Still more beautiful and more his own is the invocation in the
“Prioress’s Tale.”  I give the stanzas as modernized by Wordsworth:—­

  “O Mother Maid!  O Maid and Mother free! 
  O bush unburnt, burning in Moses’ sight! 
  That down didst ravish from the Deity,
  Through humbleness, the Spirit that that did alight
  Upon thy heart, whence, through that glory’s might
  Conceived was the Father’s sapience,
  Help me to tell 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; the moral idea emanating as it were from the soul, and the influences of external nature flowing into it; the comprehensive power of fancy using more and more the apprehensive power of imitation, and both working together till their “blended might” achieved its full fruition in the works of Raphael.