As frail and lost as you, shall rise,
His daughter with his mother's eyes?”
Many a man would be fain to listen to such a sermon who would reject any other. For the preacher is no missionary in disguise, but a fellow-sinner converted in the presence of his sin, if we may call it conversion; at least, beaten down and overwhelmed by the colossal horror and pity of it, as a wild beast is tamed by a prairie-fire.
Many beautiful things have been said by non-Catholic poets of Our Blessed Lady. Indeed, a very pretty book might be made of these Gentile testimonies, from Milton, Cowley, Crashaw (before his conversion), Wordsworth, Keble, and many others. It would seem that Parnassus is as one of the high places of Baal, where the Spirit of the Lord rushes upon the poet, whose eyes are opened and he must needs bless her whom he that blesseth “shall also himself be blessed, and he that curseth shall be reckoned accursed,” and he cries, [pg 268] “How beautiful are thy tabernacles,” O Mary, Mother of God, “as woody valleys, as watered gardens near the rivers, as tabernacles which the Lord has pitched as cedars by the water-side.” But with Mr. Rosetti it is something more than this. One is tempted to fancy that with his Italian name he must have really inherited an Italian's devotion to the Madonna. His poem “Ave” is neither more nor less than a meditation upon the joyful, sorrowful, and glorious mysteries of Our Lady's life, and it breathes a devotion as tender and sensitive—in a word, as Catholic—as though it had been written by F. Faber. We shall venture to transfer the whole of it to our pages, for we cannot otherwise justify what we have said, and part of its specific beauty is that it is in one breath:
Ave.
Mother of fair delight,
Thou handmaid perfect in God's sight,
Now sitting fourth beside the Three,
Thyself a woman Trinity,
Being a daughter born to God,