University of Virginia Library

“Where is He?” So I questioned who would be
His slave, and silence answered, “Where is He?”
I was no priest or prophet and no king
With iron sceptre, but a wanderling
Astray upon the mountains of the night,
And vainly groping for a ray of light—
Somehow and somewhere in the curtained cloud,
Which was at once my shelter and my shroud—
Without one human grace or humble gift,
And seeking just a glimmer or blue rift
For the dark earth that mocked my stumbling tread,
In those great heavens of gray, dumb overhead.
I had no knowledge but a child-like love,
That simply prayed and stretched dim hands above,
Against the veil that blurred God's miracle,
To the Unknown and the Unknowable;
I had no treasure, but a little trust
Which trembled upward like a flame, from dust
And masquerades of mist and the deep dense
Phantasmagoria of fallacious sense,
As to its native skies; I had no guide,
But my own shadow walking at my side;
I had no hope, that might a moment save,
But the dear refuge of no distant grave;
I had no Christ, of whom with hopeless tears
I sought a vision through unverdant years
So mute and dreadful, harvesting but loss,
Where all was care, and every thought a cross,
That married me to woe's unuttered wail,
And each desire a thorn, each step a nail.
But yet I could not live without my Lord,
And though the pathway to Him were a sword
Which I must walk alone, one awful edge
Of cold keen suffering, or some toppling ledge
By precipices pale, still would I dare
To go or climb if none therein had share
With me. I asked the ruddy rolling sphere,
And its response came back, “He is not here.”
I asked the ocean, where I kept vain tryst,
And stormy waiting for the Blessed Christ,
If in those purple palaces His lot
Was cast, and it replied, “I know Him not.”
I asked the eagle on his royal path
A flying bolt of ruin and of wrath,
Free of the earth and water and the air
In solitary silence fierce and fair,
Whose eyes were all ablaze with battle sheen;
But still the answer was, “I have not seen
In halls of space a Master and the joy
Of thy redemption—I, like death, destroy.”
I asked the roses reddening in the sun,
And laughing at the beauty scarce begun
By right Divine, that had save grace no choice;
And they replied, “We have not heard His voice.”
I asked the pilgrim of the world, the wind,
Which breathes of Arctic frost and flowers of Ind,
And makes the earth with song and perfume sweet,
But finds no place to rest its romping feet;
Which whispered, “Though my travellings are much,
I have not felt the impress of His touch.”

I sought Him in the churches, where the spot
Of carnal ease had fallen, and found Him not—
My Beautiful, my Love, my King, my Life;
I found but foolish babblement and strife
Of consentaneous folly and wild screeds,
And in mock thunder dead or dying creeds.
The wardens of the word and oracles
Spake in cheap wit or vulgar parables,
And charmed their hearers with mere tinkling chimes,
But had no trumpet message for the times
To stir dry bones that rotted in their shame,
And bid souls live and set the world aflame.
While I consumed with struggling need and stress
Would offer Him in utter brokenness
My heart, myself, my all, to keep Him in,
But knew not where for the besetting sin
I might attain a strength to help me stand—
The healing balm of His besetting Hand.
I sought Him in the Senate, where the law
Flowed from its ancient fountain head of awe
In justice, and most reverend right and use
With fertilising streams of power profuse,
Watered the nations as they came to drink,
And shed new life on nations prone to sink
Foredoomed and pass; I saw with fair intents
The mighty mother of all parliaments,
Dispensing measures broadcast through the land,
With equal aim and catholic command,
Builded on base of precedent and rock;
I saw with wonder, from the undying stock
New constitutions bud in festival
Of fervid youth and force magnifical,
A grander growth; I saw the wide earth mount
To vaster summits, from that one great fount
Revived; but, ah, I did not see my Lord,
Who gave those charters all their sweet accord
And liberties their latitude. I sought
Again in the calm cloistered world of thought,
Where pale and pensive students with the stamp
Of high imperial learning trimmed the lamp
That lit the ages, and led countries on
From unhewn stone to stately Parthenon,
And pillared books with bards' tremendous line
Compact of fire and tears and white moonshine,
And marble might of loveliness, and stairs
Of mist and silence blown about with airs,
Like incense out of columned courts—the lore
Spreading as waves, that sap an iron shore,
And never can be spent. I noted how
The kindling eye and broad contagious brow
Caught every gleam of Truth and flashed it forth,
As the Aurora flaming in the north,
From heart to heart and made serener skies
And other earths with fresh philosophies,
The old writ larger; and I noted still
The passion of the consecrated will,
Vowed as a Vestal to the holy Truth
And thence repairing evermore its youth,
A-burning in the frail devoted form
That could not veil the fire's translucent storm,
As some sweet altar in a shadowed shrine
Dreadful with hidden majesty Divine,
With all around it solemnly illumed,
And all within it bright and unconsumed;
But Him I noted not, who is the Light
Of every world that but reflects His sight.
I sought Him in the market-place, where greed
Pastured on helpless ignorance or need,
Outbidding and outbawling poor men's pains,
And with its muck-rake heaped the loathsome gains
That were stark losses, preying on the weak
Who starved and struggled nor had voice to speak.
I marked the sweater gorged with blood and fat
With tears of orphans, and the plutocrat—
The monster deaf and blind as death and cold,
A brute machine for coining cursed gold
From lives of murdered men and women—filled
With plunder, but not satisfied, not stilled;
I marked the fraud in fashion, honoured, crowned,
When unexposed and lofty, though it drowned
Its myriads in a sea of damned despair,
And unimagined ruin past repair;
I marked the triumph of the chartered knaves
Whose gilded progress lay o'er open graves
Grim, and the lady's dress of purple proud,
And precious which had been a sister's shroud;
But Him I found not anywhere in all.
I sought Him in the stable, at the stall,
Where once He laid His little Baby Head,
Though with the terrors of the Godhood spread
About it still; but O, He was not there,
Whose virtue yet I knew ranged everywhere
Pervading and compelling with kind power
The rolling planet and the radiant flower
In fragrance and in light; I met Him not,
The Chief among ten thousand, with no spot
Or shadow of a stain upon His dress
Of unconjecturable holiness;
I felt His Beauty, but I could not touch
The uttermost sweet hem I sought so much
With care and prayer. No vestige of His tread
Among the brutes for whom His Blood was shed,
His covenanted creatures; but the strife
Of bastard science, and the crimson knife
That carved its fatal conquests on the flesh
Of hopeless bleeding lives, and carved afresh
Its hideous blots and blunders, to apply
The shame of some poor shambling theory
And pluck from nameless horrors what might suit
Or riot on the old forbidden fruit,
With services of ghastly hecatombs
Offered to Moloch in grim catacombs.
I sought Him in the teardrop's costly gem,
The red light lingering on the fir tree stem,
The cry of hunted anguish low and long,
The wood dove crooning its wild evensong,
In windy ways of sea, in man and beast,
At gloomy fast and at the glittering feast,
In pomp and pageant and the funeral,
Through mocking loves and hates majestical;
But though I wandered far, and kept a tryst
With death itself, I could not see the Christ.

I sought Him humbly with heart-broken pleas
By the soft murmur of untravelled seas,
And over mountains and gray desert sands
Where rocks arose and stretched forbidding hands
Like skeletons; I asked the land and sky,
But vainly—till I came to Calvary,
By bitter roads that led through doors of loss,
Where hung the shadow of a shameful Cross
Betwixt the heaven and earth, and on it still
The Sacrifice of Love and subject Will,
Lashed by strange winds that seemed at angry strife,
He whose perpetual death is all our Life,
For whom remained no less or diverse plan,
The dying God and the undying Man
In unimaginable sorrow bent,
But more than Conqueror now and most content,
Within that awful darkness which is Light
To us, and every universe of night
With robes of suffering woe and sin enwrapt
In systems undiscovered and unmapt;
The service of the Priest who offers up
Himself, and drinks alone the dreadful cup
Of anguish and fierce overflowing wine
In innocence of human joy divine;
Who saveth others from the yawning grave,
Eternity's black mouth, but cannot save
Himself and will not, though by tortures tried—
My Beautiful, the Ever-Crucified.
I found Him, where I left Him long ago,
Nailed to the Cross which is our guide below
And beacon lamp and refuge from the storm,
While His great Passion shook the gentle Form
That yet embraced and chose with loving breath
The agony of endless living Death.

There I renewed my vows at wells of Truth
And washed in waters of immortal youth,
When through the gateway of the grave I went
And passed to Life and that august ascent
Of resurrection and the holy ground,
And dropt behind me every chain and bound.
But then my eyes were opened, and I saw
That solemn spectacle of bliss and awe,
Christ on the Cross in every lot and land,
The wounded Side, the pierced outspreading Hand
In benediction that could only thus
At this stupendous price be bought for us,
But by the Blood of God who cannot err—
Most willing and most sinless Sufferer.
And every milestone marked by love and loss,
Which led to Him was just the Sacred Cross;
There was no other signpost through the dark,
Save this one witness of our Hierarch.
I saw it in the sunshine of the throne,
For there He hung uncared-for and alone,
While all the cruel splendour babbled by
And left The King in stark extremity
Of solitary shame. I saw it low
Among the masses and the muddy flow
Of wrangling hates and meannesses, that crept
From crime to crime and gorged the flesh and slept,
And woke to strive and gorge again and sin—
There stood the Cross, and He to all akin,
However sunk and fouled in moral mire
His brothers—there rose up the blood-red spire,
The fountainhead of life and every good,
The strength of man, the dew of maidenhood,
Unseen, unhonoured and unsought, unknown,
But still the central fact unoverthrown
And everlasting. By the crookèd gait,
By him who dwelleth in the street called Straight
And steps right onward to the duty nigh,
Betwixt the heaving bosom and the sigh
And dying men and dead, within the feast,
Above the science butcher and the beast
Mangled and murdered for a passing play,
While angels weep and fiends hold holiday,
I saw the vision of Divine distress,
The Cross of Christ, the dread great Loveliness
For ever crucified, for ever sweet,
White hands of blessing rent and riven white feet;
I found in every home the bitter cry,
In every heart a hidden Calvary.