Democratic Sentinel, Volume 6, Number 28, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 11 August 1882 — Oscar Wil de’s Story of Rosetti’s Wife [ARTICLE]

Oscar Wil de’s Story of Rosetti’s Wife

Rosetti’s wife—a beautiful woman, with a wonderful glory of red gold hair, had entered his life to mold and color it with her love and to shape all his work. One day, in the act of raising aVenetian glass filled with wine to her lips, she died. No one knew why. With her life passed away all his interest and his hopes, and the sonnets which he felt to be her work as much as his, he put into a leaden casket and had them buried with her in her cofiiin. Some years after his friends begged that he would restore to the world the poems, and, at last, they prevailed upon him to allow them to be taken from the grave. To do this, they applied to Mr. Bruce (a secretary and the authority, I suppose) who, Mr. Wilde humorously said, could understand a thing that was an export or an import, or that had a name on the stock exchange, but to whom the word poet conveyed nothing, and who was lost in amused astonishment that anyone could think that a poet’s works could confer honor upon England. However, in the end permission was given, the grave was opened, the coffin lid raised, and behold, the beautiful red hair had grown to great length, and wound about her grave-robe; the leaden casket had broken by weight of the earth upon it, and the wonderful hair had grown in and around the sonnets, and made a lace-like mesh on every page. The Chinese, it is said, have long been in the habit of printing “ sleeve editions ” of the classics to assist candidates at the competitive examination whose memories are not sufficiently retentive. Spain, with a school population of 2,606,266, has 28,117 elementary schools, instructing 1,410,466 pupils.