Read "The Toiling of Felix" by Henry van Dyke online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
A Legend on a New Saying of Jesus / In the rubbish heaps of the ancient city of Oxyrhynchus, near the River Nile, a party of English explorers, in the winter of 1897, discovered a fragment of a papyrus book, written in the second or third century, and hitherto unknown. This single leaf contained parts of seven short sentences of Christ, each introduced by the words, "Jesus says. " It is to the fifth of these Sayings of Jesus that the following poem refers.
Prelude / Hear a word that Jesus spake / Nineteen hundred years ago, / Where the crimson lilies blow / Round the blue Tiberian lake: / There the bread of life He brake, / Through the fields of harvest walking / With His lowly comrades, talking / Of the secret thoughts that feed / Weary souls in time of need.