Can life now take? She cries in her locked heart,—
‘Leave me—I do not know you—go away!’”[[11]]
It might almost be the same sad girl that stands at “The Gate of Memory,” watching a group of young and innocent maidens at play beside a well.
“She leaned herself against the wall
And longed for drink to slake her thirst
And memory at once.”
A more original and striking composition is “Hesterna Rosa”—“Yesterday’s Rose.” All the weird realism of Rossetti’s most mediæval manner pervades this painfully impressive design;—mediæval in spirit, and yet almost Hogarthian in its bold handling of human degradation and debauchery. The motive is taken from “Elena’s Song” in Sir Henry Taylor’s “Philip van Artevelde,” Part II., Act v.:
“Quoth tongue of neither maid nor wife
To heart of neither wife nor maid,
‘Lead we not here a jolly life,