Click in the field, then press CTRL+C to copy the HTML code
<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="/comments.php?id=506359" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>Christmas-Eve</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="/comments.php?id=506359" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">I.<br>OUT of the little chapel I burst<br>Into the fresh night air again.<br>I had waited a good five minutes first<br>In the doorway, to escape the rain<br>That drove in gusts down the common’s centre,<br>At the edge of which the chapel stands,<br>Before I plucked up heart to enter:<br>Heaven knows how many sorts of hands<br>Reached past me, groping for the latch<br>Of the inner door that hung on catch,<br>More obstinate the more they fumbled,<br>Till, giving way at last with a scold<br>Of the crazy hinge, in squeezed or tumbled<br>One sheep more to the rest in fold,<br>And left me irresolute, standing sentry<br>In the sheepfold’s lath-and-plaster entry,<br>Four feet long by two feet wide,<br>Partitioned off from the vast inside—<br>I blocked up half of it at least.<br>No remedy; the rain kept driving:<br>They eyed me much as some wild beast,<br>The congregation, still arriving,<br>Some of them by the mainroad, white<br>A long way past me into the night,<br>Skirting the common, then diverging;<br>Not a few suddenly emerging<br>From the common’s self thro’ the paling-gaps,—<br>—They house in the gravel-pits perhaps,<br>Where the road stops short with its safeguard border<br>Of lamps, as tired of such disorder;—<br>But the most turned in yet more abruptly<br>From a certain squalid knot of alleys,<br>Where the town’s bad blood once slept corruptly,<br>Which now the little chapel rallies<br>And leads into day again,—its priestliness<br>Lending itself to hide their beastliness<br>So cleverly (thanks in part to the mason),<br>And putting so cheery a whitewashed face on<br>Those neophytes too much in lack of it,<br>That, where you cross the common as I did,<br>And meet the party thus presided,<br>“Mount Zion,” with Love-lane at the back of it,<br>They front you as little disconcerted,<br>As, bound for the hills, her fate averted<br>And her wicked people made to mind him,<br>Lot might have marched with Gomorrah behind him. </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="/comments.php?id=506359" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">II.<br>Well, from the road, the lanes or the common,<br>In came the flock: the fat weary woman,<br>Panting and bewildered, down-clapping<br>Her umbrella with a mighty report,<br>Grounded it by me, wry and flapping,<br>A wreck of whalebones; then, with a snort,<br>Like a startled horse, at the interloper<br>Who humbly knew himself improper,<br>But could not shrink up small enough,<br>Round to the door, and in,—the gruff<br>Hinge’s invariable scold<br>Making your very blood run cold.<br>Prompt in the wake of her, up-pattered<br>On broken clogs, the many-tattered<br>Little old-faced, peaking sister-turned-mother<br>Of the sickly babe she tried to smother<br>Somehow up, with its spotted face,<br>From the cold, on her breast, the one warm place;<br>She too must stop, wring the poor suds dry<br>Of a draggled shawl, and add thereby<br>Her tribute to the door-mat, sopping<br>Already from my own clothes’ dropping,<br>Which yet she seemed to grudge I should stand on;<br>Then stooping down to take off her pattens,<br>She bore them defiantly, in each hand one,<br>Planted together before her breast<br>And its babe, as good as a lance in rest.<br>Close on her heels, the dingy satins<br>Of a female something, past me flitted,<br>With lips as much too white, as a streak<br>Lay far too red on each hollow cheek;<br>And it seemed the very door-hinge pitied<br>All that was left of a woman once,<br>Holding at least its tongue for the nonce.<br>Then a tall yellow man, like the Penitent Thief,<br>With his jaw bound up in a handkerchief,<br>And eyelids screwed together tight,<br>Led himself in by some inner light.<br>And, except from him, from each that entered,<br>I had the same interrogation—<br>“What, you, the alien, you have ventured<br>“To take with us, elect, your station?<br>“A carer for none of it, a Gallio?”—<br>Thus, plain as print, I read the glance<br>At a common prey, in each countenance,<br>As of huntsman giving his hounds the tallyho:<br>And, when the door’s cry drowned their wonder,<br>The draught, it always sent in shutting,<br>Made the flame of the single tallow candle<br>In the cracked square lanthorn I stood under,<br>Shoot its blue lip at me, rebutting,<br>As it were, the luckless cause of scandal:<br>I verily thought the zealous light<br>(In the chapel’s secret, too!) for spite,<br>Would shudder itself clean off the wick,<br>With the airs of a St. John’s Candlestick.<br>There was no standing it much longer.<br>“Good folks,” said I, as resolve grew stronger,<br>“This way you perform the Grand-Inquisitor,<br>“When the weather sends you a chance visitor?<br>“You are the men, and wisdom shall die with you,<br>“And none of the old Seven Churches vie with you!<br>“But still, despite the pretty perfection<br>“To which you carry your trick of exclusiveness,<br>“And, taking God’s word under wise protection,<br>“Correct its tendency to diffusiveness,<br>“Bidding one reach it over hot ploughshares,—<br>“Still, as I say, though you’ve found salvation,<br>“If I should choose to cry—as now—‘Shares!’—<br>“See if the best of you bars me my ration!<br>“Because I prefer for my expounder<br>“Of the laws of the feast, the feast’s own Founder:<br>“Mine’s the same right with your poorest and sickliest,<br>“Supposing I don the marriage-vestiment;<br>“So, shut your mouth, and open your Testament,<br>“And carve me my portion at your quickliest!”<br>Accordingly, as a shoemaker’s lad<br>With wizened face in want of soap,<br>And wet apron wound round his waist like a rope,<br>After stopping outside, for his cough was bad,<br>To get the fit over, poor gentle creature,<br>And so avoid disturbing the preacher,<br>Passed in, I sent my elbow spikewise<br>At the shutting door, and entered likewise,—<br>Received the hinge’s accustomed greeting,<br>Crossed the threshold’s magic pentacle,<br>And found myself in full conventicle,<br>—To wit, in Zion Chapel Meeting,<br>On the Christmas-Eve of ’Forty-nine,<br>Which, calling its flock to their special clover,<br>Found them assembled and one sheep over,<br>Whose lot, as the weather pleased, was mine. </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="/comments.php?id=506359" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">III.<br>I very soon had enough of it.<br>The hot smell and the human noises,<br>And my neighbour’s coat, the greasy cuff of it,<br>Were a pebble-stone that a child’s hand poises,<br>Compared with the pig-of-lead-like pressure<br>Of the preaching-man’s immense stupidity,<br>As he poured his doctrine forth, full measure,<br>To meet his audience’s avidity.<br>You needed not the wit of the Sybil<br>To guess the cause of it all, in a twinkling—<br>No sooner had our friend an inkling<br>Of treasure hid in the Holy Bible,<br>(Whenever it was the thought first struck hin<br>How Death, at unawares, might duck him<br>Deeper than the grave, and quench<br>The gin-shop’s light in Hell’s grim drench)<br>Than he handled it so, in fine irreverence,<br>As to hug the Book of books to pieces:<br>And, a patchwork of chapters and texts in severance,<br>Not improved by the private dog’s-ears and creases,<br>Having clothed his own soul with, he’d fain see equipt yours,—<br>So tossed you again your Holy Scriptures.<br>And you picked them up, in a sense, no doubt:<br>Nay, had but a single face of my neighbours<br>Appeared to suspect that the preacher’s labours<br>Were help which the world could be saved without,<br>’Tis odds but I had borne in quiet<br>A qualm or two at my spiritual diet;<br>Or, who can tell? had even mustered<br>Somewhat to urge in behalf of the sermon:<br>But the flock sate on, divinely flustered,<br>Sniffing, methought, its dew of Hermon<br>With such content in every snuffle,<br>As the devil inside us loves to ruffle.<br>My old fat woman purred with pleasure,<br>And thumb round thumb went twirling faster<br>While she, to his periods keeping measure,<br>Maternally devoured the pastor.<br>The man with the handkerchief, untied it.<br>Showed us a horrible wen inside it,<br>Gave his eyelids yet another screwing.<br>And rocked himself as the woman was doing.<br>The shoemaker’s lad, discreetly choking,<br>Kept down his cough. ’Twas too provoking!<br>My gorge rose at the nonsense and stuff of it,<br>And saying, like Eve when she plucked the apple,<br>“I wanted a taste, and now there’s enough of it,”<br>I flung out of the little chapel. </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="/comments.php?id=506359" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">IV.<br>There was a lull in the rain, a lull<br>In the wind too; the moon was risen,<br>And would have shone out pure and full,<br>But for the ramparted cloud-prison,<br>Block on block built up in the west,<br>For what purpose the wind knows best,<br>Who changes his mind continually.<br>And the empty other half of the sky<br>Seemed in its silence as if it knew<br>What, any moment, might look through<br>A chance-gap in that fortress massy:—<br>Through its fissures you got hints<br>Of the flying moon, by the shifting tints,<br>Now, a dull lion-colour, now, brassy<br>Burning to yellow, and whitest yellow,<br>Like furnace-smoke just ere the flames bellow,<br>All a-simmer with intense strain<br>To let her through,—then blank again,<br>At the hope of her appearance failing.<br>Just by the chapel, a break in the railing<br>Shows a narrow path directly across;<br>’Tis ever dry walking there, on the moss—<br>Besides, you go gently all the way uphill:<br>I stooped under and soon felt better:<br>My head grew light, my limbs more supple,<br>As I walked on, glad to have slipt the fetter;<br>My mind was full of the scene I had left,<br>That placid flock, that pastor vociferant,<br>—How this outside was pure and different!<br>The sermon, now—what a mingled weft<br>Of good and ill! were either less,<br>Its fellow had coloured the whole distinctly;<br>But alas for the excellent earnestness,<br>And the truths, quite true if stated succinctly,<br>But as surely false, in their quaint presentment,<br>However to pastor and flock’s contentment!<br>Say rather, such truths looked false to your eyes,<br>With his provings and parallels twisted and twined,<br>Till how could you know them, grown double their size,<br>In the natural fog of the good man’s mind?<br>Like yonder spots of our roadside lamps,<br>Haloed about with the common’s damps.<br>Truth remains true, the fault’s in the prover;<br>The zeal was good, and the aspiration;<br>And yet, and yet, yet, fifty times over,<br>Pharaoh received no demonstration<br>By his Baker’s dream of Baskets Three,<br>Of the doctrine of the Trinity,—<br>Although, as our preacher thus embellished it,<br>Apparently his hearers relished it<br>With so unfeigned a gust—who knows if<br>They did not prefer our friend to Joseph?<br>But so it is everywhere, one way with all of them!<br>These people have really felt, no doubt,<br>A something, the motion they style the Call of them;<br>And this is their method of bringing about,<br>By a mechanism of words and tones,<br>(So many texts in so many groans)<br>A sort of reviving or reproducing,<br>More or less perfectly, (who can tell?—)<br>Of the mood itself, that strengthens by using;<br>And how it happens, I understand well.<br>A tune was born in my head last week,<br>Out of the thump-thump and shriek-shriek<br>Of the train, as I came by it, up from Manchester;<br>And when, next week, I take it back again,<br>My head will sing to the engine’s clack again,<br>While it only makes my neighbour’s haunches stir,<br>—Finding no dormant musical sprout<br>In him, as in me, to be jolted out.<br>’Tis the taught already that profit by teaching;<br>He gets no more from the railway’s preaching,<br>Than, from this preacher who does the rail’s office, I,<br>Whom therefore the flock casts a jealous eye on.<br>Still, why paint over their door “Mount Zion,”<br>To which all flesh shall come, saith the prophecy? </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="/comments.php?id=506359" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">V.<br>But wherefore be harsh on a single case?<br>After how many modes, this Christmas-Eve,<br>Does the selfsame weary thing take place?<br>The same endeavour to make you believe,<br>And much with the same effect, no more:<br>Each method abundantly convincing,<br>As I say, to those convinced before,<br>But scarce to he swallowed without wincing,<br>By the not-as-yet-convinced. For me,<br>I have my own church equally.<br>And in this church my faith sprang first!<br>(I said, as I reached the rising ground,<br>And the wind began again, with a burst<br>Of rain in my face, and a glad rebound<br>From the heart beneath, as if, God speeding me,<br>I entered His church-door, Nature leading me)<br>—In youth I looked to these very skies,<br>And probing their immensities,<br>I found God there, His visible power;<br>Yet felt in my heart, amid all its sense<br>Of that power, an equal evidence<br>That His love, there too, was the nobler dower.<br>For the loving worm within its clod,<br>Were diviner than a loveless god<br>Amid his worlds, I will dare to say.<br>You know what I mean: God’s all, man’s nought:<br>But also, God, whose pleasure brought<br>Man into being, stands away<br>As it were, an handbreadth off, to give<br>Room for the newly-made to live,<br>And look at Him from a place apart,<br>And use his gifts of brain and heart,<br>Given, indeed, but to keep for ever.<br>Who speaks of man, then, must not sever<br>Man’s very elements from man,<br>Saying, “But all is God’s”—whose plan<br>Was to create man and then leave him<br>Able, His own word saith, to grieve Him,<br>But able to glorify Him too,<br>As a mere machine could never do,<br>That prayed or praised, all unaware<br>Of its fitness for aught but praise and prayer,<br>Made perfect as a thing of course.<br>Man, therefore, stands on his own stock<br>Of love and power as a pin-point rock,<br>And, looking to God who ordained divorce<br>Of the rock from His boundless continent,<br>Sees in His Power made evident,<br>Only excess by a million fold<br>O’er the power God gave man in the mould.<br>For, see: Man’s hand, first formed to carry<br>A few pounds’ weight, when taught to marry<br>Its strength with an engine’s, lifts a mountain,<br>—Advancing in power by one degree;<br>And why count steps through eternity?<br>But Love is the ever springing fountain:<br>Man may enlarge or narrow his bed<br>For the water’s play, but the water head—<br>How can he multiply or reduce it?<br>As easy create it, as cause it to cease:<br>He may profit by it, or abuse it;<br>But ’tis not a thing to bear increase<br>As power will: be love less or more<br>In the heart of man, he keeps it shut<br>Or opes it wide as he pleases, but<br>Love’s sum remains what it was before.<br>So, gazing up, in my youth, at love<br>As seen through power, ever above<br>All modes which make it manifest,<br>My soul brought all to a single test—<br>That He, the Eternal First and Last,<br>Who, in His power, had so surpassed<br>All man conceives of what is might,—<br>Whose wisdom, too, showed infinite,<br>—Would prove as infinitely good;<br>Would never, my soul understood,<br>With power to work all love desires,<br>Bestow e’en less than man requires:<br>That He who endlessly was teaching,<br>Above my spirit’s utmost reaching,<br>What love can do in the leaf or stone,<br>(So that to master this alone,<br>This done in the stone or leaf for me,<br>I must go on learning endlessly)<br>Would never need that I, in turn,<br>Should point him out a defect unheeded,<br>And show that God had yet to learn<br>What the meanest human creature needed,—<br>—Not life, to wit, for a few short years,<br>Tracking His way through doubts and fears,<br>While the stupid earth on which I stay<br>Suffers no change, but passive adds<br>Its myriad years to myriads,<br>Though I, He gave it to, decay,<br>Seeing death come and choose about me,<br>And my dearest ones depart without me.<br>No! love which, on earth, amid all the shows of it,<br>Has ever been seen the sole good of life in it,<br>The love, ever growing there, spite of the strife in it,<br>Shall arise, made perfect, from death’s repose of it!<br>And I shall behold Thee, face to face,<br>O God, and in Thy light retrace<br>How in all I loved here, still wast Thou!<br>Whom pressing to, then, as I fain would now,<br>I shall find as able to satiate<br>The love, Thy gift, as my spirit’s wonder<br>Thou art able to quicken and sublimate,<br>Was this sky of Thine, that I now walk under,<br>And glory in Thee as thus I gaze,<br>—Thus, thus! oh, let men keep their ways<br>Of seeking Thee in a narrow shrine—<br>Be this my way! And this is mine! </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="/comments.php?id=506359" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">VI.<br>For lo, what think you? suddenly<br>The rain and the wind ceased, and the sky<br>Received at once the full fruition<br>Of the moon’s consummate apparition.<br>The black cloud-barricade was riven,<br>Ruined beneath her feet, and driven<br>Deep in the west; while, bare and breathless,<br>North and south and east lay ready<br>For a glorious Thing, that, dauntless, deathless,<br>Sprang across them, and stood steady.<br>’Twas a moon-rainbow, vast and perfect,<br>From heaven to heaven extending, perfect<br>As the mother-moon’s self, full in face.<br>It rose, distinctly at the base<br>With its seven proper colours chorded,<br>Which still, in the rising, were compressed,<br>Until at last they coalesced,<br>And supreme the spectral creature lorded<br>In a triumph of whitest white,—<br>Above which intervened the night.<br>But above night too, like the next,<br>The second of a wondrous sequence,<br>Reaching in rare and rarer frequence,<br>Till the heaven of heavens be circumflext,<br>Another rainbow rose, a mightier,<br>Fainter, flushier, and flightier,—<br>Rapture dying along its verge!<br>Oh, whose foot shall I see emerge,<br>WHOSE, from the straining topmost dark,<br>On to the keystone of that arc? </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="/comments.php?id=506359" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">VII.<br>This sight was shown me, there and then,—<br>Me, one out of a world of men,<br>Singled forth, as the chance might hap<br>To another, if in a thunderclap<br>Where I heard noise, and you saw flame,<br>Some one man knew God called his name.<br>For me, I think I said, “Appear!<br>“Good were it to be ever here.<br>“If Thou wilt, let me build to Thee<br>“Service-tabernacles Three,<br>“Where, for ever in Thy presence,<br>“In extatic acquiescence,<br>“Far alike from thriftless learning<br>“And ignorance’s undiscerning,<br>“ I may worship and remain!”<br>Thus, at the show above me, gazing<br>With upturned eyes, I felt my brain<br>Glutted with the glory, blazing<br>Throughout its whole mass, over and under,<br>Until at length it burst asunder,<br>And out of it bodily there streamed<br>The too-much glory, as it seemed,<br>Passing from out me to the ground,<br>Then palely serpentining round<br>Into the dark with mazy error. </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="/comments.php?id=506359" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">VIII.<br>All at once I looked up with terror.<br>He was there.<br>He Himself with His human air,<br>On the narrow pathway, just before:<br>I saw the back of Him, no more—<br>He had left the chapel, then, as I.<br>I forgot all about the sky.<br>No face: only the sight<br>Of a sweepy Garment, vast and white,<br>With a hem that I could recognise.<br>I felt terror, no surprise:<br>My mind filled with the cataract,<br>At one bound, of the mighty fact.<br>I remembered, He did say<br>Doubtless, that, to this world’s end,<br>Where two or three should meet and pray,<br>He would be in the midst, their Friend:<br>Certainly He was there with them.<br>And my pulses leaped for joy<br>Of the golden thought without alloy,<br>That I saw His very Vesture’s hem.<br>Then rushed the blood back, cold and clear<br>With a fresh enhancing shiver of fear,<br>And I hastened, cried out while I pressed<br>To the salvation of the Vest,<br>“But not so, Lord! It cannot be<br>“That Thou, indeed, art leaving me—<br>“Me, that have despised Thy friends.<br>“Did my heart make no amends?<br>“Thou art the Love of God—above<br>“His Power, didst hear me place His Love,<br>“And that was leaving the world for Thee!<br>“Therefore Thou must not turn from me<br>“As if I had chosen the other part.<br>“Folly and pride o’ercame my heart.<br>“Our best is bad, nor bears Thy test<br>“Still it should be our very best.<br>“I thought it best that Thou, the Spirit,<br>“Be worshipped in spirit and in truth,<br>“And in beauty, as even we require it—<br>“Not in the forms burlesque, uncouth,<br>“I left but now, as scarcely fitted<br>“For Thee: I knew not what I pitied:<br>“But, all I felt there, right or wrong,<br>“What is it to Thee, who curest sinning?<br>“Am I not weak as Thou art strong?<br>“I have looked to Thee from the beginning,<br>“Straight up to Thee through all the world<br>“Which, like an idle scroll, lay furled<br>“To nothingness on either side:<br>“And since the time Thou wast descried,<br>“Spite of the weak heart, so have I<br>“Lived ever, and so fain would die,<br>“Living and dying, Thee before!<br>“But if Thou leavest me—” </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="/comments.php?id=506359" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">IX.<br>Less or more,<br>I suppose that I spoke thus.<br>When,—have mercy, Lord, on us!<br>The whole Face turned upon me full.<br>And I spread myself beneath it,<br>As when the bleacher spreads, to seethe it<br>In the cleansing sun, his wool,—<br>Steeps in the flood of noontide whiteness<br>Some defiled, discoloured web—<br>So lay I, saturate with brightness.<br>And when the flood appeared to ebb,<br>Lo, I was walking, light and swift,<br>With my senses settling fast and steadying,<br>But my body caught up in the whirl and drift<br>Of the Vesture’s amplitude, still eddying<br>On, just before me, still to be followed,<br>As it carried me after with its motion:<br>What shall I say?—as a path were hollowed<br>And a man went weltering through the ocean,<br>Sucked along in the flying wake<br>Of the luminous water-snake.<br>Darkness and cold were cloven, as through<br>I passed, upborne yet walking too.<br>And I turned to myself at intervals,—<br>“So He said, and so it befals.<br>“God who registers the cup<br>“Of mere cold water, for His sake<br>“To a disciple rendered up,<br>“Disdains not His own thirst to slake<br>“At the poorest love was ever offered:<br>“And because it was my heart I proffered,<br>“With true love trembling at the brim,<br>“He suffers me to follow Him<br>“For ever, my own way,—dispensed<br>“From seeking to be influenced<br>“By all the less immediate ways<br>“That earth, in worships manifold,<br>“Adopts to reach, by prayer and praise,<br>‘The Garment’s hem, which, lo, I hold!” </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="/comments.php?id=506359" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">X.<br>And so we crossed the world and stopped.<br>For where am I, in city or plain,<br>Since I am ’ware of the world again?<br>And what is this that rises propped<br>With pillars of prodigious girth?<br>Is it really on the earth,<br>This miraculous Dome of God?<br>Has the angel’s measuring-rod<br>Which numbered cubits, gem from gem,<br>’Twixt the gates of the New Jerusalem,<br>Meted it out,—and what he meted,<br>Have the sons of men completed?<br>—Binding, ever as he bade,<br>Columns in this colonnade<br>With arms wide open to embrace<br>The entry of the human race<br>To the breast of . . . what is it, yon building,<br>Ablaze in front, all paint and gilding,<br>With marble for brick, and stones of price<br>For garniture of the edifice?<br>Now I see: it is no dream:<br>It stands there and it does not seem;<br>For ever, in pictures, thus it looks,<br>And thus I have read of it in books,<br>Often in England, leagues away,<br>And wondered how those fountains play,<br>Growing up eternally<br>Each to a musical water-tree,<br>Whose blossoms drop, a glittering boon,<br>Before my eyes, in the light of the moon,<br>To the granite lavers underneath.<br>Liar and dreamer in your teeth!<br>I, the sinner that speak to you,<br>Was in Rome this night, and stood, and knew<br>Both this and more! For see, for see,<br>The dark is rent, mine eye is free<br>To pierce the crust of the outer wall,<br>And I view inside, and all there, all,<br>As the swarming hollow of a hive,<br>The whole Basilica alive!<br>Men in the chancel, body, and nave,<br>Men on the pillars’ architrave,<br>Men on the statues, men on the tombs<br>With popes and kings in their porphyry wombs,<br>All famishing in expectation<br>Of the main-altar’s consummation.<br>For see, for see, the rapturous moment<br>Approaches, and earth’s best endowment<br>Blends with heaven’s: the taper-fires<br>Pant up, the winding brazen spires<br>Heave loftier yet the baldachin:<br>The incense-gaspings, long kept in,<br>Suspire in clouds; the organ blatant<br>Holds his breath and grovels latent,<br>As if God’s hushing finger grazed him,<br>(Like Behemoth when He praised him)<br>At the silver bell’s shrill tinkling,<br>Quick cold drops of terror sprinkling<br>On the sudden pavement strewed<br>With faces of the multitude.<br>Earth breaks up, time drops away,<br>In flows heaven, with its new day<br>Of endless life, when He who trod,<br>Very Man and very God,<br>This earth in weakness, shame and pain,<br>Dying the death whose signs remain<br>Up yonder on the accursed tree,—<br>Shall come again, no more to be<br>Of captivity the thrall,<br>But the one God, all in all,<br>King of kings, and Lord of lords,<br>As His servant John received the words,<br>“I died, and live for evermore!” </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="/comments.php?id=506359" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">XI.<br>Yet I was left outside the door.<br>Why sate I there on the threshold-stone,<br>Left till He returns, alone<br>Save for the Garment’s extreme fold<br>Abandoned still to bless my hold?—<br>My reason, to my doubt, replied,<br>As if a book were opened wide,<br>And at a certain page I traced<br>Every record undefaced,<br>Added by successive years,—<br>The harvestings of truth’s stray ears<br>Singly gleaned, and in one sheaf<br>Bound together for belief.<br>Yes, I said—that He will go<br>And sit with these in turn, I know.<br>Their faith’s heart beats, though her head swims<br>Too giddily to guide her limbs,<br>Disabled by their palsy-stroke<br>From propping me. Though Rome’s gross yoke<br>Drops off, no more to be endured,<br>Her teaching is not so obscured<br>By errors and perversities,<br>That no truth shines athwart the lies:<br>And He, whose eye detects a spark<br>Even where, to man’s, the whole seems dark,<br>May well see flame where each beholder<br>Acknowledges the embers smoulder.<br>But I, a mere man, fear to quit<br>The clue God gave me as most fit<br>To guide my footsteps through life’s maze,<br>Because Himself discerns all ways<br>Open to reach Him: I, a man<br>He gave to mark where faith began<br>To swerve aside, till from its summit<br>Judgment drops her damning plummet,<br>Pronouncing such a fatal space<br>Departed from the Founder’s base:<br>He will not bid me enter too,<br>But rather sit, as now I do,<br>Awaiting His return outside.<br>—’Twas thus my reason straight replied,<br>And joyously I turned, and pressed<br>The Garment’s skirt upon my breast,<br>Until, afresh its light suffusing me,<br>My heart cried,—what has been abusing me<br>That I should wait here lonely and coldly,<br>Instead of rising, entering boldly,<br>Baring truth’s face, and letting drift<br>Her veils of lies as they choose to shift?<br>Do these men praise Him? I will raise<br>My voice up to their point of praise!<br>I see the error; but above<br>The scope of error, see the love.—<br>Oh, love of those first Christian days!<br>—Fanned so soon into a blaze,<br>From the spark preserved by the trampled sect,<br>That the antique sovereign Intellect<br>Which then sate ruling in the world,<br>Like a change in dreams, was hurled<br>From the throne he reigned upon:<br>—You looked up, and he was gone!<br>Gone, his glory of the pen!<br>—Love, with Greece and Rome in ken,<br>Bade her scribes abhor the trick<br>Of poetry and rhetoric,<br>And exult, with hearts set free,<br>In blessed imbecility<br>Scrawled, perchance, on some torn sheet,<br>Leaving Livy incomplete.<br>Gone, his pride of sculptor, painter!<br>—Love, while able to acquaint her<br>With the thousand statues yet<br>Fresh from chisel, pictures wet<br>From brush, she saw on every side,<br>Chose rather with an infant’s pride<br>To frame those portents which impart<br>Such unction to true Christian Art.<br>Gone, Music too! The air was stirred<br>By happy wings: Terpander’s bird<br>(That, when the cold came, fled away)<br>Would tarry not the wintry day,—<br>As more-enduring sculpture must,<br>Till a filthy saint rebuked the gust<br>With which he chanced to get a sight<br>Of some dear naked Aphrodite<br>He glanced a thought above the toes of,<br>By breaking zealously her nose off.<br>Love, surely, from that music’s lingering,<br>Might have filched her organ-fingering,<br>Nor chose rather to set prayings<br>To hog-grunts, praises to horse-neighings.<br>Love was the startling thing, the new;<br>Love was the all-sufficient too;<br>And seeing that, you see the rest.<br>As a babe can find its mother’s breast<br>As well in darkness as in light,<br>Love shut our eyes, and all seemed right.<br>True, the world’s eyes are open now:<br>—Less need for me to disallow<br>Some few that keep Love’s zone unbuckled,<br>Peevish as ever to be suckled,<br>Lulled by the same old baby-prattle<br>With intermixture of the rattle,<br>When she would have them creep, stand steady<br>Upon their feet, or walk already,<br>Not to speak of trying to climb.<br>I will be wise another time,<br>And not desire a wall between us,<br>When next I see a church-roof cover<br>So many species of one genus,<br>All with foreheads bearing Lover<br>Written above the earnest eyes of them;<br>All with breasts that beat for beauty,<br>Whether sublimed, to the surprise of them,<br>In noble daring, steadfast duty,<br>The heroic in passion, or in action,—<br>Or, lowered for the senses’ satisfaction,<br>To the mere outside of human creatures,<br>Mere perfect form and faultless features.<br>What! with all Rome here, whence to levy<br>Such contributions to their appetite,<br>With women and men in a gorgeous bevy,<br>They take, as it were, a padlock, and clap it tight<br>On their southern eyes, restrained from feeding<br>On the glories of their ancient reading,<br>On the beauties of their modern singing,<br>On the wonders of the builder’s bringing,<br>On the majesties of Art around them,—<br>And, all these loves, late struggling incessant,<br>When faith has at last united and bound them,<br>They offer up to God for a present!<br>Why, I will, on the whole, be rather proud of it,—<br>And, only taking the act in reference<br>To the other recipients who might have allowed of it<br>I will rejoice that God had the preference! </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="/comments.php?id=506359" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">XII.<br>So I summed up my new resolves:<br>Too much love there can never be.<br>And where the intellect devolves<br>Its function on love exclusively,<br>I, as one who possesses both,<br>Will accept the provision, nothing loth,<br>—Will feast my love, then depart elsewhere,<br>That my intellect may find its share.<br>And ponder, O soul, the while thou departest,<br>And see thou applaud the great heart of the artist,<br>Who, examining the capabilities<br>Of the block of marble he has to fashion<br>Into a type of thought or passion,—<br>Not always, using obvious facilities,<br>Shapes it, as any artist can,<br>Into a perfect symmetrical man,<br>Complete from head to foot of the life-size,<br>Such as old Adam stood in his wife’s eyes,—<br>But, now and then, bravely aspires to consummate<br>A Colossus by no means so easy to come at,<br>And uses the whole of his block for the bust,<br>Leaving the minds of the public to finish it,<br>Since cut it ruefully short he must:<br>On the face alone he expends his devotion;<br>He rather would mar than resolve to diminish it,<br>—Saying, “Applaud me for this grand notion<br>“Of what a face may be! As for completing it<br>“In breast and body and limbs, do that, you!”<br>All hail! I fancy how, happily meeting it,<br>A trunk and legs would perfect the statue,<br>Could man carve so as to answer volition.<br>And how much nobler than petty cavils,<br>A hope to find, in my spirit-travels,<br>Some artist of another ambition,<br>Who having a block to carve, no bigger,<br>Has spent his power on the opposite quest,<br>And believed to begin at the feet was best—<br>For so may I see, ere I die, the whole figure! </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="/comments.php?id=506359" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">XIII.<br>No sooner said than out in the night!<br>And still as we swept through storm and night,<br>My heart beat lighter and more light:<br>And lo, as before, I was walking swift,<br>With my senses settling fast and steadying,<br>But my body caught up in the whirl and drift<br>Of the Vesture’s amplitude, still eddying<br>On just before me, still to be followed,<br>As it carried me after with its motion,<br>—What shall I say?—as a path were hollowed,<br>And a man went weltering through the ocean<br>Sucked along in the flying wake<br>Of the luminous water-snake. </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="/comments.php?id=506359" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">XIV.<br>Alone! I am left alone once more—<br>(Save for the Garment’s extreme fold<br>Abandoned still to bless my hold)<br>Alone, beside the entrance-door<br>Of a sort of temple,—perhaps a college,<br>—Like nothing I ever saw before<br>At home in England, to my knowledge.<br>The tall, old, quaint, irregular town!<br>It may be . . though which, I can’t affirm . . any<br>Of the famous middle-age towns of Germany;<br>And this flight of stairs where I sit down,<br>Is it Halle, Weimar, Cassel, or Frankfort,<br>Or Göttingen, that I have to thank for’t?<br>It may be Göttingen,—most likely.<br>Through the open door I catch obliquely<br>Glimpses of a lecture-hall;<br>And not a bad assembly neither—<br>Ranged decent and symmetrical<br>On benches, waiting what’s to see there;<br>Which, holding still by the Vesture’s hem,<br>I also resolve to see with them,<br>Cautious this time how I suffer to slip<br>The chance of joining in fellowship<br>With any that call themselves His friends,<br>As these folks do, I have a notion.<br>But hist—a buzzing and emotion!<br>All settle themselves, the while ascends<br>By the creaking rail to the lecture-desk,<br>Step by step, deliberate<br>Because of his cranium’s over-freight,<br>Three parts sublime to one grotesque,<br>If I have proved an accurate guesser,<br>The hawk-nosed, high-cheek-boned Professor.<br>I felt at once as if there ran<br>A shoot of love from my heart to the man—<br>That sallow, virgin-minded, studious<br>Martyr to mild enthusiasm,<br>As he uttered a kind of cough-preludious<br>That woke my sympathetic spasm,<br>(Beside some spitting that made me sorry)<br>And stood, surveying his auditory<br>With a wan pure look, well nigh celestial,—<br>—Those blue eyes had survived so much!<br>While, under the foot they could not smutch,<br>Lay all the fleshly and the bestial.<br>Over he bowed, and arranged his notes,<br>Till the auditory’s clearing of throats<br>Was done with, died into silence;<br>And, when each glance was upward sent,<br>Each bearded mouth composed intent,<br>And a pin might be heard drop half a mile hence,—<br>He pushed back higher his spectacles,<br>Let the eyes stream out like lamps from cells,<br>And giving his head of hair—a hake<br>Of undressed tow, for colour and quantity—<br>One rapid and impatient shake,<br>(As our own young England adjusts a jaunty tie<br>When about to impart, on mature digestion,<br>Some thrilling view of the surplice-question)<br>—The Professor’s grave voice, sweet though hoarse,<br>Broke into his Christmas-Eve’s discourse. </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="/comments.php?id=506359" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">XV.<br>And he began it by observing<br>How reason dictated that men<br>Should rectify the natural swerving,<br>By a reversion, now and then,<br>To the well-heads of knowledge, few<br>And far away, whence rolling grew<br>The life-stream wide whereat we drink,<br>Commingled, as we needs must think,<br>With waters alien to the source:<br>To do which, aimed this Eve’s discourse.<br>Since, where could be a fitter time<br>For tracing backward to its prime,<br>This Christianity, this lake,<br>This reservoir, whereat we slake,<br>From one or other bank, our thirst?<br>So he proposed inquiring first<br>Into the various sources whence<br>This Myth of Christ is derivable;<br>Demanding from the evidence,<br>(Since plainly no such life was liveable)<br>How these phenomena should class?<br>Whether ’twere best opine Christ was,<br>Or never was at all, or whether<br>He was and was not, both together—<br>It matters little for the name,<br>So the Idea be left the same:<br>Only, for practical purpose’ sake,<br>’Twas obviously as well to take<br>The popular story,—understanding<br>How the ineptitude of the time,<br>And the penman’s prejudice, expanding<br>Fact into fable fit for the clime,<br>Had, by slow and sure degrees, translated it<br>Into this myth, this Individuum,—<br>Which, when reason had strained and abated it<br>Of foreign matter, gave, for residuum,<br>A Man!—a right true man, however,<br>Whose work was worthy a man’s endeavour!<br>Work, that gave warrant almost sufficient<br>To his disciples, for rather believing<br>He was just omnipotent and omniscient,<br>As it gives to us, for as frankly receiving<br>His word, their tradition,—which, though it meant<br>Something entirely different<br>From all that those who only heard it,<br>In their simplicity thought and averred it,<br>Had yet a meaning quite as respectable:<br>For, among other doctrines delectable,<br>Was he not surely the first to insist on,<br>The natural sovereignty of our race?—<br>Here the lecturer came to a pausing-place.<br>And while his cough, like a drouthy piston,<br>Tried to dislodge the husk that grew to him,<br>I seized the occasion of bidding adieu to him,<br>The Vesture still within my hand. </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="/comments.php?id=506359" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">XVI.<br>I could interpret its command.<br>This time He would not bid me enter<br>The exhausted air-bell of the Critic.<br>Truth’s atmosphere may grow mephitic<br>When Papist struggles with Dissenter,<br>Impregnating its pristine clarity,<br>—One, by his daily fare’s vulgarity,<br>Its gust of broken meat and garlic;<br>—One, by his soul’s too-much presuming,<br>To turn the frankincense’s fuming<br>And vapours of the candle starlike<br>Into the cloud her wings she buoys on:<br>And each, that sets the pure air seething,<br>Poisoning it for healthy breathing—<br>But the Critic leaves no air to poison;<br>Pumps out by a ruthless ingenuity<br>Atom by atom, and leaves you—vacuity.<br>Thus much of Christ, does he reject?<br>And what retain? His intellect?<br>What is it I must reverence duly?<br>Poor intellect for worship, truly,<br>Which tells me simply what was told<br>(If mere morality, bereft<br>Of the God in Christ, be all that’s left)<br>Elsewhere by voices manifold;<br>With this advantage, that the stater<br>Made nowise the important stumble<br>Of adding, he, the sage and humble,<br>Was also one with the Creator.<br>You urge Christ’s followers’ simplicity:<br>But how does shifting blame, evade it?<br>Have wisdom’s words no more felicity?<br>The stumbling-block, His speech—who laid it?<br>How comes it that for one found able,<br>To sift the truth of it from fable,<br>Millions believe it to the letter?<br>Christ’s goodness, then—does that fare better?<br>Strange goodness, which upon the score<br>Of being goodness, the mere due<br>Of man to fellow-man, much more<br>To God,—should take another view<br>Of its possessor’s privilege,<br>And bid him rule his race! You pledge<br>Your fealty to such rule? What, all—<br>From Heavenly John and Attic Paul,<br>And that brave weather-battered Peter<br>Whose stout faith only stood completer<br>For buffets, sinning to be pardoned,<br>As the more his hands hauled nets, they hardened,—<br>All, down to you, the man of men,<br>Professing here at Göttingen,<br>Compose Christ’s flock! So, you and I<br>Are sheep of a good man! and why?<br>The goodness,—how did he acquire it?<br>Was it self-gained, did God inspire it?<br>Choose which; then tell me, on what ground<br>Should its possessor dare propound<br>His claim to rise o’er us an inch?<br>Were goodness all some man’s invention,<br>Who arbitrarily made mention<br>What we should follow, and where flinch,—<br>What qualities might take the style<br>Of right and wrong,—and had such guessing<br>Met with as general acquiescing<br>As graced the Alphabet erewhile,<br>When A got leave an Ox to be,<br>No Camel (quoth the Jews) like G,—<br>For thus inventing thing and title<br>Worship were that man’s fit requital.<br>But if the common conscience must<br>Be ultimately judge, adjust<br>Its apt name to each quality<br>Already known,—I would decree<br>Worship for such mere demonstration<br>And simple work of nomenclature,<br>Only the day I praised, not Nature,<br>But Harvey, for the circulation.<br>I would praise such a Christ, with pride<br>And joy, that he, as none beside,<br>Had taught us how to keep the mind<br>God gave him, as God gave his kind,<br>Freer than they from fleshly taint!<br>I would call such a Christ our Saint,<br>As I declare our Poet, him<br>Whose insight makes all others dim:<br>A thousand poets pried at life,<br>And only one amid the strife<br>Rose to be Shakespeare! Each shall take<br>His crown, I’d say, for the world’s sake—<br>Though some objected—“Had we seen<br>“The heart and head of each, what screen<br>“Was broken there to give them light,<br>“While in ourselves it shuts the sight,<br>“We should no more admire, perchance,<br>“That these found truth out at a glance,<br>“Than marvel how the bat discerns<br>“Some pitch-dark cavern’s fifty turns,<br>“Led by a finer tact, a gift<br>“He boasts, which other birds must shift<br>“Without, and grope as best they can.”<br>No, freely I would praise the man.—<br>Nor one whit more, if he contended<br>That gift of his, from God, descended.<br>Ah, friend, what gift of man’s does not?<br>No nearer Something, by a jot,<br>Rise an infinity of Nothings<br>Than one: take Euclid for your teacher:<br>Distinguish kinds: do crownings, clothings,<br>Make that Creator which was creature?<br>Multiply gifts upon his head,<br>And what, when all’s done, shall be said<br>But . . . the more gifted he, I ween!<br>That one’s made Christ, another, Pilate,<br>And This might be all That has been,—<br>So what is there to frown or smile at?<br>What is left for us, save, in growth,<br>Of soul, to rise up, far past both,<br>From the gift looking to the Giver,<br>And from the cistern to the River,<br>And from the finite to Infinity,<br>And from man’s dust to God’s divinity? </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="/comments.php?id=506359" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">XVII.<br>Take all in a word: the Truth in God’s breast<br>Lies trace for trace upon ours impressed:<br>Though He is so bright and we so dim,<br>We are made in His image to witness Him;<br>And were no eye in us to tell,<br>Instructed by no inner sense.<br>The light of Heaven from the dark of Hell,<br>That light would want its evidence,—<br>Though Justice, Good and Truth were still<br>Divine, if by some demon’s will,<br>Hatred and wrong had been proclaimed<br>Law through the worlds, and Right misnamed.<br>No mere exposition of morality<br>Made or in part or in totality,<br>Should win you to give it worship, therefore:<br>And, if no better proof you will care for,<br>—Whom do you count the worst man upon earth?<br>Be sure, he knows, in his conscience, more<br>Of what Right is, than arrives at birth<br>In the best man’s acts that we bow before:<br>This last knows better—true; but my fact is,<br>’Tis one thing to know, and another to practise;<br>And thence I conclude that the real God-function<br>Is to furnish a motive and injunction<br>For practising what we know already.<br>And such an injunction and such a motive<br>As the God in Christ, do you waive, and “heady<br>High minded,” hang your tablet-votive<br>Outside the fane on a finger-post?<br>Morality to the uttermost,<br>Supreme in Christ as we all confess,<br>Why need we prove would avail no jot<br>To make Him God, if God He were not?<br>What is the point where Himself lays stress<br>Does the precept run “Believe in Good,<br>“In Justice, Truth, now understood<br>“For the first time?”—or, “Believe in ME,<br>“Who lived and died, yet essentially<br>“Am Lord of Life?” Whoever can take<br>The same to his heart and for mere love’s sake<br>Conceive of the love,—that man obtains<br>A new truth; no conviction gains<br>Of an old one only, made intense<br>By a fresh appeal to his faded sense. </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="/comments.php?id=506359" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">XVIII.<br>Can it be that He stays inside?<br>Is the Vesture left me to commune with?<br>Could my soul find aught to sing in tune with<br>Even at this lecture, if she tried?<br>Oh, let me at lowest sympathise<br>With the lurking drop of blood that lies<br>In the desiccated brain’s white roots<br>Without a throb for Christ’s attributes,<br>As the Lecturer makes his special boast!<br>If love’s dead there, it has left a ghost.<br>Admire we, how from heart to brain<br>(Though to say so strike the doctors dum<br>One instinct rises and falls again,<br>Restoring the equilibrium.<br>And how when the Critic had done his best,<br>And the Pearl of Price, at reason’s test,<br>Lay dust and ashes levigable<br>On the Professor’s lecture-table;<br>When we looked for the inference and monition<br>That our faith, reduced to such a condition,<br>Be swept forthwith to its natural dust-hole,—<br>He bids us, when we least expect it,<br>Take back our faith,—if it be not just whole,<br>Yet a pearl indeed, as his tests affect it,<br>Which fact pays the damage done rewardingly,<br>So, prize we our dust and ashes accordingly!<br>“Go home and venerate the Myth<br>“I thus have experimented with—<br>“This Man, continue to adore him<br>“Rather than all who went before him,<br>“And all who ever followed after!”—<br>Surely for this I may praise you, my brother!<br>Will you take the praise in tears or laughter?<br>That’s one point gained: can I compass another?<br>Unlearned love was safe from spurning—<br>Can’t we respect your loveless learning?<br>Let us at least give Learning honour!<br>What laurels had we showered upon her,<br>Girding her loins up to perturb<br>Our theory of the Middle Verb;<br>Or Turklike brandishing a scimetar<br>O’er anapests in comic-trimeter;<br>Or curing the halt and maimed Iketides,<br>While we lounged on at our indebted ease:<br>Instead of which, a tricksy demon<br>Sets her at Titus or Philemon!<br>When Ignorance wags his ears of leather<br>And hates God’s word, ’tis altogether;<br>Nor leaves he his congenial thistles<br>To go and browze on Paul’s Epistles.<br>—And you, the audience, who might ravage<br>The world wide, enviably savage<br>Nor heed the cry of the retriever,<br>More than Herr Heine (before his fever),—<br>I do not tell a lie so arrant<br>As say my passion’s wings are furled up,<br>And, without the plainest Heavenly warrant,<br>I were ready and glad to give this world up—<br>But still, when you rub the brow meticulous,<br>And ponder the profit of turning holy<br>If not for God’s, for your own sake solely,<br>—God forbid I should find you ridiculous!<br>Deduce from this lecture all that eases you,<br>Nay, call yourselves, if the calling pleases you,<br>“Christians,”—abhor the Deist’s pravity,—<br>Go on, you shall no more move my gravity,<br>Than, when I see boys ride a-cockhorse<br>I find it in my heart to embarrass them<br>By hinting that their stick’s a mock horse,<br>And they really carry what they say carries them. </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="/comments.php?id=506359" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">XIX.<br>So sate I talking with my mind.<br>I did not long to leave the door<br>And find a new church, as before,<br>But rather was quiet and inclined<br>To prolong and enjoy the gentle resting<br>From further tracking and trying and testing.<br>This tolerance is a genial mood!<br>(Said I, and a little pause ensued).<br>One trims the bark ’twixt shoal and shelf,<br>And sees, each side, the good effects of it,<br>A value for religion’s self,<br>A carelessness about the sects of it.<br>Let me enjoy my own conviction,<br>Not watch my neighbour’s faith with fretfulness,<br>Still spying there some dereliction<br>Of truth, perversity, forgetfulness!<br>Better a mild indifferentism,<br>To teach that all our faiths (though duller<br>His shines through a dull spirit’s prism)<br>Originally had one colour—<br>Sending me on a pilgrimage<br>Through ancient and through modern times<br>To many peoples, various climes,<br>Where I may see Saint, Savage, Sage<br>Fuse their respective creeds in one<br>Before the general Father’s throne! </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="/comments.php?id=506359" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">XX.<br>. . . ’T was the horrible storm began afresh!<br>The black night caught me in his mesh<br>Whirled me up, and flung me prone.<br>I was left on the college-step alone.<br>I looked, and far there, ever fleeting<br>Far, far away, the receding gesture,<br>And looming of the lessening Vesture,<br>Swept forward from my stupid hand,<br>While I watched my foolish heart expand<br>In the lazy glow of benevolence,<br>O’er the various modes of man’s belief.<br>I sprang up with fear’s vehemence.<br>—Needs must there be one way, our chief<br>Best way of worship: let me strive<br>To find it, and when found, contrive<br>My fellows also take their share.<br>This constitutes my earthly care:<br>God’s is above it and distinct!<br>For I, a man, with men am linked,<br>And not a brute with brutes; no gain<br>That I experience, must remain<br>Unshared: but should my best endeavour<br>To share it, fail—subsisteth ever<br>God’s care above, and I exult<br>That God, by God’s own ways occult,<br>May—doth, I will believe—bring back<br>All wanderers to a single track!<br>Meantime, I can but testify<br>God’s care for me—no more, can I—<br>It is but for myself I know.<br>The world rolls witnessing around me<br>Only to leave me as it found me;<br>Men cry there, but my ear is slow.<br>Their races flourish or decay<br>—What boots it, while yon lucid way<br>Loaded with stars, divides the vault?<br>How soon my soul repairs its fault<br>When, sharpening senses’ hebetude,<br>She turns on my own life! So viewed,<br>No mere mote’s-breadth but teems immense<br>With witnessings of providence:<br>And woe to me if when I look<br>Upon that record, the sole book<br>Unsealed to me, I take no heed<br>Of any warning that I read!<br>Have I been sure, this Christmas-Eve;<br>God’s own hand did the rainbow weave,<br>Whereby the truth from heaven slid<br>Into my soul?—I cannot bid<br>The world admit He stooped to heal<br>My soul, as if in a thunder-peal<br>Where one heard noise, and one saw flame,<br>I only knew He named my name.<br>And what is the world to me, for sorrow<br>Or joy in its censures, when to-morrow<br>It drops the remark, with just-turned head<br>Then, on again—That man is dead?<br>Yes,—but for me—my name called,—drawn<br>As a conscript’s lot from the lap’s black yawn,<br>He has dipt into on a battle-dawn:<br>Bid out of life by a nod, a glance,—<br>Stumbling, mute-mazed, at nature’s chance,—<br>With a rapid finger circled round,<br>Fixed to the first poor inch of ground,<br>To light from, where his foot was found;<br>Whose ear but a minute since lay free<br>To the wide camp’s buzz and gossipry—<br>Summoned, a solitary man,<br>To end his life where his life began,<br>From the safe glad rear, to the dreadful van!<br>Soul of mine, hadst thou caught and held<br>By the hem of the Vesture . . . </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="/comments.php?id=506359" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">XXI.<br>And I caught<br>At the flying Robe, and unrepelled<br>Was lapped again in its folds full-fraught<br>With warmth and wonder and delight,<br>God’s mercy being infinite.<br>And scarce had the words escaped my tongue,<br>When, at a passionate bound, I sprung<br>Out of the wandering world of rain,<br>Into the little chapel again. </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="/comments.php?id=506359" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">XXII.<br>How else was I found there, bolt upright<br>On my bench, as if I had never left it?<br>—Never flung out on the common at night<br>Nor met the storm and wedge-like cleft it,<br>Seen the raree-show of Peter’s successor,<br>Or the laboratory of the Professor!<br>For the Vision, that was true, I wist,<br>True as that heaven and earth exist.<br>There sate my friend, the yellow and tall,<br>With his neck and its wen in the selfsame place;<br>Yet my nearest neighbour’s cheek showed gall,<br>She had slid away a contemptuous space:<br>And the old fat woman, late so placable,<br>Eyed me with symptoms, hardly mistakeable,<br>Of her milk of kindness turning rancid:<br>In short a spectator might have fancied<br>That I had nodded betrayed by a slumber,<br>Yet kept my seat, a warning ghastly,<br>Through the heads of the sermon, nine in number,<br>To wake up now at the tenth and lastly.<br>But again, could such a disgrace have happened?<br>Each friend at my elbow had surely nudged it;<br>And, as for the sermon, where did my nap end?<br>Unless I heard it, could I have judged it?<br>Could I report as I do at the close,<br>First, the preacher speaks through his nose:<br>Second, his gesture is too emphatic:<br>Thirdly, to waive what’s pedagogic,<br>The subject-matter itself lacks logic:<br>Fourthly, the English is ungrammatic.<br>Great news! the preacher is found no Pascal,<br>Whom, if I pleased, I might to the task call<br>Of making square to a finite eye<br>The circle of infinity,<br>And find so all-but-just-succeeding!<br>Great news! the sermon proves no reading<br>Where bee-like in the flowers I may bury me,<br>Like Taylor’s, the immortal Jeremy!<br>And now that I know the very worst of him,<br>What was it I thought to obtain at first of him?<br>Ha! Is God mocked, as He asks?<br>Shall I take on me to change His tasks,<br>And dare, despatched to a river-head<br>For a simple draught of the element,<br>Neglect the thing for which He sent,<br>And return with another thing instead?—<br>Saying . . . “Because the water found<br>“Welling up from underground,<br>“Is mingled with the taints of earth,<br>“While Thou, I know, dost laugh at dearth,<br>“And couldest, at a word, convulse<br>“The world with the leap of its river-pulse,—<br>“Therefore I turned from the oozings muddy,<br>“And bring thee a chalice I found, instead:<br>“See the brave veins in the breccia ruddy!<br>“One would suppose that the marble bled.<br>“What matters the water? A hope I have nursed,<br>“That the waterless cup will quench my thirst.”<br>—Better have knelt at the poorest stream<br>That trickles in pain from the straitest rift!<br>For the less or the more is all God’s gift,<br>Who blocks up or breaks wide the granite-seam.<br>And here, is there water or not, to drink?<br>I, then, in ignorance and weakness,<br>Taking God’s help, have attained to think<br>My heart does best to receive in meekness<br>This mode of worship, as most to His mind,<br>Where earthly aids being cast behind,<br>His All in All appears serene,<br>With the thinnest human veil between,<br>Letting the mystic Lamps, the Seven,<br>The many motions of His spirit,<br>Pass, as they list, to earth from Heaven.<br>For the preacher’s merit or demerit,<br>It were to be wished the flaws were fewer<br>In the earthen vessel, holding treasure,<br>Which lies as safe in a golden ewer;<br>But the main thing is, does it hold good measure?<br>Heaven soon sets right all other matters!—<br>Ask, else, these ruins of humanity,<br>This flesh worn out to rags and tatters,<br>This soul at struggle with insanity,<br>Who thence take comfort, can I doubt,<br>Which an empire gained, were a loss without.<br>May it be mine! And let us hope<br>That no worse blessing befal the Pope,<br>Turn’d sick at last of the day’s buffoonery,<br>Of his posturings and his petticoatings,<br>Beside the Bourbon bully’s gloatings<br>In the bloody orgies of drunk poltroonery!<br>Nor may the Professor forego its peace<br>At Göttingen, presently, when, in the dusk<br>Of his life, if his cough, as I fear, should increase,<br>Prophesied of by that horrible husk;<br>And when, thicker and thicker, the darkness fills<br>The world through his misty spectacles,<br>And he gropes for something more substantial<br>Than a fable, myth, or personification,<br>May Christ do for him, what no mere man shall,<br>And stand confessed as the God of salvation!<br>Meantime, in the still recurring fear<br>Lest myself, at unawares, be found,<br>While attacking the choice of my neighbours round,<br>Without my own made—I choose here!<br>The giving out of the hymn reclaims me;<br>I have done!—And if any blames me,<br>Thinking that merely to touch in brevity<br>The topics I dwell on, were unlawful,—<br>Or, worse, that I trench, with undue levity,<br>On the bounds of the Holy and the awful,<br>I praise the heart, and pity the head of him,<br>And refer myself to THEE, instead of him;<br>Who head and heart alike discernest,<br>Looking below light speech we utter,<br>When the frothy spume and frequent sputter<br>Prove that the soul’s depths boil in earnest!<br>May the truth shine out, stand ever before us!<br>I put up pencil and join chorus<br>To Hepzibah Tune, without further apology,<br>The last five verses of the third section<br>Of the seventeenth hymn in Whitfield’s Collection,<br>To conclude with the doxology.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br/></a><a href="https://poems.citatepedia.com/">poem</a> by <strong><a rel="author" href="https://authors.citatepedia.com/by.php?a=Robert+Browning">Robert Browning</a></strong></div>

solid border dashed border dotted border double border groove border ridge border inset border outset border no border blue green red purple cyan gold silver black