VICISTI, GALILÆE

“The shrines are dust, the gods are dead,”

They cried in ancient Rome!

“Ah yet, the Idalian rose is red,

And bright the Paphian foam:

For all your Galilæan tears

We turn to her,” men say...

But we, we hasten thro’ the years

To our own yesterday.

Thro’ all the thousand years ye need

To make the lost so fair,

Before ye can award His meed

Of perfect praise and prayer!

Ye liberated souls, the crown

Is yours; and yet, some few

Can hail, as this great Cross goes down

Its distant triumph, too.

Poor scornful Lilliputian souls,

And are ye still too proud

To risk your little aureoles

By kneeling with the crowd?

Do ye still dream ye “stand alone”

So fearless and so strong?

To-day we claim the rebels’ throne

And leave you with the throng.

Yes, He has conquered! You at least

The “van-guard” leaves behind

To croon old tales of king and priest

In the ingles of mankind:

The breast of Aphrodite glows,

Apollo's face is fair;

But O, the world's wide anguish knows

No Apollonian prayer.

Not ours to scorn the first white gleam

Of beauty on this earth,

The clouds of dawn, the nectarous dream,

The gods of simpler birth;

But, as ye praise them, your own cry

Is fraught with deeper pain,

And the Compassionate ye deny

Returns, returns again.

O, worshippers of the beautiful,

Is this the end then, this,—

That ye can only see the skull

Beneath the face of bliss?

No monk in the dark years ye scorn

So barren a pathway trod

As ye who, ceasing not to mourn,

Deny the mourner's God.

And, while ye scoff, on every side

Great hints of Him go by,—

Souls that are hourly crucified

On some new Calvary!

O, tortured faces, white and meek,

Half seen amidst the crowd,

Grey suffering lips that never speak,

The Glory in the Cloud!

In flower and dust, in chaff and grain,

He binds Himself and dies!

We live by His eternal pain,

His hourly sacrifice;

The limits of our mortal life

Are His. The whisper thrills

Under the sea's perpetual strife,

And through the sunburnt hills.

Darkly, as in a glass, our sight

Still gropes thro’ Time and Space:

We cannot see the Light of Light

With angels, face to face:

Only the tale His martyrs tell

Around the dark earth rings

He died and He went down to hell

And lives — the King of Kings!

And, while ye scoff, from shore to shore,

From sea to moaning sea,

Eloi, Eloi, goes up once more

Lama sabacthani!

The heavens are like a scroll unfurled,

The writing flames above —

This is the King of all the world

Upon His Cross of Love.