“How terrible is zeal without true knowledge;
How awful bigotry, born by religion!
How black is priestcraft, bred by selfishness,
Before whose judgment-seat there’s no redress
For any sympathizer with rebellion
Against the schemes of Jesuitic college!”
His tender-heartedness aroused such thought;—
He paused, and crossed himself, perhaps he sinned,—
In thinking thus, and carried thus away
By that sad spectacle, and then did say,
Within himself: “May be the fellow grinned,
Because his faith a glory to him brought.”
“Was that the motive which led him to suffer?
Then was he despicable more than they
Who brazed themselves his dirty flesh to fry,
Then was his smoke a stench beneath the sky,
His ashes unfit for his country’s clay,
He, not a martyr, but a worthless duffer.”
“If pride, quite obstinate, of fancied light,
Diviner, truer than of mother church,
Did actuate the Protestants to die,
Then there is justice in the people’s cry,
For such an arrogance the truth will smirch,
And rob its scepter of celestial right.”
Thus did philosopher and churchman speak,
And now the poet whispered: “Peace be still!
Where are thy chimes? All England needs their tone
Of harmony to make the people one;
Thy golden chimes! At last their music will
Interpret all which men through suff’ring seek.”
XXI
Pained and disgusted with the sight, he passed
Out of the city—’twas not very far
Before he struck the open country-road—
Which led to Shoreditch church, and meadows broad,
And fields of golden grain, where nought did mar
The peace of all that was with nature classed.
Amid a field, below a hillock’s slope,
He saw a man at work, also a lad,
With sickles in their hands, a-cutting grain,
He stopped and looked at them, the boy with pain
Seemed, raise himself, when he a bundle had
Completed, trying with his sire to cope.
And while he stretched his aching, weary back,
He gazed across the field with longing look,
A-measuring how many days ’twould take
To reach the end—the field’s dividing stake,
Then spit into his hands and firmly took
His place behind his father’s cleancut track.
This incident Sordino much impressed,
He read at once the feelings of the boy,
That not alone in body, but in mind
He suffered, sought deliverance to find,
And so he said: “I will the lad employ,
I need a guide whom heav’n with dreams hath blessed.”