Christmas Eve | Page 7

lighter and more light:

And still, as before, I was walking swift,
With my senses settling
fast and steadying,
But my body caught up in the whirl and drift
Of

the vesture's amplitude, still eddying
On just before me, still to be
followed,
As it carried me after with its motion,
--What shall I
say?--as a path, were hollowed,
And a man went weltering through
the ocean,
Sucked along in the flying wake
Of the luminous
water-snake.
XIV
Alone! I am left alone once more--
(Save for the garment's extreme
fold
Abandoned still to bless my hold)
Alone, beside the
entrance-door
Of a sort of temple,-perhaps a college,
--Like nothing
I ever saw before
At home in England, to my knowledge.
The tall
old quaint irregular town!
It may be... though which, I can't affirm...
any
Of the famous middle-age towns of Germany:
And this flight
of stairs where I sit down,
Is it Halle, Weimar, Cassel, Frankfort
Or
Gottingen, I have to thank for't?
It may be Gottingen,--most likely.

Through the open door I catch obliquely
Glimpses of a lecture-hall;

And not a bad assembly neither,
Ranged decent and symmetrical

On benches, waiting what's to see there:
Which, holding still by the
vesture's hem,
I also resolve to see with them,
Cautious this time
how I suffer to slip
The chance of joining in fellowship
With any
that call themselves his friends;
As these folk do, I have a notion.

But hist--a buzzing and emotion!
All settle themselves, the while
ascends
By the creaking rail to the lecture-desk,
Step by step,
deliberate
Because of his cranium's over-freight,
Three parts
sublime to one grotesque,
If I have proved an accurate guesser,
The
hawk-nosed high-cheek-boned Professor.
I felt at once as if there ran


A shoot of love from my heart to the man--
That sallow
virgin-minded studious
Martyr to mild enthusiasm,
As he uttered a
kind of cough-preludious
That woke my sympathetic spasm,

(Beside some spitting that made me sorry)
And stood, surveying his
auditory
With a wan pure look, well-nigh celestial,--
Those blue
eyes had survived so much!
While, under the foot they could not

smutch,
Lay all the fleshly and the bestial.
Over he bowed, and
arranged his notes,
Till the auditory's clearing of throats
Was done
with, died into a silence;
And, when each glance was upward sent,

Each bearded mouth composed intent,
And a pin might be heard drop
half a mile hence,--
He pushed back higher his spectacles,
Let the
eyes stream out like lamps from cells,
And giving his head of hair--a
hake
Of undressed tow, for colour and quantity--
One rapid and
impatient shake,
(As our own Young England adjusts a jaunty tie

When about to impart, on mature digestion,
Some thrilling view of
the surplice-question)
--The Professor's grave voice, sweet though
hoarse,
Broke into his Christmas-Eve discourse.
XV
And he began it by observing
How reason dictated that men
Should
rectify the natural swerving,
By a reversion, now and then,
To the
well-heads of knowledge, few
And far away, whence rolling grew

The life-stream wide whereat we drink,
Commingled, as we needs
must think,
With waters alien to the source;
To do which, aimed
this eve's discourse;
Since, where could be a fitter time
For tracing
backward to its prime
This Christianity, this lake,
This reservoir,
whereat we slake,
From one or other bank, our thirst?
So, he
proposed inquiring first
Into the various sources whence
This Myth
of Christ is derivable;
Demanding from the evidence,
(Since plainly
no such life was livable)
How these phenomena should class?

Whether 'twere best opine Christ was,
Or never was at all, or whether

He was and was not, both together--

It matters little for the name,

So the idea be left the same.
Only, for practical purpose' sake,

'Twas obviously as well to take
The popular story,--understanding

How the ineptitude of the time,
And the penman's prejudice,
expanding
Fact into fable fit for the clime,
Had, by slow and sure
degrees, translated it
Into this myth, this Individuum,--
Which,
when reason had strained and abated it
Of foreign matter, left, for

residuum,
A Man!--a right true man, however,
Whose work was
worthy a man's endeavour:
Work, that gave warrant almost sufficient

To his disciples, for rather believing
He was just omnipotent and
omniscient,
As it gives to us, for as frankly receiving
His word,
their tradition,--which, though it meant
Something entirely different

From all that those who only heard it,
In their simplicity thought
and averred it,
Had yet a meaning quite as respectable:
For, among
other doctrines delectable,
Was he not surely the first to insist on

The natural sovereignty of our race?--
Here the lecturer came to a
pausing-place.
And while his cough, like a drouthy piston,
Tried to
dislodge the husk that grew to him,
I seized the occasion of bidding
adieu to him,
The vesture still within my hand.
XVI
I could interpret its command.
This time he would not bid me enter

The exhausted air-bell of the Critic.
Truth's atmosphere may grow
mephitic
When Papist struggles with Dissenter,
Impregnating its
pristine clarity,
--One, by his daily fare's vulgarity,
Its gust of
broken meat and garlic;
--One, by his soul's too-much presuming

To turn the frankincense's fuming
And vapours of the candle starlike

Into the cloud her wings she buoys on.
Each, that thus sets the pure
air seething,
May poison it for healthy breathing--
But the Critic
leaves no air to poison;
Pumps out with ruthless ingenuity
Atom by
atom, and leaves you--vacuity.
Thus much of Christ does he reject?

And what retain? His intellect?
What is it I must reverence duly?

Poor intellect for worship,