Page:The poems of Richard Watson Gilder, Gilder, 1908.djvu/270

242 But was he man,

And death ends all; then was that tortured death

On Calvary a thing to make the pulse

Of memory quail and stop.

The blackest thought

The human brain may harbor comes that way.

Face that,—face all,—yet lose not hope nor heart!

One perfect moment in the life of love,

One deed wherein the soul unselfed gleams forth,

These can outmatch all ill, all doubt, all fear,

And through the encompassing burden of the world

Burn swift the spirit's pathway to its God.

THE ANGER OF CHRIST

the day that Christ ascended

To Jerusalem,

Singing multitudes attended,

And the very heavens were rended

With the shout of them.

Chanted they a sacred ditty,

Every heart elate;

But he wept in brooding pity,

Then went in the holy city

By the Golden Gate.

In the temple, lo! what lightning

Makes unseemly rout!

He in anger, sudden, frightening,

Drives with scorn and scourge the whitening

Money-changers out.