University of Virginia Library

‘Yes, of myself shall be my song to-day.’
Thus long since wrote the friend of other years,
Who, in the prime of promise and of joy,
Left us to win dear health in kindlier climes,
And to seek wider range of spirit where
New scenes and men call out new thought and feeling;
Pitching his tent beneath less wayward skies,
'Mid breezes more benignant than his own:
Now in the classic East afar, to pluck
Ionian violets, sweetest of the sweet;
Or by the rock of Hissarlik, to watch
How the flocks graze upon old Priam's tomb;
Now upon Nizza's mountain-girdled plain,
Now by the crescent of calm Spezia's bay;
Or by the banks of Arno, underneath
The laurels of the laurelled city, where
Wisdom and art and song in ages past
Held more than regal sway; again amid
Rome's labyrinth of temples and of tombs;
Now by the cliffs from which Amalfi smiles,
Thro' her vine-clustered columns of fair marble,
O'er the Salernian gulf and Tyrrhene sea;
Now on the steeps of the Euganean hills,
To breathe old Arqua's everlasting spring,
And bid the nightingale, whose songs are dreams,
Sing to the stars its love-begotten lay;
Or on some Umbrian slope, upon the marge
Of Nera or Clitumnus, as they wind
Thro' Sabine pastures, ere they link themselves
With Tuscan Tiber on its way to Rome;
Now by the plain where, desolate and lone,
Reft of its roses, Pæstum sleeps its sleep,
Still shadowed by its snowy Apennine
(Its double harvest now of thorns alone)
'Mid its three solemn ruins; or beside
The dead wolf-city of the Libyan hills;
Or in the southern vales of ruined Spain,
Twin-sister of the African Sahara,
Where, by the wingèd Darro, the Alhambra,
Half palace and half fortress, rears its pride,
Hard by the hill famed in Iberian song,—
Granada's hill, place of the Moor's last sigh,
Where in the silence of suppressed despair
He bade farewell to his beloved Spain;
Or underneath fair Jaffa's orange-blooms,
Or the long slope of fragrant Lebanon,
Where old Phœnicia with her daughters dwelt,—
Sidon and Arvad and Berytus fair,
And Tyre, the city of the island-rock,
Queen of the seas ere Rome had found a name,
Or Argos sent its thousand-galleyed fleet
Against the towers of wind-swept Ilion.

‘Yes, of myself shall be my song to-day,
As I sit here in pleasant loneliness,
Village and city left alike behind,
And nought of man within the reach of ear
Or eye, save yon far sail or rising smoke,
While dawn is making ready to come up
Behind that sea, upon whose mirror meet
Noon's first and night's last gleams,—a sea as calm
As that on which the lion of St. Mark's
Has for six centuries looked mutely down.
How real at this fresh hour all nature seems!
This stillness is reality itself,—
Reality without a voice or sound!
How real this night has been, and these clear orbs,
That just have passed in beauty out of sight!
This dawn, how real, tho' shadows sweep its sky;
This star-girt earth, and this mysterious air
In which it swims, and these perpetual ripples,
That roll themselves in childlike sport upon
The sand and shingle of this rock-fenced bay!
The very silence of the sea takes voice,
And speaks old music that has slumbered there
Since Orpheus flung his lyre upon the waves.
All things around me and above,—the peak
That wears upon its shoulders like a robe
That dreamy mist, and these substantial clouds;
That boulder by the stream, these pines that bend
To the slow breath of dawn, tho' not unused
To the rude turbulence of angry winds,
Are true. No night-begotten fantasies
Are these, no visions of the sick or idle;
No mythic phantom is this noble cliff,
That drops its shadow on yon sloping strand;
No fable is yon ever-singing brook,
Whose murmur is the music of the morn,
Whose sparkling silver, like a luminous cord,
Binds while it braids the many-coloured robe
Of that green vale below, which seems to clasp
All summer in its arms; no dreamer's dream
The tremulous verdure of yon winding wood,
Dripping with dew and sunshine; nor these flowers,
Which like low melodies fill all the air
With happy fragrance, each new-bursting bud
A beauty and a gladness and a song.
This circling atmosphere, in calm or storm,
With its great navies of slow-sailing clouds,
Some pure as snowy Alp, some rich with hues
Which never came from earth, some red, as if
Flushed with the fiery thunder from afar;
The silent footfalls of the quiet stars,
Moving in measured grace across the blue
All the night long, how true they seem to me!
And yet this throbbing dawn with its new life,
That vibrates wide and far, seems truer still;
For night is feeble and the day is strong,
Midnight relaxes and the morn restores.
I walk abroad beneath the quickening light,
And make its strength my own. O mighty sunrise,
How have I loved you, and with a deep
Intensity of spirit drunk your joy!
I see the day approaching when that sun
Shall cease to scorch, but never cease to shine!

‘Amid the thoughts of hollow unbelief,
That would turn all to fable, I would grasp
These genuine things of nature, and would feel
How real is this universe, unseen
Or seen, impalpable or palpable;
How much more real He from whom it came,
And who inhabits its prolific space!
What though a shadow falleth everywhere?
The shadow tells me that the sun is up,
The unclouded sun, and that the night is gone;
For it is light that casts the shadow, and
I know that where it is the truth must be.

‘Faith's vision is the vision of the real;
The true and the enduring are the things
We see not, for the supernatural
Hangs over and around us in these skies.
That which we see and hear and touch is not
The all of being, and outside this sphere
Of our poor vision there are other realms
And other beings truer still than these.
Yet 'tis not mystery, but that which lies,
Clear or less clear, within its golden mist
Enshrined, that the soul longs for, and with which
Alone its longings can be satisfied.
'Tis not the veil, but the invisible shrine,
The home of the Unsearchable beyond,
That the soul yearneth for,—a strange true world,
Far off yet also near, and intermixed
With ours, where the good angels go and come,
And which with the invisible majesty
Of an all-present Power is filled throughout.

‘The untrue liveth only in the heart
Of vain humanity, which fain would be
Its own poor centre and circumference,
Smiling or scowling at the name of aught
Beyond the narrow circle of the sense,
As visions of the visionary soul,
As follies of the weak and credulous.
For men believe but what they wish, no more;
And their profoundest creed is built on doubt:
With them all unbelief is honesty,
And all belief but weakness or pretence.

‘To creaturehood belongeth poverty,
Failure, and hollowness; to God alone
Pertains the perfect and the ever-true.
'Tis He who without voice can speak to us,
And who without our voice can hear us speak.
Once did I hear a faint lip whisper thus,
Yet hardly speaking, for the words were low,—
“God of the light, illuminate this gloom!
The light is Thine, and I Thy creature need it;
Share it with me! In Thee is light enough
For widest creaturehood; Thou canst not grudge
One beam to this dim soul; and that one beam,
What would it not accomplish? Thou couldst give it;
Thou wouldst not miss it, nor would Thy fair heaven
Be dimmer for the gift, nor would Thy angels
Feel as if thus they had been robbed of light;
Nor would one eye above less brightly sparkle
Because another eye below was glad.
Enough for me, whatever ills might come,
Would that soft beam of Thine for ever prove;
And this dark atom of creation, as
I feel myself to be, would give Thee praise.
Giver of light, oh, give that light to me!
I look above me, and I see each night
Squadrons of beaming orbs all marshalled yonder,
Millions of suns, with light enough for all
This infinite universe;—oh, is there not
In Him who kindled them, and keeps them still
Blazing undimmed, enough of light for me?”

‘Another voice I heard, less faint and low,
Of one who sought the true, and seeking found it;
Who wooed fair knowledge as a heavenly bride,
Nor wooed in vain; who, taking straight his way
To the one Fountain-head of truth, to Him
Who giveth largely and upbraideth not,
Was taught by Him who could not teach amiss.
Conscious of pain and ill, but above all
Of the deep void within an unfilled heart,
He sought for fulness, and the fulness flowed,—
Bread for a famished spirit, and it came;
For He who, as each yellow August shows
Its empty barns, fills them all up anew
For winter's hunger, unsolicited,
Pours the immortal food into the soul,
That, in the winter of its famine, asks
Of Him the living and eternal bread.
The voice I heard in its strong pleading said:
“Oh, pity this my aching hollowness;
Strip me of the unreal and untrue,
And show me Him, the infinitely real,
Who said not, I am thought, but, I am truth;
Who said not, I am power, but, I am love.
'Tis an untruthful world in which I live;
Duped, disappointed, cheated I must be,
If I with it am one, and take my part
Amid its mockeries of gold and wine.

‘“Out from a hollow world I would pass up
To Thee in whom I live and move and am.
Being of beings, I was made for Thee:
Life is not life, and love is but a dream,
Apart from Thee. O Spirit wise and good,
Make conquest of my will; let thy soft chains
Bind me with double bond of love and power.
Enter and reign within; fill up my being;
Then am I true and real; I am myself,
And not another, as I hitherto
Too oft have been! Then drink I in the health
And freedom of the liberating cross.
Pluck up each root of bitterness, and make
Each plant of sweetness to grow up within me.
Oh, drench me deeply in Thy heavenly dew,
That night and morning droppeth sweetly down
On weary spirits from Thy blessed heaven,
Like breath of angels in their ministry.
The current of the world is swift and strong;
I cannot front it, save with Thee to help.
This world is not upon the side of good,
And fair truth feebly fights its onward way
Thro' hostile millions, sworn to fight it down;
Error but slowly quits the field, and lurks
In every thicket in its sullen flight.
Thy ways are labyrinths, Thy purposes
Are dark, and in their evolution slow,
And hard to be interpreted; this soil
Strewn with a cold confusion everywhere,
The evil and the good mixed up together,
The truth and falsehood working side by side,
Until the day of final severance!”

‘To error and to evil men bid welcome,
As to old friends, and unbelief sits down
At table of the rich and poor alike,
A pleasant guest, and maketh mirth for all
Above the grave of truth, with jest and song.
The honesties of earth fall sick and die;
And men for place or fame, or viler gold,
Subscribe what they believe not, hiding deep
What they believe. The old nobilities
Of lofty life and simple courtesy
Forsake the earth; Truth falleth in the streets,
And no man stoops to raise her from the ground.
Fall, mighty Truth; thou shalt not lie for ever,
Nor moulder, where thou fallest, into dust!
The clouds are higher than the hills, above
The clouds the planets wander, and beyond
These kinsmen of this globe, the holy stars
Walk in their purity: all these may die,
Hills, clouds, stars, planets, but thou diest not;
No one has seen thy monument, nor shall.

‘O awful silence of the Eternal One,
Who sits above and sees all this below,
Yet sees as if He saw not, hears as if
He heard not!—And the good tries hard to rise,
Yet sinks, like little waves far out at sea;
Or specks that in the sky like rain-clouds look,
Yet pass without a shower for the parched earth.
O Thou who sidest with the weak against
The strong, reveal Thyself at length, and show
Thyself upon the side of good, and tell
The world what goodness is, and what is truth.
Tell me meanwhile that which I long to know,
More and yet more of the true things of which
Thou art the root and treasure-house, that I
May scatter round me the eternal seed,
And make earth better for my being here.
Teach me, each moment that I live, some deep
And sacred lesson, that I may not live
In vain, nor curse the day that I was born,
Bearing the burden of a useless life.
Oh, tune me, mould me, mellow me for use;
Pervade my being with Thy vital force,
That this else inexpressive life of mine
May become eloquent and full of power,
Impregnated with life and strength divine.
Put the bright torch of heaven into my hand,
That I may carry it aloft, and win
The weary eyes of wanderers here below,
To guide their feet into the way of peace.
I cannot raise the dead, nor from this soil
Pluck precious dust, nor bid the sleepers wake;
Nor still the storm, nor bend the lightning back,
Nor muffle up the thunder, lest its roar
Should break the rest of my sick sleeping boy;
Nor bind the Evil One, nor bid the chain
Fall from creation's long-enfettered limbs,
To make all nature free as at the first,
And beautiful as free; but I can live
A life that tells on other lives, and makes
This world less full of evil and of pain,—
A life which, like a pebble dropped at sea,
Sends its wide circles to a hundred shores.
Let such be mine! Creator of true life!—
Thyself the life Thou givest, give Thyself,
That Thou mayst dwell in me, and I in Thee.

‘I've been a dreamer, and I've seen the fields
Where the peace-roses blossom, and I know
Where the love-violets breathe their matchless sweets
Into the luscious air. It is a place
To which our tainted sunshine finds no way.
Beneath the cross they grow, and, gently freshened
By a bright river whose deep-hidden fount
Earth knoweth not, they spring, and bud, and bloom,
But never die. Thither I'll go, and thence
Bring peace and love to a distempered age.
I in my very weakness will be power,
Drawing the living lightning from a sky
Beyond these clouds of time, and making thus
The world my debtor ere I pass away.

‘What tho' I fall upon the battle-plain,
My work unfinished? Let me not despond,
As if the warfare had been waged for nought,
And I, with all my toil, had lived in vain.
The bravest take the front and are cut down,
Nor weeps the mother of a timid son;
Yet in their fall they conquer for all ages,
And their unfinished fight has gained, not one,
But many a battle for the struggling earth.
At death our doing of the work is o'er,
But the work done remains,—endures for ever.
We go, but that which we have done lives on,
And bears its proper fruitage after us.
We are the leaf and blossom; we must die,
And in our dying bring forth higher life.

‘Not what we see or hear alone is real;
There is an inner being, which with all
Its joys and griefs, its tempests and its calms,
Is yet more real than this palpable,
In which man's science works, to which his eye
Turns for the beautiful, round which his mind
Revolves as round his true and proper pole.

‘What is the weariness that oft weighs down
This o'erwrought frame? I see it not, nor hear;
Yet it is here, pervading brain and limb.
What is this bitterness that breaks the heart
When the inexorable grave has claimed
The loved or honoured? 'Tis as sternly true
As the sword-wound dismembering the flesh.
Shall I say mockingly to my torn heart,
Grieve thou no more? Or to my heavy eyes,
Weep not; as if my tears had been mere weakness
And my grief folly, idly lavished on
A phantom which a wise man may despise,
And which a brave man should not fear to face?

‘Not what is present is the only real.
Next July's sun and next December's snows
Will not be more ideal than the past.
June will bring roses; let us patiently
Wait on, for June will come, and with it come
Roses as fair as those once sung of old
By Teian or by Venusinian bard.
To-day will die, but with it will not die
That which is real. To-morrow will come up,
With all its inner and its outer circles,
With its still throbbing pulses, swift or slow,
Of seen and unseen life; nay, far beyond
What we call death, the same reality
Unfolds itself hereafter; there are realms
Stretching between us and the seat of God,
The depths and heights of which no mortal line
Has ever compassed. Science plumes her wing,
And moves from star to star, from sun to sun,
Measuring all visible distance, making known
The secrets of each orb, and spreading out
In sevenfold splendour every ray of light,
Like golden casket with its burning gems,
Discoursing of its riches and its power.
There is a land beyond these beaming orbs,
These pilgrims of the million-peopled sky,
Into which science has no entrance found,
In which she celebrates no victories,
And which she therefore would pronounce untrue,
A waste without a dweller or a tent,
A nebulous continent like that which rises
After the desert shower upon the sands
Of Arabah or Ramleh, named Sherâb
By the dark rangers of the wilderness.
There is a land beyond this girdling air,
A land which only He who has passed thro',
Or who has dwelt in it, can tell us of.
This globe of ours is not the goodliest
That navigates the immeasurable sea
Which men call space,—that ever silent sea,
Across whose awful face no tempest breaks,
Without a bottom and without a shore.
He is no dreamer of vain dreams who says
There must be something higher and more perfect
Than what we see around us, purer far
Than this stained life of ours, more blessed still
Than what we here call blessedness. The God
Who made us and our world is not so poor
In wisdom or in power, as to exhaust
His treasure-house upon our little world.
If there be then an earth, why not a heaven?
If man has here upon this kindred ground
A palace or a dwelling for himself,
Why may not then the great Creator build
A nobler mansion for Himself, to which
He may invite the creature He has made?
To whom meanwhile He gives this poorer earth,
The birth-place and the cradle of a greatness
Which eye hath not yet seen nor ear hath heard.

‘He who in name of grave philosophy
Smiles at my Paradise, yet with fond ear
Listens while Virgil, in his flowing verse,
Sings of Elysium and its fields of green,
But shows himself perverse and credulous,
Child of an unbelief to which the fabled
Is welcome as a refuge from the true.

‘He who in name of reason or of science
Calls me a dreamer, and my heaven a dream,
Or tells me that I need not look beyond
These hills of time, that sweep of burnished sapphire,
With all its moving and unmoving orbs,
Or the unfathomed and far-sounding sea,
For knowledge or for joy,—he mocks my spirit,
Quenches my hope, and casts me to the ground:
He is as one who flings a withering frost
O'er a fresh-blossomed orchard, or as one
Who turns soft music into discord harsh,
Or into stone transforms some beating heart.
He would surround this wondrous life of ours
With fabulous nothings, making faith a lie,
And hope a cloud just passing into air.
He bids me call this world a prison-house,
Girt round with walls which I can never scale,
Without a gate at which I may go forth
To seek and find a wider, truer home,
Nearer the seat of Him whom I call God,
Maker of all, and higher in the rank
Of that creation wherewith He has filled
His pregnant universe, whose measure is
Spacious infinitude, which lovingly
Clasps in its crystal and invisible casket
The works of Him who filleth all in all.

‘No cloudland yonder mocks the trustful gaze,
And no illusion cheats the groping hand,
Or the bewildered spirit; all is true!
No night, with its dark billows from afar,
Like a vast sea, rolls in upon the day.
There lies the realm of verity, from which
All falsehood and uncertainty have fled,
Like tremulous mist before the absorbing sun.
Beyond the subtleties of misbelief,
Or the enigmas of entangled thought,
Or anxious throbs of the unresting heart,
That trembles at its own ambiguous echoes,
Stretches the calm expanse of light divine.

‘There dreams can never come, and fantasies
Of human intellect can find no place;
But there the certain and authentic dwell.
Escaped the meshes of imprisoning doubt,
That dragged to earth the spirit's eagle wing,
We soar into pure liberty of vision,
And rest upon the high eternal peaks,
Round which no cloud can ever draw its veil
To hide the true from our impatient eye.
No oscillations of unsettled faith,
Eager to speculate, and counting doubt
The badge of mind's nobility, the test
Of mental breadth and honesty and greatness;
No mazes of perturbed or ravelled reason;
No visionary guesses, dark or sunny;
No insincerities nor empty creeds;
No frozen dogmas nor unreal words,
Whose hollow notes moan madly thro' the soul:
But where “we know,” “we see,” and “we are sure,”
Is the unfaltering tone of happy hearts,
Who, after years of drifting to and fro
On the rough Euxine of this wayward life,
Have found their everlasting anchorage
In the calm bay, round which the eternal hills
Rise with their girdle of celestial green.

‘Like clouds that have no anchor and no helm,
No chart nor pilot to direct their prow,
How many noble hearts, that might have blest
The world, and found rich blessing for themselves,
Sweep o'er life's surging sea without an aim!
Some sleep their years away, as if becalmed;
Some rush before the gale, and wreck themselves
Upon an unknown coast; some round and round,
As in a maddening maelstrom, fancy-lured,
Whirl without end, until their barque goes down;
Some set their sails for a far land of gold,
And die amid its gems; some court the storm,
And steer into its bosom; some lie down
And watch the lightning as it spends its fire
Upon the rock, or quenches its quick glow
In the dark trough of the absorbing wave.
To such the present and the seen are all;
Beyond the circle of the eye and ear
All is a void, unpeopled and profound;
Nothing exists save darkness, into which
They are to pass, as all have done before,
With shuddering step, when this illusive life
Goes down beneath them, and that wrecker Death
Flings them upon a shore of nothingness,
Themselves a vapour, a dim wreath of smoke,
The shadow of a shade, dissolved for ever.

‘O labyrinth of life, the bitter-sweet,
Which all have tasted save the happy ones
Who have gone early to their gentle sleep,
And never wept a tear nor sighed a sigh!
Thrice-ravelled mazes! The quick ebb and flow
Of the wild tide within us, which we fain
Would stay, but cannot; the vehement rise
And fall of the fair fountain of the heart,
That swells or sinks, we know not how or when;
The things that men call love and hate and fear,
The agony or ecstasy of soul;
The hemlock or the palm, the thorn or rose;
The breaking bubbles of the cataract,
In music or in thunder as they pour;
The silver smoothness of the summer stream,
That sings itself to sleep beneath the willow;
The song, the sigh, the smile, the tear together;
The cradle and the grave set side by side!

‘O life! O mystery! what means all this?
And how shall I interpret the caprice
That seems to rule the ages, as if ill
Had mastered good, and all things here below
Had snapped the bonds of law and love and truth?
Life is not what it once was meant to be;
Failure and change make up our days and years,
And man dreams daily on, still fond and weak,
Mistaking disappointment for the cloud
On which the rainbow smiles, and not the cloud
From which the tempest issues, looking for
The good time coming which has never come.
Alas! the glory here, like yonder sun,
Is made for setting, lasting but a day:
The wise have written vanity on all.

‘Depths are on every side of us; we walk
Upon the narrow ledge of perilous life.
That which we see is not the thing that is,
Or only part of it; and no man knows
The meaning of his own most simple prayers,
Or comprehends their issues; what he seeks
Touches a thousand circles, far and near,
Requiring force and agency and skill,
Which only God can either loose or bind.
The thing we ask for we can tell; the end
Of that for which we ask is far beyond us.
Sometimes before, sometimes behind us here
Our shadows fall, as shines the sun on us.
The shadowless is nowhere here on earth,
Its sun is never high enough for that.
All motion tends to rest; the universe
Must stagnate soon with infinite collapse,
Unless the hand that set its orbs a-rolling,
With impulse ever fresh shall keep them so.

‘The honours of the earth are fading fast;
Its garlands blanch in the fierce sun of time,
And crowns grow dim with age; the ancient thrones
That represent the royalty of ages,
And symbolize the coming monarchy,
Unpropped by aught save the unloving steel
Or more unloving gold, are giving way
And rocking, as the earthquake moves along
Beneath them; sceptre after sceptre drops
From palsied hands, that fain would grasp it still.
This Europe, like a fleet of war-barques, swings
Hither and thither on her straining cables,
With all the shifting winds, and seems each day
Just at the point of parting with her anchors
And going down, like the great city, struck
With angel-millstone, to arise no more.

‘The deep affections of the heart dry up,
Scorched by the lust of gold or power or pomp.
Still youth believes in beauty, feeds on flowers,
Drinks the dear sigh of one whose budding love
Is sweeter than all sweetnesses to him;
Then rushes into Mammon's foul embrace,
Wooing a world that gives no love for love.

‘O wooed and won and lost, enchantress-world!
Whose syren-song sends up the burning pulse
To fever-heat, and bids all good things die!
O wooed and won and lost! And with thee lost
All the bright gods and goddesses, which seemed
To make this earth to me a heaven below.
O wooed and won, fair world, but ever wooed
And won in vain; for whose false comeliness
I left the wooing of a fairer world,
That might by this time have been surely mine,
And in the gain of which I might have found
A heritage of beauty and of joy
Beyond the richest tenancy of time.

‘Ah! the poor soarage of this mortal wing!
We rise and fall; we fall and rise again:
Yet life is not all error, nor our past
All weakness and all failure; forasmuch
As we are Heaven's own offspring, there are thoughts
Within us which betray their birth divine.

‘Why seek I what is earthly? It departs,
And leaves me emptier. Why trust I man
Rather than Thee, the undeceiving One?
Thou ever-faithful, he so seldom true;
Thou near and living, he far off and cold!
I cast aside the finite and the low;
Nought will suffice but that which is divine.
Matter and sense are but the lowest round
Of the high ladder, whose invisible top
Rests on a throne, and lands me in a city
Whose light is love, eternal and divine.

‘'Tis said that out of death there cometh life,
That ashes are the soil whence freshly spring
The goodliest of the goodly trees of earth:
The seed we sow lives not except it die.
So did I see it when my idols perished,
When life died down, and when the cistern broke
Which for myself I had too fondly hewn.
So did I find it when the nightingale,
To which I had so fondly listened, died.
So did I know it when the earthquake smote
The brilliant shrine which hope and love had builded,
To be at once my temple and my home.

‘Then I discovered the now empty tomb
Of Him who, mightier than the grave, had gone
Up from its silence to the throne of light;
And in that sepulchre I found the link
(Long broken, and dissevered from its chain)
Between me and the heaven from which this earth
Had broken loose, like a rebellious star.
The risen Victor there had fought my fight
And won my palm; out of the tomb He had
Plucked immortality; its emptiness
But pledged to me the fulness of the life
Which out of death His victory had brought.
Another's power had done the mighty work,
And given me all its trophies and its fruits;
Another's life had won for me the life
Immortal, and my death had passed away.
The love that seemed to fill that vacant cell
Was more than morning to a soul like mine;
And in that desolate rock of Golgotha
There lay the firm foundation-stone on which
The new and fairer world is to be built,
Awaiting but the time when He shall say
To the cold ruins of this broken earth,
“Arise from your pale ashes, and put on
A beauty which ye never knew before.”
Then shall the chaos of six thousand years
Depart, and the long day of order dawn.

‘Old story tells,—it may be false, it may
Be true, I know not which,—that in Thy day
Of shame and agony upon the wood
Of Calvary, Thy shadow, Son of God,
Fell on the weeping robber at Thy side
Upon the cross, and under that strange wing
He refuge found from the oppressive heat;
And under it, to Paradise with Thee
He went rejoicing. Even so on me
Let that same shadow fall; it has not lost
Its sheltering power; and so upon this earth
Let it abide, that in the sultriness
Of scorching noons it may refresh this waste,
And bring back the lost blessing in its joy.

‘Ours is a world of symbols, sky and earth
Are ciphered o'er with type and imagery,
Big with bright truth in every atom here;
And nature (as we call it) is not that
Which is, but that which shall be after this,—
The outline of a universe where all
The thoughts of God are ripened into fulness,
Each segment rounded to a glorious whole.

‘The flowers look truer and more lovable,
More like their own sweet selves, at eve's pale hour,
Drenched in the dreamy light which twilight brings;
So earth is getting truer in the signs
Above us and beneath us, as it ripens
Into the grey of years; to us remain
The listening and the learning and the faith.

‘I would not sow the wind nor reap the storm;
I would not plough the waste and barren deep;
I would not shoot my arrows at the clouds,
Nor chase the thistle-down, nor count the sands:
I would live truly, doing a true work
In this my day of toil. I would not be
The fool or butterfly, to live unloved
And die in vain, unheeded and unmourned.
I would distribute thoughts where'er I go,
And scatter words that shall new-mould the world.
I would not be of those whose cry is change,
To whom all fixity is feebleness;
Whose mission is to uproot all rooted things,
Unfasten anchors, slacken keystones, or
Sponge out the lines of everlasting truth,
Let loose uncertainty, and set the crown
Of honour upon unbelief and doubt,
Giving us doubly chaos back again.’