poet, carried his passion for liberty and poetry into exile, and gave his son the name and worship of the great Tuscan, and a nature in which his own mysticism and originality, and the exuberant sensuousness of his nation, mingled with the earnest religious nature of his wife (of mixed English and Italian race), and the sound, high-toned morality of an admirable English education. Circumstances more favorable for the development of an exceptionally individual artistic character could hardly have been combined. Rossetti is at once mystical, imaginative, individual, and intense; a colorist of the few greatest; designer at once weird, and of remarkable range of subject and sympathy; devotional, humanitarian, satiric, and actual, and, by turns, mediæval and modern; now approaching the religious intensity of the early Italian, now satirizing a vice of to-day with a realism quite his own, and again painting images of sensuous beauty with a passionate fulness and purity which no other painter has ever rendered. His most remarkable gift is what, in the incompleteness of artistic nomenclature, I must call spontaneity of composition -that imaginative faculty by which the completeness and coherence of a pictorial composition are preserved from the beginning, so that, to its least detail, the picture bears the impress of having been painted from a complete conception. At times weird, at others grotesque, and again full of pathos, his pictures almost invariably possess this most precious quality of composition, in which Leys alone, of modern painters, is to be compared with him.

Like all great colorists, Rossetti makes of color a means of expression, and only, in a lesser degree, of representation. Color is to him an art in itself, and the harmonies of his pictures are rather like sad strains of some perfect Eastern music, always pure and wellsought in tint, but with chords that have the quality of those most precious of fabrics-the Persian and Indiansomething steals in always which is not of the seen or of earthly tones, a passage

which touches the eye as a minor strain does the ear, with a passionate sugges tion of something lost, and which, mated with his earnest and spiritual tone of thought, gives to his art, for those who know and appreciate it fully, an interest which certain morbid qualities, born of the over-intense and brooding imagination, and even certain deficiencies in power of expression, only make more deep.

Amongst modern painters he is the most poetic; and, in his early life, painting and poetry seem to have disputed the bent of his mind, and some early poems laid the foundation of a school of poetry, just as his early pictures laid those of a school of art (if even this be worthy to be called a school). In a volume of poems just published there is a sonnet on one of his earliest designs, which, doubtless, expresses the creed of art of the reform. It is called "St. Luke the Painter," and represented St. Luke preaching and showing pictures of the Virgin and Christ.

Give honor unto Luke Evangelist;
For he it was (the aged legends say)
Who first taught Art to fold her hands and pray.
Scarcely at once she dared to rend the mist
Of devious symbols: but soon, having wist
How sky-breadth and field-silence and this day
Are symbols also in some deeper way,

She looked through these to God, and was God's priest.

And if, past noon, her toil began to irk,
And she sought talismans, and turned in vain
To soulless self-reflections of man's skill;
Yet now, in this the twilight, she might still
Kneel in the latter grass to pray again,
Ere the night cometh, and she may not work.

Rossetti's indifference to public opinion was the same for picture or poem, for he only exhibited twice, and only two or three of his poems have been printed; but, as the former worked a reform amongst the painters, the latter gave a bent to some of the coming poets, and the authors of the Earthly Paradise and Atalanta in Calydon, owe to Rossetti the direction of their thoughts. I remember seeing, in the exhibition, Rossetti's first exhibited picture. The subject was "Mary's Girlhood." It represented an interior, with the Virgin

Mary sitting by her mother's side and embroidering from nature a lily, while an angel-child waters the flower which she copies. His sister Christina, the poetess, and her mother, were the models from whom he painted Mary and her mother, and the picture, full of intense feeling and mystic significance, was, for the painters, the picture of the exhibition (the long extinct "National Institution "). It is commemorated in the volumes of poems by a sonnet with the same title.

This is that blessed Mary, pre-elect

God's virgin. Gone is a great while, and she
Dwelt young in Nazareth of Galilee.
Unto God's will she brought devout respect,
Profound simplicity of intellect,

And supreme patience. From her mother's
knee

Faithful and hopeful; wise in charity;
Strong in grave peace; in pity circumspect.

So held she through her girlhood; as it were
An angel-watered lily, that near God
Grows and is quiet. Till, one dawn at home
She woke in her white bed, and had no fear
At all, yet wept till sunshine, and felt
Because the fulness of the time was come.

He exhibited again, in 1850, an Annunciation, well remembered amongst artists as "the white picture," both the angel and Mary being robed in white, in a white-walled room, the only masses of color being their hair, which was auburn. This was his last contribution to any exhibition, his disregard of public approbation growing with the evidence that appeared every day of the hold his works had taken on the artis

tic and intellectual part of the public, so that to-day he is preeminently the painter of the painters and poets, as the character of the poetry stamps him the poet of the painters. Scarcely a note has he struck in his poems which has not its corresponding expression in his painting; and poem sometimes turns to a picture, and a picture sometimes reproduces itself as a poem.

Amongst the most important of the poems thus involved is one which, conceived in the old catholic spirit, Rossetti has illustrated by a series of pictures and drawings, designed in the same tone. It is the "Ave," a hymn to the Virgin. It is full of the most ad

mirable word-painting, and follows the life of the Virgin from the annunciation to the assumption. The opening picture of the annunciation is in the spirit of his early art as the whole poem is of his early thought.

Mind'st thou not (when June's heavy breath
Warmed the long days in Nazareth),
That eve thou didst go forth to give
Thy flowers some drink that they might live
One faint night more amid the sands?
Far off the trees were as pale wands
Against the fervid sky: the sea
Sighed further off eternally,
As human sorrow sighs in sleep.
Then suddenly the awe grew deep,
As of a day to which all days
Were footsteps in God's secret ways:
Until a folding sense, like prayer
Which is, as God is, everywhere,
Gathered about thee; and a voice
Spake to thee without any noise,
Being of the silence:-"Hail!" it said,
"Thou that art highly favored;
The Lord is with thee here and now,
Blessed among all women thou!"

Another more purely imaginative and intensely pathetic picture, is of the life of Mary in the house of John, after Christ's death. It represents the interior of the house of John, with a window showing a twilight view of Jerusalem. Against the faint distance cut the window-bars, forming a cross, at the intersection of which hangs a lamp which Mary had risen to trim and light, having left her spinning, while John, who has been writing, and holds his tablets still on his knees, strikes a light with a flint and steel for Mary to use. Above the window hangs a net. The passage which is illustrated by it is one of the finest of the poem.

Mind'st thou not (when the twilight gone
Left darkness in the house of John)
Between the naked window-bars
That spacious vigil of the stars?
For thou, a watcher even as they,
Wouldst rise from where throughout the day
Thou wroughtest raiment for His poor;
And, finding the fixed terms endure
Of day and night which never brought
Sounds of His coming chariot,
Wouldst lift, through cloud-waste unexplor'd,
Those eyes which said, "How long, O Lord?"
Then that disciple whom He loved,
Well heeding, haply would be moved
To ask thy blessing in His name;
And that one thought in both, the same
Though silent, then would clasp ye round
To weep together-tears long bound-
Sick tears of patience, dumb and slow.

The poem called the Blessed Damozel was one of those which were published in an art-magazine, conducted by the literary confreres of the reformers in art, and amongst the younger English poets of the day was the key of a new poetic tendency. The writer of these lines has heard the author of the Earthly Paradise avow that the Blessed Damozel turned his mind to writing poetry. It is one of the more passionate, and, at the same time, pictorial, of all Rossetti's poems, and full of the mystic religious sense in which all the new school began their work with symbolic accessories, as though it had been in.tended for illustration.

THE BLESSED DAMOZEL.

The blessed damozel leaned out
From the gold bar of heaven;
Her eyes were deeper than the depth
Of waters stilled at even;

She had three lilies in her hand,

And the stars in her hair were seven.

Her robe, ungirt from clasp to hem,
No wrought flowers did adorn,
But a white rose of Mary's gift,
For service meetly worn;
Her hair that lay along her back
Was yellow like ripe corn.

Herseemed she scarce had been a day
One of God's choristers;
The wonder was not yet quite gone
From that still lock of hers;
Albeit, to them she left, her day
Had counted as ten years.

(To one, it is ten years of years.
Yet now, and in this place,
Surely she leaned o'er me-her hair
Fell all about my face.
Nothing: the autumn fall of leaves.
The whole year sets apace.)

"I wish that he were come to me,
For he will come," she said.
"Have I not prayed in heaven?-on earth,
Lord, Lord, has he not pray'd?

Are not two prayers a perfect strength?
And shall I feel afraid?

"We two," she said, "will seek the groves Where the lady Mary is,

"He shall fear, haply, and be dumb: Then will I lay my check

To his, and tell about our love,
Not once abashed or weak:
And the dear Mother will approve
My pride, and let me speak.

"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.

"There will I ask of Christ the Lord
Thus much for him and me:-
Only to live as once on earth
With Love,-only to be,
As then awhile, for ever now
Together, I and he."

She gazed and listened and then said,
Less sad of speech than mild,—
"All this is when he comes." She ceased.
The light thrilled towards her, fill'd
With angels in strong level flight.

Her eyes prayed, and she smil'd.

(I saw her smile.) But soon their path
Was vague in distant spheres:
And then she cast her arms along

The golden barriers,

And laid her face between her hands,

And wept. (I heard her tears.)

The influence of the study of Dante has been always perceptible in all the work of our painter-poet. The Vita Nuova has been an inexhaustible mine of picture-subject, and the poem, "Dante at Verona," one of the longest in the book, is also one of the most earnestly felt, and sympathetic. The Divina Commedia has furnished him only one picture, or rather triptych, from the story of Francesca di Rimini. In this the poets are in the central division; "The Kiss," on the right, full of the most intense passion, and the ghosts on the left, pale, dreamy, but dressed as in "The Kiss," and floating through an atmosphere filled with little flames, falling like rain. In dealing with material like this, of course a large measure of conventionalism is to be allowed in the treatment, and Rossetti never hesitates in employing all that his subject demands, so that the Dante designs are, for the most part, at once mystic and typical in conception and treatment. An important picture of "The Vision of Dante on the Day of Beatrice's Death," is most thoroughly studied and realized; two of the heads of Beatrice, and the lady who holds the veil over her at her head, are studied from two of the most celebrated beauties of London. Love leads Dante into the room where the

body lies, the floor of which is strewn with poppies, and kisses the dead face, in token of the final union-the spiritual kiss which death, the new life, permits to love.

In another vein the painter employs a degree of realization which represents faculties of a very different nature. In a picture which he calls Hesterna Rosa "yesterday's rose "-two courtesans, with their lovers, are finishing a carouse in a tent, while the day is breaking outside. One of them, debauched to utter degradation, riots in her shame and drunkenness, while the other, unused yet to her fallen state, turns, in awaking shame, from her companions. The men are throwing dice-the lover of the shame-faced girl, a low, ruffianly sharper, bites his mistress' finger abstractedly as he waits for the throw of his adversary. A little girl, an attendant, holds a lute up to her ear and touches the strings, listening to the vibration in sheer indifference to the bacchanals, her purity making the one bright point in the drama, while a monkey-type of all uncleanness-sits at the other side scratching himself in idleness.

Through the opening of the tent is seen the dawn through the orchardtrees, mingling with the lamp-light.

One, and perhaps the most powerful, cause of the deep hold which Rossetti, as painter and poet, has obtained on his contemporary painters and poets, is the intense subjectivity of his genius, which, while it gives to sympathetic appreciation an inexhaustible and inexplicable charm, to those who have no sympathy with his idiosyncrasy gives only an impression of involved phantasy and farfetched symbolism. Yet not even Dante himself was more legitimately to this manner born. Not even Titian or Turner, or the painter of the fragment of Pita, was more involuntarily and uncontrollably subjective than their fellowcountryman Rossetti. Types evolved from his own nature run through all his work, and his ideals of beauty have a sisterly likeness which no one can fail to recognize, and which renders it impossible for him to render certain types

of character with satisfaction or complete success. It was the Rossetti type of face and figure which, caricatured and exaggerated in ignorant enthusiasm by the followers of the painter, gave rise to the singular and certainly most unlovely ideal of the minor pre-Raphaelites-an ideal in which physical beauty was absolutely set at nought in the search of significance and the evidence of passion. Even in his portraits Rossetti fails, unless the subject inclines more or less to the type which he reflects.

This demands more than external beauty, be it ever so exquisite, and is only absolutely content with a certain gravity and intensity of character, deep, inscrutable, sphinx-like, or still more when these characteristics go with the expression of intense and restrained passion. Of this type the portrait of Mrs. Morris, wife of the author of the Earthly Paradise, is one of the most perfectly realized expressions. It represents a face of remarkable perfectness of proportion and nobility of intellectual character, but with a depth of meaning, half-told, questioning eyes and mute lips, which make it, once seen, never to be forgotten; and, painted with a wealth of color and completeness of power, unequalled by any modern work, so far as I know. It is one of those portraits which, like Raphael's Julius Second, Titian's "Bella Donna," and other singularly understood and rendered heads of almost all the great masters of portraiture, remain, perhaps, the highest expression of the painter's qualities.

A remarkable design of Rossetti's is the Mary Magdalene at the House of Simon the Pharisee. She is passing the house at the head of a festal procession, crowned with flowers, and accompanied by her lover, when she sees Christ through the open door, and, tearing off the garlands, pushes her way into the chamber, against the efforts of the lover and one of her female companions. Far up the street may be seen the bacchanals, singing, waving their garlands and playing on musical instruments as they

come, and they stop, in amused surprise, at the eccentricity of Mary, who with her two immediate companions occupy the centre of the composition. The head of Christ appears through the window at the right, below which, outside, a vine climbs up on the wall, and a deer nibbles at it.

The whole picture, except the grave, passionate, and touching face of Mary, turned to Christ, without any heed to the companions who hold her feet and knees to prevent her entering, and the responding face of Christ, who turns towards her as he sits at the table, is full of gayety and merriment; but the head of Mary, which is pictorially the key-note of it, gives to the ensemble the pathetic tone which almost all of Rossetti's pictures have, and which seem to be the characteristic of his nature, for scarcely one of his poems is conceived in any other feeling than one approaching to sadness, so that, to those who have not seen his painting, his poetry will give the clear idea of his individuality in art. In one of the most exquisite of his love-poems, "The Stream's Secret," he demands of the stream what message it bears from his mistress, and, rehearsing the growth of their passion to himself and the inexorable wave, he comes, at last, to find that death alone can reply to his question.

Ah, by another wave,

On other airs, the hour must come, Which to thy heart, my love, shall call me home. Between the lips of the low cave, Against that night the lapping waters lav And the dark lips are dumb.

But there Love's self doth stand, And with Life's weary wings far-flown, And with Death's eyes that make the water moan, Gathers the water in his hand.

And they that drink know nought of sky or land But only love alone.

O soul-sequestered face

Far off,-O were that night but now!

So even beside that stream even I and thou
Through thirsting lips should draw Love's grace,
And in the zone of that supreme embrace
Bind aching breast and brow.

O water whispering

Still through the dark into mine ears,As with mine eyes, is it not now with hers?Mine eyes that add to thy cold spring, Wan water, wandering water weltering, This hidden tide of tears.

In "The Portrait," again-a poem full of sad and passionate color and pictorial quality-it is the portrait of his dead love he monodizes. His love had been told, in "a dim, deep wood," and to commemorate it he paints the portrait.

Next day the memories of these things,

Like leaves through which a bird has flown,
Still vibrated with Love's warm wings;

Till I must make them all my own
And paint this picture. So,, 'twixt ease
Of talk and sweet long silences,

She stood among the plants in bloom
At windows of a summer room,
To feign the shadow of the trees.

And as I wrought, while all above
And all around was fragrant air,
In the sick burthen of my love

It seemed each sun-thrilled blossom there
Beat like a heart among the leaves.
O heart that never beats nor heaves,
In that one darkness lying still,
What now to thee my love's great will
Or the fine web the sunshine weaves?

*

Here with her face doth memory sit
Meanwhile, and wait the day's decline,
Till other eyes shall look from it,

Eyes of the spirit's Palestine,
Even than the old gaze tenderer:
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.

But enough, both of picture and poem, to convey such idea as a brief article may, of one of the most singularly gifted and imaginative artists the world has ever seen, and whose unique power, had it been supplemented by the training of such a school as that of Venice, would have placed him at the head of painters of human passion. Trained under the eye of a Veronese, his work would have gained in solidity and drawing; and, may-be, with a public capable of fully appreciating his genius, he might have painted less defiantly of its opinion. His dramatic power is not fully conveyed in any of his poems except the "Last Confession," which gives no idea of the versatility with which he depicts passion's ranging from the besotted huts of a Borgia to the ecstatic exaltation of a Magdalene, or the serenity of a Madonna. As painter or poet, human passion and human sorrow are the only themes which