Page:Complete Poetical Works of John Greenleaf Whittier (1895).djvu/481

Rh Glide on, poor ghost of woe or sin! Thou leav’st a common need within; Each bears, like thee, some nameless weight, Some misery inarticulate, Some secret sin, some shrouded dread, Some household sorrow all unsaid.
 * Pray for us!

Pass on! The type of all thou art, Sad witness to the common heart! With face in veil and seal on lip, In mute and strange companionship, Like thee we wander to and fro, Dumbly imploring as we go:
 * Pray for us!

Ah, who shall pray, since he who pleads Our want perchance hath greater needs? Yet they who make their loss the gain Of others shall not ask in vain, And Heaven bends low to hear the prayer Of love from lips of self-despair:
 * Pray for us!

In vain remorse and fear and hate Beat with bruised hands against a fate Whose walls of iron only move And open to the touch of love. He only feels his burdens fall Who, taught by suffering, pities all.
 * Pray for us!

He prayeth best who leaves unguessed The mystery of another’s breast. Why cheeks grow pale, why eyes o’erflow, Or heads are white, thou need’st not know. Enough to note by many a sign That every heart hath needs like thine.
 * Pray for us!

fagots blazed, the caldron’s smoke
 * Up through the green wood curled;

“Bring honey from the hollow oak, Bring milky sap,” the brewers spoke,
 * In the childhood of the world.

And brewed they well or brewed they ill,
 * The priests thrust in their rods,

First tasted, and then drank their fill, And shouted, with one voice and will,
 * “Behold the drink of gods!”

They drank, and lo! in heart and brain
 * A new, glad life began;

The gray of hair grew young again, The sick man laughed away his pain,
 * The cripple leaped and ran.

“Drink, mortals, what the gods have sent,
 * Forget your long annoy.”

So sang the priests. From tent to tent The Soma’s sacred madness went,
 * A storm of drunken joy.

Then knew each rapt inebriate
 * A winged and glorious birth,

Soared upward, with strange joy elate, Beat, with dazed head, Varuna’s gate,
 * And, sobered, sank to earth.

The land with Soma’s praises rang;
 * On Gihon’s banks of shade

Its hymns the dusky maidens sang; In joy of life or mortal pang
 * All men to Soma prayed.

The morning twilight of the race
 * Sends down these matin psalms;

And still with wondering eyes we trace The simple prayers to Soma’s grace,
 * That Vedic verse embalms.

As in that child-world’s early year,
 * Each after age has striven

By music, incense, vigils drear, And trance, to bring the skies more near,
 * Or lift men up to heaven!

Some fever of the blood and brain,
 * Some self-exalting spell,

The scourger’s keen delight of pain, The Dervish dance, the Orphic strain,
 * The wild-haired Bacchant’s yell,—

The desert’s hair-grown hermit sunk
 * The saner brute below;

The naked Santon, hashish-drunk, The cloister madness of the monk,
 * The fakir’s torture-show!

And yet the past comes round again,
 * And new doth old fulfil;

In sensual transports wild as vain