Our reiteration, therefore, of the term “Pre-Raphaelite” in approaching Rossetti’s work as a poet, leads us to expect, not mysticism merely, but a certain robust sensuousness, as of Pagan origin, in his interpretation of life and destiny. The romantic temper in its highest manifestations, absorbing and transfiguring, rather than conflicting with, the classic ideals, implies much more than receptivity to newer beauty and truth. It has a moral basis and an intellectual range: it apprehends the spiritual world as something closely bound up with familiar things: it finds the human soul striving for expression through material forms: it recognizes the divine possibilities of individual and social life, the force and responsibility of personal character, and the solemnity of the choice between good and evil daily made by man. But the controversy excited by Rossetti’s pictures has been neither more intemperate nor more significant than that which has raged around his poems;—interpreted by one section of his critics as a pæan of sensuality and materialism, by another as the most spiritual and chastened love- poetry of the age. The laureate of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood indeed summed up, in what now affords but one volume of original verse, the inmost vicissitudes of a spirit so rare and rich of vision as to transcend at once the canons of conventional experience. But the personal note, in the self-delineative poems, is struck with a peculiar dignity of reserve; and even while the most sacred depths of individual consciousness are laid bare, the actual _ego_ is never intruded upon the surface of the speech,—never portrays directly its own character, seldom describes its own sensations as Byron or Shelley would; but veils itself, even in the profusion of luminous imagery and searching analysis of thought and sense. The eternal mysteries and sanctities of sexual love, conceived in its highest aspects and known as a revelation and a sacrament, afford the theme of nearly all Rossetti’s autobiographic poetry. The conditions of its production were ordained by the stern fate that linked him afar off to Dante among his countrymen, and near at hand to two brother-mourners among minor English bards—James Thomson and Philip Bourke Marston—in the sad fraternity of poets whom death has prematurely robbed of the beloved object that once inspired their song. The exalted spirituality which marks Rossetti’s treatment of this theme was doubtless largely due to the influence of Dante, and especially to the fruitful inspiration and discipline of the great literary task of his youth—the translation of the “Vita Nuova” and kindred examples of the early Italian poets—than which Rossetti could have hardly found a better preparation for his work that was to come.