the altar and all its
ceremonies, must vanish from between the sinner and his God. When the
priest forgets his mediation of a servant, his duty of a door-keeper to
the temple of truth, and takes upon him the office of an intercessor, he
stands between man and God, and is a Satan, an adversary. Artistically
considered, the poem could hardly be improved.

Here is another containing a similar lesson.

_I am not worthy that thou shouldst come under my roof._

Thy God was making haste into thy roof;
Thy humble faith and fear keeps him aloof.
He'll be thy guest: because he may not be,
He'll come--into thy house? No; into thee.

The following is a world-wide intercession for them that know not what
they do. Of those that reject the truth, who can be said ever to have
_truly_ seen it? A man must be good to see truth. It is a thought
suggested by our Lord's words, not an irreverent opposition to the truth
of _them_.

_But now they have seen and hated._

_Seen?_ and yet _hated thee?_ They did not see--
They saw thee not, that saw and hated thee!
No, no; they saw thee not, O Life! O Love!
Who saw aught in thee that their hate could move.

We must not be too ready to quarrel with every oddity: an oddity will
sometimes just give the start to an outbreak of song. The strangeness of
the following hymn rises almost into grandeur.

EASTER DAY.

Rise, heir of fresh eternity,
From thy virgin-tomb;
Rise, mighty man of wonders, and thy world with thee;
Thy tomb, the universal East--
Nature's new womb;
Thy tomb--fair Immortality's perfumed nest.

Of all the glories[139] make noon gay
This is the morn;
This rock buds forth the fountain of the streams of day;
In joy's white annals lives this hour,
When life was born,
No cloud-scowl on his radiant lids, no tempest-lower.

Life, by this light's nativity,
All creatures have;
Death only by this day's just doom is forced to die.
Nor is death forced; for, may he lie
Throned in thy grave,
Death will on this condition be content to die.

When we come, in the writings of one who has revealed masterdom, upon any
passage that seems commonplace, or any figure that suggests nothing true,
the part of wisdom is to brood over that point; for the probability is
that the barrenness lies in us, two factors being necessary for the
result of sight--the thing to be seen and the eye to see it