Page:Poems of Nature and Life.djvu/367

 POET AND TOLL-GATHERER 357


 * Still others mar the sacred hymn

With hateful words and fiendish clang, Or else, with accents harsh and grim,

Join doleful drawl to pious twang, Their brains, in taste or sense unskilled, By cramming, like a sausage, filled.

��" Here some, absorbed in dreams unclean. To Bacchus vow the hymn unblest ;

This one invokes love's fickle queen, And that the demon of unrest ;

While few to master-skill aspire,

Touched with the warmth of heavenly fire.

" Such state of things, endured for long, The god beheld with silent pain.

Few sought his seat through love of song, While oft the vile, through lust of gain,

Scorning the sacred spring to taste,

Sought but to lay his temple waste.

" They bore his sacred urns away ;

His shafts they break, his bays they lop ; Each senseless idler fain would say

He'd bellowed from the mountain's top. And, to reward his worthless toil. Our priceless relics needs must spoil ;

" Until at last the god, grown tired, Went down to dwell in secret places,

And now, in glens and groves retired, Afar from noise and brazen faces,

Roams where his harmonies allure

None save the humble and the pure."

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