The poetry of Dante Gabriel Rossetti lies apart from the main current of contemporary verse, both in its highly specialized quality of thought and language, and in the conditions and circumstances of its production. Inasmuch as he followed openly the profession of a painter, pursuing poetry, for the most part, as a recreative rather than a principal study (though never with less seriousness than his accepted vocation), and publishing his first volume of original poems in his forty-second year, he is exempt to some extent from the standards of criticism applied to him whose creative energies are concentrated in the field of literature. Whether Rossetti’s genius, as he himself believed, found its highest and most perfect embodiment in poetry rather than in painting,—whether the essential qualities of his art will be more evident to posterity in the modest volume of his collected poems than in the pictures now dispersed through England and America—is still an open question. It may, however, be admitted that his mastery of the verbal medium was almost always more complete, his discipline in metrical structure more thorough, and his natural habit of diction more facile, than any skill which he attained in brush and pencil. To estimate his final influence upon contemporary thought in the one realm as against the other is yet more difficult than to assess the relative merit of his actual work in either sphere: so intimately was the poet incarnate in the painter; so largely did the painter’s vision inspire and dominate the poet.