Page:A channel passage and other poems (IA channelpassageot00swinrich).pdf/65

 From the blood-sodden soil that was blasted with fires of the Church and her creed Sprang rarely but surely, by grace of thy spirit, a flower for a weed. Thy spirit, unfelt of thy priests who blasphemed thee, enthralled and enticed To deathward a child that was even as the child we behold in Christ. The Moors, they told her, beyond bright Spain and the strait brief sea, Dwelt blind in the light that for them was as darkness, and knew not thee. But the blood of the martyrs whose mission was witness for God, they said, Might raise to redemption the souls that were here, in the sun's sight, dead. And the child rose up in the night, when the stars were as friends that smiled, And sought her brother, and wakened the younger and tenderer child.