Completely Rossettian, for example, is _A Christmas Carol_.[101]
‘Three damsels in the queen’s chamber, The queen’s mouth was most fair; She spake a word of God’s mother, As the combs went in her hair. “Mary that is of might, Bring us to thy Son’s sight.”’
Here we find a mystical content united to the antiquarianism and childish phraseology of genuine pre-Raphaelitism. _The Masque of Queen Bersabe_ is worked out on the same model, being an imitation of the mediæval miracle-play, with its Latin stage directions and puppet-theatre style. This, in its turn, has become the model of many French poems, in which there is only a babbling and stammering and a crawling on all fours, as if in a nursery.
Where he walks in Baudelaire’s footsteps, Swinburne tries to distort his face to a diabolical mien, and makes the woman say (in _Anactoria_) to the other unnaturally loved woman:
‘I would my love could kill thee. I am satiated With seeing thee live, and fain would have thee dead. I would earth had thy body as fruit to eat, And no mouth but some serpent’s found thee sweet. I would find grievous ways to have thee slain, Intense device, and superflux of pain; ... O! that I Durst crush thee out of life with love, and die-- Die of thy pain and my delight, and be Mixed with thy blood and molten unto thee.’
Or, when he curses and reviles, as in _Before Dawn_:
‘To say of shame--what is it? Of virtue--we can miss it, Of sin--we can but kiss it, And it’s no longer sin.’
One poem deserves a more detailed analysis, because it contains unmistakably the germ of the later ‘symbolism,’ and is an instructive example of this form of mysticism. The poem is _The King’s Daughter_. It is a sort of ballad, which in fourteen four-lined stanzas relates a fairy story about the ten daughters of a king, of whom one was preferred before the remaining nine, was beautifully dressed, pampered with the most costly food, slept in a soft bed, and received the attentions of a handsome prince, while her sisters remained neglected; but instead of finding happiness at the prince’s side, she became deeply wretched and wished she were dead. In the first and third lines of every stanza the story is rehearsed. The second line speaks of a mythical mill-stream, which comes into the ballad one knows not how, and which always, by some mysterious influence, symbolically reflects all the changes that take place as the action of the ballad progresses; while the fourth line contains a litany-like exclamation, which likewise makes a running reference to the particular stage reached in the narrative.
