relled beyond parallel," unblessed, with a
beauty which, if copied by a Da Vinci's hand, might stand whole ages
long "for preachings of what God can do," and then to endow such a one
with the sensitiveness of a poet's own mind, make her read afresh as
though by lightning, and in a dream, that story of the old pure days--

Much older than any history
That is written in any book,

and lastly, to gather about her an overwhelming sense of infinite solace
for the wronged and lost, and of the retributive justice with which
man's transgressions will be visited--this is, indeed, to hazard all
things in the certainty of an upright purpose and true reward.

Shall no man hold his pride forewarn'd
Till in the end, the Day of Days,
At Judgment, one of his own race,
As frail and lost as you, shall rise,--
His daughter with his mother's eyes!

Yet Rossetti made no treaty with puritanism, and in this respect his
_Jenny_ has something in common with Hawthorne's _Scarlet Letter_--than
which nothing, perhaps, that is so pure, without being puritanical,
has reached us even from the land that gave _Evangeline_ to the English
tongue. The guilty love of Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale is never
for an instant condoned, but, on the other hand, the rigorous severity
of the old puritan community is not dwelt upon with favour. Relentless
remorse must spend itself upon the man before the whole measure of his
misery is full, and on the woman the brand of a public shame must be
borne meekly to the end. But though no rancour is shown towards the
austere and blind morality which puts to open discharge the guilty
mother whilst unconsciously nourishing the yet more guilty father, we
see the tenderness of a love that palliates the baseness of the amour,
and the bitter depths of a penitence that cannot be complete until it
can no longer be concealed. And so with Jenny. She may have transient
flashes of remorseful consciousness, such as reveal to her the trackless
leagues that separate what she was from what she is, but no effort is
made to hide the plain truth that she is a courtesan, skilled only
in the lures and artifices peculiar to her shameful function. No
reformatory promptings fit her for a place at the footstool of the
puritan. Nothing tells of winter yet; on the other hand, no virulent
diatribes are cast forth against the society that shuts this woman out,
as the puritan settlement turned its back