“ONE AMONG SO MANY.”

... In a dark street she met and spoke to me,

Importuning, one wet and mild March night.

We walked and talked together. O her tale

Was very common; thousands know it all!

Seduced; a gentleman; a baby coming;

Parents that railed; London; the child born dead;

A seamstress then, one of some fifty girls

“Taken on” a few months at a dressmaker's

In the crush of the “season;” thirteen shillings a week!

The fashionable people's dresses done,

And they flown off, these fifty extra girls

Sent — to the streets: that is, to work that gives

Scarcely enough to buy the decent clothes

Respectable employers all demand

Or speak dismissal. Well, well, well, we know!

And she — “Why, I have gone on down and down,

And there's the gutter, look, that I shall die in!”

“My dear,” I say, “where hope of all but that

Is gone,‘ tis time, I think, life were gone too.”

She looks at me. “That I should kill myself?” —

“That you should kill yourself.” — “That would be sin,

And God would punish me!” — “And will not God

Punish for this?” She pauses: then whispers:

“No, no, He will forgive me, for He knows!”

I laughed aloud: “And you,” she said, “and you,

Who are so good, so noble”... “Noble? Good?”

I laughed aloud, the great sob in my throat.

O my poor darling, O my little lost sheep

Of this vast flock that perishes alone

Out in the pitiless desert!— Yet she'd speak:

She'd ask me: she'd entreat: she'd demonstrate.

O I must not say that! I must believe!

Who made the sea, the leaves so green, the sky

So big and blue and pure above it all?

O my poor darling, O my little lost sheep,

Entreat no more and demonstrate no more;

For I believe there is a God, a God

Not in the heaven, the earth, or the waters; no,

But in the heart of man, on the dear lips

Of angel women, of heroic men!

O hopeless wanderer that would not stay,

( “It is too late, I cannot rise again!” )

O saint of faith in love behind the veils,

( “You must believe in God, for you are good!” ),

O sister who made holy with your kiss,

Your kiss in that wet dark mild night of March

There in the hideous infamous London streets

My cheek, and made my soul a sacred place,

O my poor darling, O my little lost sheep!