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Home  »  The World’s Best Poetry  »  The Meeting

Bliss Carman, et al., eds. The World’s Best Poetry. 1904.

IV. Sabbath: Worship: Creed

The Meeting

John Greenleaf Whittier (1807–1892)

THE ELDER folk shook hands at last,

Down seat by seat the signal passed.

To simple ways like ours unused,

Half solemnized and half amused,

With long-drawn breath and shrug, my guest

His sense of glad relief expressed.

Outside, the hills lay warm in sun;

The cattle in the meadow-run

Stood half-leg deep; a single bird

The green repose above us stirred.

“What part or lot have you,” he said,

“In these dull rites of drowsy-head?

Is silence worship? Seek it where

It soothes with dreams the summer air;

Not in this close and rude-benched hall,

But where soft lights and shadows fall,

And all the slow, sleep-walking hours

Glide soundless over grass and flowers!

From time and place and form apart,

Its holy ground the human heart,

Nor ritual-bound nor templeward

Walks the free spirit of the Lord!

Our common Master did not pen

His followers up from other men;

His service liberty indeed,

He built no church, he framed no creed;

But while the saintly Pharisee

Made broader his phylactery,

As from the synagogue was seen

The dusty-sandalled Nazarene

Through ripening cornfields lead the way

Upon the awful Sabbath day,

His sermons were the healthful talk

That shorter made the mountain-walk,

His wayside texts were flowers and birds,

Where mingled with his gracious words

The rustle of the tamarisk-tree

And ripple-wash of Galilee.”

“Thy words are well, O friend,” I said;

“Unmeasured and unlimited,

With noiseless slide of stone to stone,

The mystic Church of God has grown.

Invisible and silent stands

The temple never made with hands,

Unheard the voices still and small

Of its unseen confessional.

He needs no special place of prayer

Whose hearing ear is everywhere;

He brings not back the childish days

That ringed the earth with stones of praise,

Roofed Karnak’s hall of gods, and laid

The plinths of Philæ’s colonnade.

Still less he owns the selfish good

And sickly growth of solitude,—

The worthless grace that, out of sight,

Flowers in the desert anchorite;

Dissevered from the suffering whole,

Love hath no power to save a soul.

Not out of Self, the origin

And native air and soil of sin,

The living waters spring and flow,

The trees with leaves of healing grow.

“Dream not, O friend, because I seek

This quiet shelter twice a week,

I better deem its pine-laid floor

Than breezy hill or sea-sung shore;

But nature is not solitude;

She crowds us with her thronging wood;

Her many hands reach out to us,

Her many tongues are garrulous;

Perpetual riddles of surprise

She offers to our ears and eyes;

She will not leave our senses still,

But drags them captive at her will;

And, making earth too great for heaven,

She hides the Giver in the given.

“And so I find it well to come

For deeper rest to this still room,

For here the habit of the soul

Feels less the outer world’s control;

The strength of mutual purpose pleads

More earnestly our common needs;

And from the silence multiplied

By these still forms on either side,

The world that time and sense have known

Falls off and leaves us God alone.

“Yet rarely through the charmed repose

Unmixed the stream of motive flows,

A flavor of its many springs,

The tints of earth and sky it brings;

In the still waters needs must be

Some shade of human sympathy;

And here, in its accustomed place,

I look on memory’s dearest face;

The blind by-sitter guesseth not

What shadow haunts that vacant spot;

No eyes save mine alone can see

The love wherewith it welcomes me!

And still, with those alone my kin,

In doubt and weakness, want and sin,

I bow my head, my heart I bare

As when that face was living there,

And strive (too oft, alas! in vain)

The peace of simple trust to gain,

Fold fancy’s restless wings, and lay

The idols of my heart away.

“Welcome the silence all unbroken,

Nor less the words of fitness spoken,—

Such golden words as hers for whom

Our autumn flowers have just made room;

Whose hopeful utterance through and through

The freshness of the morning blew;

Who loved not less the earth that light

Fell on it from the heavens in sight,

But saw in all fair forms more fair

The Eternal beauty mirrored there.

Whose eighty years but added grace

And saintlier meaning to her face,—

The look of one who bore away

Glad tidings from the hills of day,

While all our hearts went forth to meet

The coming of her beautiful feet!

Or haply hers whose pilgrim tread

Is in the paths where Jesus led;

Who dreams her childhood’s Sabbath dream

By Jordan’s willow-shaded stream,

And, of the hymns of hope and faith,

Sang by the monks of Nazareth,

Hears pious echoes, in the call

To prayer, from Moslem minarets fall,

Repeating where His works were wrought

The lesson that her Master taught,

Of whom an elder Sibyl gave,

The prophecies of Cumæ’s cave!

“I ask no organ’s soulless breath

To drone the themes of life and death,

No altar candle-lit by day,

No ornate wordsman’s rhetoric-play,

No cool philosophy to teach

Its bland audacities of speech

To double-tasked idolaters,

Themselves their gods and worshippers,

No pulpit hammered by the fist

Of loud-asserting dogmatist,

Who borrows for the hand of love

The smoking thunderbolts of Jove.

I know how well the fathers taught,

What work the later schoolmen wrought;

I reverence old-time faith and men,

But God is near us now as then;

His force of love is still unspent,

His hate of sin as imminent;

And still the measure of our needs

Outgrows the cramping bounds of creeds;

The manna gathered yesterday

Already savors of decay;

Doubts to the world’s child-heart unknown

Question us now from star and stone;

Too little or too much we know,

And sight is swift and faith is slow;

The power is lost to self-deceive

With shallow forms of make-believe.

We walk at high noon, and the bells

Call to a thousand oracles,

But the sound deafens, and the light

Is stronger than our dazzled sight;

The letters of the sacred Book

Glimmer and swim beneath our look;

Still struggles in the Age’s breast

With deepening agony of quest

The old entreaty: ‘Art thou He,

Or look we for the Christ to be?’

“God should be most where man is least;

So, where is neither church nor priest,

And never rag of form or creed

To clothe the nakedness of need,—

Where farmer-folk in silence meet,—

I turn my bell-unsummoned feet;

I lay the critic’s glass aside,

I tread upon my lettered pride,

And, lowest-seated, testify

To the oneness of humanity;

Confess the universal want,

And share whatever Heaven may grant.

He findeth not who seeks his own,

The soul is lost that ’s saved alone.

Not on one favored forehead fell

Of old the fire-tongued miracle,

But flamed o’er all the thronging host

The baptism of the Holy Ghost;

Heart answers heart: in one desire

The blending lines of prayer aspire;

’Where, in my name, meet two or three,’

Our Lord hath said, ‘I there will be!’

“So sometimes comes to soul and sense

The feeling which is evidence

That very near about us lies

The realm of spiritual mysteries.

The sphere of the supernal powers

Impinges on this world of ours.

The low and dark horizon lifts,

To light the scenic terror shifts;

The breath of a diviner air

Blows down the answer of a prayer:—

That all our sorrow, pain, and doubt

A great compassion clasps about,

And law and goodness, love and force,

Are wedded fast beyond divorce.

Then duty leaves to love its task,

The beggar Self forgets to ask;

With smile of trust and folded hands,

The passive soul in waiting stands

To feel, as flowers the sun and dew,

The One true Life its own renew.

“So, to the calmly gathered thought

The innermost of truth is taught,

The mystery dimly understood,

That love of God is love of good,

And, chiefly, its divinest trace

In Him of Nazareth’s holy face;

That to be saved is only this,—

Salvation from our selfishness,

From more than elemental fire,

The soul’s unsanctified desire,

From sin itself, and not the pain

That warns us of its chafing chain;

That worship’s deeper meaning lies

In mercy, and not sacrifice,

Not proud humilities of sense

And posturing of penitence,

But love’s unforced obedience;

That Book and Church and Day are given

For man, not God,—for earth, not heaven,—

The blessèd means to holiest ends,

Not masters, but benignant friends;

That the dear Christ dwells not afar,

The king of some remoter star,

Listening, at times, with flattered ear,

To homage wrung from selfish fear,

But here, amidst the poor and blind,

The bound and suffering of our kind,

In works we do, in prayers we pray,

Life of our life, He lives to-day.”