Wherever souls of men have worshiped, there
   Is God: where old cathedrals climb the sky,
Or shining hillsides lift their heads on high,
   Or silent woodland spaces challenge prayer,
Or inner chambers shut the heart from care;
   Where broken temples of old faiths now lie
Forgotten in the sun, or swallows cry
   At dusk about some crossroads chapel, bare
Alike of bells and beauty; where saints walked
   Of old with speaking presences unseen,
Or dreaming boys with quiet voices talked
   In pairs last night on some still college green;
Where Moses’ Sinai flamed, or Jesus trod
   The upward way apart: there, here, is God!

Now from the world the light of God is gone,
And men in darkness move and are afraid,
Some blaming heaven for the evil done,
And some each other for the part they played;
And all their woes on Him are strictly laid,
For being absent from these earthly ills,
Who set the trees to be the noonday shade,
And placed the stars in beauty on the hills.
Turn not away, and cry that all is lost;
It is not so, the world is in His hands
As once it was when Egypt’s mighty host
Rode to the sea and vanished in the sands.
For still the heart, by love and pity wrung,
Finds the same God as when the world was young.

Upon our fullness smiles the dawning day,
   Our superdreadnaughts dominate the main,
   The whirring of the infant aeroplane
Threatens with chains the breezes at their play;
Our towers rise; we prosper while we may,
   Grown drunken with the wine of loss and gain,
   Nor fearful lest we haply rear in vain
A brazen idol upon feet of clay.

The ages are not mocked; the years that fleet
   Are harsh or gentle as it seemeth well,
The victors in Thermopylae’s defeat
   Are weaker than the Spartan few who fell;
And still above the turmoil of the street
   Smiles the Madonna of a Raphael.

Sad is our youth, for it is ever going,
Crumbling away beneath our very feet;
Sad is our life, for onward it is flowing
In current unperceived, because so fleet;
Sad are our hopes for they were sweet in sowing,
But tares, self-sown, have overtopp’d the wheat;
Sad are our joys, for they were sweet in blowing;
And still, O still, their dying breath is sweet:
And sweet is youth, although it hath bereft us
Of that which made our childhood sweeter still;
And sweet our life’s decline, for it hath left us
A nearer Good to cure an older Ill:
And sweet are all things, when we hope to prize them
Not for their sake, but His who grants them or denies them.

I like the man who faces what he must,
   With step triumphant and a heart of cheer;
   Who fights the daily battle without fear;
Sees his hopes fail, yet keeps unfaltering trust
That God is God,—that somehow, true and just
   His plans work out for mortals; not a tear
   Is shed when fortune, which the world holds dear,
Falls from his grasp—better, with love, a crust
   Than living in dishonor: envies not,
Nor loses faith in man; but does his best,
   Nor ever murmurs at his humbler lot;
But, with a smile and words of hope, gives zest
   To every toiler: he alone is great
   Who by a life heroic conquers fate.

Oxford Book of English Mystical Verse p. 400
ed. D. H. S. Nicholson and A. H. E. Lee