Those five men, used to death in many forms, Yet in the presence of such death were awed. The four in silence took the sleeper up, Motionless, with the couch whereon he lay, And bore him, as to honored burial, Into the court beneath the starlit sky, And set him down before the chiliarch. Like one of those gray monuments in stone, Oft seen where church or minster of old days, In secret vault or holy chapel dim, Gathers and wards its venerated dead-- Marmoreal image of some man, supine, Deep sunken, in marmoreal down, to sleep, Safe folded in marmoreal robes from cold, The meek, pathetic face upturned to heaven, And thither-pointing hands forever laid Together on the breast, as thus to pray For the shriven spirit thence to judgment fled-- So, stretched upon his couch amid the court, White with his age, yet purer white with death, An unrebuking, unrebukable Reminder of the nothingness of time, Unheeding who beheld or what was spoke, Silent, and bringing silence touched with awe, There in marmoreal calm Gamaliel lay. The simple presence of the living man, In native majesty august with age, Would have subdued who saw to reverence; But the ennoblement and mystery Of death, now added, wrought a mightier awe, And almost breathless made the hush wherein The chiliarch for the moment from the spell Of Shimei's woven words was quite set free, Seeing things true by his simplicity. Breaking that hush, while never once his gaze Unfixing from the features of the dead, "Thou shouldst have told me this," said Lysias To the centurion, gently chiding him. But the centurion understood aright That his superior's words were less as blame Than as atonement meant for fault his own In that his late too peremptory air-- This the subaltern knew, and answered not. Shimei, alone not capable of awe, Coolly had used the interval of pause, To take the altered situation in, And to his own advantage fit his part. Two points of promise to his profit he Saw, and at once to seize them shaped his course: First, to release himself from duress there, And, further, still to sow the chiliarch's mind With seed of foul suspicion against Paul. "Gamaliel mute," said he to Lysias, "Might, peradventure, if but understood, Even better witness to thy purpose prove Than should he waken from his swoon to speak."