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The grass, the leaves, the earth, the dew,—

The grave I make the spot,

Here where she used to love me,
Here where she loves me not.

SONG.

[From Music and Moonlight.

I made another garden, yea,
For my new love;

I left the dead rose where it lay,
And set the new above.

Why did the summer not begin?

Why did my heart not haste? My old love came and walked therein, And laid the garden waste.

She entered with her weary smile,
Just as of old;

She looked around a little while,
And shivered at the cold.

Her passing touch was death to all,
Her passing look a blight;
She made the white rose-petals fall,
And turned the red rose white.

Her pale robe, clinging to the grass
Seemed like a snake

That bit the grass and ground, alas!
And a sad trail did make.

She went up slowly to the gate;
And then, just as of yore,

She turned back at the last to wait,
And say farewell once more.

DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI.

[DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI, poet and painter, was born in London, in the year 1828; his father, by birth and education an Italian, being distinguished as a curious commentator upon Dante. He became in early youth a student of painting, in which art, though never a public exhibitor, he grew steadily to fame as an imaginative designer and a colourist of the highest rank. With two years of wedded life (1860-1862) and with some intimate friendships, he passed his days in much seclusion ; residing from the year 1863 chiefly at an old and picturesque house in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea. In 1861 he published Translations from the Early Italian Poets; in 1870 Poems; and in 1881 Ballads and Sonnets. After a period of failing health he died at Birchington-on Sea, on Easter Day, 1882. The student of his life and work should consult Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, by T. Hall Caine; Dante Gabriel Rossetti, a Record and a Study. by William Sharp; and, in the Nineteenth Century, March 1883, The Truth about Rossetti, by Theodore Watts.]

It was characteristic of a poet who had ever something about him of mystic isolation, and will still appeal perhaps, though with a name it may seem now established in English literature, to a special and limited audience, that some of his poems had won a kind of exquisite fame before they were in the full sense published. The Blessed Damozel, although actually printed twice before the year 1870, was eagerly circulated in manuscript; and the volume which it now opens came at last to satisfy a long-standing curiosity as to the poet, whose pictures also had become an object of the same peculiar kind of interest. For those poems were the work of a painter, understood to belong to, and to be indeed the leader, of a new school then rising into note; and the reader of to-day may observe already, in The Blessed Damozel, written at the age of eighteen, a prefigurement of the chief characteristics of that school, as he will recognise in it also, in proportion as he really knows Rossetti, many of the characteristics which are most markedly personal and his own. Common to that school and to him, and in both alike of primary significance, was the

quality of sincerity, already felt as one of the charms of that earliest poem-a perfect sincerity, taking effect in the deliberate use of the most direct and unconventić nal expression, for the conveyance of a poetic sense which recognised no conventional standard of what poetry was called upon to be. At a time when poetic originality in England might seem to have had its utmost play, here was certainly one new poet more, with a structure and music of verse, a vocabulary, an accent, unmistakeably novel, yet felt to be no mere tricks of manner adopted with a view to forcing attention--an accent which might rather count as the very seal of reality on one man's own proper speech; as that speech itself was the wholly natural expression of certain wonderful things he really felt and saw. Here was one, who had a matter to present to his readers, to himself at least, in the first instance, so valuable, so real and definite, that his primary aim, as regards form or expression in his verse, would be but its exact equivalence to those data within. That he had this gift of transparency in language-the control of a style which did but obediently shift and shape itself to the mental motion, as a welltrained hand can follow on the tracing paper the outline of an original drawing below it, was proved afterwards by a volume of typically perfect translations from the delightful but difficult 'early Italian poets': such transparency being indeed the secret of all genuine style, of all such style as can truly belong to one man and not to another. His own meaning was always personal and even recondite, in a certain sense learned and casuistical, sometimes complex or obscure; but the term was always, one could see, deliberately chosen from many competitors, as the just transcript of that peculiar phase of soul which he alone knew, precisely as he knew it.

One of the peculiarities of The Blessed Damozel was a definiteness of sensible imagery, which seemed almost grotesque to some, and was strange, above all, in a theme so profoundly visionary. The gold bar of heaven from which she leaned, her hair yellow like ripe corn, are but examples of a general treatment, as naively detailed as the pictures of those early painters contemporary with Dante, who has shown a similar care for minute and definite imagery in his verse; there, too, in the very midst of profoundly mystic vision. Such definition of outline is indeed one among many points ir which Rossetti resembles the great Italian poet, of whom, led to him at first by family circumstances, he was ever

a lover-'a servant and singer,' as faithful, as Dante 'of Florence and of Beatrice’—with some close inward conformities of genius, independent of any mere circumstances of education. It was said by a critic of the last century, not wisely though agreeably to the practice of his time, that poetry rejoices in abstractions. For Rossetti, as for Dante, without question on his part, the first condition of the poetic way of seeing and presenting things is particularisation. 'Tell me now,' he writes, for Villon's

'Di tes-moy où, n'en quel pays,

Est Flora, la belle Romaine'

'Tell me now, in what hidden way is
Lady Flora the lovely Roman :'

-'way,' in which one might actually chance to meet her; the unmistakeably poetic effect of the couplet in English being dependent on the definiteness of that single word (though actually lighted on in the search after a difficult double rhyme) for which every one else would have written, like Villon himself, a more general one, just equivalent to place or region.

And this delight in concrete definition is allied with another of his conformities to Dante, the really imaginative vividness, namely, of his personifications-his hold upon them, or rather their hold upon him, with the force of a Frankenstein, when once they have taken life from him. Not Death only and Sleep, for instance, and the winged spirit of Love, but certain particular aspects of them, a whole 'populace' of special hours and places, 'the hour' even 'which might have been, yet might not be,' are living creatures, with hands and eyes and articulate voices.

'Stands it not by the door

Love's Hour-till she and I shall meet;
With bodiless form and unapparent feet

That cast no shadow yet before,

Though round its head the dawn begins to pour

The breath that makes day sweet?'

'Nay, why

Name the dead hours? I mind them well:

Their ghosts in many darkened doorways dwell
With desolate eyes to know them by.'

Poetry as a mania—one of Plato's two higher forms of 'divine' mania--has, in all its species, a mere insanity incidental to it,

the 'defect of its quality,' into which it may lapse in its moment of weakness and the insanity which follows a vivid poetic anthropomorphism like that of Rossetti may be noted here and there in his work, in a forced and almost grotesque materialising of abstractions, as Dante also became at times a mere subject of the scholastic realism of the Middle Age.

In Love's Nocturn and The Stream's Secret, congruously perhaps with a certain feverishness of soul in the moods they present, there is in places a near approach (may it be said?) to such insanity of realism

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Pity and love shall burn

In her pressed cheek and cherishing hands:
And from the living spirit of love that stands
Between her lips to soothe and yearn,

Each separate breath shall clasp me round in turn

And loose my spirit's bands.'

But even if we concede this,-if we allow, in the very plan of those two compositions, something of the literary conceit-what exquisite, what novel flowers of poetry, we must admit them to be, as they stand! In the one, what a delight in all the natural beauty of water, all its details for the eye of a painter; in the other, how subtle and fine the imaginative hold upon all the secret ways of sleep and dreams! In both of them, with much the same attitude and tone, Love-sick and doubtful Love-would fain inquire of what lies below the surface of sleep, and below the water; stream or dream being forced to speak by Love's powerful 'control'; and the poet would have it foretell the fortune, issue, and event of his wasting passion. Such artifices were not unknown in the old Provençal poetry of which Dante had learned something. Only, in Rossetti at least, they are redeemed by a serious purpose, by that sincerity of his, which allies itself readily to a serious beauty, a sort of grandeur of literary workmanship-to a great style. One seems to hear there a really new kind of poetic utterance, with effects which have nothing else like them; as there is nothing else, for instance, like the narrative of Jacob's Dream, or Blake's design of the Singing of the Morning Stars, or Addison's Nineteenth Psalm.

With him indeed, as in some revival of the old mythopoeic age, common things—dawn, noon, night—are full of human or personal expression, full of sentiment. The lovely little sceneries scattered up and down his poems, glimpses of a landscape, not indeed of

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