Yea, ’twere the smile o’ Him, the price.
But she has given another form of poem which should be presented before this brief review of her more material verse is concluded, and it is a form one would hardly expect from such a source. I refer to the “poem of occasion.” A few days before Christmas, Mrs. Curran remarked as she sat at the board: “I wonder if Patience wouldn’t give us a Christmas poem.” And without a moment’s hesitation she did. Here it is:
I hied me to the glen and dell,
And o’er the heights, afar and near,
To find the Yule sprite’s haunt.
I dreamt me it did bide
Where mistletoe doth bead;
And found an oak whose boughs
Hung clustered with its borrowed loveliness.
Ah, could such a one as she