Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ed. Poems of Places: An Anthology in 31 Volumes.
Asia: Vols. XXI–XXIII. 1876–79.
Hymn of the Hebrew Maid
By Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832)W
Out from the land of bondage came,
Her fathers’ God before her moved,
An awful guide in smoke and flame.
By day, along the astonished lands
The cloudy pillar glided slow;
By night, Arabia’s crimsoned sands
Returned the fiery column’s glow.
And trump and timbrel answered keen,
And Zion’s daughters poured their lays,
With priest’s and warrior’s voice between.
No portents now our foes amaze,—
Forsaken Israel wanders lone;
Our fathers would not know thy ways,
And thou hast left them to their own.
When brightly shines the prosperous day,
Be thoughts of thee a cloudy screen,
To temper the deceitful ray.
And, O, when stoops on Judah’s path
In shade and storm the frequent night,
Be thou, long-suffering, slow to wrath,
A burning and a shining light!
The tyrant’s jest, the Gentile’s scorn;
No censer round our altar beams,
And mute are timbrel, trump, and horn.
But thou hast said, the blood of goats,
The flesh of rams, I will not prize,—
A contrite heart and humble thoughts
Are mine accepted sacrifice.