The extraordinary charm of the story is in its vividness--a vividness perhaps without equal even in the best work of Tennyson (certainly much finer than similar work in Coleridge), and in the attractive characterisation of mother and daughter. There is this great difference between the mediæval poems of Coleridge or Scott, and those of Rossetti, that when you are reading "The Lay of the Last Minstrel" or the wonderful "Christabel," you feel that you are reading a fairy-tale, but when you read Rossetti you are looking at life and feeling human passion. It is a great puzzle to critics how any man could make the Middle Ages live as Rossetti did. One reason, I think, is that Rossetti was a great painter as well as a great poet, and he studied the life of the past in documents and in museums until it became to him as real as the present. But we must also suppose that he inherited a great deal of his peculiar power. This power never wearies. Although the romance of Rose Mary is not very short, you do not get tired of wondering at its beauty until you reach the end. It is divided into three parts, which is a good thing for the student, as he can see the structure of the composition at once. It is written in stanzas of five lines, thus arranged--_a_, _a_, _b_, _b_, _b._ You would think this measure monotonous, but it is not. I give two examples. The first is the description of the magic jewel. The lady unbound her jewelled zone And drew from her robe the Beryl-stone. Shaped it was to a shadowy sphere,-- World of our world, the sun's compeer, That bears and buries the toiling year. With shuddering light 'twas stirred and strewn Like the cloud-nest of the wading moon: Freaked it was as the bubble's ball, Rainbow-hued through a misty pall, Like the middle light of the waterfall. Shadows dwelt in its teeming girth Of the known and unknown things of earth; The cloud above and the wave around,-- The central fire at the sphere's heart bound, Like doomsday prisoned underground.