THE BLACK PREACHER.

A BRETON LEGEND.

  At Carnac in Brittany, close on the bay,
  They show you a church, or rather the gray
  Ribs of a dead one, left there to bleach
  With the wreck lying near on the crest of the beach;
  Roofless and splintered with thunder-stone,
  ’Mid lichen-blurred gravestones all alone,
  ’Tis the kind of ruin strange sights to see
  That may have their teaching for you and me.

  Something like this, then, my guide had to tell,
  Perched on a saint cracked across when he fell. 
  But since I might chance give his meaning a wrench,
  He talking his patois and I English-French,
  I’ll put what he told me, preserving the tone,
  In a rhymed prose that makes it half his, half my own.

  An abbey-church stood here, once on a time,
  Built as a death-bed atonement for crime: 
  ’Twas for somebody’s sins, I know not whose;
  But sinners are plenty, and you can choose. 
  Though a cloister now of the dusk-winged bat,
  ’Twas rich enough once, and the brothers grew fat,
  Looser in girdle and purpler in jowl,
  Singing good rest to the founder’s lost soul. 
  But one day came Northmen, and lithe tongues of fire
  Lapped up the chapter-house, licked off the spire,
  And left all a rubbish-heap, black and dreary,
  Where only the wind sings miserere. 
  Of what the monks came by no legend runs,
  At least they were lucky in not being nuns.

  No priest has kneeled since at the altar’s foot,
  Whose crannies are searched by the nightshade’s root,
  Nor sound of service is ever heard,
  Except from throat of the unclean bird,
  Hooting to unassoiled shapes as they pass
  In midnights unholy his witches’ mass,
  Or shouting “Ho! ho!” from the belfry high
  As the Devil’s sabbath-train whirls by;
  But once a year, on the eve of All-Souls,
  Through these arches dishallowed the organ rolls,
  Fingers long fleshless the bell-ropes work,
  The chimes peal muffled with sea-mists mirk,
  The skeleton windows are traced anew
  On the baleful flicker of corpse-lights blue,
  And the ghosts must come, so the legend saith,
  To a preaching of Reverend Doctor Death.

  Abbots, monks, barons, and ladies fair
  Hear the dull summons and gather there: 
  No rustle of silk now, no clink of mail,
  Nor ever a one greets his church-mate pale;
  No knight whispers love in the chatelaine’s ear,
  His next-door neighbor this five hundred year;
  No monk has a sleek benedicite
  For the great lord shadowy now as he;
  Nor needeth any to hold his breath,
  Lest he lose the least word of Doctor Death.