Here, then, seems to be the truth of the matter: while Shakespeare had immense dramatic power, and immense meditative power with moderate lyric power, Tennyson had the lyric gift and the meditative gift without the dramatic. His poems are more full of reflections, meditations, and generalizations upon human life than any poet’s since Shakespeare. But then the moment

that Shakespeare descended from those heights whether his metaphysical imagination had borne him, he became, not a lyrist, as Tennyson became, but a dramatist. And this divides Shakespeare as far from Tennyson as it divides him from any other first-class writer. We admirers of Tennyson must content ourselves with this thought, that, wonderful as it is for Shakespeare to have combined great metaphysical power with supreme power as a dramatist, it is scarcely less wonderful for Tennyson to have combined great metaphysical power with the power of a supreme lyrist. Nay, is it not in a certain sense more wonderful for a lyrical impulse such as Tennyson’s to be found combined with a power of philosophical and metaphysical abstraction such as he shows in some of his poems?

IV. CHRISTINA GEORGINA ROSSETTI.
1830–1894.

I.

Although the noble poet and high-souled woman we have just lost had been ill and suffering from grievous pain for a long time, Death came at last with a soft hand which could but make him welcome. Since early in August, when she took to her bed, she was so extremely weak and otherwise ill that one scarcely expected her (at any time) to live more than a month or so, and for the last six weeks or thereabouts—say from the 15th of November—one expected her to die almost from day to day. My dear friend William Rossetti, who used to go to Torrington Square every afternoon, saw her on the afternoon of December 28th [1894]. He did not, he told me, much expect to find her alive in the afternoon of the 29th, and intended, therefore, to make his next call earlier. She died at half-past seven in the morning of the 29th, in the presence only of her faithful nurse Mrs. Read. It was through her sudden collapse that she missed at her side,

when she passed away, that brother whose whole life has been one of devotion to his family, and whose tireless affection for the last of them was one of the few links that bound Christina’s sympathy to the earth.

Her illness was of a most complicated kind: two years and a half ago she was operated on for cancer: functional malady of the heart, accompanied by dropsy in the left arm and hand, followed. Although on Friday the serious symptoms of her case became, as I have said, accentuated, she was throughout the day and night entirely conscious; and so peaceful and apparently so free from pain was she that neither the medical man nor the nurse supposed the end to be quite so near as it was. During all this time, up to the moment of actual dissolution, her lips seemed to be moving in prayer, but, of course, this with her was no uncommon sign: duty and prayer ordered her life. Her sufferings, I say, had been great, but they had been encountered by a fortitude that was greater still. Throughout all her life, indeed, she was the most notable example that our time has produced of the masterful power of man’s spiritual nature when at its highest to conquer in its warfare with earthly conditions, as her brother Gabriel’s life was the most notable example of the struggle of the spiritual nature with the bodily when the two are equally equipped. It is the conviction of one whose

high privilege it was to know her in many a passage of sorrow and trial that of all the poets who have lived and died within our time, Christina Rossetti must have had the noblest soul.

A certain irritability of temper, which was, perhaps, natural to her, had, when I first became acquainted with her family (about 1872), been overcome, or at least greatly chastened, by religion (which with her was a passion) and by a large acquaintance with grief, resulting in a long meditation over the mystery of pain. In wordly matters her generosity may be described as boundless; but perhaps it is not difficult for a poet to be generous in a worldly sense—to be free in parting with that which can be precious only to commonplace souls. What, however, is not so easy is for one holding such strong religious convictions as Christina Rossetti held to cherish such generous thoughts and feelings as were hers about those to whom her shibboleths meant nothing. This was what made her life so beautiful and such a blessing to all. The indurating effects of a selfish religiosity never withered her soul nor narrowed it. With her, indeed, religion was very love—