Old Familiar Faces

by Theodore Watts-Dunton

THE END OF THE FIRST PART.

My happy dream is finished with,
My dream in which alone I lived so long.
My heart slept—woe is me, it wakeneth;
Was weak—I thought it strong.

Oh, weary wakening from a life-true dream!
Oh pleasant dream from which I wake in pain!
I rested all my trust on things that seem,
And all my trust is vain.

I must pull down my palace that I built,
Dig up the pleasure-gardens of my soul;
Must change my laughter to sad tears for guilt,
My freedom to control.

Now all the cherished secrets of my heart,
Now all my hidden hopes, are turned to sin.
Part of my life is dead, part sick, and part
Is all on fire within.

The fruitless thought of what I might have been,
Haunting me ever, will not let me rest.
A cold North wind has withered all my green,
My sun is in the West.

But, where my palace stood, with the same stone
I will uprear a shady hermitage;
And there my spirit shall keep house alone,
Accomplishing its age.

There other garden beds shall lie around,
Full of sweet-briar and incense-bearing thyme:
There I will sit, and listen for the sound
Of the last lingering chime.

It was the beauty of her life that made her personal influence so great, and upon no one was that influence exercised with more strength than upon her illustrious brother Gabriel, who in many ways was so much unlike her. In spite of his deep religious instinct and his intense sympathy with mysticism, Gabriel remained what is called a free thinker in the true meaning of that much-abused phrase. In religion as in politics he thought for himself, and yet when Mr. W. M. Rossetti affirms that the poet was never drawn towards free thinking women, he says what is perfectly true. And this arose from the extraordinary influence, scarcely recognized by himself, that the beauty of Christina’s life and her religious system had upon him.

This, of course, is not the place in which to say much about him; nor need much at any time and in any place be said, for has he not

written his own biography—depicted himself more faithfully than Lockhart could depict Walter Scott, more faithfully than Boswell could depict Dr. Johnson? Has he not done this in the immortal sonnet-sequence called ‘The House of Life’? What poet of the nineteenth century do we know so intimately as we know the author of ‘The House of Life’?

Christina Rossetti’s peculiar form of the Christian sentiment she inherited from her mother, the sweetness of whose nature was never disturbed by that exercise of the egoism of the artist in which Christina indulged and without whose influence it is difficult to imagine what the Rossetti family would have been. The father was a poet and a mystic of the cryptographic kind, and it is by no means unlikely that had he studied Shakespeare as he studied Dante he would in these days have been a disciple of the Baconians, and, of course, his influence on the family in the matter of literary activity and of mysticism must have been very great. And yet all that is noblest in Christina’s poetry, an ever-present sense of the beauty and power of goodness, must surely have come from the mother, from whom also came that other charm of Christina’s, to which Gabriel was peculiarly sensitive, her youthfulness of temperament.

Among the many differences which exist between the sexes this might, perhaps, be

mentioned, that while it is beautiful for a man to grow old—grow old with the passage of years—a woman to retain her charm must always remain young. In a deep sense woman may be said to have but one paramount charm, youth, and when this is gone all is gone. The youthfulness of the body, of course, soon vanishes, but with any woman who can really win and retain the love of man this is not nearly so important as at first it seems. It is the youthfulness of the soul that, in the truly adorable woman, is invulnerable. It is one of the deep misfortunes of the very poor of cities that as a rule the terrible struggle with the wolf at the door is apt to sour the nature of women and turn them into crones at the age when in the more fortunate classes the true beauty of woman often begins; and even where the environment is not that of poverty, but of straitened means, it is as a rule impossible for a woman to retain this youthfulness.

In the case of the Rossettis, in the early period they were in a position of straitened means. Nor was this all: the children, Gabriel alone excepted, felt themselves to be by nationality aliens. Christina, though she made only one visit to Italy, felt herself to be an Italian, and would smile when any one talked to her of the John Bullism of her brother Gabriel, and yet, with these powerful causes working against their natural elasticity of temperament, both

mother and daughter retained that juvenility which Gabriel Rossetti felt to be so refreshing. So strong was it in the mother that it had a strange effect upon the mere physique, and at eighty the expression in the eyes, and, indeed, on the face throughout, retained so much of the winsomeness of youth that she was more beautiful than most young women:—