University of Virginia Library

I am a spirit and I dwell in Heaven,
Yet have men built me many homes on earth,
Plain white-washed walls and high-arched palaces:
And blood has flowed to win me to the caves,
Where o'er her votaries lowers congenial gloom,
And brutish things their brutish forms adore.
I have been wooed by organ-notes and psalm,
By blended colours and by curious shapes,
In fretted aisles and heaven-ascending domes.
My proper temple is the mind of man,
Of blind, laborious man who knows it not;
Who spends his strength and flying suns on me,
And throws his fleeting strength and suns away.
I have had many servants upon earth;
These have they banished, tortured, bound, and slain,
With curious racks and cruel beasts and fires.
There have been marchings in the frost and sun,
Lyings in wait, fierce rapine, violence,
And midnight murders in unholy towers,
And bloody battles in the face of noon,
To build my houses where I will not come,
To save my servitors that are not mine.
Yet do men follow me through many lands,
O'er jagged rocks, by unfamiliar paths,
That totter over headlong precipices,
Or gleam with lying lights o'er lying ground,
Or shift in burning and uncertain sands,
Or sink through mountainous and starless seas.
So do men seek me and they find me not.
While I sit weeping on my throne in Heaven,
And hang out lamps to lighten all the world,
And loudly call, but all my calls are vain:
Though my dull servants echo back my voice.
As do th' unmeaning rocks and lifeless hills
Repeat the sound they do not understand,
Back to the utterer where he stands alone,
And no one hears save he who sent it forth:
So my slow servants do resound my voice,
And no one hears save I who send it forth,
I who sit weeping on my throne in Heaven.

All times, all places are alike to me,
To me who know not either place or days—
Who have no ear for your material sounds—
No eyes to see your sculpture and your towers.
The plain, dull house that overhangs the glen,
Built by uncultured tillers of the ground;
The arrowy spires that climb into the heaven,
Vain ransom for my slaughtered children wrung
From pallid lords and dying, frightened kings;
The jangling sing-song of untutored throats,
And the well-ordered chant and solemn hymn,
Are all alike unseen, unheard by me.
But my blind, groping servants know it not.
They prate that equal brothers of one race,
Men share the love of their just Father, God,
Prate—and despise the vulgar and the poor.
They preach that raiment fair and rings of gold,
High place, high honour, and the praise of men
Are nothing; and that God and Heaven are all.
They preach—and in the eyes of those who hear,
Buy honour, place, and raiment with their words:
And groan if other servants of my name
Are they from whose brows Honour sits afar,
For whose feet Place will let no ladder down,
Who do not wear the name of gentlemen—
So do these earth-bound unbelievers prate;
And still I weep on my high throne in Heaven.

God dwelleth not in temples made with hands,
And God's own Son was in a manger born,
And sat at common feasts with common men.
Not scorning silken beds and gilded halls,
Nor in a vulgar, vain humility,
As His proud servants ignorantly do talk:
But because hall and stable, lord and hind,
Were all as little and as great to Him
Who had no pride and no humility,
Whom those men slew, unknowing what they did,
Whom ye call Lord, unknowing what ye do.