The

Rossettis

words given by the prophetic author of the Seven Lamps of Architecture. In each case. finding that the wine of imaginative writing had become watered in England, their design was to crush anew in a fiery vintage what Keats had called "joy's grape."

These poets were all mediæval in their spirit, but with a mediævalism that swept them on, not to asceticisms of an intellectual species, but to a plastic expansion in which they achieved a sort of new renaissance. In

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of D. G. Rossetti

them all, even in the saintly Christina, the instinct of physical beauty was very strongly developed; each of them was a phenomenal and sensuous being, dried up in the east wind of mere moral speculation, and turning to pure, material art, with its technical and corporeal qualities, for relief and satisfaction. They found the texture of those species of poetry in which they desired to excel much relaxed by the imitation of imitations of Tennyson. That great poet himself was in some danger of succumbing to flattery of what was least admirable in his talent. The date of their first books-the Defence of Guenevere, Goblin Market, the Early Italian Poets, and the Queen Mother and Rosamund (all between 1858 and 1862)—gives a false impression of the place the four poets occupy in the history of influence, for these volumes hardly attracted even the astonishment of the public, and the publication of Atalanta in Calydon (1865) really marked the beginning of a sensation which culminated in the overwhelming success of D. G. Rossetti's Poems in 1870.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882) was the eldest of the four children of Gab riele Rossetti, the Italian patriot and scholar, who escaped from Naples in 1822 and settled in 1825 in London, where he married Frances Polidori. The baptismal names of the future poet were Gabriel Charles Dante; he was born at 38 Charlotte Street on the 12th of May 1828. He was educated, from 1837 to 1843, at King's College School. From his fifth year he had a strong leaning to literature, but when he was about fifteen he became anxious to be a painter, and began to study at Cary's Art Academy; in 1846 he was admitted as a student to the Royal Academy, where he remained two years, leaving it to paint in the studio of Madox Brown. In 1849, in company with Millais, Mr. Holman Hunt, and others, Rossetti established the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood; he was now composing some of his most famous poems.

In 1849 the exhibition of the earliest of the much-contested P. R. B. pictures made a great stir around the names of the bold young associates in art, and, with a view to projecting their heretical views into literature also, the friends started, on New Year's Day, 1850, a periodical called The Germ, the purpose of which was "to encourage and enforce an entire adherence to the simplicity of nature." To this magazine, of which only four numbers appeared, Rossetti contributed twelve pieces, including, in verse, "The Blessed Damozel," and. in prose, "Hand and Soul." To a small but very ardent circle these contributions revealed a poet of the highest originality, but the critics of the day completely ignored The Germ. In this same year Rossetti left the rooms which he shared with Mr. Holman Hunt, in Cleveland Street, and took lodgings alone at 14 Chatham Place, Blackfriars' Bridge; here he worked hard both at poetry and painting, but made no

attempt to address the public in either

art.

Of the next ten years not much distinct record has been preserved. About 1850 Rossetti met, and about 1853 became engaged to, Elizabeth Siddall, the beautiful daughter of a tradesman, herself a milliner's assistant, who was willing to sit to him as a model. It was long impossible for them to marry, and Lizzie Siddall, who under Rossetti's training had shown a curious aptitude for painting, began to suffer seriously in health. At last, in May 1860, they were married at Hastings, and, after a trip to Paris, settled in Chatham Place. Mrs. Rossetti, under very painful and mysterious circumstances, died on the 11th of February 1862. During his brief married life Rossetti had made his first appearance as the writer of a book by publishing The Early Italian Poets, a volume of paraphrases, in 1861. At the close of this he announced a collection of his original poems, but on the day of his wife's funeral he slipped the only MS. of these into her coffin. After these events Rossetti went through a period of intense depression; in company with Mr. Swinburne and Mr. George Meredith (neither of whom stayed long) he took the house with which he is most identified, 16 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, in October 1862. Here he worked hard at his painting, which was now beginning to be greatly admired under the rose, and he surrounded himself with a menagerie of amusing pet animals; he gradually regained his serenity of mind. But his temperament was extremely neurotic, and his manner of work and his acquired habits of life were not calculated to support his constitution. He was threatened with blindness, and in 1867 general strain of the nervous system resulted in insomnia. The state of his eyes, although they slowly improved, cut him off from painting and recalled him to poetry, which he had for some time past neglected.

[W. & D. Downcy John Ruskin and D. G. Rossetti

He went for a long visit to a friend at Penkill Castle, Ayrshire, and there wrote a number of important poems. He became eager to publish, but the majority of the best of his pieces existed only in his wife's coffin. In October 1869 Lord Aberdare (as Home Secretary) gave permission for the disinterment of the MS., and in 1870, after many delays caused by Rossetti's excessive fastidiousness, the Poems were at last published. They created a sensation, and Rossetti took his place at once as one of the leading poets of the day. His undiluted satisfaction, however, lasted but a few months; towards the end of 1871 a writer of the day, under a false signature,

attacked the poetry of Rossetti with extraordinary fury and some little wit. "These mon

strous libels," Rossetti wrote,

cause me great pain; " other attacks followed, the importance of which the poet vastly overrated. He was suffering greatly at this time from insomnia, he was beginning to take chloral; and in 1872, upon a renewal of the attacks, he fell into a state of melancholia, and attempted suicide. He was taken to Scotland, and soon recovered to a certain extent, but he was never really well again. He shunned most of his friends, and lived a more and more eccentric life in his house in Cheyne Walk, the abuse of chloral now having become very serious indeed. It is said that for four years he never quitted his house except in the middle of the night, and then rarely venturing outside of the garden. In 1881 the very respectful and even enthusiastic reception of his second collecRossetti's House, 16 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea tion, Ballads and Sonnets, gave him temporary pleasure, but his naturally vigorous constitution was pletely undermined. He was struck down by paralysis, from which he partly recovered, and was moved to Birchington-on-Sea, where he died on Easter Sunday, 1882. D. G. Rossetti was short, swarthy, in early middle life somewhat stout, with very fiery eyes, sensuous mouth, and high-domed forehead. He had an element of the mysterious which fascinated those who touched the outer ring of his acquaintance, and a manner which was extremely winning before disease tinctured it with moroseness. He was far too vigorous not to court the buffeting of life, and far too sensitive not to suffer exquisite pain from it.

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