may read the
future, and from which sinful eyes must chase the spirits of grace and
leave their realm to be usurped by the spirits of fire, who seal up the
truth or reveal it by contraries. Rose Mary, who has sinned with her
lover, is bidden to look in the beryl and learn where lurks the ambush
that waits to take his life as he rides at break of day. Hiding, but
remembering her transgression, she at first shrinks, but at length
submits, and the blessed spirits by whom the stone has been tenanted
give place to the fiery train. The stone is not sealed to her; and the
long spell being ministered, she is satisfied. But she has read the
stone by contraries, and her lover falls into the hand of his enemy.
By his death is their secret sin made known. And then a newer shame is
revealed, not to her eyes, but to her mother's: even the treachery of
the murdered man. Ignorant of this to the end, Eose Mary seeks to work a
twofold ransoming by banishing from the beryl the evil powers. With the
sword of her father (by whom the accursed gift had been brought from
Palestine), she cleaves the heart of the stone, and with the broken
spell her own life breaks.

It will readily be seen that the scheme of the ballad does not afford
opportunity for a memorable incursion in the domain of character. Rose
Mary herself as a creation is not comparable with Helen. But the ballad
throughout is nevertheless a triumph of the higher imagination. Nowhere
else (to take the lowest ground) has Rossetti displayed so great a gift
of flashing images upon the mind at once by a single expression.

Closely locked, they clung without speech,
And the mirrored souls shook each to each,
As the cloud-moon and the water-moon
Shake face to face when the dim stars swoon
In stormy bowers of the night's mid-noon.

Deep the flood and heavy the shock
When sea meets sea in the riven rock:
But calm is the pulse that shakes the sea
To the prisoned tide of doom set free
In the breaking heart of Rose Mary.

She knew she had waded bosom-deep
Along death's bank in the sedge of sleep.
And now in Eose Mary's lifted eye
'Twas shadow alone that made reply
To the set face of the soul's dark shy.

Nor has Rossetti anywhere displayed a more sustained picturesqueness.
One episode stands forth vividly even among so many that are
conspicuous. The mother has left her daughter in a swoon to seek help of
the p