HAD we but lived in those mysterious days,
When, a veiled God 'mid unregenerate men,
Christ calmly walked our devious mortal ways,
Crowned with grief's bitter rue in place of bays,--
Ah! had we lived but then:
Lived to drink in with every wondering breath,
A consciousness beyond all human ken,
That clothed in flesh, as long conceived in faith,
We viewed the Lord of life and Lord of death,--
All! had we lived but then:
To mark all Nature quickening where He trod,
Whether thro' golden field, or shadowy glen,
While a strange sweetness breathed from leaf and clod,
As thro' man's image they divined their God;--
Ah! had we lived but then!
Wild birds above him passed on reverent wing,
And savage sovereigns of dark dune or den,
Out stole to meet Him with mild murmuring,
Soft as a nested dove's song in the spring--
Ah! had we lived but then!
At "peace: be still!" the storm-wind ceased to roar,
And the lulled waters seemed to sigh "amen!"
Fear--the soul's mightier tempest--surged no more,
But a strange stillness fell on sea and shore;--
Ah! had we lived but then!
With our own ears to hear the words He said,
(Their music pondering o'er and o'er again!)
The wine of wisdom quaff from wisdom's head,
View the lame leap, and watch the uprising dead:
Ah! had we lived but then!
The world grows old. Faith, once a mountain stream,
Now crawls polluted down a poisonous fen;
The Bethlehem star hath lost its morning beam;
Thy face, dear Christ, wanes like a wasted dream,--
How changed, how cold since then.
Ah! 'tis our sordid lives whose promise fails:
These languorous lives of low, lost, aimless men;
Thro' mockery's mist our Lord's pure aureole pales,
Yet tenderer than the Syrian nightingales,
His voice sounds now as then.
