Poems of Nature, part 6, Religious Poems 2 | Page 4

healthful talk
That shorter made the
mountain-walk,
His wayside texts were flowers and birds,
Where
mingled with His gracious words
The rustle of the tamarisk-tree

And ripple-wash of Galilee."
"Thy words are well, O friend," I said;
"Unmeasured and unlimited,

With noiseless slide of stone to stone,
The mystic Church of God
has grown.
Invisible and silent stands
The temple never made with
hands,
Unheard the voices still and small
Of its unseen confessional.

He needs no special place of prayer
Whose hearing ear is
everywhere;
He brings not back the childish days
That ringed the
earth with stones of praise,
Roofed Karnak's hall of gods, and laid

The plinths of Phil e's colonnade.
Still less He owns the selfish good

And sickly growth of solitude,--
The worthless grace that, out of
sight,
Flowers in the desert anchorite;
Dissevered from the suffering
whole,
Love hath no power to save a soul.
Not out of Self, the
origin
And native air and soil of sin,
The living waters spring and
flow,
The trees with leaves of healing grow.
"Dream not, O friend, because I seek
This quiet shelter twice a week,

I better deem its pine-laid floor
Than breezy hill or sea-sung shore;


But nature is not solitude
She crowds us with her thronging wood;

Her many hands reach out to us,
Her many tongues are garrulous;

Perpetual riddles of surprise
She offers to our ears and eyes;
She
will not leave our senses still,
But drags them captive at her will

And, making earth too great for heaven,
She hides the Giver in the
given.
"And so, I find it well to come
For deeper rest to this still room,
For
here the habit of the soul
Feels less the outer world's control;
The
strength of mutual purpose pleads
More earnestly our common needs;

And from the silence multiplied
By these still forms on either side,

The world that time and sense have known
Falls off and leaves us
God alone.
"Yet rarely through the charmed repose
Unmixed the stream of
motive flows,
A flavor of its many springs,
The tints of earth and
sky it brings;
In the still waters needs must be
Some shade of
human sympathy;
And here, in its accustomed place,
I look on
memory's dearest face;
The blind by-sitter guesseth not
What
shadow haunts that vacant spot;
No eyes save mine alone can see

The love wherewith it welcomes me!
And still, with those alone my
kin,
In doubt and weakness, want and sin,
I bow my head, my heart
I bare
As when that face was living there,
And strive (too oft, alas!
in vain)
The peace of simple trust to gain,
Fold fancy's restless
wings, and lay
The idols of my heart away.
"Welcome the silence all unbroken,
Nor less the words of fitness
spoken,--
Such golden words as hers for whom
Our autumn flowers
have just made room;

Whose hopeful utterance through and through

The freshness of the morning blew;
Who loved not less the earth
that light
Fell on it from the heavens in sight,
But saw in all fair
forms more fair
The Eternal beauty mirrored there.
Whose eighty
years but added grace
And saintlier meaning to her face,--
The look
of one who bore away
Glad tidings from the hills of day,
While all

our hearts went forth to meet
The coming of her beautiful feet!
Or
haply hers, whose pilgrim tread
Is in the paths where Jesus led;

Who dreams her childhood's Sabbath dream
By Jordan's
willow-shaded stream,
And, of the hymns of hope and faith,
Sung
by the monks of Nazareth,
Hears pious echoes, in the call
To prayer,
from Moslem minarets fall,
Repeating where His works were
wrought
The lesson that her Master taught,
Of whom an elder Sibyl
gave,
The prophecies of Cuma 's cave.
"I ask no organ's soulless breath
To drone the themes of life and
death,
No altar candle-lit by day,
No ornate wordsman's
rhetoric-play,
No cool philosophy to teach
Its bland audacities of
speech
To double-tasked idolaters
Themselves their gods and
worshippers,
No pulpit hammered by the fist
Of loud-asserting
dogmatist,
Who borrows for the Hand of love
The smoking
thunderbolts of Jove.
I know how well the fathers taught,
What
work the later schoolmen wrought;
I reverence old-time faith and
men,
But God is near us now as then;
His force of love is still
unspent,
His hate of sin as imminent;
And still the measure of our
needs
Outgrows the cramping bounds of creeds;
The manna
gathered yesterday
Already savors of decay;
Doubts to the world's
child-heart unknown
Question us now from star and stone;
Too
little or too much we know,
And sight is swift and faith is slow;

The power is lost to self-deceive
With shallow forms of make-believe.

W e walk at high noon, and the bells
Call to a thousand oracles,

But the sound deafens, and the light
Is stronger than our dazzled sight;

The letters of the sacred Book
Glimmer and swim beneath our look;

Still struggles in the Age's breast
With deepening agony of quest

The old entreaty: 'Art thou He,
Or look we for the Christ to be?'
"God should be most where man is least
So, where is neither church
nor priest,
And never rag of form or creed
To clothe the nakedness
of need,--
Where farmer-folk in silence meet,--
I turn my

bell-unsummoned feet;'
I lay the critic's glass aside,
I tread upon my
lettered pride,
And, lowest-seated, testify
To the oneness of
humanity;
Confess the universal want,
And share whatever Heaven
may grant.
He findeth not who seeks his own,
The soul is lost that's
saved alone.
Not