Classic Poem

Thy beauty, Roslin, woke a loftier thought —
Those friars are gone, but not the truths they taught;
The mind that planned thee, and the monks that reared,
Censers, bells, candles — all have disappeared:
But the same spirit hovers round thy walls
That hallows Westminster, pervades St. Paul's,
Or makes the pile that sanctifies the Ouse
A place of pilgrimage for my small muse.

When Scotland's poet led his poet-guest
To thee from Hawthornden's romantic nest,
Thou wast a wreck, and Johnson's learned eye
Read in thy stones but barbarism gone by.
Now from a thousand leagues beyond the sea
Men come to wonder at and study thee,
And maids of English tongue but foreign birth
Kneel on thy flags and kiss thy sacred earth.

And when thy second ruin shall come round
And not one stone be on another found,
The faith which hung those arches and restored,
Shall still raise temples to the living Lord.
The creed of immortality is thine,
Whose life depends not on one mouldering shrine.
Your gods, ye Greeks, died long before your fanes:
Churches may crumble, but Christ's word remains.