The versification of the first stanza of this section is very lovely, and subtly responsive to the feeling. It exhibits the completest inspiration. No 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.