Part 2

’Tis irrecoverable, that ancient faith, Homely and wholesome, suited to the time, With rod or candy for child-minded men: No theologic tube, with lens on lens Of syllogism transparent, brings it near,-- At best resolving some new nebula, Or blurring some fixed-star of hope to mist. Science was Faith once; Faith were Science now, Would she but lay her bow and arrows by And arm her with the weapons of the time. Nothing that keeps thought out is safe from thought, For there’s no virgin-fort but self-respect, And Truth defensive hath lost hold on God. Shall we treat Him as if He were a child That knew not His own purpose? nor dare trust The Rock of Ages to their chemic tests, Lest some day the all-sustaining base divine Should fail from under us, dissolved in gas? The armëd eye that with a glance discerns In a dry blood-speck between ox and man, Stares helpless at this miracle called life, This shaping potency behind the egg, This circulation swift of deity, Where suns and systems inconspicuous float As the poor blood-disks in our mortal veins. Each age must worship its own thought of God, More or less earthy, clarifying still With subsidence continuous of the dregs; Nor saint nor sage could fix immutably The fluent image of the unstable Best, Still changing in their very hands that wrought: To-day’s eternal truth To-morrow proved Frail as frost-landscapes on a window-pane. Meanwhile Thou smiledst, inaccessible, At Thought’s own substance made a cage for Thought, And Truth locked fast with her own master-key; Nor didst Thou reck what image man might make Of his own shadow on the flowing world; The climbing instinct was enough for Thee. Or wast Thou, then, an ebbing tide that left Strewn with dead miracle those eldest shores, For men to dry, and dryly lecture on, Thyself thenceforth incapable of flood? Idle who hopes with prophets to be snatched By virtue in their mantles left below; Shall the soul live on other men’s report, Herself a pleasing fable of herself? Man cannot be God’s outlaw if he would, Nor so abscond him in the caves of sense But Nature still shall search some crevice out With messages of splendor from that Source Which, dive he, soar he, baffles still and lures. This life were brutish did we not sometimes Have intimation clear of wider scope, Hints of occasion infinite, to keep The soul alert with noble discontent And onward yearnings of unstilled desire; Fruitless, except we now and then divined A mystery of Purpose, gleaming through The secular confusions of the world, Whose will we darkly accomplish, doing ours. No man can think nor in himself perceive, Sometimes at waking, in the street sometimes, Or on the hillside, always unforewarned, A grace of being, finer than himself, That beckons and is gone,--a larger life Upon his own impinging, with swift glimpse Of spacious circles luminous with mind, To which the ethereal substance of his own Seems but gross cloud to make that visible, Touched to a sudden glory round the edge. Who that hath known these visitations fleet Would strive to make them trite and ritual? I, that still pray at morning and at eve, Loving those roots that feed us from the past, And prizing more than Plato things I learned At that best academe, a mother’s knee, Thrice in my life perhaps have truly prayed, Thrice, stirred below my conscious self, have felt That perfect disenthralment which is God; Nor know I which to hold worst enemy,-- Him who on speculation’s windy waste Would turn me loose, stript of the raiment warm By Faith contrived against our nakedness, Or him who, cruel-kind, would fain obscure, With painted saints and paraphrase of God, The soul’s east-window of divine surprise.

Where others worship I but look and long; For, though not recreant to my fathers’ faith, Its forms to me are weariness, and most That drony vacuum of compulsory prayer, Still pumping phrases for the Ineffable, Though all the valves of memory gasp and wheeze. Words that have drawn transcendent meanings up From the best passion of all bygone time, Steeped through with tears of triumph and remorse, Sweet with all sainthood, cleansed in martyr-fires, Can they, so consecrate and so inspired, By repetition wane to vexing wind? Alas! we cannot draw habitual breath In the thin air of life’s supremer heights, We cannot make each meal a sacrament, Nor with our tailors be disbodied souls,-- We men, too conscious of earth’s comedy, Who see two sides, with our posed selves debate, And only for great stakes can be sublime! Let us be thankful when, as I do here, We can read Bethel on a pile of stones, And, seeing where God _has_ been, trust in Him.

Brave Peter Fischer there in Nuremberg, Moulding Saint Sebald’s miracles in bronze, Put saint and stander-by in that quaint garb Familiar to him in his daily walk, Not doubting God could grant a miracle Then and in Nuremberg, if so He would; But never artist for three hundred years Hath dared the contradiction ludicrous Of supernatural in modern clothes. Perhaps the deeper faith that is to come Will see God rather in the strenuous doubt, Than in the creed held as an infant’s hand Holds purposeless whatso is placed therein.

Say it is drift, not progress, none the less, With the old sextant of the fathers’ creed, We shape our courses by new-risen stars, And, still lip-loyal to what once was truth, Smuggle new meanings under ancient names, Unconscious perverts of the Jesuit, Time. Change is the mask that all Continuance wears To keep us youngsters harmlessly amused; Meanwhile some ailing or more watchful child, Sitting apart, sees the old eyes gleam out, Stern, and yet soft with humorous pity too. Whilere, men burnt men for a doubtful point, As if the mind were quenchable with fire, And Faith danced round them with her war-paint on, Devoutly savage as an Iroquois; Now Calvin and Servetus at one board Snuff in grave sympathy a milder roast, And o’er their claret settle Comte unread. Fagot and stake were desperately sincere: Our cooler martyrdoms are done in types; And flames that shine in controversial eyes Burn out no brains but his who kindles them. This is no age to get cathedrals built: Did God, then, wait for one in Bethlehem? Worst is not yet: lo, where his coming looms, Of Earth’s anarchic children latest born, Democracy, a Titan who hath learned To laugh at Jove’s old-fashioned thunderbolts,-- Could he not also forge them, if he would? He, better skilled, with solvents merciless, Loosened in air and borne on every wind, Saps unperceived: the calm Olympian height Of ancient order feels its bases yield, And pale gods glance for help to gods as pale. What will be left of good or worshipful, Of spiritual secrets, mysteries, Of fair religion’s guarded heritage, Heirlooms of soul, passed downward unprofaned From eldest Ind? This Western giant coarse, Scorning refinements which he lacks himself, Loves not nor heeds the ancestral hierarchies, Each rank dependent on the next above In orderly gradation fixed as fate. King by mere manhood, nor allowing aught Of holier unction than the sweat of toil; In his own strength sufficient; called to solve, On the rough edges of society, Problems long sacred to the choicer few, And improvise what elsewhere men receive As gifts of deity; tough foundling reared Where every man’s his own Melchisedek, How make him reverent of a King of kings? Or Judge self-made, executor of laws By him not first discussed and voted on? For him no tree of knowledge is forbid, Or sweeter if forbid. How save the ark, Or holy of holies, unprofaned a day From his unscrupulous curiosity That handles everything as if to buy, Tossing aside what fabrics delicate Suit not the rough-and-tumble of his ways? What hope for those fine-nerved humanities That made earth gracious once with gentler arts, Now the rude hands have caught the trick of thought And claim an equal suffrage with the brain?

The born disciple of an elder time, (To me sufficient, friendlier than the new,) Who in my blood feel motions of the Past, I thank benignant nature most for this,-- A force of sympathy, or call it lack Of character firm-planted, loosing me From the pent chamber of habitual self To dwell enlarged in alien modes of thought, Haply distasteful, wholesomer for that, And through imagination to possess, As they were mine, the lives of other men. This growth original of virgin soil, By fascination felt in opposites, Pleases and shocks, entices and perturbs. In this brown-fisted rough, this shirt-sleeved Cid, This backwoods Charlemagne of empires new, Whose blundering heel instinctively finds out The goutier foot of speechless dignities, Who, meeting Cæsar’s self, would slap his back, Call him “Old Horse,” and challenge to a drink, My lungs draw braver air, my breast dilates With ampler manhood, and I front both worlds, Of sense and spirit, as my natural fiefs, To shape and then reshape them as I will. It was the first man’s charter; why not mine? How forfeit? when deposed in other hands?

Thou shudder’st, Ovid? Dost in him forbode A new avatar of the large-limbed Goth, To break, or seem to break, tradition’s clew, And chase to dreamland back thy gods dethroned? I think man’s soul dwells nearer to the east, Nearer to morning’s fountains than the sun; Herself the source whence all tradition sprang, Herself at once both labyrinth and clew. The miracle fades out of history, But faith and wonder and the primal earth Are born into the world with every child. Shall this self-maker with the prying eyes, This creature disenchanted of respect By the New World’s new fiend, Publicity, Whose testing thumb leaves everywhere its smutch, Not one day feel within himself the need Of loyalty to better than himself, That shall ennoble him with the upward look? Shall he not catch the Voice that wanders earth, With spiritual summons, dreamed or heard, As sometimes, just ere sleep seals up the sense, We hear our Mother call from deeps of time, And, waking, find it vision,--none the less The benediction bides, old skies return, And that unreal thing, pre-eminent, Makes air and dream of all we see and feel? Shall he divine no strength unmade of votes, Inward, impregnable, found soon as sought, Not cognizable of sense, o’er sense supreme? His holy places may not be of stone, Nor made with hands, yet fairer far than aught By artist feigned or pious ardor reared, Fit altars for who guards inviolate God’s chosen seat, the sacred form of man. Doubtless his church will be no hospital For superannuate forms and mumping shams, No parlor where men issue policies Of life-assurance on the Eternal Mind, Nor his religion but an ambulance To fetch life’s wounded and malingerers in, Scorned by the strong; yet he, unconscious heir To the influence sweet of Athens and of Rome, And old Judæa’s gift of secret fire, Spite of himself shall surely learn to know And worship some ideal of himself, Some divine thing, large-hearted, brotherly, Not nice in trifles, a soft creditor, Pleased with his world, and hating only cant. And, if his Church be doubtful, it is sure That, in a world, made for whatever else, Not made for mere enjoyment,--in a world Of toil but half-requited, or, at best. Paid in some futile currency of breath,-- A world of incompleteness, sorrow swift And consolation laggard, whatsoe’er The form of building or the creed professed, The Cross, bold type of shame to homage turned, Of an unfinished life that sways the world, Shall tower as sovereign emblem over all.

The kobold Thought moves with us when we shift Our dwelling to escape him; perched aloft On the first load of household-stuff he went; For, where the mind goes, goes old furniture. I, who to Chartres came to feed my eye And give to Fancy one clear holiday, Scarce saw the minster for the thoughts it stirred Buzzing o’er past and future with vain quest. Here once there stood a homely wooden church, Which slow devotion nobly changed for this That echoes vaguely to my modern steps. By suffrage universal it was built, As practised then, for all the country came From far as Rouen, to give votes for God, Each vote a block of stone securely laid Obedient to the master’s deep-mused plan. Will what our ballots rear, responsible To no grave forethought, stand so long as this,-- Delight like this the eye of after days Brightening with pride that here, at least, were men Who meant and did the noblest thing they knew? Can our religion cope with deeds like this? We, too, build Gothic contract-shams, because Our deacons have discovered that it pays, And pews sell better under vaulted roofs Of plaster painted like an Indian squaw. Shall not that Western Goth, of whom we spoke, So fiercely practical, so keen of eye, Find out, some day, that nothing pays but God, Served whether on the smoke-shut battle-field, In work obscure done honestly, or vote For truth unpopular, or faith maintained To ruinous convictions, or good deeds Wrought for good’s sake, mindless of heaven or hell? I know not; but, sustained by sure belief That man still rises level with the height Of noblest opportunities, or makes Such, if the time supply not, I can wait. I gaze round on the windows, pride of France, Each the bright gift of some mechanic guild Who loved their city and thought gold well spent To make her beautiful with piety; I pause, transfigured by some stripe of bloom, And my mind throngs with shining auguries, Circle on circle, bright as seraphim, With golden trumpets silent, that await The signal to blow news of good to men.

Then the revulsion came that always comes After these dizzy elations of the mind: I walked forth saddened; for all thought is sad, And leaves a bitterish savor in the brain,-- Tonic, it may be, not delectable,-- And turned, reluctant, for a parting look At those old weather-pitted images Of bygone struggle, now so sternly calm. About their shoulders sparrows had built nests, And fluttered, chirping, from gray perch to perch, Now on a mitre poising, now a crown, Irreverently happy. While I thought How confident they were, what careless hearts Flew on those lightsome wings and shared the sun, A larger shadow crossed; and, looking up, I saw where, nesting in the hoary towers, The sparrow-hawk slid forth on noiseless air, With sidelong head that watched the joy below, Grim Norman baron o’er this clan of Kelts. Enduring Nature, force conservative, Indifferent to our noisy whims! Men prate Of all heads to an equal grade cashiered On level with the dullest, and expect (Sick of no worse distemper than themselves) A wondrous cure-all in equality; They reason that To-morrow must be wise Because To-day was not, nor Yesterday, As if good days were shapen of themselves, Not of the very lifeblood of men’s souls; Meanwhile, long-suffering, imperturbable, Thou quietly complet’st thy syllogism, And from the premise sparrow here below Draw’st sure conclusion of the hawk above, Pleased with the soft-billed songster, pleased no less With the fierce beak of natures aquiline.

Thou beautiful Old Time, now hid away In the Past’s valley of Avilion, Haply, like Arthur, till thy wound be healed, Then to reclaim the sword and crown again! Thrice beautiful to us; perchance less fair To who possessed thee, as a mountain seems To dwellers round its bases but a heap Of barren obstacle that lairs the storm And the avalanche’s silent bolt holds back Leashed with a hair,--meanwhile some far-off clown, Hereditary delver of the plain, Sees it an unmoved vision of repose, Nest of the morning, and conjectures there The dance of streams to idle shepherds’ pipes, And fairer habitations softly hung On breezy slopes, or hid in valleys cool, For happier men. No mortal ever dreams That the scant isthmus he encamps upon Between two oceans, one, the Stormy, passed, And one, the Peaceful, yet to venture on, Has been that future whereto prophets yearned For the fulfilment of Earth’s cheated hope, Shall be that past which nerveless poets moan As the lost opportunity of song.

O Power, more near my life than life itself (Or what seems life to us in sense immured), Even as the roots, shut in the darksome earth, Share in the tree-top’s joyance, and conceive Of sunshine and wide air and wingëd things By sympathy of nature, so do I Have evidence of Thee so far above, Yet in and of me! Rather Thou the root Invisibly sustaining, hid in light, Not darkness, or in darkness made by us. If sometimes I must hear good men debate Of other witness of Thyself than Thou, As if there needed any help of ours To nurse Thy flickering life, that else must cease, Blown out, as ’t were a candle, by men’s breath, My soul shall not be taken in their snare, To change her inward surety for their doubt Muffled from sight in formal robes of proof: While she can only feel herself through Thee, I fear not Thy withdrawal; more I fear, Seeing, to know Thee not, hoodwinked with dreams Of signs and wonders, while, unnoticed, Thou, Walking Thy garden still, commun’st with men, Missed in the commonplace of miracle.

THE END.