Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ed. Poems of Places: An Anthology in 31 Volumes.
America: Vols. XXV–XXIX. 1876–79.
Mision San Antonio
By George Dennison Prentice (1802–1870)A
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
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,—
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
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
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
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,—
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
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,
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
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.