Have yet so much as heard this simpler lore?
45 lines✦
IMMORTALITY._ Foiled by our fellow-men, depressed, outworn,We leave the brutal world to take its way,And, _Patience! in another life_, we say,_The world shall be thrust down, and we upborne_. And will not, then, the immortal armies scornThe world’s poor, routed leavings? or will theyWho failed under the heat of this life’s daySupport the fervors of the heavenly morn? No, no! the energy of life may beKept on after the grave, but not begun;And he who flagged not in the earthly strife, From strength to strength advancing,--only he,His soul well-knit, and all his battles won,Mounts, and that hardly, to eternal life. _THE GOOD SHEPHERD WITH THE KID._ _He saves the sheep, the goats he doth not save._So rang Tertullian’s sentence, on the sideOf that unpitying Phrygian sect which cried,[10]“Him can no fount of fresh forgiveness lave,Who sins, once washed by the baptismal wave.”So spake the fierce Tertullian. But she sighed,The infant Church! of love she felt the tideStream on her from her Lord’s yet recent grave. And then she smiled; and in the Catacombs,With eye suffused but heart inspired true,On those walls subterranean, where she hid Her head ’mid ignominy, death, and tombs,She her Good Shepherd’s hasty image drew--And on his shoulders, not a lamb, a kid. _MONICA’S LAST PRAYER._[11] “Ah! could thy grave at home, at Carthage, be!”_Care not for that, and lay me where I fall!Everywhere heard will be the judgment-call;But at God’s altar, oh! remember me._ Thus Monica, and died in Italy.Yet fervent had her longing been, through allHer course, for home at last, and burialWith her own husband, by the Libyan sea. Had been! but at the end, to her pure soulAll tie with all beside seemed vain and cheap,And union before God the only care. Creeds pass, rites change, no altar standeth whole.Yet we her memory, as she prayed, will keep,Keep by this: _Life in God, and union there!_
✦