In the time of the civil broils Our swords are stubborn things. A fig for all the cities! A fig for all the kings! and ending: Right well we hold our own With the brand and the iron rod. A fig for Satan, Burgraves; Burgraves, a fig for God! But even more wonderful Rossetti seems when we go back to the old French, as in the translation which has been called "My Father's Close." Inside my father's close (_Fly away O my heart away!_) Sweet apple-blossom blows _So sweet._ Three kings' daughters fair, (_Fly away O my heart away!_) They lie below it there _So sweet!_ Now the Old French of the first stanza will show you the astonishing faithfulness of the rendering: Au jardin de mon père, (_Vole, mon cœur, vole!_) Il y a un pommier doux, _Tout doux._ Besides the small exquisite things, there are long translations from mediæval writers, French and Italian, of wonderful beauty. Compare, for example, the celebrated episode of Francesca da Rimini in Dante (which Carlyle so beautifully called "a lily in the mouth of Hell"), as translated by Byron, and as translated by Rossetti, and observe the immeasurable superiority of the latter. It would be very pleasant, if we had time, to examine Rossetti's translations more in detail; but the year advances and we must turn to an even greater master of verse--Swinburne. CHAPTER II NOTE UPON ROSSETTI'S PROSE As we are now studying Rossetti's poetry in other hours, you may be interested in some discussion of the merits of his prose--for this is still, so far as the great public are concerned, almost an unknown topic. The best of the painters of his own school, and the most delicate poet of the Victorian period, Rossetti might also have become one of the greatest prose writers of the century if he had seriously turned to prose. But ill-health and other circumstances prevented him from doing much in this direction. What he did do, however, is so remarkable that it deserves to be very carefully studied. I do not refer to his critical essays. These are not very remarkable. I refer only to his stories; and his stories are great because they happen to have exactly the same kind of merit that distinguishes his poetry. They might be compared with the stories of Poe; and yet they are entirely different, with the difference distinguishing all Latin prose fiction from English fiction. But there is certainly no other story writer, except Poe, with whose work that of Rossetti can be at all classed. They are ghostly stories--one of them a fragment, the other complete. Only two--and the outline of the third. The fragment is not less worthy of attention because it happens to be a fragment--like the poet's own "Bride's Prelude," or Coleridge's "Christabel," or Poe's "Silence." The trouble with all great fragments, and the proof of their greatness, is