noble work and love. All incidents and traditions of the great poet's exile are welded together in fusion of ardent verse to forge a memorial as of carven gold. The pure plain ease and force of narrative style melt now and then into the fire of a sad rapture, a glory of tragedy lighting the whole vision as with a funereal and triumphal torch. Even the words of that letter in which Dante put away from him the base conditions of return-words matchless among all that ever a poet found to speak for himself, except only by those few supreme words in which Milton replied to the mockers of his blindness-even these are worthily recast in the mould of English verse by the might and cunning of this workman's hand. Witness the original set against his version.

"Non est hæc via redeundi ad patriam, Pater mi; sed si alia per vos aut deinde per alios invenietur, quæ famæ Dantis atque honori non deroget, illam non lentis passibus acceptabo. Quod si per nullam talem Florentia introitur, nunquam Florentiam introibo. Quidni? nonne solis astrorumque specula ubique conspiciam? Nonne dulcissimas veritates potero speculari ubique sub cœlo, ni priùs inglorium, immo ignominiosum, populo Florentinæque civitati me reddam ?—Quippe nec panis deficiet.”

So wrote Dante in 1316; now partly rendered into English to this effect:

"That since no gate led, by God's will,
To Florence, but the one whereat
The priests and money-changers sat,
He still would wander: for that still,
Even through the body's prison bars,
His soul possessed the sun and stars."

These and the majestic lines which follow them as comment have the heart of that letter in them; the letter which we living now cannot read without the sense of a double bitterness and sweetness in its sacred speech, so lamentably and so gloriously applicable to the loftiest heir of Dante's faith and place; of his faith as patriot, of his place as exile. It seems that the same price is still fixed for them to pay who have to buy with it the inheritance of sun and stars and the sweetest truths, and all generations of time, and the love and thanks and passionate remembrance of all faithful men for ever.

This poem is sustained throughout at the fit height with the due dignity; nothing feeble or jarring disturbs its equality of exultation. The few verses of bitter ardour which brand as a prostitute the commonweal which has become a common wrong-the common goddess deformed into a common harlot-show a force of indignant imagination worthy of a great poetic satirist, of Byron and Hugo in their worst wrath. The brief pictures of the courtly life at Verona between women and rhymesters, jester and priests, have a living outline and colour; and the last words have the weight in them of time's own sentence:

"Eat and wash hands, Can Grande; scarce

We know their names now; hands which fed
Our Dante with that bitter bread,

And thou the watch-dog of those stairs
Which, of all paths his feet knew well,

Were steeper found than heaven or hell."

No words could more fitly wind up the perfect weft of the poem in which throughout the golden thread of Dante's own thought, the hidden light of his solitude at intervals between court-play and justice-work, gleams now and again at each turn of the warp till we feel as though a new remnant of that great spirit's leaving had been Vouchsafed us.

Another poem bearing the national mark upon it may be properly named with this, the "Last Confession." Its tragic hold of truth and grasp of passion make it worthy to bear witness to the writer's inheritance of patriotic blood and spirit. Its literal dramatic power of detail and composition is a distinctive test of his various wealth and energy of genius. This great gift of positive reality, here above all things requisite, was less requisite elsewhere, and could not have been shown to exist by any proof derivable from his other poems; though to any student of his designs and pictures the admirable union of this inventive fidelity to whatever of fact is serviceable to the truth of art, with the infinite affluence and gracious abundance of imagination, must be familiar enough; the subtle simplicity of perception which keeps sight always of ideal likelihood and poetical reason is as evident in his most lyrical and fanciful paintings as in Giorgione's or Carpaccio's. Without the high instinct and fine culture of this quality such a poem as we now have in sight could not have been attempted. The plain heroism of noble naked nature and coherent life is manifest from the first delicate detail to the last. The simple agony of memory inflames every line with native colour. A boyish patriot in hiding from the government finds a child forsaken in time of famine by her parents, saves and supports her sets his heart towards hers more and more with the growth of years, to find at last the taint upon her of a dawning shame, of indifference and impurity—the hard laugh of a harlot on her lips, and in her bearing the dull contempt of a harlot for love and memory. Stabbed and stung through by this sudden show of the snake's fang as it turns upon the hand which cherished it, he slays her; and even in his hour of martyrdom, dying of wounds taken in a last fight for Italy, is haunted by the lovely face and unlovely laugh of the girl he had put out of reach of shame. But the tender truth and grace, the living heat and movement of the tragedy through every detail, the noble choice and use of incident, make out of this plain story a poem beyond price. Upon each line of drawing there has been laid the strong and loving hand of a great artist, and specially a supreme

painter of fair women. In the study of the growing girl the glories of sculpture and painting are melted into one, and every touch does divine service;

“The underlip

Sucked in as if it strove to kiss itself;"

the pale face "as when one stoops over wan water;" the "deepserried locks," the rounded clinging finger-tips, and great eyes faint with passion or quivering with hidden springs of mirth,

"As when a bird flies low

Between the water and the willow-leaves,

And the shade quivers till he wins the light."

In what poet's work shall we find a touch of more heavenly beauty, and nobler union of truth and charm? and in what painter's a statelier and sweeter mastery of nature than here?

"Her body bore her neck as the tree's stem

Bears the top branch: and as the branch sustains
The flower of the year's pride, her high neck bore
Her face made wonderful with night and day."

The purest pathos of all is in the little episode of the broken figure of Love, given to the child by her preserver, and the wound of its dart on her hand; nothing in conception or in application could be tenderer or truer ; nothing more glorious in its horror than the fancy of heaven changing at its height before the very face of a spirit in paradise, with no reflection of him left on it:

"Like a pool that once gave back

Your image, but now drowns it, and is clear
Again; or like a sun bewitched, that burns

Your shadow from you, and still shines in sight."

Admirable as it is throughout for natural and moral colour, the poem is completed and crowned for eternity by the song set on the front of it as a wreath on a bride's hair, of which I can hardly say whether the Italian or the English form be the more divine. The miraculous faculty of transfusion which enables the cupbearer to pour this wine of verse from the golden into the silver cup without spilling was never before given to man. All Mr. Rossetti's translations bear the same evidence of a power not merely beyond reach but beyond attempt of other artists in language. Wonderful as is the proof of it shown by his versions of Dante and his fellows, of Villon's and other ballad-songs of old France, the capacity of recasting in English an Italian poem of his own seems to me more wonderful; and what a rare and subtle piece of work has been done here, they only can appreciate who have tried carefully and failed utterly to refashion in one language a song thrown off in another. This is the kind of test which stamps the supremacy of an artist,

answering in poetry to the subtlest successes of the same hand in painting. Whether or not there be now living a master in colours who can match the peculiar triumphs of its touch, there is assuredly no master in words. The melodies of these in their Italian form can never die out of the ear and heart they have once pierced with their keen and sovereign sweetness. This song would suffice to redeem the whole story from the province of pain, even though the poet had not left upon us the natural charm of that hope which comes in with death, that the woman grown hard and bad was indeed no less a lie, an error, a spectral show, than the laughing ghost of her forged by bodily pain and recollection.

By this poem we may set for contrast, in witness of the artist's clear wide scope of work and power, the "Burden of Nineveh;" a study of pure thought and high meditation, perhaps for sovereignty of language and strong grasp of spirit the greatest of his poems. The contemplation that brings forth such fruit should be a cherub indeed, having wings and eyes as an eagle's. The solemn and splendid metre, if I mistake not, is a new instrument of music for English hands. In those of its fashioner it makes harmonies majestic as any note of the heights or depths of natural sound. No highest verse can excel the mighty flow and chiming force of its continuous modulation, bearing on foamless waves of profound song its flock of winged thoughts and embodied visions. We hear in it as it were. for once the sound of time's soundless feet, feel for once the beat of his unfelt wings in their passage through unknown places, and centuries without form and void. Echoes and gleams come with it from "the dark backward and abysm" of dateless days; a sighing sound from the graves of gods, a wind through the doors of death which opened on the early world. The surviving shadow of the BullGod is as the shadow of death on past and passing ages, visible and recognisable by the afterlight of thought. Of the harmonious might and majesty of imagination which sustains the "speculative and active instrument" of song, we might take as separate samples the verses on its old days of worship from kings and queens, of light from lamps of prayer or fires of ruin; on the elder and later gods confused with its confusion, "all relics here together;" on the cities that rose and fell before the city of its worshippers; of their desolation and its own in the days of Christ. The stanza on the vision of the temptation has a glory on it as of Milton's work :—

"The day when he, Pride's lord and man's,
Shewed all earth's kingdoms at a glance

To Him before whose countenance

The years recede, the years advance,

And said, 'Fall down and worship me:'—

'Mid all the pomp beneath his look

Then stirred there, haply, some rebuke

Where to the wind the salt pools shook,

And in those tracts, of life forsook,

That knew thee not, O Nineveh!"

And what more august and strenuous passion of thought was ever clothed in purple of more imperial speech than consummates and concludes the poem ? as, dreaming of a chance by which in the far future this God, found again a relic in a long-ruined city, might be taken for the God of its inhabitants, the thinker comes to find in it indeed "the God of this world" and no dead idol, but a living deity and very present strength; having wings, but not to fly with; and eyes, but not to look up with; bearing a written witness and a message engraved of which he knows not, and cannot read it; crowned, but not for honour; brow-bound with a royal sign, of oppression only and contraction; firm of foot, but resting the weight of its trust on clay :

"O Nineveh, was this thy God,

Thine also, mighty Nineveh ?"

A certain section of Mr. Rossetti's work as poet and as painter may be classed under the head of sacred art: and this section comprises much of his most exquisite and especial work. Its religious quality is singular and personal in kind; we cannot properly bracket it with any other workman's. The fire of feeling and imagination which feeds it is essentially Christian, and is therefore formally and spiritually Catholic. It has nothing of rebellious Protestant personality, nothing of the popular compromise of sentiment which, in the hybrid jargon of a school of hybrids, we may call liberalized Christianism. The influence which plainly has passed over the writer's mind, attracting it as by charm of sound or vision, by spell of colour or of dream, towards the Christian forms and images, is in the main an influence from the mythologic side of the creed. It is from the sandbanks of tradition and poetry that the sacred sirens have sung to this seafarer. This divides him at once from the passionate evangelists of positive belief and from the artists upon whom no such influence has fallen in any comparable degree. There are two living and leading writers of high and diverse genius whom any student of their work-utterly apart as their ways of work lie—may and must, without prejudice or presumption, assume to hold fast, with a force of personal passion, the radical tenet of Christian faith. It is as difficult for a reasonable reader to doubt the actual and positive adherence to Christian doctrine of the Protestant thinker as of the Catholic priest; to doubt that faith in Christ as God-a tough, hard, vital faith which can bear at need hard stress of weather and hard thought-dictated "A Death in the Desert" or "Christmas Eve and Easter Day," as to doubt that it dictated the "Apologia" or "Dream of Gerontius:" though neither in the personal creed set forth by Mr. Browning, nor in the clerical