In the most naïve phase of romantic mysticism, with its devout faith in the presence of spiritual forces in play at all points upon the human soul, and in the power of the imagination to visualize conjectured things, Rossetti conceived the finest of his early dramatic sketches,— “How They Met Themselves” and “Michael Scott’s Wooing;” the former showing the influence of Blake in a more marked degree perhaps than any other drawings of the same period. The lovers that “meet themselves” are confronted, while walking in a wood, with the apparitions of their own persons, reflected, as it were, in the air before them, in exact and startling similitude,—a conception found in the well-known Döppelgänger legends of German folk-lore, which credit a dual existence to every human soul, endowing it with a sort of spectral “double” after the manner of the Buddhistic “astral body,” save that the Döppelgänger appear to be independent of the subject’s consciousness and will. The sudden terror of the lovers,—the lady sinking to the ground, the knight drawing his sword in her defence against the mysterious phenomenon, yet hesitating, like Marcellus on the ramparts of Elsinore, to “offer it the show of violence,” is shown with a force that emphasizes the reality of the vision to those who see it. In this picture, as in Rossetti’s treatment of a more exalted theme, “The Girlhood of Mary Virgin,” the barrier is over-leaped that separates the visible from the unseen; the outer and inner worlds are merged naturally and imperceptibly the one into the other—an hypothesis in which the previsions of art may yet be vindicated by scientific discovery; and the forms of the spectral lovers are scarcely more shadowy than those who stand aghast before them in the flesh. It has been suggested that the design may typify the meeting of the human soul with its prototype in ages long gone by; the recognition of unknown kinships (as if brought over from a prior existence) through that strange sense of familiarity which sometimes surprises us when we wander in spirit through the dim mazes of the historic past. In the sketch for “Michael Scott’s Wooing,” the wizard-hero conjures up, for the entertainment of his lady-love, a magical pageant of Life, Love, and other symbolic figures, which appear before her in a glass. Here the purely subjective nature of the vision is brought out; the lady alone can see the pageant; her attendants are as blind to it as Hamlet’s mother to the ghost of the murdered king.