THE MEETING.
THE elder folk shook hands at last, Down seat by seat the signal passed. To simple ways like ours unused, Half solemnized and half amused, With long-drawn breath and shrug, my guest His sense of glad relief expressed. Outside the hills lay warm in sun; The cattle in the meadow-run Stood half-leg deep; a single bird The green repose above us stirred. "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-sandalled 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 Phila'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 are 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 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 prophecies 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 worshippers, 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
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"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, - The blessed means to holiest ends, Not masters, but benignant friends; That the dear Christ dwells not afar, The king of some remoter star, 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!" JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER
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gyres
Of constellate star-choirs,
That with deep melody flow and overflow it,
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 mould 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, Daunt the stern wicked, and from discord wring Prevailing harmony, while the humblest soul Who keeps the tune the warder angels sing In golden choirs above, And only wears, for crown nd aureole,
The glow-worm light of lowliest human love, Shall fill with low, sweet undertones the
chasms
Of silence, 'twixt the booming thunderspasms.
And Earth has need of Prophets fiery-lipped And deep-souled, to announce the glorious dooms
Nor round my shoulders turn the golden light Of my thick locks to wisdom's royal ermine: Yet by the solitary tears,
Deeper than joy or sorrow,—by the thrill, Higher than hope or terror, whose quick germen,
In those hot tears to sudden vigor sprung, Sheds, even now, the fruits of graver age,
By the long wrestle in which inward ill Fell like a trampled viper to the ground,
By all that lifts me o'er my outward peers To that supernal stage Where soul dissolves the bonds by Nature bound,
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