of pure white peace and serene communion under an auroral sky of mystery, then surely is it well to spend an hour with Father Hilary, and know "the worth" of our world at length: Oh, God! my world in thee!" Do we wonder that "the Blessed Damozel" was written? Yet, even when thus abandoning himself to theology, and letting her be to him all she could, Rosetti did not forsake his grasp on present fact. All along we are made to feel that the poem is the record of a dream, a dream woven of rare interpretations of ordinary sense stimuli: yellow autumn leaves flitting down in showers; a glimpse of wheat sheaves in some harvested field; and bird-song like a handful of pearls flung into crystal glasses; a glint of blue, sudden and unexpected; and the quick drip of drops from mist-moistened branches in the very gust of wind that betrayed the clear sky one moment overhead.* But in Rose Mary we have Rosetti's masterpiece. Who does not forget his own agnosticism, be it never so belligerent, as he reads-if he reads at all-this marvelous poem? One is drenched, I will admit, in a heavy atmosphere of over-faith, but is not that * Are not Mr. Max Nordau's comments on this poem a most delightful piece of learned ignorance and willful stupidity? (Cf. Degeneration, pages 87-91.) Why did this doctor, enamored of criticism, insane and foaming at the mouth, not acquaint himself more thoroughly with our poet? If he had, how he would have relished Rosetti's Blake-cult! And how, had he read the Essay on Blake, or the Essay on Victor Hugo, would it have fared with poor Mr. Swinburne! Verse is licensed by all to be a little wild and fantastic-but prose? What a horrible case of degeneration could not have been made out! wholesomer than the cruel thin, cold air, which the lungs refuse, on peaks of barren knowledge? After In the great sonnet series, together with some poems not in sonnet form, we find a tale of life and love, of faith and doubt. You object that it is a river losing itself in Sahara sands? True. But why? For the very reason that makes it so real. all, we are not otherwise now than in the flesh. To anticipate the time when we shall be bodiless is absurd. The relations of bodies serve as a continuous orchestral accompaniment to the broken melody of soul. Certain forms, tones, color combinations, postures, are indissolubly tangled with our loves and hates. Her body he knows not from her soul. He can not. That her soul lives he knows, because her body testifies it to his senses. In absence, it is memory and imagination at his bidding that furnish her soul with a body. And memory and imagination do not always do so well. Let the lovers sit down in the same room, each busy at a different task, and he feels all the while her presence. Separate them many miles, and only at happy intervals is she felt to be near. Let death intervene, and then surely only at very rare moments does his soul cry: "Your heart is never away, But ever with mine, forever, * Parted Presence, St. 6. At other moments, far commoner, comes the aching consciousness: "She is hence and I am here."* At other moments, in fact, it needs an argument to prove to himself that he does not forget: "Didst ever say, 'Lo, I forget?' the Such thought was to remember yet: It is this mystery of death which he compares to "Heath, Forest and water, far and wide, In limpid starlight glorified," ‡ which imparts so peculiar a sense of bewilderment to many of the sonnets. "Cling heart to heart, nor of this hour demand, Whether in very truth, when we are dead, Our hearts shall wake to know Love's golden head Or but discern, through night's unfeatured scope, "O love, my love! if I no more should see Nor image of thine eyes in any spring, How then should sound upon Life's darkening slope, "A wayfarer by barren ways and chill, Steep ways and weary, without her thou art, A Death-parting. † Soothsay, St. 14. | Sonnet 43. ? Sonnet 4. Portrait, St. 9. ¶ Sonnet 53. What an interpretation of the heart by an intuitive recognition of its moods in nature! Nature is not personified, and yet she is full of man. What poems in single words! What richness of music! What a startling observation of details so meaningless that they overwhelm one with half-forgotten associated meanings! "Not I myself know all my love for thee, How should I reach so far who can not weigh As doors and windows bared to some loud sea, Lash deaf mine ears and blind my face with spray; And shall my sense pierce love, the last relay And ultimate outpost of eternity?" * How blessed a thing that he did not torture his heart to explain the "why" of love! His very skepticism delivered him from such aimless, love-killing self-scrutiny. The loud sea of mystery on which death and birth open; those "ultimate things unuttered" behind the "shaken shadow intolerable" which serves them as "frail screen;"† the impenetrable "distances beyond the utmost bound of thought;" all these are God to him. And when he tries to name Him he utters "only the one Hope's one name in a whisper the readers of his poems must not be allowed to hear from him, lest they conjure with it, and wreck for him his wonder-world beyond the grave! 5. MATTHEW ARNOLD. Such kinship as Rossetti bears to the Coleridge of Christabel and of the Ancient Mariner, Matthew Ar * Sonnet 34. † Sonnet 97. Sonnet 73. nold bears to Wordsworth. Some of us had strange experiences when first we read Arnold. Did we approach him as we did Swinburne? We did not need to find in Arnold's letters the following assurance that he took his poetic calling seriously: "To attain or approach perfection in the region of thought and feeling, and to unite this with perfection of form, demands not merely an effort, a labor, but an actual tearing of oneself to pieces which one does not readily consent to (although one is sometimes forced to it) unless one can devote one's whole life to poetry."* That he sought to attain perfection of thought and feeling, and to marry this perfection to that of form, we feel in almost every poem. But the man has something disappointing in him. He is "unstable as water." The Moon rightly says to him: "Hast thou then still the old unquiet breast, Which neither deadens into rest, Nor ever feels the fiery glow That whirls the spirit from itself away, But fluctuates to and fro, Never by passion quite possessed And never quite benumbed by the world's sway?"† What a master at diagnosis! What an unsatisfactory prescriber! No sooner do we think we shall have at length the solution of our woes-it is at his tongue's end-than it eludes him and us, and he gives us instead some beautiful bit of landscape painting, some snatch of rare music remembered just in * Letters of Matthew Arnold, Vol. I, p. 72. †“A Summer Night," p. 279 (Macmillan's 1 vol edition). |