the bedding of the dearest Dead, who did but leave this earth that
He might manifest Himself more completely.

Underneath, with a leap across the centuries, is Rossetti's
picture; Dante this time the onlooker, Beatrice, in her pale
beauty, the death-kissed one. The same idea under different
representations; the one conceived in childlike simplicity, the
other recalling, even in the photograph, its wealth of colour and
imagining; the one a world-wide ideal, the other an individual
expression of it.

Beatrice was to Dante the inclusion of belief. She was more to him
than he himself knew, far more to him after her death than before.
And, therefore, the analogy between the pictures has at core a
common reality. "It is expedient for you that I go away," is
constantly being said to us as we cling earthlike to the outward
expression, rather than to the inward manifestation--and blessed
are those who hear and understand, for it is spoken only to such as
have been with Him from the beginning. The eternal mysteries come
into time for us individually under widely differing forms. The
tiny child mothers its doll, croons to it, spends herself upon it,
why she cannot tell you; and we who are here in our extreme youth,
never to be men and women grown in this world, nurse our ideal,
exchange it, refashion it, call it by many names; and at last in
here or hereafter we find in its naked truth the Child in the
manger, even as the Wise Men found Him when they came from the East
to seek a great King. There is but one necessary condition of this
finding; we must follow the particular manifestation of light given
us, never resting until it rests--over the place of the Child. And
there is but one insurmountable hindrance, the extinction of or