mere metrical skill,
nor metrical sensibility even, could have produced it.

VIII. `Beside the Drawing-Board'.--She is seated at
her drawing-board, and has turned from the poor coarse hand
of some little peasant girl she has called in as a model,
to work, but with poor success, after a clay cast of
a hand by Leonardo da Vinci, who

"Drew and learned and loved again,
While fast the happy moments flew,
Till beauty mounted into his brain
And on the finger which outvied
His art, he placed the ring that's there,
Still by fancy's eye descried,
In token of a marriage rare:
For him on earth his art's despair,
For him in heaven his soul's fit bride."

Her effort has taught her a wholesome lesson: "the worth of
flesh and blood at last!" There's something more than beauty in a hand.
Da Vinci would not have turned from the poor coarse hand of the little girl
who has been standing by in wondering patience. He, great artist
as he was, owed all he achieved to his firm grasp upon, and struggle with,
and full faith in, the real. She imagines him saying:--

"Shall earth and the cramped moment-space
Yield the heavenly crowning grace?
Now the parts and then the whole! *
Who art thou with stinted soul
And stunted body, thus to cry
`I love,--shall that be life's strait dole?
I must live beloved or die!'
This peasant hand that spins the wool
And bakes the bread, why lives it on,
Poor and coarse with beauty gone,--
What use survives the beauty? Fool!"

--
* "On the earth the broken arcs; in the heaven, a perfect
round."--Abt Vogler.
--

She has been brought to the last stage of initiation into the mystery
of Life. But, as is shown in the next and final section of the poem,
the wifely heart has preserved its vitality, has, indeed,
grown in vitality, and cherishes a hope which shows its undying love,
and is not without a touch of pathos.

IX. `On Deck'.--In Sections V.-VIII. the soliloquies are not
directed to the husband, as they are in I.-IV. In this last,
he is again mentally addressed. She is on board the vessel
which is to convey, or is conveying, her to her English home,
or somewhere else. As there is nothing in her for him to remember,
nothing in her art efforts he cares to see, nothing she was
that deserves a place in his mind, she leaves him, sets him free,
as he has long shown to her he has