Thine, too, hath bled.
Thou that hast looked on death,
Aid us when death is near;
Whisper of heaven to faith;
Sweet Mother, hear!
Ora pro nobis! the wave must rock our sleep;
Ora, Mater, ora! Star of the Deep!
This was first written in four separate quatrains, “'Tis nightfall on the sea” being part of the first instead of the second line, and “We lift our souls,” etc., was “Our souls rise to Thee,” while the apostrophe at the end read, “Thou Star of the Deep.”
The fact of the modern origin of the hymn does not make it less probable that the earlier one of Fortunatus suggested it. It was written by Mrs. Hemans, and occurs between the forty-third and forty-fourth stanzas of her long poem, “The Forest Sanctuary.”
A Spanish Christian who had embraced the Protestant faith fled to America (such is the story of the poem) to escape the cruelties of the Inquisition, and took with him his Catholic wife and his child. During the voyage the wife pined away 411 / 359 and died, a martyr to her conjugal loyalty and love. The hymn to the Virgin purports to have been her daily evening song at sea, plaintively remembered by the broken-hearted husband and father in his forest retreat on the American shore with his motherless boy.