[28] Gâteau des Rois, “Twelfth-Cake.”
[29] To offer two pure [grains of] incense: innocence and happiness.
[30] The purest Italian, “Lingua Toscana in bocca Romana.”
[31] What, then, are days, that they should deserve our tears?
[32] “Thou lovedst me amongst all, and the gifts that men desire—this unknown power accorded to the lyre, this mysterious art of pleasing by the voice—if I am said to own it, Lord, I owe it all to thee.”
CHRISTINA ROSSETTI’S POEMS.[33]
Christina Rossetti is, we believe, the queen of the Preraphaelite school, the literary department of that school at least, in England. To those interested in Preraphaelites and Preraphaelitism the present volume, which seems to be the first American edition of this lady’s poems, will prove a great attraction. The school in art and literature represented under this name, however, has as yet made small progress among ourselves. It will doubtless be attributed to our barbarism, but that is an accusation to which we are growing accustomed, and which we can very complacently bear. The members of the school we know: Ruskin, Madox Brown, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, all the other Rossettis, Swinburne, Morris, and the rest; but we know no school. It has not yet won enough pupils to establish itself among us, and we at best regard it as a fashion that will pass away as have so many others: the low shirt-collar, flowing locks, melancholy visage, and aspect of general disgust with which, for instance, the imitators of Byron, in all save his intellect, were wont to afflict us in the earlier portion of the present century. The fact is, our English friends have a way of running into these fashions that is perplexing, and that would seem to indicate an inability on their part to judge for themselves of literary or artistic merit. To-day Pope and Addison are the fashion; to-morrow,
Byron and Jeffreys; then Wordsworth and Carlyle; then Tennyson and Macaulay; and now Rossetti, Swinburne, Morris, and their kin, if they are not in the ascendant, gain a school, succeed in making a great deal of noise about themselves, and in having a great deal of noise made about them. It is the same with tailoring in days when your tailor, like your cook, is an “artist.”