VESTAL, a poem

SHE dwelt apart, as one whom love passed by,
     Yet in her heart love glowed with steadfast beam;
     And as the moonlight on a wintry stream
With paly radiance doth glorify
All barren things that in its circle lie,
     So, from within, love shed so fair a gleam
     About her, that it made her desert seem
A paradise, abloom immortally.

Some rashly pitied her; but, to atone,
     If one perchance gazed long upon her face,
He grew to feel himself more strangely lone—
     Love lent her look such amplitude of grace;
Yet who that would have made that love his own
     Aught worthy had to offer in its place?

"Vestal" by Florence Earle Coates. Published in The Reader (December 1907), Lyrics of Life (1909) and Poems (1916) Volume II.

Nun contemplating a cross in a garden courtyard
by Ferdinand Wagner