Christina Rossetti

My life is but a working-day,
Whose tasks are set aright:
A while to work, a while to pray,
And then a quiet night.
And then, please God, a quiet night
Where Saints and Angels walk in white.
One dreamless sleep from work and sorrow,
But reawakening on the morrow.--In Patience

As a study in heredity, the Rossetti family is most interesting. Genius
seems so sporadic a stuff that when we find an outcrop along the line of a
whole family we are wont to mark it on memory's chart in red. We talk of
the Herschels, of Renan and his sister, of the Beechers, and the Fields,
in a sort of awe, mindful that Nature is parsimonious in giving out
transcendent talent, and may never do the like again. So who can forget
the Rossettis--two brothers, Dante Gabriel and William Michael, and two
sisters, Maria and Christina--each of whom stands forth as far above the
ordinary, yet all strangely dependent upon one another?

The girls sing songs to the brothers, and to each other, inscribing poems
to "my loving sister"; when Dante Gabriel, budding forth as artist, wishes
a model for a Madonna, he chooses his sister Christina, and in his sketch
mantles the plain features with a divine gentleness and heavenly splendor
such as only the loving heart can conjure forth. In the last illness of
Maria, Christina watches away the long, lagging hours of night, almost
striving with her brothers for the right of serving; and at
Birchington-on-the-Sea, Dante Gabriel waits for death, wearing out his
friends by insane suspicions, and only the sister seems equal to
ministering to this mind diseased, plucking from memory its rooted sorrow.

In a few years Christina passes out, and of the four, only William is
left; and the task of his remaining years is to put properly before the
world the deathless lives of his brother and sisters gone.

Gabriel Rossetti, father of the illustrious four, was an Italian poet who
wrote patriotic hymns, and wrote them so well that he was asked to sing
them elsewhere than in Italy. This edict of banishment was followed by an
order that the poet be arrested and executed.

The orders of banishment and execution appear quite Milesian viewed across
the years, but to Rossetti it was no joke. To keep his head in its proper
place and to preserve his soul alive, he departed one dark night for
England. He arrived penniless, with no luggage save his lyre, but with
muse intact. Yet it was an Italian lyre, and therefore of small avail for
amusing Britons. Very naturally, Rossetti made the acquaintance of other
refugees, and exile makes fast friends. It is only in prosperity that we
throw our friends overboard.

He came to know the Polidori family--Tuscan refugees--proud, intellectual