Henry at this time had visited none of the great galleries and, except in a few reproductions, knew nothing of the great Italian masters. Therefore to him this picture was Italy, the Renaissance, and Catholicism, all concentrated into one enthralling canvas. But it was something greater than that. It was the terrible meeting of Youth and Love and Death in one tremendous moment of infinite loss. Infinite passion and infinite loss were here pictured, in a medium which combined all that was spiritual and all that was sensual in a harmony of beauty that was in the same moment delirium and peace. The irresistible cry of the colour to the senses, the spheral call of the theme and its agony to the soul. Beatrice dead, and Dante taken in a dream across the strewn poppies of her death-chamber, to look his last on the sleeping face, yet a little smiling in the after-glow of life; her soul already carried by angels far over the curved and fluted roofs of the Florentine houses, on its way to Paradise. Little Beatrice! Not till they meet again in Paradise shall he see again that holy face. In a dream of loss he gazes upon her, as the angels lift up the flower-garnished sheet; and not only her face, but every detail of that room of death is etched in tears upon his eyes,--the distant winding stair, the pallid death-lamps, the intruding light of day. All Passion and all Loss, all Youth, all Love, and all Death met together in an everlasting requiem of tragic colour. Henry sat long before this picture, enveloped, as it were, in its rich gloom, as the painted profundity of a church absorbs one in its depths. And with the impression of its solemn beauty was blent a despairing awe of the artist who, of a little coloured earth, had created such a masterpiece of vitality, thrown on to a thin screen of canvas so enduringly palpable, so sumptuous, and so poignantly dominating a reflection of his visions. What a passionate energy of beauty must have been in this man's soul; what a constant fury of meditation upon things divine!