In the success of this group was vindicated at last the principles of the naturalists of the dawn of the century. Here was a mixture of color, of melody, of mysticism, of sensuousness, of elaboration of form which carried originality and independence as far as it could well go in a direction which painted life primarily from the outside. But when this brilliant culminating flash of the early school of Coleridge and Keats began to burn itself out, there was Tennyson, who might be called the conservative wing of the romantic movement, dominant as ever, and Browning, the militant wing, advanced from his mid-century obscurity into a flood-tide of appreciation which was to bear him far onward toward literary pre-eminence, placing him among the few greatest names in literature. The originality of the pre-Raphaelites grew out of their welding of romantic, classical, and mediæval elements, tempered in each case by the special mental attitude of the poet. Rossetti and his brother artists, Millais and Holman Hunt, who founded the pre-Raphaelite brotherhood of painters, pledged themselves to the fundamental principle laid down by Rossetti in the little magazine they started called the _Germ_. This new creed was simple enough and ran: "The endeavor held in view throughout the writings on art will be to encourage and enforce an entire adherence to the simplicity of Nature." In their interpretation and development of this simple principle, artists and the poets who joined them differentiated from one another often to a wide extent. In Rossetti, it becomes an adoration of the beauty of woman expressed in ultra-sensuous though not in sensual imagery, combined with an atmosphere of religious wonder such as one finds in mediæval poets, of which "The Blessed Damozel" stands as a typical example. In it, as one appreciator has said, all the qualities of Rossetti's poetry are found. "He speaks alternately like a seer and an artist; one who is now bewitched with the vision of beauty, and now is caught up into Paradise, where he hears unutterable things. To him the spiritual world is an intense reality. He hears the voices, he sees the presences of the supernatural. As he mourns beside the river of his sorrow, like Ezekiel, he has his visions of winged and wheeling glory, and leaning over the ramparts of the world his gaze is fixed on the uncovered mysteries of a world to come. There is no poet to whom the supernatural has been so much alive. Religious doubt he seems never to have felt. But the temper of religious wonder, the old, childlike, monkish attitude of awe and faith in the presence of the unseen, is never absent in him. The artistic force of his temperament drives him to the worship of beauty; the poetic and religious forces to the adoration of mystery."