Page:Poet Lore, volume 7, 1895.djvu/17



MONG the literary rarities in the possession of the owner of the Ashley Library is a manuscript in the handwriting of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, containing what is evidently a first draft of the poem 'Jenny.' Through the kindness of Mr. Wise, I have had an opportunity of examining this rarity, and propose to give a brief account of it for the benefit of those readers of who are interested in the work of the Painter-Poet.

'Jenny' may be said to be one of its author's representative poems, and is among those which called forth the special animadversion of the author of 'The Fleshly School of Poetry' as being the poet's "own property,"—a phrase the reader may construe in any way he pleases, but the intended meaning of which was pretty obvious. But, leaving "Conventionalism" to fight its battle, is it not the true function of Art to work from the within to the without? Jenny is not a creation of the poet: he found her,—a product not alone of the nineteenth century, but a type of the baser element ever developing from the undisciplined mind of