Spared, by some chance, when all beside was spoil’d.
She made the place beneath seem holy ground.
This may be superstition, weak or wild:
But ev’n the faintest relics of a shrine
Of any worship wake some thoughts divine.”
Lord Byron, it is true, was not a Protestant, but a deist. But this makes it all the more evident how full of poetry the Catholic religion is—and particularly in its worship of the Madonna—when it could so attract a mind that rejected Christianity altogether. Other non-Christian poets have proved the same thing, and none more so than our own great Unitarian poet, Longfellow, whom, when we first read “Evangeline” and “Hiawatha,” we supposed to be a Catholic. But Protestant poets, too, and of various persuasions, have evinced a sympathy with particular features of the Catholic religion as it appears to those outside of it, and especially with the Madonna. These see an ideal in our Virgin-Mother. And none has expressed this higher view so well as Wordsworth in his celebrated sonnet—to which, perhaps, we are indebted for our own first glimpse of her as an ideal. It is one of his Ecclesiastical Sonnets, and comes among a series in which, as a true poet, he is forced to lament the destructive work of the so-called Reformation.
“Mother, whose virgin bosom was uncrost
With the least shade of thought to sin allied:
Woman above all women glorified—
Our tainted nature’s solitary boast!