Classic Poem

Within a gray Empire of dawn and of dew,
Where rung the clear clarion which chanticleer blew;
Which sang to the stars, and rang round to the sea,
Proclaiming a triumph and glory to be; —

A realm where the air of the primeval gloom
Was thick with the night-opening blossoms perfume;
Where all the wide world of those delicate blooms,
The heirs of the daylight, lay still in their tombs,
Awaiting the summons, by young April given,
Blown down through the morning-lit portals of Heaven.

There, dank with the dew, and o'erveiled with this dawn,
The shadowy nations went towering on,
Enlarged by the dimness, gigantic, sublime,
They walked in this long-vanished twilight of Time.
There were marvellous marble-built marts where the sea
Proclaimed the same problem he utters to me.

There were shadowy fanes on each shadowy height,
And purple-dusk pyramids piercing the night
So far, that their pinnacles dialed the sky;
And the stars, for the shepherds to calendar by,
Their peaks in the blue, and their feet in the sand;
Each a tomb in its gloom, that o'ershadowed the land,
And between, meaning more than philosophy thinks,
In the desert, breast-deep, sat, like Egypt, the Sphynx.

There were altars a-flush with the horrible sign,
As if Murder had thrown his red cloak on the shrine;
And statues of Terror, with faces uncouth,
Where the world in its error still stumbled at truth.
And a murmur arose, as when billows in vain
Rage round some lone rock that no answer will deign.

Strange Druidical henges encircled the wold;
Dusk granite enigmas, no time can unfold;
Great dogmas in stone, a grand, terrible creed;
A hieroglyphic worship, God only could read.

Along these great woods, and among these great piles
A priesthood, mysterious, shed awe through the aisles.
In vain the sweet herbage looked up from the sod
And pointed to Heaven, and whispered of God;
And the night preached in vain, with its stars and its tears,
The truths it has taught through its millions of years.

Still, the soul in its chains, self-abased and abused,
The light only dazzled; sounds only confused,
Till a God, in his pity, came down as a child,
And walked 'mid those temples which night had defiled,
And solved the old riddles in language so plain,
That the mystery dispelled could not settle again.

Then man, in his wisdom, perverse as a blast,
Dismantled the world of each shred of the past;
The piles were no longer Divinity's throne;
The rocks were but rocks, and the sphynx but a stone.
The hills were disrobed, and the groves were but trees,
And the voice of the ocean was only the seas.
But the faith of the bard may not scorn what is gone,
While it stands in the noon it looks back to the dawn
Believing the good in all worships, it feels
A divinity present wherever it kneels.