ll it in thy reverence!

"Lady, thy goodness, thy magnificence,
Thy virtue, and thy great humility,
Surpass all science and all utterance;
For sometimes, Lady! ere men pray to thee,
Thou go'st before in thy benignity,
The light to us vouchsafing of thy prayer,
To be our guide unto thy Son so dear.

"My knowledge is so weak, O blissful Queen,
To tell abroad thy mighty worthiness,
That I the weight of it may not sustain;
But as a child of twelve months old, or less,
That laboureth his language to express,
Even so fare I; and therefore, I thee pray,
Guide thou my song, which I of thee shall say."

And again, we may turn to Petrarch's hymn to the Virgin, wherein
he prays to be delivered from his love and everlasting regrets for
Laura:--

"Vergine bella, che di sol vestita,
Coronata di stelle, al sommo Sole
Piacesti si, che'n te sua luce ascose.

"Vergine pura, d'ogni parte intera,
Del tuo parto gentil figliuola e madre!

"Vergine sola al mondo senza esempio,
Che 'l ciel di tue bellezze innamorasti."

The fancy of the theologians of the middle ages played rather
dangerously, as it appears to me, for the uninitiated and
uninstructed, with the perplexity of these divine relationships. It is
impossible not to feel that in their admiration for the divine beauty
of Mary, in borrowing the amatory language and luxuriant allegories
of the Canticles, which represent her as an object of delight to the
Supreme Being, theologians, poets, and artists had wrought themselves
up to a wild pitch of enthusiasm. In such passages as those I have
quoted above, and in the grand old Church hymns, we find the best
commentary and interpretation of the sacred pictures of the fourteenth
and fifteenth centuries. Yet during the thirteenth century there was
a purity in the spirit of the worship which at once inspired and
regulated the forms in which it was manifested. The Annunciations and
Nativities were still distinguished by a chaste and sacred simplicity.
The features of the Madonna herself, even where they were not what we
call beautiful, had yet a touch of that divine and contemplative grace
which the theologians and the poets had associated with the queenly,
maternal, and bridal character of Mary.

Thus the impulses given in the early part of the fourteenth century
continued in progressive development through the fifteenth; the
spiritual for some time in advance of the material influences;