Page:The poems of Richard Watson Gilder, Gilder, 1908.djvu/435

The place was a city in a wide, unhappy land;
Even in that empire which drifts to-day like a great ship toward a black and unknown coast;
While men, with blanched faces, cry out: "Unless the tempest abates quickly, behold the mightiest wreck on all the shores of time!"
And the time of the drama was our own time; and the coming and the going; and the people themselves were of our own day and generation;
The people, with strange beards, and look of the immemorial Orient; like those men and women who, alien and melancholy, plod the New-World streets;
Like those who, in slow and pitiful procession, on a fixed day of mourning, with dirges and wailings, poured innumerous into the city's open places;
And, as the play went on, at times the very speech of the actors, in hot debate, crackled and sputtered like the fuse of a Russian bomb.
And there an old man, the preacher of a hunted race and a despised religion, all alone called to his people to follow him, and their God, the God of Israel.
Passionately he proclaimed the faith of the fathers and the saving word and protecting arm of the Almighty;
He, the voice and the prophet of the Lord High God, called aloud to them who strayed:—
"Come ye back to your God, and to His Everlasting Word.
"Ye young men who have forgotten Him, the Unforgetting, and ye old men mumbling your prayers; ye cowards! leaving the holy shrine unprotected";
And the young men answered and called the old man the name of them who are dead and have passed away;
And the old men, unheeding, swayed to and fro, mumbling their ancient psalms and ineffectual supplications.
Then, while the noise of the beastly rabble swelled