perfected love, 'one's eyes meet no
mortal thing when they meet the light of her peaceful eyes,' as Michael
Angelo said of Vittoria Colonna; but one's thoughts stray to mortal
things, and ask, maybe, 'Has her lover gone from her, or is he coming?' or
'What pre-destinated unhappiness has made the shadow in her eyes?' If you
paint the same face, and set a winged rose or a rose of gold somewhere
about her, one's thoughts are of her immortal sisters, Pity and Jealousy,
and of her mother, Ancestral Beauty, and of her high kinsmen, the Holy
Orders, whose swords make a continual music before her face. The
systematic mystic is not the greatest of artists, because his imagination
is too great to be bounded by a picture or a song, and because only
imperfection in a mirror of perfection, or perfection in a mirror of
imperfection, delight our frailty. There is indeed a systematic mystic in
every poet or painter who, like Rossetti, delights in a traditional
Symbolism, or, like Wagner, delights in a personal Symbolism; and such men
often fall into trances, or have waking dreams. Their thought wanders from
the woman who is Love herself, to her sisters and her forebears, and to
all the great procession; and so august a beauty moves before the mind,
that they forget the things which move before the eyes. William Blake, who
was the chanticleer of the new dawn, has written: 'If the spectator could
enter into one of these images of his imagination, approaching them on the
fiery chariot of his contemplative thought, if ... he could make a friend
and companion of one of these images of wonder, which always entreat him
to leave mortal things (as he must know), then would he arise from the
grave, then would he meet the Lord in the air, and then he would be
happy.' And again, 'The world of imagination is the world of Eternity. It
is the Divine bosom into which we shall all go after the death of the
vegetated body. The world of imagination is infinite and eternal, whereas
the world of generation or vegetation is finite and temporal. There exist
in that eternal world the eternal realities of everything which we see
reflected in the vegetable glass of nature.'

Every visionary knows that the mind's eye soon comes to see a capricious
and variable world, which the will cannot shape or change, though it can
call it up and banish it again. I closed my eyes a moment ago, and a
company of people in blue robes swept by me in a blinding light, and had
gone