g, which appears to me to
sum up the moral ideal:--

"There is a vision in the heart of each,
Of justice, mercy, wisdom, tenderness
To wrong and pain, and knowledge of their cure;
And these embodied in a woman's form
That best transmits them pure as first received
From God above her to mankind below!"

II. SYMBOLS AND ATTRIBUTES OF THE VIRGIN.

That which the genius of the greatest of painters only once expressed,
we must not look to find in his predecessors, who saw only partial
glimpses of the union of the divine and human in the feminine form;
still less in his degenerate successors, who never beheld it at all.

The difficulty of fully expressing this complex ideal, and the
allegorical spirit of the time, first suggested the expedient of
placing round the figure of the glorified Virgin certain accessory
symbols, which should assist the artist to express, and the observer
to comprehend, what seemed beyond the power of art to portray;--a
language of metaphor then understood, and which we also must
understand if we would seize the complete theological idea intended
to be conveyed.

I shall begin with those symbols which are borrowed from the Litanies
of the Virgin, and from certain texts of the Canticles, in all ages
of the Church applied to her; symbols which, in the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries, frequently accompany those representations
which set forth her Glorification or Predestination; and, in the
seventeenth, are introduced into the "Immaculate Conception."

1. The Sun and the Moon.--"Electa ut Sol, pulchra ut Luna," is one
of the texts of the Canticles applied to Mary; and also in a passage
of the Revelation, "_A woman clothed with the sun, having the moon
under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars._" Hence the
radiance of the sun above her head, and the crescent moon beneath her
feet. From inevitable association the crescent moon suggests the
idea of her perpetual chastity; but in this sense it would be a pagan
rather than a Christian attribute.

2. The STAR.--This attribute, often embroidered in front of the veil
of the Virgin or on the right shoulder of her blue mantle, has become
almost as a badge from which several well-known pictures derive
their title, "La Madonna della Stella." It is in the first place
an attribute alluding to the most beautiful and expressive of her
many titles:--"_Stella Maris_" Star of the Sea,[1] which is one
interpretation of her Jewi