Even than the old gaze tenderer : Like tombs of pilgrims that have died Exquisite as is the beauty, the tenderness is as remarkable; and, for Rossetti, it is unique. It makes The Portrait exceptional, as I have said, in the body of his verse; and it is an exception which proves the rule. For elsewhere, alike where to me is the scent of violets, and to me the scent of poppies, I observe throughout one same quality in him. It connects all his many characteristics. It testifies to the empire over him of one literary canon and gospel. From old memories I enunciated it when I started. And now that I close the review of my more recent impressions of his poems I find my belief confirmed. More than Shelley-who was a priest of humanity as well as singermore even than Keats-in whom the distinct current of youth's warm blood, unchilled by the shadow of death, is perceptible-the rule with Rossetti is to be never other than a poet. While he recognizes in existence the requirements of other impulses, aims, and conditions-while he makes use of them himself-he never forgets, or pretends to forget, that for him their main object is to serve as poetic material. He shrinks from no sadness, sourness, ugliness, which will widen the compass of his lyre. I do not suppose I am libelling the general educated public if I find in that imperious eclecticism, or aestheticism, a key to his lack at all times of common popular favour. I cannot affect to be surprised when I recollect some of his beautiful monstrosities. After all, it is not an unwholesome instinct which demands of the poetic art that it shall be life's minister, sanctifying, purifying, and sweetening. Rossetti the poet recognized no such obligation any more than Rossetti the painter. Accordingly, the poet, like the painter, probably will continue to be worshipped by a sect, and not by a nation. However, poetry is a Kingdom with its own laws. It neither is obliged, nor desires, to be exclusive. Its borders are wide. They have made room for Dryden as for Milton, for Burns as for Cowper, for Byron as for Wordsworth. Well can they contain Rossetti also. Poems too have a being as well as the poet; and, so long as the language lasts, there are many of his which deserve always to be read, and some which will be. The Poetical Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, ed. by W. M. Rossetti. One vol. Ellis & Elvey, 1891. (Ballads and Sonnets, by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Fourth Edition. Ellis & White, 1882.) (The Early Italian Poets, A.D. 1100-1200-1300. Together with Dante's Vita Nuova, translated by D. G. Rossetti. Smith, Elder & Co., 1861.) 1 Rose Mary, Part I, p. 105. Ibid., Part II, p. 117. • Ibid., p. 144. Ibid., pp. 173-4. p. 110. • Ibid., p. 111 'The White Ship, pp. 140–5. • Ibid., The King's Tragedy, pp. 168-9. Ibid., p. 150. 10 Ibid., p. 175. 13 Sudden Light, p. 295. 11 Youth's Spring Tribute (The House of Life-a Sonnet Sequence), No. 14, p. 183. 12 Lost Joys (Ibid.), No. 86, p. 220. 14 The Portrait, stanzas 1, 3, 4, 7, 10, 11, 12, pp. 240-3. WILLIAM MORRIS 1834-1896 TAKE from the shelf a book by William Morris, new or old to you; read or re-read in it; and you will be very unwilling to put it down. The field is wide. The volume may be the wondrous quest of the Golden Fleece; the narrative enchants as if Orpheus again were the musician. A saga of the Volsungs may have furnished the theme; and you find charm in a riot of perfidy and slaughter. Or it may be a story from the mythology of Greece; of Perseus, Psyche, Alcestis, Pygmalion, Bellerophon. Yet another volume; and you are arbitrating between fallen Guinevere and her accuser, Sir Gauwaine; sitting with Launcelot, and his remorse, beside King Arthur's tomb; or watching with pure Sir Galahad for the Sangreal. Valiant deeds are described, and shameful or heroic dooms, of Gascon knights and Gascon thieves; torturing options between some sudden end to gay, glorious life, and its continuance with dishonour. The whole wide area of fancy, history, fable, Morris claims for his own, wherever his genius divines a possibility of foothold. Anywhere and everywhere he roofs-in a house, lighting a fire on the hearth to prove his title. There you too have been at home with him. You pass out, and forget his existence. It is a riddle very hard to guess why the reader who has gladly warmed his hands by the blaze, so rarely comes back; why, after having given apparently so much of himself to the poet, he carries little or nothing of the poet away. This is not the manner in which we treat, not merely the leaders of the choir of poets, Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Burns, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Browning, Tennyson, but others, like Gray, Goldsmith, Campbell. They are always with us. We have not to hunt for them. They come to meet us; they seek for us. The reason is that they were born winged, and fly. Morris's stories and ballads, though not wingless, stay by the nest. They cannot live without their native air and earth about them. The special message which he, like other poets, ordained prophets and preachers, had to deliver, was not itself, like many of theirs, of a nature to circulate, vibrating and echoing. His was a gospel of beauty, as was Keats's; only, Keats cared to dwell, almost to look, on nothing which was not in itself a thing of beauty. Morris saw beauty in everything, and was chained to that he saw by its very bulk. A massacre of Volsungs by Goths, for the Titanic magnitude of the treachery, rejoiced his Muse hardly less than the cruel daring which avenged it. The adultery of a hero's consort and his friend, treason, contrition, ecstasies of piety itself, and abiding heat of love purpled by the crime, painted his canvas with colours as precious to him as the virgin moonlight of Galahad's pilgrimage. Mark how he revels in the rich medley of the guilty Queen's remorse and longing, as she kneels before the Blessed Rood: 'Unless you pardon, what shall I do, Lord, To Camelot I heard once from a churl That curled me up upon my jennet's neck That I am beautiful, Lord, even as you And If even I go to hell, I cannot choose But love you, Christ, yea, though I cannot keep My own heart's love? see, though I cannot weep, Moreover, Christ, I cannot bear that hell; I am most fain to love you, and to win A place in heaven some time—I cannot tell Speak to me, Christ! I kiss, kiss, kiss your feet; Ah! now I weep!'-The maid said, ' By the tomb Not knowing what woe filled up all the room.1 He found food for sympathy and delight alike in the dauntless adventurousness of the Argonauts, in Medea's fratricide and lies, and in Jason's ungrateful infidelity. Opportunities were waiting everywhere to reward his insight and industry, whether in reconstructions of a savage feudalism, or in visions of democratic Gardens of Eden to be dotted about the happy wilds of re-afforested repentant Bloomsbury. Nay, his romance upholstered straightlegged chairs scattered here and there beside pomegranate wall-papers. All appealed to his instinct for picturesque variety, his horror of earthiness and monotony. He stamped himself, his tastes and distastes, visibly and tangibly, on cottages and palaces by the thousand or ten thousand. Spiritually he was audible in volume after volume of admirable verse and prose. Unlike his poet-peers, he did not absorb his subject into himself; rather, he sought to incorporate himself into it. His aim was to suffuse history and life with the atmosphere of lovely possibilities he |