The Organ-Blower

Devoutest of My Sunday friends,     The patient Organ-blower bends;     I see his figure sink and rise,     (Forgive me, Heaven, my wandering eyes!)     A moment lost, the next half seen,     His head above the scanty screen,     Still measuring out his deep salaams     Through quavering hymns and panting psalms.     No priest that prays in gilded stole,     To save a rich man's mortgaged soul;     No sister, fresh from holy vows,     So humbly stoops, so meekly bows;     His large obeisance puts to shame     The proudest genuflecting dame,     Whose Easter bonnet low descends     With all the grace devotion lends.     O brother with the supple spine,     How much we owe those bows of thine     Without thine arm to lend the breeze,     How vain the finger on the keys!     Though all unmatched the player's skill,     Those thousand throats were dumb and still:     Another's art may shape the tone,     The breath that fills it is thine own.     Six days the silent Memnon waits     Behind his temple's folded gates;     But when the seventh day's sunshine falls     Through rainbowed windows on the walls,     He breathes, he sings, he shouts, he fills     The quivering air with rapturous thrills;     The roof resounds, the pillars shake,     And all the slumbering echoes wake!     The Preacher from the Bible-text     With weary words my soul has vexed     (Some stranger, fumbling far astray     To find the lesson for the day);     He tells us truths too plainly true,     And reads the service all askew, -     Why, why the - mischief - can't he look     Beforehand in the service-book?     But thou, with decent mien and face,     Art always ready in thy place;     Thy strenuous blast, whate'er the tune,     As steady as the strong monsoon;     Thy only dread a leathery creak,     Or small residual extra squeak,     To send along the shadowy aisles     A sunlit wave of dimpled smiles.     Not all the preaching, O my friend,     Comes from the church's pulpit end!     Not all that bend the knee and bow     Yield service half so true as thou!     One simple task performed aright,     With slender skill, but all thy might,     Where honest labor does its best,     And leaves the player all the rest.     This many-diapasoned maze,     Through which the breath of being strays,     Whose music makes our earth divine,     Has work for mortal hands like mine.     My duty lies before me. Lo,     The lever there! Take hold and blow     And He whose hand is on the keys     Will play the tune as He shall please.     1812.