a metaphor
corresponding to the breaking of the sun through clouds. "When the
radiant morning star, Mary, broke through the suffering of thy darkened
heart, it was saluted with gladness and with these words: Greeting,
beautiful, rising morning star, from the fathomless depths of all loving
hearts!" But he also calls Mary: "Thou dazzling mirror of the Eternal
Sun!" And his Biography contains the following beautiful passage: "And
his eyes were opened and he fell on his knees, saluting the rising
morning star, the tender queen of the light of heaven; as the little
birds in the summer time salute the day, so he saluted the luminous
bringer of the eternal day, and he spoke his salutation not
mechanically, but with a sweet low singing of his soul." This is pure
and genuine nature-worship mingled with the worship of Mary.

So much for Suso. In Goethe's _Faust_, Doctor Marianus prays:

In thy tent of azure blue,
Queen supremely reigning,
Let me now thy secret view,
Vision high obtaining.

It is obvious that here the Queen of Heaven and the sun are conceived as
one. Eichendorff makes use of the metaphor:

The sun is smiling languidly
Like to a woman wondrous sweet.

The typically un-Teutonic modern poet, Alfred Mombert, on the other
hand, conceives the sun as a youth, and contrary to all custom, calls a
poem: _Der_ Sonnengeist (the sun-spirit).

The great Italians, also, were not unaware of this change of the sex of
the supreme value; at the conclusion of the _Paradise_ there is a
passage (in St. Bernard's prayer) which points to a connection in
Dante's mind between the sun and the Queen of Heaven:

"The love that moves the sun in heaven!"

_(d) Michelangelo._

In Michelangelo we meet the spirit of Plato and the plastic genius of
Greece raised to a higher plane and lit by the peculiar glory of
Christianity--the conception of the soul as an absolute value.
Michelangelo was thrilled by a passionate love of beauty; beauty
absolute, eternal and immutable. He felt profoundly the need of
salvation, and he possessed an unprecedented power of spiritual vision.
In the end, added to all these things, came consuming love for a woman,
love raised to the pitch of self-destruction, an adoration which
entitles us to regard him, next to Dante, as the greatest metaphysical
lover of all times.

At the court of the Medici at Florence, Ficinio had founded a Platonic
Academy, where Plato's works an