Born in London, 1830; died London, 1894. Daughter of Gabriel Rossetti, an Italian political exile and distinguished student of Dante, and sister of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. In the front rank of modern women poets. Her later work is devotional in sentiment and consists chiefly of poetical commentaries on religious subjects. Collective editions of her poems have been published in England and America. Author of “Goblin Market and Other Poems,” 1862; “The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems,” 1866; “Sing-Song, a Nursery Rhyme-book,” 1872; “Annus Domini, a Collect for Each Day of the Year,” 1874; “A Pageant and Other Poems,” 1881; “Letter and Spirit, Notes on the Commandments,” 1883; “Time Flies, a Reading Diary,” 1885.

Personal

  One of the saintliest of women, as well as one of our finest poets…. In some ways she reminded me of Mrs. Craik, the author of John Halifax, Gentleman; that is, in the Quaker-like simplicity of her dress, and the extreme and almost demure plainness of the material, with, in her mien, something of that serene passivity which has always a charm of its own. She was so pale as to suggest anæmia, though there was a bright and alert look in her large and expressive azure-gray eyes, a color which often deepened to a dark, shadowy, velvety gray; and though many lines were imprinted on her features, the contours were smooth and young. Her hair, once a rich brown, now looked dark, and was thickly threaded with solitary white hairs rather than sheaves of gray. She was about the medium height of women, though at the time I thought her considerably shorter…. The circumstance that a clergyman came regularly to talk and pray with her—to be, in fact, her confessor—is no doubt responsible for the assertion sometimes made that, in later life, she was a Roman Catholic. This was not so. From her girlhood to her death she was strictly a member of the Anglican Church.

  Throughout all her life, indeed, she was the most notable example that our time has produced of the masterful power of man’s spiritual nature when at its highest to conquer in its warfare with earthly conditions, as her brother Gabriel’s life was the most notable example of the struggle of the spiritual nature with the bodily when the two are equally equipped. It is the conviction of one whose high privilege it was to know her in many a passage of sorrow and trial that of all the poets who have lived and died within our time, Christina Rossetti must have had the noblest soul…. In worldly matters her generosity may be described as boundless; but perhaps it is not difficult for a poet to be generous in a worldly sense—to be free in parting with that which can be precious only to common-place souls. What, however, is not so easy is for one holding such strong religious convictions as Miss Rossetti held to cherish such generous thoughts and feelings as were hers about those to whom her shibboleths meant nothing. This was what made her life so beautiful and such a blessing to all. The indurating effects of a selfish religiosity never withered her soul nor narrowed it. With her, indeed, religion was very love—

  Christina’s habits of composing were eminently of the spontaneous kind. I question her having ever once deliberated with herself whether or not she would write something or other, and then, after thinking out a subject, having proceeded to treat it in regular spells of work. Instead of this, something impelled her feelings, or “came into her head,” and her hand obeyed the dictation. I suppose she scribbled the lines off rapidly enough, and afterwards took whatever amount of pains she deemed requisite for keeping them right in form and expression—for she was quite conscious that a poem demands to be good in execution, as well as genuine in impulse; but (strange as it seems to say so of a sister who, up to the year 1876, was almost constantly in the same house with me) I cannot remember ever seeing her in the act of composition (I take no count here of the bouts-rimés sonnets of 1848). She consulted nobody, and solicited no advice; though it is true that with regard to her published volumes—or at any rate the first two of them—my brother volunteered to point out what seemed well adapted for insertion, and what the reverse, and he found her a very willing recipient of his monitions.

  Christina Rossetti comes to us as one of those splendid stars that are so far away they are seen only at rare intervals. She never posed as a “literary person”—reading her productions at four-o’clocks and winning high praise from the unbonneted, and the discerning society editor. She never even sought a publisher. Her first volume of verses was issued by her grandfather Polidori unknown to her—printed by his own labor when she was seventeen and presented to her. What a surprise it must have been to this gentle girl to have one of her own books placed in her hands! There seems to have been an almost holy love in this proud man’s heart for his granddaughter. His love was blind, or near-sighted at least, as love is apt to be (and I am glad!) for some of the poems in this little volume are sorry stuff. Later, her brothers issued her work and found market for it; and once we find Dante Gabriel almost quarrelling with that worthy Manxman, Hall Caine, because the Manxman was compiling a volume of the best English sonnets and threatening to leave Christina Rossetti out.

  Of Christina I saw a good deal, for the hospitality of the Rossetti family was informal and cordial. She was then in excellent health, and, though she was never what would be, by the generality of tastes, considered a beautiful woman, there was a noble serenity and dignity of expression in her face which was, as is often said of women of the higher type of character, “better than beauty,” and in which one saw the spiritual exaltation that, without the least trace of the dévote, dominated in her and made her, before all other women of whom I know anything, the poetess of the divine life. The faith in the divine flamed out in her with a mild radiance which had in it no earthly warmth. She attracted me very strongly, but I should as soon have thought of falling in love with the Madonna del Gran Duca as with her. Being myself in the regions of dogmatic faith, I was in a position to judge sympathetically her religion, and though we differed in tenets as far as two sincere believers in Christianity could, I found in our discussions of the dogmas a broad and affectionate charity in her towards all differences from the ideal of credence she had formed for herself. I do not remember ever meeting any one who held such exalted and unquestioning faith in the true spiritual life as was hers. From my mother, who was in most respects the most purely spiritual woman I have ever known, Christina differed by this serenity, which in my mother was often disturbed by the doubts that had their seeds in the old and superstitious Calvinism mingled with the ground of her creed, and from which she never could liberate herself. Christina believed in God, in Heaven, in the eternal life, with an unfaltering constancy and fullness which left no questionings except, it might be, concerning her fulfillment of her religious obligations.

General

  Any American reader who for the last two or three years has occasionally seen and admired the stray poems attributed to Miss Rossetti, being asked to describe them by one word, would have pronounced them Pre-Raphaelite. They were certainly most picturesque poetry; it was her practice to dwell elaborately upon details; oftenest her theme was nature; when they were devotional, her pieces were full of that phase of religious feeling which contemplates, not without sentimentality, God made man, which, we may almost say, agonizes at the feet of a Saviour who suffers and yearns, who is bleeding and aching with fleshy wounds. To have attributed to Pre-Raphaelitism such qualities as these would, perhaps, have been to give it a definition rude or incorrect. But whether right or wrong as regards the sister art, it was not a mistake to fix upon these as the distinguishing features of Miss Rossetti’s poetry, and if with these we name a pervading sensuousness, we have the list of its essential characteristics complete…. Miss Rossetti’s merit, though unique, will never be of the supreme order.

  The first cursory impression of this book would be, we think, that its cardinal axiom was “Poetry is versified plaintiveness.” The amount of melancholy is simply overwhelming. There is a forty-twilight power of sombreness everywhere…. These verses may be as well as she can do. They contain poetical passages of merit and promise, but they show also a defectiveness of versification, a falseness of ear, and occasionally a degree of affectation and triviality that, we can only hope, are not characteristic. To borrow a little of the style and technology of a sister branch of thought, the case, as now presented, can be accounted for as in essence a simple attack of the old and well-known endemic, cacoethes scribendi. Probably it befell her at the usual early age. Only instead of the run of gushing girls, we have Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s sister, Jean Ingelow’s intimate friend and a young lady of intelligence and education, constantly in contact with real literary society, and—what is thoroughly evident in this book—read in our best poets. Add all these complicating symptoms, and is there not a something plausible about the diagnosis? We do not say, observe, and we do not mean to say, that this is Miss Rossetti’s case; only all she has done so far seems explicable on this hypothesis. For ourselves, we lean to the view that she will do more. We judge hers a strong, sensuous, impulsive, earnest, inconsiderate nature, that sympathizes well, feels finely, keeps true to itself at bottom, but does not pause to make sure that others must, as well as may, enter into the spirit that underlies her utterances, and so buries her meaning sometimes beyond Champollion’s own powers of deciphering.

  There are reasons for not subscribing to the claim more than once put forward in Miss Rossetti’s behalf to take rank beside the great Mrs. Browning. The calibre of mind required for the production of such works as “Casa Guidi Windows,” “Mother and Poet,” “Sonnets from the Portuguese,” &c. (not to name “Aurora Leigh,” the sacred dramas, and the incomparable second translation of the “Prometheus,”) is bigger than the calibre of mind demanded for the creation of such poems as “Goblin Market,” “The Prince’s Progress,” and many of the smaller and more perfectly gem-like poems of Miss Rossetti. Nor can I see that the powers of expression exhibited by Mrs. Browning were less superior to those shown as yet by Miss Rossetti than her exhibited powers of idealisation were:—simply, Miss Rossetti has betrayed a keener sense of the necessity of execution than Mrs. Browning did; not a greater executive ability, not even as great an executive ability, for the intuitive manipulation of Mrs. Browning is, in numerous cases, not short of perfection.

  She is a woman of genius, whose songs, hymns, ballads, and various lyrical pieces are studied and original. I do not greatly admire her longer poems, which are more fantastic than imaginative; but elsewhere she is a poet of a profound and serious cast, whose lips part with the breathing of a fervid spirit within.

  If you should happen to see Christina Rossetti, please to give my kind regards to her. I saw a little poem of hers, some two or three years ago, which uttered, as it were, a cry out of my own heart—to be delivered from “Self.” It was the whole cry of an earnest soul embodied in a few words; a wonderful little outburst of prayer.

  Several of Miss Rossetti’s more ambitious pieces of verse unmistakably betray a southern cast of imagination, and the pictorial element in her poems is so strong, and of such a kind, that Dante Rossetti could have found twenty or thirty congenial themes in them for his pencil. But while, of the spiritual and artistic elements in his nature, Rossetti gave most freedom to the latter element, in Miss Rossetti the spiritual predominates. And anyone who has happened to see Rossetti’s portrait of his sister and mother, can easily interpret the poetess’s face by her works, and discern how much of her corresponds, in form and fibre to an Italian type that is centuries old. The minds of brother and sister seem to have been made out of some specially wistful “divine dream-element.”

  Poverty of ideas cannot be imputed to Christina Rossetti, but the bulk of her poetry, rich as it is in music and colour, is fitter for the cloister than the hearth. In “Goblin Market,” however, she was able to clothe her mystic thought in an objective shape, and, while displaying all her wonted lyrical charm, to give an insight into natures beyond the confines of humanity, a power also evinced in Cardinal Newman’s nearly contemporary “Dream of Gerontius.”

  Here, in four hundred and fifty clearly printed pages, we have the exquisite product of a life which cannot yet have left off singing, poems of as fair an art, lyrics of as fresh a note, dreams of as strange a phantasy, as ever made blessed the English tongue. To say that Miss Rossetti is the greatest English poet among women is to pay regard to a distinction which, in questions of art, is purely arbitrary—a distinction which has given us the foolish word “poetess,” a standing witness in our language to the national obtuseness. How little must the artistic constitution—the third sex—be understood among a people with such a word in their dictionary. How inorganic such distinctions are, of course, needs no illustration, though, if such were necessary, Miss Christina Rossetti’s genius would form an admirable text; for, to my mind, she is, in right of its rarest quality, our one imaginative descendant of the magician of “Kubla Khan.” No English poet till the appearance of “Goblin Market” ever again found the hidden door to Xanadhu save she…. Sometimes in her best poems we come across a word insensitive or out of colour. This, obviously, cannot be from lack of the power of art, it can only be because her exercise of the power is mainly unconscious. We find the same flaws in the early work of Keats; but he, on the other hand, soon learnt to train his song by a mature study of style. I should say, however, that Miss Rossetti has never done this; and so great is her instinctive power of art that she has really been able to afford the neglect, her poetry retaining thereby a charming naïveté which by a self-conscious culture might have been lost to us.

  Her customary music is sad, often poignantly sad. Her lyrics have that desiderium, that obstinate longing for something lost out of life, which Shelley’s have, although her Christian faith gives her regret a more resigned and sedate character than his possesses. In the extremely rare gift of song-writing Miss Rossetti has been singularly successful. Of the poets of our time she stands next to Lord Tennyson in this branch of the art, in the spontaneous and complete quality of her Lieder, and in her propriety for the purpose of being sung…. Her music is very delicate, and it is no small praise to her that she it is who, of living verse-writers, has left the strongest mark on the metrical nature of that miraculous artificer of verse, Mr. Swinburne. In his “Poems and Ballads,” as other critics have long ago pointed out, as was shown when that volume first appeared, several of Miss Rossetti’s discoveries were transferred to his more scientific and elaborate system of harmonies, and adapted to more brilliant effects…. From the first a large section of Miss Rossetti’s work has been occupied with sacred and devotional themes. Through this most rare and difficult department of the art, which so few essay without breaking on the Scylla of doctrine on the one hand, or being whirled in the Charybdis of commonplace dullness on the other, she has steered with extraordinary success. Her sacred poems are truly sacred, and yet not unpoetical. As a religious poet of our time she has no rival but Cardinal Newman, and it could only be schismatic prejudice or absence of critical faculty which should deny her a place, as a poet, higher than that of our exquisite master of prose. To find her exact parallel it is at once her strength and her snare that we must go back to the middle of the seventeenth century. She is the sister of George Herbert; she is of the family of Crashaw, of Vaughan, of Wither.

  Miss Rossetti’s gifts, unfairly, as I think, obscured for some time by the marvellous genius of her brother, have none the less won recognition in the hearts of many men. Her poetry has always been reticent and unassuming, but always stamped with a rare distinction, a perfection of form, and an elevation of spirit which are as welcome as flowers in May. It is with a pride of possession that one puts her new volume upon the shelf, to return to again and again for refreshment of the appropriate mood.

  All who have human hearts confess her to be a sad and a sweet poet, all who have a sense of poetry know how rare was the quality of poetry in her—how spiritual and how sensuous—somewhat thin, somewhat dispread in her laxer writing, but perfectly strong, perfectly impassioned in her best. To the name of poet her right is so sure that proof of it is to be found everywhere in her “unconsidered ways,” and always irrefutable…. We are not to reverence the versification of Christina Rossetti as we have learnt to reverence that of a great and classic master. She proves herself an artist, a possessor of the weighty matters of the law of art, despite the characteristic carelessness with which she played by ear. That thought so moving, feeling so urgent, as the thought and feeling of her “Convent Threshold” are communicated, are uttered alive, proves her an artist.

  Of all the great themes with which Miss Rossetti deals, she is, above all writers, the singer of Death. Whether as the eternal home-coming, or the quiet relief after the intolerable restlessness of the world, or as the deep reality in which the fretful vanities of life are merged, it is always in view, as the dark majestic portal to which the weary road winds at last.

  Miss Rossetti’s verses sometimes suggest those of other poets, but we always feel that her art is distinctly her own…. Miss Rossetti’s genius was too original to be chargeable with anything more than that assimilation of spiritual influence from which no poet can hope wholly to escape, and which links together in one golden chain the poetic tradition of the ages. If in most of the provinces of the lyric realm Miss Rossetti’s verse challenges comparison with that of our greater singers, it is in the religious province that the challenge is most imperative and her mastery most manifest.

  Miss Rossetti is perhaps best known to the outside world as the author of “Goblin Market,” “The Prince’s Progress,” a selection of sonnets and of a series of sacred and devotional pieces. I can never forget the day I first opened a volume of her poems; I could neither relinquish the book nor yet satisfactorily account to myself for the fascination it exercised upon me. Many of the thoughts struck me as new, and all were of a unique setting…. Miss Rossetti’s ear was close to nature; she listened for its simple voices, and uttered the sounds just as she heard them. Her Nature poetry is thus saturated with the greenness and freshness of spring, or bright with the glamour of summer. There is nothing strained or affected about it; it is as natural as Nature herself. By virtue of this spontaneous natural flow it is the true Fountain Arethuse: there has been nothing like it since Herrick…. The keynote of much of Miss Rossetti’s word-music is its æsthetic mysticism and rich melancholy…. Countless passages in these poems illustrate that pure, warm ecstasy of early Italian colouring which Rossetti’s brush has immortalised for us…. But it is specially in the “Prince’s Progress” that Miss Rossetti’s subtle and mysterious art finds its most perfect expression…. Miss Rossetti … though rarely posing as teacher, philosopher, or moralist, is yet always a consummate artist; open her pages where we will, me must needs light upon beauty. Mrs. Browning was never restrained by any apprehension of treating a subject inartistically. Whatever she felt or thought was expressed, small matter how. Sometimes it came in a never-to-be-forgotten word-music, but just as often in prose that passed for the poetry it should have been. Miss Rossetti, on the contrary, treated everything as only an artist could treat it.

  Miss Rossetti, in her sacred poems, brings together all the elements of art’s excellence and of a Christian faith. Their chief note, their unique interest and delight, is a tenderness in them, a tremulous and wistful beauty of adoration, rising and passing, at times, into something like a very joyous adoration of friend by friend…. The severer poems of Miss Rossetti, solemn with the solemnity of the “Four Last Things” are no less alien from the average English attitude…. Some of her poems are awful with the awfulness of the “De-Profundis” or the “Dies Irae.” In her three hundred sacred poems we find all possible tones of feeling and thought. There are poems with a homely, carolling air about them, in their grace and sweetness, as though they were (slava reverentia) the nursery songs of Heaven. There are poems, metrically and imaginatively marvellous, surging and sweeping forward with a splendour of movement to their victorious, their exultant close, as though they were the national hymns of Heaven. There are poems, as I have said, which are the very dirges and burdens of earth: in Crashaw’s phrase, they are a “pathetical descant upon the plain song of Stabat Mater Dolorosa:” they hold the austere and solemnising sorrow of the world…. I have dwelled upon this side of Miss Rossetti’s incomparable work, because in these “New Poems” the divine are by far the finest and the most welcome…. Her sonnets have, far beyond most, that singleness of a dominant emotion, piercingly felt and craving expression, joined to a rich magnificence of strict rhythm, which is the sonnet’s perfect praise.

  There are those who seriously maintain Miss Rossetti’s claim to the highest rank among English poetesses, urging that she excels Mrs. Browning, her only possible competitor, in freedom from blemishes of form and from the liability to fall into silliness and maudlin gush, at least as much as she falls short of her in variety and in power of shaping a poem of considerable bulk. But without attempting a too rigid classification we may certainly say that Miss Rossetti has no superior among Englishwomen who have had the gift of poetry.

  Most of Miss Rossetti’s later work is intensely devotional in its character, and reveals a nature strung to an almost saint-like ecstacy. Moreover, the spiritual fervour of these poems is no mere artistic mood assumed in sympathy with the forms of mediæval devotion as in her brother’s case, but the genuine outcome of a personality steeped in the true spirit of passionate worship. But while their fervour is almost ascetic in its religious intensity, there is no trace of feebleness in them. They are strong both in intellectual and in artistic qualities. In expression they are finished and exquisite as in thought they are noble and elevating.

  Christina had the faculty of seizing beautiful moments, exalted feelings, sublime emotions and working them up into limpid song that comes echoing to us as from across soft seas. In all of her lines there is a half sobbing undertone—the sweet minor chord that is ever present in the songs of the Choir Invisible, whose music is the gladness as well as the sadness of the world.

  By the death of Christina Rossetti, literature, and not English literature alone, has lost the one great modern poetess…. In Miss Rossetti we have a poet among poets, and in Miss Rossetti alone. Content to be merely a woman, wise in limiting herself within somewhat narrow bounds, she possessed, in union with a profoundly emotional nature, a power of artistic self-restraint which no other woman who has written in verse, except the supreme Sappho, has ever shown; and it is through this mastery over her own nature, this economy of her own resources, that she takes rank among poets rather than among poetesses…. A power of seeing finely beyond the scope of ordinary vision; that, in a few words, is the note of Miss Rossetti’s genius, and it brings with it a subtle and as if instinctive power of expressing subtle and yet as if instinctive conceptions; always clearly, always simply, with a singular and often startling homeliness, which is the sincerity of a style that seems to be innocently unaware of its own beauty. This power is shown in every division of her poetry; in the peculiar witchery of the poems dealing with the supernatural, in the exaltation of the poems of devotion, in the lyrical quality of the songs of children, birds, and corn, in the special variety and the special excellence of the poems of passion and meditation. The union of homely yet always select literalness of treatment with mystical visionariness, or visionariness which is sometimes mystical, constitutes the peculiar quality of her poetry.

  Whether we look to the quality or to the quantity of her poetry of devotion—was pre-eminent among the illustrious English poets who have enriched the literature of Christian teaching by their genius. As long as Christianity remains the most vital force in the lives of millions of English-speaking people, the memory of that poet of their faith who gave them such a poem as “Passing away, saith the world, passing away,” or “Paradise,” with its exquisite last stanza the very quintessence of Christian expectation—who gave them that beautiful hymn, part of which, beginning “The Porter watches at the gate,” was sung so fittingly at her funeral service—who gave them the perfect lines, beginning “Thy lovely saints do bring Thee love”—will be cherished and honoured.