Page:The Poetry of Dante Rossetti by Hall Caine.pdf/4

 Again, when the pathos of life comes strongest and love is seen betrayed and youth traduced; when the "golden ruin of some rich soiled hair" is found, where Rossetti painted it, at the wayside, thrust out from the lap of luxury, into the night of want, desolate, houseless, wet and matted after a pelting and pitiless storm, then read "Jenny."

"Jenny, you know the city now, A child can tell the tale there, how Some things which are not yet enroll'd In market lists are bought and sold. •••••• Our learned London children know, Poor Jenny, all your pride and woe; •••••• Have seen your coach-wheels splash rebuke On virtue; and have learned your look When, wealth and health slipped past, you stare Along the streets alone, and there, Round the long park, across the bridge, The cold lamps at the pavements edge Wind on together and apart, A fiery serpent for your heart."

When the tragic hold of honour is strongest, and when baffled love sees first the poor bauble to which its soul's soul has been consecrate—and sees "the pity of it"—then read "The Last Confession," and mark the pulsation of severe emotion and torrent of mighty wrath, by whose impulse the exiled patriot slays the child he has nurtured, the woman he has loved, after the unpitiful light of the harlot's glance flashes from her eyes and the harlot's coarse, unlovely laugh rings from her lips:—

"Father, yon heard my speech and not her laugh;" But God heard that. Will God remember all?

Finally, when the mysteries of faith sound deepest, when destiny of race seems blindest, turn thoughtfully the pages of "The Burden of Nineveh," and follow the Bull-god from its first unearthing in Nineveh to where—

"Some tribe of the Australian plough Bear him afar,—a relic now Of London, not of Nineveh."

I repeat, there is but one way in which to read truly the poems of Dante Rossetti, and that is to read them as they were written. They were not the outcome of a single inspiration. They are the garnered fruits of many a harvest. They came from the many moods of their author's second self, which, though possibly of higher aptitudes, was long hidden behind the energetic person