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Thoughts on the Far Past
AMID these ruins, gloomy, ghostly, strange, | |
| The weird memorials of an elder time, | |
| The sacred relics of dead centuries, | |
| I stand in utter loneliness; and thoughts | |
| As solemn as the mysteries of the deep | 5 |
| Come o’er me, like the shadow of a cloud | |
| O’er the still waters of a lonely lake, | |
| Or like the mournful twilight of eclipse | |
O’er the dim face of Nature.
Ye were reared, | |
| O ruins old, by stern and holy men,— | 10 |
| God’s messengers unto a new-found world,— | |
| Whose voices, like the trumpets of the blast, | |
| Resounded through the forests, and shook down, | |
| As by an earthquake’s dread iconoclasm, | |
| The idols that men worshipped. Their great lives | 15 |
| Were given to awful duty, and their words | |
| Swelled, breathed, and burned and throbbed upon the air | |
| In solemn majesty. They did not shrink | |
| Or falter in the path of thorn and rock | |
| Their souls marked out. Their mouldered relics lie | 20 |
| Beneath yon humble mounds; but ah, their names, | |
| There rudely sculptured upon blocks of stone, | |
| Are breathed on earth with reverential awe, | |
| And written by God’s finger on His scroll | |
Of saints and martyrs.
Age has followed age | 25 |
| To the abysses of Eternity; | |
| And many generations of our race | |
| Have sprung and faded like the forest leaves; | |
| The mightiest temples reared by human pride | |
| Have long been scattered by a thousand storms,— | 30 |
| But ye remain. Ah yes, ye still remain, | |
| And many pilgrims yearly turn aside | |
| From their far journeyings, to come and pause | |
| Amid your shattered wrecks, as lone and wild | |
| As those of Tadmor of the desert. Wolves | 35 |
| Howl nightly in your ghostly corridors, | |
| And here the deadly serpent makes his home. | |
| Yet round your broken walls, your fallen roofs, | |
| Your many crumbling, shattered images, | |
| Your sunken floors, your shrines with grass o’ergrown, | 40 |
| And the unnumbered strange, mysterious flowers, | |
| That stand, pale nuns, upon your topmost heights, | |
| Wild chants and soul-like dirges seem to rise, | |
| And the low tones of eloquence and prayer | |
| Seem sounding on the hollow winds; and here | 45 |
| I kneel as lowly as I could have knelt, | |
| If I had listened to the living words | |
| Your grand old founders uttered in the name | |
| Of God, who sent them to proclaim his will. | |
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