THE WRECK OF THE 'BIRKENHEAD.'
[To THE EDITOR OF TER "SPECTATOR.") SIR,—Although I entirely sympathise with the wish you expressed last week that Mr. Tennyson, as he has sung for us the Charge of "the Six Hundred" at Balaclava, would also sing the story of that still braver and nobler deed of the soldiers on board the ship 'Birkenhead,' I cannot refrain from recalling to your mind, and that of your readers, the splendid lines in which that deed of heroism has been enshrined by Sir Francis Doyle. I shall never forget the first time I heard those lines. It was from the lips of the late Mr. Maurice. He was then delivering his course Of lectures at Cambridge as Professor of Moral Philosophy. He had been criticising, I remember, Mr. Bain's system of morals, and had quoted with some degree of scorn a sentiment of that writer that "in extreme cases, the conscience passes into a high grade of the prudential motive."
"Let us look at one of these extreme cases," Mr. Maurice exclaimed indignantly. "A set of rough soldiers of the ordinary English type are off the Cape, in the ship 'Birkenhead.' I shall spoil the story," he said, with cbaracteristic modesty ; "the
Professor of Poetry in the sister University shall tell it for me.". And then he began to read, in that wonderful voice, which some of us remember so well, Sir Francis Doyle's lines :— " Right on our flank the crimson sun went down, The doep sea rolled around in dark repose,
When, like the wild shriek from some captured town,
A cry of women rose." • .•
The tone of scorn ivith which he had quoted Mr. Bain's maxim, had not quite died out of Mr. Maurice's voice an he began to read, but the exquisite pathos of the poetry and the spirit of that deed of sacrifice soon made itself felt, and I shall never forget the thrill that ran through us, as he read the closing words, in a voice tremulous with emotion :—
" What follows why recall? The brave who died, Died without flinching in the bloody surf; They sleep as well, beneath that purple tide, As others, under turf."
Those of your readers who may care to do so will find the whole- poem quoted on page 70 of Professor Maurice's lectures on "The Conscience."—I am, Sir, &c.,
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