Poems by Hartley Coleridge With a Memoir of his Life by his Brother. In Two Volumes |
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ON THE LATE DR. ARNOLD. |
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 | Poems by Hartley Coleridge |  |
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ON THE LATE DR. ARNOLD.
Spirit of the Dead!
Though the pure faith of Him that was on earth
Thy subject and thy Lord forbids a prayer—
Forbids me to invoke thee as of yore:—
(Weak souls, that dared not meet their God alone,
Sought countenance and kind companionship
Of some particular saint, whose knees had grazed
The very rock on which they knelt, whose blood
Had made or sanctified the gushing well,
Round which their fond, mistaken piety
Had built a quaint confine of sculptured stone:—)
Yet may I hope that wheresoe'er he is,
Beneath the altar, by the great white throne,
In Abraham's bosom, or amid the deep
Of Godhead, blended with eternal light,
One ray may reach him from the humble heart
That thanks our God for all that he has been.
What he is now we know not: he will be
A beautiful likeness of the God that gave
Him work to do, which he did do so well.
Whom Jesus loves, to them he gives the grace
For Him to do and suffer in the world;
To suffer for the world was His alone.
But he in whom we joyed—for whom we mourn—
Did he not suffer? Worldly men say, No!
Of ills which they call ill he had not many;
The poverty which makes the very poor
Begrudge a morsel to their very child,
Was never his; nor did he “pine in thought,”
Seeing the lady of his love possessed
By a much richer and no better man.
To him the lady of his love was wed,
Soon as his manhood authorised a wife;
And though the mother of his many babes,
To him she still was young, and fair, and fresh,
As when the golden ring slipp'd from his hand
Upon her virgin finger.
Though the pure faith of Him that was on earth
Thy subject and thy Lord forbids a prayer—
Forbids me to invoke thee as of yore:—
(Weak souls, that dared not meet their God alone,
Sought countenance and kind companionship
Of some particular saint, whose knees had grazed
The very rock on which they knelt, whose blood
Had made or sanctified the gushing well,
Round which their fond, mistaken piety
Had built a quaint confine of sculptured stone:—)
Yet may I hope that wheresoe'er he is,
Beneath the altar, by the great white throne,
In Abraham's bosom, or amid the deep
Of Godhead, blended with eternal light,
One ray may reach him from the humble heart
That thanks our God for all that he has been.
201
A beautiful likeness of the God that gave
Him work to do, which he did do so well.
Whom Jesus loves, to them he gives the grace
For Him to do and suffer in the world;
To suffer for the world was His alone.
But he in whom we joyed—for whom we mourn—
Did he not suffer? Worldly men say, No!
Of ills which they call ill he had not many;
The poverty which makes the very poor
Begrudge a morsel to their very child,
Was never his; nor did he “pine in thought,”
Seeing the lady of his love possessed
By a much richer and no better man.
To him the lady of his love was wed,
Soon as his manhood authorised a wife;
And though the mother of his many babes,
To him she still was young, and fair, and fresh,
As when the golden ring slipp'd from his hand
Upon her virgin finger.
Yet he suffered
Such pains and throes as only good men feel:
For he assumed the task to rear the boy,
The bold, proud boy unto a Christian man.
'Twas not with childhood that he had to do,
Its wayward moods and ready penitence,
That still is prompt to kiss, if not the rod,
At least the hand that wields it; not to watch
Sweet instinct reaching after distant reason,
And mere affection trained to duteous love
(Though such the solace of his happy home,
Else how had he the hard behest endured?)—
Nor was it all—oh, bliss! if it had been—
To teach the young capacious intellect
How beauteous Greece and Rome, the child foredoomed
To catch the sceptre from its parent, spake,
Fitting high thoughts with words, and words with deeds.
'Twas his to struggle with that perilous age
Which claims for manhood's vice the privilege
Of boyhood;—when young Dionysus seems
All glorious as he burst upon the East,
A jocund and a welcome conqueror;
And Aphrodite, sweet as from the sea
She rose and floated in her pearly shell,
A laughing girl;—when lawless will erects
Honour's gay temple on the mount of God,
And meek obedience bears the coward's brand;
While Satan, in celestial panoply,
With Sin, his lady, smiling by his side,
Defies all heaven to arms! 'Twas his to teach,
Day after day, from pulpit and from desk,
That the most childish sin which man can do
Is yet a sin which Jesus never did
When Jesus was a child, and yet a sin
For which, in lowly pain, He lived and died:
That for the bravest sin that e'er was praised
The King Eternal wore the crown of thorns.
In him was Jesus crucified again;
For every sin which he could not prevent
Stuck in him like a nail. His heart bled for it
As it had been a foul sin of his own.
Heavy his cross, and stoutly did he bear it,
Even to the foot of holy Calvary;
And if at last he sunk beneath the weight,
There were not wanting souls whom he had taught
The way to Paradise, that, in white robes,
Thronged to the gate to hail their shepherd home!
Such pains and throes as only good men feel:
For he assumed the task to rear the boy,
The bold, proud boy unto a Christian man.
'Twas not with childhood that he had to do,
202
That still is prompt to kiss, if not the rod,
At least the hand that wields it; not to watch
Sweet instinct reaching after distant reason,
And mere affection trained to duteous love
(Though such the solace of his happy home,
Else how had he the hard behest endured?)—
Nor was it all—oh, bliss! if it had been—
To teach the young capacious intellect
How beauteous Greece and Rome, the child foredoomed
To catch the sceptre from its parent, spake,
Fitting high thoughts with words, and words with deeds.
'Twas his to struggle with that perilous age
Which claims for manhood's vice the privilege
Of boyhood;—when young Dionysus seems
All glorious as he burst upon the East,
A jocund and a welcome conqueror;
203
She rose and floated in her pearly shell,
A laughing girl;—when lawless will erects
Honour's gay temple on the mount of God,
And meek obedience bears the coward's brand;
While Satan, in celestial panoply,
With Sin, his lady, smiling by his side,
Defies all heaven to arms! 'Twas his to teach,
Day after day, from pulpit and from desk,
That the most childish sin which man can do
Is yet a sin which Jesus never did
When Jesus was a child, and yet a sin
For which, in lowly pain, He lived and died:
That for the bravest sin that e'er was praised
The King Eternal wore the crown of thorns.
In him was Jesus crucified again;
For every sin which he could not prevent
Stuck in him like a nail. His heart bled for it
As it had been a foul sin of his own.
Heavy his cross, and stoutly did he bear it,
Even to the foot of holy Calvary;
And if at last he sunk beneath the weight,
There were not wanting souls whom he had taught
The way to Paradise, that, in white robes,
Thronged to the gate to hail their shepherd home!
Many of the holy wells are said to have sprung from the blood of Martyrs: for example, St. Winifred's in Wales.
“Rome, the child,” &c. Alluding to the heathen prophecy, that Metis, Thetis, &c., were destined to produce a child more potent than his sire, which gave Jupiter so much alarm.
Dionysus, Aphrodite—Bacchus, Venus. But the Greek divinities were not originally identical with the Roman idols, by whose names they are generally called. Dionysus, or Bacchus, was in all probability an Indian type of the sun, or rather of the great productive energy of the Universe, said to be the youngest of the gods, because his worship was last introduced into Greece. There can be no doubt that the Greeks blended the traditions of their local heroes with the astronomical mythology derived from Egypt and Phœnicia, of which the earliest form survives in India, especially among the wide-spreading Boodhists.
| Poems by Hartley Coleridge | |