Pagina-afbeeldingen
PDF
ePub

Voice of sweet song! Awake, my heart, awake! | In adoration, upward from thy base Green vales and icy cliffs, all join my hymn.

Thou first and chief, sole sovereign of the vale! O, struggling with the darkness all the night, And visited all night by troops of stars, Or when they climb the sky or when they sink, Companion of the morning-star at dawn, Thyself Earth's rosy star, and of the dawn Co-herald, wake, O, wake, and utter praise! Who sank thy sunless pillars deep in earth? Who filled thy countenance with rosy light? Who made thee parent of perpetual streams?

And you, ye five wild torrents fiercely glad!
Who called you forth from night and utter death,
From dark and icy caverns called you forth,
Down those precipitous, black, jagged rocks,
Forever shattered and the same forever?
Who gave you your invulnerable life,
Yourstrength, your speed, your fury, and your joy,
Unceasing thunder and eternal foam?

And who commanded (and the silence came),
Here let the billows stiffen, and have rest?

Ye ice-falls! ye that from the mountain's brow Adown enormous ravines slope amain, · Torrents, methinks, that heard a mighty voice, And stopped at once amid their maddest plunge! Motionless torrents! silent cataracts!

Who made you glorious as the gates of Heaven
Beneath the keen full moon? Who bade the sun
Clothe you with rainbows? Who, with living
flowers

Of loveliest blue, spread garlands at your feet?
God! let the torrents, like a shout of nations,
Answer and let the ice-plains echo, God!
God! sing, ye meadow-streams, with gladsome

[blocks in formation]

Slow traveling with dim eyes suffused with tears,
Solemnly seemest, like a vapory cloud,
To rise before me, Rise, O, ever rise!
Rise like a cloud of incense, from the Earth!
Thou kingly Spirit throned among the hills,
Thou dread ambassador from Earth to Heaven,
Great Hierarch! tell thou the silent sky,
And tell the stars, and tell yon rising sun,
Earth, with her thousand voices, praises God.

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE.

AMAZING, BEAUTEOUS CHANGE!

AMAZING, beauteous change!

A world created new!

My thoughts with transport range,
The lovely scene to view;
In all I trace,
Saviour divine,

The work is thine,
Be thine the praise!

See crystal fountains play
Amidst the burning sands;
The river's winding way
Shines through the thirsty lands;
New grass is seen,
And o'er the meads
Its carpet spreads

Of living green.

Where pointed brambles grew,
Intwined with horrid thorn,
Gay flowers, forever new,
The painted fields adorn,
The blushing rose
And lily there,

In union fair,

Their sweets disclose.

Where the bleak mountain stood
All bare and disarrayed,
See the wide-branching wood
Diffuse its grateful shade;

Tall cedars nod,

And oaks and pines, And elms and vines Confess the God.

The tyrants of the plain
Their savage chase give o'er, -
No more they rend the slain,
And thirst for blood no more;
But infant hands
Fierce tigers stroke,
And lions yoke

In flowery bands.

[blocks in formation]

How still the morning of the hallowed day!
Mute is the voice of rural labor, hushed
The plowboy's whistle and the milkmaid's song.
The scythe lies glittering in the dewy wreath
Of tedded grass, mingled with fading flowers,
That yestermorn bloomed waving in the breeze;
Sounds the most faint attract the ear, the
hum

Of early bee, the trickling of the dew,
The distant bleating, midway up the hill.
Calmness sits throned on yon unmoving cloud.
To him who wanders o'er the upland leas
The blackbird's note comes mellower from the

dale;

And sweeter from the sky the gladsome lark
Warbles his heaven-tuned song; the lulling brook
Murmurs more gently down the deep-worn glen;
While from yon lowly roof, whose circling smoke
O'ermounts the mist, is heard at intervals
The voice of psalms, the simple song of praise.
With dovelike wings Peace o'er yon village
broods;

The dizzying mill-wheel rests; the anvil's din
Hath ceased; all, all around is quietness.
Less fearful on this day, the limping hare
Stops, and looks back, and stops, and looks on

[blocks in formation]

"What part or lot have you," he said,
"In these dull rites of drowsy-head?
Is silence worship? Seek it where
It soothes with dreams the summer air;
Not in this close and rude-benched hall,
But where soft lights and shadows fall,
And all the slow, sleep-walking hours
Glide soundless over grass and flowers!
From time and place and form apart,
Its holy ground the human heart,
Nor ritual-bound nor templeward
Walks the free spirit of the Lord!
Our common Master did not pen
His followers up from other men;
His service liberty indeed,

He built no church, he framed no creed;
But while the saintly Pharisee

Made broader his phylactery,

As from the synagogue was seen
The dusty-sandaled Nazarene
Through ripening cornfields lead the way
Upon the awful Sabbath day,

His sermons were the healthful talk
That shorter made the mountain-walk,
His wayside texts were flowers and birds,
Where mingled with his gracious words
The rustle of the tamarisk-tree
And ripple-wash of Galilee."

"Thy words are well, O friend," I said;
"Unmeasured and unlimited,

With noiseless slide of stone to stone,
The mystic Church of God has grown.
Invisible and silent stands

The temple never made with hands,
Unheard the voices still and small
Of its unseen confessional.
He needs no special place of prayer
Whose hearing ear is everywhere;
He brings not back the childish days
That ringed the earth with stones of praise,
Roofed Karnak's hall of gods, and laid
The plinths of Philæ's colonnade.
Still less he owns the selfish good
And sickly growth of solitude,
The worthless grace that, out of sight,
Flowers in the desert anchorite;
Dissevered from the suffering whole,
Love hath no power to save a soul.
Not out of Self, the origin
And native air and soil of sin,
The living waters spring and flow,
The trees with leaves of healing grow.

"Dream not, O friend, because I seek
This quiet shelter twice a week,
I better deem its pine-laid floor
Than breezy hill or sea-sung shore;

But nature is not solitude;

She crowds us with her thronging wood;
Her many hands reach out to us,
Her many tongues arc garrulous;
Perpetual riddles of surprise

She offers to our ears and eyes;
She will not leave our senses still,
But drags them captive at her will;
And, making earth too great for heaven,
She hides the Giver in the given.

"And so I find it well to come
For deeper rest to this still room,
For here the habit of the soul
Feels less the outer world's control;
The strength of mutual purpose pleads
More earnestly our common needs;
And from the silence multiplied
By these still forms on either side,

The world that time and sense have known
Falls off and leaves us God alone.

"Yet rarely through the charmed repose
Unmixed the stream of motive flows,
A flavor of its many springs,

The tints of earth and sky it brings;
In the still waters needs must be
Some shade of human sympathy;
And here, in its accustomed place,
I look on memory's dearest face;
The blind by-sitter guesseth not
What shadow haunts that vacant spot;
No eyes save mine alone can see
The love wherewith it welcomes me!
And still, with those alone my kin,
In doubt and weakness, want and sin,

I bow my head, my heart I bare
As when that face was living there,
And strive (too oft, alas! in vain)
The
peace of simple trust to gain,
Fold fancy's restless wings, and lay
The idols of my heart away.

"Welcome the silence all unbroken,
Nor less the words of fitness spoken,
Such golden words as hers for whom
Our autumn flowers have just made room;
Whose hopeful utterance through and through
The freshness of the morning blew ;
Who loved not less the earth that light
Fell on it from the heavens in sight,
But saw in all fair forms more fair
The Eternal beauty mirrored there.
Whose eighty years but added grace
And saintlier meaning to her face,
The look of one who bore away
Glad tidings from the hills of day,
While all our hearts went forth to meet

The coming of her beautiful feet!
Or haply hers whose pilgrim tread
Is in the paths where Jesus led ;
Who dreams her childhood's sabbath dream
By Jordan's willow-shaded stream,

And, of the hymns of hope and faith,
Sung by the monks of Nazareth,

Hears pious echoes, in the call

To prayer, from Moslem minarets fall, Repeating where His works were wrought The lesson that her Master taught,

Of whom an elder Sibyl gave,

The prophesies of Cuma's cave!

"I ask no organ's soulless breath

To drone the themes of life and death,
No altar candle-lit by day,

No ornate wordsman's rhetoric-play,
No cool philosophy to teach
Its bland audacities of speech
To doubled-tasked idolaters,
Themselves their gods and worshipers,
No pulpit hammered by the fist
Of loud-asserting dogmatist,
Who borrows for the hand of love
The smoking thunderbolts of Jove.
I know how well the fathers taught,
What work the later schoolmen wrought;

I reverence old-time faith and men,
But God is near us now as then ;
His force of love is still unspent,

His hate of sin as imminent;

And still the measure of our needs Outgrows the cramping bounds of creeds; The manna gathered yesterday

Already savors of decay;

Doubts to the world's child-heart unknown
Question us now from star and stone;

Too little or too much we know,
And sight is swift and faith is slow;
The power is lost to self-deceive
With shallow forms of make-believe.
We walk at high noon, and the bells
Call to a thousand oracles,

But the sound deafens, and the light
Is stronger than our dazzled sight;
The letters of the sacred Book
Glimmer and swim beneath our look;
Still struggles in the Age's breast
With deepening agony of quest
The old entreaty: Art thou He,
Or look we for the Christ to be?'

"God should be most where man is least ;
So, where is neither church nor priest,
And never rag of form or creed
To clothe the nakedness of need,
Where farmer-folk in silence meet,

I turn my bell-unsummoned feet; I lay the critic's glass aside,

I tread upon my lettered pride,
And, lowest-seated, testify
To the oneness of humanity;
Confess the universal want,

And share whatever Heaven may grant.
He findeth not who seeks his own,
The soul is lost that's saved alone.
Not on one favored forehead fell
Of old the fire-tongued miracle,
But flamed o'er all the thronging host
The baptism of the Holy Ghost;
Heart answers heart in one desire
The blending lines of prayer aspire ;
'Where, in my name, meet two or three,
Our Lord hath said, 'I there will be !'

"So sometimes comes to soul and sense
The feeling which is evidence
That very near about us lies
The realm of spiritual mysteries.
The sphere of the supernal powers
Impinges on this world of ours.
The low and dark horizon lifts,
To light the scenic terror shifts;
The breath of a diviner air
Blows down the answer of a prayer:·
That all our sorrow, pain, and doubt
A great compassion clasps about,
And law and goodness, love and force,
Are wedded fast beyond divorce.
Then duty leaves to love its task,
The beggar Self forgets to ask;
With smile of trust and folded hands,
The passive soul in waiting stands
To feel, as flowers the sun and dew,
The One true Life its own renew.

"So, to the calmly gathered thought
The innermost of truth is taught,
The mystery dimly understood,
That love of God is love of good,
And, chiefly, its divinest trace
In Him of Nazareth's holy face;
That to be saved is only this,
Salvation from our selfishness,
From more than elemental fire,
The soul's unsanctified desire,
From sin itself, and not the pain
That warns us of its chafing chain;
That worship's deeper meaning lies
In mercy, and not sacrifice,
Not proud humilities of sense
And posturing of penitence,

But love's unforced obedience;

That Book and Church and Day are given For man, not God, - for earth, not heaven,

[blocks in formation]

The sweet Earth, - very sweet, despite The rank grave-smell forever drifting in Among the odors from her censers white Of wave-swung lilies and of wind-swung roses, The Earth sad-sweet is deeply attaint with sin!

The pure air, which encloses Her and her starry kin, Still shudders with the unspent palpitating Of a great Curse, that to its utmost shore Thrills with a deadly shiver Which has not ceased to quiver Down all the ages, nathless the strong beating Of Angel-wings, and the defiant roar Of Earth's Titanic thunders.

Fair and sad,

In sin and beauty, our beloved Earth Has need of all her sons to make her glad; Has need of martyrs to refire the hearth Of her quenched altars, of heroic men With freedom's sword, or Truth's supernal pen, To shape the worn-out mold of nobleness again. And she has need of Poets who can string Their harps with steel to catch the lightning's

fire,

And pour her thunders from the clanging wire, To cheer the hero, mingling with his cheer, Arouse the laggard in the battle's rear,

« VorigeDoorgaan »