Showing him well, and making his commands Seem to be God's commands, moreover, too, Holding within his hands the cloths on wands; And one of these strange choosing cloths was blue, Wavy and long, and one cut short and red: No man could tell the better of the two. After a shivering half-hour you said: 'God help! Heaven's colour, the blue'; and he said, 'Hell!' Perhaps you then would roll upon your bed, And cry to all good men that loved you well, 'Ah, Christ! If only I had known, known, known;' Launcelot went away, then I could tell, Like wisest men, how all things would be, moan, And roll and hurt myself, and long to die, And yet fear much to die for what was sown. Nevertheless you, O Sir Gawaine, lie, Whatever may have happened through these years, God knows I speak truth, saying that you lie." All these rough, harsh _terza-rime_ lines are wonderful enough in their nakedness of sensations--sensations of heat, of hell, of heaven, of colours, of death, of life, of moans, and of lies. It is, in a sense, as far as such experiments go, a return to the Middle Ages; to what was exotic in them and strange and narcotic. Only here, as in _Les Litanies de Satan_ of Baudelaire--to which they have some remote likeness--there are no interludes of wholesome air, as through open doors, on these hot, impassioned scenes. Rossetti says somewhere that no modern poet, and that few poets of any century, ever compressed into so small a space so much imaginative material as he himself always did; and this, I conceive, partly, also, from that almost child-like imagination of his, for all its intellectual subtlety, that dominated him to such an extent that to tell him anything of a specially tragic or pathetic nature was cruel, so vividly did he realize every situation; and also because of his wonderful saying in regard to his own way of weaving an abominable line at the end of one of his finest sonnets into a sublime one: "Life touching lips with Immortality:" that the line he had used before belonged to the class of phrase absolutely forbidden in poetry. "It is intellectually incestuous poetry seeking to beget its emotional offspring on its own identity; whereas the present line gives only the momentary contact with the immortal which results from sensuous culmination, and is always a half-conscious element of it."