Nor does such a superficial distinction affect the spiritual qualities which pervade Rossetti’s poetry as a whole. From first to last, in dramatic description or narrative, in sonnet-argument or meditative questioning, his verse remains full-charged with the very essence of romance. As a poet, he is neither less nor more Pre-Raphaelite than as a painter. The vivid and intense simplicity of his Saxon diction, the verbal lightnings of his ballad-style, seem to correspond with the tone and method of his water-colour painting, and the more laboured splendour of the sonnets with the properties of his work in oils. Nor is it difficult to detect an analogy between that stage of his painting in which the pristine lucidity of expression was partially lost in the painful tension of his later thought, and the tendency of some few of his sonnets towards decadence into the over-laborious and the obscure. Yet if by “Pre-Raphaelite” we understand that fusion of the naïve mysticism of romance with austere Platonic Hellenism which we discern in the best Renaissance art, Rossetti never falls in spirit from that standard of beauty and truth; and rarely lapses, through the very richness and fecundity of the language at his command, into the redundant verbiage towards which his sensuous imagery was easily led. It has remained for a brother-poet of the romantic revival to cultivate a more marvellous dexterity of rhyme and rhythm, and to develop the technical resources of our language to the utmost limits of intelligible song. The lyrics of Mr. Swinburne, like the superb decorative extravagances of the later Renaissance, represent that culmination of mastery over the forms of expression wherein to-day, as of yore, the purity of the thought is lost in the splendour of the setting, and poetic power wastes itself in a magic facility of verse. The poetry of Rossetti, modern as it is in its passionate grasp of human interests, its deep insight into present and perpetual things, links itself nevertheless to an English past; takes up, as it were, the dropped threads of Elizabethan glory; re-inspires the circling breath of life which passed round Europe in the fifteenth century, kindling England from the fires of re-awakened Italy in the golden age of song. It has already been pointed out by one of Rossetti’s biographers that “the malign influence over our literature in post-Shakespearean times has been French.” It was reserved for a second Renaissance, heralded by Chatterton and Blake, led by Shelley, Keats, and Coleridge, and culminated by Dante Rossetti, to blot out two centuries of foreign tradition and control, and take us back to the broad simplicity and dignity of Shakespeare’s England.