University of Virginia Library

Three hundred years ago, or more,
In Portugal, at Santarem,
Between whose walls the Tagus flows,
Washing with lazy waves the shore,
A stately monastery rose,
Begirt with palaces, for there
The King in summer did repair
With his light loves, of course for prayer,
For their confessors came with them!
A busy place; for in the streets,
Where one to-day the muleteer meets,
Jogging in dust with jangling bells,
Rude as the mountains where he dwells,
Grave merchants met, who fortunes drew
From world-old lands discovered new
Beyond the dark and dangerous seas
By followers of the Genoese;
These, and the crews their ships who manned,
Whose cheeks with tropic suns were tanned,
Who rolled their costly bales ashore
With songs like ocean's stormy roar.
A holy spot was Santarem,
Famed for its tall cathedral spires,
That caught the morning's earliest fires,
And for the chapels under them,
Peopled with priests and sandalled friars;
Famed for its monastery more,
For where 'twas builded years before
The Virgin in a Vision shone,
A lady on a golden throne,
Who in her arms an Infant bore.
To mark the spot they builded there.
A monastery, large and fair,
Whose doors were open night and day,
Inviting all who passed that way
To enter freely, and to stay,
If when within its walls they stood,
And saw its pious brotherhood,
The simple lives they led seemed good;
As good they were to many then,
World-wearied, meditative men,
Who, till their spirits found release,
Desired forgetfulness and peace.
One of this sort one summer day,
Came to the monastery gate,
Burdened with some mysterious fate
That made him prematurely gray.
He may have been a banished lord,
Bereft of his ancestral state;
A soldier who had sheathed his sword,
Repenting deeds of blood too late.
Whoe'er he was, he sought the prior,
And from that hour became a friar;
Adopted all the brothers' ways,
And patterned after theirs his days;
Rose when they rose at matin bell,
And went when they went to his cell.
Dead to the world, which missed him not,
But which he clung to with regret,
He struggled sternly to forget
Something that would not be forgot—
Struggled in silence and alone,
Asking no aid except his own
The spectre of his soul to lay;
For he was never known to pray,
Either at morning's dewy prime,
Or Angelus, or vesper chime,
Though at the service of the dead
He closed his eyes, and bowed his head.
He lived not wholly understood
Among that simple brotherhood.
They pitied him for his distress,
That never sought relief in prayer,
But loved him for his gentleness,
And for the comfort he was there,
For many a weary heart and head
By him was sweetly comforted.
His was the hand, when they were ill,
And tossing on the bed of pain,
That gave the draught, and his the skill
That nursed them back to life again.
Such Frey Bernardo was, and so
The years with him did come and go,
Monotonous and dull and slow,
Till one dark day the pestilence
Broke out in Santarem, from whence,
Smitten with fear, the people fled,
Leaving the dying and the dead.
Then he arose in righteous ire,
Like one who has been calm too long,
And with quick steps, and eyes of fire,
And late-recovered manhood strong,
Went where the pestilence was worst,
And where they needed most his care,
Among the outcast and accursed,
Where death was in the tainted air:
He mitigated mortal pains
In cells where prisoners lay in chains,
And in the close dark hold of ships
Moistened the sailor's fevered lips:
Where the leech feared to go he went,
And to the sick and dying lent
Patience to live and strength to die,
And faith to pale priests standing by
To give them the last sacrament.
All man could do he did to save
His stricken fellows from the grave,
If ever doubtful, certain then
That God was served by serving men.
Before the pestilence was done
The shadows of departed lives
Filled all the streets of Santarem;
Husbands lamented for their wives,
The widowed mother for her son,
And little children, left with none
To comfort or to care for them,
Wept for their parents up and down
That dark, depopulated town.
The heart of Frey Bernardo, wrung
At sights and sounds of sorrow, grew
Womanly o'er these waifs, who drew
Tears to his eyes, they were so young,
And so unfriended and alone;
And two, whose mother he had known
In better days, and might have grown
To love, if fate had not denied,
And who—poor thing!—the hour she died,
Giving to each the parting kiss,
Had placed their little hands in his,
He fathered—he could do no less,
He pitied so their helplessness.
When the last sufferer was at rest,
And hushed the last, sad funeral knell,
He clasped the children to his breast
And bore them to his lonely cell.
Whether the saintly brotherhood,
To whom their cloistral solitude
And still, set ways alone seemed good,
Would let them stay with him, or he
Would have to shelter them elsewhere,
Troubled him at first, but needlessly,
The children were so welcome there.
What they to Frey Bernardo were
He could not, if he would, have told,
Nor how from his soul's sepulchre
The stone had suddenly been rolled,
And he had shuffled off at last
The stifling cerements of the Past.
But so it was. And he began
To put his old dead self away,
No more the lone and loveless man
Whose head and heart alike were gray:
For what a few short days before
Had pity been for their distress,
Had deepened into something more,
And now was anxious tenderness.
Sweet was the light in their young faces,
For the swift hours restored their bloom,
Unconscious of their childish graces
As dewy buds in secret places
Of their rathe beauty and perfume.
Perpetual sunshine filled his cell
Since he had fetched the children there,
And sweet, low voices, seldom still;
For long before the matin bell
Summoned the drowsy monks to prayer,
Before the earliest of the birds
Had piped its first, faint morning trill,
They wakened him with loving words.
He feared, in separating them
From all the children whom they knew
In their past life at Santarem,
He might, perhaps, have done them wrong
(And may have done so—who can tell?),
There was so little he could do
To make them happy in his cell,
And shorten for them the long days.
They had a hundred little plays
That kept the days from being long.
Pablo, the youngest, had his toys,
Like other Lusitanian boys—
Rude images in clay and wood,
The Patriarchs here and Prophets stood,
With fishermen of Galilee;
And there the followers of Mahound,
Their swarthy brows with turbans bound.
And red-cross knights, armed cap-a-pie.
If the girl, Inez, played with these,
It was to please her restless brother,
Who she had promised her dead mother
Should be her care when she was gone.
Left to herself, she sits alone,
Her small hands folded on her knees,
Holding her lately-counted beads,
Listening while Frey Bernardo reads
Black-letter tomes of ancient lore,
Which men, grown wiser, read no more.
Such was the quiet life they led
In the seclusion of his cell,
Through whose barred grate the sunlight fell
Till the hot sun was overhead;
Then, wooed by softest airs and sounds,
They wandered out-of-doors together,
And flitting through the garden grounds,
Enjoyed the perfect summer weather.
Beneath the shady orchard trees,
Whose laden boughs with fruit were bent,
Hand locked in hand, the children went,
Their light locks fluttering in the breeze;
The birds were singing far and near,
But they were hushed, content to hear
Such heavenly songs, so low, so clear!
What they to Frey Bernardo grew
As days went by, and their sweet ways
Became a portion of the days,
He rather felt at first than knew.
It was a pleasant sight to see
This grave, good man, erewhile so stern,
So gracious and so happy now;
And how his loving eyes would turn
And watch the children, who had brought
Their brightness to his heart and thought,
The boy, say, sitting on his knee,
Where song or story he demands,
While closer still his sister stands,
Smoothing the furrows from his brow!
He told them stories such as he
Was told in childhood, and as we
Were in our later childhood told—
Old stories that are never old,
Despite their known antiquity;
For though mythologists may trace
Through all the lands their golden way,
Back to the cradle of the race,
They are as fresh and young to-day
As when they first were said, or sung—
Young as old Homer's song is young!
When these, which in his cell apart
Day after day the children heard
Till their light hearts no more were stirred,
For now they knew them all by heart,
Had lost their charm, he told them others,
As mythical, perhaps, as these,
Culled from the hagiologies,
Of holy fathers, sainted mothers,
Gone to their long and heavenly rest—
Only the sweetest and the best;
Not those that touched on martyrdom,
For soon enough their tears would come
For their own sorrows. “They shall be
Happy while they are with me.”
Watching the pair with kindly eyes,
Which tears unshed would sometimes dim,
He pondered what they were to him,
And he to them—the tender ties
That bound their hearts together there,
Their confidence, his constant care;
And pondering so one day his mind,
Which till that moment had been blind,
Saw what he had so long denied,
So dark had been his soul with pride—
The sovereign Fatherhood above,
The certainty of Heavenly Love!
“Thou art, whatever doth befall,
The Maker and the Lord of all;
And as these children cling to me,
Hereafter I will cling to Thee,
Father and God.” He said no more,
But wept he had not prayed before.

The legend ends here. But I know
It never ended here, nor so;
For given the man whom I have sung,
Who was at once so old and young,
And who at last his duties learned
To God and Man—that man returned
Back to the world, where both could be
Much better served by such as he,
Who had begun by shunning them,
Than in his cell at Santarem.