The Christian Scholar :: :: University of Virginia Library

“How strange are things divinely wrought!
The Gods have means beyond our thought;
Expected ills they turn aside,
Beyond all hope a way provide.”
Termination of the Alcestis.

As often in the visions of our sleep
Semblances blend of life's realities,
And images of truth therein are found,
Confus'd and intertwin'd with dreamy thoughts
And empty shadows; and oft-times therein
Spirits of good and ill contending seem
More vividly than in our waking life;
That meditative wisdom oft may find
Broken reflections and stray shapes of truth
Set forth at random beneath fancy's garb.

And oft we listen when the dream is o'er,
As one who some sweet music would recall,

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Labouring the scattered fragments to retain,
If it might give forth aught of prophecy;
For while it blended with the things of sense
It seem'd to hold a commerce with the Unseen,
And Nature spake therein more than she knew,
While Faith is her divine interpreter.

Thus in poetic legends of old time
All strangely intermingling may be seen
Dreamlike similitudes of truth divine;
Wherein man, waken'd in the Christian morn,
May 'neath the tangled web of true and false
Unravelling find broken celestial forms,
Though interrupted oft and lost in clouds,
Yet phantoms and resemblances indeed,
Vision-like and unreal, and yet true,
As shadows in a mirror, though themselves
But airy nothing and an empty shade.

Before our eyes in this our living world
Hath Christ set forth on earth the scatter'd signs
Of Resurrection, when His Voice and Hand
Brought from the silent regions of the dead
Those who this life had left,—the youthful child
Of Jairus, coldly laid on bed of death,—
Or from his bier before the Nain gate
The widow's son, who heard His voice and lived;—
Or Lazarus from the darkness of the grave.
Such preludes of the Resurrection's power

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Stand forth as pillars of the Truth of God
Till the last Resurrection of the Just.
Compared with these realities divine
Those mythic fables old and Paynim tales
Are but as mirrors seen upon the clouds,
Aerial phantoms of a coming form;
Or shadowy dreams compared with things of life.

Yet sweet is Resurrection's power pourtrayed
In that fair story of Admetus' bride,
Brought by Alcides in the veil of death
From the dark regions of the place of souls;—
Alcides—that mysterious hero-god,
Himself encountering and o'ercoming death;
And who that dreaded serpent slew of old.

Mantled she stands, and waiting the third day
When after her lustrations she may speak;
Fair as the veilèd form of coming Spring,
At whose approach Nature breaks forth in song
And gratulation, with instinctive joy
Unconsciously divining deep within
Of something better than a fading spring,—
A new Creation which shall not see death.

Alcestis, noblest woman, worthy found
In dying resurrection to attain,
Who for another dared herself to die;—
Admetus too, that good Thessalian king,
Albeit not unmeet for such a boon;

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Who even now his deeply-rankling grief
Had cover'd with a show of courtesy
To entertain a stranger, and thereby
Had unawares receiv'd a saving God.

And I would in my heart engrave his words,
In this unlook'd-for blessing from the grave,
Beyond all thought to life and light restor'd.—

Adm.—

“Now we will set in order and remould
“Our lives, far better than they yet have been,
“For great I own is this my happiness .”

Alcest. lin. 1176.