counted as ten years." An echo line! votaries of Italian literature recognize the original. In the Vita Nuova Dante says: "To me it is ten years of years." Here is but one aspect of Dante's influence in the Blessed Damozel. Rossetti is honouring no real maiden; he is living over again, as was his custom, the experience of Dante in grief for Beatrice.

Still another point of view is suggested by the Blessed Damozel's heaven. This seems a well-equipped place but there is no mistake the lady is homesick. "The only reason for going to heaven that I can discern," says a friend of mine, "is to see the other side of the moon. After that I shall be lonely." You remember that Aucassin's contempt for heaven was unqualified; he preferred to be in hell with the sports. Indeed what the Blessed Damozel misses is human companionship. Heaven is impressive-and boring. Her one hope is reunion with her earthly lover. Apart from Rossetti's solemnity of tone heaven reminds us of an uncongenial houseparty. When the lover reaches heaven, "he shall fear haply and be dumb." He will be embarrassed as he learns the new snatches; cantata singing is trying, if the words are unfamiliar.

In fact the essence of this heaven is a very human literalness. The lady's bosom warms the gold bar. There are real hand-maidens attractively named; souls that are flames; and prayers that are clouds. Nothing is intangible. It should be recollected that while Rossetti was writing this poem there raged a controversy concerning the nature of the next life. But Rossetti was equally indifferent to scientist and theologian. His only concern with religion was an artistic one. When on his death-bed he called for the last sacrament, his friends regarded his action as a melodramatic caprice. All this is not indicated in the Blessed Damozel, but the poem is an omen of Rossetti's aloofness from the ideas of his era. He turns satisfied to this, a twelfth century heaven. For it is, at basis, a medieval heaven, the heaven of the aureole, of the Giver of Boons, of Thomas A Kempis. The lilies, the

stars, the singing spheres, the material resurrection, these are the emblems of Rossetti, medievalist and romanticist.

This, then, the Blessed Damozel does: vividly suggests aspects of the genius of Rossetti. But the poem's overtone, yet unmentioned, its poignant and elusive meaning springs from the very fons et origo of Rossetti's poetical nature. I mean his attitude towards love and the lady. What does the poet mean? That strangely poised figure, all languor and tenderness, so sensuous yet speaking to something beyond the senses. A transcendental sacredness invests her. Somehow she is enskied; made holy. Physical she is, yet spiritual, too, at once human and angelic.

Strangely enough, this quality is the link with Jenny, the "other poem," already darkly alluded to, and written within one year of the Blessed Damozel. "Vengeance of Jenny's case! Fie on her! Never name her, child!" Jenny is, in truth, seldom named. Her set is Carlyle's "harlotocracy." "When you do write of these people," sniffed a Frenchman, "why must you always be pudic?" And I thought instantly of DeFoe, Goldsmith, Clough. "It is not," an English critic. once remarked, as if in defense, "that readers are shocked by such subjects, but that they are afraid they ought to be." In any case the effect of this uncontinental, if continent, restraint upon writers is to make their treatment cynical-there is Byron's Beppo; or unreal-there is the Reverie of Poor Susan; or piously moral-there is the Deserted Village.

But in Jenny Rossetti offends in none of these ways. He is never cynical, though he is playful, wondering, and pitiful. He is never unreal; though he is relentless in depicting Jenny's life. And he never breathes pious morality. The poem is an amazing fabric of lightness without cynicism; realism without hardness; and sympathy without sentimentality. Swinburne's apogee is final: "Without a trait in it of anything coarse and trivial, without shadow or suspicion of any vulgar aim, or pathetic effort of a tragical or moral kind, it cleaves to absolute fact and reality."

The reader likes Jenny. Besides, if he comes to her from the other poems of Rossetti, his memory is piqued. For he is forever haunted by a resemblance. Never once free is he from the half-formed conviction that he has already known Jenny elsewhere in Rossetti's poetry. Soon analysis reveals the softly-poised figure; the long throat; the hair of "countless gold incomparable;" even the wistful reverie. Not unlike, he thinks, the Blessed Damozel. For it is she, though in other guise. One is sainted, the other debased. One is blessed, the other unblest; one the object of worship, the other of lust. But both are incarnations-no, the one incarnationby the poet-painter of his ideal of beauty:

"Fair shines the gilded aureole

In which our highest painters place
Some living woman's simple face.
And the stilled features thus descried
As Jenny's long throat droops aside-

This is the law of Rossetti's poetry, an ideal of beauty, always the same, different only in the attendant circumstances. In every case the figure is identical; only the story or background is altered. A lady of worship, or of dishonor; an Amelotte, or a Sister Helen; a Blessed Damozel or a Jenny. As Christina Rossetti once wrote:

"One face looks out from all his canvases.
A nameless girl,

A saint, an angel."

Seemingly far removed, in reality the fundamental concepts of the two poems are one: an intense adoration of beauty in woman. In the expression of this feeling Rossetti sometimes journeys, as in the case of the mystic shrine in the Blessed Damozel, into worlds where we cannot follow him. He is a mystic and he is capable of tasting the sweet intolerable pain of a Crashaw. But we can revere his exalted mood and his worship of beauty, seen and unseen. Or, at other times, in the expression of his ideal Rossetti is stirred by the plain

facts of life. The thing he reverences is desecrated. Then as his ecstasy was unbounded, so his horror is without restraint. As he thinks of Jenny, he cries out in pity: "It makes a goblin of the sun." But in both the joy and the sorrow the central feeling is, whether enshrined or degraded, beauty in woman.

An acquaintance who dislikes Rossetti is fond of telling me that the little boy who defined "lyric" as "a poem, dealing with love, death, and immorality," must have been thinking of Jenny. Unluckily the popularity of the poem has been lessened by its theme. It is read infrequently. And, as said, the ladies have consigned the Blessed Damozel to a Limbo from which she is unlikely to emerge. Yet students of the Victorians will find the two poems complementary and, more than all others, illuminative of the inner life of Rossetti.

In the Pump-room, so admirably adapted for secret discourse and unlimited confidence.

NORTHANGER ABBEY.

ON WRITING A THESIS

It was my first college commencement. I studied the program intently, reading the names of the graduates, swelling with pride as I found under "Degrees to be Conferred, College of Arts and Sciences, Bachelor of Arts," the name for which I was searching, that of my cousin, who furnished the reason for my being there. I felt important to be connected with this person of such consequence as to be set apart in cap and gown. And then I turned to the next page of the program: "Graduate School, Master of Arts." Under each name I read the word Thesis (I wondered just what a thesis was) and the title of that thesis. These titles were: Methylene Citric Anhydride and Structural Problems in the Aniline Derivatives of Citric Acid, The Hydrogenation of Vegetable Oils, The Economic Structure of Muskogiskey and Chincanceon Society, The Characteristics of Vacuum Tubes, The Treatment of Love in the Early Novels of Jonathan Goose, The Relation Between the Maximum Diffraction Angle and the Radius of Curvature of the Diffracting Edge. Then and there the glory of the Degree of Bachelor of Arts was eclipsed by its more imposing senior. How marvelously erudite one must be to write a thesis on The Relation Between the Maximum Diffraction Angle and the Radius of Curvature of the Diffracting Edge! I wished that I knew such a person. When, however, there finally arrived the time for the ceremony of presenting degrees, my interest in the cousin put out of my mind speculations as to how one must feel to be on familiar terms with Diffraction Angles and Diffracting Edges.