第98章

I remember once going into a little church in a small village some miles from a great European capital.The special object of adoration in this humblest of places of worship was a bambino, a holy infant, done in wax, and covered with cheap ornaments such as a little girl would like to beautify her doll with.Many a good Protestant of the old Puritan type would have felt a strong impulse to seize this "idolatrous" figure and dash it to pieces on the stone floor of the little church.But one must have lived awhile among simple-minded pious Catholics to know what this poor waxen image and the whole baby-house of bambinos mean for a humble, unlettered, unimaginative peasantry.He will find that the true office of this eidolon is to fix the mind of the worshipper, and that in virtue of the devotional thoughts it has called forth so often for so many years in the mind of that poor old woman who is kneeling before it, it is no longer a wax doll for her, but has undergone a transubstantiation quite as real as that of the Eucharist.The moral is that we must not roughly smash other people's idols because we know, or think we know, that they are of cheap human manufacture.

--Do you think cheap manufactures encourage idleness? --said I.

The Master stared.Well he might, for I had been getting a little drowsy, and wishing to show that I had been awake and attentive, asked a question suggested by some words I had caught, but which showed that I had not been taking the slightest idea from what he was reading me.He stared, shook his head slowly, smiled good-humoredly, took off his great round spectacles, and shut up his book.

--Sat prates biberunt,--he said.A sick man that gets talking about himself, a woman that gets talking about her baby, and an author that begins reading out of his own book, never know when to stop.You'll think of some of these things you've been getting half asleep over by and by.I don't want you to believe anything I say; I only want you to try to see what makes me believe it.

My young friend, the Astronomer, has, I suspect, been making some addition to his manuscript.At any rate some of the lines he read us in the afternoon of this same day had never enjoyed the benefit of my revision, and I think they had but just been written.I noticed that his manner was somewhat more excited than usual, and his voice just towards the close a little tremulous.Perhaps I may attribute his improvement to the effect of my criticisms, but whatever the reason, I think these lines are very nearly as correct as they would have been if I had looked them over.

WIND-CLOUDS AND STAR-DRIFTS.

VII

What if a soul redeemed, a spirit that loved While yet on earth and was beloved in turn, And still remembered every look and tone Of that dear earthly sister who was left Among the unwise virgins at the gate, Itself admitted with the bridegroom's train, What if this spirit redeemed, amid the host Of chanting angels, in some transient lull Of the eternal anthem, heard the cry Of its lost darling, whom in evil hour Some wilder pulse of nature led astray And left an outcast in a world of fire, Condemned to be the sport of cruel fiends, Sleepless, unpitying, masters of the skill To wring the maddest ecstasies of pain >From worn-out souls that only ask to die, Would it not long to leave the bliss of Heaven, Bearing a little water in its hand To moisten those poor lips that plead in vain With Him we call our Father? Or is all So changed in such as taste celestial joy They hear unmoved the endless wail of woe, The daughter in the same dear tones that hushed Her cradled slumbers; she who once had held A babe upon her bosom from its voice Hoarse with its cry of anguish, yet the same?

No! not in ages when the Dreadful Bird Stamped his huge footprints, and the Fearful Beast Strode with the flesh about those fossil bones We build to mimic life with pygmy hands, Not in those earliest days when men ran wild And gashed each other with their knives of stone, When their low foreheads bulged in ridgy brows And their flat hands were callous in the palm With walking in the fashion of their sires, Grope as they might to find a cruel god To work their will on such as human wrath Had wrought its worst to torture, and had left With rage unsated, white and stark and cold, Could hate have shaped a demon more malign Than him the dead men mummied in their creed And taught their trembling children to adore!

Made in his image! Sweet and gracious souls Dear to my heart by nature's fondest names, Is not your memory still the precious mould That lends its form to Him who hears my prayer?

Thus only I behold him, like to them, Long-suffering, gentle, ever slow to wrath, If wrath it be that only wounds to heal, Ready to meet the wanderer ere he reach The door he seeks, forgetful of his sin, Longing to clasp him in a father's arms, And seal his pardon with a pitying tear!

Four gospels tell their story to mankind, And none so full of soft, caressing words That bring the Maid of Bethlehem and her Babe Before our tear-dimmed eyes, as his who learned In the meek service of his gracious art The tones which like the medicinal balms That calm the sufferer's anguish, soothe our souls.

--Oh that the loving woman, she who sat So long a listener at her Master's feet, Had left us Mary's Gospel,--all she heard Too sweet, too subtle for the ear of man!

Mark how the tender-hearted mothers read The messages of love between the lines Of the same page that loads the bitter tongue Of him who deals in terror as his trade With threatening words of wrath that scorch like flame!

They tell of angels whispering round the bed Of the sweet infant smiling in its dream, Of lambs enfolded in the Shepherd's arms, Of Him who blessed the children; of the land Where crystal rivers feed unfading flowers, Of cities golden-paved with streets of pearl, Of the white robes the winged creatures wear, The crowns and harps from whose melodious strings One long, sweet anthem flows forevermore!