Alone! I am left alone once more—
     (Save for the garment's extreme fold
     Abandoned still to bless my hold)
Alone, beside the entrance-door
Of a sort of temple,-perhaps a college,
—Like nothing I ever saw before
At home in England, to my knowledge.
The tall old quaint irregular town!
     It may be… though which, I can't affirm… any
     Of the famous middle-age towns of Germany:
And this flight of stairs where I sit down,
Is it Halle, Weimar, Cassel, Frankfort
Or Gottingen, I have to thank for't?
It may be Gottingen,—most likely.
Through the open door I catch obliquely
Glimpses of a lecture-hall;
     And not a bad assembly neither,
Ranged decent and symmetrical
     On benches, waiting what's to see there:
Which, holding still by the vesture's hem,
I also resolve to see with them,
Cautious this time how I suffer to slip
The chance of joining in fellowship
With any that call themselves his friends;
     As these folk do, I have a notion.
     But hist—a buzzing and emotion!
All settle themselves, the while ascends
By the creaking rail to the lecture-desk,
     Step by step, deliberate
     Because of his cranium's over-freight,
Three parts sublime to one grotesque,
If I have proved an accurate guesser,
The hawk-nosed high-cheek-boned Professor.
I felt at once as if there ran
A shoot of love from my heart to the man—
That sallow virgin-minded studious
     Martyr to mild enthusiasm,
As he uttered a kind of cough-preludious
     That woke my sympathetic spasm,
(Beside some spitting that made me sorry)
And stood, surveying his auditory
With a wan pure look, well-nigh celestial,—
     Those blue eyes had survived so much!
     While, under the foot they could not smutch,
Lay all the fleshly and the bestial.
Over he bowed, and arranged his notes,
Till the auditory's clearing of throats
Was done with, died into a silence;
     And, when each glance was upward sent,
     Each bearded mouth composed intent,
And a pin might be heard drop half a mile hence,—
He pushed back higher his spectacles,
Let the eyes stream out like lamps from cells,
And giving his head of hair—a hake
     Of undressed tow, for colour and quantity—
One rapid and impatient shake,
     (As our own Young England adjusts a jaunty tie
When about to impart, on mature digestion,
Some thrilling view of the surplice-question)
—The Professor's grave voice, sweet though hoarse,
Broke into his Christmas-Eve discourse.

XV

And he began it by observing
     How reason dictated that men
Should rectify the natural swerving,
     By a reversion, now and then,
To the well-heads of knowledge, few
And far away, whence rolling grew
The life-stream wide whereat we drink,
Commingled, as we needs must think,
With waters alien to the source;
To do which, aimed this eve's discourse;
Since, where could be a fitter time
For tracing backward to its prime
This Christianity, this lake,
This reservoir, whereat we slake,
From one or other bank, our thirst?
So, he proposed inquiring first
Into the various sources whence
     This Myth of Christ is derivable;
Demanding from the evidence,
     (Since plainly no such life was livable)
How these phenomena should class?
Whether 'twere best opine Christ was,
Or never was at all, or whether
He was and was not, both together—
It matters little for the name,
So the idea be left the same.
Only, for practical purpose' sake,
'Twas obviously as well to take
The popular story,—understanding
     How the ineptitude of the time,
And the penman's prejudice, expanding
     Fact into fable fit for the clime,
Had, by slow and sure degrees, translated it
     Into this myth, this Individuum,—
Which, when reason had strained and abated it
Of foreign matter, left, for residuum,
A Man!—a right true man, however,
Whose work was worthy a man's endeavour:
Work, that gave warrant almost sufficient
     To his disciples, for rather believing
He was just omnipotent and omniscient,
     As it gives to us, for as frankly receiving
His word, their tradition,—which, though it meant
Something entirely different
From all that those who only heard it,
In their simplicity thought and averred it,
Had yet a meaning quite as respectable:
For, among other doctrines delectable,
Was he not surely the first to insist on
     The natural sovereignty of our race?—
     Here the lecturer came to a pausing-place.
And while his cough, like a drouthy piston,
Tried to dislodge the husk that grew to him,
I seized the occasion of bidding adieu to him,
The vesture still within my hand.

XVI

I could interpret its command.
This time he would not bid me enter
The exhausted air-bell of the Critic.
Truth's atmosphere may grow mephitic
When Papist struggles with Dissenter,
Impregnating its pristine clarity,
—One, by his daily fare's vulgarity,
     Its gust of broken meat and garlic;
—One, by his soul's too-much presuming
To turn the frankincense's fuming
     And vapours of the candle starlike
Into the cloud her wings she buoys on.
     Each, that thus sets the pure air seething,
     May poison it for healthy breathing—
But the Critic leaves no air to poison;
Pumps out with ruthless ingenuity
Atom by atom, and leaves you—vacuity.
Thus much of Christ does he reject?
And what retain? His intellect?
What is it I must reverence duly?
Poor intellect for worship, truly,
Which tells me simply what was told
     (If mere morality, bereft
     Of the God in Christ, be all that's left)
Elsewhere by voices manifold;
With this advantage, that the stater
     Made nowise the important stumble
     Of adding, he, the sage and humble,
Was also one with the Creator.
You urge Christ's followers' simplicity:
     But how does shifting blame, evade it?
Have wisdom's words no more felicity?
     The stumbling-block, his speech—who laid it?
How comes it that for one found able
To sift the truth of it from fable,
Millions believe it to the letter?
Christ's goodness, then—does that fare better?
Strange goodness, which upon the score
     Of being goodness, the mere due
Of man to fellow-man, much more
     To God,—should take another view
Of its possessor's privilege,
And bid him rule his race! You pledge
Your fealty to such rule? What, all—
From heavenly John and Attic Paul,
And that brave weather-battered Peter,
Whose stout faith only stood completer
For buffets, sinning to be pardoned,
As, more his hands hauled nets, they hardened,—
All, down to you, the man of men,
Professing here at Gottingen,
Compose Christ's flock! They, you and I,
Are sheep of a good man! And why?
The goodness,—how did he acquire it?
Was it self-gained, did God inspire it?
Choose which; then tell me, on what ground
Should its possessor dare propound
His claim to rise o'er us an inch?
     Were goodness all some man's invention,
     Who arbitrarily made mention
What we should follow, and whence flinch,—
What qualities might take the style
     Of right and wrong,—and had such guessing
     Met with as general acquiescing
As graced the alphabet erewhile,
When A got leave an Ox to be,
No Camel (quoth the Jews) like G⁴,—
For thus inventing thing and title
Worship were that man's fit requital.
But if the common conscience must
Be ultimately judge, adjust
Its apt name to each quality
Already known,—I would decree
Worship for such mere demonstration
     And simple work of nomenclature,
     Only the day I praised, not nature,
But Harvey, for the circulation.
I would praise such a Christ, with pride
And joy, that he, as none beside,
Had taught us how to keep the mind
God gave him, as God gave his kind,
Freer than they from fleshly taint:
I would call such a Christ our Saint,
As I declare our Poet, him
Whose insight makes all others dim:
A thousand poets pried at life,
And only one amid the strife
Rose to be Shakespeare: each shall take
His crown, I'd say, for the world's sake—
Though some objected—"Had we seen
"The heart and head of each, what screen
"Was broken there to give them light,
"While in ourselves it shuts the sight,
"We should no more admire, perchance,
"That these found truth out at a glance,
"Than marvel how the bat discerns
"Some pitch-dark cavern's fifty turns,
"Led by a finer tact, a gift
"He boasts, which other birds must shift
"Without, and grope as best they can."
No, freely I would praise the man,—
Nor one whit more, if he contended
That gift of his, from God descended.
Ah friend, what gift of man's does not?
No nearer something, by a jot,
Rise an infinity of nothings
     Than one: take Euclid for your teacher:
Distinguish kinds: do crownings, clothings,
     Make that creator which was creature?
Multiply gifts upon man's head,
And what, when all's done, shall be said
But—the more gifted he, I ween!
     That one's made Christ, this other, Pilate,
And this might be all that has been,—
     So what is there to frown or smile at?
What is left for us, save, in growth
Of soul, to rise up, far past both,
From the gift looking to the giver,
And from the cistern to the river,
And from the finite to infinity,
And from man's dust to God's divinity?