Page:The Californian volume 1 issue 1.djvu/36

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THE MIDNIGHT MASS.

Of the mission church San Carlos,
 Builded by Carmelo’s Bay,
There remains an ivied ruin
 That is crumbling fast away.
In its tower the owls find shelter,
 In its sanctuary grow
Rankest weeds above the earth-mounds,
 And the dead find rest below.

Still, by peasants at Carmelo,
 Tales are told and songs are sung
Of good Junipero Serra,
 In the sweet Castilian tongue:
How each year the padre rises
 From his grave the mass to say—
In the midnight, mid the ruins—
 On the eve of Carlos’ day.

And they tell when, aged and feeble,
 Feeling that his end was nigh,
To the mission of San Carlos
 Junipero came to die;
And he lay upon a litter
 That Franciscan friars bore,
And he bade them rest a moment
 At the cloister’s open door.

Then he gazed upon the landscape
 That in beauty lay unrolled,
And he blessed the land as Francis
 Blessed Asisi’s town of old;
And he spoke: “A hundred masses
 I will say, if still life’s guest,
That the blessing I have given
 On the land may ever rest.”

Ere a mass he celebrated
 Junipero Serra died,
And they laid him in the chancel,
 On the altar’s gospel side.
But each year the padre rises
 From his grave the mass to say—
In the midnight, mid the ruins—
 On the eve of Carlos’ day.

Then the sad souls, long years buried,
 From their lowly graves arise,
And, as if doom’s trump had sounded,
 Each assumes his mortal guise.
And they come from San Juan’s Mission,
 From St. Francis by the bay,
From the Mission San Diego,
 And the Mission San José.