The Poetical Works of Aubrey De Vere :: :: University of Virginia Library

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THE DEATH OF SAINT JEROME.

(A.D. 420.)

ARGUMENT.

After many years spent on his translation of the Sacred Scriptures into Latin, and the introduction of the Eastern Monasticism into the West, Saint Jerome returned to Jerusalem. In Bethlehem that great warrior of the Faith died. He had lived a man of controversies and of labours, of wanderings and of solitudes, of stern resentments, of impassioned friendships, and of sore griefs, the sorest of which was that caused by the fall of Rome beneath the sword of Alaric—although he saw in that fall a righteous retribution. Saint Jerome had loved Rome with a vehement and faithful, though not with a servile, love. His death-bed at Bethlehem was solaced by the filial devotion of the ‘Second Paula,’ the grand-daughter of the ‘Earlier Paula’ and the niece of Eustochium, both of whom had died at Bethlehem.

A woful night! My sleep was storm not rest:
The death-cry of great Rome rang over it.
Ten years are past; yet still I hear that cry,
And loudest oft in sleep. Who comes? 'Tis Paula!
I know that voice; I know that hand. In mine
The hot, hard bones and ropy veins grow cool
Touched by its snows. Paula! I see thee not:
Mine eyes are dazzled by the matin beam:
Those Hebrew scrolls, those characters minute
Have somewhat tasked them. All night long in fire
They glared upon me. ‘Sedet Civitas’—
Incipit Jeremiæ Lamentatio:
‘Lo, solitary sitteth now the City:’—
As dead men in the streets, so lie her sons.
I dictated in dream: I dreamed my scribe

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Dropped on the parchment down his youthful head;
I laid my hand thereon and sent him forth
With blessing to his couch. His rest was sweet:
But I—my bed is watered with my tears,
For night by night I hear the self-same cry,
‘Esuriunt Parvuli: the suckling's tongue
Cleaves to the small roof of the suckling's mouth
Because his drought is sore.’ That Hebrew Seer
Lamented Salem's downfall. Rome, great Rome!
I that rebuked thy wanderings was thy son.
Dalmatia called me by that name: I heard;
But, even in childhood, standing by her waves,
And gazing on her mountains near the sea
For me my Rome beyond them rose, seven-hilled
Fane-crowned. I cried, ‘My Mother!’
Fling it wide
Yon casement! Let the sea-breeze cool my brow!
No, not sea-breeze; this is not Aquileia
Where lived Crostatius and Eusebius, mine;
I left my young, sad sister in their charge—
Was that well done? I know not; ne'er shall know—
Then passed alone to Chalcis 'mid the sands:
It was a fiery prison to the sense,
A Patmos to the soul. Let in the breeze!
There died my dearest then upon the earth,
Hylas and Innocentius. Still at times—
Thanks, Paula, thanks! Hail, pure reviving airs
They waft me healing memories. Once again
O child, I read the tidings of thy birth
By Leta sent to Paula here recluse.
‘The child of all thy prayers is ours at last!
Mother, thy name shall be our infant's name,
A younger Paula pledged before her birth
To live like thee the handmaid of the Lord,

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With thee and thy Eustochium, my sweet sister.’
I wrote in turn: ‘Leta, I share thy joy:
Train up thy child to God: her little hands,
When first they travel o'er her mother's face
In wondering love, press thou upon those letters
Ivory or ebon, spelling God's great name:
Let Halleluiahs be her earliest song:
See she be humbly clad and tend God's poor:
When womanhood draws near her, but ere yet
Childhood has left her, send her to this spot
That, kneeling where the cradled Child-God slept
She learn His service. I will be her Teacher.
She shall be worthy of her Roman stock.’
O holy, sweet, and gracious Company!
O Household dear to God! Their feet to us
Who trod this vale of tears were beautiful
Upon the mountains: for where'er they moved
'Twas mountain land, God's Gospel lit their brows
And flashed it thence to men. I had dwelt five years
Alone in deserts lodged 'mid ravening beasts;
And when I saw man's face once more therein
Ferine was mixed with human, though in some
There lived a wild rude beauty. Back to Rome
I passed: I found not in her what my youth
Half-spurned, yet half-admired. The Prince of Peace
Held there a place that feared to claim its own:
The spoils and trophies of a thousand wars
Bade it defiance. Palsy-stricken long
The old Pagan Rite lifted a brow still crowned,
A sceptred hand, though shaking. Proud in death
Like Rome's old emperor it ‘stood up to die:’
Well-nigh two hundred temples laughed in scorn
From summits seven. The Imperial name survived,

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But trod as men in cities earthquake-jarred;
Authority, Tradition still survived:
The dignity of these things was gone by:
To shameless spectacles the people rushed:
The gloom of wearied lusts was in their eyes:
The Coliseum's blood-stained sports, though dead
Left dark their foreheads.

Sweet as music-strain
Dawned on me then that vision strong and fair
Of Romans true at once to ancient times
And loyal to God's truth. Heroic Houses,
The great patrician races of old Rome,
The Anician, Claudian, Fabian, yea the Scipios',
Before me stood, but consecrate to Christ:
Dead virtues lived again, but in the spirit.
A great thing is Nobility in death:
Those Christian nobles' soul had found a land
Worthier than that for which Attilus died—
God's Church. The hearth had won its rights. True wives
Like Lucrece or like Portia, statelier mothers
Than she whose son captured Corioli
Or she that reared the Gracchi, stood once more
In Christian Rome. Senators oft were Christian
And, garbed in peasant's cloak of homely brown,
Filled with God's poor the palace of their sires:
‘Rome is forgiven!’ I cried; ‘the wrong is past:
The blood that cried for vengeance cries no more:
Maro's old vision of a realm world-wide
Which only smote the proud to raise the weak
Shall find at last fulfilment.’ Woe is me!
I saw but half.

The many were the bad: the good were few.
Vainly God's Prophets thundered 'gainst the crime,

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Fate trod behind it close.

My lips are parched:
How fresh that water! Thanks! Holiest and best
Of all those holy ones to me so dear
Thy father's mother was—that earlier Paula:
Beside a daughter's grave I saw her first:
The trials others shunned to her grew dear;
They brought her near the Man of Woes. Her mind
Was all of ardours and of soarings made,
Winged like the Greek; unlike it soft and sacred:
Greek she knew well; Hebrew she learned ere long:
She thirsted for that land the Saviour trod
And thither fled. From North to South she tried it,
Then chose this site and here her convents raised:
She ruled them twenty years, then slept in Christ.
In death she lay as one restored to youth
The while close by great Prelates of the East
Bishops and priests chanted her requiem psalms,
And o'er the bier one black-robed mourner lay;
Her lips were on her mother's brow, her face
Hid on that mother's bosom.
In a cave
Close to that spot where stood the Sacred Crib
We laid the Dead, expectant of that day
When God shall raise her. On the rock hard by
I graved her name and lineage:
‘Here in Christ
Paula finds rest. The great Emilian race,
Cornelia's blood, the Scipios, and the Gracchi
In her lay down the pride of ancient Rome
Before the cradle of Incarnate God.
She was Eustochium's mother. All, save her,
She left to worship here.’
Eustochium's mother!

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Eustochium—those who looked upon her face
Believed perforce. Amid the virgin choir
She stood, men said, Virginity itself:
They thanked her less for all of good she taught them
Than all her presence slew. The shames of life
Vanished, and memory's book laughed out in light:
Lethè ran o'er it. Paula wept at times;
Her child shone out as from the weeping cloud
The all-radiant arch. In her the Virtues Three
Began with Hope—for what is Hope but Faith
Mounted on wings?—passed on to Charity,
And ended in some grace to man unknown.
A child she wrote me letters, sportive, brief,
Yet serious 'neath her sport. Childhood in her
Lived till her mother died.
She too is dead!
That whole great race hath passed from earth away:
Pammachius, of Camillus' mighty line,
And Leta and Toxotius. All are gone!
When died the last I registered a vow:
I vowed their names should live till mine had perished.
Those names are wedded with that Tome which clasps
My life's long labour. It is gone, that life;
Yon sun new-risen is my latest sun:
Be near me, child! Thank God, another Paula
Remains to close my eyes.
As death draws nigh,
Peace-maker best, men turn to those who made
Their peace on earth. Mine was a life of wars;
Was that my fault? I know not. Roman half,
Barbaric half, I was not made for peace;
My blood rushed fiercely as Dalmatian floods
When thunder shakes our hills. I knew in youth
A house among those hills; on stillest days

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Close round it reeled a tempest of its own,
Whirlwind of confluent winds whose course was shaped
By distant mountains. Like that house was I.
Strange hands remote had shaped me unto storm:
Storm sang the dusky matins of my life;
Storm sang my vesper psalms. Others have fled
To wastes in search of peace: I, late baptized,
Rushed there to war on fiends whose Chief had warred
Upon my Chief in the great wilderness.
Five years we battled. Victory doubtful seemed:
God spake; then ceased the winds, and fell the waves,
And there was a great calm. New foes succeeded,
Foes from Christ's household, anchorets of the East
That ground their teeth against me. ‘Ho,’ they cried,
‘Impostor of the Gentile world far West,
Tread'st thou our East?’ Then shook I from my feet
The burning sands in testimony against them:
I passed to Antioch; to Byzantium next
Better so called than by his arrogant name
Who made God's church an appanage! Next I saw
That great Thebais and its hermit sons,
And wrote their deeds. At Rome Pope Damasus
Loved me; his Saints too loved me. All the more
They hated me without a cause, those priests,
Ill-tonsured heads, obsequious; men who trod
The rich man's floors whispering his leech, and eyed
Askance the miser's will. I pointed 'gainst them
This finger now so stark. Ascetics false;
Solitaries whom envy not their fasts made lean;
And, noisomer culprits, priests that ate from gold,
That, sinning with the people sinned against them,
That prophesied illusions and deceits
And therefore won no Vision from the Lord:

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On such I hurled God's bolts.
Erred I in this?
My Mother said of me, ‘His hand is hard,
Not so his heart.’ The boy was hard; the man.
My chief of battles was with Origen,
That Greek whose airy fancies, unbaptized
Save in Castalian springs, if spared had changed
The solid lands and seas of Christian Faith
To mist of allegory. Rufinus next—
Ah, false, false friend! He walked with me in youth:
In age with parricidal hand he wrote
That book against God's Church. With him he drew
Salem's unholy bishop, Barnabas;
Later, by night that base Pelagian crew
Full fain had burned me in my monastery
Whose site, foreseeing, I had chosen for strength.
I shook this hand against them from its roofs,
Then 'scaped to yonder tower.
How unlike these
That youthful priest, angelic more than priestly,
Nepotian! Standing in the imperial court
He wore the hair-cloth hid. A soldier once
A soldier's simpleness was in him ever;
He was the outcast's help, the orphan's hope,
The strength of all the oppressed. Like pure, cold airs
Launched from white peaks on one that tracks hot sands
The casual thought of him had power to cheer me.
Once more I see him with that child-like smile
Brightening his grave and sacerdotal stillness;
Each holy widow ‘Mother’ still he called,
Each maiden ‘Sister.’ With what care he clothed
His own high thoughts in garb of teachers old:
‘Saint Irenæus; Cyprian hints—’

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Shunning all self-assertion! Ah! great God!
That lily, which the right hand of Thy pureness
Had shaped to be an image of itself,
Struck by the noontide ardours, drooped, and died!
‘I shall have letters from him soon,’ I mused:
A stranger entered, sad of face: he laid
A young priest's garment on an old man's knee;
He spake: ‘Nepotian sent it thee in death;
“Tell him that by God's altar day by day
This was my tunic as I ministered.”’
Paula, since then it lies athwart this couch:
Spread it above me dead.
He died in youth:
So best! How fair a thing is youth like his,
Summed up and whole, from Innocence to Death
Wafted unstained! How beautiful to him
Whose age is but a maimed and mangled weight,
Whose life a long frustration! Such was mine:
They that most hated, they who fain had stoned me,
Belike too high esteemed me. All that life
Was conflict fierce of random purposes,
Poor nothings which the Hand that made all worlds
Alone could shape to good. I strove to plant
The convents of the East o'er all the West
Yet never was at heart a man recluse:
I said: ‘No choice is ours: dead Paganism
Breathes from its shameful grave a mist that slays:
Christians must flee the infected world.’ To me
Not high, not pure, a restless spirit ever,
Travel world-wide, strong studies, rule of men
In these I had large share. My books were acts;
I sent them forth to toil. The thoughts heaven-born
That, angel-like, dropt by Augustine's tent—
I love that man the more for conflicts past—

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Sought not my cavern. 'Twas against my will
They changed me into Priest. Once, and but once,
I offered Sacrifice.
And yet this hand,
So soon to mingle with its native dust,
Transferred God's Oracles from tongues long dead
To Rome's which cannot die! Was this my praise?
Not so; I toiled, at first to shun temptations:
The task that lulled my youth brightened mine age:
Book after book took shape beneath my hand
Not preordained by me. God wrought the work:
Through God alone His great Book of the East
Shall live the great Book of the West, the world,
The Church's Holy Book, which, like that stone
Hewn from the mountain, that became a mountain,
Shall singly in its majesty make null
The books of all the nations, weak like them.
This is God's Book: in it the Church of God,
While myriad Errors round her rise, shall see
Writ as in stars those Truths which in her heart
Live ever, seen or veiled:—the Church's sons,
Nurtured by it on heavenly food, shall walk
Not childish, not imbecile, but as men
In lowly strength of Faith. If e'er man's race,
Its winter past, shall breathe a second spring,
The Letters of the Nations shall not take
Their mould from barbarous lands that knew not God,
Or lands corrupt which, having known, forsook Him,
But Words of God to man. Earth's Homer new,
Her Phidias, her Apelles, themes shall choose
That change not soul to sense, but sense to soul:
That Maccabean Trump for aye shall peal;
Ruth glean 'mid western fields. Rebuke shall roll
From western Carmels on insurgent kings

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Who o'er false altars hurl schismatic smoke
And filch the poor man's vineyard. Casual texts
Shall slay yet make alive; o'er western hearts
Sin-seared shall flash those dagger-points of light
That say, ‘Thou art the Man.’ The Hebrew Spirit,
Yea, though o'er earth the Hebrew race walk bare,
Abject, down-trod, priestless and altarless,
Shall judge earth's orb secure.
Paula, my pledge to thee has been fulfilled:
Paula, the End is woe. At last I face it.
Child, for thy sake it shall be briefly told.
The Goth, the Hun, Vandal, and Marcoman,
Successive swept the world. Cloudlike they rushed
O'er Scythia, Dacia, Thrace, my own Dalmatia.
The flaming churches witnessed their advance:
They dragged the old noble from his palace home,
The bishop from his flock. They slew the babe
That smiled upon their sword. The world's one flower,
Athens, they trampled 'neath a bestial hoof:
Damascus heard their coming: Antioch fell;
Their steeds they watered in Orontes' wave
And Halis, and Euphrates. We, not they,
Burned this great shame upon the brows of Rome:
Man sinned: God's judgment followed.
Near me, child!
'Twas in the night the crown of Cities fell.
A thousand and a hundred years had passed
Since from that Capitolian height arose
Earth's throne permitted. Rome, the Queen of Men,
Had changed to Queen of slaves. A cry was heard
Like cry of wolves that throng dark Dacian hills
O'erhanging some doomed village. On the march
Of Alaric south, Alaric ‘the Scourge of God,’

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Full forty thousand slaves of race barbaric
Had joined his standard. Thirty thousand more
That night within Rome's fated walls uprose;
They burst the Gate Salarian.
Paula, nearer!
The foe was in the city as a flood:
They thronged the Forum first, that Forum girt
With idol temples; next that Coliseum
Where many a Dacian chieftain, many a Goth,
Had gorged the lion's maw. 'Twas there rang out
The second cry. That was the cry of Rome—
Men say no other followed.
O my child!
Thy tears which fall so quickly on my hand
Warn me to cease. Not all was woe, was shame:
Alaric was Christian, and his Goths in part;
They spared the maid, the nun; of many great ones
Some few were buried in their native soil.
Beneath a gloomier vault the Conqueror lies.
Alaric's dread task accomplished, on him first
Earthly ambition fell. Southward he marched
To make a second continent his prey.
His Maker smote that proud one that he died.
Three days in wrath they mourned him; on the fourth
A counsel rose among them. Swift and near
A river rushed: they forced a captive host
To sluice away its waters. In its bed
They built a tomb trophied with spoils of Rome:
Therein they laid their mighty One. Once more
They rolled that river through its channel old,
Then slew that captive host. ‘No man,’ they sware,
‘Shall peer into the secret of the King;

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None trouble his remains.’
His work was done:
No day but o'er the earth the exiles passed,
Exiles once Roman princes. Every coast
Egyptian, Syrian, Pontic, watched them coming,
The old, the young, their purple changed to rags,
And followed far with sad, remorseful eyes.
The Christians of their number hither flocked;
They yearned to die there where their Lord was born.
We gave them food at first: when none remained
We gave them tears. The haggard phantoms trod
Awe-struck, the ways of Sion; by that brook,
Cedron, and under groves of Olivet,
And Calvary, and beside that garden-cave
Where lay the Saviour dead.
The sight was strange!
These were the children of that Pagan race
Which wrought God's vengeance on God's chosen City.
Their own had been the secular head of earth,
The Salem of the Unjust: their own was judged:
And now, like babes on some dead mother's breast,
They clung to her whose heart their sires had pierced,
Sought there a mother's aid. Ah me! Ah me!
Pilate and Caiaphas were one in sin.
Salem and Rome! These might have been God's hands
Stretched forth in benediction o'er the world:
They met—those hands—one blood was on them both!
One judgment is on both.
There yet remains
A ruined fragment huge of Salem's wall:

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A little Hebrew remnant haunt that spot:
They kiss those fissured stones and in their shade
Sing their lamenting psalms. How oft hard by
Have I not heard our Roman exiles weep!
Antiphonal those dirges drear! Methought
Each on the other railed reproach: first, Rome,
‘Jerusalem, Jerusalem that slay'st
The Prophets:’ next, the Hebrews' fierce retort,
‘Art thou not in the self-same condemnation?
Thy House is left unto thee desolate.’
Paula, these things lie heavy on my soul:
Last night Rome's judgment dealt with me so sorely
I scarcely knew if months or years divide
Her death-day from my own.
Her ending seemed the ending of a world.
If this our earth had in the flat sea sunk
Save one black ridge whereon I sat alone,
Such wreck had seemed not greater. It was gone,
That Empire last, sole heir of all the empires,
Their arms, their arts, their letters, and their laws.
‘'Twas in the night the wall of Moab fell’—
Ezekiel sang that verse, the man who saw
The horrors of Sin's Chambers veiled by night.
Gone, too, is David's kingdom, Israel's House:
‘Incipit Jeremiæ Lamentatio:’
‘How solitary sitteth now that City
Which whilome was the joy of all mankind.’
Begins the great lament that end hath none:
Then silence; then that dirge predicted long,
The welter of that wide barbaric flood
Thenceforth earth's sable pall and universal:
The fountains of the nether deep are burst:
The second deluge comes.

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And let it come!
That God who sits above the water-spouts
Remains unshaken. Paula, what is earth?
A little bubble trembling ere it breaks,
The plaything of that grey-haired infant, Time,
Who breaks whate'er He plays with. I was strong:
See how He played with me! Am I not broken?
Albeit I strove with men of might; albeit
Those two great Gregories clasped me, palm to palm;
Albeit I fought with beasts at Ephesus
And bear their tokens still; albeit the wastes
Knew me, and lions fled; albeit this hand
Wrinkled and prone hurled to the dust God's scorners,
Am I not broken? Lo, this hour I raise
High o'er that ruin and wreck of life not less
This unsubverted head that bent not ever,
And make my great confession ere I die,
Since hope I have, though earthly hope no more:
And this is my confession: God is great;
There is no other greatness; God is good;
There is no other goodness. He alone
Is true Existence; all beside is dream.
Likewise confession make I that His Hand,
Which made all worlds, and made them to His glory,
Which touches earthly greatness and it dies,
Shall touch one day the dead within their graves
And lift them to His life. That Death Divine
Hath raised mankind above all fates and fortunes.
Paula, when thou hast closed these eyes in death
And laid this body in this holy land
Close by thy kinsfolk whom in life I loved,
Record of me, not dangers, labours, triumphs;
Record alone that in the day of death
Christ was my stay; He only; that on Him,

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Bending above the imminent grave, I leaned—
God's penitent not less than confessor—
My total being, body, soul, and spirit,
His liegeful servant. Holy is the feast
He keepeth; and His Truth remains for aye.