and weird imagination; those, namely, describing the haggard woman with the gift of the second sight. They see something in the shadowy distance apparently instinct with life and beside a rock on the black beach

"And was it only the tossing furze,

Or brake of the waste sea-wold?
Or was it an eagle bent to the blast?"

but on the King drawing nigh he discovers only an old and haggard woman in tattered garments—old, however, only in appearance, for on seeing James she springs erect as though "her writhen limbs were wrung by a fire within," and in the sudden light given by the moon sailing clear of the cloud-rack she is seen to be gaunt and strong. The King seems known to her, for she greets him at once in strange weird words. Here was one of those opportunities for supernatural effect which Rossetti could not have let slip and which he has taken splendid advantage of the following verses being steeped in the supernatural aura as thunder-clouds are charged with electricity:

"And the woman held his eyes with her eyes :

'O King, thou art come at last ;

But thy wraith has haunted the Scottish sea
To my sight for four years past.

"Four years it is since first I met,

"Twixt the Duchray and the Dhu,

A shape whose feet clung close in a shroud,
And that shape for thine I knew.

"A year again, and on Inchkeith Isle
I saw thee pass in the breeze,
With the cerecloth risen above thy feet,
And wound about thy knees.

"And yet a year, in the Links of Forth,
As a wanderer without rest,

Thou cam'st with both thine arms i' the shroud
That clung high up thy breast.

"And in this hour I find thee here,

And well mine eyes may note

That the winding-sheet hath passed thy breast
And risen around thy throat.

"And when I meet thee again, O King,
That of death hast such sore drouth,-

Except thou turn again on this shore,-
The winding-sheet shall have moved once more,
And covered thine eyes and mouth."

The King, however, refuses to turn back, but with noble and resigned resolve determines to pursue his journey. The scene shortly after changes to the Charterhouse of Perth, on a wind-wild eve in February; and some twenty-five verses are devoted to a beautiful description of the twain who in marriage had not ceased to be lovers. On the other hand, it seems to me that nothing has been gained by the altered stanzas of The King's Quhair as sung by James, the beauty of the original being spoiled and the clipped version unsatisfactory it would have been better either to have given the stanzas in their own shape, despite that not being akin to the ballad form, or else to have condensed them to four-line octosyllabic verses not in quotation but by the writer. But the peace of the King is broken by the news that the woman who had prophesied to him on the bleak sea-shore demands to see him again, yet he will not permit this for fear he should alarm the Queen. After the royal lovers retire the traitorous Robert Stuart removes the locks and the bolts, but the waiting-women of the queen

notice nothing, though there is an eery wail in the wind outside and something ominous in the way in which

"The shadows cast on the arras'd wall

'Mid the pictured kings stood sudden and tall,
Like spectres sprung from the ground.”

As the King and Queen lie together at rest they are
suddenly startled by a
by a wild shrill voice crying
strange words under their chamber window, and they
recognise the voice as the same that once prophesied
to them by the Scottish sea. And now the King is
told it is too late, or almost too late, for the mystic
shroud she has watched year by year extending from
feet to arms covers his eyes and mouth, the pro-
phetic wail and appeal ending in the following magni-
ficent stanza, lines which no living or recent poet has
surpassed in weird imaginativeness and supernatural
effect:-

"For every man on God's ground, O King,
His death grows up from his birth
In a shadow-plant perpetually;

And thine towers high, a black yew-tree,
O'er the Charterhouse of Perth !"

But the repeated warning has come too late, and Sir Robert Graeme and his fellow-traitors have gained access to the royal apartments. At the appeal of the Queen and Catherine Douglas the unarmed and betrayed King springs down into a vault beneath, foul and confined but the only possible refuge, and while the Queen sees to the removing the traces of the torn plank which had been displaced, Catherine Douglas, as she herself is narrating, springs to the door as she hears the tread of armed men approaching and in

despair thrusts her arm through the stanchions that had once held the iron bar. One crash, however, and the arm is shattered and entrance gained. Then follows the horrible tragedy of the King's murder, after a brief space wherein the women thought to have deceived the traitors, which indeed they might have succeeded in doing had it not been for the traitorchamberlain, Robert Stuart.

The narrator of the ballad goes on to tell how vengeance was at last accomplished, and The King's Tragedy concludes with the bitter thought of Queen Jane,

"That a poet true and a friend of man,

Brief as this account of the important balladsection of Rossetti's poetic work has been, it may serve to show that his fame as a poet is not based alone upon his sonnets, that indeed it comprises compositions upon which his name will probably rest when many of the sonnets have ceased to charm any save the rare cultivated ear and the poetic student.

CHAPTER VII.

THE SONNET-SONNETS FOR PICTURES-MISCELLANEOUS

SONNETS.

"Apart from all sanctions, the student of poetry knows that no form of verse is a surer touchstone of mastery than this, which is so easy to write badly, so supremely difficult to write well, so full both of hindrance and of occasion in all matters of structure and of style; neither any a more searching test of inspiration, since on the one hand it seems to provoke the affectations of ingenuity, and on the other hand it has been chosen by the greatest men of all as the medium for their most intimate, direct, and overwhelming self-disclosures."-The Westminster Review, 1871.

"Parmi les auteurs modernes de sonnets en Angleterre, M. Rossetti a droit à la première place. Pour trouver les mêmes qualités que dans ses ouvrages, il faut s'addresser aux sonnets de Shakespeare, de Milton, ou de Wordsworth. L'influence des modèles Italiens sur l'auteur se fait fortement sentir, et l'intensité de la passion se mêle chez lui à une austérité qui vient directement du Dante. Comme magnificence de langage, la littérature Anglaise moderne n'a rien qui égale ces poèmes."Le Livre, 10 Décembre, 1881.

If it were practicable at this advanced stage to go into detail on so interesting a subject as the Sonnet, I should willingly have done so, both because of Rossetti's connection with this form of literature and because a markedly widespread interest has of late been reawakened and seems still increasing in sonnet-expression, but the exigencies of space imperatively forbid