Atma - A Romance

O that Decay were always beautiful!

How soft the exit of the dying day,

The dying season too, its disarray

Is gold and scarlet, hues of gay misrule,

So it in festive cheer may pass away;

Fading is excellent in earth or air,

With it no budding April may compare,

Nor fragrant June with long love-laden hours;

Sweet is decadence in the quiet bowers

Where summer songs and mirth are fallen asleep,

And sweet the woe when fading violets weep.

O that among things dearer in their wane

Our fallen faiths might numbered be, that so

Religions cherished in their hour of woe

Might linger round the god-deserted fane,

And worshippers be loath to leave and pray

That old-time power return, until there may

Issue a virtue, and the faith revive

And holiness be there, and all the sphere

Be filled with happy altars where shall thrive

The mystic plants of faith and hope to bear

Immortal fruitage of sweet charity;

For I believe that every piety,

And every thirst for truth is gift divine,

The gifts of God are not to me unclean

Though strangely honoured at an unknown shrine.

In temples of the past my spirit fain

For old-time strength and vigour would implore

As in a ruined abbey, fairer for

"The unimaginable touch of time"

We long for the sincerity of yore.

But this is not man's mood, in his regime

Sweet "calm decay" becomes mischance unmeet,

And dying creeds sink to extinction,

Hooted, and scorned, and sepultured in hate,

Denied their rosary of good deeds and boon

Of reverence and holy unction--

First in the list of crimes man writes defeat.

These purest dreams of this our low estate,

White-robed vestals, fond and vain designs,

I lay a wreath at your forgotten shrines.

Nearly four hundred years ago, Nanuk, a man of a gentle spirit, lived

in the Punjaub, and taught that God is a spirit. He enunciated the

solemn truth that no soul shall find God until it be first found of Him.

This is true religion. The soul that apprehends it readjusts its

affairs, looks unto God, and quietly waits for Him. The existence of an

Omnipresent Holiness was alike the beginning and the burden of his

theology, and in the light of that truth all the earth became holy to

him. His followers abjured idolatry and sought to know only the

invisible things of the spirit. He did not seek to establish a church;

the truths which he knew, in their essence discountenance a visible

semblance of divine authority, and Nanuk simply spoke them to him who

would hear,--emperor or beggar,--until in 1540 he went into that

spiritual world, which even here had been for him the real one.