At the dedication of the memorial erected to the late
Miss -Christina Rossetti in Christ Church, Woburn Square, the Bishop of Durham delivered a short but impressive address on the qualities of her poetry, taking for his text one of the sayings attributed to Jesus, "He that wonders shall reign." The Bishop defined the characteristic endowment of the true poet as "wonder, the direct consciousness of the immeasurable depths of Nature and of life, with the power of dise'-qing them to others," and found as the peculiar trait of women singers as opposed to men, "depth of feeling, an intuition of • the whole, an intensity of personal devotion." In Miss Rossetti we recognised "the completest consecration of woman's gift of poetry to the highest uses." She sang with- out art or artifice, "as the bird sings," and at the same time " saw all, saw the whole, the world as God made it,' in spite of the ravages wrought by men's self-will." She faced sorrow and death with resolute and open-eyed faith, and did not turn away, like the Greek artist, from that which marred the calm beauty of life. She was essentially the spiritual poet of our age, and at no small sacrifice concentrated her powers on her spiritual teaching more and more as time went on. We had thus lost many delicate fancies, parables of life, and passages of weird music; but, in his opinion, the message we had received outweighed them all. That is rather a high estimate of Mies Rossetti's poetry, but some of it is strangely ethereal
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