[In the following review of the verses collected in Poems, the anonymous critic analyzes the defects in Rossetti's poetry.]

We had heard some little of Miss Rossetti, in a superficial way, before reading this her book. Various verses of hers had met our eye in print, and if they themselves left no very decided mark upon the memory, yet we had the firm impression, somehow, that she was one more of the rising school of poets. Accordingly we thought it well to take a retrospect of a few post-Tennysonians—Mrs. Browning, Owen Meredith, Robert Buchanan, Jean Ingelow, and so on—supposed fellow disciples—so as to be tolerably sure of ranking the new-comer rightly. On reading this volume we find our labor lost through an entirely unforeseen circumstance. Unfortunately, it does not appear that Miss Rossetti is a poetess at all. That there are people who think her one, we infer from the fact that this is in some sort a third edition; why they think so, we are at a loss to see. The book will not answer a single test of poetry. The authoress's best claim to consideration is, mat she sincerely, persistently, fervently means to be a poetess. Only the most Demosthenian resolve could have kept her writing in face of her many inherent unfitnesses. For imagination, she offers fantasy; for sentiment, sentimentality; for aspiration, ambition; for originality and thought, little or nothing; for melody, fantastic janglings of words; and these, with all tenderness for the ill-starred intensity of purpose that could fetch them so far, are no more poetry than the industrious Virginian colonists' shiploads of mica were gold.

The first cursory impression of this book would be, we think, that its cardinal axiom was "Poetry is versified plaintiveness." The amount of melancholy is simply overwhelming. There is a forty-twilight power of sombreness everywhere. Now, criticism has taken principles, not statistics, to be its province; but we could not resist the temptation to take a little measurement of all this mourn fulness. Limiting our census strictly to the utterly irretrievable and totally wrecked poems, with not a glimmering of reassurance, we found no less than forty-nine sadnesses, all the way from shadow to unutterable blackness—"nfernam Iumbram noctemque perennem. " There is the sadness decadent, the sadness senescent, the sadness bereft, the sadness despondent, the sadness weary, the sadness despairing, the sadness simply sad, the grand sadness ineffable, and above and pervading all, the sadness rhapsodical. They are all there. Old Burton will rise from his grave, if there be any virtue in Pythagoreanism, to anatomize these poems. What it is all about is strictly a secret, and laudably well kept; which gives to the various sorrows that touching effect peculiar to the waitings of unseen babies from unascertained ailments. So sustained is the grief, indeed, that after protracted poring, we hang in abeyance between two conclusions. One is that Miss Rossetti, outside of print, is the merriest mortal in the United Kingdom; the other, that her health is worse than precarious. That one or the other must be right, we know. There is no other horn to the dilemma, no tertiary quiddity, no choice, no middle ground between hilarity and dyspepsia.

Perhaps the reader can judge for himself from mese lines, which are a not unfair sample:

"May."
I cannot tell you how it was;
But this I know: it came to pass
Upon a bright and breezy day,
When May was young; ah, pleasant May!
As yet the poppies were not born,
Between the blades of tender corn;
The last eggs had not hatched as yet,
Nor any bird foregone its mate.
I cannot tell you what it was;
But this I know: it did but pass.
It passed away with sunny May,
With all sweet things it passed away,
And left me old and cold and gray.

We may be very unappreciative, and probably are sinfully suspicious, but the above sounded at the first and sounds at the present reading, exactly like a riddle. We certainly don't know how it was nor what it was. There is a shadowy clue in its passing away with sunny May, but we are far too cautious to hazard a guess. If there be any conundrum intended, all we have to say is, we give it up.

We do but justice, however, in saying that amid much mere lugubriousness mere is some real and respectable sadness. The following, in spite of the queer English in its first lines, sounds genuine, and is moreover, for a rarity of rarities, in well-chosen and not ill-managed metre:

I have a room whereinto no one enters
Save I myself alone:
There sits a blessed memory on a throne,
There my life centres.

While winter comes and goes—Oh! tedious comer!
And while its nip-wind blows;
While bloom the bloodless lily and warm rose
Of lavish summer;

If any should force entrance he might see there
One buried, yet not dead,
Before whose face I no more bow my head
Or (sic) bend my knee there;

But often in my worn life's autumn weather
I watch there with clear eyes,
And think how it will be in Paradise
When we're together.

Here is one of a trite topic—nearly all the good things in this book are on themes as old as moonlight—but with a certain mournful richness, like autumn woods:

Life is not sweet. One day it will be sweet
To shut our eyes and die:
Nor feel the wild flowers blow, nor birds dart by
With flitting butterfly;
Nor grass grow long above our head and feet,
Nor hear the happy lark that soars sky high,
Nor sigh that spring is fleet, and summer fleet,
Nor mark the waxing wheat,
Nor know who sits in our accustomed seat.
Life is not good. One day it will be good
To die, then live again;
To sleep meanwhile: so not to feel the wane
Of shrunk leaves dropping in the wood,
Nor hear the foamy lashing of the main,
Nor mark the blackened bean-fields, nor where stood
Rich ranks of golden grain,
Only dead refuse stubble clothe the plain:
Asleep from risk, asleep from pain.

This is one of her best poems in point of style. The "waxing wheat" we are just a shade doubtful about; but the mellowness of the diction is much to our liking, and it is unmarred by any of the breaks of strange ill taste that flaw nearly all these poems. If not poetry nor novelty, at least we find it sadly agreeable verse.

Our professor of rhetoric once astonished his class by a heterodoxy, which we have since thought sound as well as neat. "Walter Scott," said he, "writes verse as well as a man can write and not be a poet." We are sorry we cannot say as much for Miss Rossetti; she has considerable faults as a writer. The chief of these has elsewhere been carped at—her laborious style of being simple. The true simplicity of poets is not a masterly artifice, but a natural and invariable product where high poetic and expressive powers combine. The best thought is always simple, because it deals only with the essences of things: the best expression—the machinery of thought—is simple, just as the best of any other machinery is. But the grand, obvious fact to the many is that the best poetry is admired for being simple. Writing for this market, Miss Rossetti and unnumbered others have more or less successfully attempted to achieve this crowning beauty of style by various processes that are to the inspiration of real simplicity as patent medicines to vigorous vitality. Almost all hold the immutable conviction that Saxon words are an infallible recipe for the indispensable brevity. Accordingly the usual process is by an elaborate application of Saxon—if rather recondite or even verging on the obsolete, so much the more efficacious—to a few random ideas. Of course, with such painful workmanship, one must not expect the best material. Original, or even well defined thought seldom thrives in the same hot-house with this super-smoothness. But without pursuing the process into results at large, we have only to take Matthew Arnold's distinction as to Miss Rossetti:—she tries hard for simplicité, and achieves simplesse. But there is no such thing as hard work without its fruits. This straining after effect crops painfully out in a peculiar baldness and childishness of phrase that is almost original. The woman who can claim The Lambs of Grasmere as her own has not lived in vain. This production, with its pathetic episode of the maternal

Teapots for the bleating mouths,
Instead of nature's nourishment,

has already been noticed in print, and duly expanded many visages. We pause rapt in admiration of the deep intuition that could select for song the incident of feeding a sheep with a teapot. It carries us back, in spirit, to the subtle humor and delicate irony of "Peter Bell," and "We are Seven." What a burst of tenderness ought we to expect, if Miss Rossetti should ever chance to see stable-boys give a horse a bolus! . . . . We shall not cite examples of this simplesse; those who like it will find it purer and more concentrated in the bard of Rydal; or if they must have it, they are safe in opening this book almost anywhere.

Of the individual poems, the two longest, "The Goblin Market" and "The Prince's Progress," are rivals for the distinction of being the worst. All the best poems are short, excepting one, "Under the Rose." The story is of an illegitimate daughter, whose noble mother takes her to live with herself at the inevitable Hall, without acknowledging her. There are able touches of nature in the portrayal of the lonely, loving, outlawed, noble heart, that, knowing her mother's secret, resolves never to betray it, even to her. In the following passage, the girl, alone at the castle, as her mother's favorite maid, describes her inner life:

Now sometimes in a dream,
My heart goes out of me
To build and scheme,
Till I sob after things that seem
So pleasant in a dream:
A home such as I see,
My blessed neighbors live in;
With father and with mother,
All proud of one another,
Named by one common name;
From baby in the bud
To full-bloun workman father;
It's little short of Heaven.

Of course the servants sneer
Behind my back at me;
Of course the village girls,
Who envy me my curls
And gowns and idleness,
Take comfort in a jeer;
Of course the ladies guess
Just so much of my history
As points the emphatic stress
With which they laud my Lady;

The gentlemen who catch
A casual glimpse of me,
And turn again to see
Their valets, on the watch
To speak a word with me;—
All know, and sting me wild;
Till I am almost ready
To wish that I were dead,—
No faces more to see,
No more words to be said;
My mother safe at last
Disburdened of her child
And the past past.

"The Convent Threshold"—the last words of a contrite novice to her lover—has touches of power. There is an unusual force about some parts, as for example here:

You linger, yet the time is short;
Flee for your life; grid up your strength
To flee; the shadows stretched at length
Show that day wanes, that night draws nigh;
Flee to the mountain, tarry not.
Is this a time for smile and sigh;
For songs among the secret trees
Where sudden blue-birds nest and sport?
The time is short, and yet you stay:
To-day, while it is called to-day,
Kneel, wrestle, knock, do violence, pray;
To-day is short, to-morrow nigh:
Why will you die? why will you die!

How should I rest in Paradise,
Or sit on steps of Heaven alone?
If saints and angels spoke of love,
Should I not answer from my throne,
'Have pity upon me, ye, my friends,
For I have heard the sound thereof?'
Should I not turn with yearning eyes,
Turn earthward with a pitiful pang?
Oh! save me from a pang in heaven!
By all the gifts we took and gave,
Repent, repent, and be forgiven.

The lines called "Sound Sleep," p. 65, we like very well for very slight cause. It says nearly nothing with a pleasant flow of cadence that has the charm of an oasis for the reader. Much better is "No, Thank You, John!" which strikes into a strain of plain sound sense that we could wish to see much more of. The style, as well as the sense, seems to shuffle off its affectations, and the last two stanzas especially are easy, natural, and neat.

A strange compound of good and bad is the singular one called

"Twice."
I took my heart in my hand,
O my love, O my love!
I said, "Let me fall or stand,
Let me live or die;
But this once hear me speak,
O my love, O my love!
Yet a woman's wonds are weak;
You should speak, not I"

You took my heart in your hand,
With a friendly smile,
With a critical eye you scanned,
Then set it down
And said: "It is still unripe—
Better wait a while;
Wait while the skylarks pipe,
Till the corn grows brown."

As you set it down it broke—
Broke, but I did not wince;
I smiled at the speech you spoke,
At your judgment that I heard:
But I have not often smiled
Since then, nor questioned since,
Nor cared for corn-flowers wild,
Nor sung with the singing-bird.

I take my heart in hand,
O my God, O my God!
My broken heart in my hand:
Thou hast seen, judge thou.
My hope was written on sand,
O my God, O my God!
Now let thy judgment stand—
Yea, judge me now.

This, contemned of a man,
This, marred one heedless day,
This heart take thou to scan
Both within and without:
Refine with fire its gold,
Purge thou its dross away;
Yea, hold it in thy hold,
Whence none can pluck it out

I take my heart in my hand"—
I shall not die, but live—
Before thy face I stand,
I, for thou callest such;
All that I have I bring,
All that I am I give,
Smile thou, and I shall sing,
But shall not question much,

This poem, we confess, puzzles us a little to decide upon it. The imitation is palpable at a glance, but it is a very clever one: the first three stanzas above all catch the mannerism of their model to admiration. But the whole is a copy, at best, of one of the archetype's inferior styles; and yet we fancy we can see, under all the false bedizening, something of poetry in the conception, though it is ill said, and only dimly translucent. There is art, too, in the parallelism of the first and last three verses. But we do not like the refrain in the fourth verse—somehow it jars. Perhaps the best we can say of it is, that Browning, in his mistier moments of convulsiveness, could write worse.

There is another imitation of Browning in this book, that is the most supremely absurd string of rugged platitudes imaginable—"Wife to Husband," p. 61. The last verse is sample enough:

Not a word for you,
Not a look or kiss Good-by.
We, one, must part in two;
Verily death is this,
I must die.

The metre generally throughout this book is in fact simply execrable. Miss Rossetti cannot write contentedly in any known or human measure. We do not think there are ten poems that are not in some new-fangled shape or shapelessness. With an overweening ambition, she has not the slightest faculty of rhythm. All she has done is to originate some of the most hideous metres that "shake the racked axle of art's rattling car." Attempting not only Browning's metrical dervish-dancings, but Tennyson's exquisite ramblings, she fails in both from an utter want of that fine ear that always guides the latter, and so often strikes out bold beauties in the former. Most of Miss Rossetti's new styles of word mixture are much like the ingenious individual's invention for enabling right-handed people to write with the left hand—more or less elever ways of doing what she don't wish to do. What possible harmony, for instance, can any one find in this jumble, which, as per the printer, is meant for a "song":

There goes the swallow—
Could we but follow!
Hasty swallow, stay,
Point us out the way:

Look back, swallow, turn back, swallow, stop, swallow.
There went the swallow—
Too late to follow,
Lost our note of way,
Lost our chance to-day.
Good-by, swallow, sunny swallow, wise swallow.

After the swallow—
All sweet things follow;
All things go their way,
Only we must stay,
Must not follow; good-by, swallow, good swallow.

Where on earth is sound or sense in this? Not a suggestion of melody, not a fraction of a coherent idea. People must read such trash as they eat meringues à la crême: we never could comprehend either process.

Truth to tell, we have in this book some of the very choicest balderdash that ever was perpetrated; worthy to stand beside even the immortal "Owl and Goose" of Tennyson. There is a piece at p. 41 which we would give the world to see translated into some foreign language, we have such an intense eagerness to understand it. Its subject, so far as we have got, seems to be the significance of the crocodile, symbolically considered. We glanced over, or rather at it once, and put it by for after reading, thinking the style probably too deep for love at first sight. On the second perusal we fell in with some extraordinary young crocodiles that we must have missed before. They had just been indulged in the luxury of being born, but Miss Rossetti's creative soul, not content with bestowing upon them the bliss of amphibious existence, made perfect their young beauty by showing them "fresh-hatched perhaps, and—daubed with brithday dew."

We are strong of head—we recovered from even this—we became of the very select few who can say they have read this thing through. There was a crocodile hero; he had a golden girdle and crown; he wore polished stones; crowns, orbs and sceptres starred his breast (why shouldn't they if they could); "special burnishment adorned his mail;" his punier brethren trembled, whereupon he immediately ate mem till "the luscious fat distilled upon his chin," and "exuded from his nostrils and his eyes." He then fell into an anaconda nap, and grew very much smaller in his sleep, till at the approach of a very queer winged vessel (probably a vessel of wrath), "the prudent crocodile rose on his feet and shed appropriate tears (obviously it is the handsome thing for all well-bred crocodiles to cry when a winged ship comes along) and wrung his hands." As a finale, Miss Rossetti, too nimble for the unwary reader, anticipates his question of "What does it all mean?" and triumphantly replying that she doesn't know herself, but that it was all just so, marches on to the next monumentum aere perennius. In the name of the nine muses, we call upon Martin Farquhar Tupper to read this and then die.

There are one or two other things like this longo intervallo, but it is reserved for the Devotional Pieces to furnish the only poem that can compete with it in its peculiar line. This antagonist poem is not so sublime an example of sustained effort, but it has the advantage that the rhyme is fully equal to the context. Permit us then to introduce the neat little charade entitled

"Amen."
It is over. What is over?
Nay, how much is over truly!—
Harvest days we toiled to sow for;
Now the sheaves are gathered newly,
Now the wheat is garnered duly.

It is finished. What is finished?
Much is finished known or unknown;
Lives are finished, time diminished;
Was the fallow field left unsown?
Will these buds be always unblown?

It suffices. What suffices?
All suffices reckoned rightly;
Spring shall bloom where now the ice is,
Roses make the bramble sightly,
And the quickening suns shine brightly,
And the latter winds blow lightly,
And my garden teems with spices.

Let now the critic first observe how consummately the mysticism of the charade form is intensified by the sphinx-like answers appended. Next note the novelties in rhyme. The rhythmic chain that links "over" and and "sow for" is the first discovery in the piece, closely rivalled by "ice is" and "spices" in the last verse. But far above all rises the subtle originality of the three rhymes in the second. A thousand literati would have used the rhyming words under the unpoetical rules of ordinary English. Miss Rossetti alone has the courage to inquire "Was the fallow field left unsown? Will these buds be always unblown?" We really do not think Shakspeare would have been bold enough to do this thus.

But despite this, the religious poems are perhaps the best. They seem at least the most unaffected and sincere, and the healthiest in tone. There are several notably good ones: one, just before the remarkable "Amen," in excruciating metre, but well said; one, "The Love of Christ which Passeth Knowledge," a strong and imaginative picture of the crucifixion; and "Good Friday, a good embodiment of the fervor of attrite repentance. The best written of all is, we think, this one (p. 248):

"Weary in Well-doing."
I would have gone; God bade me stay;
I would have worked; God bade me rest.

He broke my will from day to day,
He read my yearnings unexpressed
And said them nay.

Now I would stay; God bids me go;
Now I would rest; God bids me work.
He breaks my heart, tossed to and fro,
My soul is wrung with doubts that lurk
And vex it so.

I go, Lord, where thou sendest me;
Day after day I plod and moil:
But Christ my God, when will it be
That I may let alone my toil,
And rest with thee?

This is good style (no simplesse here) and real pathos—in short, poetry. We do not see a word to wish changed, and the conclusion in particular is excellent: there is a weariness in the very sound of the last lines.

It is remarkable how seldom thought furnishes the motive for these poems. With no lack at all of intelligence, they stand almost devoid of intellect. It is always a sentiment of extraneous suggestion, never a novelty in thought, that inspires our authoress. She seems busier depicting inner life than evolving new truths or beauties. Nor does she abound in suggestive turns of phrase or verbal felicities. In fact, as we have seen, she will go out of her way to achieve the want of ornament. But there is one subject which she has thought out thoroughly, and that subject is death. Whether in respect to the severance of earthly ties, the future state, or the psychical relations subtly linking the living to the dead, she shows on this topic a vigor and vividness, sometimes misdirected, but never wanting. Some of her queer ideas have a charm and a repulsion at once, like ghosts of dead beauty: e.g. this strange sonnet:

"After Death"
The curtains were half-drawn, the floor was swept
And strewn with rushes; rosemary and may
Lay thick upon the bed on which I lay,
Where through the lattice ivy-shadows crept.
He leaned above me, thinking that I slept
And could not hear him; but I heard him say,
"Poor child, poor child!" and as he turned away
Came a deep silence, and I knew he wept; He did not touch the shroud, or raise the fold
That hid my face, or take my hand in his,
Or ruffle the smooth pillows for my head;
He did not love me living, but once dead
He pitied me, and very sweet it is
To know he still is warm though I am cold.

There is some chiaro-oscuro about this. Under all the ghastliness of the conception, we detect here a deep, genuine, unhoping, intensely human yearning, that is all the better drawn for being thrown into the shadow. We do not know of a more graphic realization of death. Miss Rossetti seems to be lucky with her sonnets. We give the companion piece to this last—not so striking as the other, but full of heart's love, and ending with one of the few passages we recall which enter without profaning the penetralia of that highest love, which passionately prefers the welfare of the beloved one to its own natural cravings for fruition and fulfilment:

"Remember."
Remember me when I am gone away,
Gone far away into the silent land;
When you no more can hold me by the hand
Nor I half turn to go, yet turning stay.
Remember me when no more, day by day,
You tell me of our future that you planned;
Only remember me; you understand
It will be late to counsel then or pray.
Yet if you should forget me for a while
And afterwards remember, do not grieve;
For if the darkness and corruption leave
A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,
Better by far you should forget and smile
Than that you should remember and be sad.

Another marked peculiarity often shadowed forth is our authoress's sharply defined idea that the dead lie simply quiescent, neither in joy nor sorrow. There are several miserable failures to express this state, and one success, so simple, so natural, and so pleasant in measure, that we quote it, though we have seen it cited before:

When I am dead, my dearest,
Sing no sad songs for me;
Plant thou no roses at my head,
Nor shady cypress-tree:
Be the green grass above me
With showers and dew-drops wet;
And if thou wilt, remember,
And if thou wilt, forget.

I shall not see the shadows;
I shall not feel the rain;
I shall not hear the nightingale
Sing on as if in pain;
And dreaming through that twilight
That doth not rise nor set,
Haply I may remember,
And haply may forget.

Such bold insight into so profound a subject says more for the soul of an author than a whole miss's paradise of prettinesses.

In singular contrast with this religious fervency and earnestness, the sincerity of which we see no reason to impeach, comes our gravest point of reprehension of this volume. We think it fairly chargeable with utterances—and reticences—of morally dangerous tendency; and this, too, mainly on a strange point for a poetess to be cavilled at—the rather delicate subject of our erring sisters. Now, we are of those who think the world, as to this matter, in a state little better than barbarism; that far from feeling the first instincts of Christian charity, we are shamefully like the cattle that gore the sick ox from the herd. The only utterly pitiless power in human life is our virtue, when brought face to face with this particular vice. We hunt the fallen down; hunt them to den and lair; hunt them to darkness, desperation, and death; hunt their bodies from earth, and their souls (if we can) from heaven, with the cold sword in one hand, and in the other the cross of him who came into the world to save, not saints, but sinners, and who said to one of these: "Neither do I condemn thee. Go, and now sin no more."

But there is also such a thing as misdirected mercifulness; a dangerous lenity, all the more to be guarded against for its wearing the garb of charity; and we think Miss Rossetti has leaned culpably far in this direction. Two poems are especially prominent examples—"Cousin Kate," and "Sister Maude." In each the heroine has sinned, and suffered the penalties of discovery, and in each she is given the upper hand, and made a candidate for sympathy, for very bad reasons. There is no word to intimate that there is anything so very dreadful about dishonor; that it may not be some one else's fault, or nobody's fault at all—a mere social accident. A few faint hinting touches there may be of conventional condemnation, but somehow Miss Rossetti's sinners, as sinners, invariably have the best of the argument and of the situation, while virtue is put systematically in the wrong, and snubbed generally. "The Goblin Market" too, if we read it aright, is open to the same criticism. We understand it, namely, to symbolize the conflict of the better nature in us, with the prompting of the passions and senses. If so, what is the story translated from its emblematic form? One sister yields; the other by seeming to yield, saves her. Again there is not a syllable to show that the yielding was at all wrong in itself. A cautious human regard for consequences is the grand motive appealed to for withstanding temptation. Lizzie tells Laura, not that the goblin's bargain is an evil deed in the sight of God, but that Jennie waned and died of their toothsome poisons. She saves her by going just so far as she safely can. What, if anything, is the moral of all this? Not "resist the devil and he will flee from you," but "cheat the devil, and he won't catch you." Now, all these sayings and silences are gravely wrong and false to a writer's true functions. With all deference then, and fully feeling that we may mistake or misconstrue, we sincerely submit that some of these poems go inexcusably beyond the bounds of that strict moral right, which every writer who hopes ever to wield influence ought to keep steadily, and sacredly in view. We are emboldened to speak thus plainly, because we have some reason to believe that these things have grated on other sensibilities than our own, and that our stricture embodies a considerable portion of cultivated public opinion.

In conclusion, we repeat our first expressed opinion, that Miss Rossetti is not yet entitled to take a place among today's poets. The question remains, whether she ever will. We do not think this book of hers settles this question. . . . She has done nothing in poetry yet of any consequence. These verses may be as well as she can do. They contain poetical passages of merit and promise, but they show also a defectiveness of versification, a falseness of ear, and occasionally a degree of affectation and triviality that, we can only hope, are not characteristic. To borrow a little of the style and technology of a sister branch of thought, the case, as now presented, can be accounted for as in essence a simple attack of the old and well-known endemic, cacœthes scribendi. Probably it befell her at the usual early age. Only instead of the run of gushing girls, we have Dante Gabriel Rossetti's sister, Jean Ingelow's intimate friend, and a young lady of intelligence and education, constantly in contact with real literary society, and—what is thoroughly evident in this book—read in our best poets. Add all these complicating symptoms, and is there not something plausible about the diagnosis? We do not say, observe, and do not mean to say, that this is Miss Rossetti's case; only all she has done so far seems explicable on this hypothesis. For ourselves, we lean to the view that she will do more. We judge hers a strong, sensuous, impulsive, earnest, inconsiderate nature, that sympathizes well, feels finely, keeps true to itself at bottom, but does not pause to make sure that others must, as well as may, enter into the spirit that underlies her utterances, and so buries her meaning sometimes beyond Champollion's own powers of deciphering. But her next book must determine how much is to be ascribed to talent, and how much to practice and good models; and show us whether genius or gilt edges separate her from the ο πολλοί.