atrix," and a poem like "The Portrait,"
written many years before his wife's death, but subsequently retouched.
Who can read the following stanza without thinking of Beatrice and the
"Paradiso"?

"Even so, where Heaven holds breath and hears
The beating heart of Love's own breast,--
Where round the secret of all spheres
All angels lay their wings to rest,--
How shall my soul stand rapt and awed,
When, by the new birth borne abroad
Throughout the music of the suns,
It enters in her soul at once
And knows the silence there for God!"

Rossetti's ballads and ballad-romances, all intensely mediaeval in
spirit, fall, as regards their manner, into two very different classes.
Pieces like "The Blessed Damozel," "The Bride's Prelude," "Rose Mary,"
and "The Staff and Scrip" (from a story in the "Gesta Romanorum") are art
poems, rich, condensed, laden with ornament, pictorial. Every attitude
of every figure is a pose; landscapes and interiors are painted with
minute Pre-Raphaelite finish. "The Bride's Prelude"--a fragment--opens
with the bride's confession to her sister, in the 'tiring-room sumptuous
with gold and jewels and brocade, where the air is heavy with musk and
myrrh, and sultry with the noon. In the pauses of her tale stray lute
notes creep in at the casement, with noises from the tennis court and the
splash of a hound swimming in the moat. In "Rose Mary," which employs
the superstition in the old lapidaries as to the prophetic powers of the
beryl-stone, the colouring and imagery are equally opulent, and, in
passages, Oriental.

On the other hand, "Stratton Water," "Sister Helen," "The White Ship,"
and "The King's Tragedy" are imitations of popular poetry, done with a
simulated roughness and simplicity. The first of these adopts a common
ballad motive, a lover's desertion of his sweetheart through the
contrivances of his wicked kinsfolk:

"And many's the good gift, Lord Sands,
You've promised oft to me;
But the gift of yours I keep to-day
Is the babe in my body." . . .

"Look down, look down, my false mother,
That bade me not to grieve:
You'll look up when our marriage fires
Are lit to-morrow eve."

"Sister Helen" is a ballad in dialogue with a subtly varying repetend,
and introduces the popular belief that a witch could kill a man slowly by
melting a wax figure. Twice Rossetti essayed the historical ballad.
"The White Ship" tells of the drowni