The question here is, What were Christina Rossetti’s wishes? not whether her brother “agrees” with them. Hence, if it were not certain that some one would soon have restored them, would Mr. W. M. Rossetti have hesitated before doing so? For they are among the most powerful things Christina Rossetti ever wrote, and it was a subject of deep regret to her friends that she suppressed them. Yet she withdrew them from conscientious motives. In ‘Sister Maude’ she showed how great was her power in the most difficult of all forms of poetic art—the romantic ballad. Splendid as are Gabriel Rossetti’s ‘Sister Helen’ and ‘Rose Mary,’ the literary _aura_ surrounding them prevents them from seeming—as the best of the Border ballads seem—Nature’s very voice muttering in her dreams of the pathos and the mystery of the human story. It was not, perhaps, given even to Rossetti to get very near to that supreme old poet (not forgotten, because never known) who wrote “May Margaret’s” appeal to the ghost of her lover Clerk Saunders:— Is there ony room at your head, Saunders? Is there ony room at your feet? Is there ony room at your side, Saunders, Where fain, fain I wad sleep? where the very imperfections of the rhymes seem somehow to add to the pathos and the mystery of the chant. But if, indeed, it has been given to any modern poet to get into this atmosphere, it has been given to Christina Rossetti. And so with the ballad of simple human passion no modern writer has quite done what Christina Rossetti has done in one of the poems here restored:— SISTER MAUDE. Who told my mother of my shame, Who told my father of my dear? Oh who but Maude, my sister Maude, Who lurked to spy and peer. Cold he lies, as cold as stone, With his clotted curls about his face: The comeliest corpse in all the world, And worthy of a queen’s embrace. You might have spared his soul, sister, Have spared my soul, your own soul too: Though I had not been born at all, He’d never have looked at you. My father may sleep in Paradise, My mother at Heaven-gate: But sister Maude shall get no sleep Either early or late. My father may wear a golden gown, My mother a crown may win; If my dear and I knocked at Heaven-gate Perhaps they’d let us in: But sister Maude, O sister Maude, Bide _you_ with death and sin. But it is for the personal poems that this volume will be prized most dearly by certain readers.