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_THE WORLD'S BEST POETRY_

_I Home: Friendship
II Love
III Sorrow and Consolation
IV The Higher Life
V Nature
VI Fancy Sentiment
VII Descriptive: Narrative
VIII National Spirit
IX Tragedy: Humor
X Poetical Quotations_




THE WORLD'S BEST POETRY

IN TEN VOLUMES, ILLUSTRATED


Editor-in-Chief

BLISS CARMAN


Associate Editors

John Vance Cheney
Charles G.D. Roberts
Charles F. Richardson
Francis H. Stoddard


Managing Editor

John R. Howard


1904




The World's Best Poetry

Vol. IV


THE HIGHER LIFE

RELIGION AND POETRY
By
WASHINGTON GLADDEN




NOTICE OF COPYRIGHTS.

I.


American poems in this volume within the legal protection of copyright
are used by the courteous permission of the owners,--either the
publishers named in the following list or the authors or their
representatives in the subsequent one,--who reserve all their rights.
So far as practicable, permission has been secured also for poems out
of copyright.


PUBLISHERS OF THE WORLD'S BEST POETRY. 1904.

Messrs. D. APPLETON & CO., New York.--_W.G. Bryant_: "The Future
Life."

The ROBERT CLARKE COMPANY, Cincinnati.--_W.D. Gallagher_: "The
Laborer."

Messrs. T.Y. CROWELL & CO., New York.--_S.K. Bolton_: "Her Creed."

Messrs. E.P. DUTTON & CO., New York.--_Ph. Brooks_: "O Little Town of
Bethlehem;" _E. Sears_: "The Angel's Song."

Messrs. HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO., Boston.--_Alice Cary_: "My Creed;"
_Phoebe Cary_: "Nearer Home;" _J.F. Clarke_: "The Caliph and Satan,"
"Cana;" _R.W. Emerson_: "Brahma," "Good-bye," "The Problem;" _Louise
I. Guiney_: "Tryste Noel;" _J. Hay_: "Religion and Doctrine;" _C.W.
Holmes_: "The Living Temple;" _H.W. Longfellow_: "King Robert of
Sicily," "Ladder of St. Augustine," "Psalm of Life," "Santa Filomena,"
"Sifting of Peter," "Song of the Silent Land," "To-morrow;" _S.
Longfellow_: "Vesper Hymn;" _J.R. Lowell_: "Vision of Sir Launfal;"
_Frances P.L. Mace_: "Only Waiting;" _Caroline A.B. Mason_: "The
Voyage;" _T. Parker_: "The Higher Good," "The Way, the Truth, and
the Life;" _Eliza Scudder_: "The Love of God," "Vesper Hymn;" _E.C.
Stedman_: "The Undiscovered Country;" _Harriet B. Stowe_: "Knocking,
Ever Knocking," "The Other World;" _J. Very_: "Life," "The Spirit
Land;" _J.G. Whittier_: "The Eternal Goodness," "The Meeting," "The
Two Angels," "The Two Rabbis;" _Sarah C. Woolsey_: "When."

The J.B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY, Philadelphia.--_Margaret J. Preston_:
"Myrrh-Bearers."

Messrs. LITTLE, BROWN & CO., Boston.--_J.W. Chadwick_: "The Rise of
Man;" _Emily Dickinson_: "Found Wanting," "Heaven."

The LOTHROP PUBLISHING COMPANY, Boston.--_P.H. Hayne_: "Patience."

Messrs. L.C. PAGE & CO., Boston.--_C.G.D. Roberts_: "The Aim,"
"Ascription."

Messrs. SCOTT, FORESMAN & CO., Chicago.--_C.P. Taylor_: "The Old
Village Choir."

Messrs. HERBERT S. STONE & CO., Chicago.--_G. Santayana_: "Faith."

The YOUNG CHURCHMAN COMPANY, Milwaukee.--_A.C. Coxe_: "The Chimes of
England."




II.


American poems in this volume by the authors whose names are given
below are the copyrighted property of the authors, or of their
representatives named in parenthesis, and may not be reprinted without
their permission, which for the present work has been courteously
granted.

PUBLISHERS OF THE WORLD'S BEST POETRY. 1904.

_A. Coles_ (A. Coles, Jr., M.D.); _J.A. Dix_ (Rev. Morgan Dix, D.D.);
_P.L. Dunbar; W.C. Gannett; W. Gladden; S.P. McL. Pratt; O. Huckel;
Ray Palmer_ (Dr. Charles R. Palmer); _A.D.F. Randolph_ (Arthur D.F.
Randolph).




RELIGION AND POETRY

BY WASHINGTON GLADDEN.


The time is not long past when the copulative in that title might have
suggested to some minds an antithesis,--as acid and alkali, or heat
and cold. That religion could have affiliation with anything
so worldly as poetry would have seemed to some pious people a
questionable proposition. There were the Psalms, in the Old Testament,
to be sure; and the minister had been heard to allude to them as
poetry: might not that indicate some heretical taint in him, caught,
perchance, from the "German neologists" whose influence we were
beginning to dread? It did not seem quite orthodox to describe the
Psalms as poems; and when, a little later, some one ventured to speak
of the Book of Job as a _dramatic_ poem, there were many who were
simply horrified. Indeed, it was difficult for many good people
to consider the Biblical writings as in any sense literature; they
belonged in a category by themselves, and the application to them
of the terms by which we describe similar writings in other books
appeared to many good men and women a kind of profanation. This was
not, of course, the attitude of educated men and women, but something
akin to it affected large numbers of excellent people.

We are well past that period, and the relations of religion and
poetry may now be discussed with no fear of misunderstandings. These
relations are close and vital. Poetry is indebted to religion for its
largest and loftiest inspirations, and religion is indebted to poetry
for its subtlest and most luminous interpretations.

Religion is related to poetry as life is related to art. Religion is
life, the life of God in the soul of man--the response of man's spirit
to the attractions of the divine Spirit. Poetry is an interpretation
of life. Religious poetry endeavors to express, in beautiful
forms, the facts of the religious life. There is poetry that is not
religious; poetry which deals only with that which is purely sensuous,
poetry which does not hint at spiritual facts, or divine relations;
and there is religion which has but little to do with poetry: but the
highest religious thoughts and feelings are greatly served by putting
them into poetic forms; and the greatest poetry is always that which
sets forth the facts of the religious life. "Without love to man and
love to God," says Dr. Strong, "the greatest poetry is impossible.
Mere human love to God is not enough to stir the deepest chords either
in the poet or in his readers. It is the connection of human love with
the divine love that gives it permanence and security."[A]

If, then, religion is the supreme experience of the human spirit, and
that experience finds its most perfect literary expression in poetry,
the present volume ought to contain a precious collection of the best
literature. And any one who wished to give to a friend a volume which
would convey to him the essential elements of religion would probably
be safe to choose this volume rather than any prose treatise upon
theology ever printed. He who reads this book through will get
a clearer and truer idea of what the religious life is than any
philosophical discussion could give him. For this poetry is an attempt
to express life, not to explain it. It offers pictures or reports
rather than analyses of religious experience. It gives utterance
to the real life of religion in the individual soul, and is not a
generalization of religious thoughts and feelings.

The sources from which this collection has been drawn are abundant
and varied. The psalmody and hymnology of the church furnish a vast
preserve, the exploration of which would be a large undertaking. It
must be confessed that the pious people who had in their hands some
of the ancient hymn-books were justified in feeling that religion and
poetry were not closely related, for many of the hymns they were
wont to sing were guiltless of any poetic character. It was too often
evident that the hymn-writer had been more intent on giving metrical
form to proper theological concepts than on giving utterance to his
own religious life. But the feeling has been growing that in hymns, at
any rate, life is more than dogma; and we have now some collections of
hymns that come pretty near being books of poetry. The improvement in
this department of literature within the past twenty-five years has
been marked. There is still, indeed, in many hymnals, and especially
in hymnals for Sunday schools and social meetings, much doggerel; but
large recent contributions of hymns which are true poetry, many of the
best of them from American sources, have made it possible to furnish
our congregations with admirable manuals of praise.

The indebtedness of religion to poetry which is thus expressed in
the hymnology of the church is very large. Probably many of us
are indebted for definite and permanent religious conceptions and
impressions quite as much to felicitous phrases of hymns as to
any words of sermon or catechism. Our most positive convictions of
religious truth are apt to come to us in some line or stanza that
tells the whole story. The rhythm and the rhyme have helped to fix it
and hold it in the memory.

This is true not only of the hymns of the church but of many poems
that are not suitable for singing. English poetry is especially rich
in meditative and devotional elements, and of no period has this
been more true than of the nineteenth century. Cowper, Wordsworth,
Coleridge, the Brownings, Tennyson and Matthew Arnold, on the other
side of the sea, with Bryant, Longfellow, Emerson, Whittier,
Lowell, Holmes, Lanier, Sill and Gilder on this side--these and many
others--have made most precious additions to our store of religious
poetry. The century has been one of great perturbations in religious
thought; the advent of the evolutionary philosophy threatened all the
theological foundations, and there was need of a thorough revision
of the dogmas which were based on a mechanical theology, and of a
reinterpretation of the life of the Spirit. In all this the poets have
given us the strongest help. The great poet cannot be oblivious of
these deepest themes. He need not be a dogmatician, indeed he cannot
be, for his business is insight, not ratiocination; but the problems
which theology is trying to solve must always be before his mind, and
he must have something to say about them, if he hopes to command the
attention of thoughtful men. Yet while we need not depreciate
the service that has been rendered by preachers and professional
theologians who have sought to put the facts of the religious
life into the forms of the new philosophy, we must own our deeper
obligation to the poets, by whose vision the spiritual realities have
been most clearly discerned.

It was Wordsworth, perhaps, who gave us the first great contribution
to the new religious thought by bringing home to us the fact that God
is in his world; revealing himself now as clearly as in any of the
past ages. The truth of the Divine immanence, which is the foundation
of all the more positive religious thinking of to-day, and which
is destined, when once its import has been fully grasped, to
revolutionize our religious life, is made familiar to our thought
in Wordsworth's poetry. To him it was simply an experience; in quite
another sense than that in which it was true of Spinoza, it might have
been said of him that he was a "God-intoxicated man"; and although his
clear English sense permitted no pantheistic merging of the human in
the divine, but kept the individual consciousness clear for choice
and duty, the realization of the presence of God made nature in his
thought supernatural, and life sublime. To him, as Dr. Strong has
said, it was plain that "imagination in man enables him to enter into
the thought of God--the creative element in us is the medium through
which we perceive the meaning of the Creator in his creation. The
world without answers to the world within, because God is the soul of
both."

"Such minds are truly from the Deity,
For they are Powers; and hence the highest bliss
That flesh can know is theirs,--the consciousness
Of whom they are, habitually infused
Through every image and through every thought,
And all affections by communion raised
From earth to heaven, from human to divine."

The mystical faith by which man is united to God can have no clearer
confession. And in the great poem of "Tintern Abbey" this truth
received an expression which has become classical;--it must be counted
one of the greatest words of that continuing revelation by which the
truths of religion are given permanent form:

"For I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue. And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things."

We can hardly imagine that the religious experience of mankind will
ever suffer these words to drop into forgetfulness; and it would seem
that every passing generation must deepen their significance.

The same great testimony to the divine Presence in our lives is borne
by many other witnesses in memorable words. Lowell's voice is clear:

"No man can think, nor in himself perceive,
Sometimes at waking, in the street sometimes,
Or on the hillside, always unforwarned,
A grace of being finer than himself,
That beckons and is gone,--a larger life
Upon his own impinging, with swift glimpse
Of spacious circles, luminous with mind,
To which the ethereal substance of his own
Seems but gross cloud to make that visible,
Touched to a sudden glory round the edge."

If to this central truth of religion,--the reality of the communion of
the human spirit with the divine--the poets have borne such impressive
testimony, not less positively have they asserted many other of the
great things of the spirit. Sometimes they have helped us to believe,
by identifying themselves with us in our struggles with the doubts
that loosen our hold on the great realities. No man of the last
century has done more for Christian belief than Alfred Tennyson,
albeit he has been a confessed doubter. But what he said of Arthur
Hallam is quite as true of himself:

"He fought his doubts, and gathered strength,
He would not make his judgment blind,
He faced the spectres of the mind
And laid them; thus he came at length,

To find a stronger faith his own,
And Power was with him in the night,
Which makes the darkness and the light,
And dwells not in the light alone."

Those words of his, so often quoted, are often sadly misused:

"There lives more faith in honest doubt,
Believe me, than in half the creeds."

When men make these words an excuse for an attitude of habitual
negation and denial, assuming that it is better to doubt everything
than to believe anything, they grossly pervert the poet's meaning. It
is the _faith_ that lives in honest doubt that his heart applauds. He
is thinking of the fact that it is real faith in God which leads men
to doubt the dogmas which misrepresent God. But conscious as he is of
the shadow that lies upon our field of vision, he is always insisting
that it is in the light and not in the shadow that we must walk.
Therefore, although demonstration is impossible, faith is rational. So
do those great words of "The Ancient Sage" admonish us:

"Thou canst not prove that thou art body alone,
Nor canst thou prove that thou art spirit alone,
Nor canst thou prove that thou art both in one.
Thou canst not prove thou art immortal, no,
Nor yet that thou art mortal--nay, my son.
Thou canst not prove that I who speak with thee,
Am not thyself in converse with thyself,
For nothing worthy proving can be proven
Nor yet disproven. Wherefore be thou wise,
Cleave ever to the sunnier side of doubt,
And cling to Faith beyond the forms of Faith!
She reels not in the storm of warring words,
She brightens at the clash of 'Yes' and 'No,'
She sees the best that glimmers through the worst,
She feels the sun is hid but for a night,
She spies the summer through the winter bud,
She tastes the fruit before the blossom falls,
She hears the lark within the songless egg,
She finds the fountain where they wailed 'Mirage!'"

This illustrates Tennyson's mental attitude. If all who plume
themselves upon their doubts would put themselves into this posture of
mind, they would find themselves in possession of a very substantial
faith.

Tennyson has touched with light more than one problem of the soul. The
little stanza beginning

"Flower in the crannied wall"

has shown us how the mysteries of being are shared by the commonest
lives; the short lyric "Wages" condenses into a few lines the
strongest proof of the life to come; and "Crossing the Bar" has borne
many a spirit in peace out to the boundless sea.

Robert Browning's robust faith helps us in a different way. His daring
and triumphant optimism makes us ashamed of doubt. In "Abt Vogler," in
"Rabbi Ben Ezra," in "Pompilia," in "Christmas Eve," we are caught up
and carried onward by an unflinching and overcoming faith. Perhaps the
most convincing arguments for religious reality in Browning's poems
are those of "An Epistle" and of "Cleon," where the cry of the human
soul for the assurance which the Christian faith supplies is given
such a penetrating voice. And there is no reasoning about the
Incarnation, in any theological book that I have ever read, which
seems to me so cogent as that great passage in "Saul," where David
cries:

"Could I wrestle to raise him from sorrow, grow poor to enrich,
To fill up his life, starve my own out. I would--knowing which,
I know that my service is perfect. Oh, speak through me now!
Would I suffer for him that I love? So wouldst thou--so wilt thou!"

But, after all, Browning's great hymns of faith are those in which he
faces the future, like "Prospice," and the prologue of "La Saisiaz,"
and the epilogue of "Asolando,"--triumphant songs, in which one of the
healthiest-minded of human beings showed himself:

"One who never turned his back but marched breast forward,
Never doubted clouds would break,
Never dreamed though right were worsted wrong would triumph,
Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better, sleep to wake!"

It would be a grateful task to make extended record of the service
rendered to religion by the great choir of singers whose names appear
upon the pages of this book. To Elizabeth Barrett Browning our debt is
large, though her note is oftenest plaintive and the faith which she
illustrates is that by which suffering is turned to strength. Our own
New England psalmist, also, has been to great multitudes a revealer
and a comforter; few in any age have seen the central truths of
Christianity more clearly, or felt them more deeply, or uttered them
more convincingly. In such poems as "My Soul and I," "My Psalm," "Our
Master," "The Eternal Goodness," "The Brewing of Soma," and "Andrew
Ryckman's Prayer," Whittier has made the whole religious world his
debtor.

How many more there are--of those whom the world reckons as the
greater bards, and of those whom it assigns to lower places--to whom
we have found ourselves indebted for the clearing of our vision or the
quickening of our pulses, in our studies or our meditations upon the
deepest questions of life! How many there are, whose faces we
never saw, but who by some luminous word, some strain vibrant with
tenderness, some flash of insight, have endeared themselves to us
forever! They are the friends of our spirits, ministers to us of the
holiest things. They have clothed for us the highest truth in forms of
beauty; they have made it winsome and real and dear and memorable. Is
there anything better than this, that one man can do for another?

Washington Gladden

[Footnote A: "The Great Poets and their Theology."]




TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTORY ESSAY:
"RELIGION AND POETRY."
By _Washington Gladden_

POEMS OF THE HIGHER LIFE:
THE DIVINE ELEMENT--(God, Christ, the Holy Spirit)
PRAYER AND ASPIRATION
FAITH: HOPE: LOVE: SERVICE
SABBATH: WORSHIP: CREED
SELECTIONS FROM "PARADISE LOST"
HUMAN EXPERIENCE
DEATH: IMMORTALITY: HEAVEN
SELECTIONS FROM "THE DIVINE COMEDY"

INDEX: AUTHORS AND TITLES




LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

JOHN MILTON
_Photogravure from an engraving_.

THE CHILD JESUS IN THE TEMPLE
_One of Heinrich Hoffmann's wonderful scenes in the life of
Christ: the earnest, wise-faced Boy, and the eager or doubtful
but thoughtful Scribes and Doctors of the Law, are graphically
depicted._

ISAAC WATTS
_From a contemporary engraving_.

THE HOLY NIGHT
"It was the winter wild
While the heaven-born Child
All meanly wrapt in the rude manger lies."

_From photogravure after a painting by Martin Feuerstein._

CHARLES WESLEY
_From a contemporary engraving_.

THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD
"Knocking, knocking, ever knocking?
Who is there?
'Tis a pilgrim, strange and kingly,
Never such was seen before."

_From photo-carbon print after the painting by Holman Hunt_.

SIR GALAHAD
"My strength is as the strength of ten,
Because my heart is pure."

_From photogravure after the painting by George Frederick Watts_.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON
_From a photogravure after life-photograph._

DINA M. MULOCK CRAIK
_From a life-photograph by Elliott and Fry, London._

THE PHARISEE AND THE PUBLICAN
"Two went to pray? O, rather say,
One went to brag, the other to pray;
One nearer to God's altar trod,
The other to the altar's God."

_From engraving by Brend'amour, after a design by Alexander Bida_.

DANTE ALIGHIERI
_After a photograph from the fresco by His friend Giotto, discovered
under the whitewash on a watt of the Bargello palace; now in the Museo
Nazionale, Florence, Italy_.




POEMS OF THE HIGHER LIFE




POEMS OF THE HIGHER LIFE

I.

THE DIVINE ELEMENT.

* * * * *

SONG.

FROM "PIPPA PASSES."


The year's at the spring,
And day's at the morn;
Morning's at seven;
The hill-side's dew-pearled;
The lark's on the wing;
The snail's on the thorn;
God's in His heaven--
All's right with the world.

ROBERT BROWNING.


* * * * *

A PASSAGE IN THE LIFE OF SAINT AUGUSTINE.


Long pored Saint Austin o'er the sacred page,
And doubt and darkness overspread his mind;
On God's mysterious being thought the Sage,
The Triple Person in one Godhead joined.
The more he thought, the harder did he find
To solve the various doubts which fast arose;
And as a ship, caught by imperious wind,
Tosses where chance its shattered body throws,
So tossed his troubled soul, and nowhere found repose.

Heated and feverish, then he closed his tome,
And went to wander by the ocean-side,
Where the cool breeze at evening loved to come,
Murmuring responsive to the murmuring tide;
And as Augustine o'er its margent wide
Strayed, deeply pondering the puzzling theme,
A little child before him he espied:
In earnest labor did the urchin seem,
Working with heart intent close by the sounding stream.

He looked, and saw the child a hole had scooped,
Shallow and narrow in the shining sand,
O'er which at work the laboring infant stooped,
Still pouring water in with busy hand.
The saint addressed the child in accents bland:
"Fair boy," quoth he, "I pray what toil is thine?
Let me its end and purpose understand."
The boy replied: "An easy task is mine,
To sweep into this hole all the wide ocean's brine."

"O foolish boy!" the saint exclaimed, "to hope
That the broad ocean in that hole should lie!"
"O foolish saint!" exclaimed the boy; "thy scope
Is still more hopeless than the toil I ply,
Who think'st to comprehend God's nature high
In the small compass of thine human wit!
Sooner, Augustine, sooner far, shall I
Confine the ocean in this tiny pit,
Than finite minds conceive God's nature infinite!"

ANONYMOUS.


* * * * *

MEDITATIONS OF A HINDU PRINCE.


All the world over, I wonder, in lands that I never have trod,
Are the people eternally seeking for the signs and steps of a God?
Westward across the ocean, and Northward across the snow,
Do they all stand gazing, as ever, and what do the wisest know?

Here, in this mystical India, the deities hover and swarm
Like the wild bees heard in the tree-tops, or the gusts of a gathering storm;
In the air men hear their voices, their feet on the rocks are seen,
Yet we all say, "Whence is the message, and what may the wonders mean?"

A million shrines stand open, and ever the censer swings,
As they bow to a mystic symbol, or the figures of ancient kings;
And the incense rises ever, and rises the endless cry
Of those who are heavy laden, and of cowards loth to die.

For the Destiny drives us together, like deer in a pass of the hills;
Above is the sky and around us the sound of the shot that kills;
Pushed by a power we see not, and struck by a hand unknown,
We pray to the trees for shelter, and press our lips to a stone.

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