Narrative Poems, part 5, Among Hill etc | Page 7

wide its arms to save,?The sign that God had made,
The cross-boughed tree that marked the spot?And made it holy ground?He needs the earthly city not?Who hath the heavenly found.?1869.
MIRIAM.
TO FREDERICK A. P. BARNARD.
THE years are many since, in youth and hope,?Under the Charter Oak, our horoscope?We drew thick-studded with all favoring stars.?Now, with gray beards, and faces seamed with scars?From life's hard battle, meeting once again,?We smile, half sadly, over dreams so vain;?Knowing, at last, that it is not in man?Who walketh to direct his steps, or plan?His permanent house of life. Alike we loved?The muses' haunts, and all our fancies moved?To measures of old song. How since that day?Our feet have parted from the path that lay?So fair before us! Rich, from lifelong search?Of truth, within thy Academic porch?Thou sittest now, lord of a realm of fact,?Thy servitors the sciences exact;?Still listening with thy hand on Nature's keys,?To hear the Samian's spheral harmonies?And rhythm of law. I called from dream and song,?Thank God! so early to a strife so long,?That, ere it closed, the black, abundant hair?Of boyhood rested silver-sown and spare?On manhood's temples, now at sunset-chime?Tread with fond feet the path of morning time.?And if perchance too late I linger where?The flowers have ceased to blow, and trees are bare,?Thou, wiser in thy choice, wilt scarcely blame?The friend who shields his folly with thy name.?AMESBURY, 10th mo., 1870.
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One Sabbath day my friend and I?After the meeting, quietly?Passed from the crowded village lanes,?White with dry dust for lack of rains,?And climbed the neighboring slope, with feet?Slackened and heavy from the heat,?Although the day was wellnigh done,?And the low angle of the sun?Along the naked hillside cast?Our shadows as of giants vast.?We reached, at length, the topmost swell,?Whence, either way, the green turf fell?In terraces of nature down?To fruit-hung orchards, and the town?With white, pretenceless houses, tall?Church-steeples, and, o'ershadowing all,?Huge mills whose windows had the look?Of eager eyes that ill could brook?The Sabbath rest. We traced the track?Of the sea-seeking river back,?Glistening for miles above its mouth,?Through the long valley to the south,?And, looking eastward, cool to view,?Stretched the illimitable blue?Of ocean, from its curved coast-line;?Sombred and still, the warm sunshine?Filled with pale gold-dust all the reach?Of slumberous woods from hill to beach,--?Slanted on walls of thronged retreats?From city toil and dusty streets,?On grassy bluff, and dune of sand,?And rocky islands miles from land;?Touched the far-glancing sails, and showed?White lines of foam where long waves flowed?Dumb in the distance. In the north,?Dim through their misty hair, looked forth?The space-dwarfed mountains to the sea,?From mystery to mystery!
So, sitting on that green hill-slope,?We talked of human life, its hope?And fear, and unsolved doubts, and what?It might have been, and yet was not.?And, when at last the evening air?Grew sweeter for the bells of prayer?Ringing in steeples far below,?We watched the people churchward go,?Each to his place, as if thereon?The true shekinah only shone;?And my friend queried how it came?To pass that they who owned the same?Great Master still could not agree?To worship Him in company.?Then, broadening in his thought, he ran?Over the whole vast field of man,--?The varying forms of faith and creed?That somehow served the holders' need;?In which, unquestioned, undenied,?Uncounted millions lived and died;?The bibles of the ancient folk,?Through which the heart of nations spoke;?The old moralities which lent?To home its sweetness and content,?And rendered possible to bear?The life of peoples everywhere?And asked if we, who boast of light,?Claim not a too exclusive right?To truths which must for all be meant,?Like rain and sunshine freely sent.?In bondage to the letter still,?We give it power to cramp and kill,--?To tax God's fulness with a scheme?Narrower than Peter's house-top dream,?His wisdom and his love with plans?Poor and inadequate as man's.?It must be that He witnesses?Somehow to all men that He is?That something of His saving grace?Reaches the lowest of the race,?Who, through strange creed and rite, may draw?The hints of a diviner law.?We walk in clearer light;--but then,?Is He not God?--are they not men??Are His responsibilities?For us alone and not for these?
And I made answer: "Truth is one;?And, in all lands beneath the sun,?Whoso hath eyes to see may see?The tokens of its unity.?No scroll of creed its fulness wraps,?We trace it not by school-boy maps,?Free as the sun and air it is?Of latitudes and boundaries.?In Vedic verse, in dull Koran,?Are messages of good to man;?The angels to our Aryan sires?Talked by the earliest household fires;?The prophets of the elder day,?The slant-eyed sages of Cathay,?Read not the riddle all amiss?Of higher life evolved from this.
"Nor doth it lessen what He taught,?Or make the gospel Jesus brought?Less precious, that His lips retold?Some portion of that truth of old;?Denying not the proven seers,?The tested wisdom of the years;?Confirming with his own impress?The