on Hester Prynne. But we
see her and know her for what she is, a woman like unto other women:
desecrated but akin.

This dramatic quality of sitting half-passively above their creations
and of leaving their ethics to find their own channels (once assured
that their impulses are pure), the poet and the romancer possess in
common. If there is a point of difference between their attitudes of
mind, it is where Rossetti seems to reserve his whole personal feeling
for the impeachment of lust;--

Like a toad within a stone
Seated while Time crumbles on;
Which sits there since the earth was cursed
For Man's transgression at the first;
Which, living through all centuries,
Not once has seen the sun arise;
Whose life, to its cold circle charmed,
The earth's whole summers have not warmed;
Which always--whitherso the stone
Be flung--sits there, deaf, blind, alone;--
Ay, and shall not be driven out
Till that which shuts him round about
Break at the very Master's stroke,
And the dust thereof vanish as smoke,
And the seed of Man vanish as dust:--
Even so within this world is Lust.

_Sister Helen_ was written somewhat later than _The Blessed Damozel_
and the first draft of _Jenny_, and probably belonged to the poet's
twenty-fourth or twenty-fifth year. The ballad involves a story of
witchcraft A girl has been first betrayed and then deserted by her
lover; so, to revenge herself upon him and his newly-married bride, she
burns his waxen image three days over a fire, and during that time he
dies in torment In _Sister Helen_ we touch the key-note of Rossetti's
creative gift. Even the superstition which forms the basis of the ballad
owes something of its individual character to the invention and poetic
bias of the poet. The popular superstitions of the Middle Ages were
usually of two kinds only. First, there were those that arose out of a
jealous Catholicism, always glancing towards heresy; and next there were
those that laid their account neither with orthodoxy nor unbelief, and
were purely pagan. The former were the offspring of fanaticism; the
latter of an appeal to appetite or passion, or fancy, or perhaps
intuitive reason directed blindly or unconsciously towards natural
phenomena. The superstition involved in _Sister Helen_ partakes wholly
of neither character, but partly of both, with an added element of
demonology. The groundwork is essentially