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Rh ambitious effort, which, lacking a better title, I have ventured to call "Our Lady of the Air." It is built round a unique and apt metaphor:

Wild air, world-mothering Air,

Nestling me everywhere,

That each eyelash or hair

Girdles; goes home betwixt

The fleeciest, frailest-fixed

Snowflake; that's fairly mixed

With riddles, and is rife

In every least thing's life;

This needful, never spent,

And nursing element;

My more than meat and drink,

My meal at every wink;

This Air which, by life's law,

My lung must draw and draw,

Now but to breathe its praise—

Minds me in many ways

Of her, who not only

Gave God's Infinity

Dwindled to Infancy

Welcome in womb and breast,

Birth, milk and all the rest,

But mothers each new grace

That does now reach our race—

Mary Immaculate,

Merely a Woman, yet

Whose presence power is

Great as no goddess's

Was deemèd, dreamèd; who

This one work has to do—

Let all God's glory through,

God's glory which would go

Through her and from her flow

Off, and no way but so.

If I have understood

She holds high Motherhood