| WERE it not for that singular smell | |
| That seems to the genus priest to belong, | |
| Where snuff and incense are mingled well | |
| With a natural odor quite as strong: | |
| Were it not for those little ways | 5 |
| Of clasped and deprecating hands; | |
| And raising and lowering his eyes always | |
| As if he only waited commands— | |
| |
| Little there is in him of the priest, | |
| With only the slightest touch of cant, | 10 |
| With a simple, guileless heart in his breast, | |
| And a mind as honest as ignorant. | |
| Half a child and half a man, | |
| Ripe in the Fathers and green in thought, | |
| In his little circle of half a span | 15 |
| He thinks that he thinks what he was taught. | |
| |
| His duty he does to the scruple's weight; | |
| Recites his prayers, and mumbles his mass, | |
| And without his litanies, early and late, | |
| Never permits a day to pass. | 20 |
| Look at him there in the garden-plots | |
| Repeating his office, as to and fro | |
| He paces around the orange-pots, | |
| Looking about while his quick lips go. | |
| |
| His simple pleasure in simple things, | 25 |
| His willing spirit that never tires, | |
| His trivial jokes and wonderings, | |
| His peaceful temper that never fires, | |
| His joy over trifles of every day, | |
| The feeble poems he loves to quote,— | 30 |
| Are just like a child, with his heart in his play, | |
| While his duty and lessons are drill and rote. | |
| |
| What life means he does not think; | |
| Reason and thought he has been told | |
| Only lead to a perilous brink, | 35 |
| Away from Christ and the Church's fold. | |
| Therefore he humbly and blindly obeys; | |
| Does what he 's ordered and reasons not; | |
| Performs his prayers, and thinks he prays, | |
| And asks not how, or why, or what. | 40 |
| |
| Happy in this, why stir his mind, | |
| Stagnant in thought although it be? | |
| Leave him alone—he is gentle and kind, | |
| And blest with a child's simplicity. | |
| Thinking would only give him unrest, | 45 |
| Struggle, and toil, and inward strain; | |
| His heart is right in his thoughtless breast, | |
| Why should one wish to torment his brain? | |
| |
| Yet out of pastime one evil day | |
| I unfolded to him Pythagoras' plan— | 50 |
| How step by step the soul made its way | |
| From sea-anemone up to man,— | |
| How onward to higher grades it went, | |
| If its human life had been fair and pure; | |
| Or if not, to the lower scale was sent, | 55 |
| Again to ascend to man, and endure. | |
| |
| And so the soul had gleams of the past, | |
| And felt in itself dim sympathies | |
| With nature, that ended in us at last, | |
| And each of whose forms within us lies. | 60 |
| He smiled at first, and then by degrees | |
| Grew silent and sad, and confessed 't was true, | |
| But with spirit so pained and ill at ease, | |
| That my foolish work I strove to undo. | |
| |
| This thinking 's the spawn of Satan, I said, | 65 |
| That tempts us into the sea of doubt; | |
| And Satan has endless snares to spread, | |
| If once with our reason we venture out. | |
| Here you are in your Church like a port, | |
| Anchored secure, where never a gale | 70 |
| Can break your moorings,—nor even in sport | |
| Should you weigh your anchor or spread your sail. | |
| |
| So I got him back to his anchor again, | |
| And there in the stagnant harbor he lies; | |
| And he looks upon me with a sense of pain | 75 |
| As a wild freebooter; for to his eyes | |
| Free thinking, free sailing seems to be, | |
| A sort of a godless, dangerous thing, | |
| Like a pirate's life on a stormy sea— | |
| And sure at the last damnation to bring. | 80 |
