| |
| SO once more the ancient story lifts its voice undulled by age— | |
| While the pyramids stand dimly strewn across the lettered page, | |
| And we hear the slave gangs rattling loud their chains of vassalage—, | |
| |
| How the sea’s avenging fury purged the immemorial wrong | |
| How the fire cloud’s angel pinions hovered o’er the nomad throng; | 5 |
| Till at last their wondering quavers struggled into pæan song. | |
| |
| And the story has a sequel, and the sequel tears may tell, | |
| How across the desert ages journeyed footsore Israel, | |
| Ran the gauntlet of the nations, midst the scourgers’ carrion-yell. | |
| |
| But the shrewd Ahasuerus 1 toughened with each strictest test, | 10 |
| Lingered round the Gentile’s back-door, till the Gentile acquiesced | |
| And from contraband intruder made him an unwelcome guest. | |
| |
| For the world grew self-respecting, ordered things with light and law, | |
| Gave the spoiler shorter tether, closer pared the vulture’s claw, | |
| And announced the grand commandment. Would’st thou bricks, then give the straw. | 15 |
| |
| Has thy tree of life, emplanted decade-deep in sunnier earth,— | |
| Have thy virtue’s olive branches, Judah, gained in girth and worth? | |
| Is thy warrant of survival still the same that gave thee birth? | |
| |
| Walk we straighter-backed through Edom since the lightening of the yoke? | |
| Lives the faith, the self-surrender that from stake and gibbet spoke? | 20 |
| Is the message of Jeshurun more than riddling equivoque? | |
| |
| Faith and message waned to shadows, self-deceiving, self-belied, | |
| Sapless mockery of substance, time’s long-suffering petrified: | |
| May the flesh not live for ever once the soul itself has died? | |
| |
| So we move, and move at random, know not when to leap or halt, | 25 |
| Pause and hear the by-word “sluggard,” leap, and turn a somersault, | |
| And we snarl, with pointing fingers: yours—and yours—and yours the fault. | |
| |
| Hence the heretic’s revilings, rants of rabid tribalist, | |
| Each would be the true adherent, each the only loyalist; | |
| Matters it who makes the mischief, zealot or conventiclist? | 30 |
| |
| Zion listening ’midst her ruins lifts her haggard face and wan, | |
| Queries: lives the recollection martyr-years have handed on? | |
| Think they of the vows that echo from the brooks of Babylon? | |
| |
| Whose the shame, and whose the sorrow? Men and ages we condemn, | |
| Cavil at the courtly cities, rail against the tents of Shem; | 35 |
| Whose the blame, if in our bosoms dwells a dead Jerusalem? | |
