Ovid in Pontus, puling for his Rome Of men invirile and disnatured dames That poison sucked from the Attic bloom decayed, Shrank with a shudder from the blue-eyed race Whose force rough-handed should renew the world, And from the dregs of Romulus express Such wine as Dante poured, or he who blew Roland’s vain blast, or sang the Campeador In verse that clanks like armor in the charge,-- Homeric juice, if brimmed in Odin’s horn. And they could build, if not the columned fane That from the height gleamed seaward many-hued, Something more friendly with their ruder skies: The gray spire, molten now in driving mist, Now lulled with the incommunicable blue; The carvings touched to meanings new with snow, Or commented with fleeting grace of shade; The statues, motley as man’s memory, Partial as that, so mixed of true and false, History and legend meeting with a kiss Across this bound-mark where their realms confine; The painted windows, frecking gloom with glow, Dusking the sunshine which they seem to cheer, Meet symbol of the senses and the soul; And the whole pile, grim with the Northman’s thought Of life and death, and doom, life’s equal fee,-- These were before me: and I gazed abashed, Child of an age that lectures, not creates, Plastering our swallow-nests on the awful Past, And twittering round the work of larger men, As we had builded what we but deface. Far up the great bells wallowed in delight, Tossing their clangors o’er the heedless town, To call the worshippers who never came, Or women mostly, in loath twos and threes. I entered, reverent of whatever shrine Guards piety and solace for my kind Or gives the soul a moment’s truce of God, And shared decorous in the ancient rite My sterner fathers held idolatrous. The service over, I was tranced in thought: Solemn the deepening vaults, and most to me, Fresh from the fragile realm of deal and paint, Or brick mock-pious with a marble front; Solemn the lift of high-embowered roof, The clustered stems that spread in boughs disleaved, Through which the organ blew a dream of storm,-- Though not more potent to sublime with awe And shut the heart up in tranquillity, Than aisles to me familiar that o’erarch The conscious silences of brooding woods, Centurial shadows, cloisters of the elk: Yet here was sense of undefined regret, Irreparable loss, uncertain what: Was all this grandeur but anachronism,-- A shell divorced of its informing life, Where the priest housed him like a hermit-crab, An alien to that faith of elder days That gathered round it this fair shape of stone? Is old Religion but a spectre now, Haunting the solitude of darkened minds, Mocked out of memory by the sceptic day? Is there no corner safe from peeping Doubt,