Thoughts on Sunday Morning, When Prevented by a Snow Storm From Going to Church
Hark! the church-going bell! But through the air
The feathery missiles of old Winter hurled,
Offend the brow of mild-approaching Spring;
She shuts her soft blue eyes, and turns away.
Sweet is the time passed in the house of prayer,
When, met with many of this fire-fraught clay,
We, on this day,—the tribe of ills forgot,
Wherewith, ungentle, we afflict each other,—
Assemble in the temple of our God,
And use our breath to worship Him who gave it.
What though no gorgeous relics of old days,
The gifts of humbled kings and suppliant warriors,
Deck the fair shrine, or cluster round the pillars;
No stately windows decked with various hues,
No blazon of dead saints repel the sun;
Though no cloud-courting dome or sculptured frieze
Excite the fancy and allure the taste,
No fragrant censor steep the sense in luxury,
No lofty chant swell on the vanquished soul.
Ours is the faith of Reason; to the earth
We leave the senses who interpret her;
The heaven-born only should commune with Heaven,
The immaterial with the infinite.
Calmly we wait in solemn expectation.
He rises in the desk—that earnest man;
No priestly terrors flashing from his eye,
No mitre towers above the throne of thought,
No pomp and circumstance wait on his breath.
He speaks—we hear; and man to man we judge.
Has he the spell to touch the founts of feeling,
To kindle in the mind a pure ambition,
Or soothe the aching heart with heavenly balm,
To guide the timid and refresh the weary,
Appall the wicked and abash the proud?
He is the man of God. Our hearts confess him.
He needs no homage paid in servile forms,
No worldly state, to give him dignity:
To his own heart the blessing will return,
And all his days blossom with love divine.
There is a blessing in the Sabbath woods,
There is a holiness in the blue skies;
The summer-murmurs to those calm blue skies
Preach ceaselessly. The universe is love—
And this disjointed fragment of a world
Must, by its spirit, man, be harmonized,
Tuned to concordance with the spheral strain,
Till thought be like those skies, deeds like those breezes,
As clear, as bright, as pure, as musical,
And all things have one text of truth and beauty.
There is a blessing in a day like this,
When sky and earth are talking busily;
The clouds give back the riches they received,
And for their graceful shapes return they fulness;
While in the inmost shrine, the life of life,
The soul within the soul, the consciousness
Whom I can only name, counting her wealth,
Still makes it more, still fills the golden bowl
Which never shall be broken, strengthens still
The silver cord which binds the whole to Heaven.
O that such hours must pass away! yet oft
Such will recur, and memories of this
Come to enhance their sweetness. And again
I say, great is the blessing of that hour
When the soul, turning from without, begins
To register her treasures, the bright thoughts,
The lovely hopes, the ethereal desires,
Which she has garnered in past Sabbath hours.
Within her halls the preacher’s voice still sounds,
Though he be dead or distant far. The band
Of friends who with us listened to his word,
With throngs around of linked associations,
Are there; the little stream, long left behind,
Is murmuring still; the woods as musical;
The skies how blue, the whole how eloquent
With “life of life and life’s most secret joy”!