"I said to the third, 'What crime was thine?'
Crime!' she answered, in accents meek,
The babe that sucks at its mother's breast,
And smiles with its little dimpled cheek,
Is not more innocent than I.
But truth was feeble,- error was strong;
And guiltless of a deed of shame,
Men's justice did me cruel wrong.
They would not hear my truthful words:
They thought me filled with stubborn pride.
And I hung and swung in the sight of men,
And the law of blood was satisfied.'
"Then one and all, by that churchyard wall,
Raised their skinny hands at me;
Their voices mingling like the sound
Of rustling leaves in a withering tree:
His hour has come, he's one of us;
His gibbet is built, his noose is tied;
His knell shall ring, and his corpse shall swing, And the law of blood shall be satisfied.'
They vanished! I saw them, one by one,
With their bare blue feet on the drifted snow,
Sink like a thaw, when the sun is up,
To their wormy solitudes below.
THE PHANTOMS OF ST. SEPULCHRE.
Though you may deem this was a dream,
My facts are tangible facts to me;
For the sight grows clear as death draws near,
And looks into futurity."
I WAS betrayed, and cruelly undone.
Smitten to anguish in my sorest part,
And so disgusted with all human life,
That curses came spontaneous to my lips :
I cursed the day-I cursed my fellow-men ;
I cursed my God, that made so bad a world.
Goaded to frenzy, by excess of pain,
I tore my hair,-I dashed my bleeding head
Against a wall; sobbed, wept, and gnashed my teeth.
I howled anathemas against myself
For being man, and living on the earth.
When suddenly a sweet and heavenly calm
Fell on my spirit; and a mild clear light
Diffused itself about me where I stood;
And I was conscious of a visible power
Unutterably great, divinely good;
And a voice spake, not angrily, but sad:
"Weak and unjust! Thou hast blasphemed thy God; Thou hast maligned
God, whom thou knowest not.
Thy fellow-men. Live, till thou knowest both."
The awful glory stole away my sense;
Th' excess of splendour dazzled my dim eyes;
The clear words made me dumb: and for a while
Torpid and clod-like on the earth I lay,
Till th' ineffable brightness disappeared.
And when I wakened, life was misery;
Burden too mighty for my flesh to bear.
Live, till I know my God! That might I, well;
But live in sorrow till I know mankind?
Heavy the curse! But if it must be borne,
Let me gain knowledge quickly, and so die!
Long did I live. One hundred years of time
I held the faith that all my people held;
Observed their laws, and to a God of FEAR
Knelt down in awe, and worshipped His dread name.
But still I lived, and cursed the weary days;
And had no love or reverence for my kind.
And still my pain grew with my discontent,
That I could not release myself, and die.
Youth in my limbs, but age upon my heart,
I roamed the earth. I dwelt among the Greeks:
I saw, well pleased, the majesty of life;
The power of beauty, and the sense of joy;
The physical grandeur of the earth and heaven.
But God himself was stranger to my thought:
I had a worship, but no inward faith;
I prayed to gods of human lineament,
Emblems of natural forces and desires;
I filled the woods with visionary shapes;
Peopled the hills, the vales, the rocks, the streams,
The dark caves, and the sunny mountain-tops
With forms of beauty; and conversed with them
Upon unseen, unreal phantasies,
Until they seemed so palpable to sight,
So like to men in passion, vice, and crime,
I loathed, and shuddered, and abhorred them all ;-
Nor knew in what abysm and hell of thought
To sink remembrance. And I lived-and lived-
Longer than hope; and still I could not die.
Then far away into the burning east
I bent my steps. And at one drowsy noon,
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