And when the face was finished, throat and hands, Her cameriera carried him, in hate Of the English-fashioned shroud, the last brocade She dressed in at the Pitti. ‘He should paint No sadder thing than that,’ she swore, ‘to wrong Her poor signora.’ Therefore very strange The effect was. I, a little child, would crouch For hours upon the floor, with knees drawn up, And gaze across them, half in terror, half In adoration, at the picture there,— That swan-like supernatural white life, Just sailing upward from the red stiff silk Which seemed to have no part in it, nor power To keep it from quite breaking out of bounds: For hours I sate and stared. Assunta’s awe And my poor father’s melancholy eyes Still pointed that way. That way, went my thoughts When wandering beyond sight. And as I grew In years, I mixed, confused, unconsciously, Whatever I last read or heard or dreamed, Abhorrent, admirable, beautiful, Pathetical, or ghastly, or grotesque, With still that face ... which did not therefore change, But kept the mystic level of all forms And fears and admirations; was by turns Ghost, fiend, and angel, fairy, witch, and sprite,— A dauntless Muse who eyes a dreadful Fate, A loving Psyche who loses sight of Love, A still Medusa, with mild milky brows All curdled and all clothed upon with snakes Whose slime falls fast as sweat will; or, anon, Our Lady of the Passion, stabbed with swords Where the Babe sucked; or, Lamia in her first Moonlighted pallor, ere she shrunk and blinked, And, shuddering, wriggled down to the unclean; Or, my own mother, leaving her last smile In her last kiss, upon the baby-mouth My father pushed down on the bed for that,— Or my dead mother, without smile or kiss, Buried at Florence. All which images, Concentred on the picture, glassed themselves Before my meditative childhood, ... as The incoherencies of change and death Are represented fully, mixed and merged, In the smooth fair mystery of perpetual Life.