Page:Marie Corelli - the writer and the woman (IA mariecorelliwrit00coat).pdf/52

 Gratia Dei. Probably few books have ever emerged from the press in more attractive form. It was a quaint, vellum-bound, antique-looking volume tied up on all sides with strings of golden silk ribbon, and illustrated throughout with fanciful wood-cuts.

But the poems are beautiful and deserving of the fame they attained. It is curious how very different in quality they are to the author's earlier published works, issued in 1864, 1871, and 1880. Each "Love-Letter" (and there are twelve of them) is in twenty stanzas—each stanza contains six lines. Antonio Gallenga of The Times declared the poems to be as regular and symmetrical as Dante's "Comedy," with as stately and solemn, ay, and as arduous a measure! "There are marvelous powers in this poet-violinist. Petrarch himself has not so many changes for his conjugation of the verb 'to love.'" The latter is what may be called, to quote a phrase recently used in a well-known newspaper, a "quotation from an hitherto unpublished review," because the late Antonio Gallenga wrote a review of the "Love-Letters" at the request of Miss Corelli (whom he had known since her childhood); but ''The Times'' refused it, and he sent Miss Corelli the original manuscript, from which she quoted excerpts in her "Introduction" to the "Love-Letters."

A lengthy review entitled "A New Love-Poet"