love, undying love;
Asking me, at this last, to tell her true,
If we should meet again.
Her
trust in me
Had shaken her faith in what my judges held;
And, as I felt her fingers clutch my hand,
Like a child drowning, “Tell me the truth,”
she said,
“Before I lose the light of your dear face”—
It seemed so strange that dying she could see me
While I had lost her,—“tell me, before
I go.”
“Believe in Love,” was all my soul could
breathe.
I heard no answer. Only I felt her hand
Clasp mine and hold it tighter. Then she died,
And left me to my darkness. Could I guess
At unseen glories, in this deeper night,
Make new discoveries of profounder realms,
Within the soul? O, could I find Him there,
Rise to Him through His harmonies of law
And make His will my own!
This
much, at least,
I know already, that—in some strange way—
His law implies His love; for, failing that
All grows discordant, and the primal Power
Ignobler than His children.
So
I trust
One day to find her, waiting for me still,
When all things are made new.
I
raise this torch
Of knowledge. It is one with my right hand,
And the dark sap that keeps it burning flows
Out of my heart; and yet, for all my faith,
It shows me only darkness.
Was
I wrong?
Did I forget the subtler truth of Rome
And, in my pride, obscure the world’s one light?
Did I subordinate to this moving earth
Our swiftlier-moving God?
O,
my Celeste,
Once, once at least, you knew far more than I;
And she is dead, Castelli, she is dead.
VI
(Viviani, many years later, writes to a friend
in England)
I was his last disciple, as you say
I went to him, at seventeen years of age,
And offered him my hands and eyes to use,
When, voicing the true mind and heart of Rome,
Father Castelli, his most faithful friend,
Wrote, for my master, that compassionate plea; The noblest eye that Nature ever made
Is darkened; one so exquisitely dowered,
So delicate in power that it beheld
More than all other eyes in ages gone
And opened the eyes of all that are to come.
But, out of England, even then, there shone
The first ethereal promise of light
That crowns my master dead. Well I recall
That day of days. There was no faintest breath
Among his garden cypress-trees. They dreamed
Dark, on a sky too beautiful for tears,
And the first star was trembling overhead,
When, quietly as a messenger from heaven,
Moving unseen, through his own purer realm,
Amongst the shadows of our mortal world,
A young man, with a strange light on his face
