Unto a lonely villa, in a dell
Above the fragrant warm ProvenÇal shore,
The dying Rachel in a chair they bore
Up the steep pine-plumed paths of the Estrelle,

And laid her in a stately room, where fell
The shadow of a marble Muse of yore,—
The rose-crowned queen of legendary lore,
Polymnia,—full on her death-bed. ’Twas well!

The fret and misery of our northern towns,
In this her life’s last day, our poor, our pain,
Our jangle of false wits, our climate’s frowns,

Do for this radiant Greek-souled artist cease:
Sole object of her dying eyes remain
The beauty and the glorious art of Greece.

Sprung from the blood of Israel’s scattered race,
At a mean inn in German Aarau born,
To forms from antique Greece and Rome uptorn,
Tricked out with a Parisian speech and face,

Imparting life renewed, old classic grace;
Then soothing with thy Christian strain forlorn,
A-Kempis! her departing soul outworn,
While by her bedside Hebrew rites have place,—

Ah! not the radiant spirit of Greece alone
She had—one power, which made her breast its home.
In her, like us, there clashed, contending powers,

Germany, France, Christ, Moses, Athens, Rome.
The strife, the mixture in her soul, are ours;
Her genius and her glory are her own.

Even in a palace, life may be led well!
So spake the imperial sage, purest of men,
Marcus Aurelius. But the stifling den
Of common life, where, crowded up pell-mell,

Our freedom for a little bread we sell,
And drudge under some foolish master’s ken
Who rates us if we peer outside our pen,—
Matched with a palace, is not this a hell?

Even in a palace! On his truth sincere,
Who spoke these words, no shadow ever came;
And when my ill-schooled spirit is aflame

Some nobler, ampler stage of life to win,
I’ll stop, and say, “There were no succor here!
The aids to noble life are all within.”

’Twas August, and the fierce sun overhead
Smote on the squalid streets of Bethnal Green,
And the pale weaver, through his windows seen
In Spitalfields, looked thrice dispirited.

I met a preacher there I knew, and said,—
“Ill and o’erworked, how fare you in this scene?”
“Bravely!” said he; “for I of late have been
Much cheered with thoughts of Christ, the living bread.”

O human soul! as long as thou canst so
Set up a mark of everlasting light,
Above the howling senses’ ebb and flow,

To cheer thee, and to right thee if thou roam,—
Not with lost toil thou laborest through the night!
Thou mak’st the heaven thou hop’st indeed thy home.

Crouched on the pavement, close by Belgrave Square,
A tramp I saw, ill, moody, and tongue-tied;
A babe was in her arms, and at her side
A girl; their clothes were rags, their feet were bare.

Some laboring-men, whose work lay somewhere there,
Passed opposite; she touched her girl, who hied
Across, and begged, and came back satisfied.
The rich she had let pass with frozen stare.

Thought I, “Above her state this spirit towers;
She will not ask of aliens, but of friends,
Of sharers in a common human fate.

She turns from that cold succor, which attends
The unknown little from the unknowing great,
And points us to a better time than ours.”

In the bare midst of Anglesey they show
Two springs which close by one another play;
And, “Thirteen hundred years agone,” they say,
“Two saints met often where those waters flow.

One came from Penmon westward, and a glow
Whitened his face from the sun’s fronting ray;
Eastward the other, from the dying day,
And he with unsunned face did always go.”

Seiriol the Bright, Kybi the Dark! men said.
The seer from the East was then in light,
The seer from the West was then in shade.
Ah! now ’tis changed. In conquering sunshine bright
The man of the bold West now comes arrayed:
He of the mystic East is touched with night.

Long fed on boundless hopes, O race of man,
How angrily thou spurn’st all simpler fare!
“Christ,” some one says, “was human as we are;
No judge eyes us from heaven, our sin to scan;

We live no more, when we have done our span.”
“Well, then, for Christ,” thou answerest, “who can care?
From sin which Heaven records not, why forbear?
Live we like brutes our life without a plan!”

So answerest thou; but why not rather say,—
“Hath man no second life? Pitch this one high!
Sits there no judge in heaven, our sin to see?

More strictly, then, the inward judge obey!
Was Christ a man like us? Ah! let us try
If we then, too, can be such men as he!”

“Yes, write it in the rock,” Saint Bernard said,
“Grave it on brass with adamantine pen!
’Tis God himself becomes apparent, when
God’s wisdom and God’s goodness are displayed;

For God of these his attributes is made.”—
Well spake the impetuous saint, and bore of men
The suffrage captive: now not one in ten
Recalls the obscure opposer he outweighed.[9]

God’s wisdom and God’s goodness! Ay, but fools
Mis-define these till God knows them no more.
Wisdom and goodness, they are God!—what schools

Have yet so much as heard this simpler lore?
This no saint preaches, and this no Church rules;
’Tis in the desert, now and heretofore.

Foiled by our fellow-men, depressed, outworn,
We leave the brutal world to take its way,
And, Patience! in another life, we say,
The world shall be thrust down, and we upborne.

And will not, then, the immortal armies scorn
The world’s poor, routed leavings? or will they
Who failed under the heat of this life’s day
Support the fervors of the heavenly morn?

No, no! the energy of life may be
Kept on after the grave, but not begun;
And he who flagged not in the earthly strife,

From strength to strength advancing,—only he,
His soul well-knit, and all his battles won,
Mounts, and that hardly, to eternal life.

He saves the sheep, the goats he doth not save.
So rang Tertullian’s sentence, on the side
Of that unpitying Phrygian sect which cried,[10]
“Him can no fount of fresh forgiveness lave,
Who sins, once washed by the baptismal wave.”
So spake the fierce Tertullian. But she sighed,
The infant Church! of love she felt the tide
Stream on her from her Lord’s yet recent grave.

And then she smiled; and in the Catacombs,
With eye suffused but heart inspired true,
On those walls subterranean, where she hid

Her head ’mid ignominy, death, and tombs,
She her Good Shepherd’s hasty image drew—
And on his shoulders, not a lamb, a kid.

“Ah! could thy grave at home, at Carthage, be!”
Care not for that, and lay me where I fall!
Everywhere heard will be the judgment-call;
But at God’s altar, oh! remember me.

Thus Monica, and died in Italy.
Yet fervent had her longing been, through all
Her course, for home at last, and burial
With her own husband, by the Libyan sea.

Had been! but at the end, to her pure soul
All tie with all beside seemed vain and cheap,
And union before God the only care.

Creeds pass, rites change, no altar standeth whole.
Yet we her memory, as she prayed, will keep,
Keep by this: Life in God, and union there!