The Shoes of Happiness.
THE HAPPINESS OF LOWLINESS
And just as this opening poem teaches the happiness of poverty, so the next, "The Juggler of Touraine," teaches the happiness of lowliness.
Poor Barnabas, just a common juggler, when winter came, because he had been spending the summer amusing people, had no place to go, and a sympathetic monk took him into the monastery to live. Barnabas was happy for a time; but after a while, as he saw everybody else worshiping the Beautiful Mother with lute and brush, viol, drum, talent, and prayer, he began to feel that his talents were worthless:
"But I, poor Barnabas, nothing can I,
But drone in the sun as a drowsy fly."
The Shoes of Happiness.
Then came a thought that leaped like flame over his being, and an hour later the monks found him, kneeling in the sacred altar place. What he was doing chagrined them. They were shocked just as many people of this day, to see a man worshiping with a different bend of the knee than that to which they had been accustomed. How prone we are to judge those who do not worship just as we have worshiped! This seems such a common human weakness that Alfred Noyes, with a touch of kindly indignation, speaks a word in "The Forest of Wild Thyme" that may be interjected just here in this study of Barnabas the juggler, whom the monks indignantly found worshiping the Virgin by juggling his colored balls in the air, and speaking thus as he juggled:
"'Lady,' he cried again, 'look, I entreat:
I worship with fingers, and body, and feet!"
"And they heard him cry at Our Lady's shrine:
'All that I am, Madame, all is thine!
Again I come with spangle and ball
To lay at your altar my little, my all!'"
The Shoes of Happiness.