دو Menella Bute Smedley. a prose writer with "The Maiden Aunt" (1849), “Twice Lost, and Other Tales" (1863); "Linnet's Trial" (1864); "A Mere Story" (1869); and Other Folks' Lives" (1869), also earned her due reward of praise for "Lays and Ballads from English History" (1858); "Poems (1868), and "Two Dramatic Poems (1874). She was also the writer of "The Child World" (1869), and such verses in " Poems written for a Child" (1868) as are signed "B." Miss Smedley's dramatic style -particularly in "Lady Grace "—exhibits wit and pathos, and genuine, if not intense dramatic instinct. Her shorter poems, however, are what her reputation as a poetess chiefly rests upon. Throughout these a very noble tone of thought runs; the language is well managed; the forms of verse are treated delicately. Miss Smedley's poems have come from a thoughtful and disciplined mind. Her ballad of " Harold the Hero" has a genuine effect of bold Saxon simplicity about it. "A Character" and "A Contrast" are finely sustained pieces of psychological analysis. The lyric, “Wind me a Summer Crown," like "The Little Fair Soul," has become a general favourite. THE LITTLE FAIR SOUL. A LITTLE fair soul that knew no sin With fear and tumult in his eyes. "Oh, brother, is it you?" he cried ; Your face is like a breath from home; Why do you stay so long outside? "Tell me first how our mother fares, And has she wept too much for me?" CHAPTER X. CHRISTINA ROSSETTI-EMILY PFEIFFER-AUGUSTA WEBSTER JEAN INGELOW ALICE MEYNELL HARRIET HAMILTON KING-MATHILDE BLIND-MARY ROBINSONOTHER WRITERS. C Christina G. HRISTINA G. ROSSETTI, sister of Dante Rossetti, and daughter of Gabriele Rossetti, the commentator on Dante, was born on the 5th December, 1830. Hers has been a life led apart from the world, almost as much as was that of her brother the painter. Of Gabriele Rossetti's gifted family, Dante had the eldest son's inheritance of genius. He was as much an anachronism in the history of art and letters as if the Campo Santo of Pisa should suddenly begin to spring up in Cheapside. Quite ignorant of science, comparatively ignorant of even the names of modern books, careless as a heathen god about our politics, he busied himself about nothing except thinking as he might have thought hundreds of years ago, without any aid from the numerous boasted advancements of knowledge that our present civilisation has brought us. Almost without consciousness that his position in art or letters was such an incongruity, he was outwardly a nineteenth-century English householder, and inwardly an Italian cinque-centist. With this difference: cradled in such an age as ours, he could not possibly help being influenced by its tone to some extent. Ours is a critical age, and a critical age is never a joyful age. The early masters felt as much pleasure in existing as new-born blades of grass might be fancied to feel in springing through the ground. They were filled with an unquestioning belief in religion, and painted with a holy joy. Rossetti grew up with an inner sadness; he could not believe in the "eternal verities " as they believed: he could not, though he tried; but yet, though their early religion was to him but a ghostly thing, the art that was the outcome of their genius and their belief became to him of itself a sort of religion. He relished at any rate the flowery intricacy of their symbolism, their gentle mysticism, their freedom of aspiration, and their innocence of all vulgarity of theme. These charms he could appreciate, and these moulded his own inspiration into art. Even where he was a thorough sceptic, his artistic sympathies made him admire. the piety of these predecessors. It is remarkable that in another sphere of imaginative creation, a great man of our time, himself sceptical by conviction, has drawn his inspiration from the piety of those who went before him. Hawthorne's creed was little conformable to any articles of Church dogma which carry weight with Christian communities. But the ancient traditions of the stern Puritans who founded Salem were in his soul, as that Puritan blood was in his veins; and these filtered themselves through his "miasmatic imagination" into the gloomy romance which formed the basis of his genius. As Hawthorne was sceptic and Puritan in one, so Rossetti mingled within himself the freely speculative man of our century, with the devout mystic of the middle ages; and the American teller of tales was no less directly the inheritor of the stern Calvinistic blood of Salem than Rossetti was by nationality and temperament descendant of the monkish painters who preached in pigments in days when there was but one Christian church in Europe. These few words upon Rossetti seem necessary here, |