d bathe there in God's sight.

Perhaps Rossetti never did anything more beautiful and spiritual than
this little work of his twentieth year; and more than once in later life
he painted the beautiful lady who is the subject of it, with the lilies
lying along her arm.

A first draft of _Jenny_ was struck off when the poet was scarcely more
than a boy, and taken up again years afterwards, and almost entirely
re-written--the only notable passage of the early poem that now remains
being the passage on lust. It is best described in the simplest phrase,
as a man's meditations on the life of a courtesan whom he has met at a
dancing-garden and accompanied home. While he sits on a couch, she lies
at his feet with her head on his knee and sleeps. When the morning dawns
he rises, places cushions beneath her head, puts some gold among
her hair, and leaves her. It is wisest to hazard at the outset all
unfavourable comment by the frankest statement of the story of the
poem. But the _motif_ of it is a much higher thing. _Jenny_ embodies
an entirely distinct phase of feeling, yet the poet's root impulse
is therein the same as in the case of _The Blessed Damozel_. No two
creations could stand more widely apart as to outward features than
the dream of the sainted maiden and the reality of the frail and fallen
girl; yet the primary prompting and the ultimate outcome are the same.
The ardent longing after ideal purity in womanhood, which in the one
gave birth to a conception whereof the very sorrow is but excess of
joy found expression in the other through a vivid presentment of the
nameless misery of unwomanly dishonour:--

Behold the lilies of the field,
They toil not neither do they spin;
(So doth the ancient text begin,--
Not of such rest as one of these Can share.)
Another rest and ease
Along each summer-sated path
From its new lord the garden hath,
Than that whose spring in blessings ran
Which praised the bounteous husbandman,
Ere yet, in days of hankering breath,
The lilies sickened unto death.

It was indeed a daring thing the author proposed to himself to do, and
assuredly no man could have essayed it who had not consciously united
to an unfailing and unshrinking insight, a relativeness of mind such as
right-hearted people might approve. To take a fallen woman, a cipher of
man's sum of lust, befouled with the shameful knowledge of the streets,
yet young, delicate, "appa