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

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 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