A Recusant

The church stands there beyond the orchard-blooms:
How yearningly I gaze upon its spire!
Lifted mysterious through the twilight glooms,
Dissolving in the sunsets golden fire,
Or dim as slender incense morn by morn
Ascending to the blue and open sky.
For ever when my heart feels most forlorn
It murmurs to me with a weary sigh,
How sweet to enter in, to kneel and pray
With all the others whom we love so well!
All disbelief and, doubt might pass away,
All peace float to us with its Sabbath bell.
Conscience replies, There is but one good rest,
Whose head is pillowed upon Truths pure breast.

James Thomson

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James Thomson

From the Midst of the Fire

James Thomson, Simple Poetry

Mater Tenebrarum

James Thomson, Simple Poetry

A Song of Sighing

James Thomson, Simple Poetry

E. B. B.

James Thomson, Simple Poetry

English

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Hymn on Solitude

Hail, mildly pleasing Solitude,
Companion of the wise and good,
But from whose holy piercing eye
The herd of fools and villains fly.
Oh! how I love with thee to walk,
And listen to thy whispered talk,
Which innocence and truth imparts,
And melts the most obdurate hearts.
A thousand shapes you wear with ease,
And still in every shape you please.
Now wrapt in some mysterious dream,
A lone philosopher you seem;
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And now you sweep the vaulted sky;
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James Thomson

The Old Church On The Hill.

Moss-grown, and venerable it stands,
    From the way-side dust and noise aloof,
And the great elms stretch their sheltering hands
    To bless its grey old roof.

About it summer's greenery waves;
    The birds build fearless overhead;
Its shadow falls among the graves;
    Around it sleep the dead.

The summer sunshine softly takes
    The chancel window's pictured gloom;
The moonlight enters too, and makes
    The shadow of a tomb.

Along these aisles the bride hath passed,
    And brightened, with her innocent grace.
The pensive twilight years have cast
    About the holy place.

They brought her here--a tiny maid,
    Unweeting any gain or loss,
And on her baby forehead laid
    The symbol of the Cross.

And he...

Kate Seymour Maclean

Old St. David's At Radnor

What an image of peace and rest
    Is this little church among its graves!
All is so quiet; the troubled breast,
The wounded spirit, the heart oppressed,
    Here may find the repose it craves.

See, how the ivy climbs and expands
    Over this humble hermitage,
And seems to caress with its little hands
The rough, gray stones, as a child that stands
    Caressing the wrinkled cheeks of age!

You cross the threshold; and dim and small
    Is the space that serves for the Shepherd's Fold;
The narrow aisle, the bare, white wall,
The pews, and the pulpit quaint and tall,
    Whisper and say: "Alas! we are old."

Herbert's chapel at Bemerton
    Hardly more spacious is than this;
But Poet and Pastor, blent in one,
Clothed with a splendor, ...

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Through Foulest Fogs

Through foulest fogs of my own sluggish soul,
Through midnight glooms of all the wide world's guilt,
Through sulphurous cannon-clouds that surge and roll
Above the steam of blood in anger spilt;
Through all the sombre earth-oppressing piles
Of old cathedral temples which expand
Sepulchral vaults and monumental aisles,
Hopeless and freezing in the lifeful land;
I gaze and seek with ever-longing eyes
For God, the Love-Supreme, all-wise, all-good:
Alas! in vain; for over all the skies
A dark and awful shadow seems to brood,
A numbing, infinite, eternal gloom:
I tremble in the consciousness of Doom.

James Thomson

The Impercipient

(At A Cathedral Service)



That from this bright believing band
An outcast I should be,
That faiths by which my comrades stand
Seem fantasies to me,
And mirage-mists their Shining Land,
Is a drear destiny.

Why thus my soul should be consigned
To infelicity,
Why always I must feel as blind
To sights my brethren see,
Why joys they've found I cannot find,
Abides a mystery.

Since heart of mine knows not that ease
Which they know; since it be
That He who breathes All's Well to these
Breathes no All's-Well to me,
My lack might move their sympathies
And Christian charity!

I am like a gazer who should mark
An inland company
Standing upfingered, with, "Hark! hark!
The glorious distant sea!"
And feel, ...

Thomas Hardy

To A. J. Scott

    WITH THE FOLLOWING POEM.

    I walked all night: the darkness did not yield.
    Around me fell a mist, a weary rain,
    Enduring long. At length the dawn revealed

    A temple's front, high-lifted from the plain.
    Closed were the lofty doors that led within;
    But by a wicket one might entrance gain.

    'Twas awe and silence when I entered in;
    The night, the weariness, the rain were lost
    In hopeful spaces. First I heard a thin

    Sweet sound of voices low, together tossed,
    As if they sought some harmony to find
    Which they knew once, but none of all that host

    Could wile the far-fled music back to mind.
    Loud voices, distance-low, wandered along
    The pillared paths, and up the arches twined

George MacDonald