The phase of romanticism carried to its climax by the pre-Raphaelite poets Rossetti and his sister, Morris and Swinburne had, like the work of Tennyson, its full recognition, in its own time, because these poets, like him, have put into exquisite music romantic subjects derived both from the classics and from mediæval legend. The new note of sensuousness, due largely to the Italian influence of Rossetti, with his sensuous temperament, his intensity of passion and his love of art, and also in Morris and Swinburne to their pagan feeling, one of the elements inaugurated by the general breaking down of orthodox religious ideals through the encroachments of science, does not seem to have affected their popularity. As there were those who would sympathize with the Tennysonian attitude toward doubt, and those who would sympathize with Matthew Arnold's, there were others to feel like Swinburne, pantheistic, and, like Morris, utterly hopeless of a future, while others again might criticise the pagan feeling, but, with their inheritance of beauty from Tennyson and his predecessors of the dawn of the century, would delight in these new developments of the romantic spirit. [Illustration: A. C. SWINBURNE] Ruskin is said to have been the original inspirer of these four poets, though Fitz-Gerald's "Rubaiyat" of Omar Khayyám was not without its influence. But as Edmund Gosse says, "The attraction of the French romances of chivalry for William Morris, of Tuscan painting for D. G. Rossetti, of the spirit of English Gothic architecture for Christina Rossetti, of the combination of all these with Greek and Elizabethan elements for Swinburne, were to be traced back to start--words given by the prophetic author of the 'Seven Lamps of Architecture.'" Though the first books of this group of poets, the "Defence of Guenevere" (1858), "Goblin Market," "Early Italian Poets," "Queen Mother and Rosamond" (1861), did not make any impression on the public, with the publication of Swinburne's "Atalanta in Calydon" an interest was awakened which reached a climax with the publication of Rossetti's poems in 1870. Rossetti had thrown these poems into his wife's grave, as the world knows, but was prevailed upon to have them recovered and published.