In such a spirit does Rossetti conceive “The Girlhood of Mary Virgin,”— not as a miraculous but an exquisitely natural thing; miraculous, at least, in Walt Whitman’s sense of the word,—the sense in which all beauty and all goodness are miracles to man. He shows us the up-growing of a simple country girl, in a home full of the sweetness of family love; remote and quiet, yet with no artificial superiority or isolation from the average world. The maiden in the picture, with an innocent austerity of face, sits at an embroidery-frame by her mother’s side. In front of her is a growing lily, whose white blossoms, the symbol of her purity, she is copying with her needle on the cloth of red, beneath St. Anna’s watchful eye. The flower-pot rests on a pile of books, inscribed with the names of the choicest virtues, uppermost of which is Charity. Near to these lie a seven-thorned briar and a seven-leaved palm-branch, with a scroll inscribed “Tot dolores tot gaudia,” typical of “her great sorrow and her great reward.” The lily is tended by a beautiful child- angel, the guardian both of the flower and the girl who is herself, in Rossetti’s words, “An angel-watered lily, that near God Grows and is quiet.” Around the balcony trails a vine, which St. Joiachim is pruning above; significant of the True Vine which must hereafter suffer “the chastisement of our peace.” The dove that broods among its branches promises the Comforter that is to come. The realism of the picture is a realism of the mediæval kind, that takes possession of, instead of ignoring, the spiritual world, and overleaps the boundaries of visible things; depicting the invisible with the daring confidence of imaginative faith. The child-angel with her crimson pinions is as substantial on the canvas as the soberly-clad virgin at her symbolic task.