Here, then, seems to be the truth of the matter: while Shakespeare had immense dramatic power, and immense meditative power with moderate lyric power, Tennyson had the lyric gift and the meditative gift without the dramatic. His poems are more full of reflections, meditations, and generalizations upon human life than any poet’s since Shakespeare. But then the moment that Shakespeare descended from those heights whether his metaphysical imagination had borne him, he became, not a lyrist, as Tennyson became, but a dramatist. And this divides Shakespeare as far from Tennyson as it divides him from any other first-class writer. We admirers of Tennyson must content ourselves with this thought, that, wonderful as it is for Shakespeare to have combined great metaphysical power with supreme power as a dramatist, it is scarcely less wonderful for Tennyson to have combined great metaphysical power with the power of a supreme lyrist. Nay, is it not in a certain sense more wonderful for a lyrical impulse such as Tennyson’s to be found combined with a power of philosophical and metaphysical abstraction such as he shows in some of his poems? IV. CHRISTINA GEORGINA ROSSETTI. 1830–1894. I. Although the noble poet and high-souled woman we have just lost had been ill and suffering from grievous pain for a long time, Death came at last with a soft hand which could but make him welcome. Since early in August, when she took to her bed, she was so extremely weak and otherwise ill that one scarcely expected her (at any time) to live more than a month or so, and for the last six weeks or thereabouts—say from the 15th of November—one expected her to die almost from day to day. My dear friend William Rossetti, who used to go to Torrington Square every afternoon, saw her on the afternoon of December 28th [1894]. He did not, he told me, much expect to find her alive in the afternoon of the 29th, and intended, therefore, to make his next call earlier. She died at half-past seven in the morning of the 29th, in the presence only of her faithful nurse Mrs. Read. It was through her sudden collapse that she missed at her side, when she passed away, that brother whose whole life has been one of devotion to his family, and whose tireless affection for the last of them was one of the few links that bound Christina’s sympathy to the earth. [Picture: Christina Rossetti. From a crayon-drawing by D. G. Rossetti reproduced by the kind permission of Mr. W. M. Rossetti]