University of Virginia Library

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
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.