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Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-82), christened Charles Gabriel Dante, was the eldest son and second child of Gabriele Rossetti, Italian scholar and patriot, who spent the last thirty years of his life in exile in London, and of Frances Polidori, the sister of Lord Byron's friend. blood Rossetti was three-fourths Italian, the English strain coming through his mother's mother, whose maiden name was Pierce. He was born in London, and educated at King's College School, early took to painting, and in 1846 entered the antique school of the Royal Academy, where he made the acquaintance of William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais. By his personal magnetism and his enthusiasm for the conversion of others to his own ideas, Rossetti was a natural leader of men; and he has the best title to be regarded as the founder of the PreRaphaelite Brotherhood, a movement to do away in painting with the grandiose conceptions and fluent technique of the Academies of Art, and to recapture something of the religious intensity and humble, painstaking

her, in her coffin. Some seven years later he yielded to the persuasions of his friends and permitted them to be disinterred. The volume entitled Poems was published in 1870, and became the centre of fierce controversy. In 'The Fleshly School of Poetry,' an article contributed to the Contemporary Review (October 1871) over the signature 'Thomas Maitland,' and reprinted separately, Mr Robert Buchanan stated the case of Rossetti's assailants, which, faintly outlined a year

before in Blackwood's Magazine, was restated later in the Quarterly (1872), and, after his death, with even greater ferocity and rancour in the British Quarterly (1882). Apart from personal innuendo, these attacks charged Rossetti's poetry with gross animalism and vapid affectation. It is not easy to understand why Mr Buchanan's assault should have affected Rossetti as it did, but from this time he became habitually depressed and moody, more secluded in his habits, and addicted to the frequent use of chloral. He had lived and worked in

a circle of sympathy, and this covert at

The immediate occasion, says Mr Holman Hunt, of the founding of the Brotherhood was the discovery, at Millais' house, of a book of engravings of the frescoes in the Campo Santo at Pisa. The short-lived magazine, The Germ, was planned in 1849 to promulgate the ideas of the Brotherhood, and in 1851 Mr Ruskin wrote to the Times to defend them from the contumely that they had already excited. Rossetti's first oil-painting, 'The Girlhood of Mary Virgin,' belongs to the year 1849; before this date he had produced some of his finest poetic work, notably The Blessed Damozel and The Portrait. For the next ten years he worked hard at poetry and painting, and in 1861 published his first volume of translations, The Early Italian Poets. The publication of his original poems was delayed by the death of his wife, Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal, who died in 1862, less than two years after their marriage. In the despair of his grief Rossetti buried the manuscript poems, many of which had been written for

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perhaps for the first time, the breadth and depth of the popular misunderstanding of poetry. He replied, in a moderate and serious vein, under the title 'The Stealthy School of Criticism' (Athenæum, 1871), showing that in his sonnets, if they be not garbled by malice, all the passionate and just delights of the body are declared-somewhat figuratively, it is true, but unmistakably-to be as naught if not ennobled by the concurrence of the soul at all times.' Years later, in a private letter, Mr Buchanan admitted that he had been 'most unjust' when he 'impugned the purity and misconceived the passion of writings, too hurriedly read, and reviewed currente calamo!

From his wife's death onward Rossetti lived in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, where for a short time he shared his house with Mr Swinburne, Mr George Meredith, and his brother, Mr W. M. Rossetti. In 1874 he published Dante and his Circle, a volume of translations wonderful for their fidelity to the matter and form of the originals, and in

1881 Ballads and Sonnets, which contains the completed sonnet-sequence entitled The House of Life. In the following year he died, from the effects of a paralytic stroke, at Birchington near Margate.

All who knew Rossetti personally are at one in testifying to the dominant influence and power of his temperament and intellect over those with whom he was brought into contact. He was vehement, passionate, wilful, brusque in phrase and manner, absolutely direct and sincere, genial and often playful in humour. The very force and largeness of his temper made him a leader, and turned his ideas into movements. During his later years the so-called 'Æsthetic Movement,' which directed itself, not without a mixture of affectation, to the cult of beauty in daily life, bore witness to his influence. In literature his main ideas were held, with inevitable characteristic differences, by William Morris and Walter Pater. In disciples of weaker mind and feebler temper the worship of beauty and passion became little better than a fashionable craze-the amusement of brainless and bloodless eccentrics. Yet even the æsthetic movement helped to break up the prevalent indifference of the British public to the fine arts by giving to art the more intelligible form of a religion. In all the poetic and artistic movement of the mid-nineteenth century Rossetti was a prime force in England, as Baudelaire was in France. Alone among his Pre-Raphaelite associates he was first of all a poet. It is not wholly easy to apply the Pre-Raphaelite doctrine to poetry, yet in Rossetti's early poems its influence may be traced. The Pre-Raphaelites aimed at a minute fidelity in the representation of natural objects, and modelled their practice on the Tuscan artists of the earlier Renaissance. To the modern impressionist, with his fuller psychology of vision, fidelity to nature may well seem inconsistent with discipleship to the early Tuscans. Yet all depends upon the attitude and purpose of the painter. The Pre-Raphaelites looked at nature not as a vague pageant of tones fading into one another, and leading up to a focus of interest, but as an ordered array of objects, each infinitely worthy of intense and reverential scrutiny. Their multitudes are not the crowds of earth, but the hierarchies of an imagined heaven, where each soul is a point of light. They arrange images and impressions as the Japanese arrange flowers, so that each may keep its perfect independence and none be lost in the mass. A religious sense inspires their efforts, but it is still a religion of the eye: nothing is too small for attention; the meaning of nature is in every part; all natural forms, if they be carefully observed, are perfect in beauty. The Pre-Raphaelites love order, procession, ritual; and to gratify this taste they thin out the wild profusion of nature as a forester thins a wood. Their eye is the eye of a child, who sees the shape of the clover-leaf long before he sees the clouds or the gradations of shadow on the hills. This love of distinctness and clarity, of the perfection and

chastity of sharply separated existences, may be found in Rossetti's earliest poems. These poems owe much to the Tuscan painters, and seem to belong to an earlier and more religious order of ideas. The Blessed Damozel, holding the three lilies in her hand and wearing the seven stars in her hair, gazing from the rampart of God's house far down into the gulf where the moon flutters like a little feather, is described with a homely simplicity and tenderness of language which recalls the best phase of mediæval literature, modified by the influence of Italian painting:

Herself shall bring us, hand in hand,
To Him round whom all souls
Kneel, the clear-ranged unnumbered heads,
Bowed with their aureoles :

And angels meeting us shall sing

To their citherns and citoles.

The same influences are visible in The Staff and Scrip:

The lists are set in Heaven to-day,

The bright pavilions shine;

Fair hangs thy shield, and none gainsay ;

The trumpets sound in sign

That she is thine.

And in The Portrait a similar method is used with that ease and mastery in figurative suggestion which is one of Rossetti's great powers:

While hopes and aims long lost with her
Stand round her image side by side,
Like tombs of pilgrims that have died
About the Holy Sepulchre.

The distinct perception and close delineation of single things seen can never of itself make fine poetry. Its poetic value depends on its relation to feeling, its service rendered by way of suggesting or expressing the governing emotion. The fixed, intense gaze of passion sees things almost supernaturally distinct; when the mind is under the stress of some great pain, or lifted on the wave of some great joy, the senses are abnormally acute. From perfect grief there need not be Wisdom or even memory:

One thing then learnt remains to me,-
The woodspurge has a cup of three.

So the Pre-Raphaelite method touches a perfection in poetry that it missed in painting; for in poetry it is employed in strict subordination to a single feeling. Tennyson's 'blue fly buzzing in the pane,' which was ridiculed by some of his early critics, awakens at once a sense of the dreary monotony of life in the deserted house. Rossetti's My Sister's Sleep is an even finer example of the same poetic mode. Watch is being kept at midnight in the sick-room; and twelve strikes :

Our mother rose from where she sat :
Her needles, as she laid them down,
Met lightly, and her silken gown
Settled no other noise than that.

In this and in others of his early poems, as, for instance, World's Worth, there is a purity of diction and a slow distinctness of enunciation that bespeak deep passion. There is no 'flow of language; it is the ebbing of the life-blood, drop by drop.

Rossetti is most widely and generally known as the author of The House of Life. These famous sonnets, which range through a great diversity of moods, have but one subject-the passion, and the mystery, and the sacrament of love between man and woman. The passion is so intense that it bears the seal of tragic fate on its forehead even from its birth, like the love of Romeo and Juliet or of Tristan and Iseult. As we are carried along these rapids we hear the distant roar of the doom ahead. It is perhaps over-curious to speculate on the different completion that Rossetti might have given to The House of Life had fate dealt more gently with him, and carried him out safely among the pastures where the river is deep and silent and the voices of children are heard. Perhaps his gain would have been our loss, for where the shadow falls deepest and the doom impends, his thought tightens its grasp, and his expression becomes almost Shakespearian in its tortuous and complex strength. His poetry fulfils the requirements of his own famous saying, which makes 'fundamental brain-work' an essential of all poetry. The glamour of his passion and the intoxication of his admirers with the strange beauty that he celebrates interfered for a time with the due recognition of his speculative genius. But it is on the strength of this foundation-on the range and power of his vision-that his best claim to a place among the English poets must be based. The attention of the public is at all times easily lured from substance to accident; and the early Italian angels and archaic musical instruments have obscured the calm sweep of the horizon that surrounds them. In The Blessed Damozel, written by a boy of eighteen, these lines might well startle a critic looking only for costume and conceits:

From the fixed place of Heaven she saw
Time like a pulse shake fierce
Through all the worlds.

Rossetti has that great 'negative capability' which Keats found lacking in Coleridge, the power of resting content in the contemplation of mystery, without any irritable striving after certainty and system. Some of his profoundest reflections have thus been mistaken, even by favourable critics, for commonplaces. Commonplaces are great truths which from the dullness and flimsiness of man's mind have lost their power to move. They regain that power in the mind of a poet. A tree outlives the generations of man; and there comes a man whom the thought excites :

Ye, who have passed Death's haggard hills; and ye
Whom trees that knew your sires have ceased to know
And still stand silent :-is it all a show,-
A wisp that laughs upon the wall?

The Burden of Nineveh is a splendid piece of historical imagining. The great winged stone bulls of Nineveh, newly dug up, are seen by the poet as they are carried into the British Museum, and they beget in him a passion of reverie. Their shadow, under which Sennacherib has perhaps knelt, is now thrown on the London flags:

Lo thou! could all thy priests have shown
Such proof to make thy godhead known?
From their dead Past thou liv'st alone;
And still thy shadow is thine own,

Even as of yore in Nineveh.

When Satan showed all the kingdoms of the world to Christ, did the desolation of Nineveh, already ruined, not rebuke him? The poem is compacted of thought, down to the last line, in. which there comes a sense of misgiving with regard to our own civilisation, when it shall be looked back upon by coming generations :

Those heavy wings spread high,
So sure of flight, which do not fly;
That set gaze, never on the sky;

Those scriptured flanks it cannot see;
Its crown, a brow-contracting load;
Its planted feet which trust the sod:
(So grew the image as I trod :)
O Nineveh, was this thy God,-

Thine also, mighty Nineveh?

...

Since the whole bulk of Rossetti's poetic work is comparatively small, its variety deserves notice. A Last Confession is a dramatic monologue, not unlike some of Browning's, but built round a single impression-the sense of horror awakened in the soul by the sound of a coarse, empty laugh, which reveals, as no sight can reveal it, the abode of lost souls. The whole tragedy, it is easy to divine, was built up from this single experience. In The King's Tragedy and The White Ship two memorable historical tragedies are recited with concentrated power. Sister Helen and Eden Bower tell weird stories of supernatural terror in a revived ballad metre, with varied refrains. Perhaps those critics are right who insist on the insuperable difficulties of modern attempts to revive the ballad. The refrain, well suited for the broad and simple effects of the old ballads, is teased and varied in Sister Helen for the purposes of a more restless and critical poetry, and the old effect is lost. Lastly, in The Stream's Secret, Love's Nocturne, and many shorter poems Rossetti proves himself unsurpassed in the power of evoking emotions of wonder and pathos and mystery from the subtle music of words.

It is customary to conclude the critical consideration of a poet by noticing his limitations, and by enlarging on what he did not accomplish, which is like saying the Lord's Prayer backwards by way of thank-offering for his achievements. Rossetti, it is truly said, 'deals with man little as a social being, and not much as an ethical being; he knows (save here and there) of no care for the

many, of no conflict between duty and desire, the interest of the many and the passion of one.' But he expressed the passion of one-the passion of man, hungry at heart and islanded between two eternities-with a stress of thought, a lyrical fervour, and a high command of the manifold chords of language which have not often been matched in the annals of English poetry.

Sonnet VII.-Supreme Surrender.
To all the spirits of Love that wander by
Along his love-sown harvest-field of sleep
My lady lies apparent; and the deep
Calls to the deep; and no man sees but I.
The bliss so long afar, at length so nigh,

Rests there attained. Methinks proud Love must weep
When Fate's control doth from his harvest reap
The sacred hour for which the years did sigh.
First touched, the hand now warm around my neck
Taught memory long to mock desire and lo!
Across my breast the abandoned hair doth flow,
Where one shorn tress long stirred the longing ache:
And next the heart that trembled for its sake
Lies the queen-heart in sovereign overthrow.
Sonnet LV.-Still-born Love.

The hour which might have been yet might not be,
Which man's and woman's heart conceived and bore
Yet whereof life was barren,- -on what shore
Bides it the breaking of Time's weary sea?
Bondchild of all consummate joys set free,

It somewhere sighs and serves, and mute before
The house of Love, hears through the echoing door
His hours elect in choral consonancy.

But lo! what wedded souls now hand in hand
Together tread at last the immortal strand

With eyes where burning memory lights love home?
Lo! how the little outcast hour has turned
And leaped to them and in their faces yearned
'I am your child: O parents, ye have come!'
Sonnet LXXIII.-The Choice.

Think thou and act; to-morrow thou shalt die.

Outstretched in the sun's warmth upon the shore, Thou say'st: Man's measured path is all gone o'er : Up all his years, steeply, with strain and sigh, Man clomb until he touched the truth; and I, Even I, am he whom it was destined for.' How should this be? Art thou then so much more Than they who sowed, that thou shouldst reap thereby? Nay, come up hither. From this wave-washed mound Unto the furthest flood-brim look with me; Then reach on with thy thought till it be drown'd. Miles and miles distant though the last line be, And though thy soul sail leagues and leagues beyond,— Still, leagues beyond those leagues, there is more sea. Sonnet LXXVII.-Soul's Beauty. Under the arch of Life, where love and death,

Terror and mystery, guard her shrine, I saw Beauty enthroned; and though her gaze struck awe, I drew it in as simply as my breath.

Hers are the eyes which, over and beneath,

The sky and sea bend on thee,-which can draw,
By sea or sky or woman, to one law,
The allotted bondman of her palm and wreath.

This is that Lady Beauty, in whose praise
Thy voice and hand shake still,-long known to thee
By flying hair and fluttering hem,--the beat
Following her daily of thy heart and feet,
How passionately and irretrievably,

In what fond flight, how many ways and days!

Sonnet XCI.-Lost on Both Sides.

As when two men have loved a woman well,

Each hating each, through Love's and Death's deceit ; Since not for either this stark marriage-sheet And the long pauses of this wedding-bell; Yet o'er her grave the night and day dispel

At last their feud forlorn, with cold and heat;
Nor other than dear friends to death may fleet
The two lives left that most of her can tell :—

So separate hopes, which in a soul had wooed
The one same Peace, strove with each other long,
And Peace before their faces perished since:
So through that soul, in restless brotherhood,
They roam together now, and wind among
Its bye-streets, knocking at the dusty inns.
My Sister's Sleep.

She fell asleep on Christmas Eve:

At length the long-ungranted shade
Of weary eyelids overweigh'd
The pain nought else might yet relieve.

Our mother, who had leaned all day

Over the bed from chime to chime,
Then raised herself for the first time,
And as she sat her down, did pray.

Her little work-table was spread

With work to finish. For the glare
Made by her candle, she had care
To work some distance from the bed.

Without, there was a cold moon up,
Of winter radiance sheer and thin;
The hollow halo it was in
Was like an icy crystal cup.

Through the small room, with subtle sound
Of flame, by vents the fireshine drove
And reddened. In its dim alcove
The mirror shed a clearness round.

I had been sitting up some nights,
And my tired mind felt weak and blank;
Like a sharp strengthening wine it drank
The stillness and the broken lights.

Twelve struck. That sound, by dwindling years
Heard in each hour, crept off; and then
The ruffled silence spread again,

Like water that a pebble stirs.

Our mother rose from where she sat :
Her needles, as she laid them down,
Met lightly, and her silken gown
Settled no other noise than that.

'Glory unto the Newly Born!'

So, as said angels, she did say; Because we were in Christmas Day, Though it would still be long till morn.

Just then in the room over us

There was a pushing back of chairs,
As some who had sat unawares
So late, now heard the hour, and rose.
With anxious softly-stepping haste

Our mother went where Margaret lay,
Fearing the sounds o'erhead-should they
Have broken her long-watched-for rest!
She stopped an instant, calm, and turned;
But suddenly turned back again;
And all her features seemed in pain
With woe, and her eyes gazed and yearned.
For my part, I but hid
my face,

And held my breath, and spoke no word:
There was none spoken; but I heard
The silence for a little space.

Our mother bowed herself and wept :
And both my arms fell, and I said,

'God knows I knew that she was dead.'
And there, all white, my sister slept.
Then kneeling, upon Christmas morn
A little after twelve o'clock,

We said, ere the first quarter struck, 'Christ's blessing on the newly born!' The Sea-Limits.

Consider the sea's listless chime :

Time's self it is, made audible,—
The murmur of the earth's own shell.
Secret continuance sublime

Is the sea's end: our sight may pass
No furlong further. Since time was,
This sound hath told the lapse of time.
No quiet, which is death's,-it hath
The mournfulness of ancient life,
Enduring always at dull strife.
As the world's heart of rest and wrath,
Its painful pulse is in the sands.
Last utterly, the whole sky stands,
Grey and not known, along its path.

Listen alone beside the sea,

Listen alone among the woods;
Those voices of twin solitudes

Shall have one sound alike to thee:

Hark where the murmurs of thronged men

Surge and sink back and surge again,—

Still the one voice of wave and tree.
Gather a shell from the strown beach
And listen at its lips; they sigh
The same desire and mystery,
The echo of the whole sea's speech.
And all mankind is thus at heart
Not anything but what thou art :
And Earth, Sea, Man, are all in each.
The Cloud Confines.

The day is dark and the night

To him that would search their heart;
No lips of cloud that will part
Nor morning song in the light:
Only, gazing alone,

To him wild shadows are shown,
Deep under deep unknown
And height above unknown height.

Still we say as we go,

'Strange to think by the way, Whatever there is to know,

That shall we know one day.'

The Past is over and fled;
Named new, we name it the old;
Thereof some tale hath been told,
But no word comes from the dead;
Whether at all they be,

Or whether as bond or free,
Or whether they too were we,
Or by what spell they have sped.
Still we say as we go,-

'Strange to think by the way, Whatever there is to know,

That shall we know one day.'

What of the heart of hate

That beats in thy breast, O Time?—
Red strife from the furthest prime,

And anguish of fierce debate,
War that shatters her slain,

And peace that grinds them as grain,
And eyes fixed ever in vain
On the pitiless eyes of Fate.
Still we say as we go,—

'Strange to think by the way, Whatever there is to know,

That shall we know one day.'

What of the heart of love

That bleeds in thy breast, O Man?—
Thy kisses snatched 'neath the ban
Of fangs that mock them above;
Thy bells prolonged unto knells,
Thy hope that a breath dispels,
Thy bitter forlorn farewells
And the empty echoes thereof?

Still we say as we go,-
'Strange to think by the way,
Whatever there is to know,

That shall we know one day.'

The sky leans dumb on the sea,
Aweary with all its wings;
And oh the song the sea sings
Is dark everlastingly.

Our past is clean forgot,

Our present is and is not,

Our future's a sealed seed-plot, And what betwixt them are we?— We who say as we go,'Strange to think by the way, Whatever there is to know,

That shall we know one day.'

The Family Letters and Memoir by his brother, William Michael (2 vols. 1895), should be referred to; that brother's Rossetti as Designer and Writer (1889); the Rossetti Papers (1903) compiled by the same hand; Rossetti's Letters to W. Allingham (1897); Theodore Watts-Dunton in Encyclopædia Britannica and Nineteenth Century for March 1883; works by William Sharp (1882), Hall Caine (1882), Joseph Knight (1887), and F. G. Stephens (Portfolio, 1894); and Walter Pater's Essay on Rossetti. See also articles on 'The Rossettis' by William Sharp in the Fortnightly for 1886; on 'The Poetical Writings of Mr Dante Gabriel Rossetti' by Miss Alice Law in the Westminster Review for 1895; and on 'The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood' by W. Holman Hunt in the Contemporary Review for 1886 (three articles).

WALTER RALEIGH.