One looked to see them flame, as lightning-struck, Those cities of people that rejected Him, Bethsaida, Chorazin, and that proud Capernaum, when on them His woes He launched, Hurtling them from His mouth like thunderbolts. "To ears fresh wounded from such frightful woes, How balmy and how healing were these words Cadenced ineffably from those same lips: 'Come unto Me, all ye that labor, ye That heavy laden are, come ye, and I Will give you rest. My yoke upon you take And learn of Me, for meek and lowly in heart Am I, and ye rest to your souls shall find.' "With invitation or with warning He Or with most sweet instruction heavenly wise, Our soul, our senses, feasting thus, the while He wrought too with that easy omnipotence His manifold mighty miracles of grace, We walked long time with Jesus; how long time I know not, for the days and weeks they came And went unnoted and the seasons changed. But at last He, how shall I say it? became Almost a different being from Himself. He spake of a mysterious hour, 'Mine hour,' He called it with some solemn meaning, what, We could not or we did not then divine, Couched in the word; that hour was now drawn near. It seemed to frown upon Him imminent And cast a somber shadow on His face. He dreaded it, and yet He welcomed it, Hasting the more to meet it as it neared. "We were afraid of Him, with a new fear, He looked so awful in His loneliness. For He no longer with us walked; He walked Before us, hasting to Jerusalem. How steadfastly His face was thither set! He as if saw the features of His hour Coming out clearer and clearer, and always there! He now would oftentimes His chosen twelve Take from the rest apart to tell them how The Son of Man, oft so He named Himself, Should be delivered up to the chief priests And to the scribes, and be by them condemned To death; and how the Gentiles in their turn Should mock Him and should scourge Him and should spit Upon Him and should kill Him; then how He Should from the dead the third day rise again. But they those sayings understood not then, So simple and easy afterward, though strange. Like a refrain recurring in a song, Some sad refrain that lingers in the ear Persistent through whatever else is sung, So did these doubtful boding prophecies Again and yet again, not understood, At intervals return amid the strain Of other teaching opulent and sweet That flowed and flowed in changes without end, Unending, from His lips. And all the while Were miracles and signs, as by the way And little reckoned, dropping from His hands Like full-ripe fruit from an unconscious tree!