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Her love of flowers, and birds, and trees, and all that makes the earth so beautiful, is not one whit stronger than Christina’s own, but it is a love born of an exhaustive detailed knowledge of Nature’s life.
The queen, her mother, did not love her so much as she ought; partly, perhaps, on account of Christina’s want of beauty, and also, because both the king and queen had wished for a son, who might have gained as great renown in battle as his father had. The king, however, soon became exceedingly fond of the infant princess. When Christina was very young, she was taken violently sick.
It was through her sudden collapse that she missed at her side, when she passed away, that brother whose whole life has been one of devotion to his family, and whose tireless affection for the last of them was one of the few links that bound Christina’s sympathy to the earth. From a crayon-drawing by D. G. Rossetti reproduced by the kind permission of Mr.
All the Rossettis inherited from their father voices so musical that they could be recognized among other voices in any gathering, and no doubt that clear-cut method of syllabification which was so marked a characteristic of Christina’s conversation, but which gave it a sort of foreign tone, was inherited from the father.
In such a view I by no means agree, and I therefore reproduce it.” If Christina’s objection was valid when she raised it, it is, of course, valid now, when the beloved poet is in the “country beyond Orion,” and knows what sanctions are of man’s imagining, and what sanctions are more eternal than the movements of the stars.
In religion as in politics he thought for himself, and yet when Mr. W. M. Rossetti affirms that the poet was never drawn towards free thinking women, he says what is perfectly true. And this arose from the extraordinary influence, scarcely recognized by himself, that the beauty of Christina’s life and her religious system had upon him.
There is, perhaps, no more striking instance of the inscrutable lines in which ancestral characteristics descend than the way in which the passion for symbolism was inherited by Christina and Gabriel Rossetti from their father. While Christina’s poetical work may be described as being all symbolical, she was not much given, like her brother, to read symbols into the every-day incidents of life.
And yet all that is noblest in Christina’s poetry, an ever-present sense of the beauty and power of goodness, must surely have come from the mother, from whom also came that other charm of Christina’s, to which Gabriel was peculiarly sensitive, her youthfulness of temperament.
She could disarm Gustavus of his sword, which was so terrible to the princes of Europe. But alas! the king was not long permitted to enjoy Christina’s society. When she was four years old, Gustavus was summoned to take command of the allied armies of Germany, which were fighting against the Emperor.
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