whose secret growth the Dove
Is sometimes felt to be,
While every leaf that His plumes touch
Saith His Name audibly.

Here the love involved is so etherealised as scarcely to be called
human, save only on the part of the mortal dreamer, in whose yearning
ecstasy the ear thinks it recognises a more earthly note. The lover
rejoins.--

(Alas! We two, we two, thou say'st!
Yea, one wast thou with me
That once of old. But shall God lift
To endless unity
The soul whose likeness with thy soul
Was but its love for thee?)

It is said of the few existent examples of the art of Giorgione that,
around some central realisation of human passion gathers always a
landscape which is not merely harmonised to it, but a part of it,
sharing the joy or the anguish, lying silent to the breathless
adoration, or echoing the rapturous voice of the full pleasure of those
who are beyond all height and depth more than it. Something of this
passive sympathy of environing objects comes out in the poem:

Around her, lovers, newly met
'Mid deathless love's acclaims,
Spoke evermore among themselves
Their rapturous new names;
And the souls mounting up to God
Went by her like thin flames.

And still she bowed herself and stooped
Out of the circling charm;
Until her bosom must have made
The bar she leaned on warm,
And the lilies lay as if asleep
Along her bended arm.

The sense induced by such imagery is akin to that which comes of rapt
contemplation of the deep em-blazonings of a fine stained window when
the sun's warm gules glides off before the dim twilight. And this sense
as of a thing existent, yet passing stealthily out of all sight away,
the metre of the poem helps to foster. Other metres of Rossetti's have
a strenuous reality, and rejoice in their self-assertiveness, and seem,
almost, in their resonant strength, to tell themselves they are very
good; but this may almost be said to be a disembodied voice, that
lives only on the air, and, like the song of a bird, is gone before its
accents have been caught. Of the four-and-twenty stanzas of the poem,
none is more calmly musical than this:

When round his head the aureole clings,
And he is clothed in white,
I 'll take his hand and go with him
To the deep wells of light;
We will step down as to a stream,
An