He sat beside the lowly door: His _homeless_ eyes appeared to trace In evening skies remembered lore, And shadows of his Father's face. One only knew him. She alone Who nightly to his cradle crept. And _lying like the moonbeam prone Worshipped her Maker as he slept_. Whoever can read that without admiring it, is a clod: whoever can read it without having his whole idea of Christ's childhood intensely vivified and expanded, must be a St. John or an angel. How beautiful, and, when we look at it, how bold is the epithet "homeless!" How exactly it embodies the longing of his spirit out of its human prison toward the freedom of the heavens! Yet how daringly true to imagine the omnipresent Deity homeless! Again, how acutely the last scene characterizes the tender timidity of Mary's mother-love, and how natural and intensely human the conscious, sweet self-deception which brought her to worship when only the humanity slept, and she seemed separated from her Son and alone with her Creator! But the simile of the taper is perhaps the best touch of all, as being the masterly expression of one of the most subtle and difficult conceptions of the human mind. It must divide the honors of comparison with the concluding lines of the MATER SALVATORIS. O heart with his in just accord! O soul his echo, tone for tone! O spirit that heard, and kept his word! O countenance moulded like his own! Behold, she seemed on earth to dwell; But, hid in light, alone she sat Beneath the throne ineffable, Chanting her clear magnificat. Fed from the boundless heart of God, The Joy within her rose more high. And all her being overflowed, Until the awful hour was nigh. Then, then there crept her spirit o'er The shadow of that pain world-wide, Whereof her Son the substance bore;-- Him offering, half in him she died. _Standing like that strange moon, whereon The mask of earth lies dim and dead, An orb of glory, shadow-strewn, Yet girdled with a luminous thread_. For originality, and perfect expression of an idea by an image, we know of nothing better in all our range of poetry than those two similes. That last is especially wonderful for its reconditeness. Who would ever think of an annular eclipse of the moon as an illustration of religion? And yet how marvellously well it does illustrate! The first verse of the poem is very poor and strained in its rhythm, and the second not much better in its mysticism, which is rather adapted to the enthusiasm of the middle ages; but the end counterbalances all. Having thus digressed to the Blessed Virgin, we go on to note in how many lights these poems display her. The idea of her they present is, to an ordinary idea, as the flashing, many-faceted jewel to the rough gem of the mines. Here, for example, the whole poetry of motherhood is pressed into her service in a few dense lines: {80}