Then what said I? Gallant replies
Seem flattery, and offend her:—
But—meet no angels, Pansie?
The suggestion is obvious, that the maiden realizes to the lover’s eye the ideal of an angel. As she comes he asks her slyly,—for she has been to the church—“Is it true that nobody ever sees real angels?” She answers innocently, thinking him to be in earnest, “No—long ago people used to see angels, but in these times no one ever sees them.” He does not dare tell her how beautiful she seems to him; but he suggests much more than admiration by the tone of his protesting response to her answer: “What! You cannot mean to say that there are no angels now?” Of course that is the same as to say, “I see an angel now”—but the girl is much too innocent to take the real and flattering meaning.
Wordsworth’s portrait of the ideal woman is very famous; it was written about his own wife though that fact would not be guessed from the poem. The last stanza is the most famous, but we had better quote them all.
She was a phantom of delight
When first she gleamed upon my sight;
A lovely apparition, sent
To be a moment’s ornament;
Her eyes as stars of twilight fair;