MEDITATIONS ON THE LAST JUDGMENT.
———
BY ERASTUS W. ELLSWORTH.
———
Thou, who, from majesty of light,
Didst move Isaiah’s heart aright,
And touch his prophet lips with fire,
Once more a mortal song inspire.
Uplift my powers above the sphere
Of themes that daily earth me here;
Give me, on things within thy Book,
With the large eye of truth to look.
So shall my daily works be sped,
For when this heart of mine is fed
On things of lofty consequence,
My daily life is more intense.
My mortal spirits most ally
With nature and humanity,
When most I bear, however known,
Some deep emotion all my own.
Night hovers! What with hand and thought
My will would do, must soon be wrought;
Lo! how the years no more return,
Each with his own sepulchral urn.
Give me, O Lord, an eye to see
Illusion from reality:
This world, and all its ample scene,
Is like a grand cathedral screen;
So vastly spread, and graven high
With labyrinthine blazonry;
Rapt to a whisper, I behold
Art so sublime and manifold.
Lo! half in light, and half in gloom,
Sleeps at the base an ancient tomb,
Whose prickly-blooming niches bear
All forms of rapture and despair.
Above, in solemn ’scutcheons hung,
Are legends in an unknown tongue—
The fingers of the God of light
Touched on the awful walls of night.
Through middle breadth, from side to side,
The bounding-footed hours glide,
And scatter blooms, like meteor things,
About a glass with glowing wings.
But I behold an usher wait,
And wave me onward to a gate,
Whose leaves on groaning staples turn,
Within whose arch no lamp will burn.
When, for thy feet, those valves shall play,
How soon this grandeur fleets away,
How, through a vista vast and clear,
These eyes shall look, these ears shall hear,
Preluding my eternity,
Deep stops unmouthed in symphony—
Hymns of an inexpressive choir,
Or tremblings of a winnowed fire.
O Thou, who laidst thy splendors by,
To show me how to live and die,
Be thou, O Lord, my hope and home,
Now, and in ages yet to come.
When, the firm stars and swinging spheres,
Conscious of their accomplished years,
Flare in the motions of thy mind,
As cressets to a midnight wind,
And shrunk of oil, collect their gold,
And the great angel, once foretold,
Girt with a noonday, comes to stand,
One foot on sea, and one on land;
When powers that wear a grand impress,
Beatitudes expressionless,
Curbed in the glory of a zone,
Set forth the white eternal throne;
When the loud trump, with solemn jar,
Shall rouse thy creatures to thy bar,
Unhousing all the sprites that dwell
In realms of heaven and earth and hell;
When, up from where earth’s empire stirs,
From all her unchained sepulchres,
The trump-alarmed nations run,
As vapors flitting to the sun;
When, up from hell’s volcanic gloom,
The devils soar to final doom,
And shade, in horror and affright,
Their eyelids from access of light.
When thou art come to judgment sore,
Whom every eye shall see; before
Whose eyes the heavens shall crack and roll,
Even as a furnace-writhing scroll;
When Thou, alone, dost sit serene,
In that immense concurrent scene,
Revolving, in thy dome of thought,
All that eternal ages wrought.
When Gabriel lays, with solemn look,
Beneath thine eye the dooms-day book,
And opens where the leaves rehearse
The index of the universe;
When the proud rebel’s reckoned score
Is big with debts unknown before;
When, ’lumined in unshaded day,
The good man’s whiteness all is gray;
When, at that session in the air,
My name is called in judgment there,
When what is writ shall plainly draw
The sword of that unswerving law;
When swathed in tempest, like a star
O’er an unknown horizon bar,
Millions of ghosts unharbored all,
Shall watch to see me rise or fall;
O then, what prayer shall I renew
To make my Judge my Father too?
What breath of mine—what moving tone
Shall make my bosom all his own?
Look not on alms my hands have done,
Nor on the tint my soul hath won;
Lord, when thine eye shall rest on me,
Remember thy Gethsemane.
THE TRIAL BY BATTLE.
A TALE OF CHIVALRY.
(Continued from page 330.)