Poems of Nature, part 5, Religious Poems 1 | Page 9

altar overthrown and
broken,
O'er tree-grown barrow and gray ring of stone.
Blind Faith had martyrs in those old high places,
The Syrian hill
grove and the Druid's wood,
With mother's offering, to the Fiend's
embraces,
Bone of their bone, and blood of their own blood.
Red altars, kindling through that night of error,
Smoked with warm
blood beneath the cruel eye
Of lawless Power and sanguinary Terror,

Throned on the circle of a pitiless sky;

Beneath whose baleful shadow, overcasting
All heaven above, and
blighting earth below,
The scourge grew red, the lip grew pale with
fasting,
And man's oblation was his fear and woe!
Then through great temples swelled the dismal moaning
Of dirge-like
music and sepulchral prayer;
Pale wizard priests, o'er occult symbols
droning,
Swung their white censers in the burdened air
As if the pomp of rituals, and the savor
Of gums and spices could the
Unseen One please;
As if His ear could bend, with childish favor,

To the poor flattery of the organ keys!
Feet red from war-fields trod the church aisles holy,
With trembling
reverence: and the oppressor there,
Kneeling before his priest, abased
and lowly,
Crushed human hearts beneath his knee of prayer.
Not such the service the benignant Father
Requireth at His earthly
children's hands
Not the poor offering of vain rites, but rather
The
simple duty man from man demands.
For Earth He asks it: the full joy of heaven
Knoweth no change of
waning or increase;
The great heart of the Infinite beats even,

Untroubled flows the river of His peace.
He asks no taper lights, on high surrounding
The priestly altar and the
saintly grave,
No dolorous chant nor organ music sounding,
Nor
incense clouding tip the twilight nave.
For he whom Jesus loved hath truly spoken
The holier worship which
he deigns to bless
Restores the lost, and binds the spirit broken,

And feeds the widow and the fatherless!
Types of our human weakness and our sorrow!
Who lives unhaunted
by his loved ones dead?
Who, with vain longing, seeketh not to
borrow
From stranger eyes the home lights which have fled?

O brother man! fold to thy heart thy brother;
Where pity dwells, the
peace of God is there;
To worship rightly is to love each other,

Each smile a hymn, each kindly deed a prayer.
Follow with reverent steps the great example
Of Him whose holy
work was "doing good;"
So shall the wide earth seem our Father's
temple,
Each loving life a psalm of gratitude.
Then shall all shackles fall; the stormy clangor
Of wild war music
o'er the earth shall cease;
Love shall tread out the baleful fire of anger,

And in its ashes plant the tree of peace!
1848.
THE HOLY LAND
Paraphrased from the lines in Lamartine's Adieu to Marseilles,
beginning
"Je n'ai pas navigue sur l'ocean de sable."
I have not felt, o'er seas of sand,
The rocking of the desert bark;
Nor
laved at Hebron's fount my hand,
By Hebron's palm-trees cool and
dark;
Nor pitched my tent at even-fall,
On dust where Job of old has
lain,
Nor dreamed beneath its canvas wall,
The dream of Jacob o'er
again.
One vast world-page remains unread;
How shine the stars in
Chaldea's sky,
How sounds the reverent pilgrim's tread,
How beats
the heart with God so nigh
How round gray arch and column lone

The spirit of the old time broods,
And sighs in all the winds that
moan
Along the sandy solitudes!
In thy tall cedars, Lebanon,
I have not heard the nations' cries,
Nor
seen thy eagles stooping down
Where buried Tyre in ruin lies.
The
Christian's prayer I have not said
In Tadmor's temples of decay,
Nor
startled, with my dreary tread,
The waste where Memnon's empire

lay.
Nor have I, from thy hallowed tide,
O Jordan! heard the low lament,

Like that sad wail along thy side
Which Israel's mournful prophet
sent!
Nor thrilled within that grotto lone
Where, deep in night, the
Bard of Kings
Felt hands of fire direct his own,
And sweep for God
the conscious strings.
I have not climbed to Olivet,
Nor laid me where my Saviour lay,

And left His trace of tears as yet
By angel eyes unwept away;
Nor
watched, at midnight's solemn time,
The garden where His prayer and
groan,
Wrung by His sorrow and our crime,
Rose to One listening
ear alone.
I have not kissed the rock-hewn grot
Where in His mother's arms He
lay,
Nor knelt upon the sacred spot
Where last His footsteps pressed
the clay;
Nor looked on that sad mountain head,
Nor smote my
sinful breast, where wide
His arms to fold the world He spread,

And bowed His head to bless--and died!
1848.
THE REWARD
Who, looking backward from his manhood's prime,
Sees not the
spectre of his misspent time?
And, through the shade
Of funeral
cypress planted thick behind,
Hears no reproachful whisper on the
wind
From his loved dead?
Who bears no trace of passion's evil force?
Who shuns thy sting, O
terrible Remorse?
Who does not cast
On the thronged pages of his
memory's book,
At times, a sad and half-reluctant look,
Regretful
of the past?
Alas! the evil which we fain would shun
We do, and leave the
wished-for good undone
Our strength to-day
Is but to-morrow's
weakness, prone to fall;
Poor, blind, unprofitable servants all
Are

we alway.
Yet who, thus