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225

ODE TO JERUSALEM.

I

Jerusalem, Jerusalem!
If any love thee not, on them
May all thy judgments fall;
For every hope that crowns our earth,
All birth-gifts of her heavenly birth
To thee she owes them all!

II

Deep was thy guilt, and deep thy woe;
The brand of Cain upon thy brow
Each shore has felt thy tread:
No Altar now is thine; no Priest;
Upon thy hearth no paschal feast:
The paschal moon is dead.

III

When from their height the Nations fall
The kind grave o'er them strews her pall;
They die as mortals die:
But He who looked thee in the face
Stamped there that look no years erase
His own on Calvary.

IV

Awe-struck on thee men gaze, and yet
Confess thy greatness, own our debt
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And trembling still revere
The Royal Family of Man
Supporting thus its blight and ban
With constancy austere.

V

Those Sciences by us so prized
The sternness of thy strength despised,
Devices light and vain
Of men who lack the might to live
In that repose contemplative
Which Asian souls maintain.

VI

By thee the Book of Life was writ;
And, wander where it may, with it
Thy soul abroad is sent:
Wherever towers a Christian Church
Palace of Earth, Heaven's sacred Porch
It is thy monument.

VII

Thy minstrel songs, like sounds wind-borne
From harps on Babel boughs forlorn
O'er every clime have swept;
And Christian mothers yet grow pale
With echoes faint of Rachel's wail;
Our maids with Ruth have wept.

VIII

Thou bind'st the Present with the Past
The prime of ages with the last;
The golden chain art thou
Whereon alone all fates are hung
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Of nations springing, or upsprung
Earthward once more to bow.

IX

Across the World's tumultuous gate
Thou flingest thy shadow's giant weight;
The mightiest birth of Time
For all her pangs she may not bear
Until her feast she bids thee share
And mount her throne sublime.

X

Far other gaze than that he pours
On empires round thee sunk, and shores
That once in victory shone,
Far other gaze and paler frown
The great Saturnian star bends down
On cedared Lebanon.

XI

He knows that thou, obscured and dim
Thus wrestling all night long with him
Shall victor rise at last:
Destined thy mystic towers to rear
More high than his declining sphere
When, downward on the blast

XII

God's mightiest Angel leaps and stands,
A Shape o'er-shadowing seas and lands;
And swears by Him who swore
A faithful oath and kind to Man
Ere worlds were shaped or years began,
That ‘Time shall be no more.’
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