"Come to us fiery with the saints of God To judge the world and take His power and reign." Then one. "This was the very road we trod That April day, would it could come again; The day they flung the flowers." "Let be," said one, "He was a lovely soul, but what He meant Passes our wit, for none among us, none, Had brains enough to fathom His intent. His mother did not, nor could one of us, But while He spoke I felt I understood." And one, "He knew that it would finish thus. Let His thought be, I know that He was good. There is the orchard see, the very same Where we were sleeping when the soldiers came." So from the cruel cross they buried God; So, in their desolation, as they went They dug him deeper with each step they trod, Their lightless minds distorting what He meant. Lamenting Him, their leader, who had died, They heaped the stones, they rolled the heavy door; They said, "Our glory has been crucified, Unless He rise our glory will be o'er." While in the grave the spirit left the corpse Broken by torture, slowly, line by line, And saw the dawn come on the eastern thorpes, And shook his wings and sang in the divine, Crying "I told the truth, even unto death, Though I was earth and now am only breath." If all be governed by the moving stars, If passing planets bring events to be, Searing the face of Time with bloody scars, Drawing men's souls even as the moon the sea; If as they pass they make a current pass Across man's life and heap it to a tide, We are but pawns, ignobler than the grass Cropped by the beast and crunched and tossed aside. Is all this beauty that does inhabit heaven Trail of a planet's fire? Is all this lust A chymic means by warring stars contriven To bring the violets out of Cæsar's dust? Better be grass, or in some hedge unknown The spilling rose whose beauty is its own. In emptiest furthest heaven where no stars are Perhaps some planet of our master sun Still rolls an unguessed orbit round its star Unthought, unseen, unknown of any one. Roving dead space according to its law Casting our light on burnt-out suns and blind Singing in the frozen void its word of awe One wandering thought in all that idiot mind. And, in some span of many a thousand year, Passing through heaven, its influence may arouse Beauty unguessed in those who habit here, And men may rise with glory on their brows, And feel new life like fire, and see the old Fall from them dead, the bronze's broken mould.