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:

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:

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”:

“What of her glass without her?” he cries again after the great bereavement which has removed the visible presence of the beloved:

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?

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:

And in a similar strain the poet prays:

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,—

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,—

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,—

And—

We follow the soul of the lover—

across “death’s haggard hills”; among

and through

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

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:

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 flow of the monologue gleams with such images as these:

or—

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 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,—

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,—

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

The knight wins in the battle, but dies in the victory, and his body is brought to the queen.

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: