Classic Poem

Feast of the Purification, 1873

I

This day we keep our Candlemas in snow:
Wan is the sky: a bitter wind and dear
Wrinkles the bosom of you blackening mere:
Of these I reck not, but of thee, and O!
Of that bright Roman morn, so long ago,
When, children new of her, that Church more dear
To liegeful hearts with each injurious year,
We watched the famed procession circling slow.
Once more I see it wind with lights upholden
On through the Sistine, on and far away:
Once more I mark beneath its radiance golden
Thy forehead shine, and, with it kindling, say,
" Rehearsals dim were those, O friend: this hour
Surely God's light it is that on thee rests in power! "

II

Again we met. We trod the fields and farms
Of that fair isle, thy happy English home;
We gazed upon blue sea, and snowy foam
Clipt in the jutting headland's woody arms:
The year had reached the fulness of her charms:
The Church's year, from strength to strength increased,
Its zenith held, that great Assumption feast
Whose sun with annual joy the whole earth warms,
That day how swiftly rushed from thy full heart
Hope's glorying flood! How high thy fancy soared,
Kenning, though far, once more thine England's crest
A light to Christendom's old heaven restored!
" In a large room " thy heart its home had found:
The land we trod that day to thee was holy ground.

III

The world external knew thee but in part:
It saw and honoured what was least in thee;
The loyal trust, the inborn courtesy;
The ways so winning, yet so pure from art;
The cordial reverence, keen to all desert,
All save thine own; the accost so frank and free;
The public zeal that toiled, but not for fee,
And shunned alike base praise and hireling's mart:
These things men saw; but deeper far than these
The under-current of thy soul worked on
Unvexed by surface-ripple, beam, or breeze,
And unbeheld its way to ocean won:
Life of thy life was still that Christian faith
The sophist scorns. It failed thee not in death.