And: 

     Oh, Mary!  Secret fountain,
     Closed garden of delight,
     The Prince of Heaven mirrors
     Him in thy beauty bright.

But after describing all the joys of heaven, Brother Hans comes to the conclusion that a man knows about as much of celestial matters as an ox knows of discant singing.

His relationship to Mary is tender, intimate and familiar: 

     Within my heart concealed
     There is a secret cell;
     At nightfall and at daybreak
     My lady there does dwell. 
     The mistress of the house is she,
     I feel her love and care about. 
     If she denies herself to me,
     Methinks the mistress has gone out.

In another poem he prays to Mary to allow him to tear off a small piece of her robe, so that he may keep himself warm with it in the winter.

Like Cino da Pistoia, who commended his dying soul not to God but to his loved one, Brother Hans commends himself to Mary: 

     Thus I commend my soul into thy hands,
     When it must journey to those unknown lands,
     Where roads and paths are new and strange to it.

And: 

     Oh, come to me, thou Bride of God,
     When my faint soul departs from me!

There remains one more motif to consider, a motif which in a way completes the picture of the celestial lady:  As men love and desire the women of the earth, so God loves the Lady of Heaven.  St. Bernard first expressed this naive idea, which makes God the Father resemble a little the ancient Jupiter.  “She attracted the eyes of the heavenly hosts, even the heart of the King went out to her.”  “He Himself, the supreme King and Ruler, so much desires thy beauty, that He is awaiting thy consent, upon which He has decided to save the world.  And Him Whom thou delightest in thy silence, thou wilt delight even more by thy speech, for He called to thee from Heaven:  ’Oh! fairest among women!  Let me hear thy voice!’” etc.  Here we have St. Bernard, the rock of orthodoxy, representing God as Mary’s languishing admirer!  Suso is irreproachable in this respect, but Conrad says that the colour of Mary’s face was so bright and made it so lovely,

     That even the Eternal Sire
     Was filled with sacred fire,
     And all the heavenly princes....

Thus, at the turn of the fourteenth century the great celestial change was complete:  By the side of God, nay, even in the place of God, a woman was enthroned.  “The Virgin became the God of the Universe,” says Michelet, a thorough, though rather imaginative expert on the Middle Ages.  The people primitively worshipped idols.  The clergy, headed by the Dominican and Franciscan monks, introduced Lady Days into the calendar and invented the rosary to facilitate the recital of the Aves; secular orders of knighthood placed themselves under the Virgin’s protection (La Chevalerie de Sainte Marie), but the rarest minds, sublimating the beloved, raised her into Heaven and worshipped her as divine.  The established religion was compelled to enter into partnership with the great emotion of the time, metaphysical love, lest it ran the risk of losing its sway over humanity.