Does the road wind up-hill all the way?
Yes, to the very end.
Will the day's journey take the whole long day?
From morn to night, my friend.
But is there for the night a resting-place?
A roof for when the slow dark hours begin.
May not the darkness hide it from my face?
You cannot miss that inn.
Shall I meet other wayfarers at night?
Those who have gone before.
Then must I knock, or call when just in sight?
They will not keep you standing at that door.
Shall I find comfort, travel-sore and weak?
Of labour you shall find the sum.
Will there be beds for me and all who seek?
Yea, beds for all who come.
The culmination of her pathetic weariness is always this cry for rest, a
cry for supreme acquiescence in the will of Heaven, troubled by no
personal volition, no desire, no emotion, save only love that waits for
blessed absorption. Her latter years became what St. Teresa called a
long "prayer of quiet"; and her brother's record of her secluded life in
the refuge of his home, and later in her own house on Torrington Square,
reads like the saintly story of a cloistered nun. It might be said of
her, as of one of the fathers, that she needed not to pray, for her life
was an unbroken communion with God. And yet that is not all. It is a
sign of her utter womanliness that envy for the common affections of
life was never quite crushed in her heart. Now and then through this
monotony of resignation there wells up a sob of complaint, a note not
easy, indeed, to distinguish from that _amari aliquid_ of jealousy,
which Thackeray, cynically, as some think, always left at the bottom of
his gentlest feminine characters. The fullest expression of this feeling
is in one of her longer poems, _The Lowest Room_, which contrasts the
life of two sisters, one of whom chooses the ordinary lot of woman with
home and husband and children, while the other learns, year after
tedious year, the consolation of lonely patience. The spirit of the poem
is not entirely pleasant. The resurgence of personal envy is a little
disconcerting; and the only comfort to be derived from it is the proof
that under different circumstances Christina Rossetti might have given
expression to the more ordinary lot of contented womanhood as perfectly
as she sings the pathos and hope of the cloistered life. Had that first
voice, which led her "where the bluest water flows," suffered her also
to quench the thirst of her heart, had not that second voice summoned
her to follow, this might have been. But literature, I think, would have
lost in her gain. As it is, we must recognise that the vision of
fulfilled affection and of quiet home joys still troubled her, in her
darker hours, with a feeling of embittered regret. Two or three of the
stanzas of _The Lowest Room_ even evoke a reminiscence of that scene in
Thomson's _City of Dreadful Night_, where the "shrill and lamentable
cry" breaks through the silence of the shadowy congregation:
In all eternity I had one chance,
One few years' term of gracious human life,
The splendours of the intellect's advance,
The sweetness of the home with babes and wife.
But if occasionally this residue of bitterness in Christina Rossetti
recalls the more acrid genius of James Thomson, yet a comparison of the
two poets (and such a comparison is not fantastic, however unexpected it
may appear) would set the feminine character of our subject in a
peculiarly vivid light. Both were profoundly moved by the evanescence of
life, by the deceitfulness of pleasure, while both at times, Thomson
almost continually, were troubled by the apparent content of those who
rested in these joys of the world. Both looked forward longingly to the
consummation of peace. In his call to _Our Lady of Oblivion_ Thomson
might seem to be speaking for both, only in a more deliberately
metaphorical style:
Take me, and lull me into perfect sleep;
Down, down, far hidden in thy duskiest cave;
While all the clamorous years above me sweep
Unheard, or, like the voice of seas that rave
On far-off coasts, but murmuring o'er my trance,
A dim vast monotone, that shall enhance
The restful rapture of the inviolate grave.
But the roads by which the two would reach this "silence more musical
than any song" were utterly different. With an intellect at once
mathematical and constructive, Thomson built out of his personal
bitterness and despair a universe corresponding to his own mood, a
philosophy of atheistic revolt. Like Lucretius, "he denied divinely the
divine." In that tremendous conversation on the river-walk he represents
one soul as protesting to another that not for all his misery would he
carry the guilt of creating such a world; whereto the second replies,
and it is the poet himself who speaks:
The world rolls round forever as a mill;
It grinds out death and life and good and ill;
It has no purpose, heart or mind or will....
Man might know one thing were his sight less dim;
That it whirls not to suit his petty whim,
That it is quite indifferent to him.
There is the voluntary ecstasy of the saints, there is also this stern
and self-willed rebellion, and, contrasted with them both, as woman is
contrasted with man, there is the acquiescence of Christina Rossetti and
of the little group of writers whom she leads in spirit:
Passing away, saith the World, passing away....
Then I answered: Yea.