Whose unstirred lips are music's visible tone;
Whose eyes the sungates of the soul unbar,
Being of its furthest fires oracular,
The evident heart of all life sown and mown.

Thus also Mrs. Browning says of her earlier ideal loves,

Their shining fronts,
Their songs, their splendors (better, yet the same,
As river water hallowed into founts)
Met in thee.
[Footnote: _Sonnets of the Portuguese_, XXVI.]

Reflection of this sort almost inevitably leads the poet to the
conviction that his real love is eternal beauty. Such is the progress of
Rossetti's thought in _Heart's Hope_:

Lady, I fain would tell how evermore
Thy soul I know not from thy body nor
Thee from myself, neither our love from God.

The whole of Diotima's theory of the ascent to ideal beauty is here
implicit in three lines. In the same spirit Christina Rossetti
identifies her lover with her Christian faith:

Yea, as I apprehend it, love is such
I cannot love you if I love not Him,
I cannot love Him if I love not you.
[Footnote: _Monna Innominata_, VI. See also Robert Bridges, _The of
Love_ (a sonnet sequence).]