A Ruined Chapel

A few stones piled together long ago, And fallen again to ruin, have a charm To hallow all the world. The sweetest sounds Are those most near akin to silences, Such as sea whispers rippling at the prow When the loud engine ceases, muffled bells, Or wandering waves of dying harmony In echoing minsters; and the sweetest notes Of Life are those that reach us from afar,-- Those wafted whispers of humanity And Love and Death, that none can ever hear Amid the mighty voices of the world. This is a little spot of neutral ground Beside the pilgrim road, between the world We know of and the world of which we dream. The summer wind that blows outside and bends The flowers that grow upon the chancel wall Sounds far away; the sunbeams falling here Look other than the common light that floods The meadowlands beyond, and overhead The roof of noonday sky is all its own. The story written now upon these walls Is not of scenes in long forgotten hours: Another meaning and another life Which keeps that past within it, as a tree Hides vanished sunlight, has outlived the old: These ruins hold our hearts, not theirs who built. For though erewhile I fell into a dream Of summer on a morning long ago, Saw knightly men and noble ladies cross The sward of green and climb the winding stair And enter at the doorway one by one; Though of their fellowship a while I seemed, Knelt there at matins, watched the sunlight fall Through the dim traceries, and stain the floor With rose and gold where now the grass is green,-- I looked for something which I could not find, There was a want of something I had known, An emptiness at heart, as though all life Had dwindled from its high significance. And soon the sound of the Gregorian Grew ghostly in my ears; the simpler faith My soul accepted in that former world Was troubled, and once more the chapel walls Were ruined, and the infinite blue sky Became a roof above the empty nave. But lo! the wind, which was the same soft wind That roamed about the chapel walls of old, Had gathered from the ages a new voice And breathed the soul of an unfathomed life; The skies were deeper; in the wayside flowers The beauty dreaming at the heart of things Seemed nearer than before; and in my heart Beat the strong pulses of the larger hope, The grander sorrows, the sublimer wrongs, The nobler freedom and the truer love, Which the great world has won upon its way And learned from century to century.

Nay! from our world we cannot long escape,-- Its voices are around me, even here Within the ruined cloisters of the past; But here to pilgrim wayfarers they sound No longer clamorous and harsh, but met By dreams of the eternal and unknown They make a whispered music in our ears,-- Even as sea-tides flowing up the stream Meet the strong rapids breaking among rocks, And lull their tumult to a rippled song.