What is thy worship but a vain pretence, Spirit of Beauty, and a servile trade, A poor and an unworthy traffic made With the most sacred gifts of soul and sense; If they who tend thine altars, gathering thence No strength, no purity, may still remain Selfish and dark, and from Life’s sordid stain Find in their ministrations no defence? Thus many times I ask, when aught of mean Or sensual has been brought unto mine ear, Of them whose calling high is to insphere Eternal Beauty in forms of human art-- Vexed that my soul should ever moved have been By that which has such feigning at the heart.
Thou cam’st not to thy place by accident, It is the very place God meant for thee; And shouldst thou there small scope for action see, Do not for this give room to discontent; Nor let the time thou owest to God be spent In idly dreaming how thou mightest be, In what concerns thy spiritual life, more free From outward hindrance or impediment. For presently this hindrance thou shalt find That without which all goodness were a task So slight, that Virtue never could grow strong: And wouldst thou do one duty to His mind, The Imposer’s--over-burdened thou shalt ask, And own thy need of grace to help, ere long.
No harsh transitions Nature knows, No dreary spaces intervene; Her work in silence forward goes, And rather felt than seen.
For where the watcher, that with eye Turned eastward, yet could ever say When the faint glooming in the sky First lightened into day?
Or maiden, by an opening flower That many a summer morn has stood, Could fix upon the very hour It ceased to be a bud?
The rainbow colours mix and blend Each with the other, until none Can tell where fainter hues had end, And deeper tints begun.
But only doth this much appear-- That the pale hues are deeper grown; The day has broken bright and clear; The bud is fully blown.
Dear child, and happy shalt thou be, If from this hour, with just increase All good things shall grow up in thee, By such unmarked degrees.
If there shall be no dreary space Between thy present self and past, No dreary miserable place With spectral shapes aghast;
But the full graces of thy prime Shall, in their weak beginnings, be Lost in an unremembered time Of holy infancy.