room, where fell
The shadow of a marble Muse of yore—
The rose-crown’d queen of legendary lore,
Polymnia—full on her death-bed. ’Twas well!
The fret and misery of our northern towns,
In this her life’s last day, our poor, our pain,
Our jangle of false wits, our climate’s frowns,
Do for this radiant Greek-soul’d artist cease;
Sole object of her dying eyes remain
The beauty and the glorious art of Greece.
III
Sprung from the blood of Israel’s scatter’d race,
At a mean inn in German Aarau born,
To forms from antique Greece and Rome uptorn,
Trick’d out with a Parisian speech and face,
Imparting life renew’d, old classic grace;
Then, soothing with thy Christian strain forlorn,
A-Kempis! her departing soul outworn,
While by her bedside Hebrew rites have place—
Ah, not the radiant spirit of Greece alone
She had—one power, which made her breast its home!
In her, like us, there clash’d, contending powers,
Germany, France, Christ, Moses, Athens, Rome.
The strife, the mixture in her soul, are ours;
Her genius and her glory are her own.
East London
’Twas August, and the fierce sun overhead
Smote on the squalid streets of Bethnal Green,
And the pale weaver, through his windows seen
In Spitalfields, look’d thrice dispirited;
I met a preacher there I knew, and said:
“Ill and o’erwork’d, how fare you in this scene?”
“Bravely!” said he; “for I of late have been
Much cheer’d with thoughts of Christ, the living bread.”
O human soul! as long as thou canst so
Set up a mark of everlasting light,
Above the howling senses’ ebb and flow,
To cheer thee, and to right thee if thou roam,
Not with lost toil thou labourest through the night!
Thou mak’st the heaven thou hop’st indeed thy home.
West London
Crouch’d on the pavement, close by Belgrave Square
A tramp I saw, ill, moody, and tongue-tied;
A babe was in her arms, and at her side
A girl; their clothes were rags, their feet were bare.
Some labouring men, whose work lay somewhere there,
Pass’d opposite; she touch’d her girl, who hied
Across, and begg’d, and came back satisfied.
The rich she had let pass with frozen stare.
Thought I: Above her state this spirit towers;
She will not ask of aliens, but of friends,
Of sharers in a common human fate.
She turns from that cold succour, which attends
The unknown little from the unknowing great,
And points us to a better time than ours.
The Better Part
Long fed on boundless hopes, O race of man,
How angrily thou spurn’st all simpler fare!
Christ,
some one says, was human as we are
;
No judge eyes us from Heaven, our sin to scan;
We live no more, when we have done our span
.
“Well, then, for Christ,” thou answerest, “who can care?
From sin, which Heaven records not, why forbear?
Live we like brutes our life without a plan!”
So answerest thou; but why not rather say:
“Hath man no second life?—Pitch this one high!
Sits there no judge in Heaven, our sin to see?—
“More strictly, then, the inward judge obey!
Was Christ a man like us?—Ah! let us try
If we then, too, can be such men as he!”
Immortality
Foil’d by our fellow-men, depress’d, outworn,
We leave the brutal world to take its way,
And, Patience! in another life
, we say,
The world shall be thrust down, and we upborne!
And will not, then, the immortal armies scorn
The world’s poor, routed leavings; or will they,
Who fail’d under the heat of this life’s day,
Support the fervours of the heavenly morn?
No, no! the energy of life may be
Kept on after the grave, but not begun;
And he who flagg’d not in the earthly strife,
From strength to strength advancing—only he,
His soul well-knit, and all his battles won,
Mounts, and that hardly, to eternal life.
Worldly Place
Even in a palace, life may be led well!
So spake the imperial sage, purest of men,
Marcus Aurelius.—But the stifling den
Of common life, where, crowded up pell-mell,
Our freedom for a little bread we sell,
And drudge under some foolish master’s ken,
Who rates us, if we peer outside our pen—
Match’d with a palace, is not this a hell?
Even in a palace! On his truth sincere,
Who spoke these words, no shadow ever came;
And when my ill-school’d spirit is aflame
Some nobler, ampler stage of life to win,
I’ll stop, and say: “There were no succour here!
The aids to noble life are all within.”
The Divinity
“Yes, write it in the rock!” Saint Bernard said,
“Grave it on brass with adamantine pen!
’Tis God himself becomes apparent, when
God’s wisdom and God’s goodness are display’d,
“For God of these his attributes is made.”—
Well spake the impetuous Saint, and bore of men
The suffrage captive; now, not one in ten
Recalls the obscure opposer he outweigh’d.43
God’s wisdom and God’s goodness!—Ay, but fools
Mis-define these till God knows them no more.
Wisdom and goodness, they are God!—what schools
Have yet so much as heard this simpler lore?
This no Saint preaches, and this no Church rules;
’Tis in the desert, now and heretofore.
The Good Shepherd with the Kid
He saves the sheep, the goats he doth not save!
So rang Tertullian’s sentence, on the side
Of that unpitying Phrygian sect44 which cried:
“Him can no fount of fresh forgiveness lave,
“Who sins, once wash’d by the baptismal wave!”
So spake the fierce Tertullian. But she sigh’d,
The infant Church; of love she felt the tide
Stream on her from her Lord’s yet recent grave.
And then she smiled, and in the Catacombs,
With eye suffused but heart inspired true,
On those walls subterranean, where she hid
Her head in ignominy, death, and tombs,
She her Good Shepherd’s hasty image drew;
And on his shoulders, not a lamb, a kid.
Austerity of Poetry
That son of Italy who tried to blow,45
Ere Dante came, the trump of sacred song,
In his light youth amid a festal throng
Sate with his bride to see a public show.
Fair was the bride, and on her front did glow
Youth like a star; and what to youth belong,
Gay raiment, sparkling gauds, elation strong.
A prop gave way! crash fell a platform! lo,
Mid struggling sufferers, hurt to death, she lay!
Shuddering they drew her garments off—and found
A robe of sackcloth next the smooth, white skin.
Such, poets, is your bride, the Muse! young, gay,
Radiant,
