By W. M. Rossetti: "Her First Season: Sonnet." As I have said
elsewhere, my brother and I were at one time greatly addicted to
writing sonnets together to _bouts-rimés_: the date may have been
chiefly 1848, and the practice had, I think, quite ceased for some
little while before "The Germ" commenced in 1850. This sonnet was one
of my _bouts-rimés_ performances. I ought to have been more chary
than I was of introducing into our seriously-intended magazine such
hap-hazard things as _bouts-rimés_ poems: one reason for doing so was
that we were often at a loss for something to fill a spare page.

By John L. Tupper: "A Sketch from Nature." The locality indicated in
these very spirited descriptive lines is given as "Sydenham Wood."
When I was compiling the posthumous volume of John Tupper's "Poems"
which came out in 1897, I should, so far as merit is concerned, have
wished to include this little piece: it was omitted solely on the
ground of its being already published.

By Christina Rossetti: "An End." Written in March 1849.

By Collinson: "The Child Jesus, a Record Typical of the Five
Sorrowful Mysteries." Collinson, as I have already said, was hardly a
writing man, and I question whether he had produced a line of verse
prior to undertaking this by no means trivial task. The poem, like
the etching which he did for it, is deficient in native strength, nor
is there much invention in the symbolical incidents which make it up:
but its general level, and several of its lines and passages, always
appeared to me, and still appear, highly laudable, and far better
than could have been reckoned for. Here and there a telling line was
supplied by Dante Rossetti. Millais, when shortly afterwards in
Oxford, found that the poem had made some sensation there. It is