queenly in her looks, such as poets and painters have given her. The artists of the Middle Ages are largely responsible, not for the deification, but for the idealization, of the Virgin Mary. Divesting ourselves of these misleading impressions of medieval art, we picture not a wondrous beauty of form or face, but that beauty of the soul which shines through the countenance, showing itself in deep, tender, thoughtful eyes; the spiritual blending with the womanly, producing a kind of illumination, such as is seen only in the faces of saintly women. Without ascribing to her supernatural graces, we can well believe that there was something sweetly spiritual in her face, as became the descendant of a long line of mothers in Israel — devout women who had been waiting for the kingdom of God. Her mind was filled with sacred thoughts, "waiting," like Simeon, "for the consolation of Israel," and so full of these great hopes, that she was, though "troubled," not affrighted by the apparition of the angel. For such interior grace and purity she was chosen to be the mother of our Lord. And when beneath this lowly roof came that blissful hour, there overspread her countenance an added grace which it never had before. There was no halo round her head, but in her face shone the light of love. Her eyes perhaps were downcast, as if she felt, at that moment more than ever, how unworthy she was of the honor which was given her, and yet there was the inexpressible beaming of a mother's joy, as she took her first-born child — and such a child — within her arms. Such is the image we gather from the few faint touches in the New Testament — that of a simple woman, pure, unworldly; with a woman's capacity for suffering, as well as for devotion; not self-denying so much as self-forgetting; never thinking of herself, but with her whole existence wrapped up in that of her Son, to whom she clung, not only with natural
