lens could really well succeed in embracing them in one focus. As an experiment of how much can be got into fourteen lines it possesses great merit; but it is not a sonnet in the true sense of the word. The lines printed opposite to it, and entitled The Last Three from Trafalgar, are of a very different order, and constitute not only one of Rossetti's most striking sonnets but form also perhaps the most powerful utterance that has been given in days when Trafalgar is beginning to seem far off. Another fine composition is that on the late Czar, Alexander the Second, and I may take this opportunity of stating that Rossetti was not so indifferent to great political questions as is generally supposed. Though a liberal in politics, his sympathies (as he said) "were with the man who by liberating forty million serfs brought upon himself the hatred of those blood-thirsty agitators that are impeding Europe in the march of progress." Words on the WindowPane is characteristic, but it is spoiled in music by the fourth line" scratched it through tettered cark;" and that on the Place de la Bastille is sympathetic with its affecting subject. Winter and Spring are two very beautiful "natural" sonnets, the former being especially picturesque; but the closing lines of Spring exhibit a reversion from "natural" to literary poetry very characteristic of the author whenever attempting transcription from nature.

The Church Porch was written about 1852 and was the first of two sonnets with the same raison d'être, but the author did not wish the second to be printed: it is representative of the reaction experienced in finding a soulless service in the building wherein were expected to be found

66 Silence, and sudden dimness, and deep prayer,
And faces of crowned angels all about."

Untimely Lost is a pathetic and beautiful tribute to the memory of Oliver Madox Brown from whose genius Rossetti, in common with many others, expected so much good fruit, expectations that were so sadly and prematurely disappointed.

Having now referred to nearly all the printed pictorial and miscellaneous sonnets other than those added to The House of Life, I will conclude this chapter with two not to be found in either volume.1 The first appeared in the Academy for 15th February 1871 and is dated from Stratford-on-Avon, and is a good example of Rossetti's humour and earnestness in one; the second is addressed to Mr. Philip Bourke Marston, the author of Song-Tide, etc., and a friend of younger years whom Rossetti both loved and believed in, and whose powers are all the more remarkable from the terrible disadvantage of blindness.

ON THE SITE OF A MULBERRY TREE;

Planted by Wm. Shakespeare; felled by the Rev. F. Gastrell.

This tree, here fall'n, no common birth or death

Shared with its kind. The world's enfranchised son,
Who found the trees of Life and Knowledge one,

Here set it, frailer than his laurel-wreath.

Shall not the wretch whose hand it fell beneath

Rank also singly-the supreme unhung?

Lo! Sheppard, Turpin, pleading with black tongue

This viler thief's unsuffocated breath!

1 For the fine sonnet Raleigh's Cell in the Tower, see Mr. Caine's Sonnets of Three Centuries.

We'll search thy glossary, Shakespeare! whence almost, And whence alone, some name shall be revealed

For this deaf drudge, to whom no length of ears Sufficed to catch the music of the spheres ; Whose soul is carrion now,-too mean to yield Some tailor's ninth-allotment of a ghost.

To P. B. MARSTON.

Sweet poet, thou of whom these years that roll
Must one day, yet, the burdened birthright learn,
And by the darkness of thine eyes discern

How piercing was the sight within thy soul,
Gifted, apart, thou goest to the great goal,

A cloud-bound, radiant spirit, strong to earn,
Light-reft, that prize for which fond myriads yearn
Vainly, light-blest,-the seer's aureole.

And doth thine ear, divinely dowered to catch

All spheral sounds, in thy song blent so well, Still hearken for my voice's slumbering spell With wistful love? ah! let the muse now snatch My wreath for thy young brows, and bend to watch Thy veiled, transfiguring sense's miracle.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE HOUSE OF LIFE.

"Should he (Rossetti) complete The House of Life upon its original projection, he will leave a monument of beauty more lasting than the tradition of his presence."

E. C. STEDMAN, Victorian Poets.

"Above all ideal personalities with which the poet must learn to identify himself, there is one supremely real which is the most imperative of all; namely, that of his reader. And the practical watchfulness needed for such assimilation is as much a gift and instinct as is the creative grasp of alien character. It is a spiritual contact hardly conscious yet ever renewed, and which must be a part of the very act of production."

D. G. ROSSETTI.

BOTH these quotations are very apropos to the subject, the first being a concise statement of a fact that is almost beyond doubt, and the second an utterance of peculiar significance in connection with the author himself and with the famous Sonnet-Sequence called The House of Life. The latter statement is a dictum that Rossetti acted up to in the main, but which he by no means invariably fulfilled: the greater part of the House of Life does conform to the artistic requirement that the sympathetic bond between poet and reader must take precedence of ideal personalities, but not infrequently is the reader arrested by obscurity of expression, by a too subjective motif or treatment of

motif, and by an absence of certain qualities where such might have been expected. While it is beyond doubt that the poet has in this series left behind him a monument of beauty that will last as long or longer than the tradition of his presence, it must be admitted that it does not embrace one-half of what constitutes the life of emotion, and that the title is a misnomer in so far as it is meant to be an adequate representation of the life spiritual. The House of Life is too significant a name to be mainly limited only to the expression of all the varying emotions that accompany the passion of love, for nothing can then be given to the passion of the intellect, little or nothing to wider human hopes and fears, to the longings and aspirations of the individual soul and of a spirit sympathetic with the general life of humanity. So that in the beautiful work of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (for one work it is despite its composition being of an hundred sonnets, as much as the collection of lyrics called In Memoriam is a poetic unity), while we find the most subtle shades of personal pain, regret, shadowy hope, remorse, spiritual agony, love, passion, rapture, foreboding, despondency, frustration, we do! not in addition find the high hope of the soul that we associate with Shelley or the joy in life so characteristic of Keats. We pass through a shadowy land, remote from the pathways of men,

"Nor spire may rise nor bell be heard therefrom

where seldom the wind rises from the "secret groves into wide, sweet, and passionate force, where the rustling leaves are like regrets and sorrows, and the flowers like remembered joys, and where the dull