he bramble which
clutches her and seeks to smirch her purity is the folly, the
muddiness, the stupid cruelty of the world which mocks at all vision,
at all idealism--it is the mortal trying to drag down the immortal
part of man. Mary is the love of beauty, or of God; the bramble is the
stupidity and grossness of the practical world.

But Mary, "in her rapt girlhood," with her "eyes like the
rain-shadowed sea," is not the less sweet because she stands for an
idea.

Through meadows flowering with happiness
Went Mary, feeling not the air that laid
Honours of gentle dew upon her head;
Nor that the sun now loved with golden stare
The marvellous behaviour of her hair,
Bending with finer swerve from off her brow
Than water which relents before a prow;
Till in the shrinking darkness many a gleam
Of secret bronze-red lustres answered him.

And when the Spirit of Life vaunts itself in her,

Not vain his boast; for seemly to the Lord,
Blue-robed and yellow-kerchieft, Mary went.
There never was to God such worship sent
By any angel in the Heavenly ways,
As this that Life had utter'd for God's praise,
This girlhood--as the service that Life said
In the beauty and the manners of this maid.
Never the harps of Heaven played such song
As her grave walking through the grasses long.

I cannot dwell upon the subject of _The Sale of St. Thomas_. The
dialogue between Thomas and the captain gives opportunity for
description and metaphor almost Elizabethan in their ferocity, though
the reflections of Thomas have a spiritual quality which is entirely
modern. We hear

Of monkeys, those lewd mammets of mankind.

And of flies staring

Out of their little faces of gibbous eyes.

And there are lines such as

Men there have been who could so grimly look
That soldiers' hearts went out like candle flames
Before their eyes, and the blood perisht in them,

which might be placed side by side with Marlowe's:

The frowning looks of fiery _Tamburlaine_
That with his terrour and imperious eies,
Commands the hearts of his associates.

And we may contrast these vehement records of things with the more
philosophic passages:

Thou must not therefore stoop thy spirit's sight
To pore only within the candle-gleam
Of conscious wit and reasonable brain;
But search into the sacred darkness lying
Outside thy knowledge of