Love strong as Death! She lived through thee That mystic life whose every breath _From Life's low harp-string amorously Draws out the sweetened name of Death_. Love stronger far than Death or Life! Thy martyrdom was o'er at last Her eyelids drooped; and without strife To Him she loved her spirit passed. For once we can leave the of a poem to the unaided italics with a good grace. To expound the exquisiteness of these lines would be like botanically dissecting a lily. But there is a deeper underlying excellence that may perhaps not suggest itself so irresistibly--the marvellous intuitive delicacy of the whole conception embodied by this poem. Only a truly profound religious feeling could thus happily have characterized the effect of such a sorrow on such a nature. A mere pietist would have painted a sanctified apathy; a merely smart writer would have imbued her with an eagerness for the end of earthly trouble; a man of talent would have made her resigned to death; the man of genius makes her resigned _to life_. Here is the effortless exactness of true poet. Two more views, and we can turn from this picture of the Blessed Virgin of the May Carols--one, her human and inferior relation to God; and the other, her human and superior relation to ourselves. To the first point, perhaps the most explicit of the poems is the following, which, also, is a good example of the author s peculiar, sudden manner of turning his broad philosophy into the channel of some forcible application: {81} Not all thy purity, although The whitest moon that ever lit The peaks of Lebanonian snow Shone dusk and dim compared with it;-- Not that great love of thine, whose beams Transcended in their virtuous heat Those suns which melt the ice-bound streams, And make earth's pulses newly beat:-- It was not these that from the sky Drew down to thee the Eternal Word: He looked on thy humility; He knew thee, "Handmaid of thy Lord." Let no one claim with thee a part; Let no one, Mary, name thy name, While, aping God, upon his heart Pride sits, a demon robed in flame. Proud Vices, die! Where Sin has place Be Sin's familiar self-disgust. Proud Virtues, doubly die; that Grace At last may burgeon from your dust. But the poem which of all most truly, tenderly, and perfectly develops the whole beautiful spiritual dependence of the true Catholic upon the Mother of his God, is the Mater Divinae Gratis, already published in The Catholic World for May, p. 216.