O to have heard the unearthly symphonies,
Which o’er the starlight peace of Syrian skies
Came floating like a dream, that blessed night
When angel songs were heard by sinful men,
Hymning Messiah’s advent! O to have watched
That night with those poor shepherds, whom, when first
The glory of the Lord shed sudden day—
Day without dawn, starting from midnight, day
Brighter than morning, on those lonely hills,
Strange fear surprised—fear lost in wondering joy,
When from the angelic multitude swelled forth
The many-voiced consonance of praise—
Glory in the highest to God, and upon earth
Peace: towards men good-will. But once before
In such glad strains of joyous fellowship,
The silent earth was greeted by the heavens,
When at its first foundation they looked down
From their bright orbs, those heavenly ministries,
Hailing the new-born world with bursts of joy.

Not long the vision tarried: died away
The wondrous music on the charmed ear
Of those few peasants. Morn returning found
No footstep on her solitary hills
Of angel visitant—all closed the scene
Of that bless’d pageantry to mortal gaze.
Far other sounds than voices jubilant,
Bethlehem, thy streets sent forth, when the fierce king,
Searching his infant rival, foully slew
Thy innocent babes, and Rachel from her tomb
Groaned for her offspring. Not the less, e’en then,
Angels unseen thy hallow’d precincts watched,
And from the assassin’s arm bore tenderly
Upward each ransomed spirit—for of such
The heavenly kingdom. These but died for Him
Who died for all—most honored in their death,
And bless’d. Thus angels joy when mortals weep.

City of David! Thou art desecrate:
And fall’n Jerusalem sits captive now
In dust and darkness. Every holy one
Has long forsaken the polluted land.
Where stood the Cross, the avenger’s ensign waved:
The Roman came, and thy proud temple fell.
The Pagan brought his idols: these displaced,
The mumming priests usurped the christened fane,
With stores of relics, crosses, holy wares,
And venal pardons: till the Saracen
Came in his might, with zeal iconoclast,
And swept away the unhallowed trumpery.
Now-for the honour of the Prince of Peace.

Europe pours forth her motley Christian hordes,
Frenzied with demon zeal, to plant anew
The red-cross banner on the guilty soil
Again the nameless horrors of the siege
Were acted o’er. The conqueror blushed to take
His golden crown, yet not refused the name,
King of Jerusalem. Brief the boast profane.
Again the crescent triumphed. Palestine
Shook back into the sea the leaguered hosts
Of armed apostles, churchmen militant.
Then domes and minarets, with convent towers,
Again commingling rose. Then pilgrims came
Crouching to Turkish lords, and rival sects
Bargained and quarreled for the sepulcher.
Ineffable disgrace! Loathsome abuse
Of names and things most holy! Trodden down
By all in turn, Pagan, and Frank, and Tartar—
So runs the dread anathema, trodden down
Beneath the oppressor: darkness shrouding thee
From every blessed influence of heaven;
Thus hast thou lain for ages, iron-bound
As with a curse. Thus art thou doomed to lie:
Yet not for ever.

Mightiest Lord! how long—
How long, ere prophecy’s dark veil withdrawn,
Shall shew consummated thy wondrous schemes
Of deepest wisdom? Ere, the times fulfill’d,
Jerusalem shall rise, and break her yoke
Of bondage, shaking off her loathed weeds,
And call her scatter’d sons from every clime
To be again a nation? When the crescent
Shall wane, and fade, and vanish: and the troops
Of demon shadows, as their altar fires
Grow pale, shall shuddering flee the golden dawn?

O England! O my country! high and holy
Is thy prerogative: the foremost thou
To lead thy sons forth to the help of Heaven
Against the mighty: holy this crusade,
And waged with holier weapons. Thou secure
Hast risen, like the ark, upon the waves
That swept away the empires. Europe views,
With hope-sick heart, upon thy towering cliffs,
The sunshine resting which to her hath set.
Thee grateful Afric worships, hailing thee
Redeemer of her sons. Thy dreaded power
Poor crouching India owns. When shall she learn
To bless thy name? Thou, in the darken’d East,
Hast risen in blood-red lustre. But e’en now,
As higher thou art seen, purging thyself
From that portentous hue, thy purer light
Begins to shed a more benignant ray.
O England! high thy office! Thou art named
Chosen Evangelist of nations! Send,
O send thy Careys and thy Martyns forth,
Thy living Bibles to the pagan world:
And sound through every realm that trump of God
Which bursts the bands of moral death, and bids
The dry bones take the shape of man, and live.

There was a nation-whisper not its name—
Lords of the realm through which old Ganges rolls
Her guilty stream, land populous with gods,
Olympus of the East: those Christian lords,
Great Juggernaut’s copartners, shared the gains
Of his lewd triumphs, winking at the cheat.
Yea, and at Doorga feasts, the Christian fair
Did graceful homage to the mis-shaped gods,
And pledged the cup of demons. Then we heard,
To veil their shame, of Hindoo innocence—
Meek, simple, virtuous, mild idolaters,
They needed not to learn the Christians’ faith.
Witness the dire suttee, the corse-strewn plain,
Where vultures track the abominable car
Of blood-stain’d lewdness. Bear thou witness too,
River of hell, whose deadly baptism stains
E’en to the soul its victim. Witness ye
Dark sanctuaries, whence shrieks, with laugh obscene
Commingling, speak the worship and the god.
O righteous sword of Mahomed, which gave
The shaven crowns of those infernal priests
To their own goddess, a meet sacrifice—
Fresh beads for Kali’s necklace. Not with sword
Or spear of earthly temper, sainted WARD,
Didst thou, with thy heroic compeers, take
The field, and patiently sit down before
The thrice-entrenched Pandemonium
Of central Ind. Slowly, by sap and mine,
The painful siege proceeds: and many an arm
Must fail, and many a martyr wreath be won,
Until at length the powers of hell shall yield:
And He whose right it is, shall enter in
To reign. Lift up your heads, ye fortress gates!
Ye long-closed barriers of the East, give way!

Land of the Sun, once thy fond idol! Land
Of rose-gardens, where aye the bulbul sings
His most voluptuous song! Thou mother-land
And cradle of the nations! Land of Cyrus!
(Shall e’er a second Cyrus spring from thee?)
Thy palaces have heard a heavenly voice:
A prophet’s feet have trod thy burning soil:
A man of God has left his name with thee.
Thy sage Mollahs, say, have they yet resolv’d
The Christian’s knotty interrogatives?
Go, send for aid to Mecca. Ha! the Arab!
The Wahabite is there! The Caliphate,
Shrunk to the shadow of a name, survives
But in thy Othman rival, who e’en now
Sees Egypt lost, and quails before the Greek.
Rouse thee! shake off the trammels of a creed
Forged to enslave thee. From thy Soofish dreams
Awake to manlier life: and, if thou canst,
Call up thy ancient Magi from their rest,
To lead thee to His rising, who returns
To gladden thee, with healing in his beams—
The SUN whom thou mayst worship. Thy Euphrates
Shall flee his ancient channel, to prepare
A passage for the monarchs of the East.
And thou, Celestial Empire! teeming hive
Of millions! vast impenetrable realm!
The hour is writ in heaven, thy yellow sons
Shall bow at the holy name, and woman there
Relent into the mother. Human loves
And softest charities shall in the train
Of heavenly faith attend. Thy wondrous wall
Is scaled, thy mystic tongue decipher’d now.

Where, in the furthest deserts of the deep,
The coral-worm its architecture vast
Uprears, and new-made islands have their birth,
The Paphian Venus, driven from the West,
In Polynesian groves long undisturb’d
Her shameful rites and orgies foul maintain’d.
The wandering voyager at Taheite found
Another Daphne. On his startled ear,
What unaccustom’d sounds come from those shores,
Charming the lone Pacific? Not the shouts
Of war, nor maddening songs of Bacchanals:
But, from the rude Morai, the full-toned psalm
Of Christian praise. A moral miracle!
Taheite now enjoys the gladdening smile
Of sabbaths. Savage dialects, unheard
At Babel, or at Jewish Pentecost,
Now first articulate divinest sounds,
And swell the universal Amen.

Now, nature’s forlornest children, they who haunt
Her icy frontiers, on humanity’s
Extremest verge, leading amphibious life
’Mid polar glooms—e’en they on Greenland’s coast,
And horrid Labrador, have learn’d the sound
Of heavenly tidings. Self-denying men
Alike the scorching line and freezing pole
Have dared, to bear the message of their God
To all the scatter’d fragments of our race.
True soldiers of the Cross! well worthy ye
To join the martyr choir, who even now
Await in bliss their amaranthine crowns.

In milder latitudes the red man roves,
Where vast Missouri gathers in his course
A thousand streams. Noblest of savages,
In war not quite a demon, and in peace
Nought less than man, the Arab of the West—
In him, yet unextinct, a faint remain
Of Nature’s primal creed, like a sick lamp
Struggling with noxious darkness, strangely gleams.
He nor to Brahma, Budh, nor Jupiter,
Falls down: but, with sublimer faith than erst
Peopled Olympus with vile deities,
Feels the Invisible, invokes his name—
Giver of Life! and calls his Maker good.
When shall these scatter’d flocks be gather’d home
From the recesses of the wilderness,
At the Good Shepherd’s voice? When, one fold,
Couch with the lamb, the lion? Runs not so
The promise of the oracle? Oh, then
The white man shall forgive the Indian’s hue,
And the Great Spirit, looking down, behold
His children form one peaceful family.

It spreads! It spreads! the tidings of relief
To suffering Nature—In those guilty isles,
Where men grow rich with crime, distilling sweets
From human veins, and marketing in blood—
The slave, amid his toils, catches the sound,
And deems his yoke press lighter: hears how Christ
Died e’en for him, and feels himself a man.
Thou Moloch wealth! what sable hecatombs
Of human victims on thine altars groan!
What marvel then if riches grow in hell?

But brighter days on western Afric dawn:
The long-lost seed, with tears and patience sown,
At length has pierced the parch’d and hungry soil:
And the Sierra smiles a Christian land.
Not long in enigmatic mystery
Shall Niger roll his stream, nor Nilus keep
The secret of his source. Those central glooms,
Dark ’mid the glare of fiery noon, where basks
The serpent, and the sovereign lion roams,
Barbaric realms, to which, from Atlas top,
Th’ arch-foe might point exultant, and repeat
His impious boast, Mine are they all! for there
Evil is throned and worshipp’d—even there
Shall penetrate the voice that demons flee.
Press’d in on every side, Idolatry
Shall see her fetish spells o’ermaster’d—see
Her bestial symbols chased back to their dens,
Till, in his very citadel, the Power
Of Darkness to the meek Redeemer yield.

O Star! the most august of all that clasp
The star-girt heav’n, which erst in eastern skies
Didst herald, like the light of prophecy,
The Sun of Righteousness, the harbinger
Of more than natural day: whether thou track
The circuit of the universe, or thrid,
As with a golden clew, the labyrinth
Of suns and systems, still from age to age
Auguring to distant spheres some glorious doom;
Sure thou thy blessed circle hast well nigh
Described, and in the majesty of light,
Bending on thy return, wilt soon announce
His second advent. Yes, even now thy beams
Suffuse the twilight of the nations. Light
Wakes in the region where gross darkness veil’d
The people. They who in death’s shadow sat,
Shall hail that glorious rising; for the shade
Prophetic shrinks before the dawning ray
That cast it: forms of earth that interposed,
Shall vanish, scatter’d like the dusky clouds
Before the exultant morn: and central day
All shadowless, even to the poles shall reign.

Volume of God! thou art that eastern Star
Which leads to Christ. Soon shall thy circuit reach
Round earth’s circumference, in every tongue
Revealing to all nations, what the heavens
But shadow forth, the glory of the Lord.

And are there those, the wisdom of this world,
Who, in base fear and blind astronomy,
With astrolabe or quadrant watch thy path,
Suspicious of thine aspect, save when seen
In certain fair conjunctions, and in nodes
Ideal; who would dare restrict thy light
To time and rule? O foul astrology!
Roll on: free, boundless be thy beauteous course!
Roll on, and turn those angry clouds to light!

Vain, vain the despot’s frown, the bigot’s rage!
The gates of knowledge, that for ages slept
Upon their massive hinges, while a few,
By stealth or fee, through the low portal crept,
Where jealous Power was sentineled—those gates
At length have yielded, and the joyous poor
Crowd eager through the wondrous avenue.
Oh, throw them wider still: the infant race
Shall learn to lisp Hosanna on their way.

Who would not be a Christian? Who but now
Would share the Christian’s triumph and his hope?
His triumph is begun. ’Tis his to hail,
Amid the chaos of a world convulsed,
A new creation rising. ’Mid the gloom
Which wraps the low concerns of states and kings
He marks the morning star, sees the far East
Blush with the purple dawn: he hears a trump,
Louder than all the clarions and the clang
Of horrid war, swelling, and swelling still,
In lengthening notes, its all-awakening call—
The trump of Jubilee. Are there not signs,
Thunders, and voices in the troubled air?
Do ye not see, upon the mountain tops,
Beacon to beacon answering? Who can tell
But all the harsh and dissonant sounds which long
Have been—are still—disquieting the earth,
Are but the tuning of the varying parts
For the grand chorus which shall usher in
The hastening triumph of the Prince of Peace?
Yes; His shall be the kingdoms. He shall come,
Ye scoffers at his tarrying. Hear ye not
E’en now the thunder of his wheels? Awake,
Thou slumbering world! E’en now the symphonies
Of that blest song are floating through the air,
Peace, peace on earth, and glory be to God.

Josiah Conder
The Star in the East, and Other Poems, 1824