HIDE me, mother! my fathers belong'd to the church of old,

1 am driven by storm and sin and death to the ancient fold,

I cling to the Catholic Cross once more, to the Faith that saves.

My brain is full of the crash of wrecks, and the roar of waves,

My life itself is a wreck, I have sullied a noble name,

I am flung from the rushing tide of the world as a waif of shame,

I am roused by the wail of a child, and awake to a livid light,

And a ghastlier face than ever has haunted a grave by night.

I would hide from the storm without, I would flee from the storm within, I would make my life one prayer for a soul that died in his sin.

10

I was the tempter, mother, and mine was the deeper fall;

I will sit at your feet, I will hide my face, I will tell you all

II

He that they gave me to, mother, a heedless and innocent bride

He would open the books that I prized, and toss them away with a yawn, Repell'd by the magnet of Art to the which my nature was drawn,

The word of the Poet by whom the deeps of the world are stirr'd,

The music that robes it in language be neath and beyond the word!

My Shelley would fall from my hands when he cast a contemptuous glance From where he was poring over his Tables of Trade and Finance;

My hands, when I heard him coming, would drop from the chords or the keys, But ever I fail'd to please him, however I strove to please —

All day long far-off in the cloud of the city, and there

30

Lost, head and heart, in the chances of dividend, consol, and share And at home if I sought for a kindly caress, being woman and weak, His formal kiss fell chill as a flake of snow on the cheek.

And so, when I bore him a girl, when I held it aloft in my joy,

He look'd at it coldly, and said to me, 'Pity it is n't a boy.'

The one thing given me, to love and to live for, glanced at in scorn!

The child that I felt I could die for if she were basely born!

- as

I had lived a wild-flower life, I was planted

Mother, I have not

III

however their tongues may have babbled of me Sinn'd thro' an animal vileness, for all but a dwarf was he,

And all but a hunchback too; and I look'd at him, first, askance,

With pity- not he the knight for an amorous girl's romance! Tho' wealthy enough to have bask'd in the light of a dowerless smile, Having lands at home and abroad in a rich West-Indian isle;

But I came on him once at a ball, the heart of a listening crowd

Why, what a brow was there! he was seated-speaking aloud

To women, the flower of the time, and men at the helm of state

Flowing with easy greatness and touching on all things great,

Science, philosophy, song self ready to weep

50

- till I felt my

For I knew not what, when I heard that voice, as mellow and deep

When he clothed a naked mind with the wisdom and wealth of his own,

And I bow'd myself down as a slave to his intellectual throne,

When he coin'd into English gold some treasure of classical song,

When he flouted a statesman's error, or flamed at a public wrong, When he rose as it were on the wings of an eagle beyond me, and past Over the range and the change of the world from the first to the last, 70 When he spoke of his tropical home in the canes by the purple tide,

And the high star-crowns of his palms on the deep-wooded mountain-side, And cliffs all robed in lianas that dropt to the brink of his bay,

And trees like the towers of a minster, the sons of a winterless day.

'Paradise there!' so he said, but I seem'd in Paradise then

With the first great love I had felt for the first and greatest of men;

Ten long days of summer and sin must be so

- if it

But days of a larger light than I ever again shall know Days that will glimmer, I fear, thro' life to my latest breath;

'No frost there,' so he said, 'as in truest love no death.'

VI

80

Mother, one morning a bird with a warble plaintively sweet

Perch'd on the shrouds, and then fell fluttering down at my feet;

I took it, he made it a cage, we fondled it, Stephen and I,

But it died, and I thought of the child for a moment, I scarce know why.

VII

But if sin be sin, not inherited fate, as many will say,

My sin to my desolate little one found me at sea on a day,

When her orphan wail came borne in the shriek of a growing wind,

And a voice rang out in the thunders of ocean and heaven, 'Thou hast sinn'd.' And down in the cabin were we, for the towering crest of the tides

'The wages of sin is death,' and there I began to weep,

'I am the Jonah, the crew should cast me into the deep,

For, ah, God! what a heart was mine to forsake her even for you!'

'Never the heart among women,' he said, 'more tender and true.'

'The heart! not a mother's heart, when I left my darling alone.'

'Comfort yourself, for the heart of the father will care for his own.'

'The heart of the father will spurn her,' I cried, for the sin of the wife,

The cloud of the mother's shame will enfold her and darken her life.'

100

Then his pale face twitch'd. 'O Stephen,
I love you, I love you, and yet'
As I lean'd away from his arms- ' would
God, we had never met!'

And he spoke not only the storm; till after a little, I yearn'd

For his voice again, and he call'd to me, " Kiss me! and there - as I turn'd 'The heart, the heart!' I kiss'd him, I

clung to the sinking form,

And the storm went roaring above us, and he was out of the storm.

Till I woke from the trance, and the ship stood still, and the skies were blue, But the face I had known, O mother, was not the face that I knew.

IX

The strange misfeaturing mask that I saw so amazed me that I

Stumbled on deck, half mad. I would fling myself over and die :

But one- he was waving a flag- the one man left on the wreck

'Woman,'

he graspt at my arm, stay there!' I crouch'd upon deckWe are sinking, and yet there's hope: look yonder,' he cried, a sail!' 121 In a tone so rough that I broke into passionate tears, and the wail

Of a beaten babe, till I saw that a boat was nearing us-- then

All on a sudden I thought, I shall look on the child again.

They took us aboard. The crew were gentle, the captain kind,

But I was the lonely slave of an oftenwandering mind;

130

For whenever a rougher gust might tumble a stormier wave,

'O Stephen,' I moan'd, 'I am coming to thee in thine ocean-grave.'

And again, when a balmier breeze curl'd over a peacefuller sea,

I found myself moaning again, 'O child, I am coming to thee.'

XII

The broad white brow of the isle- that bay with the color'd sand

Rich was the rose of sunset there, as we drew to the land;

All so quiet the ripple would hardly blanch into spray