A thing I might myself have thought as well,
But would not say it, for it was not worth!”
Ask: “Is this truth?” For is it still to tell
That be the theme a point or the whole earth,
Truth is a circle, perfect, great or small?
Patmore’s The Seasons, Christina Rossetti’s Dream Land, Dante’s My Sister’s Sleep and Hand and Soul, Woolner’s My Beautiful Lady and Of My Lady in Death, Tupper’s The Subject in Art, William Rossetti’s Her First Season, and a long review of Clough’s Bothic of Toper-na-fuosich make up the first number. In the others are The Blessed Damozel, Christina’s An End and A Pause of Thought, Patmore’s Stars and Moon, John Orchard’s Dialogue on Art, and many other things of value, concluding with a review of Browning’s Christmas Eve and Easter Day, in which William Rossetti establishes with elaborate seriousness, through six pages of solemn and awesome sentences, that “Browning’s style is copious and certainly not other than appropriate”; that if you will understand him, you shall.
All this came to our mind the other day when some one accused us of being “juvenile.” What hideous stigma was thereby put upon us? The only grievous thing about juvenility is its unwillingness to be frank; it usually tries to appear very, very old and very, very wise. The Germ was quite frankly young; otherwise it could not have been so full of death poetry, for it is youth’s most natural affectation to steep itself in death. But The Germ might have been even more “juvenile” and so avoided some of the heavy, sumptuous sentences in that Browning review. It would have gained in readableness without any possible sacrifice of beauty or truth. In their poetry the Pre-Raphaelites were as simple and spontaneous as children; in their criticism they were rhetorical. Our sympathy is somehow very strongly with the spontaneity—whatever dark juvenile crimes it may be guilty of—in the eyes of those who merely look but do not see.
Rebellion
George Soule
Sing me no song of the wind and rain—