articulation must imply depth and wealth of thought. This flattering unction the very foolishest of malignants will hardly in this case be able to lay upon the corrosive sore which he calls his soul: the ulcer of ill-will must rot unrelieved by the rancid ointment of such fiction. Hardly could a fool here or a knave there fail to see or hope to deny the fullness of living thought and subtle strength of nature underlying this veil of radiant and harmonious words. It is on the other side that attack might be looked for from the more ingenious enemies of good work: and of these there was never any lack. Much of Mr. Rossetti's work is so intense in aim, so delicate and deep in significance, so exuberant in offshoot and undergrowth of sentiment and thought, that even the sweet lucidity and steady current of his style may not suffice to save it from the charges of darkness and difficulty. He is too great a master of speech to incur the blame of hard or tortuous expression; and his thought is too sound and pure to be otherwise dark than as a deep well-spring at noon may be, even where the sun is strongest and the water brightest. In its furthest depth there is nothing of weed or of mud; whatever of haze may seem to quiver there is a weft of the sun's spinning, a web not of woven darkness but of molten light. But such work as this can be neither unwoven nor recast by any process of analysis. The infinite depth and wealth of life which breathes and plays among these songs and sonnets cannot be parcelled and portioned out for praise or comment. This "House of Life" has in it so many mansions, so many halls of state and bowers of music, chapels for worship and chambers for festival, that no guest can declare on a first entrance the secret of its scheme. Spirit and sense together, eyesight and hearing and thought, are absorbed in splendour of sounds and glory of colours distinguishable only by delight. But the scheme is solid and harmonious; there is no waste in this luxury of genius: the whole is lovelier than its loveliest part. Again and again may one turn the leaves in search of some one poem or some two which may be chosen for sample and thanksgiving; but there is no choice to be made. Sonnet is poured upon sonnet, and song hands on the torch to song; and each in turn (as another poet has said of the lark's note falling from the height of dawn) "Rings like a golden jewel down a golden stair." There are no poems of the class in English-I doubt if there be any even in Dante's Italian-so rich at once and pure. Their golden affluence of images and jewel-coloured words never once disguises the firm outline, the justice and chastity of form. No nakedness could be more harmonious, more consummate in its fleshly sculpture, than the imperial array and ornament of this august poetry. Mailed in gold as of the morning and girdled with gems of strange water, the beautiful body as of a carven goddess gleams through them tangible and taintless, without spot or default. There is not a jewel here but it fits, not a beauty but it subserves an end. There seems no story in this sequence of sonnets, yet they hold in them all the action and passion of a spiritual history with tragic stages and elegiac pauses and lyric motions of the living soul. Their earnest subtleties and exquisite ardours recall to mind the sonnets of Shakespeare; poems in their way unapproachable, and here in no wise imitated. Shakespeare's have at times a far more passionate and instant force, a sharper note of delight or agony or mystery, fear, or desire or remorse -a keener truth and more pungent simpleness of sudden phrase, with touches of sound and flashes of light beyond all reach; Mr. Rossetti's have a nobler fullness of form, a more stately and shapely beauty of build: they are of a purer and less turbid water than the others are at times, and not less fervent when more serene than they; the subjectmatter of them is sweet throughout, natural always and clear, however intense and fine in remote and delicate intricacy of spiritual stuff. There is nothing here which may not be felt by any student who can grasp the subtle sense of it in full, as a just thing and admirable, fit for the fellowship of men's feelings; if men, indeed, have in them enough of noble fervour and loving delicacy, enough of truth and warmth in the blood and breath of their souls, enough of brain and heart for such fellow-feeling. For something of these they must have to bring with them who would follow the radiant track of this verse through brakes of flowers and solitudes of sunlight, past fountains hidden under green bloom of leaves, beneath roof-work of moving boughs where song and silence are one music. All passion and regret and strenuous hope and fiery contemplation, all beauty and glory of thought and vision, are built into this golden house where the life that reigns is love; the very face of sorrow is not cold or withered, but has the breath of heaven between its fresh live lips and the light of pure sweet blood in its cheeks; there is a glow of summer on the red leaves of its regrets and the starry frost-flakes of its tears. Resignation and fruition, forethought and afterthought, have one voice to sing with in many keys of spirit. A more bitter sweetness of sincerity was never pressed into verse than beats and burns here under the veil and girdle of glorious words; there are no poems anywhere of more passionate meditation or vision more intense than those on "Lost Days," "Vain Virtues," "The Sun's Shame;" none of more godlike grace and sovereign charm than those headed "Newborn Death," "A Superscription," "A Dark Day," "Known in Vain," "The One Hope;" and of all splendid and profound lovepoetry, what is there more luminous or more deep in sense and spirit than the marvellous opening cycle of twenty-six sonnets, which embrace and express all sorrow and all joy of passion in union, of outer love and inner, triumphant or dejected or piteous or at peace? No one, till he has read these, knows all of majesty and melody, all of energy and emotion, all of supple and significant loveliness, all of tender cunning and exquisite strength, which our language can show at need in proof of its powers and uses. The birth of love, his eucharistic presence, his supreme vision, his utter union in flesh and spirit, the secret of the sanctuary of his heart, his louder music and his lower, his graver and his lighter seasons; all work of love and all play, all dreams and devices of his memory and his belief, all fuller and emptier hours from the first which longs for him to the last which loses, all change of lights from his mid-day to his moonrise, all his foreknowledge of evil things and good, all glad and sad hours of his night-watches, all the fear and ardour which feels and fights against the advent of his difference and dawn of his division, all agonies and consolations that embitter and allay the wounds of his mortal hour; the pains of breach and death, the songs and visions of the wilderness of his penance, the wood of desolation made beautiful and bitter by the same remembrance, haunted by shadows of the same hours for sorrow and for solace, and, beyond all, the light of the unaccomplished hour which missed its chance in one life to meet it in another, where the sundered spirits revive into reunion; all these things are here done into words and sung into hearing of men as they never were till now. With a most noble and tender power all forms and colours of the world without are touched and drawn into service of the spirit; and this with no ingenious abuse of imagery or misuse of figures, but with such gracious force of imagination that they seem to offer voluntary service. What interlude more radiant than that of the "Portrait," more gracious and joyous than the "Love-Letter," more tender than the remembered "Birth-Bond," more fervent than the memorial "Day of Love," more delicate than the significance of "Love's Baubles," more deep and full than the bitter-sweet "Life-in-Love," more soft in spiritual shade of changeful colour than "The LoveMoon," more subtly solemn in tragic and triumphant foresight than "The Morrow's Message," more ardent with finer fires and more tremulous with keener senses than the sonnets of parting, than "Broken Music," or "Death-in-Love," ever varied the high delight of verse, the sublime sustention of choral poetry through the length of an imperial work? In the sonnet called "Love-Sweetness" there is the very honey of pure passion, the expression and essence of its highest thought and wisdom; and in that called "He and I," the whole pain and mystery of growing change. Even Shelley never expressed the inmost sense and mighty heart of music as this poet has done in "The Monochord." There are no lyrics in our lyrical English tongue of sweeter power than the least of these which follow the sonnets. The "Song of the Bower" is sublime by sheer force of mere beauty; the sonorous fluctuation of its measure, a full tide under a full moon, of passion lit and led by memory to and fro beneath fiery and showery skies of past and future, has such depth and weight in its moving music that the echo of it is as a seashell in the mind's ear for ever. Observe the glorious change of note from the delicate colour of the second stanza to the passionate colour of the third; the passage from soft bright symbols to the actual fire of vision and burning remembrance; from the shelter of soul under soul and mirror of tears wherein heart sees heart, to the grasp and glow of "Large lovely arms and a neck like a tower" growing incarnate upon the sight of memory: and again to the deep dim witness and warning, the foresight and regret which lighten and darken the ways of coming life. This is perhaps, for style at once ample and simple, the noblest song of all; yet it is but one of many noble. Among these others I find none which clings by itself so long and close to the mind as one outside their circle— the song of the sea-beach, called "Even So;" it dies out with a suppressed sigh like the last breath or heartbeat of a yearning weakwinged wind. "A Little While" is heavy with all the honey of foretasted sorrow, sweeter in its aftertaste than the joy resigned, with a murmur beyond music in its speech. The perfect pity of the two last lines has the touch on it of plain truth and patience; "I'll tell thee when the end is come In "Plighted Promise" and "Love Lily" the white flame of delight breathes and trembles in a subtler air, with a sure and faultless charm of motion. I like the first stanza of "Sudden Light "better than the second and third, admirably as they are fashioned and set to the music of the thought they have less seeming effusion of an insuppressible sense; and the touches of colour and odour and sound in it are almost too fine in their harmony to be matched with any later. There is not a more delicate note of magic nature in these poems. The tremulous ardour of "Penumbra" is another witness to the artist's mastery of hand; the finest nerves of life are finely touched; the quiver and ache of soul and senses to which all things are kindled and discoloured by half morbid lights of emotion give a burning pulse of melody to the verses. The same fear or doubt which here is attired in fancies of feverish beauty finds gentler utterance, again outside this circle, in "A New Year's Burden;" the tone and colour have always a fresh and sure harmony. Four poems in a different key from such songs are "The Sea-Limits," "A Young Fir-Wood," "The Honeysuckle," "The Woodspurge;" not songs, but studies of spirit and thought, concrete and perfect. The first of these has the solemn weight and depth in it of living water, and a sound like the speech of 母 the sea when the wind is silent. The very note of that world-old harmony is caught and cast into words. "Consider the sea's listless chime: Time's self it is, made audible: The murmur of the earth's own shell." This little verse also has the "Socret continuance sublime" which "is the sea's end;" it too is a living thing with an echo beyond reach of the sense, its chord of sound one part of the multiform unity of mutual inclusion in which all things rest and mix; like the sigh of the shaken shell, it utters "the same desire and mystery" as earth through its woods, and water through its waves, and man through his multitudes: it too has in it a breath of the life immeasurable and imperishable. The other three of these studies have something of the same air and flavour: their keen truthfulness and subtle sincerity touch the same springs and kindle the same pulses of thought. The passionate accuracy of sense half blunted and half whetted by obsession and possession of pain is given in "The Woodspurge" with a bitterly beautiful exactitude. In all the glorious poem built up of all these poems there is no great quality more notable than the sweet and sovereign unity of perfect spirit and sense, of fleshly form and intellectual fire. This Muse is as the woman praised in the divine words of the poet himself, "Whose speech Truth knows not from her thought, And if not love, how then should judgment? for love and judgment Other parts of his work done here have upon them the more instant sign of that sponsor and master of his mind; there is a special and delicate savour of personal interest in the sonnet on the "darkness" of Dante, sacred to the fame of a father made again illustrious in his children, which will be cherished with a warm reverence by all heedful students. The poem of "Dante at Verona" stands apart among the rest with a crown on it of the like consecration, as perhaps the loftiest monument of all raised by the devotion of a race of genius for two generations of |