Then, in strange contrast to the wild scenery of the “black beach-side” in winter, we are shown the king and queen at home and keeping festival in the ill-fated house. The revelry of the halls, and the quiet joy of the hearthside, seem to avert for a time the coming woe. The king takes his harp, and sings to the queen an old love-song which he had written to her from prison long ago. But soon the boded fate falls on them unaware:

The entrance of the traitors, with “three hundred armèd men,” urges on the climax of the tragedy, until at last the king, discovered in the vault where he had hastily hidden:

The poem ends on a stern note of revenge and retribution, for, when the shameful deed is done, the queen keeps watch for a whole month beside the royal body; refusing to permit the burial till every one of the “murderous league” is put to a more terrible death than his lord.

There is, perhaps, a higher aspect to this passion of revenge, this fierce, imperative, triumphant sense of moral justice and supernatural retribution, than the somewhat partial and personal form which it assumes in mediæval poetry. Beneath the crude worship of arbitrary rule, behind the primitive conception of a Power that for ever vindicates the brave and puts the coward to confusion, lies the germ of that larger sense of divine vengeance which inspires and dominates all great tragedy. Something of this higher strain of feeling, this perception of the futility of merely human punishments and personal judgments, yet mingled with an instinctive acceptance of the human measures as the instruments of the divine, finds expression in the ballad of “Sister Helen.” The theme is based upon an ancient superstition to the effect that the death of a wrong-doer could be supernaturally procured by the injured person, by making a waxen image in his semblance and melting it for three days and nights before a fire. Sister Helen’s lover has been unfaithful to her, and in her anger against him she melts his image and keeps her dreadful watch relentlessly through the appointed hours, till the spell is completed, and her vengeance achieves its purpose in the death of her enemy. The poem is cast in the form of a dialogue between Sister Helen and her little brother, whose childish wonder at the mysterious process distracts him from his play; and he looks by turns at the fatal fire and at the wintry landscape without.

She bids the child watch from the balcony while she, within, proceeds with her incantation. Presently messengers ride hastily up the road, calling upon Helen, and pleading with her for mercy upon the dying man:

The contrast between the boy’s innocent, eager reports and observations, and Helen’s bitter, mocking answers, carries with it all the solemn terror of the Greek, and all the mystic naïveté of the mediæval world. At last the unfaithful lover’s aged father, and finally his three days’ bride, arrive to add their entreaties for his life, and the lady falls fainting at Helen’s inhospitable door.

It is not until too late that Helen learns that by seeking revenge for her own sorrow she has only doubled the sin. Absorbed in her own heart’s bitterness, she cannot know that the only anger worthy to play a part in the divine retribution is that which burns not so much for the sin against self as for the sin against love; which draws from the smart of personal injury a righteous indignation for others’ wrongs, a profound and passionate pity for fellow-victims of a too common evil, a too familiar grief. But in Helen’s vengeance lies her own despair:

The same thought of reciprocal sin, if we may so express it,—of the mutual responsibility of soul to soul,—that subtle action of the law of vicarious suffering by which every soul that falls short of its own highest and best inevitably drags down some other soul with it,—and the converse thought of individual redemption through mutual love: these afford the motive of “Rose Mary.”

The story turns upon the magic properties attributed to the Beryl-stone, into which the pure in heart might look and read the future, and be forewarned against all danger or calamity. Rose Mary’s mother bids her read the mysterious crystal on the eve of her lover’s journey to a distant shrine, whither he rides to seek shrift for his soul before the wedding-day. The mother fears some ambush of foes by the way, and trusts the Beryl to reveal where the danger lies. Unknown to her, however, Rose Mary and her lover have joined in sin; and their sin dispossesses the good spirits from the stone, and yields their place to evil spirits, so that the spell works by contraries, and the oracle speaks falsely; the lover is betrayed and killed on the road at night. But, unknown to Rose Mary, her lover has been faithless, even to her own love. The sin is threefold,—his with her, hers with him, and his with another; and Rose Mary learns that only by an heroic forgiveness and self-sacrifice which shall cost her very life can she atone for her own and his greater sin, win pardon for both, and cast out the evil tenants from the Beryl stone. The ballad moves throughout at Rossetti’s highest poetic level; its majestic rhythm sweeps from verse to verse in a torrent of swift, strong, lyric narrative, almost too cohesive for quotation, save in such descriptive stanzas as these:

But the imagery from first to last is of extraordinary tenderness and power; as, for instance, in describing the first lightning-flash before a storm,—

or when,—

and in the past night,—

It is impossible to adequately criticise “Rose Mary” without reference to the question already raised by Mr. Theodore Watts, as to whether in future editions of Rossetti’s poems the “Beryl Songs” should not be removed from their present places in the interludes of the poem and relegated to a note at the end. Writing on this point in the “Athenæum,” Mr. Watts said:—“The only case in which Rossetti’s changes were not improvements was the case of the changes in ‘Rose Mary,’ made, not after, but before, it appeared in type,—changes which can only be called lamentable. It had lain in its perfect form for years, and although it had been read in manuscript to scores of friends, no line in it had been altered. But when passing ‘Ballads and Sonnets’ through the press in 1881, at a time when he was out of health, Rossetti called to mind certain remarks upon a supposed lack of clarity in his work which had fallen not only from some critics but from certain friends; and in an evil moment it occurred to him that it would be a gain to ‘Rose Mary’ if the three parts were knit together by lyrics, and he set to work to write the ‘Beryl Songs’ which now appear in the ballad. The lyrics themselves are not good, for his endowment of metre was not equal to his other poetical gifts; but had they been as good as the lyrics in ‘Maud’ the disaster to the poem would have been none the less grievous. A friend whom at that time he consulted upon everything strongly fought against the introduction of these incongruities, but Rossetti was too ill to be persistently opposed, and only became conscious of the mistake when it was too late, the book being then before the public.”

It is obvious that the friend here alluded to is Mr. Watts himself, and it must be remembered that inasmuch as every line of the ballad without the lyrics had been familiar to him for years, his verdict can hardly be accepted as that of an unbiassed judge. It is, at all events, dubious whether any editor would now presume to disturb the sequence of the poem.

In one other ballad of kindred structure does Rossetti sustain a similar flow of exquisite imagination, in verbal beauty and subtlety of idiom hard to surpass in modern English verse. “The Bride’s Prelude” is indeed but a lovely fragment, a delicate vignette, a little character-sketch bathed in the warmest and finest of mediæval colouring; a prelude only, as it modestly claims to be; but, like Chopin’s preludes in music, so perfect in its limited range that the ear craves no further melody for a long while after its brief passion has sung itself to rest. It is a bride’s confession to her younger sister on her wedding morn; and, taking the form of a broken monologue interspersed with descriptive passages of the highest poetic order, its movement is more deliberate, its ornament more richly wrought, perhaps, than that of the more dramatic ballads. It might almost be said that nowhere else does Rossetti so oppress the reader with the actual feeling of the atmosphere in which the tale is told. The intense and sultry stillness of the chamber at mid-noon, where the two women sit together probing for the first and only time the one dire secret of the past, weighs upon us like veritable glare and burning silence, save for the bride’s difficult speech, and the shocked sister’s faint answers, and the keen, far-off sounds in the courtyard below, till the last word is said. Every minute detail of sight and sound heightens the effect of warmth and colour in contrast to the bare simplicity and hard tragedy of the narrative.

Such fragments afford the merest glimpses of the background, the pure, delicate, ultra-refined, and yet intensely naturalistic setting of the poem.

And indeed it is this highest refinement of naturalism, this perfect idealization of realities, this raising of the simplest and commonest accessories of life into universal beauty and significance, that remains Rossetti’s inmost, utmost charm. This it is that sends us back, again and again, from all the splendours of his maturity, from the vivid glories of the ballads and the long-drawn passion of the sonnets, to the primal sweetness and utter simplicity of “The Blessed Damozel;” the easiest to love, the hardest to place in a just order, amid all that came from the hand and heart of Rossetti.

Written in his nineteenth year (though re-touched with important improvements afterwards), while the ballads above referred to were the work of his maturity,—and as remote from them in spirit as in date, the poem is unique among unique poetry. “The Blessed Damozel” is no product of precocity. It has not the laboured archaism, the studied originality, which mark most of the travel-poems of 1849 (“Paris and Belgium,” “Antwerp and Bruges,” etc.). Superb as are the sonnets of that early period—such noble utterances as “The Staircase of Notre Dame,” “Place de la Bastille,” and “The Refusal of Aid between Nations” remaining unsurpassed by anything in the “House of Life” series—the irregular lyrics and blank-verse chronicles of those journeys are apt to keep us in mind of those etymological researches at the British Museum by which Rossetti is said to have stored his vocabulary with the purest Saxon, preparatory to ballad-work. “The Blessed Damozel,” on the contrary, is the most spontaneous and convincing of all his shorter poems. It seems to have sprung straight from the heart of the boy-poet in a sort of prophetic rapture, ere he knew the sorrow which he sang, and which his song should ease, as the most perfect art can sometimes ease, in other souls, for generations to come. Its strength lies in the very acme of tenderness; its source in the purest strain of common human feeling—the passionate, insatiable craving of the faithful heart for the continuity of life and love beyond the tomb, and the deep sense of the poverty of celestial compromises to satisfy the mourner on either side of the gulf that Death has set between. Here again is the true romantic note—the insistence on the joy and glory of the physical world, the delight in the earthly manifestations of affection, and the awed, plaintive conflict of impatience with resignation under the mystery of parting and transition to an unknown state. It is the same thought which an American poet has expressed in “Homesick in Heaven,”—the thought that the beloved departed must in some way share the sorrow of separation, and await the last reunion with scarcely less longing than theirs whom they have left behind. “The Blessed Damozel” is one whom Death has thus removed from her lover’s side, and she is pictured leaning out of Heaven, watching with tears and prayers for some sign of his coming. It is the lover himself who sees her thus, as in a dream, and tells us how,—

and how, on the mystic borderland between earth and heaven,—

The glories of the upper air have no charm for her until he shares them. Still gazing downward from “the ramparts of God’s house,” she sees—

she knows the angels who “sit circlewise”—

Her one prayer is for the old companionship, the old, simple, earthly happiness,—

It was not until many years later that “The Blessed Damozel” afforded the subject of the picture by which Rossetti is most popularly and superficially known to the outer world. It was his habit to inscribe his pictures with some original verse, generally in sonnet form; and some of his best descriptive sonnets, such as “Pandora,” “Fiametta,” “Found,” “Astarte Syriaca,” and “Mary Magdalene,” had such an origin. “The Blessed Damozel” is said to be only instance of a picture executed after instead of before the correlative poem.

Two important works stand yet apart, alike from what we have classed as introspective and personal poetry, and from the splendid ballads in which consists Rossetti’s most immortal contribution to English literature. “Jenny” and “A Last Confession” exemplify his use of the dramatic monologue, and alone among his compositions bear in a marked degree the influence of Browning. Especially is this influence notable in “A Last Confession.” The Italy of this wonderful fragment—placed by critics of authority in the front rank of Rossetti’s work—is, par excellence, Browning’s Italy, with all the intense humanness and distinction of character which dominates its furies and its loves, with all the Saxon intellect and reason stamped into and burning through the irresponsible passion of the South. Just as in his ballads and sonnets Rossetti grafted the clean-cut Saxon diction on to the long and languorous habit of the Latin tongue, so in “A Last Confession” does he graft vivid thought and piercing argument upon the deep pathos and terror of the theme. It is a death-bed story told in a priest’s ear; a story of passion and crime, and of a girl’s shallow laugh that drove her lover to kill her in a frenzy of despair. For he remembered how, awhile before,—

Somewhat akin in spirit (though less dramatic in treatment), in that it deals with the problem of sexual love in its darkest form, is the rhymed monologue entitled “Jenny;” and put into the mouth of one who has followed, half in pity, half in curiosity, a beautiful courtesan to her home, and sits with her in the luxurious chamber which is the purchase of her shame. The poem is to some extent in obvious relation to Rossetti’s long contemplated but never completed picture, “Found;” but the latter shows the end of poor Jenny in after years,—

whereas her visitor in the poem finds her in all her prime and pride, and asks,—

“Jenny,” perhaps, being cast in a more meditative form, lacks the poignancy and fervour of the utterance which comes, in “A Last Confession,” from the lips of the sinner himself instead of from the spectator merely, but it surpasses all contemporary studies of its kind in its bold and masterly handling of a difficult theme. Both, however, are distinct from the lyric poems in that their abruptness of movement and irregularity of structure are the abruptness and irregularity of quick dramatic thought, impatient of metrical elaboration, surcharging the poetic vehicle with subject matter; an effect which must not be confused with the ruggedness of the true ballad-form, whose broken music haunts the ear by its very waywardness and variety of rhythm, and gains its end by a studied artlessness the more exquisite for its apparent unconstraint. Nor is the effect of Rossetti’s universal preference for assonance over rhyme—a special characteristic of romantic poetry—identical in the ballads, sonnets and monologues just quoted. In the sonnets it relieves the rigid tension of the rhyme-system with an overtone of delicate caprice. In “Jenny” and “A Last Confession” it heightens the suggestion of impulse, and even haste of thought and emotion outrunning the metrical order which it chose. In the ballads, it is the result of the finest workmanship, not of accident or pressure of thought upon speech; it is the rich inlaying of the most highly-wrought woof of imaginative language with the brilliance of a perpetual surprise.

Rossetti is too near to us for a final estimate of his place among the century’s poets. Enough has been said to illustrate the range and consistency of his art, as a whole, and the intimate relation of his poetry to his painting. The dominant æsthetic motives are the same in “Dante’s Dream” and “The House of Life,” in “Dis Manibus” and “The King’s Tragedy,” in “Beata Beatrix” and “The Blessed Damozel.” He was the prophet of a natural idealism, based upon the frank acceptance and pursuit of the highest earthly good, subject only and absolutely to moral and spiritual law. He stood apart, as we have seen, from the intellectual struggles of his day. Philosophical controversies seldom troubled him. To theological speculation and historical discovery he was alike indifferent. But his isolation, his specialism even, are but evidences of the intensity of the new life to which he was awakened, and the reality of the visions which he saw. He sets before us in all its significance the problem of the dual possibilities of womanhood, by the simple, irresistible, pictorial statement of the contrast between the shameful actuality of “Found” and the noble ideal of “Sibylla Palmifera” and “Monna Vanna.” His lamentation for the manhood of his age is that,—

Such words are but the reiteration of that moral collectivism, that principle that “soul must somehow pay for soul,” which Rossetti maintains unbrokenly as an assumption needing neither emphasis nor reserve. The problem which his work leaves to the next generation lies in the application of that principle to social and national ideals. The task of the twentieth century will be to do for society what Rossetti has done for art,—to restore to it the dignity and glory of a free life, embracing all that nature has to give, under the dominion of associated reason, and conscience, and will. And when Rossetti’s genius shall have fulfilled its share in that unification of all knowledge to which the paths of science and poetry, art and scholarship, tend alike in the progress of time, England and Italy may join in worthier recognition of his life-work, whose face was set towards the final triumph of humanity—the reconciliation of the physical with the spiritual world.