Narrative Poems, part 5, Among Hill etc | Page 8

common law of righteousness.?We search the world for truth; we cull?The good, the pure, the beautiful,?From graven stone and written scroll,?From all old flower-fields of the soul;?And, weary seekers of the best,?We come back laden from our quest,?To find that all the sages said?Is in the Book our mothers read,?And all our treasure of old thought?In His harmonious fulness wrought?Who gathers in one sheaf complete?The scattered blades of God's sown wheat,?The common growth that maketh good?His all-embracing Fatherhood.
"Wherever through the ages rise?The altars of self-sacrifice,?Where love its arms has opened wide,?Or man for man has calmly died,?I see the same white wings outspread?That hovered o'er the Master's head!?Up from undated time they come,?The martyr souls of heathendom,?And to His cross and passion bring?Their fellowship of suffering.?I trace His presence in the blind?Pathetic gropings of my kind,--?In prayers from sin and sorrow wrung,?In cradle-hymns of life they sung,?Each, in its measure, but a part?Of the unmeasured Over-Heart;?And with a stronger faith confess?The greater that it owns the less.?Good cause it is for thankfulness?That the world-blessing of His life?With the long past is not at strife;?That the great marvel of His death?To the one order witnesseth,?No doubt of changeless goodness wakes,?No link of cause and sequence breaks,?But, one with nature, rooted is?In the eternal verities;?Whereby, while differing in degree?As finite from infinity,?The pain and loss for others borne,?Love's crown of suffering meekly worn,?The life man giveth for his friend?Become vicarious in the end;?Their healing place in nature take,?And make life sweeter for their sake.
"So welcome I from every source?The tokens of that primal Force,?Older than heaven itself, yet new?As the young heart it reaches to,?Beneath whose steady impulse rolls?The tidal wave of human souls;?Guide, comforter, and inward word,?The eternal spirit of the Lord?Nor fear I aught that science brings?From searching through material things;?Content to let its glasses prove,?Not by the letter's oldness move,?The myriad worlds on worlds that course?The spaces of the universe;?Since everywhere the Spirit walks?The garden of the heart, and talks?With man, as under Eden's trees,?In all his varied languages.?Why mourn above some hopeless flaw?In the stone tables of the law,?When scripture every day afresh?Is traced on tablets of the flesh??By inward sense, by outward signs,?God's presence still the heart divines;?Through deepest joy of Him we learn,?In sorest grief to Him we turn,?And reason stoops its pride to share?The child-like instinct of a prayer."
And then, as is my wont, I told?A story of the days of old,?Not found in printed books,--in sooth,?A fancy, with slight hint of truth,?Showing how differing faiths agree?In one sweet law of charity.?Meanwhile the sky had golden grown,?Our faces in its glory shone;?But shadows down the valley swept,?And gray below the ocean slept,?As time and space I wandered o'er?To tread the Mogul's marble floor,?And see a fairer sunset fall?On Jumna's wave and Agra's wall.
The good Shah Akbar (peace be his alway!)?Came forth from the Divan at close of day?Bowed with the burden of his many cares,?Worn with the hearing of unnumbered prayers,--?Wild cries for justice, the importunate?Appeals of greed and jealousy and hate,?And all the strife of sect and creed and rite,?Santon and Gouroo waging holy fight?For the wise monarch, claiming not to be?Allah's avenger, left his people free,?With a faint hope, his Book scarce justified,?That all the paths of faith, though severed wide,?O'er which the feet of prayerful reverence passed,?Met at the gate of Paradise at last.
He sought an alcove of his cool hareem,?Where, far beneath, he heard the Jumna's stream?Lapse soft and low along his palace wall,?And all about the cool sound of the fall?Of fountains, and of water circling free?Through marble ducts along the balcony;?The voice of women in the distance sweet,?And, sweeter still, of one who, at his feet,?Soothed his tired ear with songs of a far land?Where Tagus shatters on the salt sea-sand?The mirror of its cork-grown hills of drouth?And vales of vine, at Lisbon's harbor-mouth.
The date-palms rustled not; the peepul laid?Its topmost boughs against the balustrade,?Motionless as the mimic leaves and vines?That, light and graceful as the shawl-designs?Of Delhi or Umritsir, twined in stone;?And the tired monarch, who aside had thrown?The day's hard burden, sat from care apart,?And let the quiet steal into his heart?From the still hour. Below him Agra slept,?By the long light of sunset overswept?The river flowing through a level land,?By mango-groves and banks of yellow sand,?Skirted with lime and orange, gay kiosks,?Fountains at play, tall minarets of mosques,?Fair pleasure-gardens, with their flowering trees?Relieved against the mournful cypresses;?And, air-poised lightly as the blown sea-foam,?The marble wonder of some holy dome?Hung a white moonrise over the still wood,?Glassing its beauty in a stiller flood.
Silent the monarch gazed, until the night?Swift-falling hid the city from his sight;?Then to the woman at his feet he said?"Tell me, O Miriam, something thou hast read?In childhood of the Master of thy faith,?Whom