hing
_within_, while his "divine and most glorious" Mother was standing
_without_.

The theologians of the middle ages insist on the close and mystical
relation which they assure us existed between Christ and his mother:
however far separated, there was constant communion between them; and
wherever he might be--in whatever acts of love, or mercy, or benign
wisdom occupied for the good of man--_there_ was also his mother,
present with him in the spirit. I think we can trace the impress
of this mysticism in some of the productions of the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries. For example, among the frescoes by Angelico da
Fiesole in the cloisters of St. Mark, at Florence, there is one of
the Transfiguration, where the Saviour stands glorified with arms
outspread--a simple and sublime conception,--and on each side, half
figures of Moses and Elias: lower down appear the Virgin and St.
Dominick. There is also in the same series a fresco of the Last Supper
as the Eucharist, in which the Virgin is kneeling, glorified, on one
side of the picture, and appears as a partaker of the rite. Such a
version of either subject must be regarded as wholly mystical and
exceptional, and I am not acquainted with any other instance.

LO SPASIMO.

"O what avails me now that honour high,
To have conceived of God, and that salute,
'Hail highly favoured among woman blest!
While I to sorrows am no less advanced,
And fears as eminent, above the lot
Of other women by the birth I bore."
--"This is my favoured lot,
My exaltation to afflictions high."

MILTON.

In the Passion of our Lord, taken in connection with the life of the
Virgin Mother, there are three scenes in which she is associated with
the action as an important, if not a principal, personage.

We are told in the Gospel of St. John (chap. xvii), that Christ took a
solemn farewell of his disciples: it is therefore supposed that he did
not go up to his death without taking leave of his Mother,--without
preparing her for that grievous agony by all the comfort that his
tender and celestial pity and superior nature could bestow. This
parting of Christ and his Mother before the Crucifixion is a modern
subject. I am not acquainted with any example previous to the
beginning of the sixteenth century. The earliest I have met with is by
Albert Durer, in the series of the life of the Virgin, but there are
probably examples more ancient, or at least contemporary. In