* * * * *
Though Rome’s gross yoke
Drops off, no more to be endured,
Her teaching is not so obscured
By errors and perversities,
That no truth shines athwart the lies:
And he, whose eye detects a spark
Even where, to man’s, the whole seems dark,
May well see flame where each beholder
Acknowledges the embers smoulder.
But I, a mere man, fear to quit
The clue God gave me as most fit
To guide my footsteps through life’s maze,
Because himself discerns all ways
Open to reach him: I, a man
Able to mark where faith began
To swerve aside, till from its summit
Judgment drops her damning plummet,
Pronouncing such a fatal space
Departed from the founder’s base:
He will not bid me enter too,
But rather sit, as now I do,
Awaiting his return outside.
—’Twas thus my reason straight replied
And joyously I turned, and pressed
The garment’s skirt upon my breast,
Until, afresh its light suffusing me,
My heart cried “What has been abusing me
That I should wait here lonely and coldly,
Instead of rising, entering boldly,
Baring truth’s face, and letting drift
Her veils of lies as they choose to shift?
Do these men praise him? I will raise
My voice up to their point of praise!
I see the error; but above
The scope of error, see the love.—
Oh, love of those first Christian days!
—Fanned so soon into a blaze,
From the spark preserved by the trampled sect,
That the antique sovereign Intellect
Which then sat ruling in the world,
Like a change in dreams, was hurled
From the throne he reigned upon:
You looked up and he was gone.
The remainder of the stanza is taken up with a most eloquent, but
somewhat difficult passage, illustrating the triumph of the new Love
over the old Culture. In the following stanza he makes up his mind that
he “will feast his love, then depart elsewhere, that his intellect may
find its share”; so the next transition, by the same mode of rapture, is
to a German University. What he sees there provokes again his latent
humour:—