Page:Poems by Christina Rossetti with illustrations by Florence Harrison.djvu/18

at one time and restorative at another. The weakness of motive is partly carried by the poet's good faith, partly by the Pre-Raphaelite grace—"quaintness" we would not call it, remembering how the word followed Rossetti to and fro, and how much it harassed his heart; but perhaps it may be applied with less danger of offence to the slighter verse of his sister.

There is nothing of London in her poems, hut there seems to have been little of the country in her life. It is rather in her beautiful devotional prose than in her poetry that we find traces of a close observant love of nature. Of her reading we know little. We get a glimpse of Jeremy Taylor among her books, of Donne, Herbert, Metastasio, Tasso, Ariosto, Petrarch, and, of course, Dante; of a few modern and contemporary authors, such as Canon Dixon, Alfred Gurney, Mrs. Gaskell, Mrs. Browning, L.E.L., Adelaide Procter, Jean Ingelow—a little list very feminine and clerical; and of these even we hear by chance. She names them rather than discusses them.

Of the greater number of saints and of the greater number of writers during at least seven of the Christian centuries it must be said that their constant meditation was upon death. In nothing has the habit of the world achieved a greater change. But Christina Rossetti conformed to the ancient discipline. Her portrait should have been painted with the skull on the table. This preoccupation of hers renders the task of selection from her poems somewhat difficult; so great might be the monotony. But in all her poems of death there is the sense of life. This is so in the almost delirious power of "The Convent Threshold", as in the gentler, affectionate meditations.

ALICE MEYNELL.