CHRISTINA ROSSETTI

Clothed with deep eyelids under and above—Yea, all thy beauty sickens me with love;

turns to the abominations of cruelty inFaustine; sings enchantingly of rest inThe Garden of Proserpine—

Here, where the world is quiet,Here, where all trouble seemsDead winds' and spent waves' riotIn doubtful dreams of dreams;I watch the green field growingFor reaping folk and sowing,For harvest-time and mowing,A sleepy world of streams.I am tired of tears and laughter,And men that laugh and weep,Of what may come hereafterFor men that sow to reap:I am weary of days and hours,Blown buds of barren flowers,Desires and dreams and powersAnd everything but sleep.

I am tired of tears and laughter,And men that laugh and weep,Of what may come hereafterFor men that sow to reap:I am weary of days and hours,Blown buds of barren flowers,Desires and dreams and powersAnd everything but sleep.

Now the acquiescence of weariness may have its inner compensations, even its sacred joys; but satiety with its torturing impotence and its hungering for forbidden fruit, is perhaps the most immoral word in the language; its unashamed display causes a kind of physical revulsion in any wholesome mind. My own feeling is that Swinburne, when he wrote these poems, had little knowledge or experience of the world, but, as sometimes happens with unbalanced natures, had sucked poison from his classical reading until his brain was in a kind of ferment. While in this state he fell under the spell of Baudelaire's deliberate perversion of the passions, with results which threw the innocent Philistines of England into a fine bewilderment of horror. That the poet's own heart was sound at core, and that his satiety was of the imagination and not of the body, would seem evident from the abruptness with which he passed, under a more wholesome stimulus, to a very different mood. Unfortunately, his maturer productions are lacking in the quality of human emotion which, however derived, pulsates in every line of thePoems and Ballads. There is a certain contagion in such a song asDolores. Taking all things into consideration, and with all one's repulsion for its substance, that poem is still the most effective of Swinburne's works, a magnificent lyric of blended emotion and music. It is a personification of the mood which produced the whole book, a cry ofthe tormented heart to our Lady of Satiety. It is filled with regret for a past of riotous pleasure; it pants with the lust of blood; it is gorgeous and heavily scented, and the rhythm of it is the swaying of bodies drunken with voluptuousness:

Fruits fail and love dies and time ranges;Thou art fed with perpetual breath,And alive after infinite changes,And fresh from the kisses of death;Of languors rekindled and rallied,Of barren delights and unclean,Things monstrous and fruitless, a pallidAnd poisonous queen.Could you hurt me, sweet lips, though I hurt you?Men touch them, and change in a triceThe lilies and languors of virtueFor the raptures and roses of vice;Those lie where thy foot on the floor is,These crown and caress thee and chain,O splendid and sterile Dolores,Our Lady of Pain.

Could you hurt me, sweet lips, though I hurt you?Men touch them, and change in a triceThe lilies and languors of virtueFor the raptures and roses of vice;Those lie where thy foot on the floor is,These crown and caress thee and chain,O splendid and sterile Dolores,Our Lady of Pain.

No doubt you will find here in germ all that was to mar the poet's later work. The rhythm lacks resistance; there is no definite vision evoked out of the rapid flux of images; the thought has no sure control over the words. Dolores is almost in the same breath the queen of languors and raptures; she is pallid and rosy, and a hostile criticism might find in the stanzas a succession of contradictions. Compare the poem with the fewlines inJennywhere Rossetti has expressed the same idea of man's inveterate lust:

Like a toad within a stoneSeated while Time crumbles on;Which sits there since the earth was cursedFor Man's transgression at the first—

and the difference is immediately apparent between that concentration of mind which sums up a thought in a single definite image and the fluctuating, impalpable vision of a poet carried away by the intoxication of words. All that is true, and yet, somehow, out of this poem ofDoloresthere does arise in the end a very real and memorable mood—real after the fashion of a mood excited by music rather than by painting or sculpture.

ThePoems and Balladsare splendid butmalsain; they are impressive and they have the strength, ambiguous it may be, of springing, directly or indirectly, from a genuine emotion of the body. The change on passing to theSongs Before Sunrise(published in 1871) is extraordinary. During the five years that elapsed between these volumes the two master passions of Swinburne's life laid hold on him with devastating effect—the passion of Liberty and the passion of the Sea. Henceforth the influence of Mazzini and Victor Hugo was to dominate him like an obsession. Now, heaven forbid that one should say or think anything in despite of Liberty! The mere name conjures up recollections of glory and pride, and in it the hopes of the future are involved. And yet the very magnitude of its content renders it peculiarly liable to misuse. To this man it means one thing, and to another another, and many might cry out in the end, as Brutus did over virtue: "Thou art a naked word, and I followed thee as though thou hadst been a substance!" Certainly nothing is more dangerous for a poet than to fall into the habit of mouthing those great words of liberty, virtue, patriotism, and the like, abstracted of very definite events and very precise imagery. To Swinburne the sound of liberty was a charm to cast him into a kind of frothing mania. It is true that one or two of the poems on this theme are lifted up with a superb and genuine lyric enthusiasm. TheEve of Revolution, for instance, with which theSongs Before Sunriseopen, rings with the stirring noise of trumpets:

I hear the midnight on the mountains cryWith many tongues of thunders, and I hearSound and resound the hollow shield of skyWith trumpet-throated winds that charge and cheer,And through the roar of the hours that fighting fly,Through flight and fight and all the fluctuant fear. . . .

But even here the reverberation of the words begins to conceal their meaning, and such abstractions as "the roar of the hours" lead into the worst of Swinburne's faults. Many of the longerhymns to liberty are nearly unreadable—at least if any one can endure to the end ofA Song of Italy, it is not I. And as one goes through these rhapsodies that came out year after year, one begins to feel that Swinburne's notion of liberty, when it is not empty of meaning, is something even worse. Too often it is Kipling's gross idolatry of England uttered in a kind of hysterical falsetto. It was not pretty at a time of estrangement between England and France to speak of "French hounds whose necks are aching Still from the chain they crave"; and one needed not to sympathise with the Boers in the South African war to feel something like disgust at Swinburne's abuse:

. . . the truth whose witness now draws nearTo scourge these dogs, agape with jaws afoam,Down out of life.

Probably the poet thought he was giving voice to a righteous and Miltonic indignation. The best criticism of such a sonnet is to turn to Milton's "Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints."

I have read somewhere a story of Swinburne's driving up late to a dinner and entering into a violent altercation with the cabman, to the vast amusement of the waiting guests within the house. That incorrigible wag and hanger-on of genius, Charles Augustus Howell, was of the party and acted as chorus to the dialogue outside."The poet's got the best of it, as usual," drawls the chorus. "He lives at the British Hotel in Cockspur Street, and never goes anywhere except in hansoms, which, whatever the distance, he invariably remunerates with one shilling. Consequently, when, as to-day, it's a case of two miles beyond the radius, there's the devil's own row; but in the matter of imprecation the poet is more than a match for cabby, who, after five minutes of it, gallops off as though he had been rated by Beelzebub himself." Really, 'tis a bit of gossip which may be taken as a comment on not a few of Swinburne's dithyrambs of liberty.

Not less noble in significance is that other word, the sea, which Swinburne now uses with endless reiteration. In his reverence for the weltering ocean ways, the bulwark of England's freedom, he does of course only follow the best traditions of English poetry fromBeowulftoThe Seven Seasof Kipling, who is again in this his imitator. Nor is it the world of water alone that dominates his imagination, but with it the winds and the panorama of the sky ever rolling above. Already in thePoems and Balladsthere is a hint of the sympathy between the poet and this realm of water and air. One of the finest passages inThe Triumph of Timeis that which begins:

I will go back to the great sweet mother,Mother and lover of men, the sea.I will go down to her, I and none other,Close with her, kiss her and mix her with me.

But for the most part the atmosphere of those poems was too sultry for the salt spray of ocean, and it is only with theSongs Before Sunrise, with the obsession of the idea of liberty, that we are carried to the wide sea "that makes immortal motion to and fro," and to the "shrill, fierce climes of inconsolable air." Thenceforth the reader is like some wave-tossed mariner who should take refuge in the cave of Æolus; at least he is forced to admire the genius that presides over the gusty concourse:

Hic vasto rex Æolus antroLuctantis ventos tempestatesque sonorasImperio premit ac vinclis et carcere frenat.Illi indignantes magno cum murmure montisCircum claustra fremunt.

The comparison is not so far-fetched as it might seem. There is a picture of Swinburne in theRecollectionsof the late Henry Treffry Dunn which almost personifies him as the storm-king:

It had been a very sultry day, and with the advancing twilight, heavy thunder-clouds were rolling up. The door opened and Swinburne entered. He appeared in an abstracted state, and for a few minutes sat silent. Soon, something I had said anent his last poem set his thoughts loose. Like the storm that had just broken, so he began in low tones to utter lines of poetry. As the storm increased, he got more and more excited and carried away by the impulse of his thoughts, bursting into a torrent of splendid verse that seemed like some grand airwith the distant peals of thunder as an intermittent accompaniment. And still the storm waxed more violent, and the vivid flashes of lightning became more frequent. But Swinburne seemed unconscious of it all, and whilst he paced up and down the room, pouring out bursts of passionate declamation, faint electric sparks played round the wavy masses of his luxuriant hair.... Amidst the rattle of the thunder he still continued to pour out his thoughts, his voice now sinking low and sad, now waxing louder as the storm listed.

The scattered poems in his later books that rise above thePoems and Balladswith a kind of grandiose suggestiveness are for the most part filled with echoes of wind and water. That haunting picture of crumbling desolation,A Forsaken Garden, lies "at the sea-down's edge between windward and lee." One of the few poems that seem to contain the cry of a real experience,At a Month's End, combines this aspect of nature admirably with human emotion:

Silent we went an hour together,Under grey skies by waters white.Our hearts were full of windy weather,Clouds and blown stars and broken light.

And the sensation left from a reading ofTristram of Lyonesseis of a vast phantasmagoria, in which the beating of waves and the noise of winds, the light of dawns breaking on the water, and the floating web of stars, are jumbled together in splendid but inextricable confusion. So the coming of love upon Iseult, as she sails overthe sea with Tristram, takes this magnificent comparison:

And as the august great blossom of the dawnBurst, and the full sun scarce from sea withdrawnSeemed on the fiery water a flower afloat,So as a fire the mighty morning smoteThroughout her, and incensed with the influent hourHer whole soul's one great mystical red flowerBurst. . . .

Further on the long confession of her passion at Tintagel, while Tristram has gone over-sea to that other Iseult, will be broken by those thundering couplets:

And swordlike was the sound of the iron wind,And as a breaking battle was the sea.

But even to allude to all the passages of this kind in the poem—the swimming of Tristram, his rowing, and the other scenes—would fill an essay. In the end it must be confessed that this monotony of tone grows fatiguing. The rhythmic grace of the metre is like a bubble blown into the air, floating before our eyes with gorgeous iridescence—but when it touches earth, it bursts. There lies the fatal weakness of all this frenzy over liberty and this hymeneal chanting of sky and ocean; it has no basis in the homely facts of the heart. Read the account of Tristram and Iseult in the wilderness bower; it is all very beautiful, but you wonder why it leaves you so cold. There is not a single detail to fix an image of the place in themind, not a word to denote that we are dealing with the passion of individual human beings. Then turn to the same episode in the old poem of Gottfried von Strassburg; read the scene where the forsaken King Mark, through a window of their forest grotto, beholds the lovers lying asleep with the sword of Tristram stretched between them:

He gazed on his heart's delight, Iseult, and deemed that never before had he seen her so fair. She lay sleeping, with a flush as of mingled roses on her cheek, and her red and glowing lips apart; a little heated by her morning wandering in the dewy meadow and by the spring. On her head was a chaplet woven of clover. A ray of sunlight from the little window fell upon her face, and as Mark looked upon her he longed to kiss her, for never had she seemed so fair and so lovable as now. And when he saw how the sunlight fell upon her he feared lest it harm her, or awaken her, so he took grass and leaves and flowers, and covered the window therewith, and spake a blessing on his love and commended her to God, and went his way, weeping.

It is good to walk with head lifted to the stars, but it is good also to have the feet well planted on earth. If another example of Swinburne's abstraction from human interest were desired, one might take that rhapsody of the wind-beaten waters and "land that is lonelier than ruin," calledBy the North Sea. The picture of desolate and barren waste is one of the most powerful creations in his later works (it was published in1880), yet there is still something wanting to stamp the impression into the mind. You turn from it, perhaps, to Browning's similar description inChilde Rolandand the reason is at once clear. You come upon the line: "One stiff, blind horse, his every bone a-stare," and pause. There is in Swinburne's poem no single touch which arrests the attention in this way, concentrating the effect, as it were, to a burning point, and bringing out the symbolic relation to human life. Yet I cannot pass from this subject without noticing what may appear a paradoxical phase of Swinburne's character. Only when he lowers his gaze from the furies and ecstasies of man's ambition to the instinctive ways of little children does his art become purely human. It would be easy to select a full dozen of the poems dealing with child-life and the tender love inspired by a child that touch the heart with their pure and chastened beauty. I should feel that an essential element of his art were left unremarked if I failed to quote some such examples as these two roundels onFirst Footstepsand aA Baby's Death:

A little way, more soft and sweetThan fields aflower with May,A babe's feet, venturing, scarce completeA little way.Eyes full of dawning dayLook up for mother's eyes to meet,Too blithe for song to say.Glad as the golden spring to greetIts first live leaflet's play,Love, laughing, leads the little feetA little way.

A little way, more soft and sweetThan fields aflower with May,A babe's feet, venturing, scarce completeA little way.

Eyes full of dawning dayLook up for mother's eyes to meet,Too blithe for song to say.

Glad as the golden spring to greetIts first live leaflet's play,Love, laughing, leads the little feetA little way.

The little feet that never trodEarth, never strayed in field or street,What hand leads upward back to GodThe little feet?A rose in June's most honied heat,When life makes keen the kindling sod,Was not more soft and warm and sweet.Their pilgrimage's periodA few swift moons have seen completeSince mother's hands first clasped and shodThe little feet.

The little feet that never trodEarth, never strayed in field or street,What hand leads upward back to GodThe little feet?

A rose in June's most honied heat,When life makes keen the kindling sod,Was not more soft and warm and sweet.

Their pilgrimage's periodA few swift moons have seen completeSince mother's hands first clasped and shodThe little feet.

Despite the artificiality of the French form and a kind of revolving dizziness of movement, one catches in these child-lyrics a simplicity of feeling not unlike Longfellow's cry, "O little feet! that such long years." Swinburne himself might not relish the comparison, which is none the less just.

It is not often safe to attempt to sum up a large body of work in a phrase, yet with Swinburne we shall scarcely go astray if we seek such a characterisation in the one wordmotion. Both the beauty and the fault of his extraordinary rhythms are exposed in that term, and certainly his first claim to originality lies in his rhythmical innovations. There had been nothing in English comparable to the steady swell, like the waves of asubsiding sea, in the lines ofAtalantaand thePoems and Ballads. They brought a new sensuous pleasure into our poetry. But with time this cadenced movement developed into a kind of giddy race which too often left the reader belated and breathless. Little tricks of composition, such as a repeated cæsura after the seventh syllable of the pentameter, were employed to heighten the speed. Moreover, the longer lines in many of the poems are not organic, but consist of two or more short lines huddled together, the effect being to eliminate the natural resting-places afforded by the sense. And occasionally his metre is merely wanton. He uses one verse, for example, which with its combination of gliding motion and internal jingles is uncommonly irritating:

Hills andvalleyswhere Aprilrallieshis radiant squadron of flowers andbirds,Steep strangebeachesand lustrousreachesof fluctuant sea that the landengirds,Fields anddownsthat the sunrisecrownswith life diviner than lives inwords,—

a page of this sets the nerves all a-jangle.

And if Swinburne is one of the obscurest of English poets, it is due in large part to this same element of motion. A poem may move swiftly and still be perfectly easy to follow, so long as the thought is simple and concrete; witness the works of Longfellow. Or, on the other hand, the thought may be tortuous and still invite reflection,so long as the metre forces a continual pause in the reading; witness Browning. Now, no one will accuse Swinburne of overloading his pages with thought; it is not there the obscurity lies. The difficulty is with the number and the peculiarly vague quality of his metaphors. Let me illustrate what I mean by this vagueness. I open one of the volumes at random and my eye rests on this line inA Channel Passage:

As a tune that is played by the fingers of death on the keys of life or of sleep.

If one were reading the poem and tried to evoke this image before his mind, he would certainly need to pause for a moment. Or I open toWalter Savage Landorand find this passage marked:

High from his throne in heaven Simonides,Crowned with mild aureole of memorial tearsThat the everlasting sun of all time seesAll golden, molten from the forge of years.

The sentiment is simple enough, and it might be sufficient to feel the force of this in a general way, were it not that the metaphorical expression almost compels one to pause and form an image of the whole before proceeding. Such an image is, no doubt, possible; but the mingling of abstract and concrete terms makes the act of visualisation slow and painful. At the same time the rhythm is swift and continuous, so that any pause in the reading demands a deliberate effort of the will.The result is a form of obscurity which in many of the poems is almost prohibitive for an indolent man—and are not the best readers always a little indolent? And there is another habit—trick, one might say—which increases this vagueness of metaphor in a curious manner. Constantly he uses a word in its ordinary, direct sense and then repeats it as an abstract personification. I find an example to hand in the stanzas writtenAt a Dog's Grave:

The shadow shed round those we love shines brightAslove'sown face.

It is only a mannerism such as another, but it recurs with sufficient frequency to have an appreciable effect on the mind.

Indeed, if this vagueness of imagery were only an occasional appearance, the difficulty would be slight. As a matter of fact, no inconsiderable portion of Swinburne's work is made up of a stream of half-visualised abstractions that crowd upon one another with the motion of clouds driven below the moon. He is more like Walt Whitman in this respect than any other poet in the language. Whitman is concrete and human and very earthly, but, with this difference, there is in both writers the same thronging procession of images which flit by without allowing the reader to concentrate his attention upon a single impression; they are both poets of vast and confused motion. Swinburne is notable for his wantof humour, yet he is keen enough to see how close this flux of high-sounding words lies to the absurd. In the present collected edition of his poems he has includedThe Heptalogia, or Seven against Sense, a series of parodies which does not spare his own mannerisms. Some scandalised Philistines, I doubt, might even need to be told thatNephelidiawas a parody:

Nay, for the nick of the tick of the time is a tremulous touch on the temples of terror,Strained as the sinews yet strenuous with strife of the dead who is dumb as the dust-heaps of death:Surely no soul is it, sweet as the spasm of erotic emotional exquisite error,Bathed in the balms of beatified bliss, beatific itself by beatitude's breath.

Pretty much all the traits of Swinburne's style are there—the long breathless lines with their flowing dactyls or anapæsts, the unabashed alliteration, the stream of half-visualised images, the trick of following an epithet with its own abstract substantive, the sense of motion, and above all the accumulation of words. Of this last trait of verbosity I have said nothing, for the reason that it is too notorious to need mentioning. It may not, however, be superfluous to point out a little more precisely the special form his tautology assumes. He is never more graphic and nearer to nature than when he describes the ecstasy of swimming at sea. He is himself passionately fond of the exercise, and once at least was almost drowned inthe Channel. Let us take, then, a stanza fromA Swimmer's Dream:

All the strength of the waves that perishSwells beneath me and laughs and sighs,Sighs for love of the life they cherish,Laughs to know that it lives and dies,Dies for joy of its life, and livesThrilled with joy that its brief death gives—Death whose laugh or whose breath forgivesChange that bids it subside and rise.

Pass the fault of beginning with the abstraction "strength"—the first two lines are graphic and reproduce a real sensation; the second two lines are an explanatory repetition; the last four dissolve both image and emotion into a flood of words. It is the common procedure in the later poems; it renders the regular dramas (with the exception of the earlierChastelard) almost intolerably tedious.

And what is the impression of the man himself that remains after living with his works for several months? The frankness with which he parodies his own eccentricities might seem to indicate a becoming modesty, and yet that is scarcely the word that rises first to the lips. Indeed, when I read in the very opening of the Dedicatory Epistle that precedes the present edition of his poems such a statement as that "he finds nothing that he could wish to cancel, to alter, or to unsay, in any page he has ever laid before his reader," I was prepared for a character quite the contrary of modest, and as I turned pageafter page, there became fixed in my mind a feeling that I should hesitate to call personal repulsion—a feeling of annoyance at least, for which no explanation was present. Only when I reachedAtalanta in Calydon, in the fourth volume, did the reason of this become evident. That poem, exquisite in many ways, is filled with talk of time and gods, of love and hate, of life and death, of all high-sounding words that lend gravity to poetry, and yet in the end it is itself light and not grave. The very needless reiteration of these words, their bandying from verse to verse, deprives them of impressiveness. No, a true poet who respects the sacredness of noble ideas, who cherishes some awe for the mysteries, does not buffet them about as a shuttlecock; he uses them sparingly and only when the thought rises of necessity to those heights. There is a lack of emotional breeding, almost an indecency, in Swinburne's easy familiarity with these great things of the spirit.

And this judgment is confirmed by turning to his prose. I trust it is not prejudice, but after a while the vociferous and endless praise of Victor Hugo in his essays had a curious effect upon me. I began to ask: Is the critic really thinking of Hugo alone, or is half of this frenzied adulation meant for his own artistic methods? "Malignity and meanness, platitude and perversity, decrepitude of cankered intelligence and desperation of universal rancor," he exclaims against Sainte-Beuve; and over the other critics of his idol he cries out, "The lazy malignity of envious dullness is as false and fatuous as it is common and easy." Can one avoid the surmise that he has more than Hugo to avenge in such tirades? It is the same with every one who is opposed to his own notions of art. Of Walt Whitman it is: "The dirty, clumsy paws of a harper whose plectrum is a muckrake." Of a French classicist: "It is the business of a Nisard to pass judgment and to bray." And of those who intimate (he is ostensibly defending Rossetti) that beauty and power of expression can accord with emptiness or sterility of matter: "This flattering unction the very foolishest of malignants will hardly in this case be able to lay upon the corrosive sore which he calls his soul." Sometimes, I admit, this manner of invective rises to a sublimity of fury that sounds like nothing so much as a combination of Carlyle and Shelley. For example: "The affection was never so serious as to make it possible for the most malignant imbecile to compare or to confound him [Jowett] with such morally and spiritually typical and unmistakable apes of the Dead Sea as Mark Pattison, or such renascent blossoms of the Italian renascence as the Platonic amorist of blue-breeched gondoliers who is now in Aretino's bosom." It's not criticism; it's not fair to Mark Pattison or to John Addington Symonds, but it is sublime. It is a storm of wind only, but it leaves a devastated track.

Enough has been said to indicate the trait of character that prevails through these pages of eulogy and vituperation. It is not nice to apply so crass a word asconceitto one who undoubtedly belongs to the immortals of our pantheon, yet the expression forces itself upon me. Listen to another of his outbursts, this time against Matthew Arnold: "His inveterate and invincible Philistinism, his full community of spirit and faith, in certain things of import, with the vulgarest English mind!" Does not the quality begin to define itself more exactly? There is a phrase they use in France,épater le bourgeois, of those artistic souls who contrast themselves by a kind of ineffable contempt with commonplace humanity, and who take pleasure in tweaking the nose, so to speak, of the amiable plebeian. Have a care, gentlemen! The Philistine has a curious trick of revenging himself in the long run. For my own part, when it comes to a breach between the poetical and the prosaic, I take my place submissively with the latter. There is at least a humble safety in retaining one's pleasure in certain things of import with the vulgarest English mind, and if it were obligatory to choose between them (as, happily, it is not) I would surrender the wind-swept rhapsodies of Swinburne for the homely conversation of Whittier.

Probably the first impression one gets from reading theComplete Poetical Worksof Christina Rossetti, now collected and edited by her brother, Mr. W. M. Rossetti,[6]is that she wrote altogether too much, and that it was a doubtful service to her memory to preserve so many poems purely private in their nature. The editor, one thinks, might well have shown himself more "reverent of her strange simplicity." For page after page we are in the society of a spirit always refined and exquisite in sentiment, but without any guiding and restraining artistic impulse; she never drew to the shutters of her soul, but lay open to every wandering breath of heaven. In comparison with the works of the more creative poets her song is like the continuous lisping of an æolian harp beside the music elicited by cunning fingers. And then, suddenly, out of this sweet monotony, moved by some stronger, clearer breeze of inspiration, there sounds a strain of wonderful beauty and flawless perfection, unmatched in its own kind in English letters. An anonymouspurveyor of anecdotes has recently told how one of these more exquisite songs called forth the enthusiasm of Swinburne. It was just after the publication ofGoblin Market and Other Poems, and in a little company of friends that erratic poet and critic started to read aloud from the volume. Turning first to the devotional paraphrase which begins with "Passing away, saith the World, passing away," he chanted the lines in his own emphatic manner, then laid the book down with a vehement gesture. Presently he took it up again, and a second time read the poem through, even more impressively. "By God!" he exclaimed at the end, "that's one of the finest things ever written!"

Passing away, saith the World, passing away:Chances, beauty, and youth, sapped day by day,Thy life never continueth in one stay.Is the eye waxen dim, is the dark hair changing to grey,That hath won neither laurel nor bay?I shall clothe myself in Spring and bud in May:Thou, root-stricken, shalt not rebuild thy decayOn my bosom for aye.Then I answered: Yea.Passing away, saith my Soul, passing away:With its burden of fear and hope, of labour and play,Hearken what the past doth witness and say:Rust in thy gold, a moth is in thine array,A canker is in thy bud, thy leaf must decay.At midnight, at cockcrow, at morning, one certain dayLo the Bridegroom shall come and shall not delay;Watch thou and pray.Then I answered: Yea.Passing away, saith my God, passing away:Winter passeth after the long delay:New grapes on the vine, new figs on the tender spray,Turtle calleth turtle in Heaven's May.Though I tarry, wait for Me, trust Me, watch and pray:Arise, come away, night is past and lo it is day:My love, My sister, My spouse, thou shalt hear Me say.Then I answered: Yea.

Passing away, saith my Soul, passing away:With its burden of fear and hope, of labour and play,Hearken what the past doth witness and say:Rust in thy gold, a moth is in thine array,A canker is in thy bud, thy leaf must decay.At midnight, at cockcrow, at morning, one certain dayLo the Bridegroom shall come and shall not delay;Watch thou and pray.Then I answered: Yea.

Passing away, saith my God, passing away:Winter passeth after the long delay:New grapes on the vine, new figs on the tender spray,Turtle calleth turtle in Heaven's May.Though I tarry, wait for Me, trust Me, watch and pray:Arise, come away, night is past and lo it is day:My love, My sister, My spouse, thou shalt hear Me say.Then I answered: Yea.

And Swinburne, somewhat contrary to his wont, was right. Purer inspiration, less troubled by worldly motives, than these verses cannot be found. Nor would it be difficult to discover in their brief compass most of the qualities that lend distinction to Christina Rossetti's work. Even her monotone, which after long continuation becomes monotony, affects one here as a subtle device heightening the note of subdued fervour and religious resignation; the repetition of the rhyming vowel creates the feeling of a secret expectancy cherished through the weariness of a frustrate life. If there is any excuse for publishing the many poems that express the mere unlifted, unvaried prayer of her heart, it is because their monotony may prepare the mind for the strange artifice of this solemn chant. But such a preparation demands more patience than a poet may justly claim from the ordinary reader. Better would be a volume of selections from her works, including a number of poems of this character. It would stand, in its own way, supreme in English literature,—as pure and fine an expression of the feminine genius as the world has yet heard.

It is, indeed, as the flower of strictly feminine genius that Christina Rossetti should be read and judged. She is one of a group of women who brought this new note into Victorian poetry,—Louisa Shore, Jean Ingelow, rarely Mrs. Browning, and, I may add, Mrs. Meynell. She is like them, but of a higher, finer strain than they (ϰαλαὶ δέ τε πᾶσαι), and I always think of her as of her brother's Blessed Damozel, circled with a company of singers, yet holding herself aloof in chosen loneliness of passion. She, too, has not quite ceased to yearn toward earth:

And still she bowed herself and stoopedOut of the circling charm;Until her bosom must have madeThe bar she leaned on warm,And the lilies lay as if asleepAlong her bended arm.

I have likened the artlessness of much of her writing to the sweet monotony of an æolian harp; the comparison returns as expressing also the purely feminine spirit of her inspiration. There is in her a passive surrender to the powers of life, a religious acquiescence, which wavers between a plaintive pathos and a sublime exultation of faith. The great world, with its harsh indifference for the weak, passes over her as a ruinous gale rushes over a sequestered wood-flower; she bows herhead, humbled but not broken, nor ever forgetful of her gentle mission,—

And strong in patient weakness till the end.

She bends to the storm, yet no one, not the great mystics nor the greater poets who cry out upon the sound and fury of life, is more constantly impressed by the vanity and fleeting insignificance of the blustering power, or more persistently looks for consolation and joy from another source. But there is a difference. Read the masculine poets who have heard this mystic call of the spirit, and you feel yourself in the presence of a strong will that has grasped the world, and, finding it insufficient, deliberately casts it away; and there is no room for pathetic regret in their ruthless determination to renounce. But this womanly poet does not properly renounce at all, she passively allows the world to glide away from her. The strength of her genius is endurance:

She stands there like a beacon through the night,A pale clear beacon where the storm-drift is—She stands alone, a wonder deathly-white:She stands there patient, nerved with inner might,Indomitable in her feebleness,Her face and will athirst against the light.

It is characteristic of her feminine disposition that the loss of the world should have come to her first of all in the personal relation of love. And here we must signalise the chief service of theeditor toward his sister. It was generally known in a vague way, indeed it was easy to surmise as much from her published work, that Christina Rossetti bore with her always the sadness of unfulfilled affection. In the introductory Memoir her brother has now given a sufficiently detailed account of this matter to remove all ambiguity. I am not one to wish that the reserves and secret emotions of an author should be displayed for the mere gratification of the curious; but in this case the revelation would seem to be justified as a needed explanation of poems which she herself was willing to publish. Twice, it appears, she gave her love, and both times drew back in a kind of tremulous awe from the last step. The first affair began in 1848, before she was eighteen, and ran its course in about two years. The man was one James Collinson, an artist of mediocre talent who had connected himself with the Pre-raphaelite Brotherhood. He was originally a Protestant, but had become a Roman Catholic. Then, as Christina refused to ally herself to one of that faith, he compliantly abandoned Rome for the Church of England. His conscience, however, which seems from all accounts to have been of a flabby consistency, troubled him in the new faith, and he soon reverted to Catholicism. Christina then drew back from him finally. It is not so easy to understand why she refused the second suitor, with whom she became intimately acquainted about 1860, and whom she loved inher own retiring fashion until the day of her death. This was Charles Bagot Cayley, a brother of the famous Cambridge mathematician, himself a scholar and in a small way a poet. Some idea of the man may be obtained from a notice of him written by Mr. W. M. Rossetti for theAthenæumafter his death. "A more complete specimen than Mr. Charles Cayley," says Mr. Rossetti, "of the abstracted scholar in appearance and manner—the scholar who constantly lives an inward and unmaterial life, faintly perceptive of external facts and appearances—could hardly be conceived. He united great sweetness to great simplicity of character, and was not less polite than unworldly." One might suppose that such a temperament was peculiarly fitted to join with that of the secluded poetess, and so, to judge from her many love poems, it actually was. Of her own heart or of his there seems to have been no doubt in her mind. Even in her most rapturous visions of heaven, like the yearning cry of the Blessed Damozel, the memory of that stilled passion often breaks out:

How should I rest in Paradise,Or sit on steps of heaven alone?If Saints and Angels spoke of love,Should I not answer from my throne,Have pity upon me, ye my friends,For I have heard the sound thereof?

She seems even not to have been unfamiliar with the hope of joy, and I would persuade myself thather best-known lyric of gladness, "My heart is like a singing-bird," was inspired by the early dawning of this passion. But the hope and the joy soon passed away and left her only the solemn refrain of acquiescence: "Then I answered: Yea." Her brother can give no sufficient explanation of this refusal on her part to accept the happiness almost within her hand, though he hints at lack of religious sympathy between the two. Some inner necessity of sorrow and resignation, one almost thinks, drew her back in both cases, some perception that the real treasure of her heart lay not in this world:

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