lorify the rest.

The third is from the garden culled, the Rose,
The eye of flowers, worthy for her scent,
To top the fairest lily now, that grows
With wonder on the thorny regiment.

The fourth is the humble Ivy intersert
But lowly laid, as on the earth asleep,
Preserved in her antique bed of vert,
No faiths more firm or flat, then, where't doth creep.

But that, which sums all, is the Eglantine,
Which of the field is cleped the sweetest briar,
Inflamed with ardour to that mystic shine,
In Moses' bush unwasted in the fire.

Thus love, and hope, and burning charity,
(Divinest graces) are so intermixt
With odorous sweets and soft humility,
As if they adored the head, whereon they are fixed.

PART TWO

CHAPTER II

THE ANNUNCIATION I

And the angel came in unto her, and said, Hail, thou that art
highly favoured, the Lord is with thee; blessed art thou
among women.

S. Luke, I. 28

Oh God, whose will it was that thy Word should take flesh, at the
message of the Angel, in the womb of the blessed Virgin Mary, grant to
us thy suppliants that, we who believe her to be truly the Mother of
God, may be assisted by her intercession with thee. Through &c.

ROMAN.

When we attempt to reconstruct imaginatively any scene of Holy
Scripture it is almost inevitable that we see it through the eyes of
some great artist of the past. The Crucifixion comes to us as Duerer or
Guido Reni saw it; the Presentation or the Visitation presents itself to
us in terms of the imagination of Raphael; we see the Nativity as a
composition of Corregio. So the Annunciation rises before us when we
close our eyes and attempt to make "the composition of place" in a
familiar grouping of the actors: a startled maiden who has arisen
hurriedly from work or prayer, looking with wonder at the apparition of
an angel who has all the eagerness of one who has come hastily upon an
urgent mission. The surroundings differ, but artists of the Renaissance
like to think of a sumptuous background as a worthy setting for so
great an event.

We keep close to the meaning of Scripture if we set the Annunciation in
a room in a cottage of a Palestinian working man. And I like to think of
S. Mary at her accustomed work when Gabriel appeared, not with a rush of
wings, but as a silent and hardly felt presence standing before her whom
the Lord has chos