University of Virginia Library

WITHIN a maze of narrow, tortuous streets,
Whose convolutions deaden the day's din
And roar of City turmoil to that hum
Of softly murmuring sound one hears within
The pearly chambers of a twisted shell,
A gray old church stands in a little space
Of swarded churchyard, green and variegate
With plaited flower beds; in the City's heart,
A flowered nest of peace and restfulness.
But one of many other quiet nooks
That nestle in the mirky City's midst,
To me long use and knowledge made it dear
Beyond its fellows, for it seemed to me,
The ancient fane, all lonely as it was
And resonant to but few human steps,
Wore an especial air of friendly peace
And seemed to tender comfort to my soul.
Ay, and the very flowers had in their eyes,
Upturned to seek the friendly heaven's blink
Between the long lines of encroaching walls,
A deeper meaning than flowers use to show
To general sight, as who should say, “We long
After the open freedom of the plains
And breezy freshness of the blossomed fields
With an incessant longing; yet, resigned
To do God's service where He bids it us,
We are content to live beneath the smoke
And give our scent and comfort of our bloom
As freely as our brethren of the meads,
Feeding our yearning on the infrequent sun
And the rare love of some few weary souls,
That gather consolation from our life.”

Hard by the church, a little parsonage,
Gray as itself, but green with clustering wealth
Of ivy tendrils, nestled to its side,
As if for shelter from the encroaching world:
And therein dwelt an old and reverend man,
Who was the priest of that neglected fane,
Uncomraded, except by memories
And the vague creatures of his own sweet thoughts.
A man who, working God's work in the world,
Had little commerce with world's use, but dwelt
Within the heaven of his own clear faith,
'Spite age's frosts, he was a child at heart
And had still childhood's generous confidence,
Its pure delight in bright and innocent things.
For him, the dreams, that had made sweet his youth
And glorified his manhood, still relieved
The sunset-shadow of his waning life
And lighted up the gloom of those stern hours,
When, in the gray of the descending years,
The sea of memory gives up its dead.
He had not lost his early purity
Of joy in all the sweet and rare delights,
The delicate and shrinking mysteries,
That swarm, for those who love, in this our world:
He had yet faith in all the lovely myths
And fables, that do symblize God's love
In picture-speech of bird-song and of bloom;
Relived dead youth in every violet's scent,
Saw Ophir in each lily's golden dust,
Golconda in each flower-cup's crystal dew.

The sceptic murmur of the unquiet age,
Eager for light, no matter though it lose,
In the cold gleam, some glow of ancient warmth,
Had reached him in his peaceful solitude;
And to his mild but clear intelligence
It could not but be patent that the doom
Of death was passed for many a thing he loved,
Much good, that had for many weary years
Outlived its use, and many an old belief,
That, in its time, had been the breath of life
To millions, but was now long since worn out
And sunk to superstition. Much he grieved
A natural grief (as one who, in a dream,
Sees the phantasmata of his sweet thoughts
Fade from him and will not be comforted,
But mourns them waking, though he knew them not
For real or seeming) and his soul was full
Of troubling doubt. For him the coming years
Were big with fears; he could not shape his hope,
That had so long run all unquestioningly
In the worn channel of the ancient faith,
Into the stronger current of new thought,
That swept old landmarks from his way of life.
The clinging dogmas of time-honoured creeds
Fettered his spirit with the knitted webs
Of their exanimate subtleties, so that
He was not free to let his simple love
(That else might, with the magic of its own
All-powerful menstruum, have solved for him
The weary problem) work its natural work,
Clogged as it was by age-old fallacies.
And so his spirit in the tangling doubts
Strove, like a fly caught in a spider's web,
That twines itself more inextricably,
With every effort, in the unyielding toils.

One night, he dreamt, an angel came to him,
As Beatrice to Dante, in the shape,
Thrice sublimate, of one whom he had loved
In the clear Spring-time of his vanished youth,
And took him by the hand and led him up
To a high mountain's snow-incoronate top
And showed him all the kingdoms of the world.
Before him lay the glory and the power
Of all that has on earth been fair and bright,
Stately and wonderful, since being was;
All teachings that have swayed the souls of men,
All that has aye been powerful to save,
All faiths, were imaged for him in the dream,
Living a symbol-life in definite shapes;
And all high thoughts and solemn mysteries
Moved, radiant, o'er the surface of the world,
Clothed in their own fulfilment's acted shape,
Or stood in statue-majesty, enshrined
In snow of marble and gold-glitterance.
Beneath his feet the earth spread far and wide,
Veined with the tortuous silver of its streams,
And here and there majestic temples rose,
Graven to all cunning shapes of human art
And vivid at the heart with fire-cored gems.
Strange lustres flashed from the enchanted shapes
And met each other in the throbbing air,
Weaving a dazzling, iridescent haze
About the path of those weird phantasies.
The netted radiance hid the constant sky
And made, for those that dwelt beneath its spell,
A new and seeming heaven, bright and strange,
Here sweet with glancing lights, there stern with storms,
And holding, on its topmost pinnacle,
A painted dream of earthly luxury,
That men had wrought from their fantastic hopes
And set it in the sky and called it “heaven.”

The priest gazed long upon the changing play
Of those phantasmal semblances, and soon
He saw the gradual light fade out from them;
The gem-fire died within its ancient haunts
And all the radiant shapes grew etiolate
And colourless as darkness-blanching flowers.
It seemed to him, the essence of their life
Had left them and their source of radiance,
Impermanent, had dried up at the spring.
And as he looked, a crash of thunderous song,
Wherein all awful sweetness was expressed,
Pealed out across the surface of the earth
And rent the charmed veil of that seeming heaven,
Letting in on it the eternal light.
The dream-forms shrank and shrivelled in the blaze
Of new irradiance, “alba sicut lux,”
And all the structures of that wondrous birth
Sank into ruin. All the earth was strewn
With one huge waste of gray and lifeless wrecks.
He looked and knew the symbolled destiny,
Pre-eminent among the other shapes,
Of that old faith, which was so dear to him;
And with a sudden dreary consciousness
And sense how blank was life thenceforth to him,
Shorn of its own particular star of hope,
Sank down upon his knees and bowed his head
Upon his hands. The angel looked at him
With eyes in which there shone compassionate love
And peace; and then to him, “Be not dismayed:
These are but earthly things thou seëst die,
But fabrics of a human phantasy,
That men have fashioned, after their own shape,
From their unreasoning fears and baseless hopes,
From their unreal pains and feverish joys,
And knelt and worshipped their own handiwork.
And so they are but mortal, do but live
So long as the quick, animating soul
Throbs in their confines. When it flees from them,
They crumble into vague and shapeless wreck.
The hearts of men do ofttimes cleave to them,
For that they feel in them their godlike part,
The sympathetic presence of the soul,
And worship, all unconscious, their own selves.
Many have drawn from them the breath of life,
Whilst that their living virtue yet had force;
And folk still cling to them with desperate faith,
Long after every spark of life has fled,
As one who seeks deliverance in the arms
Of his once powerful friend, now old and weak,
And will not lightly credit his decay.
But, ere they had their being, God was God
And will be yet, although the heavens pass.
Be not dismayed: there is no change in Him
Alone. Thy refuge is the Eternal God
And under thee the everlasting arms.”

The listener's heart drank comfort from the clear
Sustaining words, and from the shade of doubt
His soul leapt out into the day of hope,
As waters leap from out the dim rock-rifts
Into the morning splendour of the sun.
Before him still the waste of ruins lay,
But over all things, as within himself,
He felt some healing influence had passed
And softened their stern aspect of despair.
The garish sun died out and all the earth
Lay in the moonlit sanctity of death:
And as he stood, the air was all astir
With that blithe mystery, that ushers in
The Spring-time, and the summer-hearted world
Throbbed with the coming rapture of the May.
The buds burst out into a new flower-birth
And all the eager host of passionate blooms
Spread, rustling, o'er the surface of the earth.
Spring's fresh leaf-green and delicate-petalled blooms
Hid the gray ruins with a fragrant shroud;
All-mother Earth put forth her flowerful hand
And took the dead again to her embrace,
All things forgiven, all but love forgotten
In the new peace of that assoiling death.
The air was sweet with carol; all the woods
Were budded and the sudden flowering sky
Flamed with the tender promise of new dawn.

Then, “Lift thine eyes,” the angel said to him,
“Toward the golden region of the East.”
He raised his head and looked across the mists
To where the sun ran, reddening, through the brume,
And burning through the opal-hearted veil,
He saw the jasper hills of a new heaven.