chorus of awe and lamentation which seems to wail round the lattice, as if the wind had been charged with a human cry, compose a picture the tragic elevation of which cannot easily be surpassed. . . . . The reader must take these examples as pledges that throughout the series he will meet with beauty as rare and suggestion as fine as we have instanced. We would direct him specially to a song, entitled, "The Woodspurge," which intervenes between the sonnets. We have no further space for comment or quotation; but we shall have written to little purpose if there be any poem in the volume to which our readers will not eagerly resort.'
Pall Mall Gazette.
'Here is a volume of poetry upon which to congratulate the public and the author; one of those volumes, coming so seldom and so welcome to the cultivated reader, that are found at a first glance to promise the delight of a new poetical experience. There is no mistaking the savour of a book of strong and new poetry of a really high kind; no confounding it with the milder effluence that greets us from a hundred current books of poetry, in various degrees praiseworthy, or hopeful, or accomplished; and we may say at once that it is the former and rarer savour that is assuredly in the present case to be discerned. . . . .There remains a section of Mr. Rossetti's work which is perhaps most of all characteristic of his peculiar genius, and which to those having most sympathy with that genius will be especially stirring and delightful, while to the general reader its contents are likely to remain to a certain degree problematical and difficult. The last hundred pages of the volume are occupied principally with sonnets, its last division of all proclaiming the double artistic profession of the author by the heading "Sonnets for Pictures, and other Sonnets." . . . . The peculiar combination of exquisiteness with pregnancy, which is the note of Mr, Rossetti's poetical diction, enables him to put a great deal into a small space; and when one of these majestic and melodious sonnets seems obscure, as it will seem at first, the reader will almost always find, if he perseveres, that this is the obscurity not of emptiness or confusion, but of closeness and concentration.'
New Monthly Magazine.
'These poems are imbued with a philosophy of no such narrow scope as immortalises vistas and hollows, but with one which, serious and far-reaching, engenders, if the phrase be not inappropriate, a wide mental perspective within its moral horizon. The poetry is never trifling, it blows none of those aëri-typed bubbles which please the feminine even less than the effeminate mind, but is ever earnest. It bears the mark of suffering (without which, alas! how poor is human experience), but it is not the personal sorrow which is set forth, at least not until it has been cast in the universal mould, and brought out as a fitting study for all who under affliction need strength, under trial, resignation.'
