A few stones piled together long ago,
And fallen again to ruin, have a charm
To hallow all the world. The sweetest sounds
Are those most near akin to silences,
Such as sea whispers rippling at the prow
When the loud engine ceases, muffled bells,
Or wandering waves of dying harmony
In echoing minsters; and the sweetest notes
Of Life are those that reach us from afar,--
Those wafted whispers of humanity
And Love and Death, that none can ever hear
Amid the mighty voices of the world.
This is a little spot of neutral ground
Beside the pilgrim road, between the world
We know of and the world of which we dream.
The summer wind that blows outside and bends
The flowers that grow upon the chancel wall
Sounds far away; the sunbeams falling here
Look other than the common light that floods
The meadowlands beyond, and overhead
The roof of noonday sky is all its own.
The story written now upon these walls
Is not of scenes in long forgotten hours:
Another meaning and another life
Which keeps that past within it, as a tree
Hides vanished sunlight, has outlived the old:
These ruins hold our hearts, not theirs who built.
For though erewhile I fell into a dream
Of summer on a morning long ago,
Saw knightly men and noble ladies cross
The sward of green and climb the winding stair
And enter at the doorway one by one;
Though of their fellowship a while I seemed,
Knelt there at matins, watched the sunlight fall
Through the dim traceries, and stain the floor
With rose and gold where now the grass is green,--
I looked for something which I could not find,
There was a want of something I had known,
An emptiness at heart, as though all life
Had dwindled from its high significance.
And soon the sound of the Gregorian
Grew ghostly in my ears; the simpler faith
My soul accepted in that former world
Was troubled, and once more the chapel walls
Were ruined, and the infinite blue sky
Became a roof above the empty nave.
But lo! the wind, which was the same soft wind
That roamed about the chapel walls of old,
Had gathered from the ages a new voice
And breathed the soul of an unfathomed life;
The skies were deeper; in the wayside flowers
The beauty dreaming at the heart of things
Seemed nearer than before; and in my heart
Beat the strong pulses of the larger hope,
The grander sorrows, the sublimer wrongs,
The nobler freedom and the truer love,
Which the great world has won upon its way
And learned from century to century.
Nay! from our world we cannot long escape,--
Its voices are around me, even here
Within the ruined cloisters of the past;
But here to pilgrim wayfarers they sound
No longer clamorous and harsh, but met
By dreams of the eternal and unknown
They make a whispered music in our ears,--
Even as sea-tides flowing up the stream
Meet the strong rapids breaking among rocks,
And lull their tumult to a rippled song.