Here in the lonely chapel I will wait, Here will I rest, if any rest may be; So fair the day is, and the hour so late, I shall have few to share the blessed calm with me. Calm and soft light, sweet inarticulate calls! One shallow dish of eerie golden fire By molten chains above the altar swinging, Draws my eyes up from the shadowed stalls To the warm chancel-dome; Crag-like the clustered organs loom, Yet from their thunder-threatening choir Flows but a ghostly singing-- Half-human voices reaching home In infinite, tremulous surge and falls. Light on his stops and keys, And pallor on the player’s face, Who, listening rapt, with finger-skill to seize The pattern of a mood’s elusive grace, Captures his spirit in an airy lace Of fading, fading harmonies. Oh, let your coolness soothe My weariness, frail music, where you keep Tryst with the even-fall; Where tone by tone you find a pathway smooth To yonder gleaming cross, or nearer creep Along the bronzèd wall, Where shade by shade thro’ deeps of brown Comes the still twilight down. Wilt thou not rest, my thought? Wouldst thou go back to that pain-breeding room Whence only by strong wrenchings thou wert brought? O weary, weary questionings, Will ye pursue me to the altar rail Where my old faith for sanctuary clings, And back again my heart reluctant hale Yonder, where crushed against the cheerless wall Tiptoe I glimpsed the tier on tier Of faces unserene and startled eyes-- Such eyes as on grim surgeon-work are set, On desperate outmaneuverings of doom? Still must I hear The boding voice with cautious rise and fall Tracking relentless to its lair Each fever-bred progenitor of faith, Each fugitive ancestral fear? Still must I follow, as the wraith Of antique awe toward a wreck-making beach Drives derelict? Nay, rest, rest, my thought, Where long-loved sound and shadow teach Quietness to conscience overwrought.