Pulter invites her children, in her second emblem, to follow her ascension of what she calls “blessed steps,” which she identifies with a sequence of virtuous abstractions starting (appropriately, at the bottom) with “Humility” and ending with “Charity.” In his own verse, George Herbert invoked a similar trope of blessed steps and may have influenced not only Pulter’s thematic concerns but also the stair-step visualization emulated in her emblem’s marginal notes. As the illustration below demonstrates, in “The Church Floor,” Herbert aligns each step up “the gentle rising” to the quire (the part of the church where the choir performs) with a specific virtue. Herbert uses the indentation of verse lines to visualize these steps and aid his didactic preoccupation. Pulter similarly employs a visual representation of the “steps” she and, she hopes, her children will “mount” (lines 25, 19) by listing virtues in the margin of the manuscript.

George Herbert, The Temple ([1633], 56), RB 61378, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.