeon rise from the dead, and reveal what they have witnessed in hell during Christ's descent 12 quickly. into it. "device, plan. If this king come in mankind will be fetch, And lead it where Lazar is and lightly me bind. That such a lord and a light shall lead them all hence. and reach me the bars beat, with thy dam', and His light stop. Ere we through brightness be blent · bar we the gates! That no light leap in at louvre nor at loop. And thou, Ashtaroth, hoot out and have out our knaves, Brimstone boiling burning out-cast it All hot on their heads that enter nigh the walls. . Set bows of brake and brazen guns, And shoot out shot enough His sheltrums 10 to blend". 13 a-cloy we them each one!' 'Listen!' quoth Lucifer for I this lord know, 14 nor devil's queintise 15; Both this lord and this light is long ago I knew him. That Adam and Eve and all their issue Should die with dool 18 If that they touched a and here dwell ever, tree or took thereof an apple. Thus this lord of light such a law made; And, since He is so leal a Lord I 'lieve that He will not And, since we have been seised seven thousand winters, And [He] never was there-against and now will begin, He were unwrast of1 His word that witness is of truth!' 'That is sooth,' said Satan 'but I me sore doubt, For thou got them with guile Against His love and His leave and His garden broke, on His land yedest3, Not in form of a fiend but in form of an adder; As two gods, with God both good and ill; Thus haddest thou them out and hither at the last. 9 It is not graithly gotten where guile is at the root. . Forthy 10 I dread me,' quoth the devil 'lest Truth will them fetch; And, as thou beguiledest God's image in going of an adder, 11 So hath God beguiled us all in going of a wy11' 'What lord art Thou?' quoth Lucifer 'The lord of might and Duke of this dim place of main that made all things. anon undo the gates, That Christ may come in the king's son of heaven.' Lucifer might not look so light him ablent 13 ; And those that our Lord loved They durst not look on our Lord the least of them all, But let Him lead forth which Him list Many hundreds of angels harped then and sang, Clarior est solito post maxima nebula Phebus, Post inimicitias clarior est et amor. 'After sharpest showers,' quoth Peace most sheen is the sun, Is no weather warmer than after watery clouds, Than after war and wrack when Love and Peace be masters. And Peace, through patience all perils stopped.' * Truth trumped them, and sang * Te Deum laudamus; And then luted Love in a loud note, Ecce quam bonum et quam iocundum est habitare fratres Till the day dawned these damsels danced, That men rung to the resurrection and with that I awaked, And called Kitte my wife and Calote my daughter, 'Arise! and go reverence God's resurrection, And creep on knees to the cross and kiss it for a jewel, And rightfullest relic none richer on earth! For God's blessed body it bare, for our boot', May no grisly ghost 1 1 help, remedy. Iglide where it shadoweth !' 2 frightens away. JOHN GOWER. [JOHN GOWER seems to have been born about 1330, and died in 1408, having been blind for eight or nine years before his death. He was a gentleman of ancient family, owning estates in Kent and Suffolk. The place of his birth is unknown; he is believed to have died in the priory of St. Mary Overies, Southwark, in the church of which, now called St. Saviour's, his tomb may still be seen. The earliest of his three principal works, Speculum Meditantis, was in French verse, but it has not come down to posterity, nor is the precise time of its composition known. The second, Vox Clamantis, in Latin elegiac verse, was written between 1382 and 1384, and commemorates the rising of the commons under Wat Tyler in the former year, moralizing upon it and improving the occasion with astonishing prolixity. The third, Confessio Amantis, one of the best known of early English poems, was written between 1385 and 1393.] It was The poetry of Gower has been variously estimated. a practice with the poets of the sixteenth century to link his name in a venerated trio with those of Chaucer and Lydgate, just as in the seventeenth century the names of Shakspere, Jonson, and Fletcher were often joined together as the great dramatic lights of the preceding age. In each case the effect of closer study has been to lead men to think that they have been joining gold with iron and clay. Shakspere, read attentively, rises high above the standard reached by Jonson and Fletcher; and in a yet greater degree has the genius of Chaucer, accurately studied and rightly felt, impressed the present age with the sense of his unrivalled eminence among his contemporaries. Gower, a man of birth and fortune, must have lived in the cultivated society of his day. Of that society, French poetry, in its various forms of Fabliau, Rondel, Romance, Epigram, Chanson, &c., was one of the chief delights and distractions. With much imitative power, with the faculty of sustained attention, with a high appreciation for his own thoughts, and remarkable |