The fresh stanzas in question, which had already obtained the suffrages of his brother, of Mr. Bell Scott, and other qualified critics, were subsequently sent to me. They are as follows. After Keith of Keith, the father of Sister Helen’s sometime lover, has pleaded for his son in vain, the last suppliant to arrive is his son’s bride:
A lady here, by a dark steed brought,
Sister Helen,
So darkly clad I saw her not.
“See her now or never see aught,
Little brother!”
(O Mother, Mary Mother,
Whit more to see, between Hell and Heaven?)
“Her hood falls back, and the moon shines fair,
Sister Helen,
On the Lady of Ewern’s golden hair.”
“Blest hour of my power and her despair,
Little brother!”
(O Mother, Mary Mother,
Hour blest and bann’d, between Hell and Heaven!)
“Pale, pale her cheeks, that in pride did glow,
Sister Helen,
‘Neath the bridal-wreath three days ago.”
“One morn for pride and three days for woe,
Little brother!”
(O Mother, Mary Mother,
Three days, three nights, between Hell and Heaven!)
“Her clasp’d hands stretch from her bending head,
Sister Helen;
With the loud wind’s wail her sobs are wed.”
“What wedding-strains hath her bridal bed,
Little brother?”
(O Mother, Mary Mother,
What strain but death’s, between Hell and Heaven?)
“She may not speak, she sinks in a swoon,
Sister Helen,—
She lifts her lips and gasps on the moon.”
“Oh! might I but hear her soul’s blithe tune,
Little brother!”
(O Mother, Mary Mother,
Her woe’s dumb cry, between Hell and Heaven!)
“They’ve caught her to Westholm’s saddle-bow,
Sister Helen,
And her moonlit hair gleams white in its flow.”
“Let it turn whiter than winter snow,
Little brother!”
(O Mother, Mary Mother,
Woe-withered gold, between Hell and Heaven!)
Besides these there are two new stanzas, one going before, and the other following after, the six stanzas quoted, but as the scattered passages involve no farther incident, and are rather of interest as explaining and perfecting the idea here expressed, than valuable in themselves, I do not reprint them.
I think it must be allowed, by fit judges, that nothing more subtly conceived than this incident can be met with in English poetry, though something akin to it was projected by Coleridge in an episode of his contemplated Michael Scott. It is—in the full sense of an abused epithet—too weird to be called picturesque. But the crowning merit of the poem still lies, as I have said, in the domain of character. Through all the outbursts of her ignescent hate Sister Helen can never lose the ineradicable relics of her human love:
But he and I are sadder still.
As Rossetti from time to time made changes in his poems, he transcribed the amended verses in a copy of the Tauchnitz edition which he kept constantly by him. Upon reference to this little volume some days after his death, I discovered that he had prefaced Sister Helen with a note written in pencil, of which he had given me the substance in conversation about the time of the publication of the altered version, but which he abandoned while passing the book through the press. The note (evidently designed to precede the ballad) runs:
It is not unlikely that some may be offended at seeing the
additions made thus late to the ballad of S. H. My best
excuse is that I believe some will wonder with myself that
such a climax did not enter into the first conception.
At the foot of the poem this further note is written:
I wrote this ballad either in 1851 or early in 1852. It was
printed in a thing called The Düsseldorf Annual in (I
think) 1853—published in Germany. {*}
* In the same private copy of the Poems the following
explanatory passage was written over the much-discussed
sonnet, entitled, The Monochord:—“That sublimated mood of
the soul in which a separate essence of itself seems as it
were to oversoar and survey it.” Neither the style nor the
substance is characteristic of Rossetti, and though I do not
at the moment remember to have met with the passage
elsewhere, I doubt not it is a quotation. That quotation
marks are employed is not in itself evidence of much moment,
for Rossetti had Coleridge’s enjoyment of a literary
practical joke, and on one occasion prefixed to a story in
manuscript a long passage on noses purporting to be from
Tristram Shandy, but which is certainly not discoverable in
Sterne’s story.
The next letter I shall quote appears to explain itself: