| |
| I LIKE a church; I like a cowl; | |
| I love a prophet of the soul; | |
| And on my heart monastic aisles | |
| Fall like sweet strains, or pensive smiles: | |
| Yet not for all his faith can see | 5 |
| Would I that cowlëd churchman be. | |
| Why should the vest on him allure, | |
| Which I could not on me endure? | |
| |
| Not from a vain or shallow thought | |
| His awful Jove young Phidias brought; | 10 |
| Never from lips of cunning fell | |
| The thrilling Delphic oracle; | |
| Out from the heart of nature rolled | |
| The burdens of the Bible old; | |
| The litanies of nations came, | 15 |
| Like the volcano’s tongue of flame, | |
| Up from the burning core below,— | |
| The canticles of love and woe: | |
| The hand that rounded Peter’s dome | |
| And groined the aisles of Christian Rome | 20 |
| Wrought in a sad sincerity; | |
| Himself from God he could not free; | |
| He builded better than he knew; | |
| The conscious stone to beauty grew. | |
| |
| Knowst thou what wove yon woodbird’s nest | 25 |
| Of leaves and feathers from her breast? | |
| Or how the fish outbuilt her shell, | |
| Painting with morn each annual cell? | |
| Or how the sacred pine-tree adds | |
| To her old leaves new myriads? | 30 |
| Such and so grew these holy piles, | |
| Whilst love and terror laid the tiles. | |
| Earth proudly wears the Parthenon, | |
| As the best gem upon her zone, | |
| And Morning opes with haste her lids | 35 |
| To gaze upon the Pyramids; | |
| O’er England’s abbeys bends the sky, | |
| As on its friends, with kindred eye; | |
| For out of Thought’s interior sphere | |
| |
| These wonders rose to upper air; | 40 |
| And Nature gladly gave them place, | |
| Adopted them into her race, | |
| And granted them an equal date | |
| With Andes and with Ararat. | |
| These temples grew as grows the grass; | 45 |
| Art might obey, but not surpass. | |
| The passive Master lent his hand | |
| To the vast soul that o’er him planned; | |
| And the same power that reared the shrine | |
| Bestrode the tribes that knelt within. | 50 |
| Ever the fiery Pentecost | |
| Girds with one flame the countless host, | |
| Trances the heart through chanting choirs, | |
| And through the priest the mind inspires. | |
| The word unto the prophet spoken | 55 |
| Was writ on tables yet unbroken; | |
| The word by seers or sibyls told, | |
| In groves of oak, or fanes of gold, | |
| Still floats upon the morning wind, | |
| Still whispers to the willing mind. | 60 |
| One accent of the Holy Ghost | |
| The heedless world hath never lost. | |
| I know what say the fathers wise,— | |
| The Book itself before me lies, | |
| Old Chrysostom, best Augustine, | 65 |
| And he who blent both in his line, | |
| The younger Golden Lips or mines, | |
| Taylor, the Shakespeare of divines. | |
| His words are music in my ear, | |
| I see his cowlëd portrait dear; | 70 |
| And yet, for all his faith could see, | |
| I would not the good bishop be. | |
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