Poems of Nature, part 6, Religious Poems 2 | Page 7

off the grave-clothes of thy sin!
Rise from the
dust thou liest in,
As Mary rose at Jesus' word,
Redeemed and white
before the Lord!
Reclairn thy lost soul! In His name,
Rise up, and
break thy bonds of shame.
Art weak? He 's strong. Art fearful? Hear

The world's O'ercomer: "Be of cheer!"
What lip shall judge when
He approves?
Who dare to scorn the child He loves?
THE PRAYER OF AGASSIZ.
The island of Penikese in Buzzard's Bay was given by Mr. John
Anderson to Agassiz for the uses of a summer school of natural history.
A large barn was cleared and improvised as a lecture-room. Here, on
the first morning of the school, all the company was gathered. "Agassiz
had arranged no programme of exercises," says Mrs. Agassiz, in Louis
Agassiz; his Life and Correspondence, "trusting to the interest of the
occasion to suggest what might best be said or done. But, as he looked

upon his pupils gathered there to study nature with him, by an impulse
as natural as it was unpremeditated, he called upon then to join in
silently asking God's blessing on their work together. The pause was
broken by the first words of an address no less fervent than its
unspoken prelude." This was in the summer of 1873, and Agassiz died
the December following.
On the isle of Penikese,
Ringed about by sapphire seas,
Fanned by
breezes salt and cool,
Stood the Master with his school.
Over sails
that not in vain
Wooed the west-wind's steady strain,
Line of coast
that low and far
Stretched its undulating bar,
Wings aslant along the
rim
Of the waves they stooped to skim,
Rock and isle and
glistening bay,
Fell the beautiful white day.
Said the Master to the youth
"We have come in search of truth,

Trying with uncertain key
Door by door of mystery;
We are
reaching, through His laws,
To the garment-hem of Cause,
Him, the
endless, unbegun,
The Unnamable, the One
Light of all our light
the Source,
Life of life, and Force of force.
As with fingers of the
blind,
We are groping here to find
What the hieroglyphics mean

Of the Unseen in the seen,
What the Thought which underlies

Nature's masking and disguise,
What it is that hides beneath
Blight
and bloom and birth and death.
By past efforts unavailing,
Doubt
and error, loss and failing,
Of our weakness made aware,
On the
threshold of our task
Let us light and guidance ask,
Let us pause in
silent prayer!"
Then the Master in his place
Bowed his head a little space,
And the
leaves by soft airs stirred,
Lapse of wave and cry of bird,
Left the
solemn hush unbroken
Of that wordless prayer unspoken,

While its
wish, on earth unsaid,
Rose to heaven interpreted.
As, in life's best
hours, we hear
By the spirit's finer ear
His low voice within us, thus

The All-Father heareth us;
And His holy ear we pain
With our
noisy words and vain.
Not for Him our violence
Storming at the

gates of sense,
His the primal language, His
The eternal silences!
Even the careless heart was moved,
And the doubting gave assent,

With a gesture reverent,
To the Master well-beloved.
As thin mists
are glorified
By the light they cannot hide,
All who gazed upon him
saw,
Through its veil of tender awe,
How his face was still uplit

By the old sweet look of it.
Hopeful, trustful, full of cheer,
And the
love that casts out fear.
Who the secret may declare
Of that brief,
unuttered prayer?
Did the shade before him come
Of th' inevitable
doom,
Of the end of earth so near,
And Eternity's new year?
In the lap of sheltering seas
Rests the isle of Penikese;
But the lord
of the domain
Comes not to his own again
Where the eyes that
follow fail,
On a vaster sea his sail
Drifts beyond our beck and hail.

Other lips within its bound
Shall the laws of life expound;
Other
eyes from rock and shell
Read the world's old riddles well
But
when breezes light and bland
Blow from Summer's blossomed land,

When the air is glad with wings,
And the blithe song-sparrow sings,

Many an eye with his still face
Shall the living ones displace,

Many an ear the word shall seek
He alone could fitly speak.
And
one name forevermore
Shall be uttered o'er and o'er
By the waves
that kiss the shore,
By the curlew's whistle sent
Down the cool,
sea-scented air;
In all voices known to her,

Nature owns her
worshipper,
Half in triumph, half lament.
Thither Love shall tearful
turn,
Friendship pause uncovered there,
And the wisest reverence
learn
From the Master's silent prayer.
1873.
IN QUEST
Have I not voyaged, friend beloved, with thee
On the great waters of
the unsounded sea,
Momently listening with suspended oar
For the
low rote of waves upon a shore
Changeless as heaven, where never
fog-cloud drifts
Over its windless wood, nor mirage lifts
The
steadfast hills; where never birds of doubt
Sing to mislead, and every

dream dies out,
And the dark riddles which perplex us here
In the
sharp solvent of its light are clear?
Thou knowest how vain our quest;
how, soon or late,
The baffling tides and circles of debate
Swept
back our bark unto its starting-place,
Where, looking forth upon the
blank, gray space,
And round about us seeing, with sad eyes,
The
same old difficult hills and cloud-cold skies,
We said: "This outward
search availeth not
To find