Yet Rossetti made no treaty with puritanism, and in this respect his _Jenny_ has something in common with Hawthorne’s _Scarlet Letter_--than which nothing, perhaps, that is so pure, without being puritanical, has reached us even from the land that gave _Evangeline_ to the English tongue. The guilty love of Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale is never for an instant condoned, but, on the other hand, the rigorous severity of the old puritan community is not dwelt upon with favour. Relentless remorse must spend itself upon the man before the whole measure of his misery is full, and on the woman the brand of a public shame must be borne meekly to the end. But though no rancour is shown towards the austere and blind morality which puts to open discharge the guilty mother whilst unconsciously nourishing the yet more guilty father, we see the tenderness of a love that palliates the baseness of the amour, and the bitter depths of a penitence that cannot be complete until it can no longer be concealed. And so with Jenny. She may have transient flashes of remorseful consciousness, such as reveal to her the trackless leagues that separate what she was from what she is, but no effort is made to hide the plain truth that she is a courtesan, skilled only in the lures and artifices peculiar to her shameful function. No reformatory promptings fit her for a place at the footstool of the puritan. Nothing tells of winter yet; on the other hand, no virulent diatribes are cast forth against the society that shuts this woman out, as the puritan settlement turned its back on Hester Prynne. But we see her and know her for what she is, a woman like unto other women: desecrated but akin. This dramatic quality of sitting half-passively above their creations and of leaving their ethics to find their own channels (once assured that their impulses are pure), the poet and the romancer possess in common. If there is a point of difference between their attitudes of mind, it is where Rossetti seems to reserve his whole personal feeling for the impeachment of lust;-- Like a toad within a stone Seated while Time crumbles on; Which sits there since the earth was cursed For Man’s transgression at the first; Which, living through all centuries, Not once has seen the sun arise; Whose life, to its cold circle charmed, The earth’s whole summers have not warmed; Which always--whitherso the stone Be flung--sits there, deaf, blind, alone;-- Ay, and shall not be driven out Till that which shuts him round about Break at the very Master’s stroke, And the dust thereof vanish as smoke, And the seed of Man vanish as dust:-- Even so within this world is Lust.