A more familiar passage from the “Vita Nuova” is illustrated by the largest, and in many respects the finest, of Rossetti’s completed pictures, “Dante’s Dream;” dealing with the poet’s record of the vision in which “it was revealed to him that the Lord God of Justice had called his most gracious lady unto Himself.” “Then feeling bewildered,” says Dante, writing of that strange experience, which occurred to him at the age of twenty-five, “I closed mine eyes, and my brain began to be in travail, as the brain of one frantic. And I seemed to look toward Heaven, and to behold a multitude of angels who were returning upwards, having before them an exceedingly white cloud. Then my heart, that was so full of love, said unto me, ‘It is true that our lady lieth dead;’ and it seemed to me that I went to look upon the body wherein that blessed and most noble spirit had had its abiding place. And so strong was this idle imagining that it made me to behold my lady in death; whose head certain ladies seemed to be covering with a white veil, and who was so humble of her aspect that it was as though she had said, ‘I have attained to look on the beginning of peace.’” On a red-draped couch in the chamber of death lies the Blessed Beatrice, clad in white robes, her hands folded on her bosom, and her bright hair spread about her pillow. Her maidens, at her head and feet, are hanging over her a purple pall, filled with May-blossoms, the emblem of the spring-time of her life, in which she died. The floor is strewn with poppies, symbolizing again the sleep in which she takes her unbroken rest; and on the frieze above are roses and violets, suggestive of the beauty and purity of the departed soul. Over the couch hangs a lamp, glimmering with a fast- expiring flame; and high up in air, through an opening in the roof, is seen a flight of angels, garbed in the deep red of a damask rose,— symbolic of the Platonic love which should immortalize the beloved in the sight of all men,—and bearing the white cloud that represents the life that has fled. The crimson doves, of which Rossetti made his constant symbol of heavenly ministries, flutter up and down the staircases on either side of the room. Before the couch stands the figure of Love, with his flame-coloured robes fastened at the shoulder by a scallop-shell, signifying pilgrimage. In one hand he holds a winged arrow—his weapon for the heart—and a bunch of rosemary; with the other he leads Dante, who, clad in the black garb of mourning, tinged with the purple of consecration, advances as if in a dream, and shrinks, dazed and awed, before the beauty of the dead Beatrice. And Love, still holding Dante by the hand, bends forward and kisses the face of the beloved, thus making himself the mediator between Dante and Beatrice, and the reconciler of life with death. It is as though the poet’s life- long worship were summed up and presented at the gate of heaven by a