Page:Poems by Christina Rossetti with illustrations by Florence Harrison.djvu/16

viii once in earlier youth, again at about the age of thirty-six. To each of her suitors, we read, her heart inclined, and especially to the second; but she rejected the one because he was a Roman Catholic, and the second because he was not definitely a Christian. We know nothing but by the considerate and reticent report of a brother about these griefs in Christina Rossetti's life, these troubles in what was otherwise so calm. The periods, the seasons, and the progress of that life were within. Letters necessarily make a large part of so tranquil a visible career, but the letters her faithful biographer has printed are little more than cheerful notes, household words, often playful. Her only sister entered an Anglican sisterhood, in which she died. She herself was, her brother says, "I rather think, an outer sister—but in no sort of way professed—of the [same] convent". That a most affectionate brother should do no more than conjecture on such a matter is worth noting as significant of Christina Rossetti's reserve in those matters of religion that touched her most nearly. There was her life, there were her sorrows and her joys—in the daily service, the Communion on all Thursdays and Sundays. She bequeathed a ring from her dead hand to the offertory of the church of her worship. She died, in the act of prayer, of the most painful of diseases, in 1894, aged sixty-four years.

Christina Rossetti's right to the name of poet is to be traced even in her "inconsidered ways". She approaches her poems, as it were, from the side of poetry, and not from the side of commonplace. When she reaches the heights of perfect poetry we are aware that her access has been from the yonder side; and if we are doubtful as to ways whereby other poets have climbed, we never doubt that those hills are in her very own country. And this is true notwithstanding her "homeliness"; she was obviously very fond of her own homeliness, it was old-English, comfortable, unpretentious, but the homeliness was of the home of poetry, and we think of her as a simple country-woman in the poetic country, always accustomed and at ease.

When Sir Aubrey de Vere celebrated the energy and splendour of Queen Elizabeth as characters of "the sister of a god", he certainly did not intend to assign to her a merely derivative glory. Did he not imply that she was of the blood divine, no mere borrower, not one dependent for a name, no wearer of dignity by right of association, but a sister by nature and likeness? In this sense Christina Rossetti's highest honour is that she is the sister of a great and doubtless an immortal poet; because her genius