They started the work of their Lord, sad, silent, and solemnly poor.
These fathers, how little they thought of themselves, and how much of the days
When the children of men would be brought to pray in their temple, and praise!
Ah! full of the radiant, still, heroic old life that has flown,
The merciful monks of Seville toiled on, and died bare and unknown.

The music, the colour, the gleam of their mighty cathedral will be
Hereafter a luminous dream of the heaven I never may see;
To a spirit that suffers and seeks for the calm of a competent creed,
This temple, whose majesty speaks, becomes a religion indeed;
The passionate lights--the intense, the ineffable beauty of sound--
Go straight to the heart through the sense,
as a song would of seraphim crowned.
And lo! by these altars august, the life that is highest we live,
And are filled with the infinite trust
and the peace that the world cannot give.

They have passed, have the elders of time--
they have gone; but the work of their hands,
Pre-eminent, peerless, sublime, like a type of eternity stands!
They are mute, are the fathers who made this church in the century dim;
But the dome with their beauty arrayed remains, a perpetual hymn.
Their names are unknown; but so long as the humble in spirit and pure
Are worshipped in speech and in song, our love for these monks will endure;
And the lesson by sacrifice taught will live in the light of the years
With a reverence not to be bought, and a tenderness deeper than tears.

Rover

No classic warrior tempts my pen
To fill with verse these pages--
No lordly-hearted man of men
My Muse's thought engages.

Let others choose the mighty dead,
And sing their battles over!
My champion, too, has fought and bled--
My theme is one-eyed Rover.

A grave old dog, with tattered ears
Too sore to cock up, reader!--
A four-legged hero, full of years,
But sturdy as a cedar.

Still, age is age; and if my rhyme
Is dashed with words pathetic,
Don't wonder, friend; I've seen the time
When Rove was more athletic.

He lies coiled up before me now,
A comfortable crescent.
His night-black nose and grizzled brow
Fixed in a fashion pleasant.

But ever and anon he lifts
The one good eye I mention,
And tries a thousand doggish shifts
To rivet my attention.

Jus