Last year the Christian knelt and pray’d —

Not to thy strength — in Nineveh.

Now, thou poor god, within this hall

Where the blank windows blind the wall

From pedestal to pedestal,

The kind of light shall on thee fall

Which London takes the day to be:

While school-foundations in the act

Of holiday, three files compact,

Shall learn to view thee as a fact

Connected with that zealous tract:

“ROME, — Babylon and Nineveh”.

Deemed they of this, those worshippers,

When, in some mythic chain of verse

Which man shall not again rehearse,

The faces of thy ministers

Yearned pale with bitter ecstasy?

Greece, Egypt, Rome, — did any god

Before whose feet men knelt unshod

Deem that in this unblest abode

Another scarce more unknown god

Should house with him, from Nineveh?

Ah! in what quarries lay the stone

From which this pillared pile has grown,

Unto man’s need how long unknown,

Since those thy temples, court and cone,

Rose far in desert history?

Ah! what is here that does not lie

All strange to thine awakened eye?

Ah! what is here can testify

(Save that dumb presence of the sky)

Unto thy day and Nineveh?

Why, of those mummies in the room

Above, there might indeed have come

One out of Egypt to thy home,

An alien. Nay, but were not some

Of these thine own “antiquity”?

And now, — they and their gods and thou

All relics here together, — now

Whose profit? whether bull or cow,

Isis or Ibis, who or how,

Whether of Thebes or Nineveh?

The consecrated metals found,

And ivory tablets, underground,

Winged teraphim and creatures crown’d.

When air and daylight filled the mound,

Fell into dust immediately.

And even as these, the images

Of awe and worship, — even as these, —

So, smitten with the sun’s increase,

Her glory mouldered and did cease

From immemorial Nineveh.

The day her builders made their halt,

Those cities of the lake of salt

Stood firmly ’stablished without fault,

Made proud with pillars of basalt,

With sardonyx and porphyry.

The day that Jonah bore abroad

To Nineveh the voice of God,

A brackish lake lay in his road,

Where erst Pride fixed her sure abode,

As then in royal Nineveh.

The day when he, Pride’s lord and Man’s,

Showed all the kingdoms at a glance

To Him before whose countenance

The years recede, the years advance,

And said, Fall down and worship me: —

’Mid all the pomp beneath that look,

Then stirred there, haply, some rebuke,

Where to the wind the Salt Pools shook,

And in those tracts, of life forsook,

That knew thee not, O Nineveh!

Delicate harlot! On thy throne

Thou with a world beneath thee prone

In state for ages sat’st alone;

And needs were years and lustres flown

Ere strength of man could vanquish thee:

Whom even thy victor foes must bring,

Still royal, among maids that sing

As with doves’ voices, taboring

Upon their breasts, unto the King,—

A kingly conquest, Nineveh!

Here woke my thought. The wind’s slow sway

Had waxed; and like the human play

Of scorn that smiling spreads away,

The sunshine shivered off the day:

The callous wind, it seemed to me,

Swept up the shadow from the ground:

And pale as whom the Fates astound,

The god forlorn stood winged and crown’d:

Within I knew the cry lay bound

Of the dumb soul of Nineveh.

And as I turned, my sense half shut

Still saw the crowds of kerb and rut

Go past as marshalled to the strut

Of ranks in gypsum quaintly cut.

It seemed in one same pageantry

They followed forms which had been erst;

To pass, till on my sight should burst

That future of the best or worst

When some may question which was first,

Of London or of Nineveh.