  "The shrines are dust, the gods are dead," They cried in ancient Rome! "Ah yet, the Idalian rose is red, And bright the Paphian foam: For all your GalilÆan tears We turn to her," men say ... But we, we hasten thro' the years To our own yesterday. Thro' all the thousand years ye need To make the lost so fair, Before ye can award His meed Of perfect praise and prayer! Ye liberated souls, the crown Is yours; and yet, some few Can hail, as this great Cross goes down Its distant triumph, too. Poor scornful Lilliputian souls, And are ye still too proud To risk your little aureoles By kneeling with the crowd? So fearless and so strong? To-day we claim the rebels' throne And leave you with the throng. Yes, He has conquered! You at least The "van-guard" leaves behind To croon old tales of king and priest In the ingles of mankind: The breast of Aphrodite glows, Apollo's face is fair; But O, the world's wide anguish knows No Apollonian prayer. Not ours to scorn the first white gleam Of beauty on this earth, The clouds of dawn, the nectarous dream, The gods of simpler birth; But, as ye praise them, your own cry Is fraught with deeper pain, And the Compassionate ye deny Returns, returns again. O, worshippers of the beautiful, Is this the end then, this,— That ye can only see the skull Beneath the face of bliss? No monk in the dark years ye scorn So barren a pathway trod As ye who, ceasing not to mourn, Deny the mourner's God. And, while ye scoff, on every side Great hints of Him go by,— Souls that are hourly crucified On some new Calvary! O, tortured faces, white and meek, Half seen amidst the crowd, Grey suffering lips that never speak, The Glory in the Cloud! In flower and dust, in chaff and grain, He binds Himself and dies! We live by His eternal pain, His hourly sacrifice; The limits of our mortal life Are His. The whisper thrills Under the sea's perpetual strife, And through the sunburnt hills. Darkly, as in a glass, our sight Still gropes thro' Time and Space: We cannot see the Light of Light With angels, face to face: Only the tale His martyrs tell Around the dark earth rings He died and He went down to hell And lives—the King of Kings! And, while ye scoff, from shore to shore, From sea to moaning sea, Eloi, Eloi, goes up once more Lama sabacthani! The heavens are like a scroll unfurled, The writing flames above— This is the King of all the world Upon His Cross of Love. |
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