Page:Complete Poetical Works of John Greenleaf Whittier (1895).djvu/72

40 I threw my eyes upon the works of nature, which spake to all my senses a language which neither time nor nations have it in their power to alter. Thenceforth my histories and my journals were the herbage of the fields and meadows. My thoughts did not go forth painfully after them, as in the case of human systems; but their thoughts, under a thousand engaging forms, quietly sought me. In these I studied, without effort, the laws of that Universal Wisdom which had surrounded me from the cradle, but on which heretofore I had bestowed little attention.”

Speaking of Rousseau, he says: “I derived inexpressible satisfaction from his society. What I prized still more than his genius was his probity. He was one of the few literary characters, tried in the furnace of affliction, to whom you could, with perfect security, confide your most secret thoughts…. Even when he deviated, and became the victim of himself or of others, he could forget his own misery in devotion to the welfare of mankind. He was uniformly the advocate of the miserable. There might be inscribed on his tomb these affecting words from that Book of which he carried always about him some select passages, during the last years of his life: His sins, which are many, are forgiven, for he loved much.”

“ believe, and yet, in grief, I pray for help to unbelief; For needful strength aside to lay The daily cumberings of my way.

“I ’m sick at heart of craft and cant, Sick of the crazed enthusiast’s rant, Profession’s smooth hypocrisies, And creeds of iron, and lives of ease.

“I ponder o’er the sacred word, I read the record of our Lord; And, weak and troubled, envy them Who touched His seamless garment’s hem;

“Who saw the tears of love He wept Above the grave where Lazarus slept; And heard, amidst the shadows dim Of Olivet, His evening hymn.

“How blessed the swineherd’s low estate, The beggar crouching at the gate, The leper loathly and abhorred, Whose eyes of flesh beheld the Lord!

“O sacred soil His sandals pressed! Sweet fountains of His noonday rest! O light and air of Palestine, Impregnate with His life divine!

“Oh, bear me thither! Let me look On Siloa’s pool, and Kedron’s brook; Kneel at Gethsemane, and by Gennesaret walk, before I die!

“Methinks this cold and northern night Would melt before that Orient light; And, wet by Hermon’s dew and rain, My childhood’s faith revive again!”

So spake my friend, one autumn day, Where the still river slid away Beneath us, and above the brown Red curtains of the woods shut down.

Then said I,—for I could not brook The mute appealing of his look,— “I too am weak, and faith is small, And blindness happeneth unto all.

“Yet sometimes glimpses on my sight, Through present wrong, the eternal right; And, step by step, since time began, I see the steady gain of man;

“That all of good the past hath had Remains to make our own time glad, Our common daily life divine, And every land a Palestine.

“Thou weariest of thy present state; What gain to thee time’s holiest date? The doubter now perchance had been As High Priest or as Pilate then!

“What thought Chorazin’s scribes? What faith In Him had Nain and Nazareth? Of the few followers whom He led One sold Him,—all forsook and lied.

“O friend! we need nor rock nor sand, Nor storied stream of Morning-Land; The heavens are glassed in Merrimac,— What more could Jordan render back?

“We lack but open eye and ear To find the Orient’s marvels here; The still small voice in autumn’s hush, Yon maple wood the burning bush.

“For still the new transcends the old, In signs and tokens manifold;