We sincerely regret to report the death on Saturday last
of Miss Christina Rossetti, the best probably of our women poets since Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and the youngest of a family distinguished by great literary and artistic gifts. In later life, her poetry, though always spiritual and often very beautiful, was rather sad and touched with mysticism ; but "Goblin Market" is a poem whose mysticism is perfectly transparent, and that will live as long as any poem of the second order of genius in English literature. It is full of buoyancy and life, of the most delicate fancy, and of singular and yet very graceful originality, besides being founded on that central religious truth of the reality of sin, and of human power to resist it, without which the worship of beauty becomes essentially pantheistic and enervating. "Goblin Market" is not in any sense didactic or permeated by the spirit of edification. It is a genuine work of imagina- tion, though of imagination set in motion and sustained by the spirit of awe, and embodying in an airy and beautiful form the grotesque disguises of that lawless passion for beauty which ends in ugliness. It was an early and impres- sive augury of much of the kind of modern poetry to which that passion afterwards save birth.
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