The Complete Poetical Works of George MacDonald. George MacDonald

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       Flashed on him cheerful from a fire and lamp,

       That burned alone, as in a fairy-tale:

       Behold! a little room, a curtained bed,

       An easy chair, bookshelves, and writing-desk;

       An old print of a deep Virgilian wood,

       And one of choosing Hercules! The youth

       Gazed and spoke not. The old paternal love

       Had sought and found an incarnation new!

       For, honouring in his son the simple needs

       Which his own bounty had begot in him,

       He gave him thus a lonely thinking space,

       A silent refuge. With a quiet good night,

       He left him dumb with love. Faintly beneath,

       The horses stamped, and drew the lengthening chain.

      Three sliding years, with slowly blended change,

       Drew round their winter, summer, autumn, spring,

       Fulfilled of work by hands, and brain, and heart.

       He laboured as before; though when he would,

       And Nature urged not, he, with privilege,

       Would spare from hours of toil—read in his room,

       Or wander through the moorland to the hills;

       There on the apex of the world would stand,

       As on an altar, burning, soul and heart—

       Himself the sacrifice of faith and prayer;

       Gaze in the face of the inviting blue

       That domed him round; ask why it should be blue;

       Pray yet again; and with love-strengthened heart

       Go down to lower things with lofty cares.

      When Sundays came, the father, daughter, son

       Walked to the church across their own loved fields.

       It was an ugly church, with scarce a sign

       Of what makes English churches venerable.

       Likest a crowing cock upon a heap

       It stood—but let us say—St. Peter's cock,

       Lacking not many a holy, rousing charm

       For one with whose known self it was coeval,

       Dawning with it from darkness of the unseen!

       And its low mounds of monumental grass

       Were far more solemn than great marble tombs;

       For flesh is grass, its goodliness the flower.

       Oh, lovely is the face of green churchyard

       On sunny afternoons! The light itself

       Nestles amid the grass; and the sweet wind

       Says, I am here,—no more. With sun and wind And crowing cocks, who can believe in death? He, on such days, when from the church they Came, And through God's ridges took their thoughtful way, The last psalm lingering faintly in their hearts, Would look, inquiring where his ridge would rise; But when it gloomed or rained, he turned aside: What mattered it to him?

      And as they walked

       Homeward, right well the father loved to hear

       The fresh rills pouring from his son's clear well.

       For the old man clung not to the old alone,

       Nor leaned the young man only to the new;

       They would the best, they sought, and followed it.

       "The Pastor fills his office well," he said,

       In homely jest; "—the Past alone he heeds!

       Honours those Jewish times as he were a Jew,

       And Christ were neither Jew nor northern man!

       He has no ear for this poor Present Hour,

       Which wanders up and down the centuries,

       Like beggar-boy roaming the wintry streets,

       With witless hand held out to passers-by;

       And yet God made the voice of its many cries.

       Mine be the work that comes first to my hand!

       The lever set, I grasp and heave withal.

       I love where I live, and let my labour flow

       Into the hollows of the neighbour-needs.

       Perhaps I like it best: I would not choose

       Another than the ordered circumstance.

       This farm is God's as much as yonder town;

       These men and maidens, kine and horses, his;

       For them his laws must be incarnated

       In act and fact, and so their world redeemed."

      Though thus he spoke at times, he spake not oft;

       Ruled chief by action: what he said, he did.

       No grief was suffered there of man or beast

       More than was need; no creature fled in fear;

       All slaying was with generous suddenness,

       Like God's benignant lightning. "For," he said,

       "God makes the beasts, and loves them dearly well—

       Better than any parent loves his child,

       It may be," would he say; for still the may be Was sacred with him no less than the is— "In such humility he lived and wrought— Hence are they sacred. Sprung from God as we, They are our brethren in a lower kind, And in their face we see the human look." If any said: "Men look like animals; Each has his type set in the lower kind;" His answer was: "The animals are like men; Each has his true type set in the higher kind, Though even there only rough-hewn as yet. The hell of cruelty will be the ghosts Of the sad beasts: their crowding heads will come, And with encircling, slow, pain-patient eyes, Stare the ill man to madness."

      When he spoke,

       His word behind it had the force of deeds

       Unborn within him, ready to be born;

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