Roundhead soldiers in a wood; and of W.L. Windus’s “Outlaw,” similarly hurt and tended in an equally sylvan scene. But in none of these cases is the spiritual struggle of the ministering visitant portrayed with an intensity at all to be compared with the exalted passion that dominates “The Merciful Knight.” Such are the principal stages of thought and feeling through which the Pre-Raphaelite painters pass—in no given order indeed, but with a wholly intelligible sequence of ideas—from the first impulses of romance—the apprehension of the supernatural, of the mystery of fate, of the moral order, and the divine possibilities of human life—to that highest idealism of romantic love, and of its power over death and destiny, which we find in their interpretation of Keats’s “Eve of St. Agnes,” and supremely in Rossetti’s imaginative treatment of the love of Dante for Beatrice. Something of the mystical glory of a pure and lofty passion, and of the power of perfect womanhood to raise, as in Keats’s poem, the earthlier elements of love into the very essence of worship, appears in Hunt’s early picture, “The Flight of Madeline and Porphyro,” and in the triptych of “The Eve of St. Agnes,” by Arthur Hughes; but its most complete expression, apart from Rossetti, must be sought in Millais’s “St. Agnes’ Eve,”—in the opinion of many, the greatest of his paintings; the consummation of that wonderful aftermath of poetic genius which followed a full decade later than what seemed to be his prime. For the beauty of Madeline, by a significant paradox, is that she is not beautiful. Her attitude is daringly simple; she is standing by her bed in the moonlight, half-unclad; her gown has slipped from her waist to her feet, and the keen, silver-blue rays creep softly about her slender figure and shed a faint light into the foreground of the deep-shadowed room. Yet with all the mellow tenderness of colour and atmosphere that wrap her round, there is in no detail of her form or gesture, or the aspect of her averted face, the slightest appeal to the sensuous possibilities of the scene. There is about her an extraordinary spiritual loveliness, born of the utter artlessness and sincerity of her pose and the girlish innocence of her look, as if the absolute naturalness of the situation were its own protection from all thought of ill. Everything around her speaks of her simple holiness and purity, and seals, as it were, the pledge of the answering purity of Porphyro’s love.