—if thinner and smaller than his—is indubitably of his quality. She partakes by her own nature of his poetry, and would have been a poet even if Dante Gabriel Rossetti—being yet within himself what he was—had not written. Her poetry is, in a word, true poetry as gold leaf is gold; and sometimes her poems are as it were a mere film of poetry. This is true of the least admirable. In the best the unmistakable genius is not only present but important, even great. The poet of "The Convent Threshold" and "Up-Hill", for example, possesses her art in bulk and in condensation. These are brief poems, not little ones. In all the ranks of English poets there is surely not one who should not be glad to own the authorship of these. In "The Convent Threshold" there is, I think, more passion than in any other poem written by a woman. In this respect Christina Rossetti surpasses Elizabeth Barrett Browning, abundant as was the earlier poet, and few and reluctant as are here the words of the later. Here is no loud tone, but the whisper is close and terrible:
My words were slow, my tears were few;
But through the dark my silence spoke
Like thunder.
In "Up-Hill" there is not this urgency, but there is an equal power. One wonders whether the writer used a conscious art; much of her work, indeed, would be greatly the better for the friction of what D. G. Rossetti called "fundamental brain-work". Ease is good, but—if the paradox may be permitted—it must be ease at a certain cost. We are not surprised to hear that Christina Rossetti generally did not "work". Her poems often lack friction and weight, in consequence—friction of water and the oar, of air and the pinion, of thought and utterance. But now and again appears such a perfect piece of art as this poem, "Up-Hill"; we feel assured that no added "brainwork" could better it; but let us suppose that for once she did work, and so let criticism be justified. In "Goblin Market", on the other hand, ease is almost too conspicuous. But the freedom, the sweetness, and the freshness of the diction give to this poem a charm out of all measure. The story has not the reasonableness that we have the right to expect even from a fairy tale—or especially from a fairy tale. It would be doing a wrong to the pleasant phantasy to take it as an allegory—it is a story, not an allegory, but, like all authentic and honest fairy stories, it has a moral. The moral, however, is not intelligible; there is no perceptible reason why the goblin fruits should be deadly
