"I have a room whereinto no one enters
Save I myself alone:
There sits a blessed memory on a throne,
There my life centres.
While winter comes and goes-Oh! tedious comer!
And while its nip-wind blows;
While bloom the bloodless lily and warm rose
Of lavish summer;
If any should force entrance he might see there
One buried, yet not dead,
Before whose face I no more bow my head
Or (sic) bend my knee there;
But often in my worn life's autumn weather
I watch there with clear eyes,
And think how it will be in Paradise
When we're together."
Here is one of a trite topic—nearly all the good things in this book are on themes as old as moonlight—but with a certain mournful richness, like autumn woods:
"Life is not sweet. One day it will be sweet
To shut our eyes and die:
Nor feel the wild flowers blow, nor birds dart by
With flitting butterfly;
Nor grass grow long above our head and feet,
Nor hear the happy lark that soars sky high,
Nor sigh that spring is fleet, and summer fleet,
Nor mark the waxing wheat,
Nor know who sits in our accustomed seat.
Life is not good. One day it will be good
To die, then live again;
To sleep meanwhile: so not to feel the wane
Of shrunk leaves dropping in the wood,
Nor hear the foamy lashing of the main,
Nor mark the blackened bean-fields, nor where stood
Rich ranks of golden grain,
Only dead refuse stubble clothe the plain:
Asleep from risk, asleep from pain."
This is one of her best poems in point of style. The "waxing wheat" we are just a shade doubtful about; but the mellowness of the diction is much to our liking, and it is unmarred by any of the breaks of strange ill taste that flaw nearly all these poems. If not poetry nor novelty, at least we find it sadly agreeable verse.
Our professor of rhetoric once astonished his class by a heterodoxy, which we have since thought sound as well as neat. "Walter Scott," said he, "writes verse as well as a man can write and not be a poet." We are sorry we cannot say as much for Miss Rossetti; she has considerable faults as a writer. The chief of these has elsewhere been carped at—her laborious style of' being simple. The true simplicity of poets is not a masterly artifice, but a natural and invariable product where high poetic and expressive powers combine. The best thought is always simple, because, it deals only with the essences of things: the best expression—the machinery of thought—is simple, just as the best of any other machinery is. But the grand, obvious fact to the many is that the best poetry is admired for being simple. Writing for this market, Miss Rossetti and unnumbered others have more or less successfully attempted to achieve this crowning beauty of style by various processes that are to the inspiration of' real simplicity as patent medicines to vigorous vitality. Almost all hold the immutable conviction that Saxon words are an infallible recipe for the indispensable brevity. Accordingly the usual process is by an elaborate application of' Saxon—if rather recondite or even verging on the obsolete, so much the more efficacious—to a few random ideas. Of course, with such painful workmanship, one must not expect the best material. Original, or even well [{841}] defined thought seldom thrives in the same hot-house with this super-smoothness. But without pursuing the process into results at large, we have only to take Matthew Arnold's distinction as to Miss Rossetti:—she tries hard for simplicité, and achieves simplesse. But there is no such thing as hard work without its fruits. This straining after effect crops painfully out in a peculiar baldness and childishness of phrase that is almost original. The woman who can claim The Lambs of Grasmere as her own has not lived in vain. This production, with its pathetic episode of the maternal
"Teapots for the bleating mouths,
Instead of nature's nourishment,"
has already been noticed in print, and duly expanded many visages. We pause rapt in admiration of the deep intuition that could select for song the incident of feeding a sheep with a teapot. It carries us back, in spirit, to the subtle humor and delicate irony of Peter Bell, and We are Seven. What a burst of tenderness ought we to expect, if Miss Rossetti should ever chance to see stable-boys give a horse a bolus! . . . . . We shall not cite examples of this simplesse; those who like it will find it purer and more concentrated in the bard of Rydal; or if they must have it, they are safe in opening this book almost anywhere.
Of the individual poems, the two longest, The Goblin Market and The Prince's Progress, are rivals for the distinction of being the worst. All the best poems are short, excepting one, Under the Rose. The story is of an illegitimate daughter, whose noble mother takes her to live with herself at the inevitable Hall, without acknowledging her. There are able touches of nature in the portrayal of the lonely, loving, outlawed, noble heart, that, knowing her mother's secret, resolves never to betray it, even to her. In the following passage, the girl, alone at the castle, as her mother's favorite maid, describes her inner life:
"Now sometimes in a dream,
My heart goes out of me
To build and scheme,
Till I sob after things that seem
So pleasant in a dream:
A home such as I see,
My blessed neighbors live in;
With father and with mother,
All proud of one another,
Named by one common name;
From baby in the bud
To full-blown workman father; It's little short of Heaven.
. . . . .
Of course the servants sneer
Behind my back at me;
Of course the village girls,
Who envy me my curls
And gowns and idleness,
Take comfort in a jeer;
Of course the ladies guess
Just so much of my history
As points the emphatic stress
With which they laud my Lady;
The gentlemen who catch
A casual glimpse of me,
And turn again to see
Their valets, on the watch
To speak a word with me;—
All know, and sting me wild;
Till I am almost ready
To wish that I were dead,—
No faces more to see,
No more words to be said;
My mother safe at last.
Disburdened of her child
And the past past."
The Convent Threshold—the last words of a contrite novice to her lover—has touches of power. There is an unusual force about some parts, as for example here: