Always a wanderer, our Poet-Priest found his first real home, since his childhood, when pastor of St. Mary's Church in Mobile. To that home he pays a tribute in verse.
It was an enchanting solitude for the "restless heart,"—the plain little church with its cross pointing the way upward, the front half-hidden by trees through which its window-eyes look out to the street. A short distance from the church and farther back was the priest's house, set in a bewilderment of trees and vines and shrubbery from which window, chimney, roof, and cornice peep out as if with inquisitive desire to see what manner of world lies beyond the forest.
Up into the silent skies
Where the sunbeams veil the star,
Up,—beyond the clouds afar,
Where no discords ever mar,
Where rests peace that never dies.
Here, amid the "songs and silences," he wrote "just when the mood came, with little of study and less of art," as he said, his thoughts leaping spontaneously into rhymes and rhythms which he called verses, objecting to the habit of his friends of giving them "the higher title of poems," never dreaming of "taking even lowest place in the rank of authors."
I sing with a voice too low
To be heard beyond to-day,