d boom!
Moriah's marvellous fane is leaning low;
With cries of woe her rafters rend in twain;
For our Imperial One is brought to naught.
Yea, even where most cunningly she was wrought,
The fire has cleft its way each coign into,
For wood and stone searching her bosom through.
Astonishingly high she took the blue,
Yet weeping molten dross shall meet the ground--
A sight for grief profound to gaze across.
Flame follows flame, each like a giant worm,
To feast and batten on her beauteous form.
Through gold and silver doors they sinuous swarm
And crop the carven flowers with gust enorme;
Till all is emptiness.
Then with hellish shout
The embruted Gentiles in exultant rout
Into her Holy of Holies profanely press!

One streaming flood of steaming blood--
Shudders her sacred pavement!

LOVE DIVINE

(From "Emanuel." After Gwilym Hiraethog, 1802-1880.)

When the angel trumpet sounded.
Through the unbounded ether blown,
Star on star danced on untiring,
Choiring past the Great White Throne;
Then as, every globe outglancing,
Earth's entrancing orb went by,
Love Divine in blushing pleasure
Steeped the azure of the sky.

Wisdom, when she saw Earth singled
From the bright commingled band,
Whispered Mercy: "That green wonder
Yonder is thy promised land!"
Mercy looked and loved Earth straightway,
At Heaven's gateway smiling set.
Ah! that glance of tender yearning
She is turning earthward yet.

BEHIND THE VEIL

(After Islwyn, 1832-1878, the Welsh Wordsworth)

What say ye, can we charge a master soul
With error, when beyond all life's experience
Between the cradle and the grave, it rises,
Whispering of things unutterable, breaks its bond
With outward sense and sinks into itself,
As fades a star in space? Hath not that soul
A history in itself, a refluent tide
Of mystery murmuring out of unplumbed deeps,
On distant inaccessible strands, whereon
Memory lies dead amid the monstrous wreckage
Of jarring worlds? Are yonder stars above
As spiritually, magnificently bright
As Poesy feigns? May not some slumbering sense,
A memory dim of those diviner days,
When all the Heavens were yet aglow with God,
Transfuse them through and through with glimmering grace
And glory? Still the Stars within us shine,
And Poesy is but a recollection
Of Something greater