Collected Poems: With Autobiographical and Critical Fragments ::

“Where is he gone? O men and maidens, where
Is gone the fairest amid all the fair?
Mine eyes desire him, and with dawning day
My heart goes forth to find him on the way.”
Ah, how that music lingers, and again
Returns the dying sweetness of the strain!
How clearly on my inner sense is borne
The fair fresh beauty of the mountain morn,
And cries of flocks afar, and mixed with these
The green delightful tumult of the trees,—
The birds that o'er us from the upper day
Threw flitting shade, and went their airy way,—
The bright-robed chorus and the silent throng,
And that first burst and sanctity of song!
In such a place with eager faces fair
Sat men of old in bright Athenian air,

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Heard in such wise the folk of Theseus sing
Their welcome to the world-forsaken king,—
Awaited thus between the murmuring trees
The whisper of appeased Eumenides,
Till breath came thick and eyes no more could see
For sweet prevision of the end to be.
But ah, how hard a task to set again
The living Christ among the homes of men!
Have we not grown too faithless or too wise
For this old tale of many mysteries?
Will not this passion of the peasants seem
Like children's tears for terror of a dream?—
“Hosanna! whoso in the Highest Name,
Hosanna! cometh as Elias came,
Him Israel hails and honours, Israel showers
Before him all her hopes and all her flowers.”—

O Son of God! O blessed vision, stay!
O be my whole life centred in to-day!
Ah, let me dream that this indeed is He,
Mine eyes desired Him, and at last they see!

Then as some loving wife, whose lord has come
Wounded but safe from a far battle home,
Yet must before the day's declining go
On a like quest against another foe,—
With throbbing breast his kingly voice she hears

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Her eager gaze is dazzled with her tears,
Nor clearly can she place his tales apart
For the overwhelming passion of her heart,
For joy and love, for pity and for pain,
For thinking “He is come, he goes again!”—
In such confusion of the soul I saw
Their mighty pictures of the vanished Law,
Which, as they held, that Law to Gospel bound
With mystic meaning and design profound:—
Joseph by Dothan and the shepherd's well,
Tobias in the hand of Raphael,—
The crowding people who with joy descry
The food of angels fluttering from the sky;—
Ah, sweet that still upon this earth should be
So many simple souls in holy glee,
Such maids and men, unknowing shame or guile,
Whose whole bright nature beams into a smile!

Thro' all these scenes the fateful story ran,
And the grave presence of the Son of Man:
There was the evening feast, remembered long,
The mystic act and sacramental song;
There was the dreadful garden, rock and tree,
Waker and sleepers in Gethsemane;—
The selfsame forms that I so oft had seen

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Shrined the portcullis and the rose between,
When heaven's cold light in cheerless afternoon
Changed while we knelt from sun to ghostly moon.

And one there was who on his deeds could draw
A gaze that half was horror, half was awe,
Who when the supper of the Lord was spread
Drank of the cup and ate the broken bread,
And then, with night without him and within,
Went forth and sinned the unutterable sin.

Better if never on his ways had shone
The Light which is men's life to look upon;
If he had worn a torpid age away
In the poor gains and pleasures of the day,
From toil to toil had been content to go,
Nor ever aim so high or fall so low!

But, when he saw the Christ, he thought to fly
His own base self and selfish misery;
He trusted that before those heavenly eyes
All shameful thoughts were as a dream that dies,
And new life opened on him, great and free,
And lov on earth and paradise to be.

But ah! thro' all men some base impulse runs,
(The brute the father and the men the sons,)

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Which if one harshly sets him to subdue,
With fiercer insolence it boils anew:
He ends the worst who with best hope began:
How hard is this! how like the lot of man!

When this man's best desire and highest aim
Had ended in the deed of traitorous shame,
When to his bloodshot eyes grew wild and dim
The stony faces of the Sanhedrim,—
When in his rage he could no longer bear
Men's voices nor the sunlight nor the air,
Nor sleep, nor waking, nor his own quick breath,
Nor God in heaven, nor anything but death,—
I bowed my head, and through my fingers ran
Tears for the end of that Iscariot man,
Lost in the hopeless struggle of the soul
To make the done undone, the broken whole.

O brother! howsoever, wheresoe'er
Thou hidest now the hell of thy despair,
Hear that one heart can pity, one can know
With thee thy hopeless solitary woe.

But when the treacherous deed was planned and done,
The soldiers gathered, and the shame begun,
Thereat the indignant heavens in fierce disdain

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Blew down a rushing and uproarious rain;
The tall trees wailed; ill-heard and scarcely seen
Were Jew and Roman those rough gusts between,
Only unmoved one still and towering form
Made, as of old, a silence in the storm.

Then was the cross uplifted; strange to see
That final sign of sad humanity;
For men in childhood for their worship chose
The primal force by which as men they rose;
Then round their homes they bade with boyish grace
The hanging Bacchus swing his comely face;
And now, grown old, they can no more disdain
To look full-front upon the eyes of Pain,
But must all corners of the champaign fill
With bleeding images of this last ill,
Must on yon mountain's pinnacle enshrine
A crucifix, the dead for the divine.

Yet never picture, wonderfully well
By hands of Dürer drawn or Raphael,
Nor wood by shepherds that one art who know
Carved in long nights behind the drifted snow,
Could with such holy sorrows flood and fill
The eyes made glimmering and the heart made still,

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As that pale form whose outstretched limbs so long
Made kingship of the infamy of wrong,
O'er whose thorn-twined majestic brows ran down
Blood for anointing from the bitter crown.

Then from the lips of David's Son there brake
Such phrase as David in the Spirit spake,—
Ay, and four words with such a meaning fraught
As seemed an answer to my in most thought;—
O dreadful cry, and by no seer foreshewn,
“My God, my God, I die and am alone!”

Where is he gone? O men and maidens, where
Is gone the fairest amid all the fair?
Mine eyes desire him, and with dawning day
My heart goes forth to find him on the way.

University of Virginia Library

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