The wonder was not yet quite gone
From that still look of hers,
Albeit, to them she left, her day
Had counted as ten years.”
With the calm, unhesitating realism of Fra Angelico, he paints his lady leaning out towards him “from the gold bar of heaven,” with stars in her hair and lilies in her hand; and the outline is so clear and firm, so free from the mist of modern sentimentalism, that the paroxysm of doubt which breaks in at the end of the fourth stanza, and which for a moment makes the radiant vision tremulous, is really wanted to remind us of the abyss which the imagination is spanning:
“It was the rampart of God's house
That she was standing on,
By God built over the sheer depth
The which is space begun;
So high that, looking downward thence,