"So welcome I from every source The tokens of that primal Force, Older than heaven itself, yet new As the young heart it reaches to, Beneath whose steady impulse rolls The tidal wave of human souls; Guide, comforter, and inward word, The eternal spirit of the Lord Nor fear I aught that science brings From searching through material things; Content to let its glasses prove, Not by the letter's oldness move, The myriad worlds on worlds that course The spaces of the universe; Since everywhere the Spirit walks The garden of the heart, and talks With man, as under Eden's trees, In all his varied languages. Why mourn above some hopeless flaw In the stone tables of the law, When scripture every day afresh Is traced on tablets of the flesh? By inward sense, by outward signs, God's presence still the heart divines; Through deepest joy of Him we learn, In sorest grief to Him we turn, And reason stoops its pride to share The child-like instinct of a prayer." And then, as is my wont, I told A story of the days of old, Not found in printed books,--in sooth, A fancy, with slight hint of truth, Showing how differing faiths agree In one sweet law of charity. Meanwhile the sky had golden grown, Our faces in its glory shone; But shadows down the valley swept, And gray below the ocean slept, As time and space I wandered o'er To tread the Mogul's marble floor, And see a fairer sunset fall On Jumna's wave and Agra's wall. The good Shah Akbar (peace be his alway!) Came forth from the Divan at close of day Bowed with the burden of his many cares, Worn with the hearing of unnumbered prayers,-- Wild cries for justice, the importunate Appeals of greed and jealousy and hate, And all the strife of sect and creed and rite, Santon and Gouroo waging holy fight For the wise monarch, claiming not to be Allah's avenger, left his people free, With a faint hope, his Book scarce justified, That all the paths of faith, though severed wide, O'er which the feet of prayerful reverence passed, Met at the gate of Paradise at last. He sought an alcove of his cool hareem, Where, far beneath, he heard the Jumna's stream Lapse soft and low along his palace wall, And all about the cool sound of the fall Of fountains, and of water circling free Through marble ducts along the balcony; The voice of women in the distance sweet, And, sweeter still, of one who, at his feet, Soothed his tired ear with songs of a far land Where Tagus shatters on the salt sea-sand The mirror of its cork-grown hills of drouth And vales of vine, at Lisbon's harbor-mouth.