are hardly the produce of the rushy glen where the leering goblin merchants tramped and whisked up and down.
This leads me to speak of another region which Christina Rossetti trode with an eager familiarity—the land of dreams and visions. With the exception of Coleridge, who, in his three great poems, moved in that difficult and turbid air with so proud a freedom, it may be said that no English poet except Christina, her brother, and James Thomson, have ever successfully attempted such work. Mr. Yeats, it is true, of younger writers, has passed beyond the threshold of that eerie and unsubstantial land; but with him it is the melancholy Celtic twilight, the home of old earth-spirits, neither high nor hopeful, but with a bewildered sadness, as of discrowned kings and discredited magicians. To a characteristically English poet such as Wordsworth, such a region, as he betrays in the memorable sonnet, "The world is too much with us," was a place of desperate soulless horror. But Christina Rossetti, in "Goblin Market," and the "Ballad of Boding," as her brother in "Rose Mary," and "Sister Helen," passed successfully along the narrow road of allegory. In English hands such subjects are apt to pass with fatal swiftness into the ludicrous and the grotesque. Witness the merry horned demons of monkish MSS., and the cheerful oddities, so far aloof from fantastic horror, of our English gurgoyles and stall-work, the straddling and padding forms of Bunyan. What is needed is a sort of twilight of the soul, a simple directness such as children value, a sense of grave verisimilitude, hopelessly alien from the business-like Puritan mind.
Then, too, there is the singular creation of the modern ballad, initiated by Coleridge, and carried to supreme perfection by D. G. Rossetti, and in a less degree by his sister; that vague, dream-laden writing which, using old forms of austere simplicity, charges them with a whole world of modern sicknesses and degenerate dreams. It was this that Matthew Arnold went so passionately in search of in a poem like the "Scholar Gipsy," and yet could contrive no inner picture of the haunted wanderer's thoughts, but only touch in the external aspects of the phantom traveller, as seen unexpectedly by human toilers and pleasure-seekers engaged in homely exercises.
But Miss Rossetti, in such poems as "Brandons Both," and in a supreme degree in the exquisite ballad of "Noble Sisters," which we will quote in extenso, laid a secure hand on the precise medium required:—
NOBLE SISTERS
"Now did you mark a falcon,
Sister dear, sister dear,
Flying toward my window
In the morning cool and clear?
With jingling bells about her neck.
But what beneath her wing?
It may have been a ribbon,
Or it may have been a ring."
"I marked a falcon swooping
At the break of day;
And for your love, my sister dove,
I 'frayed the thief away."
"Or did you spy a ruddy hound,
Sister fair and tall,
Went snuffing round my garden bound,
Or crouched by my bower wall.
With a silken leash about his neck;
But in his mouth may be
A chain of gold and silver links,
Or a letter writ to me?"
"I heard a hound, highborn sister,
Stood baying at the moon;
I rose and drove him from your wall,
Lest you should wake too soon."
"Or did you meet a pretty page,
Sat swinging on the gate;
Sat whistling, whistling like a bird—
Or may be slept too late—
With eaglets broidered on his cap,
And eaglets on his glove?
If you had turned his pockets out,
You had found some pledge of love."
"I met him at this daybreak,
Scarce the east was red;
Lest the creaking gate should anger you,
I packed him off to bed."
"Oh patience, sister. Did you see
A young man tall and strong,
Swift-footed to uphold the right
And to uproot the wrong,
Come home across the desolate sea
To woo me for his wife?
And in his heart my heart is locked,
And in his life my life."
"I met a nameless man, sister.
Who loitered round our door;
I said: 'Her husband loves her much.
And yet she loves him more.'"
"Fie, sister, fie; a wicked lie,
A lie, a wicked lie.
I have none other love but him,
Nor will have till I die;
And you have turned him from our door,
And stabbed him with a lie.
I will go seek him through the world
In sorrow till I die."
"Go seek in sorrow, sister,
And find in sorrow too;
If thus you shame our father's name,
My curse go forth with you."
But such writings, exquisite as they are, are but the outworks and bastions of the inner life. One could almost wish that Christina Rossetti were further removed by time and space, and were passed beyond the region of letters, biographies, and personal memoirs, which before long will possibly begin "to tear her heart before the crowd." Nowadays, in the excessive zest for personal information, which received such shameful incentives from Carlyle, and still more shameless encouragement from his biographers, we may thank God, as Tennyson did, that there are yet poets of whom we know as little as we know of Shakespeare, about whom even the utmost diligence of researchers has disinterred but a handful of sordid and humiliating facts.
But Miss Rossetti's poems are so passionately human a document as to set one tracing by a sort of inevitable instinct the secrets of a buoyant and tender soul, sharpened and refined by blow after blow of harsh discipline. The same autobiographical savour haunts all her work as haunted the eager dramas of Charlotte Brontë, the first of women-writers of every age. Step by step it reveals itself, the sad and stately development of this august soul. The first tremulous outlook upon the intolerable loveliness of life, the fantastic melancholy of youth, the deep desire of love, the drawing nearer of the veiled star, disappointment, disillusionment, the over-powering rush of the melancholy, that had waited like a beast in ambush for moments of lassitude and reaction. Then was the crisis: would the wounded life creep on on a broken wing, or would the spiritual vitality suffice to fill the intolerable void? It did suffice; and the strength of the character that thus found repose was attested by the rational and temperate form of faith that ministered to the failing soul.
At such a moment the sensuous spirit is apt to slide into the luxurious self-surrender that Roman Catholicism permits. To me, indeed, it is a matter of profound surprise that Miss Rossetti did not fall into this temptation; but just as she had, with instinctive moderation, chosen the cool and temperate landscape of her adopted country, so the National Church of England, with its decorous moderation, its liberal generosity, its refined ardour, was the chosen home of this austere spirit. The other danger to be feared was that of a bitter renunciation of old delights, a sojourn in the wilderness of some arid and fantastic pietism. An elder sister of Miss Rossetti's indeed sought the elaborate seclusion of a religious house; and had D. G. Rossetti—to use the uncouth Puritan phrase—"found religion," there is no doubt that he too would have reverted to the Church of his fathers. But Miss Rossetti became, as Mr. Edmund Gosse has, in a penetrating criticism in the Century Magazine (June 1893) pointed out, the poetess, not of Protestantism, but of Anglicanism.
We must retrace our steps for a moment, and touch first on Miss Rossetti's love lyrics. Very occasionally she allowed herself, in the early days, to speak of love with the generous abandon of an ardent spirit, as in the exquisite lyric where she still lingers in the pictorial splendours of the pre-Raphaelite school.