I am including this writer in 'Victorian Poets' as her work, with all its sentimentality, is typical of that period.

However, she lived in the United States and was born in Charleston, South Carolina, on 13 February 1825.

Her maternal grandparents were natives of France, who fled to South Carolina from San Domingo at the time of the servile insurrection in that island.

She lost her mother when a child, and her father, William Young Ripley, a native of Vermont, removed shortly afterward to New York, and in 1830 to his native state, where he was one of the first to develop the Rutland marble quarries.

In 1847 Miss Ripley married Seneca R. Dorr, then of New York, who shortly afterward went to Rutland, Vermont, and lived there till his death in 1884.

She wrote from early childhood, but her first published poem was sent to the "Union Magazine" by her husband, without her knowledge, a year or two after their marriage.

PicForNewsletterBudapestJuly2006TOURCastleChurchInside


ENTERING IN

The church was dim and silent
With the hush before the prayer,
Only the solemn trembling
Of the organ stirred the air;
Without, the sweet, still sunshine,
Within, the holy calm,
Where priest and people waited
For the swelling of the psalm.

Slowly the door swung open
And a little baby girl,
Brown-eyed, with brown hair falling
In many a wavy curl,
With soft cheeks flushing hotly,
Shy glances downward thrown,
And small hands clasped before her,
Stood in the aisle alone.

Stood half abashed, half frightened,
Unknowing where to go,
While like a wind-rocked flower,
The form swayed to and fro;
And the changing color fluttered
In the little troubled face,
As from side to side she wavered
With a mute, imploring grace.

It was but for a moment;
What wonder that we smiled;
By such a strange, sweet picture
From holy thoughts beguiled?
When up rose some one softly,
And many an eye grew dim,
As through the tender silence
He bore the child with him.

And I — I wondered (losing
The sermon and the prayer)
If when sometime I enter
The "many mansions" fair,
And stand abashed and drooping
In the portals' golden glow,
Our God will send an angel
To show me where to go!