Изображения страниц
PDF
EPUB

Or when from Ezion-Geber's way
It saw the long procession file,
And heard the Hebrew timbrels play
The music of the lordly Nile;

Or saw the tabernacle pause,

Cloud-bound, by Kadesh Barnea's wells
While Moses graved the sacred laws,
And Aaron swung his golden bells.

Rock of the desert, prophet-sung!
How grew its shadowing pile at length,
A symbol, in the Hebrew tongue,
Of God's eternal love and strength.

On lip of bard and scroll of seer,
From age to age went down the name,
Until the Shiloh's promised year,
And Christ, the Rock of Ages, came!

The path of life we walk to-day

Is strange as that the Hebrews trod;
We need the shadowing rock, as they,
We need, like them, the guides of God.

God send his angels, Cloud and Fire,
To lead us o'er the desert sand!
God give our hearts their long desire,
His shadow in a weary land!

ON A PRAYER-BOOK,

WITH ITS FRONTISPIECE, ARY SCHEFFER'S "CHRISTUS CONSOLAT AMERICANIZED BY THE OMISSION OF THE BLACK MAN.

O ARY SCHEFFER! when beneath thine eye, Touched with the light that cometh from above,

ON A PRAYER-BOOK.

373

Grew the sweet picture of the dear Lord's love, No dream hadst thou that Christian hands would

tear

Therefrom the token of his equal care,

And make thy symbol of his truth a lie! The poor, dumb slave whose shackles fall away In his compassionate gaze, grubbed smoothly out, To mar no more the exercise devout Of sleek oppression kneeling down to pray Where the great oriel stains the Sabbath day! Let whoso can before such praying-books Kneel on his velvet cushion; I, for one, Would sooner bow, a Parsee, to the sun, Or tend a prayer-wheel in Thibetan brooks, Or beat a drum on Yedo's temple-floor. No falser idol man has bowed before, In Indian groves or islands of the sea,

Than that which through the quaint-carved
Gothic door

Looks forth,-a Church without humanity!
Patron of pride, and prejudice, and wrong,-
The rich man's charm and fetish of the strong,
The Eternal Fulness meted, clipped, and shorn,
The seamless robe of equal mercy torn,
The dear Christ hidden from his kindred flesh,
And, in his poor ones, crucified afresh !
Better the simple Lama scattering wide,

Where sweeps the storm Alechan's steppes along, His paper horses for the lost to ride,

And wearying Buddha with his prayers to make
The figures living for the traveller's sake,

Than he who hopes with cheap praise to beguile
The ear of God, dishonoring man the while;
Who dreams the pearl gate's hinges, rusty grown,
Are moved by flattery's oil of tongue alone;
That in the scale Eternal Justice bears

The generous deed weighs less than selfish prayers,
And words intoned with graceful unction move
The Eternal Goodness more than lives of truth and
love.

Alas, the Church -The reverend head of Jay,
Enhaloed with its saintly silvered hair,
Adorns no more the places of her prayer
And brave young Tyng, too early called away,
Troubles the Haman of her courts no more
Like the just Hebrew at th' Assyrian's door;
And her sweet ritual, beautiful but dead
As the dry husk from which the grain is shed,
And holy hymns from which the life devout
Of saints and martyrs has well nigh gone out,
Like candles dying in exhausted air,

For Sabbath use in measured grists are ground;
And, ever while the spiritual mill goes round,
Between the upper and the nether stones,

Unseen, unheard, the wretched bondman groans, And urges his vain plea, prayer-smothered, anthemdrowned!

Oh, heart of mine, keep patience!—Looking forth,
As from the Mount of Vision, I behold,
Pure, Just, and free, the Church of Christ on earth,—
The martyr's dream, the golden age foretold!
And found, at last, the mystic Graal I see,
Brimmed with His blessing, pass from lip to lip
In sacred pledge of human fellowship;
And over all the songs of angels hear,―
Songs of the love that casteth out all fear,—
Songs of the Gospel of Humanity!

Lo! in the midst, with the same look he wore,
Healing and blessing on Genesaret's shore,
Folding together, with the all-tender might
Of his great love, the dark hands and the white,
Stands the Consoler, soothing every pain,
Making all burdens light, and breaking every chain

TO J. T. F.

375

TO J. T. F.

(ON A BLANK LEAF OF "POÈMS PRINTED, NOT PUBLISHED.")

WELL thought! who would not rather hear
The songs to Love and Friendship sung
Than those which move the stranger's tongue,
And feed his unselected ear?

Our social joys are more than fame;
Life withers in the public look.
Why mount the pillory of a book,
· Or barter comfort for a name?

Who in a house of glass would dwell,
With curious eyes at every pane?
To ring him in and out again,
Who wants the public crier's bell?

To see the angel in one's way,
Who waits to play the ass's part,-
Bear on his back the wizard Art,
And in his service speak or bray ?

And who his manly locks would shave,
And quench the eyes of common sense,
To share the noisy recompense

That mocked the shorn and blinded slave?

The heart has needs beyond the head,
And, starving in the plenitude

Of strange gifts, craves its common food,-
Our human nature's daily bread.

We are but men: no gods are we,
To sit in mid-heaven, cold and bleak,
Each separate, on his painful peak,
Thin-cloaked in self-complacency!

Better his lot whose axe is swung
In Wartburg woods, or that poor girl's
Who by the Ilm her spindle whirls
And sings the songs that Luther sung,

Than his who, old, and cold, and vain,
At Weimar sat, a demigod,

And bowed with Jove's imperial nod His votaries in and out again !

Ply, Vanity, thy winged feet!
Ambition, hew thy rocky stair!
Who envies him who feeds on air
The icy splendor of his seat?

I see your Alps, above me, cut
The dark, cold sky; and dim and lone
I see ye sitting-stone on stone-
With human senses dulled and shut.

I could not reach you, if I would,
Nor sit among your cloudy shapes;
And (spare the fable of the grapes
And fox) I would not if I could.

Keep to your lofty pedestals!
The safer plain below I choose:
Who never wins can rarely loose,
Who never climbs as rarely falls.

Let such as love the eagle's scream
Divide with him his home of ice:
For me shall gentler notes suffice,--
The valley-song of bird and stream;

The pastoral bleat, the drone of bees,
The flail-beat chiming far away,
The cattle-low, at shut of day,

The voice of God in leaf and breeze!

« ПредыдущаяПродолжить »