CHAPTER VIII.

THE POETRY OF DANTE ROSSETTI.

The “Pre-Raphaelite” in Literature—The Complexity of Talent in an Age of

Re-birth—The Restoration of Romance in England—The Latin and the

Saxon in Rossetti—Latin Diction for the Sonnets as Reflective

Poetry—Saxon Diction for the Ballads as Dramatic Poetry—“The House

of Life”—Treatment of Romantic Love—Illustrations of Sonnet

Structure—Miscellaneous Lyrics—“The Portrait,” “The Stream’s

Secret,” “Dante at Verona,” “The Staff and Scrip”—The Ballads—“The

White Ship,” “The King’s Tragedy,” “Sister Helen,” “Rose Mary,” “The

Bride’s Prelude,” “The Blessed Damozel”—“A Last Confession”—“Jenny”—

Relation of Rossetti’s Poetry to his Painting.

The poetry of Dante Gabriel Rossetti lies apart from the main current of

contemporary verse, both in its highly specialized quality of thought

and language, and in the conditions and circumstances of its production.

Inasmuch as he followed openly the profession of a painter, pursuing

poetry, for the most part, as a recreative rather than a principal study

(though never with less seriousness than his accepted vocation), and

publishing his first volume of original poems in his forty-second year,

he is exempt to some extent from the standards of criticism applied to

him whose creative energies are concentrated in the field of literature.

Whether Rossetti’s genius, as he himself believed, found its highest and

most perfect embodiment in poetry rather than in painting,—whether the

essential qualities of his art will be more evident to posterity in the

modest volume of his collected poems than in the pictures now dispersed

through England and America—is still an open question. It may, however,

be admitted that his mastery of the verbal medium was almost always more

complete, his discipline in metrical structure more thorough, and his

natural habit of diction more facile, than any skill which he attained

in brush and pencil. To estimate his final influence upon contemporary

thought in the one realm as against the other is yet more difficult than

to assess the relative merit of his actual work in either sphere: so

intimately was the poet incarnate in the painter; so largely did the

painter’s vision inspire and dominate the poet.

But it would be a poor analysis that should divide too finely the

interwoven threads of a radiant and many-coloured genius. In an age of

intellectual re-birth, of artistic and social revolution, the re-

adjustment of forces and functions in the ethical and æsthetical realms

is apt to produce a strange complexity of talent, not always beneficial

to a single art, not always well for the diversely endowed artist, but

often tending to the unification of many activities into one effective

stream of purpose, moved by the impulse that infused the nation with a

Time-Spirit potent for immortal things. Such a combination of talent in

single personalities, in a period of rare national fertility in

scholarship and creative power, reveals at the same time the basic unity

of the æsthetic life and its inseparable interdependence with the moral

ideal. Michaelangelo, at the zenith of the Italian Renaissance, standing

at the parting of the ways, gathered up, as it seemed, the several arts

into his representative genius, and left to the land that was soon to

swamp the æsthetic spirit in the mire of a materialistic decadence the

threefold heritage of his painting, his sculpture, and his song.

Rossetti, at the zenith of the English Renaissance, drew a twofold

inspiration from the struggle of the modern world, and left the double

dower of painting and of poetry, to urge the coming generation to the

higher issues of fine art, or to stand, the witness of rejected ideals

to ages recalcitrant to the vision and the impulse of to-day.

For the first greatness of Rossetti’s poetry is that it assumes for ever

the reality and the immanence of a spiritual—and more—a moral world. Not

that he ever misuses the vehicles of art as tools of philosophy, or

stoops to a didactic application of æsthetic truth. But his art is all

moral (as Mr. Ruskin would put it) because it is all fine art. And the

moral purpose of art is the better secured when art is trusted to effect

that purpose in its own way. The consciously didactic poet is less sure

to mould the will and character of a people, than he the form and

substance of whose utterance are so perfected in truth and virility of

thought, in majesty and grace of speech, as to be a fit oblation to his

own ideal. Not “how can I best teach others and influence them aright?”

but “how can I best express the highest things I know and feel?” is the

self-examination of the true artist. Rossetti’s poetry is self-

expressive, self-revealing to the very heart’s core. The ultimate test

of poetry is not “what did this man intend to teach us?” but “of what

sort is the manhood here revealed? what are the visions by which it

lived? what the ideals in which it grew? Is such a soul’s experience

wide, deep, typical, and profitable to the rest of mankind?”

In applying such a test to the writings of Rossetti, it is necessary to

distinguish between what may be roughly termed the “personal” and the

“impersonal” poems. In the one class, supremely exemplified by the

“House of Life” sonnets, but including also “Dante at Verona,” “The

Stream’s Secret,” “The Portrait,” and many of the shorter lyrics, the

personal note of love or grief, of memory or hope, is wholly dominant;

the poet’s soul is absorbed with its individual being, and sees in all

the life around him the illustration and interpretation of his own. In

the other class, in the great romantic ballads, in “Rose Mary” and “The

Blessed Damozel,” in “The White Ship” and “The King’s Tragedy,” in “The

Bride’s Prelude” and “Sister Helen,” the imagination takes a higher and

a larger range; the one soul interprets others, waiting not to be

interpreted. The art becomes impersonal in this sense only—that the

thought of self is merged in the full and immense life of humanity,

laying hold of the universal consciousness through its own initiative

experience; the heart beats with the world’s heart, shares its eternal

struggles, contributes to its eternal growth; and the spirit knows

itself one fragment of an infinite whole. In such a sphere the art

remains the more vitally personal, in that the poet brings the mysteries

of existence, the abiding problems and realities of the conscious world,

to the touchstone, as it were, of his own spirit, and submits himself

thereby to the more crucial test,—of how he can interpret humanity to

man, and make more clear the knowledge, more possible the realization,

of his highest ideals.

With this general division of the subject-matter of Rossetti’s poetry,

the classification of its metrical cast and forms of diction will be

singularly parallel. Most of his finest compositions might be

distinguished as purely Saxon or pre-eminently Latin poems; and it is

notable that the more intimately subjective and analytic the thought

within, the more persistently does it assume the Latin garb; while as

the imagination ranges from the introspection of the hyper-conscious

self, and finds, on the heights of common human feeling and aspiration,

a larger and a freer air, the mode passes into the more keen and

rarified Saxon speech. No other English poet has resolved the breadth

and simplicity of the Gothic, and the depth and intensity of the Italian

habit of expression, into such distinctive poetic vehicles. But at the

same time few have blended the diverse elements of the modern English

tongue into the harmony and sonority with which Rossetti’s music thrills

when he tempers the sharper Saxon with a deep undertone of polysyllabic

song; or stirs the languorous pulses of a sonnet with some swift cadence

of familiar words. He had the finest perception of national and racial

properties of form and rhythm; and discerning the characteristics of the

poetry of action in the literature of the north, and the poetry of

reflection in the literature of the south, he cast his great historical

lyrics in the highest narrative—that is to say, the ballad form; and

chose the sonnet—the most remote, chastened, and exclusive vehicle—for

the meditative, and yet sensuous, self-delineative love-poetry.

These broad generalizations, however, cannot be closely pressed upon the

entire sequence of Rossetti’s poems. The exigencies of the English

language alone elude their literal application. They will rather serve

to illustrate the duality of his endowments, and the singular power of

his genius both to conserve and specialize the characteristics of his

Italian heritage, and also to waive them in the Saxon mode as utterly as

though the latter were more native to his tongue.

Nor does such a superficial distinction affect the spiritual qualities

which pervade Rossetti’s poetry as a whole. From first to last, in

dramatic description or narrative, in sonnet-argument or meditative

questioning, his verse remains full-charged with the very essence of

romance. As a poet, he is neither less nor more Pre-Raphaelite than as a

painter. The vivid and intense simplicity of his Saxon diction, the

verbal lightnings of his ballad-style, seem to correspond with the tone

and method of his water-colour painting, and the more laboured splendour

of the sonnets with the properties of his work in oils. Nor is it

difficult to detect an analogy between that stage of his painting in

which the pristine lucidity of expression was partially lost in the

painful tension of his later thought, and the tendency of some few of

his sonnets towards decadence into the over-laborious and the obscure.

Yet if by “Pre-Raphaelite” we understand that fusion of the naïve

mysticism of romance with austere Platonic Hellenism which we discern in

the best Renaissance art, Rossetti never falls in spirit from that

standard of beauty and truth; and rarely lapses, through the very

richness and fecundity of the language at his command, into the

redundant verbiage towards which his sensuous imagery was easily led. It

has remained for a brother-poet of the romantic revival to cultivate a

more marvellous dexterity of rhyme and rhythm, and to develop the

technical resources of our language to the utmost limits of intelligible

song. The lyrics of Mr. Swinburne, like the superb decorative

extravagances of the later Renaissance, represent that culmination of

mastery over the forms of expression wherein to-day, as of yore, the

purity of the thought is lost in the splendour of the setting, and

poetic power wastes itself in a magic facility of verse.

The poetry of Rossetti, modern as it is in its passionate grasp of human

interests, its deep insight into present and perpetual things, links

itself nevertheless to an English past; takes up, as it were, the

dropped threads of Elizabethan glory; re-inspires the circling breath of

life which passed round Europe in the fifteenth century, kindling

England from the fires of re-awakened Italy in the golden age of song.

It has already been pointed out by one of Rossetti’s biographers that

“the malign influence over our literature in post-Shakespearean times

has been French.” It was reserved for a second Renaissance, heralded by

Chatterton and Blake, led by Shelley, Keats, and Coleridge, and

culminated by Dante Rossetti, to blot out two centuries of foreign

tradition and control, and take us back to the broad simplicity and

dignity of Shakespeare’s England.

Our reiteration, therefore, of the term “Pre-Raphaelite” in approaching

Rossetti’s work as a poet, leads us to expect, not mysticism merely, but

a certain robust sensuousness, as of Pagan origin, in his interpretation

of life and destiny. The romantic temper in its highest manifestations,

absorbing and transfiguring, rather than conflicting with, the classic

ideals, implies much more than receptivity to newer beauty and truth. It

has a moral basis and an intellectual range: it apprehends the spiritual

world as something closely bound up with familiar things: it finds the

human soul striving for expression through material forms: it recognizes

the divine possibilities of individual and social life, the force and

responsibility of personal character, and the solemnity of the choice

between good and evil daily made by man.

But the controversy excited by Rossetti’s pictures has been neither more

intemperate nor more significant than that which has raged around his

poems;—interpreted by one section of his critics as a pæan of sensuality

and materialism, by another as the most spiritual and chastened love-

poetry of the age. The laureate of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood indeed

summed up, in what now affords but one volume of original verse, the

inmost vicissitudes of a spirit so rare and rich of vision as to

transcend at once the canons of conventional experience. But the

personal note, in the self-delineative poems, is struck with a peculiar

dignity of reserve; and even while the most sacred depths of individual

consciousness are laid bare, the actual _ego_ is never intruded upon the

surface of the speech,—never portrays directly its own character, seldom

describes its own sensations as Byron or Shelley would; but veils

itself, even in the profusion of luminous imagery and searching analysis

of thought and sense.

The eternal mysteries and sanctities of sexual love, conceived in its

highest aspects and known as a revelation and a sacrament, afford the

theme of nearly all Rossetti’s autobiographic poetry. The conditions of

its production were ordained by the stern fate that linked him afar off

to Dante among his countrymen, and near at hand to two brother-mourners

among minor English bards—James Thomson and Philip Bourke Marston—in the

sad fraternity of poets whom death has prematurely robbed of the beloved

object that once inspired their song. The exalted spirituality which

marks Rossetti’s treatment of this theme was doubtless largely due to

the influence of Dante, and especially to the fruitful inspiration and

discipline of the great literary task of his youth—the translation of

the “Vita Nuova” and kindred examples of the early Italian poets—than

which Rossetti could have hardly found a better preparation for his work

that was to come.

Into his great sonnet-sequence, “The House of Life,” Rossetti poured the

full passion of his mystic love,—partially inherent in his own sensuous,

imaginative, and introspective nature, partially instilled at the feet

of Dante; and learned—a bitter and a costly lesson—at the school of

experience also; fraught with inestimable joy and sorrow to his own

soul. “At an age,” says one writing of that hard probation, “when most

men have outlived the romances of their youth, Rossetti was laying, in

‘The House of Life,’ the foundations of a new school of love-poetry.” He

was in fact re-creating the æsthetic life of a nation; restoring to it,

through the alembic of mediæval and Renaissance thought, the lost glory

of all that was abidingly precious in the Platonic world. For in this

wondrous cycle of sonnets is re-coined the whole language of ideal love.

From the last echo of the “Vita Nuova” it takes up the same pure strain,

and sings again the song of Dante for the Blessed Beatrice; hymning the

very apotheosis of spiritual passion, and harmonizing once more in

English poetry the intellectual with the sensuous world. Never, in the

superb visions of “The House of Life”—in which the soul of man is

pictured sojourning awhile during its solemn and fateful passage through

eternity—never does the physical love become the stumbling-block to the

spiritual, but always the key to it. The “body’s beauty” is only

precious as the witness of the “soul’s beauty;” the physical bond is

nothing if not the symbol of a spiritual affinity, a sacred kinship,

fore-ordained, if not eternal, sealed in Heaven and consecrated to the

divinest purposes; the sensuous rapture is but a symbolic worship,—“the

outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace” which to

reject or betray is to profane the inmost sanctuary of the God of Love:

“Even so, when first I saw you, seemed it, love,

That among souls allied to mine was yet

One nearer kindred than life hinted of.

O born with me somewhere that men forget,

And though in years of sight and sound unmet,

Known for my soul’s birth-partner well enough!”

Love the revealer of unseen verities, the binder of invisible bonds;

Love the deliverer from material trammels, the opener of the gate of

life; these are to him the gracious manifestations of the same deity:

“O what from thee the grace, to me the prize,

And what to Love the glory,—when the whole

Of the deep stair thou tread’st to the dim shoal

And weary water of the place of sighs,

And there dost work deliverance, as thine eyes

Draw up my prisoned spirit to thy soul!”

In the large atmosphere of such a worship, seeing all things, as we have

said, _sub specie eternitatis_, the poet portrays the sweetest

intimacies of communion, soul with soul; questioning, recording,

comparing from time to time the recurring phases of joy and hope, memory

and regret. “When do I see thee most?” he asks in the exquisite sonnet

called “Lovesight”:

“When do I see thee most, beloved one?

When in the light the spirits of mine eyes

Before thy face, their altar, solemnize

The worship of that love through thee made known?

Or when in the dusk hours, (we two alone,)

Close-kissed and eloquent of still replies

Thy twilight-hidden glimmering visage lies,

And my soul only sees thy soul its own?”

“What of her glass without her?” he cries again after the great

bereavement which has removed the visible presence of the beloved:

“What of her glass without her? The blank grey

There where the pool is blind of the moon’s face.

Her dress without her? The tossed empty space

Of cloud-rack whence the moon has passed away.

Her paths without her? Day’s appointed sway

Usurped by desolate night. Her pillowed place

Without her? Tears, ah me! for love’s good grace,

And cold forgetfulness of night or day.”

And with what fine insight does Rossetti pierce the tender subtleties of

the woman’s responsive heart! Has any other English poet discerned so

well that retrospective instinct which clings to the early semblances of

pure and non-sexual love?

—“She loves him, for her infinite soul is love.

* * * * * *

With wifely breast to breast

And circling arms, she welcomes all command

Of love,—her soul to answering ardours fanned:

Yet as morn springs or twilight sinks to rest,

_Ah! who shall say she deems not loveliest

The hour of sisterly sweet hand-in-hand?_”

In that hint lies the acknowledgment of the Platonic ideal,—that

whatever dignifies and ennobles the affections must lie not in the

outward conditions but within; that the senses are but the accessories

of Love; the temporary channels, not the eternal stream. And this

insistence on the spiritual aspects of passion affects the whole tone

and temper of Rossetti’s poetry; raising it, in moments of intense

feeling, almost to the mystic exaltation of a Pascal, and transfiguring

all the world of consciousness by the knowledge and memory of an

overmastering love. From the first to the last of the hundred sonnets we

are shown steadfastly the outlook upon life of one to whom all life has

been sanctified by that supreme experience. “Who can read ‘The House of

Life’” (says Mr. F.W.H. Myers in his essay on “Rossetti and the Religion

of Beauty”[15]) “and not feel that this poet has known love as love can

be, not an enjoyment only or a triumph, but a worship and a

regeneration?”

In such a spirit does the poet take account of time and opportunity, and

recognize the solemnities of passing hour. Life has become more sacred,

the man more responsible, the imperative forces of character and destiny

more urgent than before. The sense of personal possibilities and

shortcomings weighs upon him. “Lost days” and wasted chances oppress his

mind. The actualities of evil in his own sphere of being look darker in

the face of the recognized good:

“The lost days of my life until to-day,

What were they, could I see them on the street

Lie as they fell? Would they be ears of wheat

Sown once for food but trodden into clay?

Or golden coins squandered and still to pay?

Or drops of blood dabbling the guilty feet?

Or such spilt water as in dreams must cheat

The throats of men in Hell, athirst alway?

I do not see them here, but after death

God knows I know the faces I shall see,

Each one a murdered self, with low last breath.

‘I am thyself,—what hast thou done to me?’

‘And I—and I—thyself,’ (lo! each one saith,)

‘And thou thyself to all eternity!’”

And in a similar strain the poet prays:

“O Lord of work and peace! O Lord of life!

O Lord, the awful Lord of will! though late,

Even yet renew this soul with duteous breath:

That when the peace is garnered in from strife,

The work retrieved, the will regenerate,

This soul may see thy face, O Lord of death!”

This sense of destiny it is, this keen perception—characteristic of all

true romance—of the reality of the spiritual world, the transiency of

earthly joys and the insufficiency of external things, that gives the

persistent undertone of melancholy to Rossetti’s love-sonnets, and more

or less, indeed, to all his poetry. He does not, perhaps, sustain the

peculiar minor key which the resigned and pensive fatalism of William

Morris imparts. His grasp of fate is firmer, and with all his despair

and doubt and grief he keeps a greater dignity of front than any of his

surviving brother-poets. But his pessimism, if it must be called so, had

its source in a hyper-sensitive and self-conscious personality, and was

drawn, as one has said of Michaelangelo, from “the struggle of a strong

nature to attune itself.” It is an absorbing struggle, on which to look

with reverent reserve; carried on within the sorely-shaken spaces of a

spirit too proud to vent itself, as Swinburne’s, in a broad and vigorous

iconoclasm; too isolated to find relief, as the poet of “The Earthly

Paradise” was presently to do, in the vanguard of a social revolution

promising the heaven of his dreams. Nor could Rossetti’s wayward heart

find permanent rest in the fervid religious faith which sustained the

poetess of the Pre-Raphaelite movement—his sister, Miss Christina

Rossetti.

Yet the sadness that tinges Rossetti’s verse is nearly always of a kind

that chastens without enervating, and strengthens while it subdues.

Intimately personal and subtly introspective as it is, it lifts us on to

the highest planes of living poetry. We feel that the writer has learnt

that first great lesson which indeed Rossetti himself has urged in these

sonnets,—

“By thine own tears thy song must tears beget,

O Singer!”

And by that baptism of tears he rises to the rank of those whose

individual loss and grief have blessed the world, as the death of Edward

King blessed it in Milton’s “Lycidas,” and in far greater measure the

death of Arthur Hallam blessed it in Tennyson’s “In Memoriam.” For while

sometimes the expression of personal pain may be put into such perfect

art as to afford in its very poignancy of feeling a sort of æsthetic

consolation, the test of the highest poetic grief is that it shall lose

the smart of personal injury in a strong sense of brotherhood with

fellow-sufferers, and shall translate the revolt against individual pain

into a wide compassion with the sorrows of a nation or of all humanity.

Nor can we avoid comparison of “The House of Life” with the two great

kindred cycles of love-sonnets in the English language,—the sonnets of

Shakespeare, and Mrs. Browning’s “Sonnets from the Portuguese;” the one

celebrating a hopeless and desolating passion, the other a fortunate and

consummated love. Rossetti touches both these precedents, in that he

knew alike the depths and heights, the hell and heaven, of that passion

of which the poets say,—

“All other pleasures are not worth its pain.”

He enjoyed happiness, and suffered despair, not merely in the outward

circumstances of his love, but in a more subtle and irretrievable way.

The fallacy dies hard, that leads us to imagine that the unvaryingly sad

and gloomy natures are the supreme sufferers of the world. On the

contrary, the acuteness of pain is measured by its victim’s capacity for

mirth. And there are some natures so finely organized, so highly-strung,

that even joy is almost painful to them. They cannot lose themselves in

a moment’s rapture, but are beset with contrasts behind and before; are

haunted with the cost of every ecstasy, and rarely learn that calm and

self-possessing wisdom which is the fruit of the knowledge of good and

evil, and through which may come at last, in many channels of

temperament, in many forms of faith and duty, the power to subdue the

evil to the good. Such were Shelley and Keats, Leopardi and Heine, James

Thomson and Philip Bourke Marston: such also was Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

It would be superfluous to dwell at length on the extraordinary richness

of Rossetti’s metaphor and simile. The imagery in the “House of Life” is

for the most part sensuous, fervid, and almost tropical in colour and

atmosphere. Here are a crowd of variously portentous spirits,—

... “Fame, whose loud wings fan the ashen Past

To signal fires;”

... “Song, whose hair

Blew like a flame and blossomed like a wreath;”

... “Love, smiling to receive

Along his eddying plumes the auroral wind;”

And—

... “Life herself, the spirit’s friend and love,

Even still as Spring’s authentic harbinger

Glows with fresh hours for hope to glorify;

Though pale she lay when in the winter grove

Her funeral flowers were snowflakes shed on her

And the red wings of frost-fire rent the sky.”

We follow the soul of the lover—

... “where wan water trembles in the grove,

And the wan moon is all the light thereof,”

... “o’er the sea of love’s tumultuous trance,”

“Upon the devious coverts of dismay”

across “death’s haggard hills”; among

“Shadows and shoals that edge eternity,”

and through

... “that last

Wild pageant of the accumulated past

That clangs and flashes for a drowning man.”

The superb climax just quoted terminates one of the most vivid and

haunting of the “House of Life” series,—“The Soul’s Sphere,”—

illustrative of the vast range of consciousness known to one

“Who, sleepless, hath ... anguished to appease

Tragical shadow’s realm of sound and sight

Conjectured in the lamentable night,”

and probes the memory for images whose calm splendour may bring

forgetfulness of self. The subject is that of Wordsworth’s well-known

sonnet, “A flock of sheep that leisurely pass by;” and the contrast

between the visions conjured up by the two very diverse poets exactly

illustrates the difference of temperament which set them at opposite

poetic poles. The mind of Wordsworth rests in the contemplation of

familiar things, gains peace in the common incidents of pastoral life,

loves Nature best in her ordinary moods, and seeks always the homeliest

of consolations, the most universal joys. The mind of Rossetti craves

ever for the superlative, the exceptional, the intense, and can find no

ease in anything very simple and quiet.

The value of a poet’s verdict on his own poems is not always to be

measured by his critical faculty when applied to general literature. The

friends of Rossetti have been unanimous in his praise as a critic both

of prose and of poetry, though his desultory reading and vehemence of

judgment led him sometimes into extravagances of worship or

condemnation, and blunted his discrimination of relative merits in

divergent schools. Hence his persistent and quite explicable antipathy

to Wordsworth, and his exaggerated estimate of Chatterton in later life.

But in his criticism of his own work it is inevitable that a poet should

be somewhat biassed by associations and memories bearing upon its

production. It is difficult to take seriously Rossetti’s admission to

the indiscreet admirer of one of his shorter poems,—“You are right: ‘The

Cloud Confines’ _is_ my very best thing.” Lyrically unimpeachable indeed

it is, though not more so than the exquisite “Autumn Song,” “A New

Year’s Burden,” “Insomnia,” “Three Shadows,” or “Sunset Wings;” and

therefore are we fain to take Rossetti’s judgment as based largely on

technical considerations when, in selecting his own favourites from

among the “House of Life” series, he adds to the noble sonnet “Lost

Days” (already quoted) the less impassioned but more coherent and

melodious “Still-born Love,” “The One Hope,” and “Known in Vain.” These

certainly excel in some of the highest qualities of the sonnet form—

unity of idea, and the steady set of the rhythmic flow and ebb in motive

and application; though in none of these does the sestet conform to the

pure Guittonian model on three-rhyme-sounds, blending the first and

fourth, second and fifth, and third and sixth lines in a double tercet,

as it does with signal success in “Lost on Both Sides,” “The Portrait,”

and “Hope Overtaken;” and in only one out of his chosen four (“The One

Hope”) does Rossetti attain what he personally preferred as the most

perfect order of sestet rhymes, based upon two terminal sounds, and

rhyming the first, fourth, and fifth lines against the second, third,

and sixth; thus opening the sestet with a quatrain harmonizing in

structure with the octet above, and yet avoiding the rhymed couplet at

the close which would remove the whole poem from the Italian mould in

which, despite many irregularities, nearly all Rossetti’s sonnets are

cast. The sestet of “Lost Days” (like several others in the series)

exemplifies what is generally held to be the best arrangement of the

two-rhymed sestet in the Guittonian form,—that in which the first,

third, and fifth terminals chime against the second, fourth, and sixth.

Admirable as these four sonnets are, however, in clarity of thought and

cumulative power, it is doubtful whether they should rank higher, from

the broadest standards of poetry, than “Lost on Both Sides,”

“Lovesight,” “Mid-rapture,” or “Supreme Surrender;” in all of which the

gathering force of the motive sweeps in a fine torrent—mournful,

searching, tender, or triumphant—to its eddying close, and the best

tribute to the metrical art of each is that it conveys so perfectly the

inmost fulness of the thought. Frequently, indeed, Rossetti ends a

sonnet with a rhymed couplet on a new terminal sound, following a

Guittonian quatrain, as in “Mid-Rapture,” “True Woman,” “Her Heaven,”

and “The Song-Throe;” or in some cases following a Shakespearean

quatrain after a Guittonian octet, as, for instance, in “Venus Victrix”

and “The Love-Moon.” Very rarely does he compose a whole sonnet in the

Shakespearean measure, namely, that in which the two rhyme-sounds of the

doubled-quatrained octave occur in alternate lines, and the former of

them is carried forward with a new rhyme for the similarly alternated

quatrain of a sestet clenched with a rhyming couplet on another note, as

in “Willow-Wood” (No. III.). The question of the legitimacy of a rhymed

couplet at the close of anything but a wholly Shakespearean sonnet has

been much debated by conflicting authorities on poetic form. The sonnet

is at once the most elastic and the most arbitrary of vehicles for the

concise embodiment of a single thought and its accessory similes. From

the scholar’s point of view, no indiscriminate grafting of one

essentially national and historic growth of form upon another is

theoretically defensible. But, since no European language is of

exclusive stock, the fusion of Latin and Saxon speech in the varied

beauty of modern English seems hardly less anachronistic than the

adaptation of traditional metres to the new requirements of the poetic

faculties of the age.

Akin to the “House of Life” in spirit and substance is “The Portrait;” a

reminiscence, after the death of the loved model, of hours which saw the

painting of the picture on a stormy summer day. Here the sonnet’s long-

drawn strain gives place to a quicker measure:

“But when that hour my soul won strength

For words whose silence wastes and kills,

Dull raindrops smote us, and at length

Thundered the heat within the hills.

That eve I spoke those words again

Beside the pelted window-pane;

And there she hearkened what I said,

With under-glances that surveyed

The empty pastures blind with rain.

* * * * * *

“Last night at last I could have slept,

And yet delayed my sleep till dawn,

Still wandering. Then it was I wept:

For unawares I came upon

Those glades where once she walked with me.

And as I stood there suddenly,

All wan with traversing the night,

Upon the desolate verge of light

Yearned loud the iron-bosomed sea.”

In “The Stream’s Secret” the verse assumes a still more lyrical rhythm,

as the poet communes with the familiar waters concerning his lost love,

and desires—

“The wind-stirred robe of roseate grey

And rose-crown of the hour that leads the day

When we shall meet once more,”

. . . . . .

“As on the unmeasured height of Love’s control

The lustral fires are lit.”

The flow of the monologue gleams with such images as these:

“And on the waste uncoloured wold

The visible burthen of the sun grown cold,

And the moon’s labouring gaze;”

or—

“The soul hears the night’s disconsolate cry,

And feels the branches, wringing wet,

Cast on its brow, that may not once forget,

Blind tears from the blind sky.”

In “Dante at Verona” Rossetti portrays in a somewhat diffuse and

irregular string of descriptive stanzas, some incidents, historic and

imaginary, but always congruous with our best ideals of Dante,—of his

exile from Florence and his sojourn at the Court of Verona after the

death of Beatrice. The poem lacks balance and unity of plan, but abounds

in passages of exquisite feeling, wrought through the keen vision of

those significant accessories that make a great, if fragmentary picture

of the commanding personality so near akin in many aspects to his modern

namesake and disciple, yet strangely removed from him in temperament and

character. How far in either case the lover’s worship was fulfilled and

consummated in a single earthly embodiment of the ideal, or whether such

a brief apparent gain served but to feed the fires of the insatiable

idealism behind it, is hardly for the historian to estimate. But

whatever the actual channels found by the dominant passion of their

poetry, however diverse the conditions under which it sought its outlet

towards the infinite sea, both Dante and Rossetti may be counted with

the isolated band of dreamers, who, as Shelley once said aptly of

himself, “are always in love with something or other; their error

consists in seeking in a mortal image the likeness of what is, perhaps,

eternal.” They “have loved Antigone before they visited this earth, and

are ever demanding of life more than it can give.”

On such a pilgrimage the sombre figure of “Dante at Verona” passes

before us, through the palaces and gardens of Can Grande della Scala,

ever remote, self-absorbed, austere; “with set brows lordlier than a

frown;” and we are shown his vigils, his spiritual isolation among the

gross luxuries and corruptions of the table, the chamber, and the hall;

and how his presence half won, half awed the women of the court;

“And when the music had its sign

To breathe upon them for more ease

Sometimes he turned and bade it cease.”

And he who followed steadfastly the inward vision of the lost Beatrice,

to be regained in Paradise, cherished with the more integrity his love

for the city of Beatrice,—Florence, that “sat solitary” when Beatrice

died, and now seemed lost also. And he answered them that would win back

the exiled patriot-poet,—

“That since no gate led, by God’s will,

To Florence, but the one whereat

The priests and money-changers sat,

He still would wander; for that still,

Even through the body’s prison-bars

His soul possessed the sun and stars.”

Here again is struck the keynote of romance, “the note of resistance and

defiance” of external trammels and material bonds; the note of spiritual

courage which can pierce through the finite to the infinite life, and

“possess” what this world cannot remove or bestow. And in this high

strain the personal accent, the autobiographic undertone, loses itself

in a loftier music, and “Dante at Verona” is brought within measurable

distance of Rossetti’s finest work—his great romantic ballads, “Rose

Mary,” “The White Ship,” “The King’s Tragedy,” “Sister Helen,” “The

Bride’s Prelude,” “The Staff and Scrip,” and “The Blessed Damozel.”

“The Staff and Scrip,” perhaps, ranks next above “Dante at Verona,” to

which it links itself as a kind of companion poem; celebrating the life-

long faithfulness of a lady to her knight-errant, perished in defence of

her cause. Coming as a pilgrim through her wasted lands, the hero seeks

the queen in her dim palace, where,—

“The sweetness sickened her

Of musk and myrrh,”

and dedicates himself to the redemption of the country from her foe.

“She sent him a sharp sword, whose belt

About his body there

As sweet as her own arms he felt.

He kissed its blade, all bare,

Instead of her.”

The knight wins in the battle, but dies in the victory, and his body is

brought to the queen.

“‘Uncover ye his face,’ she said.

‘O changed in little space!’

She cried; ‘O pale that was so red!

O God, O God of grace!

Cover his face.’

“His sword was broken in his hand

Where he had kissed the blade.

‘O soft steel that could not withstand!

O my hard heart unstayed,

That prayed and prayed!’”

The exaltation of spirit is more sustained, the diction more finely

distilled, the air clearer, the whole balance and setting of the

narrative more perfect than in “Dante at Verona.” The passion of

chivalric love, worship, heroism, loyalty, burns at a white-heat from

the first line to the last. Every phrase is purged, chastened, and full-

charged; and flies swiftly with its portentous burden of meaning

straight to the mark. It breathes the very soul of that romantic

chivalry to which the modern world is turning with a shaken conscience

and a regenerate will; impelled to a larger application of its

principles than the golden ages knew. The glory of true knighthood in

its championship of the weak, its resistance of tyranny, its heroic

self-sacrifice, its contempt of ease, its defiance of pain, its devotion

to principle, is as yet a tardy sunrise brokenly discerned through the

long reaches of historic years; an unsteady dawn of world-light clouded

by men’s lust of private power; a scant and partial gleam of what it

must involve for the social life to be.

“The White Ship” and “The King’s Tragedy” stand together as Rossetti’s

sole and supreme achievements in the realm of historical romance. They

stand, in fact, alone in conception and treatment among modern English

ballads: unequalled even by Tennyson’s “Revenge,” and crowning the lyric

with something almost of the epic quality. The theme of “The White Ship”

is found in the familiar story of Henry I. of England, who is said to

have “never smiled again” after the loss of the “white ship” in which

his son and heir—not mentioned by name in the poem—perished in crossing

the channel from Normandy. “The King’s Tragedy” relates, through the

mouth of Catherine Douglas (“Kate Barlass”), the assassination of James

I. of Scotland by Sir Robert Graeme. In neither ballad is the action

lifted to an unfamiliar or phantasmal world; in both it is transfused,

as it passes across the stage of actual history, with a glow and glamour

of supernatural light; brought near to us with a direct realism of

incident and detail as convincing as it is transparent, and yet shrouded

in an atmosphere of mysticism and reserve, pervaded with a sense of doom

and fatality, that holds us in a mingled awe and exaltation such as we

feel in the purest Greek tragedy, amid the strivings of the gods with

men. The narrative of “The White Ship” is told bluntly, vividly,

incoherently, by the humblest of the king’s retinue and the sole

survivor of the royal train, “the butcher of Rouen, poor Berold;” and

the movement seems to gather the more power and sincerity from his

untutored lips. Its dominant motives, its finer touches,—the withholding

of the hero’s name and the allusions to him merely as “the Prince,” the

emphasis on the manner of the death of the “lawless, shameless youth”

who died, after all, for his sister’s sake—the emphasis throughout on

character rather than on incident—these are true marks of romantic

poetry.

But “The King’s Tragedy” far surpasses the earlier ballad in sustained

and unfaltering dignity of passion, in the tender humanness of the

narrative setting, the grandly simple presentation of the climax, and

the weird portent of the earlier scenes. None but the two or three who

saw the writer in the course of his task can know what the poem cost

Rossetti in his dying year,—the last great product of a literary genius

still ascendant when obscured by death, and if not the finest of all his

ballads, sharing at least the rank of “Sister Helen,” “Rose Mary,” and

“The Blessed Damozel.” Never does he use the supernatural machinery with

a more masterly restraint or yet with a more powerful effect of dread

and presage, than when he brings the aged woman of the sea, like one of

the witches of “Macbeth,” to confront the King with her fourfold vision

of his doom:

“Four years it is since first I met,

’Twixt the Duchray and the Dhu,

A shape whose feet clung close in a shroud,

And that shape for thine I knew.

“A year again, and on Inchkeith Isle

I saw thee pass in the breeze,

With the cerecloth risen above thy feet

And wound about thy knees.

“And yet a year, in the Links of Forth,

As a wanderer without rest,

Thou cam’st with both thine arms i’ the shroud

That clung high up thy breast.

* * * * * *

“And when I met thee again, O King,

That of death hast such sore drouth,—

Except thou turn again on this shore,—

The winding-sheet shall have moved once more,

And covered thine eyes and mouth.

“For every man on God’s ground, O King,

His death grows up from his birth

In a shadow-plant perpetually;

And thine towers high, a black yew-tree,

O’er the Charterhouse of Perth!”

Then, in strange contrast to the wild scenery of the “black beach-side”

in winter, we are shown the king and queen at home and keeping festival

in the ill-fated house. The revelry of the halls, and the quiet joy of

the hearthside, seem to avert for a time the coming woe. The king takes

his harp, and sings to the queen an old love-song which he had written

to her from prison long ago. But soon the boded fate falls on them

unaware:

“’Twas a wind-wild eve in February,

And against the casement pane

The branches smote like summoning hands,

And muttered the driving rain.”

The entrance of the traitors, with “three hundred armèd men,” urges on

the climax of the tragedy, until at last the king, discovered in the

vault where he had hastily hidden:

“Half-naked stood, but stood as one

Who yet could do and dare.

With the crown, the King was stript away,—

The Knight was ’reft of his battle array,—

But still the man was there!”

The poem ends on a stern note of revenge and retribution, for, when the

shameful deed is done, the queen keeps watch for a whole month beside

the royal body; refusing to permit the burial till every one of the

“murderous league” is put to a more terrible death than his lord.

“And then she said,—‘My King, they are dead!’

And she knelt on the chapel floor,

And whispered low with a strange proud smile,—

‘James, James, they suffered more!’”

There is, perhaps, a higher aspect to this passion of revenge, this

fierce, imperative, triumphant sense of moral justice and supernatural

retribution, than the somewhat partial and personal form which it

assumes in mediæval poetry. Beneath the crude worship of arbitrary rule,

behind the primitive conception of a Power that for ever vindicates the

brave and puts the coward to confusion, lies the germ of that larger

sense of divine vengeance which inspires and dominates all great

tragedy. Something of this higher strain of feeling, this perception of

the futility of merely human punishments and personal judgments, yet

mingled with an instinctive acceptance of the human measures as the

instruments of the divine, finds expression in the ballad of “Sister

Helen.” The theme is based upon an ancient superstition to the effect

that the death of a wrong-doer could be supernaturally procured by the

injured person, by making a waxen image in his semblance and melting it

for three days and nights before a fire. Sister Helen’s lover has been

unfaithful to her, and in her anger against him she melts his image and

keeps her dreadful watch relentlessly through the appointed hours, till

the spell is completed, and her vengeance achieves its purpose in the

death of her enemy. The poem is cast in the form of a dialogue between

Sister Helen and her little brother, whose childish wonder at the

mysterious process distracts him from his play; and he looks by turns at

the fatal fire and at the wintry landscape without.

“‘Why did you melt your waxen man,

Sister Helen?

To-day is the third since you began.’

‘The time was long, yet the time ran,

Little brother.’

(O Mother, Mary Mother,

Three days to-day, between Hell and Heaven!)”

She bids the child watch from the balcony while she, within, proceeds

with her incantation. Presently messengers ride hastily up the road,

calling upon Helen, and pleading with her for mercy upon the dying man:

“‘But he calls for ever on your name,

Sister Helen,

And says that he melts before a flame.’

‘My heart for his pleasure fared the same,

Little brother.’

(O Mother, Mary Mother,

Fire at the heart, between Hell and Heaven!)”

The contrast between the boy’s innocent, eager reports and observations,

and Helen’s bitter, mocking answers, carries with it all the solemn

terror of the Greek, and all the mystic naïveté of the mediæval world.

At last the unfaithful lover’s aged father, and finally his three days’

bride, arrive to add their entreaties for his life, and the lady falls

fainting at Helen’s inhospitable door.

“‘They’ve caught her to Westholm’s saddle-bow,

Sister Helen,

And her moonlit hair gleams white in its flow.’

‘Let it turn whiter than winter snow,

Little brother!’

(O Mother, Mary Mother,

Woe-withered gold, between Hell and Heaven!)”

It is not until too late that Helen learns that by seeking revenge for

her own sorrow she has only doubled the sin. Absorbed in her own heart’s

bitterness, she cannot know that the only anger worthy to play a part in

the divine retribution is that which burns not so much for the sin

against self as for the sin against love; which draws from the smart of

personal injury a righteous indignation for others’ wrongs, a profound

and passionate pity for fellow-victims of a too common evil, a too

familiar grief. But in Helen’s vengeance lies her own despair:

“‘Ah! what white thing at the door has crossed,

Sister Helen?

Ah! what is this that sighs in the frost?’

‘A soul that’s lost as mine is lost,

Little brother!’

(O Mother, Mary Mother,

Lost, lost, all lost, between Hell and Heaven!)”

The same thought of reciprocal sin, if we may so express it,—of the

mutual responsibility of soul to soul,—that subtle action of the law of

vicarious suffering by which every soul that falls short of its own

highest and best inevitably drags down some other soul with it,—and the

converse thought of individual redemption through mutual love: these

afford the motive of “Rose Mary.”

“Shame for shame, yea, and sin for sin:

Yet peace at length may our poor souls win

If love for love be found therein.”

The story turns upon the magic properties attributed to the Beryl-stone,

into which the pure in heart might look and read the future, and be

forewarned against all danger or calamity. Rose Mary’s mother bids her

read the mysterious crystal on the eve of her lover’s journey to a

distant shrine, whither he rides to seek shrift for his soul before the

wedding-day. The mother fears some ambush of foes by the way, and trusts

the Beryl to reveal where the danger lies. Unknown to her, however, Rose

Mary and her lover have joined in sin; and their sin dispossesses the

good spirits from the stone, and yields their place to evil spirits, so

that the spell works by contraries, and the oracle speaks falsely; the

lover is betrayed and killed on the road at night. But, unknown to Rose

Mary, her lover has been faithless, even to her own love. The sin is

threefold,—his with her, hers with him, and his with another; and Rose

Mary learns that only by an heroic forgiveness and self-sacrifice which

shall cost her very life can she atone for her own and his greater sin,

win pardon for both, and cast out the evil tenants from the Beryl stone.

The ballad moves throughout at Rossetti’s highest poetic level; its

majestic rhythm sweeps from verse to verse in a torrent of swift,

strong, lyric narrative, almost too cohesive for quotation, save in such

descriptive stanzas as these:

“Even as she spoke, they two were ’ware

Of music-notes that fell through the air;

A chiming shower of strange device,

Drop echoing drop, once, twice, and thrice,

As rain may fall in Paradise.

* * * * * *

As the globe slid to its silken gloom,

Once more a music rained through the room;

Low it splashed like a sweet star-spray,

And sobbed like tears at the heart of May,

And died as laughter dies away.”

But the imagery from first to last is of extraordinary tenderness and

power; as, for instance, in describing the first lightning-flash before

a storm,—

“Ere labouring thunders heave the chain

From the flood-gates of the drowning rain,”

or when,—

“The dawn broke dim on Rose Mary’s soul,—

No hill-crown’s heavenly aureole,

But a wild gleam on a shaken shoal,”

and in the past night,—

“She knew she had waded bosom-deep

Along death’s bank in the sedge of sleep.”

It is impossible to adequately criticise “Rose Mary” without reference

to the question already raised by Mr. Theodore Watts, as to whether in

future editions of Rossetti’s poems the “Beryl Songs” should not be

removed from their present places in the interludes of the poem and

relegated to a note at the end. Writing on this point in the “Athenæum,”

Mr. Watts said:—“The only case in which Rossetti’s changes were not

improvements was the case of the changes in ‘Rose Mary,’ made, not

after, but before, it appeared in type,—changes which can only be called

lamentable. It had lain in its perfect form for years, and although it

had been read in manuscript to scores of friends, no line in it had been

altered. But when passing ‘Ballads and Sonnets’ through the press in

1881, at a time when he was out of health, Rossetti called to mind

certain remarks upon a supposed lack of clarity in his work which had

fallen not only from some critics but from certain friends; and in an

evil moment it occurred to him that it would be a gain to ‘Rose Mary’ if

the three parts were knit together by lyrics, and he set to work to

write the ‘Beryl Songs’ which now appear in the ballad. The lyrics

themselves are not good, for his endowment of metre was not equal to his

other poetical gifts; but had they been as good as the lyrics in ‘Maud’

the disaster to the poem would have been none the less grievous. A

friend whom at that time he consulted upon everything strongly fought

against the introduction of these incongruities, but Rossetti was too

ill to be persistently opposed, and only became conscious of the mistake

when it was too late, the book being then before the public.”

It is obvious that the friend here alluded to is Mr. Watts himself, and

it must be remembered that inasmuch as every line of the ballad

_without_ the lyrics had been familiar to him for years, his verdict can

hardly be accepted as that of an unbiassed judge. It is, at all events,

dubious whether any editor would now presume to disturb the sequence of

the poem.

In one other ballad of kindred structure does Rossetti sustain a similar

flow of exquisite imagination, in verbal beauty and subtlety of idiom

hard to surpass in modern English verse. “The Bride’s Prelude” is indeed

but a lovely fragment, a delicate vignette, a little character-sketch

bathed in the warmest and finest of mediæval colouring; a prelude only,

as it modestly claims to be; but, like Chopin’s preludes in music, so

perfect in its limited range that the ear craves no further melody for a

long while after its brief passion has sung itself to rest. It is a

bride’s confession to her younger sister on her wedding morn; and,

taking the form of a broken monologue interspersed with descriptive

passages of the highest poetic order, its movement is more deliberate,

its ornament more richly wrought, perhaps, than that of the more

dramatic ballads. It might almost be said that nowhere else does

Rossetti so oppress the reader with the actual feeling of the atmosphere

in which the tale is told. The intense and sultry stillness of the

chamber at mid-noon, where the two women sit together probing for the

first and only time the one dire secret of the past, weighs upon us like

veritable glare and burning silence, save for the bride’s difficult

speech, and the shocked sister’s faint answers, and the keen, far-off

sounds in the courtyard below, till the last word is said. Every minute

detail of sight and sound heightens the effect of warmth and colour in

contrast to the bare simplicity and hard tragedy of the narrative.

“The room lay still in dusty glare,

Having no sound through it

Except the chirp of a caged bird

That came and ceased: and if she stirred,

Amelotte’s raiment could be heard.

“Although the lattice had dropped loose,

There was no wind; the heat

Being so at rest that Amelotte

Heard far beneath the plunge and float

Of a hound swimming in the moat.

“Some minutes since, two rooks had toiled

Home to the nests that crowned

Ancestral ash-trees. Through the glare

Beating again, they seemed to tear

With that thick caw the woof o’ the air.”

Such fragments afford the merest glimpses of the background, the pure,

delicate, ultra-refined, and yet intensely naturalistic setting of the

poem.

And indeed it is this highest refinement of naturalism, this perfect

idealization of realities, this raising of the simplest and commonest

accessories of life into universal beauty and significance, that remains

Rossetti’s inmost, utmost charm. This it is that sends us back, again

and again, from all the splendours of his maturity, from the vivid

glories of the ballads and the long-drawn passion of the sonnets, to the

primal sweetness and utter simplicity of “The Blessed Damozel;” the

easiest to love, the hardest to place in a just order, amid all that

came from the hand and heart of Rossetti.

Written in his nineteenth year (though re-touched with important

improvements afterwards), while the ballads above referred to were the

work of his maturity,—and as remote from them in spirit as in date, the

poem is unique among unique poetry. “The Blessed Damozel” is no product

of precocity. It has not the laboured archaism, the studied originality,

which mark most of the travel-poems of 1849 (“Paris and Belgium,”

“Antwerp and Bruges,” etc.). Superb as are the sonnets of that early

period—such noble utterances as “The Staircase of Notre Dame,” “Place de

la Bastille,” and “The Refusal of Aid between Nations” remaining

unsurpassed by anything in the “House of Life” series—the irregular

lyrics and blank-verse chronicles of those journeys are apt to keep us

in mind of those etymological researches at the British Museum by which

Rossetti is said to have stored his vocabulary with the purest Saxon,

preparatory to ballad-work. “The Blessed Damozel,” on the contrary, is

the most spontaneous and convincing of all his shorter poems. It seems

to have sprung straight from the heart of the boy-poet in a sort of

prophetic rapture, ere he knew the sorrow which he sang, and which his

song should ease, as the most perfect art can sometimes ease, in other

souls, for generations to come. Its strength lies in the very acme of

tenderness; its source in the purest strain of common human feeling—the

passionate, insatiable craving of the faithful heart for the continuity

of life and love beyond the tomb, and the deep sense of the poverty of

celestial compromises to satisfy the mourner on either side of the gulf

that Death has set between. Here again is the true romantic note—the

insistence on the joy and glory of the physical world, the delight in

the earthly manifestations of affection, and the awed, plaintive

conflict of impatience with resignation under the mystery of parting and

transition to an unknown state. It is the same thought which an American

poet has expressed in “Homesick in Heaven,”—the thought that the beloved

departed must in some way share the sorrow of separation, and await the

last reunion with scarcely less longing than theirs whom they have left

behind. “The Blessed Damozel” is one whom Death has thus removed from

her lover’s side, and she is pictured leaning out of Heaven, watching

with tears and prayers for some sign of his coming. It is the lover

himself who sees her thus, as in a dream, and tells us how,—

“She bowed herself, and stooped

Out of the circling charm,

Until her bosom must have made

The bar she leaned on warm,”

and how, on the mystic borderland between earth and heaven,—

“The souls mounting up to God

Went by her like thin flames.”

The glories of the upper air have no charm for her until he shares them.

Still gazing downward from “the ramparts of God’s house,” she sees—

“The tides of day and night

With flame and darkness ridge

The void, as low as where this earth

Spins like a fretful midge;”

she knows the angels who “sit circlewise”—

“To fashion the birth-robes for them

Who are just born, being dead!”

Her one prayer is for the old companionship, the old, simple, earthly

happiness,—

“Only to live as once on earth

With Love,—only to be,

As then awhile, for ever now,

Together, I and he.”

It was not until many years later that “The Blessed Damozel” afforded

the subject of the picture by which Rossetti is most popularly and

superficially known to the outer world. It was his habit to inscribe his

pictures with some original verse, generally in sonnet form; and some of

his best descriptive sonnets, such as “Pandora,” “Fiametta,” “Found,”

“Astarte Syriaca,” and “Mary Magdalene,” had such an origin. “The

Blessed Damozel” is said to be only instance of a picture executed after

instead of before the correlative poem.

Two important works stand yet apart, alike from what we have classed as

introspective and personal poetry, and from the splendid ballads in

which consists Rossetti’s most immortal contribution to English

literature. “Jenny” and “A Last Confession” exemplify his use of the

dramatic monologue, and alone among his compositions bear in a marked

degree the influence of Browning. Especially is this influence notable

in “A Last Confession.” The Italy of this wonderful fragment—placed by

critics of authority in the front rank of Rossetti’s work—is, _par

excellence_, Browning’s Italy, with all the intense humanness and

distinction of character which dominates its furies and its loves, with

all the Saxon intellect and reason stamped into and burning through the

irresponsible passion of the South. Just as in his ballads and sonnets

Rossetti grafted the clean-cut Saxon diction on to the long and

languorous habit of the Latin tongue, so in “A Last Confession” does he

graft vivid thought and piercing argument upon the deep pathos and

terror of the theme. It is a death-bed story told in a priest’s ear; a

story of passion and crime, and of a girl’s shallow laugh that drove her

lover to kill her in a frenzy of despair. For he remembered how, awhile

before,—

... “A brown-shouldered harlot leaned

Half through a tavern window thick with wine.

Some man had come behind her in the room

And caught her by the arms, and she had turned

With that coarse empty laugh on him....

... And three hours afterwards,

When she that I had run all risks to meet

Laughed as I told you, my life burned to death

Within me, for I thought it like the laugh

Heard at the fair....

And all she might have changed to, or might change to,

Seemed in that laugh.”

Somewhat akin in spirit (though less dramatic in treatment), in that it

deals with the problem of sexual love in its darkest form, is the rhymed

monologue entitled “Jenny;” and put into the mouth of one who has

followed, half in pity, half in curiosity, a beautiful courtesan to her

home, and sits with her in the luxurious chamber which is the purchase

of her shame. The poem is to some extent in obvious relation to

Rossetti’s long contemplated but never completed picture, “Found;” but

the latter shows the end of poor Jenny in after years,—

“When, wealth and health slipped past, you stare

Along the streets alone, and there,

Round the long park, across the bridge,

The cold lamps at the pavement’s edge,

Wind on together and apart,

A fiery serpent for your heart,”—

whereas her visitor in the poem finds her in all her prime and pride,

and asks,—

“What has man done here? How atone

Great God, for this which man has done?

. . . . . .

But if, as blindfold fates are tossed

Through some one man this life be lost,

Shall soul not somehow pay for soul?”

“Jenny,” perhaps, being cast in a more meditative form, lacks the

poignancy and fervour of the utterance which comes, in “A Last

Confession,” from the lips of the sinner himself instead of from the

spectator merely, but it surpasses all contemporary studies of its kind

in its bold and masterly handling of a difficult theme. Both, however,

are distinct from the lyric poems in that their abruptness of movement

and irregularity of structure are the abruptness and irregularity of

quick dramatic thought, impatient of metrical elaboration, surcharging

the poetic vehicle with subject matter; an effect which must not be

confused with the ruggedness of the true ballad-form, whose broken music

haunts the ear by its very waywardness and variety of rhythm, and gains

its end by a studied artlessness the more exquisite for its apparent

unconstraint. Nor is the effect of Rossetti’s universal preference for

assonance over rhyme—a special characteristic of romantic poetry—

identical in the ballads, sonnets and monologues just quoted. In the

sonnets it relieves the rigid tension of the rhyme-system with an

overtone of delicate caprice. In “Jenny” and “A Last Confession” it

heightens the suggestion of impulse, and even haste of thought and

emotion outrunning the metrical order which it chose. In the ballads, it

is the result of the finest workmanship, not of accident or pressure of

thought upon speech; it is the rich inlaying of the most highly-wrought

woof of imaginative language with the brilliance of a perpetual

surprise.

Rossetti is too near to us for a final estimate of his place among the

century’s poets. Enough has been said to illustrate the range and

consistency of his art, as a whole, and the intimate relation of his

poetry to his painting. The dominant æsthetic motives are the same in

“Dante’s Dream” and “The House of Life,” in “Dis Manibus” and “The

King’s Tragedy,” in “Beata Beatrix” and “The Blessed Damozel.” He was

the prophet of a natural idealism, based upon the frank acceptance and

pursuit of the highest earthly good, subject only and absolutely to

moral and spiritual law. He stood apart, as we have seen, from the

intellectual struggles of his day. Philosophical controversies seldom

troubled him. To theological speculation and historical discovery he was

alike indifferent. But his isolation, his specialism even, are but

evidences of the intensity of the new life to which he was awakened, and

the reality of the visions which he saw. He sets before us in all its

significance the problem of the dual possibilities of womanhood, by the

simple, irresistible, pictorial statement of the contrast between the

shameful actuality of “Found” and the noble ideal of “Sibylla Palmifera”

and “Monna Vanna.” His lamentation for the manhood of his age is that,—

... “Man is parcelled out in men

To-day; because, for any wrongful blow,

No man not stricken asks, ‘I would be told

Why thou dost strike’; but his heart whispers then,

‘_He is he, I am I._’”

Such words are but the reiteration of that moral collectivism, that

principle that “soul must somehow pay for soul,” which Rossetti

maintains unbrokenly as an assumption needing neither emphasis nor

reserve. The problem which his work leaves to the next generation lies

in the application of that principle to social and national ideals. The

task of the twentieth century will be to do for society what Rossetti

has done for art,—to restore to it the dignity and glory of a free life,

embracing all that nature has to give, under the dominion of associated

reason, and conscience, and will. And when Rossetti’s genius shall have

fulfilled its share in that unification of all knowledge to which the

paths of science and poetry, art and scholarship, tend alike in the

progress of time, England and Italy may join in worthier recognition of

his life-work, whose face was set towards the final triumph of humanity—

the reconciliation of the physical with the spiritual world.

-----

Footnote 15:

F.W.H. Myers, “Essays: Modern.”

THE END.

INDEX.

Academy, The Royal, 33, 74-75, 80-81, 108, 122, 126-128, 161.

Academy Schools, 23, 27-31.

Academicians of last generation, 33.

“Adam and Eve,” 34.

“Alastor,” 108.

Albert Gallery, Edinburgh, 118.

Allingham, William, 136.

“Anniversary of the Death of Beatrice,” 118, 255.

“Annunciation, The,” 204-205.

Anthony, Mark, 87, 128-129.

“April Love,” 125.

“Art and Poetry,” 72.

“Arthur conveyed to Avalon,” 143.

Art Union, The, 129.

Arundel Club, The, 117.

“Astarte Syriaca,” or “Venus Astarte,” 59, 184-185, 189.

“Aurelia, or Fazio’s Mistress,” 117, 157.

Australia, 108.

“Autumn Leaves,” 121, 127, 229.

“Awakening Conscience, The,” 149, 224, 236, 239.

“Ballads and Sonnets,” 186, 298.

Banks, Mrs., 168.

Barbizon School, 134.

Baring, Miss, 168.

Bateman, E.L., 109.

“Beata Beatrix,” 4, 91, 121, 157, 159, 161-162, 224, 252-253.

“Beatrice,” 129.

Behnes, 108.

“Bello Mano, La,” 181.

“Beloved, The,” or “The Bride,” 91, 157.

“Benedick and Beatrice,” 106.

Beryl Songs, 298.

“Bethlehem Gate,” 116, 160, 217.

Birchington, 190-192.

Birmingham Art Gallery, 153, 162.

“Black Brunswicker, The,” 127, 148, 243-244.

Blake, 2, 137, 267.

“Blessed Damozel, The,” 4, 162, 175-176, 180, 185, 217, 257, 263, 287,

290, 301-304.

“Blind Girl, The,” 121-122, 228-229.

“Blue Bower, The,” 91, 117, 157.

“Blue Closet, The,” 117-118.

“Boat of Love, The,” 180, 251.

“Bocca Baciata,” 104, 117, 157.

“Body of Harold, The,” 34.

Bognor, 181-182.

Botticelli, 48, 50.

“Bower Garden, The,” 117.

“Bower Maiden, The,” 172, 179.

Boyce, W.P., 129.

Boyd, Miss Alice, 168, 171.

Brett, Mr. John, 118, 129.

“Briar Rose, The,” 232.

“Bride’s Prelude, The,” 263, 286, 299-301.

British Institution, 108.

Brotherhood, The Pre-Raphaelite, formed, 62-69;

dispersed, 107, 119.

Brown, Ford Madox, 32-35, 64, 71, 73, 87, 118, 138, 151-155, 161-162,

175, 178, 193, 219;

some characteristics of, 34, 64, 107, 151-155, 219, 226;

portrait of, 110.

Browning, Robert, 85, 94-96, 104, 165-166, 199;

portraits of, 109, 117.

“Burd, Helen,” 127.

Burlington Club, 204.

Burne-Jones, E., 4, 140-143, 214;

some characteristics of, 205, 219-221, 224, 232, 246-248.

Burne-Jones, Mrs., 168.

Burton, W.S., 129, 248.

Byron, 268.

Caine, Mr. Hall, 188-189, 190, 192.

Campbell, James, 129.

“Caractacus,” 35.

“Carlisle Tower,” 116.

Carlyle, Thomas, 85, 154;

portrait of, 108.

Carrick, J.M., 129.

Cary’s Academy, 23, 30.

“Cassandra,” 189.

Cassavetti, the Misses, 168.

“Chapel before the Lists, The,” 116.

“Charity Boy’s Début, The,” 63.

Chatham Place, 94, 159, 163.

Chatterton, 3, 267, 280.

“Chaucer at the Court of Edward III.,” 35, 153.

Chelsea, 163, 172, 180, 193.

Christchurch, Albany Street, 169.

Christianity in English Art, 5, 76-77, 196-221.

Christianity in Italian Art, 40-43, 46-48, 50-52.

“Christian Priests Escaping,” or, “The Christian Missionary,” 76, 146.

“Christ in the House of His Parents,” 75-78, 126, 205-208.

“Christ in the Temple,” 4, 150, 218.

“Christmas Carol, A,” 118.

“Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem,” 129.

Cimabue, 39, 47, 57.

Classicism, characteristics of, 9-12, 45, 49-50.

Classicism of the Eighteenth Century, 9-10.

Classicism under the Puritans, 11.

“Claudio and Isabella,” 149, 224, 244, 246.

Clifton, J.T., 61.

Coleridge, 267.

Collins, Charles, 118, 126.

Collins, William, 126.

Collinson, James, 4, 63, 74, 93, 99, 126.

Combe, Mr. Thomas, and Mrs., 146.

Constable, 2, 3.

“Convent Thoughts,” 126.

“Cordelia’s Portion,” 153.

Cornelius, 134.

Coronio, Mrs., 168.

“Cottager’s Return, The,” 125.

Cox, David, 131.

“Cromwell Dictating,” 155.

“Cromwell on his Farm,” 155.

“Crucifixion, The,” 116, 215.

Cumberland, 188-189.

Cuyp, 132.

Cyclographic Society, 60-61.

“Cymon and Iphigenia,” 62.

Dalrymple, Mrs., 168.

“Damozel, The Blessed,” 4, 162, 175-176, 180, 185, 217, 257, 263, 287,

290, 301-304.

“Damozel of the Sanct Grael, The,” 116, 181.

Danby, 132.

“Dante at Verona,” 215, 262, 284-285.

Dante, influence of, 22, 98;

illustrations of, 99, 104-105, 116-118, 129, 180, 190, 249-258, 269.

“Dante’s Dream,” 4, 116, 118, 138, 162, 168, 173, 188, 190, 253-255.

“Day and Night Songs,” 136.

“Day-dream, The,” 139, 180-181, 186-187.

Davis, William, 118, 129.

“Death of Boadicea,” 108.

“Death of Breuse sans Pitié, The,” 116.

“Death of Chatterton, The,” 128.

“Death of Lady Macbeth, The,” 236.

“Death of Sir Tristram, The,” 154.

Dennis, William, 61.

Deverell, Walter, 5, 61, 99, 119.

“Devout Childhood of St. Elizabeth, The,” 126.

“Dis Manibus,” or “The Roman Widow,” 167, 175, 180.

“Donna della Finestra, La,” or “Our Lady of Pity,” 181, 224, 256-258.

Döpplegänger Legends, The, 106, 225.

“Down Stream,” 172.

“Dream of Sardanapalus, The,” 154.

Dunn, Mr. H.T., 170.

Dürer, Albrecht, 51, 82.

Dutch School, 39.

“Ecce Ancilla Domini,” 4, 64, 78-79, 92, 203.

“Edward Grey,” 139.

“Eleanor Sucking the Poison,” 108.

“Elijah and the Widow’s Son,” 155.

Eliot, George, 196-199.

Elnore, 134.

“Enemy Sowing Tares, The,” 122, 147.

English Art in 1850, 2, 3.

“Entombment, The,” 4, 155, 219.

“Eros and Euphrosyne,” 108.

“Eve of St. Agnes, The,” 4, 121-122, 125, 147, 248-249.

Exhibitions, Pre-Raphaelite, 67, 118.

Expression in Art, 25-26.

“Fair Rosamund,” 118.

“Farmer’s Daughter, The,” 118.

“Fazio’s Mistress,” 117, 157.

“Feeding the Hungry,” 108.

“Ferdinand Lured by Ariel,” 75-78, 91.

“Fiametta,” 168.

“Fiametta, A Vision of,” 119, 181, 185.

Fine Art Society, The, 118.

“Fleshly School of Poetry, The,” 176.

“Flight of Madeline and Porphyro,” 62, 248.

Foreign Schools, 134.

Forsyth, Rev. P.F., 199, 216, 241.

“Found,” 4, 107, 236-237, 306.

Frescoes at Manchester, 155;

at Oxford, 142-146;

at Westminster Hall, 33-35, 108, 128, 151.

Fra Angelico, 5, 48.

“Fra Angelico Painting,” 117.

Fra Bartolomeo, 113.

Fra Lippo Lippi, 48.

“Fra Pace,” 117.

“Francesca da Rimini,” 215, 234-235.

“Galahad, Sir,” 116, 138, 143, 232.

“Gate of Memory, The,” 107, 236-238.

“George, St., A Wedding of,” 118.

“George, St., and Princess Sabra,” 160, 245.

“Germ, The,” 69-74, 95.

Ghiberti, 57.

“Ghirlandata, La,” 91, 158, 167, 180.

Giorgione, 49.

“Giorgione Painting,” 117.

Giotto, 39, 48, 57, 113.

“Giotto Painting,” 251.

“Girlhood of Mary Virgin, The,” 1, 4, 55, 66-67, 92, 202, 225.

Glasgow Institute of Fine Arts, 118.

“Goblin Market,” 139.

Goodall, 134.

Gosse, Mr. Edmund, 166.

Graham, Mr. William, 175.

Gray, Miss Euphemia Chalmers, 148.

Green, N.E., 61.

Guildhall Loan Exhibition, 162.

Hake, Dr. Gordon, 175, 178-179, 181;

portrait of, 109.

Hake, Mr. George, 175, 178;

portrait of, 110.

Halliday, M.F., 129.

Hancock, John, 61, 129.

“Hand and Soul,” 71-72.

Hannay, James Lennox, 79.

“Hark!” 30.

Harris, Dr., 190, 192.

Haydon, 90.

“Heart of the Night, The,” 160, 231.

Heaton, Mrs. Aldham, 167.

Heaton, Miss, 168.

Heine, 11, 14, 117, 277.

Hellenism in Italy, 42-49.

Herbert, Miss, 103, 167.

“Hesterna Rosa,” 107, 118, 236-238.

“Hireling Shepherd, The,” 149.

Hogarth Club, 117.

“House of Life, The,” 161, 262-282.

Howell, Mrs., 168.

“How They Met Themselves,” 106, 224-226.

“Hugenot, A,” 4, 121, 127, 147, 243, 246.

Hughes, Arthur, 4, 118, 125, 136-137, 142-143, 204-205, 249.

Hunt, William Holman, 29-31, 35-36, 63-67, 86-87, 92, 95, 100, 101,

109, 118-119, 122, 137, 146, 148-150;

characteristics of, 6, 15, 86, 107, 138, 208-213, 215-217, 224, 230,

236, 239, 244, 246, 248;

portrait of, 109.

“Il Ramoscello,” 157.

Inchbold, 118.

“Infant Christ Adored, The,” 116, 156, 218.

“Infants’ Repast, The,” 34.

“Isabella,” 55, 60, 65, 67, 229.

“Isabella and the Pot of Basil,” 150.

“Isumbras at the Ford, Sir,” 148, 245-246.

Italian Pre-Raphaelites, The, 39-57, 113.

“Jenny,” 304-307.

“Jesus Washes Peter’s Feet,” 155.

“Joan of Arc,” 191, 245.

Johnson, Dr., and the Methodist Ladies, 159.

“Joli Cœur,” 119.

“Justice,” 34.

“Kate the Queen,” 95.

Keats, influence of, 58, 267, 277;

subjects from, 60-62, 65, 117, 229, 248-249.

Keene, J.B., 61.

Kelmscott, 172, 178.

Kernahan, Mr. Coulson, 174.

“King Arthur Receiving Excalibur,” 143.

“King Arthur’s Tomb,” 116, 233.

Kingdon, Miss, 168.

“King René’s Honeymoon,” 154.

Kingsley, Charles, 141.

“King’s Tragedy, The,” 8, 186, 263, 286, 289-292.

Knewstub, Mr., 170.

“Laboratory, The,” 105, 238.

“Lady Lilith,” 157, 214.

“Lady of Good Children, Our,” 34, 155.

“Lady of Pity, Our,” 181, 224, 256-258.

“Lady of Shalott, The,” 138.

“La Pia,” 157, 159.

“La Ricordanza” (“Mnemosyne, or the Lamp of Memory”), 91, 175, 180.

“Last Confession, A,” 304-307.

“Last Day in the Old Home, The,” 127.

“Last of England, The,” 4, 153.

“Launcelot Escaping,” 116.

“Launcelot, Sir, before the Shrine,” 143, 233.

Lawrence, 2, 122.

Lear, Edward, 129.

Leathart, Mrs., 168.

Leighton, Sir F., 134.

Leonardo, 49, 51, 121, 132.

Leopardi, 277.

Leyland, Mr. F.R., 163, 175, 190;

portrait of, 109.

Lewes, J.F., 129.

“Light of the World, The,” 4, 146, 211-213.

Linnell, 132.

Liverpool Academy, The, 87-88, 118.

Liverpool, Walker Art Gallery, 150, 154, 174, 190.

Llandaff Cathedral, Triptych for, 104, 116, 156, 218.

“Loving Cup, The,” 157.

“Lucretia Borgia,” 106, 117-118, 159.

“Luke the Painter, St.,” 117.

Lushington, Mr. Godfrey, 140.

Lushington, Mr. Vernon, 141.

Lushington, Mrs., 168.

Lyell, Mr. Charles, 109.

“Lyra Innocentium,” 126.

“Maids of Elfinmere,” 137.

Manchester, Frescoes at, 155.

“Mariana,” 137.

“Mariana in the South,” 137.

“Mariana of the Moated Grange,” 80-82, 124, 231.

“Mariana” (Shakespeare’s), 157.

Marshall, Dr. John, 162, 190.

Marston, Philip Bourke, 166, 192, 269, 277.

Martineau, R.B., 127.

Martin’s, St., Scarborough, 169.

“Mary in the House of John,” 215.

“Mary Magdalene at the Door,” 118, 213-215.

Masaccio, 57.

Massey, Mr. Gerald, 131.

“Matilda Gathering Herbs,” 215.

Maurice, Frederick Denison, 141, 199;

portrait of, 154.

“May in the Regent’s Park,” 126.

“May Morning on Magdalen Tower,” 150.

“Melancholia,” 51.

Memmi, Simon, 113.

“Merciful Knight, The,” 246.

Meredith, Mr. George, 164-166.

“Merlin Lured into the Pit,” 143.

Michaelangelo, 45, 49, 121, 132, 165, 261, 275.

“Michael Scott’s Wooing,” 106, 180, 224-226.

Millais, Sir John Everett, 28-31, 61, 63, 65, 74-78, 86-87, 92, 100,

109, 118-120, 136-139, 146-148;

change of style, 122-124, 133;

some characteristics of, 6, 15, 17, 65, 86, 106, 113, 120, 137, 201,

206-208;

on colour, 88-89;

portrait of, 109.

“Mirror of Venus, The,” 129.

“Mnemosyne, or the Lamp of Memory,” 91, 175, 180.

Models, 64-67, 79-80, 100-103, 105, 110, 126-127, 145, 154, 167, 186,

214.

“Modern Painters,” 36-39, 83.

“Monna Pomona,” 160.

“Monna Rosa,” 117-163.

“Monna Vanna,” 157.

Monro, Alexander, 105, 142-143.

“Morning Music,” 105.

Morris, William, 140-145, 165, 168, 172, 178, 274-275.

Morris, Mrs. William, 145, 168, 186.

Morris, Miss May, 168.

Morten, Thomas, 129.

Mount Temple, Lord and Lady, 161, 168, 175, 185.

Moxon’s “Tennyson,” 137.

Murillo, 132.

Museum, South Kensington, 102.

Myers, Mr. T.W.H., 7, 273.

National Gallery, The, 79, 159.

“Nativity, The,” 205.

Nature as a Background, 15-16.

“Nature’s Mirror,” 129.

“New Day, The,” 179.

Nicholson, P.W., 200.

“Nimuë Brings Sir Peleus,” 143.

“Nineveh,” 140.

“Old Churchyard, The,” 129.

“Ophelia,” 4, 121-122, 147, 227, 229.

Orchard, John, 73.

“Order of Release, The,” 121, 147.

“Oriana,” 138.

“Orlando and Adam,” 106.

“Our Lady of Good Children,” 34, 155.

“Our Lady of Pity,” 181, 224, 256-258.

Outlines, Rossetti’s, 24.

Overbeck, 134.

Oxford, 77, 140-141, 145;

frescoes at, 142-146.

“Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, The,” 140.

Painters of the Last Generation, 33.

“Palace of Art, The,” 138.

“Palomides’s Jealousy, Sir,” 143.

“Pandora,” 59, 118, 157, 162, 241-242.

“Paolo and Francesca,” 215, 234-235.

“Parable of Love, A,” 105.

“Parable of the Vineyard, The,” 169.

“Parisina and Manfred,” 154.

“Passover in the Holy Family, The,” 116, 192, 205-206.

Patmore, Mr. Coventry, 71, 73, 80.

Paton, Sir Noel, 129, 174.

Payne, John, 166.

Penkill, 171.

Pessimism in Art, 13-16.

Poetry, Rossetti’s, 23, 68, 71-73, 140, 161, 176-177, 179, 259-309.

“Poetry, Art and,” 72.

Polidori, Gaetano, 20.

Polidori, Miss Margaret, 169.

Pollen, J. Hungerford, 142-143.

Portraits, Pre-Raphaelite, 66, 102, 108-114, 117, 145-146, 148, 154,

161, 168, 186, 214.

“Portrait, The,” 263, 283.

Pre-Raphaelite Exhibitions, 67, 118.

Pre-Raphaelitism, Characteristics of, 5-6, 9, 12-17, 58, 63-64, 69, 80,

84-86, 122, 124, 130, 133-135, 198-201.

“Pretty Baa-Lambs,” 152.

Prices of Pictures, 67, 150, 190.

“Prince’s Progress, The,” 140.

Prinsep, Mr. Val, 129, 142-143, 173.

“Proscribed Royalist, The,” 126, 147, 247.

“Proserpine,” 118-119, 157, 180, 191, 241.

“Protestant Lady, The,” 127.

“Psyche,” 236, 239-40.

“Puck,” 108.

“Queen’s Page, The,” 117.

“Question, The,” or “The Sphinx,” 181, 191.

“Rachel and Leah,” 116.

“Rainbow, The,” 108.

“Rainbow, The Spirit of The,” 181.

“Ramoscello, Il,” 157.

“Random Shot, The,” or “L’Enfant du Regiment,” 148.

Raphael, 6, 49, 52-54, 83, 132.

“Reaper and the Flowers, The,” 125.

Redgrave, 24.

“Regina Cordium,” 160, 167.

Renaissance in Italy, The, 40-55, 121.

“Renunciation of St. Elizabeth, The,” 93.

Replicas, 162.

“Rescue, The,” 148, 245.

“Retro me, Sathana,” 66.

“Return of the Dove, The,” 80.

Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 89-90.

“Rienzi swearing Revenge,” 66-67.

Roehampton, 178.

“Roman Widow, The” (“Dis Manibus”), 167, 175, 180.

Romance, Characteristics of, 12-16, 45-46, 49-50, 183-184.

“Romeo and Juliet,” 4, 154, 226.

“Rosa Triplex,” 168.

“Rose Garden, The,” 160.

“Rose Mary,” 179, 263, 286, 290, 296-299.

Rossetti, Christina, 22, 71, 139, 275.

Rossetti, Gabriel Charles Dante, commonly called Dante Gabriel,

Rossetti, 7, 19-28, 30-31, 35, 58-68, 90, 92-107, 109, 115, 136-140,

141-143, 156-196;

some characteristics of, 3, 5-8, 15, 24, 28, 58, 86, 96-98, 106-107,

121, 176, 194-195, 201-206, 213-218, 223-226, 230-238, 241-242,

245, 250-258, 259-309;

portraits of, 109, 192-193;

Rossetti’s Outlines, 24;

Colour, 91, 99.

Rossetti, Gabriele, 20.

Rossetti, William Michael, 63, 71, 73, 109, 120, 164;

portrait of, 109.

Royal Academy, 33, 74-75, 80-81, 108, 122, 126-128, 161.

Royal Scottish Academy, 118.

Rubens, 132.

Ruskin, John, 4, 36-39, 56-57, 85-87, 99, 113-115, 127, 141, 150, 200,

229;

portraits of, 109, 147;

letters to the “Times,” 80-84.

Russell Place Exhibition, 118.

“Sancta Lilias,” 181.

“Saint Agnes of Intercession,” 72.

“Saint George, A Wedding of,” 118.

“Saint George and Princess Sabra,” 160, 245.

“Saint Luke the Painter,” 117.

“Salutation of Beatrice, The,” 189-190, 250-251.

Sandys, Mr. Frederick, 128-129, 175.

Sarrazin, M. Gabrièl, 233.

Sass’s Academy, 28.

“Scapegoat, The,” 4, 150, 210-211.

Scott, Mr. W. Bell, 178.

“Sea-Spell, The,” 167, 175, 181.

Seddon, Mr. J.P., 118, 129, 190, 193.

“Sermon on the Plain, The,” 169.

Sevenoaks, 95.

“Seward, John,” 73.

“Shadow of Death, The,” 150, 205, 208-211.

Sharp, Mr. William, 190, 192.

Shelley, 267-268, 277.

Shields, Mr. Frederick, 129, 175, 187, 190, 192-193.

“Sibylla Palmifera,” 157, 167, 214.

Siddal, Miss (Mrs. D.G. Rossetti), 99-103, 159-161;

portraits of, 102, 117, 159-161.

“Sir Galahad,” 116, 138, 143, 232.

“Sir Isumbras at the Ford,” 148, 245-246.

“Sir Palomides’s Jealousy,” 143.

“Sir Patrick Spens,” 101.

“Sister Helen,” 263, 286, 290, 293-295.

Smith, Bernhard, 108.

Sonnets, Rossetti’s, 23, 161, 170, 179, 214, 237, 242, 269-282, 304.

South Kensington Museum, 102.

Spartali, Miss (Mrs. Stillman), 167.

Specialism in Art, 6-8.

“Sphinx, The,” or “The Question,” 181, 191.

“Spirit of the Rainbow, The,” 181.

“Spring,” 118.

“Staff and Scrip, The,” 140, 287.

Stained Glass, Designs for, 168-169.

Stanhope, Mr. Spencer, 129, 142.

“Stealthy School of Criticism, The,” 177.

Stephens, Mr. F.G., 61, 63, 73, 75, 88, 95, 109, 120;

portrait of, 109.

Stillman, Mr. W.J., 110.

Stillman, Mrs. (Miss Spartali), 167.

Stobhall, 162, 178.

Stone, 134.

“Strayed Sheep, The, or Our English Coasts,” 149.

“Stream’s Secret, The,” 263, 283.

Strudwick, Mr. J.M., 5, 230.

Sumner, Mrs., 175.

“Sun may Shine, The,” 105.

“Surgeon’s Daughter, The,” 127.

Swinburne, A.C., 145, 164, 166, 177, 242, 266, 275;

portraits of, 109, 117.

“Taurello’s First Sight of Fortune,” 105.

Tebbs, Mrs. Virtue, 168.

Technique, Imperfect, 25, 39.

Tennyson, 85, 94-95, 104, 165-166, 199;

illustrations of, 116, 137-139, 142-143, 154, 160, 230-234;

portraits of, 108-109, 117, 137.

Thomas, Mr. Cave, 69, 128.

Thomson, James, 269, 277.

“Tibullus’s Return to Delia,” 118.

“Times,” Ruskin’s letters to the, 80-84.

Tirebuck, William, 223.

“Titania,” 108.

Titian, 2, 5, 49.

“Too Late,” 127.

“Transfiguration, The,” 155.

“Tree of Life, The,” 220.

“Tristram and Iseult,” 116, 160.

“Triumph of the Innocents, The,” 150, 217.

“Tune of the Seven Towers, The,” 116.

Tupper, Mr. J.L., 71-72.

Turner, 2, 16.

“Two Mothers,” 119.

“Under the Microscope,” 177.

“Vale of Rest, The,” 16, 129, 148, 228-229.

“Valentine and Sylvia,” 79-80, 87-101.

Venables, 146.

“Venetian Pastoral, A,” 68.

Venetian School, 49-50.

“Venus Astarte,” or “Astarte Syriaca,” 59, 184-185, 189.

“Venus Verticordia,” 157.

“Veronica Veronese,” 91, 167, 180.

Vinter, Mr. J.A., 23-24, 31, 61.

“Viola,” 100-101.

“Vision of Fiametta, A,” 119.

“Waiting,” 154.

Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, The, 150, 154, 174, 190.

Walker, Frederick, 16.

Walker, Sir A.B., 88.

Wallis, Henry, 4, 128.

“Washing Hands,” 118, 160.

“Water Willow,” 119.

Watkins, F., 61.

Watson, J.D., 129.

Watts, Mr. G.F., 4, 34, 113, 151, 227, 235-236, 239-240.

Watts, Mr. Theodore, 101, 174, 181, 185, 190, 192, 195;

portrait of, 109.

“Wedding of St. George, A,” 118.

Wells, Mrs. W.T., 168.

“White Ship, The,” 182, 263, 286, 288-290.

“Wicked Husbandmen, The,” 169.

“Wiclif Reading,” 34, 152.

“Widow’s Mite, The,” 35.

Wilding, Miss, 167.

Wilkie, 90.

Williams, Miss, 168.

Windus, W.L., 118, 127, 248.

“Woodman’s Daughter, The,” 80, 228-229.

Woodward, Mr., 142.

Woolner, Thomas, 63, 71, 105, 108-109, 129, 137, 153.

Wordsworth, 279, 183.

“Work,” 154.

Working Men’s College, The, 141.

Wyatt, Mr. James, 145.

[Illustration]

CHISWICK PRESS:—C. WHITTINGHAM AND CO., TOOKS COURT,

CHANCERY LANE.

Footnotes

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Transcriber’s Note

Errors in the text have been corrected where they can be reasonably

attributed to the printer or editor, or where the same word appears as

expected elsewhere. Inconsistencies in punctuation, particularly in the

Index, have been resolved.

The details of each correction are noted below.

p. xi “Bethlehem Gate”[—] Added.

p. 4 Ruskin: “I believe [Rosetti’s] _Sic._

p. 22 its poet[r]y, its self-devotion Added.

p. 30 Mill[ia/ai]s’s Transposed.

p. 67 duly signed and [monogramed] _Sic._

p. 71 a poem called “The Seasons,” Mr[.] Added.

Tupper

p. 73 [“]Ruggiero and Angelica” Added.

p. 74 _apologia_ for the Pre-Rapha[e]lite Added.

Brotherhood

p. 74 heaped upon the Pre-R[e/a]phaelites Corrected.

p. 79 seen only in the o[b]scure little Added.

Portland Gallery

p. 84 is to [to] have a principal Removed.

p. 131 ‘You see purple,’ ‘You see red,’ [‘]You Added.

see yellow.’

p. 224 marked degree perhaps tha[t/n] any other Corrected.

drawings

p. 239 ever-significant story of “Psyche” Added.

suggest[s] the same