In Westminster Abbey

"The Southern Transept, hardly known by any other name but Poet's Corner."     DEAN STANLEY.     Tread softly here; the sacredest of tombs     Are those that hold your Poets.    Kings and queens     Are facile accidents of Time and Chance.     Chance sets them on the heights, they climb not there!     But he who from the darkling mass of men     Is on the wing of heavenly thought upborne     To finer ether, and becomes a voice     For all the voiceless, God anointed him:     His name shall be a star, his grave a shrine.     Tread softly here, in silent reverence tread.     Beneath those marble cenotaphs and urns     Lies richer dust than ever nature hid     Packed in the mountain's adamantine heart,     Or slyly wrapt in unsuspected sand--     The dross men toil for, and oft stain the soul.     How vain and all ignoble seems that greed     To him who stands in this dim claustral air     With these most sacred ashes at his feet!     This dust was Chaucer, Spenser, Dryden this--     The spark that once illumed it lingers still.     O ever-hallowed spot of English earth!     If the unleashed and happy spirit of man     Have option to revisit our dull globe,     What august Shades at midnight here convene     In the miraculous sessions of the moon,     When the great pulse of London faintly throbs,     And one by one the stars in heaven pale!