But where the lowliest church its cross uplifts Above the city’s sordidness and sin; Where all unheeded human wreckage drifts And drowns amid the foulness and the din-- There, too, anear the very gates of hell, O Saviour, dost Thou dwell! Oh, meet it is that round Thy altar thrones, Thy highest priests should ministering throng With silken robe, with gold and precious stones, With solemn chant and loud triumphant song: What beauty that the world could give would be Too beautiful for Thee? And yet to those that work with grimy hands And sweaty brows in ditches and in drains, Thou comest with a love that understands Their labor ill-requitted, and their pains. Who knows so well as Thou what they endure, O Father of the poor? And so, deep-hid in many a city street, Or far where lonely workers break the soil, Are shrines where Thou, the Merciful, dost meet, In love’s embrace, the weary ones that toil. For them Thy hospitable board is spread, With Thee, Thy very Self, their Daily Bread! TO ASK OUR LADY’S PATRONAGE FOR A BOOK ON COLUMBUS: A FRAGMENT BY THOMAS D’ARCY MCGEE Star of the Sea, to whom, age after age, The maiden kneels whose lover sails the sea; Star, that the drowning death-pang can assuage, And shape the soul’s course to eternity; Mother of God, to Egypt’s realm exiled, Mother of God, in Bethlehem’s crib confined, Thee do I ask to aid my anxious mind, And make this book find favour with thy Child. Of one who lived and laboured in thy ray, I would rehearse the striving and success; Through the dense past I ne’er shall find my way, Unless thou helpest, hold Comfortress; A world of doubt and darkness to evade; An ocean all unknown to Christian kind; Another world by nature’s self arrayed, O’er the wide waste of waves, I seek to find. A GENERAL COMMUNION BY ALICE MEYNELL I saw the throng, so deeply separate, Fed at one only board-- The devout people, moved, intent, elate, And the devoted Lord. Oh struck apart! not side from human side, But soul from human soul, As each asunder absorbed the multiplied, The ever unparted whole. I saw this people as a field of flowers, Each grown at such a price The sum of unimaginable powers Did no more than suffice. A thousand single central daisies they, A thousand of the one; For each the entire monopoly of day; For each, the whole of the devoted sun. THE SHEPHERDESS BY ALICE MEYNELL She walks--the lady of my delight-- A shepherdess of sheep. Her flocks are thoughts. She keeps them white; She guards them from the steep; She feeds them on the fragrant height, And folds them in for sleep.