There is something exceedingly pathetic in this little volume.  Its weakness as verse, for it certainly is weak, had nothing ignoble about it, and what is weak without being in the least base has already a negative distinction.  The author hopes to be a Lovelace or a Montrose, equally ready to do his monarch service with sword or pen.  The Duke of Rutland has not quite been a Montrose, but he has been something less brilliant and much more useful, a faithful servant of his country, through an upright and laborious life.  The young poet of 1841, thrilled by the Tractarian enthusiasm of the moment, looked for a return of the high festivals of the Church, for a victory of faith over all its Paynim foes.  “The worst evils,” he writes, “from which we are now suffering, have arisen from our ignorant contempt or neglect of the rules of the Church.”  He was full of Newman and Pusey, of the great Oxford movement of 1837, of the wind of fervour blowing through England from the common-room of Oriel.  Now all is changed past recognition, and with, perhaps, the solitary exception of Cardinal Newman, preserved in extreme old age, like some precious exotic, in his Birmingham cloister, the Duke of Rutland may look through the length and breadth of England without recovering one of those lost faces that fed the pure passion of his youth.

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.