“Sister Helen” is a ballad in dialogue with a subtly varying repetend, and introduces the popular belief that a witch could kill a man slowly by melting a wax figure.  Twice Rossetti essayed the historical ballad.  “The White Ship” tells of the drowning of the son and daughter of Henry I. with their whole ship’s company, except one survivor, Berold, the butcher of Rouen, who relates the catastrophe.  The subject of “The King’s Tragedy” is the murder of James I. by Robert Graeme and his men in the Charterhouse of Perth.  The teller of the tale is Catherine Douglas, known in Scottish tradition as Kate Barlass, who had thrust her arm through the staple, in place of a bar, to hold the door against the assassins.  A few stanzas of “The Kinges Quair” are fitted into the poem by shortening the lines two syllables each, to accommodate them to the ballad metre.  It is generally agreed that this was a mistake, as was also the introduction of the “Beryl Songs” between the narrative parts of “Rose Mary.”  These ballads of Rossetti compare well with other modern imitations of popular poetry.  “Sister Helen,” e.g., has much greater dramatic force than Tennyson’s “Oriana” or “The Sisters.”  Yet they impress one, upon the whole, as less characteristic than the poet’s Italianate pieces; as tours de force carefully pitched in the key of minstrel song, but falsetto in effect.  Compared with such things as “Cadyow Castle” or “Jack o’ Hazeldean,” they are felt to be the work of an art poet, resolute to divest himself of fine language and scrupulously observant of ballad convention in phrase and accent—­details of which Scott was often heedless—­but devoid of that hearty, natural sympathy with the conditions of life from which popular poetry sprang, and wanting the lyrical pulse that beats in the ballad verse of Scott, Kingsley, and Hogg.  In “The King’s Tragedy” Rossetti was poaching on Scott’s own preserves, the territory of national history and legend.  If we can guess how Scott would have handled the same story, we shall have an object lesson in two contrasted kinds of romanticism.  Scott could not have bettered the grim ferocity of the murder scene, nor have equalled, perhaps, the tragic shadow of doom which is thrown over Rossetti’s poem by the triple warning of the weird woman.  But the sense of the historic environment, the sense of the actual in places and persons, would have been stronger in his version.  Graeme’s retreat would have been the Perthshire Highlands, and not vaguely “the land of the wild Scots.”  And if scenery had been used, it would not have been such as this—­a Pre-Raphaelite background: 

  “That eve was clenched for a boding storm,
    ’Neath a toilsome moon half seen;
  The cloud stooped low and the surf rose high;
  And where there was a line of the sky,
    Wild wings loomed dark between.”