C.D. Warner, et al., comp.
The Library of the World’s Best Literature. An Anthology in Thirty Volumes. 1917.
Amélie Rives Troubetzkoy (1863–1945)
Unto the Least of These Little Ones
O
That make pure, hallowed age seem young indeed—
Wan eyes that on drear horrors daily feed;
Learned deep in all that leaves us most unwise!
Poor wells, beneath whose troubled depths Truth lies,
Drowned, drowned, alas! So does my sad heart bleed
When I remember you; so does it plead
And strive within my breast—as one who cries
For torture of her first-born—that the day,
The long, bright day, seems thicker sown for me
With eyes of children than the heavens at night
With stars on stars. To watch you is to pray
That you may some day see as children see
When man, like God, hath said, “Let there be light.”
These, bearing first their cross, no childhood know,
But, aged with toil, through countless horrors grow
To age more horrible. Rough locks atoss
Above drink-reddened eyes, like Southern moss
That drops its tangles to the marsh below;
No standard dreamed or real by which to show
The piteous completeness of their loss;
No rest, no hope, no Christ: the cross alone
Borne on their backs by day, their bed by night,
Their ghastly plaything when they pause to weep,
Their threat of torture do they dare to moan;
A darkness ever dark across their light,
A weight that makes a waking of their sleep.
Count thou these children fallen from their place;
Lift and console them of thy pity’s grace,
And teach them that to suffer is not all;
Hedge them about with love as with a wall,
Give them in dreams the knowledge of thy face,
And wipe away such stains as sin doth trace,
Sending deliverance when brave souls call.
Deliver them, O Lord, deliver them!—
These children—as thy Son was once a child!
Make them even purer than before they fell,
Radiant in raiment clean from throat to hem;
For, Lord, till thou hast cleansed these sin-defiled,
Of such the kingdom, not of heaven, but hell.