For rest enfolded in that happy haunt, For time to meditate the Church's creed; The white life issuing thence his soul may win It was a little company of ten. Over them all was Monica gently set, By what rude fortune from thy garden toss'd, With her a boy of fifteen summers came. A tint of flowers and oceans far away Him evermore a shadow overhung, Not of the great Numidian forests born— The prophecy of genius that dies young, The far cloud-film of a too radiant morn. Ah! they who early pass through one dark gate Have looks like thine, thou young Adeodate! Thou art of those who breathe with a strange smile The delicate words that only genius saith; Guests whom God spares us but a little while, For they are wanted in the land of death, And leave but tracks of light that was not seen, Hints of a golden land that might have been. Hast thou no mother with a name to note? It is not written in the tenderest scroll That love and recollection ever wrote, The perfected confession of a soul. Into the dark she glides, a silent shame, And a veil'd memory without a name. And the world knoweth not what words she pray'd, What measure by her beating heart was kept, Well that one penitent hath found such grace That no light hand hath lifted from her face Well that one book at least, at least one sod, Well that the virgin saints of her may cry, Is hers, some calm after a storm of years. Next comes the laureate of the little throng, Waxwork, not marble, in hexameters-- But one moves aye among them as the chief— A thoughtful brow with saint engrav'd thereon. And there was something of the Psalmist's grief, And of the inspiration of St. John, And of the gravity that might beseem Roman his speech, not as men talk'd at Rome. Here an apostle spake, and there a psalm, And here philosophy had made its home. Passion and thought he pack'd in epigram, Marring the stone of speech wherewith he wrought, But perfecting the likeness of his thought. O'er all he said there hung a subtle spell. Four lakes, that made a fourfold heav'n below, Slept in that pleasant place, where Apennine Grey-fissured meets the Alpine lines of snow; Round it a symphony of light divine, Red on the hill-side, gold along the plain, One of those spots where busy hearts are still The near ones crested with the olive wood, Fair sped the days. At noon, not overproud, Sweet liberty for prayer or for the word, Well for the men whose spirits try to scale Defeat alone for him who never strives. High themes wherewith to cope makes weak men strong:Well for the men who lived when thought was young. Well for the men who lived in the long ago, Made the old music that is ever new : Well for the men who lived when books were few. Few books were with them; but they were the best— The Epistles, Gospels, and prophetic scroll; The Psalter, too, wherein the ruggedest Of Latin takes to it a Hebrew soul, And seems to yearn for music that may reach Others, moreover, which no sage contemns, That star the broad brows of the kings of thought, They show in distance-chief the glorious Greek- Yet Plato preach'd magnificently Christ. Yea, in each volume, and on every sod, Now, as I write, I seem to hear the kine, That runs toward the bath through banks of vine, The And as it dropped insubstantive on the rill, Proving that chance is God's incognito— That chance, in Heaven's tongue order, interweaves Vaster variety than waves and leaves. And oft I meditate what round they made What soft imaginative rites they had, With what investiture their faith they clad. Not then the church rose visibly encrown'd. And on the Alpine pinnacle was set |