Page:Complete Poetical Works of John Greenleaf Whittier (1895).djvu/103

Rh All nature warned in sounds and signs: The wind in the tops of the forest pines In the name of the Highest called to prayer, As the muezzin calls from the minaret stair. Through ceilëd chambers of secret sin Sudden and strong the light shone in; A guilty sense of his neighbor’s needs Startled the man of title-deeds; The trembling hand of the worldling shook The dust of years from the Holy Book; And the psalms of David, forgotten long, Took the place of the scoffer’s song.

The impulse spread like the outward course Of waters moved by a central force; The tide of spiritual life rolled down From inland mountains to seaboard town.

Prepared and ready the altar stands Waiting the prophet’s outstretched hands And prayer availing, to downward call The fiery answer in view of all. Hearts are like wax in the furnace; who Shall mould, and shape, and cast them anew? Lo! by the Merrimac Whitefield stands In the temple that never was made by hands,— Curtains of azure, and crystal wall, And dome of the sunshine over all— A homeless pilgrim, with dubious name Blown about on the winds of fame; Now as an angel of blessing classed, And now as a mad enthusiast. Called in his youth to sound and gauge The moral lapse of his race and age, And, sharp as truth, the contrast draw Of human frailty and perfect law; Possessed by the one dread thought that lent Its goad to his fiery temperament, Up and down the world he went, A John the Baptist crying, Repent!

No perfect whole can our nature make; Here or there the circle will break; The orb of life as it takes the light On one side leaves the other in night. Never was saint so good and great As to give no chance at St. Peter’s gate For the plea of the Devil’s advocate. So, incomplete by his being’s law, The marvellous preacher had his flaw; With step unequal, and lame with faults, His shade on the path of History halts.

Wisely and well said the Eastern bard: Fear is easy, but love is hard,— Easy to glow with the Santon’s rage, And walk on the Meccan pilgrimage; But he is greatest and best who can Worship Allah by loving man.

Thus he,—to whom, in the painful stress Of zeal on fire from its own excess, Heaven seemed so vast and earth so small That man was nothing, since God was all,— Forgot, as the best at times have done, That the love of the Lord and of man are one.

Little to him whose feet unshod The thorny path of the desert trod, Careless of pain, so it led to God, Seemed the hunger-pang and the poor man’s wrong, The weak ones trodden beneath the strong. Should the worm be chooser?—the clay withstand The shaping will of the potter’s hand?

In the Indian fable Arjoon hears The scorn of a god rebuke his fears: “Spare thy pity!” Krishna saith; “Not in thy sword is the power of death! All is illusion,—loss but seems; Pleasure and pain are only dreams; Who deems he slayeth doth not kill; Who counts as slain is living still. Strike, nor fear thy blow is crime; Nothing dies but the cheats of time; Slain or slayer, small the odds To each, immortal as Indra’s gods!”

So by Savannah’s banks of shade, The stones of his mission the preacher laid On the heart of the negro crushed and rent, And made of his blood the wall’s cement; Bade the slave-ship speed from coast to coast, Fanned by the wings of the Holy Ghost; And begged, for the love of Christ, the gold Coined from the hearts in its groaning hold. What could it matter, more or less Of stripes, and hunger, and weariness? Living or dying, bond or free, What was time to eternity?

Alas for the preacher’s cherished schemes! Mission and church are now but dreams; Nor prayer nor fasting availed the plan To honor God through the wrong of man.