Rosalys--

are consummate triumphs of the word-music brought by Tennyson into
English poetry. Indeed this couplet of names might be made a sort of
text to expound the great appeal to the ear of this kind of poetry,
which any one who is deaf to the exceptional and golden harmony of the
arrangement need never hope to appreciate. It is perfectly easy to
change the order in many ways without affecting the verse; there is
absolutely none of these combinations which approaches the actual one in
beauty of sound and suggestion.

"Love's Nocturn" which follows is more of the early Italian school pure
and simple; and "Troy Town," a ballad with burdens, is one of a class of
poem much affected by Rossetti and ever since, which has produced some
admirable work, but is perhaps a little open to the charge of too
deliberate archaism. It is at any rate far inferior to his own "Sister
Helen." But "The Burden of Nineveh" which follows is in a quite
different style, and besides its intrinsic excellence is noteworthy as
showing how very far Rossetti was from being limited in his choice of
manners. But to go through the whole contents of this very remarkable
volume would be impossible, and we can only particularise the great
sonnet-sequence "The House of Life" (which was attacked for want of
decency with as little intelligence as "The Blessed Damozel" had been
attacked for want of sense), and a set "for pictures." The first,
somewhat thorny and obscure in language, is of extreme poetical and
philosophical beauty. The latter, beautiful enough, may be said to lend
themselves a little to the attacks of those critics who charged Rossetti
with, in the Aristotelian phrase, "shifting his ground to another kind"
or (to vary the words) of taking the quotation _ut pictura poesis_ in
too literal a sense. Some songs, especially "Penumbra" and "The
Woodspurge," of intense sweetness and sadness, were also included; and
the simple directness of "Jenny" showed, like "Nineveh," capacities in
the poet not easily to be inferred from the bulk of his poems.

Rossetti's second volume, while it added only too little to the bulk of
his work--for much of it consisted of a revised issue of "The House of
Life"--added greatly to its enjoyment. But it produced no new kind,
unless certain extensions of the ballad-scheme into narrative poems of
considerable length--"Rose-Mary," "The White Ship," and "The King's
Tragedy"--be counted as such. "Rose-Mary" in particular ex