An English Madonna :: :: University of Virginia Library

This was the wondrous thing,—if Christian creeds are dreaming
Of real eternal fact,—that God who hath the gleaming
Limitless realms of space
For dwelling-place and home, deemed all that glory a minor
Splendour than that of love, and held it far diviner
To shine forth humbly through a human face.

This was the wondrous deed,—that God who through the spaces
Passed like the wind of night, and filled the viewless places

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With majesty supreme,
Was yet content on earth, for sweet love's sake, to tarry;
Content our pain to bear and our wild sin to carry;
Content to share the restless human dream.

This was a kinglier height of grandeur, and supremer
Than thought however vast of mightiest human dreamer
Could ever grasp or span:
That God the awful Lord of stars beyond all number
Should with his own right hand relieve and disencumber
His soul of godhead, and be born as man.

This was a vaster deed than thought of loftiest singer
Could ever quite devise: that God the great light-bringer
Should leave the deep blue sky
And venture forth alone, unguarded by his legions,
And stoop to earth's malign inhospitable regions,
And, being the Lord of life, should dare to die.

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And so it is with love. The strongest is the lowliest.
The love most full of God, and greatest, and the holiest,
Is not the love which clings
To the fair starry skies or sunful, but the passion
Which stoops above the earth with measureless compassion
And shields the shieldless with perpetual wings.

The love which gives is God.—The love which softly falling
Through tiers on tiers of stars respondeth to the calling
Of love with footstep fleet:
The love which never asks save only—“Am I needed?”
The love which through long years it may be half unheeded
Seems some day terribly divine and sweet.