We have never seen anything to compare with the picture of the Holy Child here presented, unless it be the picture of the Holy Mother. We cannot, in our allotted space, render all the admirable gradations and delicate shadings, but must cull with difficult choice one or two only. One of the first is the
Daily beneath his mother's eyes Her lamb maturity his lowliness: 'Twas hers the lovely sacrifice With fillet and with flower to dress.
Beside his little cross he knelt, With human-heavenly lips he prayed; _His will with in her will she felt, And yet his will her will obeyed_. . . .
He willed to lack; he willed to bear; He willed by suffering to be schooled; He willed the chains of flesh to wear; Yet from her arms the world he ruled.
_As tapers 'mid the noontide glow With merged yet separate radiance burn_, With human taste and touch, even so, The things he knew he willed to learn.
He sat beside the lowly door: His _homeless_ eyes appeared to trace In evening skies remembered lore, And shadows of his Father's face.
One only knew him. She alone Who nightly to his cradle crept. And _lying like the moonbeam prone Worshipped her Maker as he slept_.
Whoever can read that without admiring it, is a clod: whoever can read it without having his whole idea of Christ's childhood intensely vivified and expanded, must be a St. John or an angel. How beautiful, and, when we look at it, how bold is the epithet "homeless!" How exactly it embodies the longing of his spirit out of its human prison toward the freedom of the heavens! Yet how daringly true to imagine the omnipresent Deity homeless! Again, how acutely the last scene characterizes the tender timidity of Mary's mother-love, and how natural and intensely human the conscious, sweet self-deception which brought her to worship when only the humanity slept, and she seemed separated from her Son and alone with her Creator! But the simile of the taper is perhaps the best touch of all, as being the masterly expression of one of the most subtle and difficult conceptions of the human mind. It must divide the honors of comparison with the concluding lines of the
O heart with his in just accord! O soul his echo, tone for tone! O spirit that heard, and kept his word! O countenance moulded like his own!