James and Mary Ford, eds. Every Day in the Year. 1902.
July 18Dean Stanley
By Paul Hamilton Hayne (18301886)D
And prostrate lies that brave, majestic head;
True! his stilled features own death’s arctic mould,
Yet, by Christ’s blood, I know he is not dead!
The robe of flesh, whence his true self hath fled;
Whate’er be false, one faith holds fast and sure,
Great souls like his abide not with the dead:
Breathing the effluence of ethereal birth,
Through deeds divine, his spirit walks again,
On rhythmic feet the mournful paths of earth!
The glamour of his goodness still survives,
Not in vain glimpses of a flattering dream,
But flower and fruit of ransomed human lives.
No Levite plea his mercy turned apart,
But wounded souls—to whom all else were blind—
He soothed with wine and balsam of the heart.
His Master’s watchword pealed o’er land and sea;
And still through days of gain, and days of loss,
Proclaimed the golden truce of charity.
But given the thought sincere—the earnest aim;
God’s garden will not spurn the humblest weed
That yearns for purer air and loftier flame.
Seer-like he spake, as one that viewed his goal,
While the world felt through darkness and through tears,
Mysterious music thrill its raptured soul.
Clothed in winged deeds across the empyreal height,
And all the expanding space is flushed with fire,
And deep on deep, heaven opens to our sight,—
Our rain of human sorrow; on his breast
Cross the pale palms: and pulseless heart and head
Leave to the quiet of his cloistered rest.
Thy life-force folded like an unfurled sail!
Spent is time’s rage—its foam of crested woes—
And thou hast found, at last, the Holy Grail!