To Ask Our Lady’s Patronage for a Book on Columbus: A Fragment
Star of the Sea, to whom, age after age,
The maiden kneels whose lover sails the sea;
Star, that the drowning death-pang can assuage,
And shape the soul’s course to eternity;
Mother of God, to Egypt’s realm exiled,
Mother of God, in Bethlehem’s crib confined,
Thee do I ask to aid my anxious mind,
And make this book find favour with thy Child.
Of one who lived and laboured in thy ray,
I would rehearse the striving and success;
Through the dense past I ne’er shall find my way,
Unless thou helpest, hold Comfortress;
A world of doubt and darkness to evade;
An ocean all unknown to Christian kind;
Another world by nature’s self arrayed,
O’er the wide waste of waves, I seek to find.