Page:Dreams and Images.djvu/309

And river-songs of students wafted far
Across Mondego's Hills of Loneliness
And Meditation where Coimbra slept.
Thus triumphed Frei Egidio. But high
In the Collegio de Jesus the blow
Was red on every cheek; the Rector rose
In the community and said: "Padre
Francisco, not in fifty years have we
In our Coimbra known such sore defeat;
Tell me, I pray, had you no thought to save
Your honor and the honor of our schools—
You, boast of Rome and Salamanca's halls.—
You, to whom all the dialectic arts
Have been as play—could you not parry, feint,
Or bait Egidio until some chance
Or newer turn might save your argument?"
Suarez bowed and answered: "Better far
That we be humbled than a great man fall
To utter shame and ruin! Had I told
Egidio there that in denying thus
My proposition he was challenging
A solemn canon, word for word, prescribed
At Constance by the Universal Church—
Fetch me the Book of Councils—he was lost."
Scarce was the secret spoken, ere it stole
In rumor through the novice-court, and thence
Below to Santa Cruz,—stole, like a cloud,
Black, ominous, across the starlit dome
Above the black mosteiro, where the moon
Revelled amid the sculptured lattices,—
The marble ropes and palms memorial
Of old Da Gama and his caravels,—
Upon the rose-paths and the trickling pools