Soon shall our little Wilma learn to be
Amid the immortal blest
An unrepining guest,
Who now, dear heart, is young for your eternity.
CRAGWELL END
I
There's nothing I know of to make you spend
A day of your life at Cragwell End.
It's a village quiet and grey and old,
A little village tucked into a fold
(A sort of valley, not over wide)
Of the hills that flank it on either side.
There's a large grey church with a square stone tower,
And a clock to mark you the passing hour
In a chime that shivers the village calm
With a few odd bits of the 100th psalm.
A red-brick Vicarage stands thereby,
Breathing comfort and lapped in ease,
With a row of elms thick-trunked and high,
And a bevy of rooks to caw in these.
'Tis there that the Revd. Salvyn Bent
(No tie could be neater or whiter than _his_ tie)
Maintains the struggle against dissent,
An Oxford scholar _ex Aede Christi_;
And there in his twenty-minute sermons
He makes mince-meat of the modern Germans,
Defying their _apparatus criticus_
Like a brave old Vicar,
A famous sticker
To Genesis, Exodus and Leviticus.
He enjoys himself like a hearty boy
Who finds his life for his needs the aptest;
But the poisoned drop in his cup of joy
Is the Revd. Joshua Fall, the Baptist,
An earnest man with a tongue that stings--
The Vicar calls him a child of schism--
Who has dared to utter some dreadful things
On the vices of sacerdotalism,
And the ruination
Of education
By the Church of England Catechism.
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