Pre-Raphaelite and other Poets. Lafcadio Hearn

have all the delightful innocence of the Middle Ages, when the soul was thought of only as another body of finer substance. Now it is altogether the human warmth of the poem that makes its intense attraction. Rarely to-day can any Western poet write satisfactorily about heavenly things, because we have lost the artless feeling of the Middle Ages, and we cannot think of the old heaven as a reality. In order to write such things, we should have to get back the heart of our fathers; and Rossetti happened to be born with just such a heart. He had probably little or no real faith in religion; but he was able to understand exactly how religious people felt hundreds of years ago.

      Let us now turn to a more earthly phase of the same tone of love which appears in "The Blessed Damozel." Now it is the lover himself on earth who is speaking, while contemplating the portrait of the dead woman whom he loved. We shall only make extracts, on account of the extremely elaborate and difficult structure of the poem.

      THE PORTRAIT

       This is her picture as she was:

       It seems a thing to wonder on,

       As though mine image in the glass

       Should tarry when myself am gone.

       I gaze until she seems to stir—

       Until mine eyes almost aver

       That now, even now, the sweet lips part

       To breathe the words of the sweet heart:—

       And yet the earth is over her.

       … …

       Even so, where Heaven holds breath and hears

       The beating heart of Love's own breast—Where

       round the secret of all spheres

       All angels lay their wings to rest— How shall my soul stand rapt and awed. When, by the new birth borne abroad Throughout the music of the suns, It enters in her soul at once And knows the silence there for God!

      Here is the very highest form of mystical love; for love is identified with God, and the reunion in heaven is a blending, not with a mere fellow soul, but with the Supreme Being. By "silence" here you must understand rest, heavenly peace. The closing stanza of the poem contains one of the most beautiful images of comparison ever made in any language.

      Here with her face doth memory sit

       Meanwhile, and wait the day's decline,

       Till other eyes shall look from it,

       Eyes of the spirit's Palestine,

       Even than the old gaze tenderer:

       While hopes and aims long lost with her

       Stand round her image side by side,

       Like tombs of pilgrims that have died

       About the Holy Sepulchre.

      What the poet means is this: "Now I sit, remembering the past, and look at her face in the picture, as long as the light of day remains. Presently, with twilight the stars will shine out like eyes in heaven—heaven which is my Holy Land, because she is there. Those stars will then seem to me even as her eyes, but more beautiful, more loving than the living eyes. The hopes and the projects which I used to entertain for her sake, and which died when she died—they come back to mind, but like the graves ranged around the grave of Christ at Jerusalem." The reference is of course to the great pilgrimages of the Middle Ages made to Jerusalem.

      More than the artist speaks here; and if there be not strong faith, there is at least beautiful hope. A more tender feeling could not be combined with a greater pathos; but Rossetti often reaches the very same supreme quality of sentiment, even in poems of a character closely allied to romance. We can take "The Staff and Scrip" as an example of mediæval story of the highest emotional quality.

      "Who rules these lands?" the Pilgrim said.

       "Stranger, Queen Blanchelys."

       "And who has thus harried them?" he said.

       "It was Duke Luke did this;

       God's ban be his!"

       The Pilgrim said, "Where is your house?

       I'll rest there, with your will."

       "You've but to climb these blackened boughs

       And you'll see it over the hill,

       For it burns still."

       "Which road, to seek your Queen?" said he.

       "Nay, nay, but with some wound

       You'll fly back hither, it may be,

       And by your blood i' the ground

       My place be found."

       "Friend, stay in peace. God keep your head,

       And mine, where I will go;

       For He is here and there," he said.

       He passed the hillside, slow,

       And stood below.

      So far the poem is so simple that no one could expect anything very beautiful in the sequence. We only have a conversation between a pilgrim from the Holy Land, returned to his native country (probably mediæval France), and a peasant or yeoman belonging to the estate of a certain Queen. We may suspect, however, from the conversation, that the pilgrim is a knight or noble, and probably has been a crusader. He sees that the country has been ravaged by some merciless enemy; and the peasant tells him that it was Duke Luke. The peasant's house is burning; he himself is hiding in terror of his life. But the pilgrim is not afraid, and goes to see the Queen in spite of all warning. One can imagine very well that the purpose of the Duke in thus making war upon a woman was to force a marriage as well as to acquire territory. Now it was the duty of a true knight to help any woman unjustly oppressed or attacked; therefore the pilgrim's wish to see the Queen is prompted by this sense of duty. Hereafter the poem has an entirely different tone.

      The Queen sat idle by her loom:

       She heard the arras stir,

       And looked up sadly: through the room

       The sweetness sickened her

       Of musk and myrrh.

       Her women, standing two and two,

       In silence combed the fleece.

       The Pilgrim said, "Peace be with you,

       Lady"; and bent his knees.

       She answered, "Peace."

       Her eyes were like the wave within;

       Like water-reeds the poise

       Of her soft body, dainty-thin;

       And like the water's noise

       Her plaintive voice.

      The naked walls of rooms during the Middle Ages were covered with drapery or tapestry, on which figures were embroidered or woven. Arras was the name given to a kind of tapestry made at the town of Arras in France.

      For him, the stream had never well'd

       In desert tracts malign

       So sweet; nor had he ever felt

       So faint in the sunshine

       Of Palestine.

       Right so, he knew that he saw weep

       Each night through every dream

       The Queen's own face, confused in sleep

       With visages supreme

       Not known to him.

      At this point the poem suddenly becomes mystical. It is not chance nor will that has brought these two together, but some divine destiny. As he sees the Queen's face for the first time with his eyes, he remembers having seen the same face many times before in his dreams. And when he saw it in dreams, it was also the face of a woman weeping; and there were also other faces in the dream, not human but "supreme"—probably angels or other heavenly beings.

      "Lady,"