He partly recovered his mental poise, and for a time entirely recovered his poetic and artistic faculties, which seemed at first not to be affected by his use of chloral. Several of his best pictures belong to this time; the (Bal lads and Sonnets' were published in 1881. These last years however, were years of pitful suf fering ana gradual collapse. His friends shel tered him from his worst moods and cared for him to the end.
In both painting and poetry Rossetti's per. sonality expressed itself with unusual evenness throughout his career, and in 'The Blessed Damozel,' one of his earliests, almost all his qualities can be traced. ire so much of his other writing, it was illustrated, set to painting, as it were, by himself ; but without such aid the pictorial genius is strong in the verse. The ideas are typically concrete; not only the Damozel, leaning on the bar of Heaven, is seen, with the lilies in her hand, and on earth the fall of autumn leaves, and in the sky the moon)); but from all points of view the appeal is to the eyes, as in that imag inative glimpse of the world spinning far below the bridge of Heaven; and in the picture of souls ascending to God like thin flames—such as William Blake could have drawn; and in that level flight') of the angels. The three lilies in the Damozel's hand and the seven stars in her hair, and the five handmaidens of the Virgin are definitely numbered for the effect of concreteness ,• Rossetti habitually employs the device, as Keats employed it in the 'Belle Dame Sans Merci,> after the manner of the old English ballads — a manner that strongly influenced Rossetti. Partly from the ballads 'The Blessed Damozel' derived some of its mediaeval flavor ; but the quality was really per sonal with the poet. Here as in his other poems Rossetti manages to reproduce •the romance of the archaic, without any great reproduction .of the archaic itself. The furnishing of Heaven in the poem is quaint and remote, in effect like the lovely names of the five handmaidens; but the thought or attitude of no particular past time is revived. Perhaps some of this pseudo archaic flavor comes from the strange verse music, which Rossetti introduced into English. The secret of much of its charm is veiled in the poet's genius, but its most striking trait, its melancholy evenness, can be explained by Rosy. setti's training in Italian prosody. In writing English poetry he departs radically from the genius of English metre; instead of fitting the words, with their natural accents undisturbed, into the regular beat of the verse — so placing them that the natural reading of the line would determine the rhythm,-, Rossetti allows a pre conceived rhythm to determine the accent of the words, as in the line her five hand.
maidens, whose etc.
These characteristics of 'The Blessed Damo zel,) and others besides, reappear more marked in other poems —the subtlety of thought, in 'Love's Nocturne' ; the mediaeval mood of de votion, altogether or almost religious, in 'Ave,' and in 'The Portrait,) with its splendid closing image; the ballad element, together with the unusual skill in reproducing physical sensation, in 'Eden Bower,) "Troy Town,) and the longer ballads; and the same sad, even music in them all Among his other verse the elaborate ballads —'Rose Mary,) 'The White Ship,' 'The Males Tragedy,' show Rossetti's debt to ballad lit erature, and at the same time mark the wide gulf between the clear simplicity of the old nar ratives and the wrought loveliness of his work. In his shorter ballads, however, such as 'Strat ton Water,) he is much simpler. What hold he had on real life is powerfully concentrated in 'Jenny,) probably his most thoughtful poem.
Rossetti's sonnet sequence, 'The House of Life,) undoubtedly places him among the mas ters of the sonnet form, though none of the son nets, perhaps, are so well known as 'The Blessed Damozel.' Technically, they have more of the rise and fall of the best Italian models than is usual in English poetry, and at times, as in the first sonnet, or the 24th or the 25th, their cadence is superb. But in many of them the mystical subject matter is baffling, and Rossetti's characteristic evenness of manner, here also an evenness of mood, makes the sequence monot onous at last. Perhaps Rossetti's best sonnets were written singly for pictures as the beau tiful (Lilith,) and the 'Venus with the three wonderful lines at the end.
The most widely known of Rossetti's trans lations are the three from Villon, especially the 'Ballad of Dead Ladies,) and Dante's Nuova.) In all of his translated verse, how ever, the same traits are found as in his origi nal the same exquisite, rather than great mood, the same concrete, yet remote, aspects of beauty, and the same un-English music of the verse. He has many imitators in both his arts. See HOUSE or LIFE.
Bibliography.— The best edition is by W. M. Rossetti. For and criticism, con sult Introduction to the above; 'Dante Gabriel Rossetti; His Family with memoir by Rossetti, W. M.•, Caine, Hall, 'Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti); Pater,Walter, in i the same essay in Ward's 'English Recent studies are by Ben son, A. C. (1905) ; Marellier (1901); Singer (1908), and Symons, Arthur (1909).
Jonw EsSIC/NE, Adjunct Professor of English in Columbia Uni versity.