From time and place and form apart,
Its holy ground the human heart,
Nor ritual-bound nor templeward
Walks the free spirit of the Lord!
Our common Master did not pen
His followers up from other men ;
His service liberty indeed,

He built no church, he framed no creed;
But while the saintly Pharisee
Made broader his phylactery,

As from the synagogue was seen
The dusty-sandalled Nazarene
Through ripening cornfields lead the way
Upon the awful Sabbath day,

His sermons were the healthful talk
That shorter made the mountain-walk,
His wayside texts were flowers and birds,
Where mingled with his gracious words
The rustle of the tamarisk-tree
And ripple-wash of Galilee."

"Thy words are well, O friend," I said;
"Unmeasured and unlimited,
With noiseless slide of stone to stone,
The mystic Church of God has grown.
Invisible and silent stands

The temple never made with hands,
Unheard the voices still and small
Of its unseen confessional.

He needs no special place of prayer
Whose hearing ear is everywhere;
He brings not back the childish days
That ringed the earth with stones of praise,
Roofed Karnak's hall of gods, and laid
The plinths of Phila's colonnade.
Still less he owns the selfish good
And sickly growth of solitude,

The worthless grace that, out of sight,
Flowers in the desert anchorite;
Dissevered from the suffering whole,
Love hath no power to save a soul.
Not out of Self, the origin
And native air and soil of sin,
The living waters spring and flow,
The trees with leaves of healing grow.

"Dream not, O friend, because I seek
This quiet shelter twice a week,
I better deem its pine-laid floor
Than breezy hill or sea-sung shore;
But nature is not solitude;

She crowds us with her thronging wood;
Her many hands reach out to us,
Her many tongues are garrulous ;
Perpetual riddles of surprise
She offers to our ears and eyes;
She will not leave our senses still,
But drags them captive at her will;

And, making earth too great for heaven,
She hides the Giver in the given.

"And so I find it well to come
For deeper rest to this still room,
For here the habit of the soul
Feels less the outer world's control;
The strength of mutual purpose pleads
More earnestly our common needs;
And from the silence multiplied

By these still forms on either side,

The world that time and sense have known Falls off and leaves us God alone.

"Yet rarely through the charmed repose
Unmixed the stream of motive flows,
A flavor of its many springs,
The tints of earth and sky it brings;
In the still waters needs must be
Some shade of human sympathy;
And here, in its accustomed place,
I look on memory's dearest face;
The blind by-sitter guesseth not
What shadow haunts that vacant spot;
No eyes save mine alone can see
The love wherewith it welcomes me!
And still, with those alone my kin,
In doubt and weakness, want and sin,

I bow my head, my heart I bare
As when that face was living there,
And strive (too oft, alas! in vain)
The peace of simple trust to gain,
Fold fancy's restless wings, and lay
The idols of my heart away.

"Welcome the silence all unbroken,
Nor less the words of fitness spoken, -
Such golden words as hers for whom
Our autumn flowers have just made room;
Whose hopeful utterance through and through
The freshness of the morning blew ;
Who loved not less the earth that light
Fell on it from the heavens in sight,
But saw in all fair forms more fair
The Eternal beauty mirrored there.
Whose eighty years but added grace
And saintlier meaning to her face, ·
The look of one who bore away
Glad tidings from the hills of day,
While all our hearts went forth to meet

The coming of her beautiful feet!

Or haply hers whose pilgrim tread

Is in the paths where Jesus led;

Who dreams her childhood's sabbath dream
By Jordan's willow-shaded stream,

And, of the hymns of hope and faith,
Sung by the monks of Nazareth,

Hears pious echoes, in the call

To prayer, from Moslem minarets fall,

Repeating where His works were wrought

The lesson that her Master taught,

Of whom an elder Sibyl gave,
The prophecies of Cumæ's cave!

"I ask no organ's soulless breath

To drone the themes of life and death,
No altar candle-lit by day,

No ornate wordsman's rhetoric-play,
No cool philosophy to teach
Its bland audacities of speech
To doubled-tasked idolaters,
Themselves their gods and worshippers,
No pulpit hammered by the fist
Of loud-asserting dogmatist,
Who borrows for the hand of love
The smoking thunderbolts of Jove.
I know how well the fathers taught,
What work the later schoolmen wrought;
I reverence old-time faith and men,
But God is near us now as then;
His force of love is still unspent,
His hate of sin as imminent;
And still the measure of our needs
Outgrows the cramping bounds of creeds;
The manna gathered yesterday
Already savors of decay ;

Doubts to the world's child-heart unknown
Question us now from star and stone;
Too little or too much we know,
And sight is swift and faith is slow;
The power is lost to self-deceive
With shallow forms of make-believe.
We walk at high noon, and the bells
Call to a thousand oracles,

But the sound deafens, and the light
Is stronger than our dazzled sight;
The letters of the sacred Book
Glimmer and swim beneath our look;
Still struggles in the Age's breast
With deepening agony of quest
The old entreaty: 'Art thou He,
Or look we for the Christ to be?'

"God should be most where man is least; So, where is neither church nor priest, And never rag of form or creed

Of old the fire-tongued miracle,
But flamed o'er all the thronging host
The baptism of the Holy Ghost;
Heart answers heart: in one desire
The blending lines of prayer aspire ;
'Where, in my name, meet two or three,'
Our Lord hath said, 'I there will be !'

"So sometimes comes to soul and sense
The feeling which is evidence
That very near about us lies
The realm of spiritual mysteries.
The sphere of the supernal powers
Impinges on this world of ours.
The low and dark horizon lifts,
To light the scenic terror shifts;
The breath of a diviner air
Blows down the answer of a prayer :·
That all our sorrow, pain, and doubt
A great compassion clasps about,
And law and goodness, love and force,
Are wedded fast beyond divorce.
Then duty leaves to love its task,
The beggar Self forgets to ask ;
With smile of trust and folded hands,
The passive soul in waiting stands
To feel, as flowers the sun and dew,
The One true Life its own renew.

-

"So, to the calmly gathered thought
The innermost of truth is taught,
The mystery dimly understood,
That love of God is love of good,
And, chiefly, its divinest trace
In Him of Nazareth's holy face;
That to be saved is only this,
Salvation from our selfishness,
From more than elemental fire,
The soul's unsanctified desire,
From sin itself, and not the pain
That warns us of its chafing chain;
That worship's deeper meaning lies
In mercy, and not sacrifice,
Not proud humilities of sense
And posturing of penitence,
But love's unforced obedience;

A PRAYER FOR LIFE.

O FATHER, let me not die young! Earth's beauty asks a heart and tongue To give true love and praises to her worth; Her sins and judgment-sufferings call For fearless martyrs to redeem thy Earth From her disastrous fall.

For though her summer hills and vales might

seem

The fair creation of a poet's dream,

Ay, of the Highest Poet,

Whose wordless rhythms are chanted by the

gyres

Of constellate star-choirs,

That with deep melody flow and overflow it,
The sweet Earth, - very sweet, despite
The rank grave-smell forever drifting in
Among the odors from her censers white
Of wave-swung lilies and of wind-swung roses,
The Earth sad-sweet is deeply attaint with sin!
The pure air, which encloses
Her and her starry kin,
Still shudders with the unspent palpitating
Of a great Curse, that to its utmost shore
Thrills with a deadly shiver
Which has not ceased to quiver
Down all the ages, nathless the strong beating
Of Angel-wings, and the defiant roar
Of Earth's Titanic thunders.

Fair and sad,
In sin and beauty, our beloved Earth
Has need of all her sons to make her glad ;
Has need of martyrs to refire the hearth
Of her quenched altars, of heroic men
With Freedom's sword, or Truth's supernal pen,
To shape the worn-out mould of nobleness again.
And she has need of Poets who can string

Their harps with steel to catch the lightning's

Writ on the silent heavens in starry script,
And flashing fitfully from her shuddering
tombs,
Commissioned Angels of the new-born Faith,
To teach the immortality of Good,
The soul's God-likeness, Sin's coeval death,
And Man's indissoluble Brotherhood.

Yet never an age, when God has need of him, Shall want its Man, predestined by that need,

To pour his life in fiery word or deed, The strong Archangel of the Elohim!

Earth's hollow want is prophet of his coming:

In the low murmur of her famished cry, And heavy sobs breathed up despairingly, Ye hear the near invisible humming Of his wide wings that fan the lurid sky Into cool ripples of new life and hope, While far in its dissolving ether ope Deeps beyond deeps, of sapphire calm, to cheer With Sabbath gleams the troubled Now and Here.

Father thy will be done,
Holy and righteous One!
Though the reluctant years

May never crown my throbbing brows with white,

Nor round my shoulders turn the golden light Of my thick locks to wisdom's royal ermine: Yet by the solitary tears,

Deeper than joy or sorrow, by the thrill, Higher than hope or terror, whose quick germen, In those hot tears to sudden vigor sprung, Sheds, even now, the fruits of graver age,

By the long wrestle in which inward ill Fell like a trampled viper to the ground,

By all that lifts me o'er my outward peers To that supernal stage Where soul dissolves the bonds by Nature bound,

Fall when I may, by pale disease unstrung, Or by the hand of fratricidal rage,

I cannot now die young!

ANONYMOUS.

THE GREENWOOD SHRIFT.

GEORGE III. AND A DYING WOMAN IN WINDSOR FOREST
OUTSTRETCHED beneath the leafy shade
Of Windsor forest's deepest glade,

A dying woman lay;

Three little children round her stood, And there went up from the greenwood A woful wail that day.

He saw the evening's chilly star
Above his native vale afar;

A moment on the horizon's bar
It hung, then sank, as with a sigh ;
And there the crescent moon went by,
An empty sickle down the sky.

To soothe his pain, Sleep's tender palm
Laid on his brow its touch of balm ;
His brain received the slumberous calm;
And soon that angel without name,
Her robe a dream, her face the same,
The giver of sweet visions came.

She touched his eyes; no longer sealed,
They saw a troop of reapers wield
Their swift blades in a ripened field.
At each thrust of their snowy sleeves
A thrill ran through the future sheaves
Rustling like rain on forest leaves.