Christina Rossetti's Poems. With Mustrations by Florence Harrison. Introduction by
Alice Meynell. (Blackie mid Son. 15s. net.)—There is very little to be said about Christina :Rossetti; that little Mrs. Meynell says very well. There was something conventional about her life; it was, as it were, a commentatio mortis. She died at the age of sixty-four, and for all but eight years of this period she was her mother's constant companion. She had a suitor in her early youth, another when she was thirty- six; the first belonged to another faith, the second was not definitely a believer. Her life was spent in religious observances and in good works, sometimes of the very humblest kind. Mrs. Meynell quotes from Mr. W. M. Rossetti the touching little detail that "one thing which occupied her to an extent one would hardly credit was the making up of scrap-books for hospital patients or children." Certainly after we have read these few pages—they would make some eight or ten of an ordinary volume—we under- stand the poems better. The poems are in two parts, " General " and "Devotional." Of the former there are eighty-one, headed by "Goblin Market " ; of the second, twenty-nine. As for the illus- trations, they are what we should have expected them to be, though we cannot say that they are wholly to our taste. They are, indeed, curiously different, though with a certain resemblance. Let any one compare, for instance, "Jessie Cameron" and "Eve," which happen to come together. Our chief complaint against them is that they are not beautiful ; but then we are prepared to admit that the task of illustrating such poems was a difficult one. It would have been well to give a bibliography of the volumes from which the poems came. The popular biographical dictionary to which we turned for information did not contain the name !
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