"Love's Nocturn" which follows is more of the early Italian school pure and simple; and "Troy Town," a ballad with burdens, is one of a class of poem much affected by Rossetti and ever since, which has produced some admirable work, but is perhaps a little open to the charge of too deliberate archaism. It is at any rate far inferior to his own "Sister Helen." But "The Burden of Nineveh" which follows is in a quite different style, and besides its intrinsic excellence is noteworthy as showing how very far Rossetti was from being limited in his choice of manners. But to go through the whole contents of this very remarkable volume would be impossible, and we can only particularise the great sonnet-sequence "The House of Life" (which was attacked for want of decency with as little intelligence as "The Blessed Damozel" had been attacked for want of sense), and a set "for pictures." The first, somewhat thorny and obscure in language, is of extreme poetical and philosophical beauty. The latter, beautiful enough, may be said to lend themselves a little to the attacks of those critics who charged Rossetti with, in the Aristotelian phrase, "shifting his ground to another kind" or (to vary the words) of taking the quotation _ut pictura poesis_ in too literal a sense. Some songs, especially "Penumbra" and "The Woodspurge," of intense sweetness and sadness, were also included; and the simple directness of "Jenny" showed, like "Nineveh," capacities in the poet not easily to be inferred from the bulk of his poems. Rossetti's second volume, while it added only too little to the bulk of his work--for much of it consisted of a revised issue of "The House of Life"--added greatly to its enjoyment. But it produced no new kind, unless certain extensions of the ballad-scheme into narrative poems of considerable length--"Rose-Mary," "The White Ship," and "The King's Tragedy"--be counted as such. "Rose-Mary" in particular exhibits the merits and defects of the poet in almost the clearest possible light, and it may be safely said that no English poet, not the very greatest, need have been ashamed of such a stanza as this, where there is no affectation worth speaking of, where the eternal and immortal commonplaces of poetry are touched to newness as only a master touches, and where the turn of the phrase and verse is impeccable and supreme:-- And lo! on the ground Rose-Mary lay, With a cold brow like the snows ere May, With a cold breast like the earth till Spring-- With such a smile as the June days bring When the year grows warm for harvesting.