It was the beauty of her life that made her personal influence so great, and upon no one was that influence exercised with more strength than upon her illustrious brother Gabriel, who in many ways was so much unlike her. In spite of his deep religious instinct and his intense sympathy with mysticism, Gabriel remained what is called a free thinker in the true meaning of that much-abused phrase. In religion as in politics he thought for himself, and yet when Mr. W. M. Rossetti affirms that the poet was never drawn towards free thinking women, he says what is perfectly true. And this arose from the extraordinary influence, scarcely recognized by himself, that the beauty of Christina’s life and her religious system had upon him. This, of course, is not the place in which to say much about him; nor need much at any time and in any place be said, for has he not written his own biography—depicted himself more faithfully than Lockhart could depict Walter Scott, more faithfully than Boswell could depict Dr. Johnson? Has he not done this in the immortal sonnet-sequence called ‘The House of Life’? What poet of the nineteenth century do we know so intimately as we know the author of ‘The House of Life’? Christina Rossetti’s peculiar form of the Christian sentiment she inherited from her mother, the sweetness of whose nature was never disturbed by that exercise of the egoism of the artist in which Christina indulged and without whose influence it is difficult to imagine what the Rossetti family would have been. The father was a poet and a mystic of the cryptographic kind, and it is by no means unlikely that had he studied Shakespeare as he studied Dante he would in these days have been a disciple of the Baconians, and, of course, his influence on the family in the matter of literary activity and of mysticism must have been very great. And yet all that is noblest in Christina’s poetry, an ever-present sense of the beauty and power of goodness, must surely have come from the mother, from whom also came that other charm of Christina’s, to which Gabriel was peculiarly sensitive, her youthfulness of temperament.