Classic Poem

We know there once was One on earth
Who penetrated all He saw,
To whom the lily had its worth,
And Nature bared her inmost law.
And when the mountain-side He trod,
The universe before Him shone,
Translucent in the smile of God,
Like young leaves in the morning sun.
Glory which Greece had never won,
To consecrate her Parthenon.

Nature her fine transmuting powers
Laid open to His piercing ken:
The life of insects and of flowers;
The lives, and hearts, and minds of men;
Depths of the geologic past,
The mission of the youngest star; —
No mind had ever grasp so vast,
No science ever dived so far.
All that our boldest guess sees dim
Lay clearly visible to Him.

Had He but uttered forth in song
The visions of His waking sight,
The thoughts that o'er His soul would throng,
Alone upon the hills at night;
What poet's loftiest ecstasies
Had stirred men with such rapturous awe
As would those living words of His,
Calm utterance of what He saw!
All earth had on those accents hung,
All ages with their echoes rung.

But He came not alone to speak, —
He came to live, He came to die:
Living, a long lost race to seek;
Dying, to raise the fallen high
He came, Himself the living Word,
The Godhead in His person shone;
But few and poor were those who heard,
And wrote His words when He was gone:
Words children to their hearts can clasp,
Yet angels cannot wholly grasp.

But where those simple words were flung,
Like raindrops on the parched green,
A living race of poets sprung,
Who dwelt among the things unseen;
Who loved the fallen, sought the lost,
Yet saw beneath time's masks and shrouds;
Whose life was one pure holocaust,
Death but a breaking in the clouds:
His Volume as the world was broad,
His Poem was the Church of God.