A Child of the People :: :: University of Virginia Library

I know a carven church in a Breton town,
Where angels now will be singing all night long.
There are wonders waiting a poet
In many a mouldering nook 'mid the quaint wharves brown,
But the poets pass post-haste with their glory of song,
So the world never gets to know it.

If you knew how nearly my heart was broken then!
I had given the whole of my hopes of eternity
To have known my friend dead only.
I had hurried fast away from the eyes of men,
But the very motes in the air had eyes to see,
And I dare yet less be lonely:

For devils all down the road would gibber and grin,
And the owl—why, a child could tell he had heard my shame,
As he blinked in mute derision;
And the hideous spouting heads on the gabled inn
Leered, and made mouths, and gurgled about my shame,
And croaked of the last suspicion.

122

So at last I came to this little town by night;—
A bad, black night, when there came no stars to stare,
And the wind had rain to tell of.
Through the dark church door I reeled from the last of the light;—
How it came to be open I never thought to care,—
I had thoughts they will make my hell of.

Pitch-dark, but I knew how the sculptured stone ones stood,
With still eyes suddenly drawn from the altar shrine,
And gazed in their soulless fashion;
While the million baby-angels about the rood
Grew rounder-cheeked, and the twelve made semi-sign
On the very eve of the Passion.

Then I rose up brazen-browed in the midst of them,
Stung into scorn of the scorn of the world, and spake:—
“Sweet saints, unscared of the Prussian,
Though your council sat last night at Jerusalem,
And keep St. Chad in his own church here awake
With your drowsy adjourned discussion,

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“I budge no further, though every separate hair
Of the holy beard they keep in the coffers, packed
With the plate and gold candelabrum,
Should fit itself to a Holy Innocent there,
Whose sleek, smooth head in the week of his birth was cracked:—
I swear by the beard of Abram!”

What light was that? A globe as of living flame,
Stainless and soft beyond all light of the moon,
O'er the altar poised and floated.
Life to the marble limbs of the martyrs came;
Started the stiff-legged knights from their centuried swoon,
With rust no longer coated;

Stepped saints from the windows, wrapped in wondrous woof;
Flew gilded heads and wings from the galleries
To the floor like apple-blossom;
Last came the mighty angels lost in the roof;
But the climbing cherubs fell from the dizzy frieze,
Like flowers into Mary's bosom.

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Ah, God, that singing! It rings in my ears to-day!—
Snared, all my soul, in the sweet melodious net
Of a song,—but the angels live it.
My burden of madness now I could cast away;
The festering sin of my hell-false friend forget;
For the world,—poor world,—forgive it!

Then a mighty breath of the wrath of God blew sore,
And bore me back, back ever, into the street,
Through the door to the wind that waited,
And flung me fierce on the wave of the world once more:—
Lost, not for scorn of a beard that's a modern cheat,
But a man that my heart had hated!

All that wild night and the wild night through were driven,
And evermore on a faithful wind float down
Strange melodies on my track.
So now, whenever they come, those waifs of heaven,
I know that the angels sing in the Breton town;—
But I may no more go back!