An estimate of the disposition and character of such a man as Rossetti will not be lightly attempted by those who can only honour his memory from afar; having never added to the deep enjoyment of his art the privilege of personal intercourse with the artist. His tender and passionate affection, his chivalrous loyalty, his gracious _bonhomie_, his winning dignity, are matters so familiar to all who really knew him, as to render eulogy alike superfluous and impertinent. Of the other side of that magnetic personality,—of his hyper-sensitive pride, his morbid isolation of his suffering self from those healthy breezes of broad intellectual life which it is so easy to prescribe, so bitterly hard for a nature such as his to stand against,—of these things it may be said with all sympathy and reverence that they were the price of his greatness. There are some temperaments so finely organized, so delicately strung, that even joy is painful to them. They cannot lose in the sense of delight the consciousness of what that delight has cost them. They perceive so acutely the realities, the conditions, of life, that an hour of rapture makes them more quick to the pain behind and before. Such was Shelley, such were Keats and Byron; such was Dante Gabriel Rossetti. It is the curse of the artistic temperament: it is the blessing of Art. “There are some of us,” said Shelley, “who have loved an Antigone before we visited this earth, and must pursue through life that unregainable ideal.” “I think,” he added, in words that might well be applied to Rossetti, “one is always in love with something or other; the error consists in seeking in a mortal image the likeness of what is, perhaps, eternal.” In other words, Rossetti was an idealist, and for the idealist there is no primrose path to heaven. His soul was too open to the ideal to be proof against the actual. His whole nature was like an Æolian harp, responsive through the whole gamut of thought and sense to every breath of circumstance or destiny that played about the world around it. For him there was no life without emotion. He craved sensation, as one craves a narcotic, to destroy its own results. _Ennui_ was his bane. Nothing in his history is more pathetic than his need, in later years, of the perpetual ministry of close friends. The delicate instrument that could never be silent was hard to keep in tune. It demanded a firm and tender hand laid upon all those quivering strings of being to merge the discords into some sort of harmony, even if it were always in a minor key. Such a hand he found more than once among those that knew and loved him, but he found it supremely in the friendship of Mr. Theodore Watts, to whom his last poems were dedicated. CHAPTER VI. TREATMENT OF RELIGIOUS SUBJECTS.