Here is the very highest form of mystical love; for love is identified with God, and the reunion in heaven is a blending, not with a mere fellow soul, but with the Supreme Being. By "silence" here you must understand rest, heavenly peace. The closing stanza of the poem contains one of the most beautiful images of comparison ever made in any language. Here with her face doth memory sit Meanwhile, and wait the day's decline, Till other eyes shall look from it, Eyes of the spirit's Palestine, Even than the old gaze tenderer: While hopes and aims long lost with her Stand round her image side by side, Like tombs of pilgrims that have died About the Holy Sepulchre. What the poet means is this: "Now I sit, remembering the past, and look at her face in the picture, as long as the light of day remains. Presently, with twilight the stars will shine out like eyes in heaven--heaven which is my Holy Land, because she is there. Those stars will then seem to me even as her eyes, but more beautiful, more loving than the living eyes. The hopes and the projects which I used to entertain for her sake, and which died when she died--they come back to mind, but like the graves ranged around the grave of Christ at Jerusalem." The reference is of course to the great pilgrimages of the Middle Ages made to Jerusalem. More than the artist speaks here; and if there be not strong faith, there is at least beautiful hope. A more tender feeling could not be combined with a greater pathos; but Rossetti often reaches the very same supreme quality of sentiment, even in poems of a character closely allied to romance. We can take "The Staff and Scrip" as an example of mediæval story of the highest emotional quality. "Who rules these lands?" the Pilgrim said. "Stranger, Queen Blanchelys." "And who has thus harried them?" he said. "It was Duke Luke did this; God's ban be his!" The Pilgrim said, "Where is your house? I'll rest there, with your will." "You've but to climb these blackened boughs And you'll see it over the hill, For it burns still." "Which road, to seek your Queen?" said he. "Nay, nay, but with some wound You'll fly back hither, it may be, And by your blood i' the ground My place be found." "Friend, stay in peace. God keep your head, And mine, where I will go; For He is here and there," he said. He passed the hillside, slow, And stood below.