Predestinata.
VIII.
Eternal Beauty, ere the spheres
Had rolled from out the gulfs of night,
Sparkled, through all the unnumbered years,
Before the Eternal Father's sight.
Like objects seen by Man in dream,
Or landscape glassed on morning mist,
Before His eyes it hung—a gleam
Flashed from the eternal Thought of Christ.
It stood the Archetype sublime
Of that fair world of finite things
Which, in the bands of Space and Time,
Creation's glittering verge enrings.
Star-like within the depths serene
Of that still vision, Mary, thou
With Him, thy Son, of God wert seen
Millenniums ere the lucid brow
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Of Eye o'er Eden founts had bent,—
Millenniums ere that second Fair
With dust the hopes of man had blent,
And stained the brightness once so fair.
Elect of Creatures! Man in thee
Beholds that primal Beauty yet,—
Sees all that Man was formed to be,—
Sees all that Man can ne'er forget!
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IX.
Three worlds there are:—the first of Sense—
That sensuous earth which round us lies;
The next of Faith's Intelligence;
The third of Glory, in the skies.
The first is palpable, but base;
The second heavenly, but obscure;
The third is star-like in the face—
But ah! remote that world as pure!
Yet, glancing through our misty clime,
Some sparkles from that loftier sphere
Make way to earth;—then most what time
The annual spring-flowers re-appear.
Amid the coarser needs of earth
All shapes of brightness, what are they
But wanderers, exiled from their birth,
Or pledges of a happier day?
Yea, what is Beauty, judged aright,
But some surpassing, transient gleam;
Some smile from heaven, in waves of light,
Rippling o'er life's distempered dream?
Or broken memories of that bliss
Which rushed through first-born Nature's blood
When He who ever was, and is,
Looked down, and saw that all was good?
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X.
Alas! not only loveliest eyes,
And brows with lordliest lustre bright,
But Nature's self—her woods and skies—
The credulous heart can cheat or blight.
And why? Because the sin of man
Twixt Fair and Good has made divorce;
And stained, since Evil first began,
That stream so heavenly at its source.
O perishable vales and groves!
Your master was not made for you;
Ye are but creatures: human loves
Are to the great Creator due.
And yet, through Nature's symbols dim,
There are with keener sight that pierce
The outward husk, and reach to Him
Whose garment is the universe.
For this to earth the Saviour came
In flesh; in part for this He died;
That man might have, in soul and frame,
No faculty unsanctified.
That Fancy's self—so prompt to lead
Through paths disastrous or defiled—
Upon the Tree of Life might feed;
And Sense with Soul be reconciled.
Idolatria.
XI.
The fancy of an age gone by,
When Fancy's self to earth declined,
Still thirsting for Divinity,
Yet still, through sense, to Godhead blind,
Poor mimic of that Truth of old,
The patriarchs' hope—a faith revealed—
Compressed its God in mortal mould,
The prisoner of Creation's field.
Nature and Nature's Lord were one!
Then countless gods from cloud and stream
Glanced forth; from sea, and moon, and sun:
So ran the pantheistic dream.
And thus the All-Holy, thus the All-True,
The One Supreme, the Good, the Just,
Like mist was scattered, lost like dew,
And vanished in the wayside dust.
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Mary! through thee the idols fell:
When He the nations longed for [Footnote 1] came—
True God yet Man—with man to dwell,
The phantoms hid their heads for shame.
[Footnote 1: "The Desire of the Nations.">[
His place or thine removed, ere long
The bards would push the sects aside;
And lifted by the might of song
Olympus stand re-edified.
Tota Pulchra.
XII.
A broken gleam on wave and flower—
A music that in utterance dies—
O Poets, and O Men! what more
Is all that Beauty which ye prize?
And ah! how oft Corruption works
Through that brief Beauty's force or wile!
How oft a gloom eternal lurks
Beneath an evanescent smile!
But thou, serene and smiling light
Of every grace redeemed from Sense,
In thee all harmonies unite
That charm a pure Intelligence.
Whatever teaches mind or heart
To God by loveliest types to mount,
Mary, is thine. Of each true Art
The parent art thou, and the fount.
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Those pictures, fair as moon or star,
The ages dear to Faith brought forth,
Formed but the illumined calendar
Of her, that Church which knows thy worth.
Not less doth Nature teach through thee
That mystery hid in hues and lines:
Who loves thee not hath lost the key
To all her sanctuaries and shrines.