THOUGHTS TOWARDS A CRITICISM OF THE

WORKS OF DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI.

HE latest biographer of Rossetti, if indeed this poet can be said to have had a biographer as yet, speaking of "The Blessed Damozel," remarks: "Nothing in the descriptions recalls any preceding work. In Protestant literature, at least, it is a thing unheard of in a poem in a sense religious, to find no trace of biblical phraseology." We must needs, I think, have some misgiving as we read the first of these two sentences, whether the originality of the poem really does lie in the descriptions, and whether after all the descriptions do not recall to mention only one name, Coleridge. But when we come to the words, "In Protestant literature," we are indeed fairly taken aback, and ask ourselves if this writer has made any effort to understand the poem he is trying to analyze. And yet this is no unfair specimen of the sort of criticism that Rossetti has, for the most part, hitherto received. But I must rather be obliged, than otherwise, to Mr. Knight, for he could not have given me an initiative fuller of suggestion: "In Protestant literature," and this too of "The Blessed Damozel."

As I was turning over a short time since the thin leaves, with their heavy seventeenth-century type, of the Hesperides and thinking where in English art, till we come to the art of Rossetti, can we find a parallel to Herrick's surprising resource of pictorial detail, where but in Rossetti's pictures is such a profusion of sweet sights and scents

as in this old poet, with his April, May, his June and July flowers, his lutes of amber, his harps and viols, his wealth of colour, from the vermilion that the Lady of the Nuptial Song trod upon, to the green silk cord with which the silver bow of the girl in "The Vision" was strung, mixt, as they are, with the odour of spikenard, musk, amber, and those other smells sweet as the vestry of the oracles and "set about" his many dainty mistresses,-as these and a hundred such idle thoughts crowded into my brain, I came upon a poem I seemed previously not to have noticed, a poem that made me exclaim, "Here is The Blessed Damozel' of Protestant literature!" But pardon me, Herrick, that I even for a moment should have wronged you thus. How could you, most delightful of Pagans, have held any but the Catholic faith, the one inheritor of Paganism? Happily, moreover, it is against the nature of art for any true artist to lend a word, much less a poem, to a protestant cause. I should have said, "Here is 'The Blessed Damozel' of Catholic literature."

I will give the poem exactly as I found it at page 373 (London, 1648), of the works both human and divine of Robert Herrick.

COMFORT TO A YOUTH THAT HAD LOST HIS LOVE.

What needs complaints,

When she a place

Has with the race
Of Saints?

In endlesse mirth,
She thinks not on
What's said or done

In earth:

She sees no teares,

Or any tone

Of thy deep grone

She heares:

Nor do's she minde,

Or think on't now,

That ever thou

Wast kind.

But chang'd above,

She likes not there,

As she did here,

Thy Love.

Forbeare therefore,
And Lull asleepe

Thy woes and weep
No more.

It is not for any difference of treatment or style that I place this poem side by side with "The Blessed Damozel." Much less do I wish to compare Herrick to Rossetti. It is for one difference, and one alone, that I have taken the trouble to transcribe the lyric, the difference of the opposite attitudes, as shown in these two poems, of the girl in heaven towards her lover on earth. Set the last verse but one of Herrick's "Comfort" against this twenty-second verse of "The Blessed Damozel," and you have my meaning. The Damozel herself is speaking:

"There will I ask of Christ the Lord

Thus much for him and me :-
Only to live as once on earth

With Love,-only to be,

As then awhile, for ever now
Together, I and he."