III. “Love giving gifts Is suspicious and cold; I have all, my Beloved, When Thee I hold.
IV. “Hope and devotion The good may gain, I am but worthy Of passion and pain.
V. “So noble a Lord None serves in vain— For the pay of my love Is my love’s sweet pain.
VI. “I love thee, to love thee, No more I desire; By faith is nourished My love’s strong fire.
VII. “I kiss Thy hands When I feel their blows; In place of caresses Thou givest me woes.
VIII. “But in Thy chastening Is joy and peace; O Master and Love, Let not Thy blows cease!
IX. “Thy beauty, Beloved, With scorn is rife! But I know that Thou lovest me Better than life.
X. “And because Thou lovest me, Lover of mine, Death can but make me Utterly Thine.
XI. “I die with longing Thy face to see; Ah, sweet is the anguish Of Death to me!”
Marcela de Carpio retired from the world in 1621. It was not till 1870 that the ladies of the Convent of the Trinity at Alcala called the attention of the director of the Spanish Academy to a manuscript so dear to that sisterhood,—the love-songs of a nun, the poems of Sister Marcela de Felix. Such a delay in publication would be disastrous to a worldling of the pen, but oblivion cannot bury a soul. Besides, Sister Marcela was dreaming of heaven, not of print; her thought incidentally overflows and she inherited her father’s facility with the pen.