Page:The poems of Richard Watson Gilder, Gilder, 1908.djvu/206

178 He who saw in children's eyes

Eternal paradise;

Who made the poor man's lowly

Labor a service holy,

And sweat of work more sweet

Than incense at God's feet;

Who turned the God of Fear

To a father, bending near;

Who looked through shame and sin

At the sanctity within;

Whose memory, since he died,

The earth hath sanctified—

Hath been the stay and the hold

Of millions of lives untold,

And the world on its upward path

Hath led from crime and wrath;—

You say that this Christ hath past

And we cannot hold him fast?

II

Ah, no! If the Christ you mean

Shall pass from this time, this scene,

These hearts, these lives of ours,

'T is but as the summer flowers

Pass, but return again,

To gladden a world of men.

For he,—the only, the true,—

In each age, in each waiting heart,

Leaps into life anew;

Tho' he pass, he shall not depart.

Behold him now where he comes!

Not the Christ of our subtile creeds,

But the lord of our hearts, of our homes,