onneted and the discerning society editor. She
never even sought a publisher. Her first volume of verses was issued by
her grandfather Polidori unknown to her--printed by his own labor when
she was seventeen and presented to her. What a surprise it must have been
to this gentle girl to have one of her own books placed in her hands!
There seems to have been an almost holy love in this proud man's heart for
his granddaughter. His love was blind, or near-sighted at least, as love
is apt to be (and I am glad!), for some of the poems in this little volume
are sorry stuff. Later, her brothers issued her work and found market for
it; and once we find Dante Gabriel almost quarreling with that worthy
Manxman, Hall Caine, because the Manxman was compiling a volume of the
best English sonnets and threatening to leave Christina Rossetti out.

Christina had the faculty of seizing beautiful moments, exalted feelings,
sublime emotions, and working them up into limpid song that comes echoing
to us as from across soft seas. In all her lines there is a half-sobbing
undertone--the sweet minor chord that is ever present in the songs of the
Choir Invisible, whose music is the gladness as well as the sadness of the
world.

I have a dear friend who is an amateur photographic artist, which be it
known is quite a different thing from a kodak fiend. The latter is
continually snapping a machine at incongruous things; he delights in
catching people in absurd postures; he pictures the foolish, the
irrelevant, the transient and the needless. But what does my friend
picture? I'll tell you. He catches pictures only of beautiful objects:
swaying stalks of goldenrod, flights of thistle-down, lichen on old stone
walls, barks of trees, oak-leaves, bunches of acorns, single sprays of
apple-blossoms. Last Spring he found two robins building a nest in a
cherry-tree: he placed his camera near them, and attaching a fine wire to
spring the shutter, took a picture of Mr. and Mrs. Robin Redbreast laying
down the first coarse straws for their nest. Then he took a picture every
day for thirty days of that nest--from the time four blue eggs are shown
until four, wide-open mouths are held hungrily for dainty grubs. This
series of photographs forms an Epic of Creation. So, if you ask me to
solve the question of whether photography is art, I'll answer: it all
depends upon what you picture, and how you present it.

Christina Rossetti focused her thought on the beautifu