The next night The Lord stood in theophany by Paul, And said: "Be of good cheer; as thou of me Hast witnessed in Jerusalem, so must Thou also yet witness in Rome." And Paul Was of good cheer in glad obedience, And slept a sleep so leavened with happy dream. But night-long lonely vigil Shimei kept, Stung from repose to study of revenge. At dawn, his hatch of hell, quick by the heat Of brooding hatred in that patient breast, Was ready to come forth and stalk abroad. 'Death to apostate Saul!' his public word, 'Death to that hated man!' was Shimei's thought. Thought not so much, as law to him of thought, Which formed and fixed the habit of the mind; His thought was simply, 'How to get Paul slain,' His feeling was a hatred bent to slay; Now, bent to slay; once, but to torture bent. This, partly because hatred is like love Herein, that it, by only being, grows-- Until, at last, usurping quite the man, It overgrows him like a polypus; And partly because plot and act of hate Sting to find hateful more the hated one, Hate against whom is so self-justified. But Shimei's hate of Paul, antipathy At first, deep, primal, irreversible, A doom born in him when himself was born, And thence--from that time forth when in the hall Of council Saul disdained and flouted him-- A conscious, fostered, festering grudge become-- This hate, now grown by but persisting long, And much more grown through long self-exercise, Had yet, beyond the private argument, Its public ground of warrant for itself. Mocker though Shimei was, not less was he, To his full measure of sincerity, Sincerely in his mockery a Jew; His nation's scorn of Jesus was his scorn, And who loved Jesus for that cause he hated. Buoyed and supported by the spirit rife, The common conscience, of his countrymen, Nay, conscious of approval and acclaim Without him, as of genius blithe within Him, prompt to indirection and deceit, Shimei, far more than clear and confident, Felt also something of the fowler's joy In cunning, as for Paul his toils he spread. All this; yet all was not enough to fire The hate that burned sevenfold in Shimei's breast. With all, there was an alien element Infused, Tartarean fuelling from beneath, A breath of hell to blow his hate so hot. No merely human hatred crucified The Lord of glory and the Lord of love! No merely human hatred followed Paul On his angelic errand round the world, With scourge, with ambush, with imprisonment, And mouth agape to drink that holy blood!