She has reached, in this soliloquy, high ground: --

"If you loved only what were worth your love,
Love were clear gain, and wholly well for you:
Make the low nature better by your throes!
GIVE EARTH YOURSELF, GO UP FOR GAIN ABOVE!"

The versification of the first stanza of this section is very lovely,
and subtly responsive to the feeling. It exhibits
the completest inspiration. No mere metrical skill,
nor metrical sensibility even, could have produced it.

VIII. `Beside the Drawing-Board'. -- She is seated at
her drawing-board, and has turned from the poor coarse hand
of some little peasant girl she has called in as a model,
to work, but with poor success, after a clay cast of
a hand by Leonardo da Vinci, who

"Drew and learned and loved again,
While fast the happy moments flew,
Till beauty mounted into his brain
And on the finger which outvied
His art, he placed the ring that's there,
Still by fancy's eye descried,
In token of a marriage rare:
For him on earth his art's despair,
For him in heaven his soul's fit bride."

Her effort has taught her a wholesome lesson: "the worth of
flesh and blood at last!" There's something more than beauty in a hand.