“My Father’s house ye made a den of thieves,”
Said Christ to priests who wrought for Him a cross,
But afterwards, full often, in His name
The priesthood has been guilty of the same:
What was a sister nation’s grievous loss,
They proudly stored in dusky sacristies.
Such was the plunder of the noble art,
Which Philip from the Netherlands did take,
Such, too, the treasures which Napoleon
With ruthless warfare from the nations won;
Thus ever, where the priest his sign doth make
Upon the sin which pierced the sacred heart.
Such guilt may, even in Sordino’s times,
Have rested upon some Parisian church,
Or abbey in its strange seclusiveness,
But everywhere he found but weariness,
Resulting from his all persistent search,
And nowhere did he see nor hear his chimes.
XII
Why should a soul consume its power and peace
In quest of that which useless seems and vague,
In following mirages of ideals,
And pass through many harassing ordeals,
Endure the cruel sneer of mobs that plague,
When one may dwell ’mongst them in mental ease?
Why follow, like a fettered slave, one’s longing
Which sometimes leads through dun and dreary wilds,
O’er pathless hills and mountain tops afar,
And then points to a dim and distant star,
With faith a-smiling, like a little child’s,
While spectral shadows round one’s soul is thronging?
Because a gleam—as from a fiery globe—
Illumined souls before their incarnation,
And bound them with love’s chain eternally,
That Beauty’s face for ever they might see,
And ne’er be happy in their earthly station,
Unless their life in heav’n’s pure light they robe.
This gleam was ever glowing in the heart
Of him whom men might say was “lacking sense,”
The light of beauty and a smould’ring love.—
Since strait-laced folk may now his acts reprove,
And fearing this, we shall the tale condense,
Of what took place, before he did depart.
One day he met a scholar from Vienna,
Whose home was on the banks of that fair stream,
Renowned in history and minstrel’s song,
O’er whose blue waters, as they flow along,
Some olden romance hovers like a dream,
In saffron hues of terra di Sienna.
There traveled with this scholar a young woman
Whose beauty smote Sordino at first sight,
And made him captive unaware; how strange!
Since he had thought himself outside the range,
Now two score ten, ev’n of the wildest flight
Of any arrow from the little bow-man.