the whole majesty of her great wrong, she
loses the originally vulgar character of the witch. It is not as the
consequence of a poison-speck in her own heart that she has recourse to
sorcery. She does not love witchery for its own sake; she loves it only
as the retributive channel for the requital of a terrible offence. It
is throughout the last hour of her three-days' conflict, merely, that we
see her, but we know her then not more for the revengeful woman she is
than for the trustful maiden she has been. When she becomes conscious of
the treason wrought against her, we feel that she suffers change. In
the eyes of others we can see her, and in our vision of her she is
beautiful; but hers is the beauty of fair cheeks, from which the canker
frets the soft tenderness of colour, the loveliness of golden hair that
has lost its radiance, the sweetness of eyes once dripping with the
dews of the spirit, now pale, and cold, and lustreless. Very soon the
wrongdoer shall reap the harvest of a twofold injury: this day another
bride shall stand by his side. Is there, then, no way to wreak the just
revenge of a broken heart? _That_ suggests sorcery. Yes, the body and
soul of the false lover may melt as before a flame; but the price of
vengeance is horrible. Yet why? Has not love become devilish? Is not
life a curse? Then wherefore shrink? The resolute wronged woman must
go through with it. And when the last hour comes, nature itself is
portentous of the virulent ill. In the wind's wake, the moon flies
through a rack of night clouds. One after one the suppliants crave
pardon for the distant dying lover, and last of these comes the
three-days' bride.

In addition to the three great poems just traversed, Rossetti had
written, before the completion of his twenty-sixth year, _The Staff
and Scrip, The Burden of Nineveh, Troy Town, Eden Bower_ and _The Last
Confession_, as well as a fragment of _The Bride's Prelude_, to which
it will be necessary to return. But, with a single exception, the
poems just named may be said to exist beside the three that have been
analysed, without being radically distinct from them, or touching
higher or other levels, and hence it is not considered needful to dwell
upon them at length. _The Last Confession_ covers another range of
feeling, it is true, whereof it may be said that the nobler part is
akin to that which finds expression in the pure and shattered love of
Othello; but it is a range of feeling less