Next, as from a far country, there came one. *
Slow was his gait, his garment travel-stain'd,
And in his hand methought he held a scroll,
Written from right to left Semitic-wise.
Then one said to him, "Wherefore art thou come?
And he, "I come from him of Anathoth.”
Whereat he bound a stone upon the scroll,
And flung it far away into the flood;
When suddenly a trumpet-blast wax'd loud
Against Chaldea, rousing Ararat,
And Ashkenaz and Minni, kingdoms old.
Yea, instantaneously a mighty voice
Of Heaven, and earth, and all that is therein,
Sang over Babylon. And as far north.
The ice-bound mariner looks up, and lo!
The sky is spann'd with the auroral arch,
And the Heav'n, full of glory, blossometh
With light unspeakable: so now, methought,
The sky grew radiant up above my head,
World upon world. And then I heard a song,
Angels, archangels, and the company,
Of Heav'n chanting unto golden harps
With exultation-" Babylon the great
Is fallen, fallen "—and from earth below
Rose echo, "Fallen, fallen," back again.
Whereon I thought that I could hear far off
The cedars and the firs of Lebanon,†
With a wind rustling all their odorous robes,
That shaped itself in long low syllables,
As if a happy thought went sighing through
Their dark green halls and sombre colonnades,
Saying, "No feller comes against us now,
Since they have laid thee low, O Babylon!"
And the great river sobb'd, "O Babylon!"
I beheld gods, and demigods, and kings,
Like shadows upon unsubstantial thrones.
I saw the crowns.upon their wither'd brows,
Like the thin circlet of the waning moon
Over a thin white cloud. Ranged were they all,
A royal consistory, row on row,
Sleeping their sleep. But now their ranks were stirred,
As the wan leaves, shrunken from red to white,
-The chestnuts' ashes, or the beeches' fire—
Are stirr'd in heaps, and a shrill murmuring went
Among them, like the wailing of the birds.
And they look'd narrowly on one that came
Into their company, and laugh'd, and said,
"How art thou fallen, O thou Morning star!
For we are kings at least, and take our fill
Of rest, each one in glory on his bed,
Strewn with sweet odours, divers kinds of spice.
But thou art as a wanderer in our land,
Thy carcase trodden under foot of men—
Disrobed, disscepted, dropp'd with blood, discrown'd!" Then Heav'n and the abyss were mute once more, And the curse fell upon broad walls, high gates,
Utterly broken, burnèd in the fire:
And the curse fell on garden-terraces,
Faded, all faded, like a golden cloud,
And tumbled like a cliff in heaps of stones;
And the curse fell upon Euphrates last,
Fountain and flood and all his sea dried up.
Yet other shapes and sounds came to me still.
I saw a fire dark-red in the fierce sky,
Three shadowy figures flitting to and fro;
Far off I heard their Benedicite.*
I saw a host, across the river's bed,
Trample right onward to a palace-gate,
Whence from a great feast fled a thousand lords,
And dark sultanas dress'd in white symars.
And in the hall I saw a blaze of light
Round gold and silver cups of strange device,
And one mysterious figure, scarlet-robed,†
Waiting unmoved, and on the daïs high
A king, the wine still red on his white lips.
And I beheld a barge upon the wave;
Lo! at its helm there was a godlike form,
A glittering tiar above his kausia.
Sitting the centre of a light of gems,
Shadow'd by silk-embroider'd sails, he steered
His pinnace to the dyke Pallakopas,
Keeping his royal court and state on deck,
As his yacht bore him to see the pictured graves
Of the old kings, that sleep world without end,
Where shadows are the only moving things.
And one kept court upon the deck as well,
White-lipp'd, and grim, and stern, and that was Death.
And next a stately chamber, muffled round
With golden curtains, rose beside the stream:
And, his face cover'd with a silken veil,
Walked the Resch Glutha § among agèd men,
Thin faces, pinch'd-up foreheads, narrow hearts,
Whereon the thoughts of God's eternal book
Are stamp'd in petty legendary lore,
As the great waves with all their noble beat
* The Song of the Three Children.
Alexander the Great. See Grote, "History,” vol. xii.
§ The "Chief of the Captivity" among the Babylonian Jews. The Gemara, Mischna, and Talmud grew up in Babylon.
Carve out those feather'd lines along the strand
And last I thought Euphrates was dried up,
And o'er his bed the kings of the Orient,
Surging with war's full stream of clanging gold,*
March'd to the battle of Almighty God.
But on before me swept the moonlit stream
That had entranced me with its memories-
A thousand battles, and one burst of Psalms,
Rolling his waters to the Indian Sea
Beyond Balsara and Elana far,
Nigh to two thousand miles from Ararat.
And his full music took a finer tone,
And sang me something of a "gentler stream"†
That rolls for ever to another shore
Whereof our God Himself is the sole sea.
And Christ's dear love the pulsing of the tide,
And His sweet Spirit is the breathing wind.
Something it chanted, too, of exiled men
On the sad bank of that strange river Life,
Hanging the harp of their deep heart desires.
To rest upon the willow of the Cross,
And longing for the everlasting hills,
Mount Sion, and Jerusalem of God.
And then I thought I knelt, and kneeling heard
Nothing-save only the long wash of waves,
And one sweet psalm that sobbed for evermore.
Πολλῷ ῥευμάτι—χρυσοῦ καναχῆς. (Soph., Antig.," 130.) "A gentler stream with gladness still
The city of our God shall fill." (Psa. xlvi. 4.)
AN angel's voice-and lo! on Hagar's ears,
Sitting in Zophar by the well forlorn,
Four words-the future of a life unborn;
Four words the story of four thousand years!
Here in this West, the land of onward wills,
Our restless history moves, and all things change; But there they stand unmoved, as is the range And steadfast front of the eternal hills.
And as the man for ever, so the race,
Wearing about it through the changeless years
The self-same laughters and the self-same tears,
The self-same lights, and shadows on the face!
So Ishmael yet can rein his battle steeds
Over the burning stretches vast and wide,
The country from the Red Sea's western side
To where Euphrates moans among his reeds;
Then back and back, o'er miles of desert sand,
Till over-wearied horse and rider rest
Beneath some Pyramid, whose lofty crest
Welcomes them nobly to their mother-land.
* This poem, by my son, was awarded the prize for the best Poem on a Sacred Subject in the University of Oxford, 1875–1878.
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