ORIGINAL.
CHRISTINA G. ROSSETTI.
[Footnote 241]
[Footnote 241: Poems, by Christina G. Rossetti. Boston: Roberts, Brothers. 1866.]
We had heard some little of Miss Rossetti, in a superficial way, before reading this her book. Various verses of hers had met our eye in print, and if they themselves left no very decided mark upon the memory, yet we had the firm impression, somehow, that she was one more of the rising school of poets. Accordingly we thought it well to take a retrospect of a few post-Tennysonians—Mrs. Browning, Owen Meredith, Robert Buchanan, Jean Ingelow, and so on—supposed fellow disciples—so as to be tolerably sure of ranking the new-comer rightly. On reading this volume, we find our labor lost through an entirely unforeseen circumstance. Unfortunately, it does not appear that Miss Rossetti is a poetess at all. That there are people who think her one, we infer from the fact that this is in some sort a third edition; why they think so, we are at a loss to see. The book will not answer a single test of poetry. The authoress's best claim to consideration is, that she sincerely, persistently, fervently means to be a poetess. Only the most Demosthenian resolve could have kept her writing in face of her many inherent unfitnesses. For imagination, she offers fantasy; for sentiment, sentimentality; for aspiration, ambition; for originality and thought, little or nothing; for melody, fantastic janglings of words; and these, with all tenderness for the ill-starred intensity of purpose that could fetch them so far, are no more poetry than the industrious Virginian colonists' shiploads of mica were gold.
The first cursory impression of this book would be, we think, that its cardinal axiom was "Poetry is versified plaintiveness." The amount of melancholy is simply overwhelming. There is a forty-twilight power of sombreness everywhere. Now, criticism has taken principles, not statistics, to be its province; but we could not resist the temptation to take a little measurement of all this mournfulness. Limiting our census strictly to the utterly irretrievable and totally wrecked poems, with not a glimmering of reassurance, we found no less than forty-nine sadnesses, all the way from shadow to unutterable blackness—"nfernam Iumbram noctemque perennem." There is the sadness decadent, the sadness senescent, the sadness bereft, the sadness despondent, the sadness weary, the sadness despairing, the sadness simply sad, the grand sadness ineffable, and above and pervading all, the sadness rhapsodical. They are all there. Old Burton will rise from his grave, if there be any virtue in Pythagoreanism, to anatomize these poems. What it is all about is strictly a secret, and laudably well kept; which gives to the various sorrows that touching effect peculiar to the wailings of unseen babies from unascertained ailments. So sustained is the grief, indeed, that after protracted poring, we hang in abeyance between two conclusions. One is that Miss Rossetti, outside of print, is the merriest mortal in the United Kingdom; the other, that her health is worse than precarious. That one or the other must be right, we know. There is no other horn to the dilemma, no tertiary quiddity, no choice, no middle ground between hilarity and dyspepsia.
Perhaps the reader can judge for himself from these lines, which are a not unfair sample:
"MAY.
I cannot tell you how it was;
But this I know: it came to pass
Upon a bright and breezy day,
When May was young; ah, pleasant May!
As yet the poppies were not born,
Between the blades of tender corn;
The last eggs had not hatched as yet,
Nor any bird foregone its mate.
I cannot tell you what it was;
But this I know: it did put pass.
It passed away with sunny May,
With all sweet things it passed away,
And left me old and cold and gray."
We may be very unappreciative, and probably are sinfully suspicious, but the above sounded at the first and sounds at the present reading, exactly like a riddle. We certainly don't know how it was nor what it was. There is a shadowy clue in its passing away with sunny May, but we are far too cautious to hazard a guess. If there be any conundrum intended, all we have to say is, we give it up.
We do but justice, however, in saying that amid much mere lugubriousness there is some real and respectable sadness. The following, in spite of' the queer English in its first lines, sounds genuine, and is moreover, for a rarity of rarities, in well-chosen and not ill-managed metre: