the pillaring hours
And pulled my life upon me,"

and,

"The linked fantasies, in whose blossomy twist
I swung the earth a trinket at my wrist."

All that is gone, and he is face to face with the grim demands of God.

There follows a protest against those demands. To him it appears that
they are the call for sheer sacrifice and death. He had sought
self-realisation in every lovely field that lay open to the earth. But
now the trumpeter is sounding, "from the hid battlements of Eternity,"
the last word and final meaning of human life. His is a dread figure,
"enwound with glooming robes purpureal, cypress-crowned." His demand is
for death and sacrifice, calling the reluctant children of the green
earth out from this pleasance to face the awful will of God.

It is the Cross that he has seen in nature and beyond it. Long ago it
was set up in England, that same Cross, when Cynewulf sang his _Christ_.
On Judgment Day he saw it set on high, streaming with blood and flame
together, amber and crimson, illuminating the Day of Doom. Thompson has
found it, not on Calvary only, but everywhere in nature, and by _tour de
force_ he blends the sunset with Golgotha and finds that the lips of
Nature proclaim the Gospel of Jesus Christ. In the garden of the
monastery there stands a cross, and the sun is setting over it.

"Thy straight
Long beam lies steady on the Cross. Ah me!
What secret would thy radiant finger show?
Of thy bright mastership is this the key?
Is _this_ thy secret then, and is it woe?

Thou dost image, thou dost follow
That king-maker of Creation
Who ere Hellas hailed Apollo
Gave thee, angel-god, thy station;

Thou art of Him a type memorial.
Like Him thou hangst in dreadful pomp of blood
Upon thy Western rood;
And His stained brow did veil like thine to night.

Now, with wan ray that other sun of Song
Sets in the bleakening waters of my soul.
One step, and lo! the Cross stands gaunt and long
'Twixt me and yet bright skies, a presaged dole.

Even so, O Cross! thine is the victory,
Thy roots are fast within our fairest fields;
Brightness may emanate in Heaven from Thee:
Here Thy dread symbol only shadow yields."

This is ever the first appearance of the Highest when men see it. And,
to the far-seeing eyes