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(From The Cathedral)
ELUDING these, I loitered through the town, | |
| With hope to take my minster unawares | |
| In its grave solitude of memory. | |
| A pretty burgh, and such as Fancy loves | |
| For bygone grandeurs, faintly rumorous now | 5 |
| Upon the mind’s horizon, as of storm | |
| Brooding its dreamy thunders far aloof, | |
| That mingle with our mood, but not disturb. | |
| Its once grim bulwarks, tamed to lovers’ walks, | |
| Look down unwatchful on the sliding Eure, | 10 |
| Whose listless leisure suits the quiet place, | |
| Lisping among his shallows homelike sounds | |
| At Concord and by Bankside heard before. | |
| Chance led me to a public pleasure-ground, | |
| Where I grew kindly with the merry groups, | 15 |
| And blessed the Frenchman for his simple art | |
| Of being domestic in the light of day. | |
| His language has no word, we growl, for Home; | |
| But he can find a fireside in the sun, | |
| Play with his child, make love, and shriek his mind, | 20 |
| By throngs of strangers undisprivacied. | |
| He makes his life a public gallery, | |
| Nor feels himself till what he feels comes back | |
| In manifold reflection from without; | |
| While we, each pore alert with consciousness, | 25 |
| Hide our best selves as we had stolen them, | |
| And each bystander a detective were, | |
| Keen-eyed for every chink of undisguise. | |
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| So, musing o’er the problem which was best,— | |
| A life wide-windowed, shining all abroad, | 30 |
| Or curtains drawn to shield from sight profane | |
| The rites we pay to the mysterious I,— | |
| With outward senses furloughed and head bowed | |
| I followed some fine instinct in my feet, | |
| Till, to unbend me from the loom of thought, | 35 |
| Looking up suddenly, I found mine eyes | |
| Confronted with the minster’s vast repose. | |
| Silent and gray as forest-leaguered cliff | |
| Left inland by the ocean’s slow retreat, | |
| That hears afar the breeze-borne rote and longs, | 40 |
| Remembering shocks of surf that clomb and fell, | |
| Spume-sliding down the baffled decuman, | |
| It rose before me, patiently remote | |
| From the great tides of life it breasted once, | |
| Hearing the noise of men as in a dream. | 45 |
| I stood before the triple northern port, | |
| Where dedicated shapes of saints and kings, | |
| Stern faces bleared with immemorial watch, | |
| Looked down benignly grave and seemed to say, | |
| “Ye come and go incessant; we remain | 50 |
| Safe in the hallowed quiets of the past; | |
| Be reverent, ye who flit and are forgot, | |
| Of faith so nobly realized as this.” | |
| I seem to have heard it said by learned folk | |
| Who drench you with æsthetics till you feel | 55 |
| As if all beauty were a ghastly bore, | |
| The faucet to let loose a wash of words, | |
| That Gothic is not Grecian, therefore worse; | |
| But, being convinced by much experiment | |
| How little inventiveness there is in man, | 60 |
| Grave copier of copies, I give thanks | |
| For a new relish, careless to inquire | |
| My pleasure’s pedigree, if so it please, | |
| Nobly, I mean, nor renegade to art. | |
| The Grecian gluts me with its perfectness, | 65 |
| Unanswerable as Euclid, self-contained, | |
| The one thing finished in this hasty world, | |
| Forever finished, though the barbarous pit, | |
| Fanatical on hearsay, stamp and shout | |
| As if a miracle could be encored. | 70 |
| But ah! this other, this that never ends, | |
| Still climbing, luring fancy still to climb, | |
| As full of morals half divined as life, | |
| Graceful, grotesque, with ever new surprise | |
| Of hazardous caprices sure to please, | 75 |
| Heavy as nightmare, airy-light as fern, | |
| Imagination’s very self in stone! | |
| With one long sigh of infinite release | |
| From pedantries past, present, or to come, | |
| I looked, and owned myself a happy Goth. | 80 |
| Your blood is mine, ye architects of dream, | |
| Builders of aspiration incomplete, | |
| So more consummate, souls self-confident, | |
| Who felt your own thought worthy of record | |
| In monumental pomp! No Grecian drop | 85 |
| Rebukes these veins that leap with kindred thrill, | |
| After long exile, to the mother-tongue. | |
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| Ovid in Pontus, puling for his Rome | |
| Of men invirile and disnatured dames | |
| That poison sucked from the Attic bloom decayed, | 90 |
| Shrank with a shudder from the blue-eyed race | |
| Whose force rough-handed should renew the world, | |
| And from the dregs of Romulus express | |
| Such wine as Dante poured, or he who blew | |
| Roland’s vain blast, or sang the Campeador | 95 |
| In verse that clanks like armor in the charge,— | |
| Homeric juice, if brimmed in Odin’s horn. | |
| And they could build, if not the columned fane | |
| That from the height gleamed seaward many-hued, | |
| Something more friendly with their ruder skies: | 100 |
| The gray spire, molten now in driving mist, | |
| Now lulled with the incommunicable blue; | |
| The carvings touched to meanings new with snow, | |
| Or commented with fleeting grace of shade; | |
| The statues, motley as man’s memory, | 105 |
| Partial as that, so mixed of true and false, | |
| History and legend meeting with a kiss | |
| Across this bound-mark where their realms confine; | |
| The painted windows, freaking gloom with glow, | |
| Dusking the sunshine which they seem to cheer, | 110 |
| Meet symbol of the senses and the soul; | |
| And the whole pile, grim with the Northman’s thought | |
| Of life and death, and doom, life’s equal fee,— | |
| These were before me: and I gazed abashed, | |
| Child of an age that lectures, not creates, | 115 |
| Plastering our swallow-nests on the awful Past, | |
| And twittering round the work of larger men, | |
| As we had builded what we but deface. | |
| Far up the great bells wallowed in delight, | |
| Tossing their clangors o’er the heedless town, | 120 |
| To call the worshippers who never came, | |
| Or women mostly, in loath twos and threes. | |
| I entered, reverent of whatever shrine | |
| Guards piety and solace for my kind | |
| Or gives the soul a moment’s truce of God, | 125 |
| And shared decorous in the ancient rite | |
| My sterner fathers held idolatrous. | |
| The service over, I was tranced in thought: | |
| Solemn the deepening vaults, and most to me, | |
| Fresh from the fragile realm of deal and paint, | 130 |
| Or brick mock-pious with a marble front; | |
| Solemn the lift of high-embowered roof, | |
| The clustered stems that spread in boughs disleaved, | |
| Through which the organ blew a dream of storm,— | |
| Though not more potent to sublime with awe | 135 |
| And shut the heart up in tranquillity, | |
| Than aisles to me familiar that o’erarch | |
| The conscious silences of brooding woods, | |
| Centurial shadows, cloisters of the elk: | |
| Yet here was sense of undefined regret, | 140 |
| Irreparable loss, uncertain what: | |
| Was all this grandeur but anachronism,— | |
| A shell divorced of its informing life, | |
| Where the priest housed him like a hermit-crab, | |
| An alien to that faith of elder days | 145 |
| That gathered round it this fair shape of stone? | |
| Is old Religion but a spectre now, | |
| Haunting the solitude of darkened minds, | |
| Mocked out of memory by the sceptic day? | |
| Is there no corner safe from peeping Doubt, | 150 |
| Since Gutenberg made thought cosmopolite | |
| And stretched electric threads from mind to mind? | |
| Nay, did Faith build this wonder? or did Fear, | |
| (Blockish or metaphysic, matters not), | |
| That makes a fetish and misnames it God | 155 |
| Contrive this coop to shut its tyrant in, | |
| Appeased with playthings, that he might not harm? * * * * * | |
| I walked forth saddened; for all thought is sad, | |
| And leaves a bitterish savor in the brain, | |
| Tonic, it may be, not delectable, | 160 |
| And turned, reluctant, for a parting look | |
| At those old weather-pitted images | |
| Of bygone struggle, now so sternly calm. | |
| About their shoulders sparrows had built nests, | |
| And fluttered, chirping, from gray perch to perch, | 165 |
| Now on a mitre poising, now a crown, | |
| Irreverently happy. While I thought | |
| How confident they were, what careless hearts | |
| Flew on those lightsome wings and shared the sun, | |
| A larger shadow crossed; and looking up, | 170 |
| I saw where, nesting in the hoary towers, | |
| The sparrow-hawk slid forth on noiseless air, | |
| With sidelong head that watched the joy below, | |
| Grim Norman baron o’er this clan of Kelts. | |
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