The curate thinks you have no soul;
I know that he has none. But you,
Dear friend, whose solemn self-control,
In our foursquare familiar pew,
Was pattern to my youth -- whose bark
Called me in summer dawns to rove --
Have you gone down into the dark
Where none is welcome -- none may love?
I will not think those good brown eyes
Have spent their life of truth so soon;
But in some canine paradise
Your wraith, I know, rebukes the moon,
And quarters every plain and hill,
Seeking his master... As for me,
This prayer at least the gods fulfill;
That when I pass the flood and see
Old Charon by the Stygian coast
Take toll of all the shades who land,
Your little, faithful, barking ghost
May leap to lick my phantom hand.
-St John Lucas
English novelist (1879 - 1934)
written by Lord Byron
Newstead was founded in 1170 by Henry II and was an active religious community for 400 years. The original Priory church was dissolved in 1539 by Henry VIII. In 1540 Sir John Byron bought the estate and converted the Priory into a family house. In 1789 at the age of ten, George Gordon, who had grown up in Scotland inherited both his title, Lord Byron, and Newstead Abbey.
A few years later when his Newfoundland died and in 1808 he had the Newf buried at the abbey and then in 1809 he took his first trip abroad, which inspired the long, melancholy poem Childe Harolds Pilgrimage, by which he was best known in the nineteenth century and today as one of the great poets of the English Romantic era.
On one side of the pedestal supporting the antique urn he had inscribed:
NEAR THIS SPOT
ARE DEPOSITED THE REMAINS OF ONE
WHO POSSESSED BEAUTY WITHOUT VANITY
STRENGTH WITHOUT INSOLENCE
COURAGE WITHOUT FEROCITY
AND ALL THE VIRTUES OF MAN WITHOUT HIS VICES
THIS PRAISE WHICH WOULD BE UNMEANING
FLATTERY IF INSCRIBED OVER HUMAN ASHES
IS BUT A JUST TRIBUTE TO THE MEMORY OF
BOATSWAIN, A DOG
WHO WAS BORN AT NEWFOUNDLAND, MAY 1803,
AND DIED AT NEWSTEAD, NOVEMBER 18, 1808.
When some proud son of man returns to earth
Unknown to glory, but upheld by birth,
The sculptur'd art exhausts the art of woe,
And stoned urns record who rest below;
When all is done, upon the tomb is seen,
Not what he was, but what he should have been;
But the poor Dog, in life the firmest friend,
The first to welcome, foremost to defend;
Whose honest heart is still his master's own,
Who labours, fights, lives, breathes, for him
alone
Unhonour'd falls, unnoticed all his worth,
Denied in Heaven the soul he held on earth;
While man, vain insect! hopes to be forgiven,
And claims himself sole exclusive of Heaven!
Oh, man! thou feeble tenant of an hour,
Debas'd by slavery, or corrupt by power,
Who knows thee well, must quit thee with
disgust,
Degraded mass of animated dust!
By nature vile, ennobled but by name,
Each kindred brute might bid thee blush for
shame.
Ye! who, perchance, behold this single Urn
Pass on--it none you wish to mourn:
To mark a Friend's remains these stones arise,
I never knew but one, and here he lies.
Newstead Abbey, November 30,1808
(Just oncec, I'd like to read the St Lucas poem, the Byron poem,and the KKipling poem without my vision getting all blurry.)