The first is from Wordsworth, and may be recited before the Madonna di San Sisto:—­

  “Mother! whose virgin bosom was uncrost
  With the least shade of thought to sin allied! 
  Woman! above all women glorified;
  Out tainted nature’s solitary boast;
  Purer than foam on central ocean tost;
  Brighter than eastern skies at daybreak strewn
  With fancied roses, than the unblemish’d moon
  Before her wane begins on heaven’s blue coast,
  Thy Image falls to earth.  Yet some I ween,
  Not unforgiven, the suppliant knee might bend,
  As to a visible Power, in which did blend
  All that was mix’d and reconcil’d in thee,
  Of mother’s love with maiden purity,
  Of high with low, celestial with terrene.”

The next, from Shelley, reads like a hymn in honour of the Immaculate
Conception:—­

  Seraph of Heaven! too gentle to be human,
  Veiling beneath that radiant form of woman
  All that is insupportable in thee
  Of light, and love, and immortality! 
  Sweet Benediction in the eternal curse! 
  Veil’d Glory of this lampless Universe! 
  Thou Moon beyond the clouds!  Thou living Form
  Among the Dead!  Thou Star above the storm! 
  Thou Wonder, and thou Beauty, and thou Terror! 
  Thou Harmony of Nature’s art!  Thou Mirror
  In whom, as in the splendour of the Sun,
  All shapes look glorious which thou gazest on!”

  “See where she stands! a mortal shape endued
  With love, and life, and light, and deity;
  The motion which may change but cannot die,
  An image of some bright eternity;
  A shadow of some golden dream; a splendour
  Leaving the third sphere pilotless.”

I do not know whether intentionally or not, but we have here assembled some of the favourite symbols of the Virgin—­the moon, the star, the “terribilis ut castrorum acies” (Cant. vi. 10), and the mirror.

The third is a passage from Robert Browning, 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.