m lisping; infancy to palsied age,
By all the ways to human frailty known,
Enter that vale of shadows, deep and still,
Leaving behind their pomp and power and wealth,
Leaving their rags and wretchedness and want,
And cast-off bodies, dust to dust returned,
By flames consumed or moldering to decay,
While here the real character appeared,
All shows, hypocrisies and shams cast off,
So that a life of gentleness and love
Shines through the face and molds the outer form
To living beauty, blooming not to fade,
While every act of cruelty and crime
Seems like a gangrened ever-widening wound,
Wasting the very substance of the soul,
Marring its beauty, eating out its strength.

And here arrived, the good, in little groups
Together drawn by inward sympathy,
And led by devas, take the upward way
To those sweet fields his opened eyes had seen,
Those ever-widening mansions of delight;
While those poor souls--O sad and fearful sight!--
The very well-springs of the life corrupt,
Shrink from the light and shun the pure and good,
Fly from the devas, who with perfect love
Would gladly soothe their anguish, ease their pain,
Fly on and down that broad and beaten road,
Till in the distance in the darkness lost.
Lost! lost! and must it be forever lost?
The gentle Buddha's all-embracing love
Shrunk from the thought, but rather sought relief
In that most ancient faith by sages taught,
That these poor souls at length may find escape,
The grasping in the gross and greedy swine,
The cunning in the sly and prowling fox,
The cruel in some ravening beast of prey;
While those less hardened, less depraved, may gain
Rebirth in men, degraded, groveling, base.[1]

But here in sadness let us drop the veil,
Hoping that He whose ways are not like ours,
Whose love embraces all His handiwork,
Who in beginnings sees the final end,
May find some way to save these sinful souls
Consistent with His fixed eternal law
That good from good, evil from evil flows.

Here Buddha saw the mystery of life
At last unfolded to its hidden depths.
He saw that selfishness was sorrow's root,
And ignorance its dense and deadly shade;
He saw that selfishness bred lust and hate,
Deformed the features, and defiled the soul
And closed its windows to those waves of love
That flow perennial from Nirvana's Sun.
He saw that groveling lusts and base desires
Like noxi