The Three Taverns | Page 6

let my appearance be for you
No living answer; for Time writes of
death
On men before they die, and what you see
Is not the man. The
man that you see not --
The man within the man -- is most alive;

Though hatred would have ended, long ago,
The bane of his activities.

I have lived,
Because the faith within me that is life
Endures to live,
and shall, till soon or late,
Death, like a friend unseen, shall say to me

My toil is over and my work begun.
How often, and how many a time again,
Have I said I should be with
you in Rome!
He who is always coming never comes,
Or comes too
late, you may have told yourselves;
And I may tell you now that after
me,
Whether I stay for little or for long,
The wolves are coming.
Have an eye for them,
And a more careful ear for their confusion

Than you need have much longer for the sound
Of what I tell you --
should I live to say
More than I say to Caesar. What I know
Is
down for you to read in what is written;
And if I cloud a little with
my own
Mortality the gleam that is immortal,
I do it only because I
am I --
Being on earth and of it, in so far
As time flays yet the
remnant. This you know;
And if I sting men, as I do sometimes,

With a sharp word that hurts, it is because
Man's habit is to feel
before he sees;
And I am of a race that feels. Moreover,
The world
is here for what is not yet here
For more than are a few; and even in
Rome,
Where men are so enamored of the Cross
That fame has
echoed, and increasingly,
The music of your love and of your faith

To foreign ears that are as far away
As Antioch and Haran, yet I
wonder
How much of love you know, and if your faith
Be the shut
fruit of words. If so, remember
Words are but shells unfilled. Jews
have at least
A Law to make them sorry they were born
If they go
long without it; and these Gentiles,
For the first time in shrieking
history,
Have love and law together, if so they will,
For their
defense and their immunity

In these last days. Rome, if I know the
name,
Will have anon a crown of thorns and fire
Made ready for the
wreathing of new masters,
Of whom we are appointed, you and I, --

And you are still to be when I am gone,
Should I go presently. Let
the word fall,
Meanwhile, upon the dragon-ridden field
Of
circumstance, either to live or die;
Concerning which there is a
parable,
Made easy for the comfort and attention
Of those who

preach, fearing they preach in vain.
You are to plant, and then to plant
again
Where you have gathered, gathering as you go;
For you are in
the fields that are eternal,
And you have not the burden of the Lord

Upon your mortal shoulders. What you have
Is a light yoke, made
lighter by the wearing,
Till it shall have the wonder and the weight

Of a clear jewel, shining with a light
Wherein the sun and all the fiery
stars
May soon be fading. When Gamaliel said
That if they be of
men these things are nothing,
But if they be of God they are for none

To overthrow, he spoke as a good Jew,
And one who stayed a Jew;
and he said all.
And you know, by the temper of your faith,
How far
the fire is in you that I felt
Before I knew Damascus. A word here,

Or there, or not there, or not anywhere,
Is not the Word that lives and
is the life;
And you, therefore, need weary not yourselves
With
jealous aches of others. If the world
Were not a world of aches and
innovations,
Attainment would have no more joy of it.
There will
be creeds and schisms, creeds in creeds,
And schisms in schisms;
myriads will be done
To death because a farthing has two sides,

And is at last a farthing. Telling you this,
I, who bid men to live,
appeal to Caesar.
Once I had said the ways of God were dark,

Meaning by that the dark ways of the Law.
Such is the glory of our
tribulations;
For the Law kills the flesh that kills the Law,
And we
are then alive. We have eyes then;
And we have then the Cross
between two worlds --
To guide us, or to blind us for a time,
Till we
have eyes indeed. The fire that smites
A few on highways, changing
all at once,
Is not for all. The power that holds the world
Away
from God that holds himself away --
Farther away than all your
works and words

Are like to fly without the wings of faith --
Was
not, nor ever shall be, a small hazard
Enlivening the ways of easy
leisure
Or the cold road of knowledge. When our eyes
Have
wisdom, we see more than we remember;
And the old world of our
captivities
May then become a smitten glimpse of ruin,
Like one
where vanished hewers have had their day
Of wrath on Lebanon.