 | The Poetical Works of (Richard Monckton Milnes) Lord Houghton |  |
PALM LEAVES.
THE GREEK AT CONSTANTINOPLE.
In stern magnificence look down
On the bright lake and stream of sea,
And glittering theatre of town:
Above the throng of rich kiosks,
Above the towers in triple tire,
Above the domes of loftiest mosques,
These pinnacles of death aspire.
Where white and gold and brilliant hue
Contrast with Nature's gravest glooms,
As these again with heaven's clear blue:
The city's multitudinous hum,
So far, yet strikes the listening ear,—
But what are thousands to the sum
Of millions calmly sleeping here?
The Muslim loves to rest at last,
Loves to recross the band of sea
That parts him from his people's past.
'Tis well to live and lord o'er those
By whom his sires were most renowned,
But his fierce heart finds best repose
In this traditionary ground.
I gave my sight full range below,
Reclining on a grassy ledge,
Itself a grave, or seeming so:
And that huge city flaunting bright,
That crowded port and busy shore,
With roofs and minarets steeped in light,
Seemed but a gaudy tomb the more.
From Greek and Roman power combined,
From strength, that with a world had coped,
Matched to the queen of human mind;—
From all the wisdom, might, and grace,
That Fancy's gods to man had given,
Blent in one empire and one race,
By the true faith in Christ and Heaven.
Are soonest and most harshly torn;
The wise could scarce discriminate
That evening splendour from the morn;
Though we, sad students of the past,
Can trace the lurid twilight line
That lies between the first and last,
Who bore the name of Constantine.
When I perceived that by me stood
A Grecian youth of earnest mien,
Well-suiting my reflective mood:
And when he spoke, his words were tuned
Harmonious to my present mind,
As if his spirit had communed
With mine, while I had there reclined.
Beyond the compass of the eye,
And on a spot like this can more
Than charms of form and hue descry,—
Take off this mask of beauty,—scan
The face of things with truth severe,
Think, as becomes a Christian man,
Of us thy Christian brethren here!
When Europe echoed, terror-riven,
That a new foot was on the earth,
And a new name came down from Heaven:
When over Calpe's straits and steeps
The Moor had bridged his royal road,
And Othman's sons from Asia's deeps
The conquests of the Cross o'erflowed.
Had failed upon the plain of Tours,
The fate, whose course you know so well,
This foul subjection had been yours:
Where then had been the long renown
France can from sire to son deliver?
Where English freedom rolling down,
One widening, one continuous, river?
The tale was told in Christian halls,
How Sobieski turned to flight
The Muslim from Vienna's walls:
How, when his horse triumphant trod
The burgher's richest robes upon,
The ancient words rose loud—‘From God
A man was sent whose name was John.’
Prescription to such doom as ours,
That Grecian hearts can ever live
Contented serfs of barbarous powers:
More than six hundred years had past,
Since Moorish hosts could Spain o'erwhelm,
Yet Boabdil was thrust at last,
Lamenting, from Grenada's realm.
From this usurped unnatural throne,
The Turk is driven, 'tis surely meet
That we again should hold our own:
Be but Byzantium's native sign
Of Cross on Crescent once unfurled,
And Greece shall guard by right divine
The portals of the Eastern world.
The Persian myriads stood at bay,
The spacious East lay down unmanned
Beneath the Macedonian's sway:
Alas! that Greek could turn on Greek—
Fountain of all our woes and shame—
The fragments of the Grecian name.
The fearful race whose infant strength
Stretches its arms of conquest forth,
To grasp the world in breadth and length?
They cry ‘That ye and we are old,
And worn with luxuries and cares,
And they alone are fresh and bold,
Time's latest and most honoured heirs!
Alas for men that think and feel,
If once beside this Bosphorus
Shall stamp Sclavonia's frozen heel!
Oh! place us boldly in the van,
And ere we yield this narrow sea,
The past shall hold within its span
At least one more Thermopylæ.”
The Turks adopted the sign of the Crescent from Byzantium after the conquest: the Cross above the Crescent is found on many ruins of the Grecian city; among others, on the Genoese castle on the Bosphorus. The Virgin standing on the Crescent is another common sign.
THE TURK AT CONSTANTINOPLE TO THE FRANK.
The land that once was Greece and still was Rome;
We deemed that his and our dominion
Was there as sure as in our Eastern home:
We never thought a single hour to pause
Till the wide West had owned Mohammed's laws.
The truth revealed by one plain-seeming man
Cut off the cavil, thundered down the gibe,
And formed a nation to its lofty plan:
What barrier could its wave of victory stem?
Not thy religious walls, Jerusalem!
Might for some years the ripe success delay;
But when we once stood firm on Europe's coast,
'Twas as the dawning of that final day,
That could not close till Islam's flag was furled
O'er the last ruins of the Roman world.
Long ere we crushed to dust the Grecian name:
It was no Western to whom Bajazid
Surrendered his long heritage of fame;
The shame of Hungary was not less sure,
Because your victor crouched before Timour.
By Lladislaus paid on Varna's plain:
For many a Knight there met unhonoured death,
When, like a god of vengeance, rose again
Old Amurath from his far home and cried,
“Now Jesus combats on Mohammed's side!”
When seated safe on this imperial throne;
Witness the wonders wrought before Belgrade,
The fields whose very loss none blushed to own;
Witness St. John's proud island-chevaliers,
Thrust from their lordship of two hundred years.
And the bright Crescent haunted Europe's eye,
Would scour the Vatican, ere he could die:
Why was our arm of conquest shortened? Why?
Ask him whose will is o'er us, like the sky.
Still echoes with the Muslim's fervent prayers;
The just successor of the Khaleefate
Still on his brow the sign of empire wears;
We hold our wealth without reserve or fear;
And yet we know we are but tented here.
And yet these realms are neither theirs nor ours,
Sultan and subject are alike the tool
Of Europe's ready guile or banded powers;
Against the lords of continent and sea
What can one nation do, one people be?
Of wives' disdain, and children's thoughtless woe,
Of Christian triumph o'er the Prophet's name,
Of Russia's smile beneath her mask of snow:
Let us return to Asia's fair domain,
Let us in truth possess the East again!
We you no more: ye take our good for ill;
Ye scorn what we esteem man's happiest lot—
Perfect submission to creative will;
Ye would rejoice to watch from us depart
Our ancient temperance—our peace of heart.
Ye will destroy us, not with open swords,
Not with such arms as brave men must not fear,
But with the poison'd shafts of subtle words:
Your blank indifference for our living creed
Would make us paltry Infidels indeed.
For love of Duty, and delight in Prayer?
How are we wiser that our minds are tost
By winds of knowledge on a sea of care?
How are we better that we hardly fear
To break the laws our fathers held most dear?
The noble garb in nature's wisdom given,
And turban that, on every Muslim's brow,
Was as a crown at once for earth and heaven:—
Sleeps in yon deep unwielded by the son.
Our Father's shadows welcome us once more;
Back to the glories of the Khaleefate,
Back to the faith we loved, the dress we wore,
When in one age the world could well contain
Haroòn Er-Rasheed and your Charlemagne!
A.D. 1444. A copy of the treaty, the monument of Christian perfidy had been displayed in the front of battle; and it is said that the Sultan, in his distress, lifting his eyes and his hands to heaven, implored the protection of the God of Truth, and called on the prophet Jesus himself, to avenge the impious mockery of his name and religion.—Gibbon, chap. lxvii.
The sword of Mohammed the Second, worn at the conquest of Constantinople, had always been religiously preserved in a mosque untainted by the foot of the Infidel. The late Sultan put it on, the day he went to visit the large man-of-war which bears his name, when first completed: on mounting the ship's side, the sword, which was a small short one, got detached, and fell into the strait, lost irrecoverably;—this was regarded at the time as a most unhappy omen.
THE HAREEM.
By many a complicated line,—
Behind the lattice closely laced
With filagree of choice design,—
Behind the lofty garden-wall,
Where stranger face can ne'er surprise,—
That inner world her all-in-all,
The Eastern Woman lives and dies.
The narrow circle where she rests;
His will the single perfect law,
That scarce with choice her mind molests;
Their birth and tutelage the ground
And meaning of her life on earth—
She knows not elsewhere could be found
The measure of a woman's worth.
An Idol in a secret shrine,
Where one high-priest alone dispels
The solitude of charms divine:
And in his honour has her own,
And dreams not that the love she gives
Can be too much for him alone.
Above the scent of lemon groves,
Where bubbling fountains kiss the wind,
And birds make music to their loves,—
She lives a kind of faëry life,
In sisterhood of fruits and flowers,
Unconscious of the outer strife,
That wears the palpitating hours.
In pleasure's and in passion's place,
Her duteous loyalty supplies
The presence of departed grace:
So hopes she, by untiring truth,
To win the bliss to share with him,
Those glories of celestial youth,
That time can never taint or dim.
As in the open Western home,
Over our being's busy foam;
Through latitudes of varying faith
Thus trace we still her mission sure,
To lighten life, to sweeten death,
And all for others to endure.
Checks the wild foot that knows no fear,
Yet shrinks, as if from sacrilege—
When rapine comes thy precincts near:
Existence, whose precarious thread
Hangs on the tyrant's mood and nod,
Beneath thy roof its anxious head
Rests as within the house of God.
Compelled another's will to scan,
Another's favour forced to crave
There is the subject still the man:
There is the form that none but he
Can touch,—the face that he alone
Of living men has right to see;—
Not He who fills the Prophet's throne.
Honours the female heart, that blends
With thought of life's sublimest ends,
Ne'er to the Eastern home deny
Its lesser, yet not humble praise,
To guard one pure humanity
Amid the stains of evil days.
It is supposed to be left to the will of the husband to decide whether his wife should be united to him in a future state: but this does not imply that her happiness after death depends upon him.
THE MOSQUE.
Surmounted by an ample dome,
Or, in some lands that favoured lie,
With centre open to the sky,
But roofed with archèd cloisters round,
That mark the consecrated bound,
And shade the niche to Mekkeh turned,
By which two massive lights are burned;
With pulpit whence the sacred word
Expounded on great days is heard;
With fountain fresh, where, ere they pray,
Men wash the soil of earth away;
With shining minaret, thin and high,
From whose fine-trelliced balcony
Announcement of the hours of prayer
Is uttered to the silent air;
Such is the Mosque—the holy place,
Where faithful men of every race,
Meet at their ease, and face to face.
More manifest, or more to fear;
Not that the glory of his face
Is circumscribed by any space;
In court or chamber, mart or street,
For purposes of gain or pleasure,
For friendliness or social leisure,—
So, for the greatest of all ends
To which intelligence extends,
The worship of the Lord, whose will
Created and sustains us still,
And honour of the Prophet's name,
By whom the saving message came,
Believers meet together here,
And hold these precincts very dear.
Unstained by touch of shodden feet—
A decent and delightful seat!
Where, after due devotions paid,
And legal ordinance obeyed,
Men may in happy parlance join,
And gay with serious thought combine;
May ask the news from lands away,
May fix the business of to-day;
Or, with “God-willing,” at the close,
To-morrow's hopes and deeds dispose.
With silver-sounding laugh and shout,
No more disturbing those that pray,
Than the poor birds, that fluttering fly
Among the rafters there on high,
Or seek at times, with grateful hop,
The corn fresh-sprinkled on the top.
Should hurt this sacred family,—
Lest inconsiderate words should wound
Devout adorers with their sound,—
Lest careless feet should stain the floor
With dirt and dust from out the door,—
'Tis well that custom should protect
The place with prudence circumspect,
And let no unbeliever pass
The threshold of the faithful mass;
That as each Muslim his Hareem
Guards even from a jealous dream,
So should no alien feeling scathe
This common home of public faith,
So should its very name dispel
The presence of the infidel.
A building raised by human hand,
Most honour to the men of prayer,
Whose mosque is in them everywhere!
Who, amid revel's wildest din,
In war's severest discipline,
On rolling deck, in thronged bazaar,
In stranger lands, however far,
However different in their reach
Of thought, in manners, dress, or speech,—
Will quietly their carpet spread,
To Mekkeh turn the humble head,
And, as if blind to all around,
And deaf to each distracting sound,
In ritual language God adore,
In spirit to his presence soar,
And, in the pauses of the prayer,
Rest, as if rapt in glory there!
Many of the mosques possess funds dedicated to the support of birds and other animals: one at Cairo has a large boat at the top filled with corn as fast as it is consumed, and another possessed an estate bequesthed to it to give food to the homeless cats of the city. Most of these funds have, however, now passed, with those of higher charities, into Mehemet Ali's own pocket.
MOHAMMEDANISM.
Were met by early foes,
Who oft assault by strategy concealed,
And oft in force arose;
Her pleasurable faith,
At call of one who lived in that he died,
And preached that Life was Death;
Blent fragments of the new,
Though every master held himself the chief
Discerner of the true;
Th' Idea that long ago
Had ruled the Hebrew mind occasion caught
To strike a final blow.
Was sown a living seed,
Strong these contending mysteries to displace
By one plain ancient creed.
The Patriarch name begot,
Rose a new Prophet, simple to behold,
Cast in a humble lot;
Let half his life go by,
And then stood up a man of faith and fate,
That could the world defy.
He preached, and little more,
Resting the weight of all he had to say
On what was said before.
The streams that spring and run,
The clouds that with regenerate life supply
The havoc of the sun:
The camel and the palm,
To them for sustenance or service sent,
And wondrous herbs of balm;
From one Creative will,
As well the bee that 'mid the blossoms hums,
As human pride and skill.
Before Him humbly bend,
And, willing or unwilling, earth and heaven
Work out His solemn end.
The Absolute, the One,—
With whom a thousand years are as an hour,
And earth as moon or sun.
His creature men permit
The puny fragments of their mortal wills
Against his might to set?
With objects of the eye
And fanciful devices to divide
His awful monarchy.
Command the only Lord?
Adorers or adored?
But these are weak and frail:
—By men and angels every living hour
Father, Creator, hail!
He spoke in lowly words,
As one who wanted not or power or pelf,
Or more than God affords;
Of God's majestic will,
In his whole being resolutely bent
That mission to fulfil.
Were Nature's, not his own,
Teaching that God was everywhere revealed—
Not in His words alone.
To please inconstant youth,
But one who uttered, without shows and seems,
The serious facts of truth;
Were parts to mortals given
Of that eternal Book of thought divine—
The Prototype in heaven:
Of sin that Adam saw
In Pentateuch, and Gospel, and Kuràn
Enunciates Allah's law.
The prophet lineage run,
Down till the fulness of due time unfolds
Immaculate Mary's son.
The great commission past,—
Mohammed, the Apostle of the Wild,
The purest and the last.
Rejecting other claim
To power or honour than attends of right
The Apostolic name.
Unhastened, undelayed,
Fixed to consign to their eternal homes
All men that God has made:
And, like a ball of sand,
God shall take up this our terrestrial sphere,
In the hollow of his hand;
Each man shall stand alone,
Before his judge, and, once for ever, win
A prison or a throne.
Shall seek in whom to trust,
And when his idols help him not, shall cry
“O God! that I were dust!”
A glorious light shall play,
And angels herald them to Paradise,
To bliss without decay;
And ever-budding flowers;
Rivers that cool in brightest noon-day run,
Nor need the shade of bowers;
To which the laden trees
Bend at desire, and every hour disclose
Fresh tastes and fragrances;
By angel-children plied,
And love without satiety or stain
For bridegroom or for bride.
Awaits the bolder few,
That plunge their being in the Infinite,
And rise to life anew.
The new religion wore,
And in new words men followed, as is wont,
Precepts they scorn'd before.
From tribes to nations rose,
And open enmities and ribald gibes
Grew feeble to oppose.
This simple, noble name;
And reckoned life a thing of little store,
A transitory game.
That led the Muslim forth,
And wonder not that they who follow it
Should conquer half the earth.
No fear and fear no loss?
One only thing—they could not overthrow
The kingdom of the Cross.
Beyond their spirits' range,
A Truth for which the faith they represent
Had nothing to exchange.
One God the Orient still
Adores through many a realm of mighty span,
A God of Power and Will—
Rests utterly apart
From all the vast Creations of His might,
From Nature, Man, and Art:—
All other beings weigh
No more than in the potter's reckoning stand
The workings of his clay:—
To save or to destroy;
And to eternal pain predestinate,
As to eternal joy:—
Demanding simple awe,
Beyond all principles of good or ill,
Above idea of law.
To which the bounds belong
Only of that unalterable line
Disparting right from wrong:—
The issues of free-will,
By its own sacrifice can expiate
The penalties of ill.
Of fallen nature raised,
By inward strife and moral discipline,
Higher than e'er debased,—
From highest heaven to meet
The poorest wandering spirit that returns
To its Creator's feet.
At once to God and man,
Author Himself and part of the profound
And providential plan:
Himself the living sign,
How by God's grace the fallen sons of earth
May be once more divine.
Were different powers of strife;
Mohammed's truth lay in a holy Book,
Christ's in a sacred Life.
And realms of thought expand,
The Letter stands without expanse or range,
Stiff as a dead man's hand;
The Spirit Christ has shed
Flows through the ripening ages fresh and warm,
More felt than heard or read.
And closest ties of race,
May guard Mohammed's precept and decrees,
Through many a tract of space,
The sapless tree must fall,
Nor let the form one time did well to take
Be tyrant over all.
Bringing the blessèd hour,
When in Himself the God of Love shall merge
The God of Will and Power.
Mohammed always professes to be renewing old truths, not to be revealing new ones: he seems to be always wishing to restore the patriarchal state of thought and feeling, with the addition of a distinct faith in a future life and in a day of final retribution.
The frequent recurrence of this notion evidently applies to the doctrine of the Trinity and the worship of the Virgin as much as to that of Idols; it is singular that Mohammed considers the two as equally common to all Christians; it has been suggested that the sect of Collyridians, who used to sacrifice cakes (KOLLURI/DES) to St Mary, had come prominently under his notice: this is unlikely and unnecessary; the mere title of the Mother of God was enough to excite his hostility, as that of the Son did; and his was not the mind to make the philosophical distinction.
I ask for no payment; I am paid at the hand of God—the Master of the universe. Kuràn, chap. xxvi. ver. 109.
The archetye or “mother” of all these sacred books, is supposed to have existed in Heaven from the beginning of things: thus the Prophet always speaks of the Kuràn as a thing completed from the very beginning: thus, too, every verse is as much the Kuràn as the whole book. This adoration of the Word has had a peculiar effect on the Arabic language,—every word in the Kuràn being declared, as a matter of faith, to be pure Arabic, even those demonstrably Persian. The copies of the Kuràn printed by order of Mahomet Ali have not yet been sanctioned by the ecclesiastical authorities: they say, “they cannot answer for the errors of the press, some of them probably intentional, Infidels being occasionally employed in the work. The copyists, it must be remembered, are a strong interest in the East.
Mohammed seems to have attached so little importance to miraculous events—regarding the whole world as one incessant miracle—that his recognition of the supernatural birth of Christ does not imply any acknowledgment of his divine nature. It still remains a subject of inquiry, from what sources he derived his notions of the theory of Christianity, or the person of its author. Not, probably, from books: for if his assertion (chap. xxix. v. 47) that he could neither read nor write had not been correct, it could have been disproved by many persons present, who had known him from his youth; and Toland's theory of his instruction by the apocryphal gospel of Barnabas has been put an end to by the discovery of the forgery of that work, written with the very intent of exciting this notion, long after Mohammed's era, in Italy or Spain. The Syrian monk, Sergius, is a rather obscure personage: Mohammed only knew him in his early days, and he is hardly likely to have filled the mind of a heathen boy with strange legends and perverted facts. The Christianity of the Kuràn is, in all probability, the Arabian tradition of that time, formed out of the recollections of the doctrine which spread very early into Arabia, but did not meet with much success there, and the relations of the Nestorian fugitives, who would not scruple to attribute many corruptions to the orthodox body. The Infancy, and other apocryphal gospels, are derived from a similar source, and hence their frequent coincidence with Mohammedan notions.
Oriental mysticism distinguishes itself from Christian by the predominance of the sensual character: it is the rapture of the soul, the ecstatic interfusion of pleasure and pain, the yearning towards the absorption of self in the Infinite, which is at the heart of the spiritual religion of the East, while with us there is much more sentiment, and a variety according to the character of the individual, unknown to Oriental Pantheism.
Mohammed carries out the doctrine of predestination with a merciless logic—“Would you force men to become believers? How can a soul believe without the will of God?” Chap. x. v. 99. “There shall be a great number of those that are saved among the ancient peoples, but few among those of modern times.” Chap. lvi. v. 13. The eternity of hell does not seem to be doubted.
THE SONG OF THE WAHABEES.
These Protestants of Mohammedanism owe their origin to the Sheykh Mohammed Ibn-Abd-El-Wahhab, who founded or incorporated them into a religion and political sect in 1745. They professed to restore Islam to its primitive purity, and to establish an ascetic morality throughout its followers. Like some other religious Reformers, they committed great devastation in places reputed holy, and gratified by the same acts their hatred of superstition and their love of gain. They forbade all luxury in dress and habits of life, and even interdicted the use of the pipe—almost a necessary of existence to the Oriental. The attention of the Porte was not long ago directed to their increasing power in Arabia and the molestations they offered to the pilgrims to the Holy Cities; and the present Pasha of Egypt, after many losses and repulses, succeeded in completely subduing them. Individuals of these tenets are still occasionally to be met with, but it is very difficult to draw from them any information or acknowledgment.
Shall be o'erlaid by dreams and thoughts of none or little worth;
We will not that the noblest Man, that ever lived and died,
Should be for canting, cozening, Saints in reverence set aside.
Mohammed took his lot with us, a man with other men;
And thus in our due love to him, and awe for God alone,
We bless his memory as the chest that holds the precious stone.
Praises and prayers from faithful crowds to Allah's name should rise.
The best of Mosques is still the tent where earnest Muslims meet,
The best of Minarets is the rock that desert tempests beat.
We all are Saints who read the Book and worship from our youth.
Men are no happier than they were for all El-Azhar's lore,
And if our Faith wins Paradise, can knowledge win us more?
Should leave their wholesome natural ends and turn to His despite;
That men should change the sweetest flowers to bitter poison weeds:
The Book has said that “everyone is hostage for his deeds.”
No pipe or downy bed for him, but horse and sword in hand;
Let they who will consume their lives in joys of vicious ease,—
The Prophet's word will scarce prevail with Preachers such as these.
The shawls of rich Cashmere look best on our Circassian maids;
We wear the homely woollen woof, such as Mohammed wore,
Nor steal from herbs the drunken dreams that he with wine forswore.
For Life is not a jest, and God will not create in vain,—
And thus we will not rest while earth has idols still to fall;
Till Islam is indeed Islam, and Allah God for all!
The whole notion of Hagiology is totally at variance with the original idea of Islam: nevertheless there is no city without its mosque, sanctified by the relics of the Prophet or his family, and hardly a district without the tomb of its local Saint. Part of the dress of the Prophet is yearly soaked in a large quantity of water, which is bottled into small vials, and sent to all the great dignitaries of the Empire. So vain have been the Prophet's efforts to establish a practical Monotheism.
| The Poetical Works of (Richard Monckton Milnes) Lord Houghton | |