ballad may do that final justice which
history itself withholds. Thus the King Henry of _The White Ship_ is
governed by lust of dominion more than by parental affection; and the
Prince, his son, is a lawless, shameless youth; intolerant, tyrannical,
luxurious, voluptuous, yet capable of self-sacrifice even amidst peril
of death.

When he should be King, he oft would vow,
He 'd yoke the peasant to his own plough.
O'er him the ships score their furrows now.
God only knows where his soul did wake,
But I saw him die for his sister's sake.

The King James of _The King's Tragedy_ is of a righteous and fearless
nature, strong yet sensitive, unbending before the pride and hate of
powerful men, resolute, and ready even where fate itself declares that
death lurks where his road must lie; his beautiful Queen Jane is sweet,
tender, loving, devoted--meet spouse for a poet and king. The incidents
too are those of history: the choice and final collocation of them, and
the closing scene in which the queen mourns her husband, being the sum
of the author's contribution. And those incidents are in the highest
degree varied and picturesque. The author has not achieved a more vivid
pictorial presentment than is displayed in these latest ballads from his
pen. It would be hard to find in his earlier work anything bearing more
clearly the stamp of reality than the descriptions of the wreck in _The
White Ship_, of the two drowning men together on the mainyard, of the
morning dawning over the dim sea-sky--

At last the morning rose on the sea
Like an angel's wing that beat towards me--

and of the little golden-haired boy in black whose foot patters down
the court of the king. Certainly Rossetti has never attained a higher
pictorial level than he reaches in the descriptions of the summoned
Parliament in _The King's Tragedy_, of the journey to the Charterhouse
of Perth, of the woman on the rock of the black beach of the Scottish
sea, of the king singing to the queen the song he made while immured by
Bolingbroke at Windsor, of the knock of the woman at the outer gate,
of her voice at night beneath the window, of the death in _The Pit
of Fortune's Wheel_. But all lesser excellencies must make way in our
regard before a distinguishing spiritualising element which exists
in these ballads only, or mainly amongst the author's works. Natural
portents are here first employed as factors of poetic creation.
Presenti