I
Rossetti in one of his letters numbers his favourite colours in the order
of his favour, and throughout his work one feels that he loved form and
colour for themselves and apart from what they represent. One feels
sometimes that he desired a world of essences, of unmixed powers, of
impossible purities. It is as though the last judgment had already begun
in his mind and that the essences and powers, which the divine hand had
mixed into one another to make the loam of life, fell asunder at his
touch. If he painted a flame or a blue distance, he painted as though he
had seen the flame out of whose heart all flames had been taken, or the
blue of the abyss that was before all life; and if he painted a woman's
face he painted it in some moment of intensity when the ecstasy of the
lover and of the saint are alike, and desire becomes wisdom without
ceasing to be desire. He listens to the cry of the flesh till it becomes
proud and passes beyond the world where some immense desire that the
intellect cannot understand mixes with the desire of a body's warmth and
softness. His genius like Shelley's can hardly stir but to the rejection
of nature, whose delight is profusion, but never intensity, and like
Shelley's it follows the Star of the Magi, the Morning and Evening Star,
the mother of impossible hope, although it follows through deep woods,
where the Star glimmers among dew-drenched boughs and not through 'a
wind-swept valley of the Apennine.' Men like him cannot be happy as we
understand happiness, for to be happy one must delight like nature in mere
profusion, in mere abundance, in making and doing things, and if one sets
an image of the perfect before one it must be the image that draws her
perpetually, the image of a perfect fulness of natural life, of an Earthly
Paradise. One's emotion must never break the bonds of life, one's hands
must never labour to loosen the silver cord, one's ears must never strain
to catch the sound of Michael's trumpet. That is to say, one must not be
among those that would have prayed in old times in some chapel of the
Star, but among those who would have prayed under the shadow of the Green
Tree, and on the wet stones of the Well, among the worshippers of natural
abundance.