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Christina Rossetti (1830-94), the youngest child of Gabriele Rossetti, and sister to Dante Rossetti, spent the greater part of her life in London, where she was born and died. She lived in great privacy, devoting herself to the care of her mother (who died in 1886), to her religious duties, and to poetry. She was an attached member of the Church of England, and, for reasons of religion, rejected two proposals of marriage, one from a Roman Catholic, the other from a suitor of 'undefined and heterodox views.' The series of sonnets entitled Monna Innominata, and some others

of her best-known poems, are probably as directly autobiographical in import as Mrs Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese. Her earliest printed verses appeared when she was eleven years old, and from that time till her death she wrote, not voluminously, but incessantly. A volume called Verses was privately issued by her grandfather, Gaetano Polidori, in 1847; she contributed several numbers to The Germ (1850) over

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of effort in all her work. She made no attempt in the larger poetic kinds of drama or romance, and was never betrayed by literary admiration into imitating the works of others at the sacrifice of sincerity and spontaneity. Imitation has been the besetting sin of not a few English poetesses. Mrs Aphra Behn, a clever and excellent woman, has been called vicious because she wrote fashionable comedies from the stand-point of the courtly rakes of the Restoration; Mrs Hemans is almost inconceivable without Byron; and Mrs Browning often forgoes her genuine gifts, even in her lyrics, to

masquerade as a kind of conventional man, or, straining after power, strikes that note of 'falsetto muscularity' which, in works like Aurora Leigh, offended Dante Rossetti. It is therefore not a little to say in praise of Miss Rossetti that she knew herself and held fast by her own experience: that she looked in her heart and wrote. Nor would she have resented praise bestowed on her work as 'woman's work.' Women know and feel many things that men do not know or feel, and it is only by expressing these things that they can match men in literature. It was by simple loyalty to their own experience and their own vision that Jane Austen and Christina Rossetti achieved their unique positions among English writers.

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CHRISTINA GEORGINA ROSSETTI

(with her Mother, FRANCES MARY LAVINIA ROSSETTI). From the Drawing in Crayons by D. G. Rossetti (1877) in the National Portrait Gallery.

'Ellen Alleyn;' and thereafter wrote many poems, articles, essays, and short stories for various magazines. The best of her poems were collected by her in Goblin Market and other Poems (1862), The Prince's Progress and other Poems (1866), A Pageant and other Poems (1881), and Verses (1893). To these must be added the posthumous volume of New Poems (1896).

Though by the accidents of association Christina Rossetti was brought near to the group of poets and painters who started the Pre-Raphaelite movement, she belongs to no school, and holds a place by herself in English poetry. She is the least ambitious, and some would add the greatest, of English poetesses. She has that rarest of gifts, the gift of expressing deep feeling in quiet speech and perfect musical cadence. Her best sonnets, though they have not the splendour of the greatest of Shakespeare's, or Milton's, or Wordsworth's, or Rossetti's, yet come nearer than any of these to the purity and simplicity and perfection of form that mark the finest Italian sonnets. Her thoughts run naturally into a lyrical mould, and there is no sense

Her genius is almost purely lyrical, and her poems are full of that beautiful redundance and that varied reiteration which are natural to all strong feeling and all spontaneous melody. Her lyrics have very much the air of improvisations; she chooses for theme some simple, elemental feeling, and pours it into song, the expression rising unsought, with incessant recurrence to the words or phrases given at first, and with a delicate sense of pattern which prescribes the changes in the cadence. Her ideas are so essentially poetical that they can hardly be expressed in prose. Her art is so subtly simple that critical analysis may well despair of explaining it. The whole bulk of her poems would yield but few quotations and perhaps not one generalised statement of moral truth. Though, like many other poets famous for

verbal melody, she had no strong taste for music, her poetical gift is musical rather than pictorial. Her most characteristic imagery, such as is found in A Birthday or Death Watches, is passionate, not contemplative; it is the outcome of moments of feeling arrested, and yields little or nothing to thought, yet everywhere and always the soul of poetry is in her work.

The poems of many earlier religious poets are easily and sharply divisible into secular and sacred. It would be vain to attempt any such bisection of Miss Rossetti's work. Some of her poems deal with religious themes, and some do not, but all alike are permeated with religious ideas. This is especially noticeable in the very few of them that have any sort of claim to be called 'long poems.' Goblin Market and The Prince's Progress are fairy stories, the one telling of certain goblin sellers of magic fruit who haunt a mossy valley, the other describing the temptations and adventures that befall a prince of fable on his way to claim his bride. The stories are told without the smallest didactic intention; they are dream fantasies; but no one who reads them can fail to perceive that the ideas shadowed in them are all religious. Goblin Market is an idyl of temptation and of vicarious sacrifice; The Prince's Progress is a history of the pilgrimage of the soul, unmindful of its destiny, blinded and hindered by the love of ease and pleasure, by the search for wealth or knowledge, and aroused from time to time by the chiding, wailing voices that are carried on the air. A deep melancholy underlies all her most heart-felt poems, and if she resembles Shelley in lyrical elevation and the natural glow of lyrical utterance, there is more of the sadness of humanity in her poems than in his. Her verses beginning, 'Passing away, saith the World, passing away,' have been given the fame that they deserve by the praise of Mr Swinburne, who alludes to them as 'the great New-Year hymn of Miss Rossetti, so much the noblest of sacred poems in our language that there is none which comes near it enough to stand second; a hymn touched as with the fire and bathed as in the light of sunbeams, tuned as to chords and cadences of refluent sea-music beyond reach of harp and organ, large echoes of the serene and sonorous tides of heaven.'

Shall I forget?

Shall I forget on this side of the grave?
I promise nothing: you must wait and see

Patient and brave.

(O my soul, watch with him and he with me.) Shall I forget in peace of Paradise?

I promise nothing: follow, friend, and see
Faithful and wise.

(O my soul, lead the way he walks with me.)

A Birthday.

My heart is like a singing bird

Whose nest is in a watered shoot;

My heart is like an apple-tree

Whose boughs are bent with thickset fruit;

My heart is like a rainbow shell That paddles in a halcyon sea; My heart is gladder than all these

Because my love is come to me.

Raise me a dais of silk and down;

Hang it with vair and purple dyes; Carve it in doves and pomegranates,

And peacocks with a hundred eyes; Work it in gold and silver grapes,

In leaves and silver fleurs-de-lys;
Because the birthday of my life

Is come, my love is come to me.
Echo.

Come to me in the silence of the night;
Come in the speaking silence of a dream;
Come with soft rounded cheeks and eyes as bright
As sunlight on a stream;

Come back in tears,

O memory, hope, love of finished years.

O dream how sweet, too sweet, too bitter sweet, Whose wakening should have been in Paradise, Where souls brim-full of love abide and meet; Where thirsting longing eyes

Watch the slow door

That opening, letting in, lets out no more. Yet come to me in dreams, that I may live My very life again though cold in death: Come back to me in dreams, that I may give Pulse for pulse, breath for breath:

Speak low, lean low,

As long ago, my love, how long ago.

Rest.

O Earth, lie heavily upon her eyes;

Seal her sweet eyes weary of watching, Earth; Lie close around her; leave no room for mirth With its harsh laughter, nor for sound of sighs. She hath no questions, she hath no replies,

Hushed in and curtained with a blessed dearth Of all that irked her from the hour of birth; With stillness that is almost Paradise. Darkness more clear than noonday holdeth her, Silence more musical than any song; Even her very heart has ceased to stir : Until the morning of Eternity

Her rest shall not begin nor end, but be;

And when she wakes she will not think it long.

From 'Old and New Year Ditties.' Passing away, saith the World, passing away: Chances, beauty and youth sapped day by day: Thy life never continueth in one stay.

Is the eye waxen dim, is the dark hair changing to gray
That hath won neither laurel nor bay?

I shall clothe myself in Spring and bud in May:
Thou, root-stricken, shalt not rebuild thy decay
On my bosom for aye.

Then I answered: Yea.

Passing away, saith my Soul, passing away :
With its burden of fear and hope, of labour and play ;
Hearken what the past doth witness and say:

Rust in thy gold, a moth is in thine array,

A canker is in thy bud, thy leaf must decay.

At midnight, at cockcrow, at morning, one certain day, Lo, the Bridegroom shall come and shall not delay: Watch thou and pray.

Then I answered: Yea.

Passing away, saith my God, passing away :

Winter passeth after the long delay :

New grapes on the vine, new figs on the tender spray :
Turtle calleth turtle in Heaven's May.

Though I tarry, wait for Me, trust Me, watch and pray.
Arise, come away, night is past and lo it is day,
My love, My sister, My spouse, thou shalt hear Me say.
Then I answered: Yea.

Sœur Louise de la Miséricorde.

I have desired, and I have been desired;
But now the days are over of desire,

Now dust and dying embers mock my fire;
Where is the hire for which my life was hired?
Oh vanity of vanities, desire!

Longing and love, pangs of a perished pleasure,
Longing and love, a disenkindled fire,
And memory a bottomless gulf of mire,
And love a fount of tears outrunning measure;

Oh vanity of vanities, desire!

Now from my heart, love's deathbed, trickles, trickles,
Drop by drop slowly, drop by drop of fire,

The dross of life, of love, of spent desire;

Alas, my rose of life gone all to prickles,

Oh vanity of vanities, desire!

Oh vanity of vanities, desire;

Stunting my hope which might have strained up higher,
Turning my garden plot to barren mire ;

Oh death-struck love, oh disenkindled fire,
Oh vanity of vanities, desire!

Monna Innominata.

'Amor, che ne la mente mi ragiona.'-DANTE.
'Amor vien nel bel viso di costei.'-PETRARCA.

If there be any one can take my place
And make you happy whom I grieve to grieve,
Think not that I can grudge it, but believe

I do commend you to that nobler grace,
That readier wit than mine, that sweeter face;
Yea, since your riches make me rich, conceive
I too am crowned, while bridal crowns I weave,
And thread the bridal dance with jocund pace.
For if I did not love you, it might be

That I should grudge you some one dear delight; But since the heart is yours that was mine own, Your pleasure is my pleasure, right my right, Your honourable freedom makes me free,

And you companioned I am not alone. There is a Life of Christina Rossetti by Mackenzie Bell (1898), containing excerpts from her letters; and essays on her works by Edmund Gosse (Critical Kit-Kats, 1896), Arthur Symons (Studies in Two Literatures, 1897), A. C. Benson (in the National Review, February 1895), and Mrs Meynell (in the New Review, February 1895).

WALTER RALEIGH.

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1833-98), beloved by English children as 'Lewis Carroll,' was the son of the vicar of Daresbury in Runcorn parish, Cheshire; and, passing from Rugby to Christ Church, Oxford, he graduated B.A. in 1854

with a first-class in mathematics. Elected a student of his college, he took orders in 1861, and from 1855 to 1881 was mathematical lecturer. In his own name he published a series of useful and even important mathematical works, begun with books on algebraical geometry and trigonometry in 1860, and continued in 1867-96 by works on Determinants, Euclid and his Modern Rivals, Curiosa Mathematica, and Symbolic Logic. Traces of a mathematical mind may also be found in the wonderfully different half of his literary activity credited to 'Lewis Carroll.' He was extremely punctilious in preserving the distinction between Dodgson the mathematical college don and the

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'Lewis Carroll' whose works overflowed with fun, nonsense, humour, and the imaginary creations dear to children. 'Lewis Carroll' never quite equalled again the genial creator of Alice, his first triumph; Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865), with its continuation Through the Lookingglass (1872), and its illustrations by Tenniel, has become a nursery classic, and been translated into most of the languages of Europe. To the 'Lewis Carroll' series belong also Phantasmagoria (1869), Hunting of the Snark (1876), Doublets (1879), Rhyme? and Reason? (1883; new ed. 1897), A Tangled Tale (1886), Game of Logic (1887), and Sylvie and Bruno (1889-93)-the latter in places positively tedious. Mr S. D. Collingwood published his Life and Letters in 1898, and The Lewis Carroll Picture Book in 1899.

Charles Haddon Spurgeon (1834-92), born at Kelvedon in Essex, in 1849 became usher in a school at Newmarket, and in 1854 pastor of the New Park Street Chapel, London. The vast

Metropolitan Tabernacle was erected for him in 1859-61; with it were connected almshouses, a pastor's college, and an orphanage, over all of which he exercised and maintained effective supervision. He had a unique gift as an orator, and enlivened his fervour with quaint humour; his voice was of marvellous clearness and reach, and he wielded his mother-tongue with native vigour. His theological acquirements were slender and his commentaries uncritical. With the newer criticism he had no sympathy; and four years before his death he withdrew from the Baptist Union because no action was taken against persons charged with what he and conservative divines regarded as fundamental errors. His sermons, issued weekly from 1855, showed enormous energy of productivity, and continued to be surprisingly fresh; they had an average issue of 30,000, and were translated into several foreign tongues. He published over a hundred volumes, including The Saint and his Saviour (1867), John Ploughman's Talk (1868), The Treasury of David (a commentary on the Psalms, 1865-80), Interpreter (1874), Sermons in Candles (1891), and Messages to the Multitude (1892). A collection of Spurgeon's speeches was edited by Pike (1878); there are short Lives by Pike, Ellis, and Shindler (1891-92), and the authoritative autobiography in four volumes was compiled by his wife and Mr Harland (1897-98).

Sir John Robert Seeley (1834-95) was the third son of Mr Seeley the publisher. He was educated at the City of London School and at Christ's College, Cambridge, was bracketed with three others as senior classic in 1857, and next year was elected a Fellow of his college. In 1863 he became Professor of Latin in University College, London, in 1869 of Modern History at Cambridge, and there to the end of his industrious life he remained. Ecce Homo had appeared anonymously in 1865, and excited an extraordinary commotion in the religious world. It was denounced with vehemence by many evangelicals like Lord Shaftesbury as subverting the foundation of Christian faith and hope; on the other hand, its reverent tone and literary charm commended the book to many orthodox minds. For while it deliberately excluded consideration of the supernatural and insisted on Christ's human work as the founder of a Church of humanity, it did not profess to deal with all the aspects of Christ's missionsome even expected it to be followed by an Ecce Deus, which was no part of Seeley's plan. The work certainly produced no little influence on contemporary thought. Strictly anonymous at first, it was soon pretty confidently referred to the Cambridge historian, and was ultimately acknowledged by him as his. Natural Religion (1882), also anonymously published, was perhaps an even more effective presentation of the author's view of the essence of Christianity; but as an eirenicon between science and faith, it persuaded neither

For it posited

the Christian nor the Agnostic. a non-supernatural Christianity, and contented itself with a religion which was practically the pursuit of the ideal in life. Seeley's Life and Times of Stein (1879) was the best history of the creator of modern Germany, but, written without enthusiasm, it was generally pronounced tedious. His Short Life of Napoleon the First (1885) insisted on treating that portentous phenomenon as a clever and unscrupulous condottiere merely, and almost wholly ignored his power of political combination, his administrative sagacity, and his profound legislative achievement. In so far the historian showed himself liable to a prepossession.

SIR J. R. SEELEY.

In his his

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From a Photograph by Elliott & Fry.

torical work generally Seeley sought for the driest light and refused to appeal to the emotions; and his concern in history was with the State and its development, with public documents and diplomatics though he strove to find in past political consecutions answers to the pressing problems of the present. In one work he struck a chord in the public breast; his Expansion of England (1883) did much to build up British Imperialism, to show the significance of the struggle between France and Britain in the eighteenth century, and to emphasise the value of Britain's oversea inheritance. His Growth of British Policy, unfinished at his death, was an almost equally pregnant essay on our foreign policy, its conditioning causes, methods, and results, from the accession of Elizabeth down to the beginning of the eighteenth century; to this Professor Prothero prefixed a short Life of the author (1895). An Introduction to Political Science, published in 1896, comprises two series of lectures. Seeley's work on Goethe, a reissue of magazine articles, was sound and

For

sensible but not remarkably illuminative. his service to the national cause he was created K.C.M.G. in 1894.

Lord de Tabley was the title, borne after his succession in 1887 to his father, the second baron, by the Hon. JOHN BYRNE LEICESTER WARREN (18351895), one of the truest poets of his time, though he never attained popularity with the public, and even to many lovers of poetry became well known only a few years before his death. Educated at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford, he was for a time attached to the embassy at Constantinople under Sir Stratford de Redcliffe. In 1859 he was called to the Bar, and about the same time published, under a pseudonym, a volume of poems-his own, and not, as has been erroneously said, the joint work of himself and a dead friend. Other volumes of verse-including Ballads and Metrical Sketches, The Threshold of Atrides, Glimpses of Antiquity, Præterita, Eclogues and Monodramas, Studies in Verse - followed in 1860-65; and two powerful dramas, Philoctetes (1866) and Orestes (1868), were Greek not in subject-matter alone. In 1868, too, the author (pseudonymous or anonymous as yet) made his only entry into English public life as candidate for Mid-Cheshire on the Liberal side. He was not elected, and soon after took up his residence in London, where he lived the life of a literary recluse in the society of a few warm friends. He was not a bookman merely, but an enthusiastic expert in botany, in book-plates, and in Greek coins. Fruits of these studies appeared in a work on book-plates (1880) and one on The Flora of Cheshire (1899). Rehearsals (1870) and Searching the Net (1873) were collections of poems; The Soldier's Fortune (1876) was a poetic tragedy. Poems, Dramatic and Lyrical (1893), comprised selections from past work with new pieces, and a supplementary volume appeared in 1895. At his death his fame was steadily growing; and a posthumous volume, Orpheus in Thrace, and other Poems, edited by the Hon. Lady Leighton Warren (1901), was universally greeted as a rare addition to the treasury of English poetry. Tabley's high-strung, too sensitive temperament is reflected in much of his verse-his noble melancholy, his all-but pessimistic outlook on a world of empty strife and vain ambition. And another and equally sensitive side of his character appears in the poems and passages which give rich and melodious utterance to the poet's heart-felt joy in the ineffable beauty of nature.

Lord de

See the Memoir by Sir M. E. Grant Duff prefixed to The Flora of Cheshire (1899); Mr Gosse's Critical Kit-Kats (1896); and the biographical sketch by Professor Hugh Walker (1903).

Sir Walter Besant (1836-1901), born at Portsmouth, studied at King's College, London, and at Christ's College, Cambridge; and, having abandoned the idea of taking orders, was appointed to a professorship in Mauritius, where he found time to read largely in French literature.

A succession of feverish attacks compelling him to resign this post, he returned to England, and in 1868 gladly accepted the office of secretary of the newly-founded Palestine Exploration Fund, an appointment he retained till his success as a writer of fiction made him independent of this staff (1885). His first work, Studies in French Poetry, appeared in 1868, and attracted much attention, rather by its interest and pleasant style than from its exhaustiveness. Three years later he began to collaborate in story-writing with James Rice (1844-82), who from Northampton came to Queen's at Cambridge, from law drifted into literature, had published one or two unimportant novels, and was now editor of Once a Week. Together they produced Readymoney Mortiboy (1872), My Little Girl, With Harp and Crown, This Son of Vulcan, The Golden Butterfly (1876, which greatly increased their popularity), The Monks of Thelema, By Celia's Arbour, The Chaplain of the Fleet, and The Seamy Side (1881). This literary partnership between two men of different gifts, comparable for intimacy with that of Beaumont and Fletcher or of Erckmann and Chatrian, continued unbroken-and with the happiest results-until the death of the younger collaborateur. Thenceforward Besant continued to produce fiction wholly his own in invention and development, with unabated energy and fertility, though for the most part in a distinguishably different manner, sending forth in succession All Sorts and Conditions of Men (1882), All in a Garden Fair, Dorothy Forster, Children of Gibeon, Armorel of Lyonesse, The Ivory Gate, Beyond the Dreams of Avarice, The Master Craftsman, The Rebel Queen, The Fourth Generation, The Lady of Lynn, and other stories.

Ready-money Mortiboy (drafted by Rice and partly written before the partnership began) and The Golden Butterfly are probably the best-known of all the books associated with Besant's name; and though it be admitted that the books produced by the collaborateurs are richer in humour, more vivid in characterisation, fresher and more entertaining altogether, this does not prove that these features were wholly or mainly Mr Rice's contribution, but that Besant grew older. Unquestionably the later novels were many of them somewhat incredible and factitious, didactic and overweighted with detail, as well apt to repeat ideas and situations. Perhaps Besant was right in regarding Dorothy Forster, a story of the Earl of Derwentwater and the Rebellion of 1815, as his best tale. All Sorts and Conditions of Men, on the other hand, was the most notable of a series which produced a marked and unexpected influence on the public heart and conscience; they stimulated and guided the philanthropic (and fashionable) movement that led to the establishment of the People's Palace in the east end of London.

Another series of Sir Walter's literary enterprises concerned the topography and history of London.

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