_1868-1875_ After these last-mentioned poems there is a gap of Silence which may be accounted for in his own words from a letter to R. W. D. Oct. 5, '78: 'What (verses) I had written I burnt before I became a Jesuit (i.e. 1868) and re- solved to write no more, as not belonging to my profession, unless it were by the wish of my superiors; so for seven years I wrote nothing but two or three little presentation pieces which occasion called for. But when in the winter of '75 the Deutschland was wrecked in the mouth of the Thames and five Franciscan nuns, exiles from Germany by the Falck Laws, aboard of her were drowned I was affected by the account and happening to say so to my rector he said that he wished some one would write a poem on the subject. On this hint I set to work and, though my hand was out at first, produced one. I had long had haunting my ear the echo of a new rhythm which now I realised on paper. ... I do not say the idea is altogether new . . . but no one has professedly used it and made it the principle throughout, that I know of. ... However I had to mark the stresses . . . and a great many more oddnesses could not but dismay an editor's eye, so that when I offered it to our magazine _The Month_ . . . they dared not print it.' Of the _two or three presentation pieces_ here mentioned one is certainly the Marian verses 'Rosa mystica', published in the 'The Irish Monthly', May '98, and again in Orby Shipley's 'Carmina Mariana', 2nd series, p. 183: the autograph exists.