CUERVO - Biblioteca Nacional de Colombia

GOLD HAIR: ' A LEGEND OF PORNIC 553
Louis-d'or, some six times five,
And duly double, every piece.
Now do you see? With the priest to shrive,
"VUh parents preventing her soul's release
By kisses that kept alive,-
21
22
With heaven's gold gates about to ope,
With friends' praise, gold-like, lingering still,
An instinct had bidden the girl's hand grope
For gold, the true sort-" Gold in heaven, I hope;
" But I keep earth's if God willi "
23
Enough! The priest took the grave's grim yield:
The parents, they eyed that price of sin
As if thirty pieces lay revealed
On the place to bury strangers in,
The hideous Potter's Field.
24
But the priest bethought him: '" Milk that'8" spilt •
"-You know the adage I \Vatch and pray I
" Saints tumble to earth with so slight a tilt I
" It would build a new altar; that, we may I "
And the altar therewith was built.
25
Why I deliver this horrible verse?
As the text of a sermon, which now I preach:
Evil or good may be belter or worse
In the human heart, but the mixture of each
Is a marvel and a curse.
26
1'he candid incline to surmise of late
F That the Christian faith may be false, I find:
Or our Essays-and-Reviews' debate
Begins to tell on the public mind,
And Colenso's words have weight:
©Biblioteca Nacional de Colombia