Into his great sonnet-sequence, “The House of Life,” Rossetti poured the full passion of his mystic love,—partially inherent in his own sensuous, imaginative, and introspective nature, partially instilled at the feet of Dante; and learned—a bitter and a costly lesson—at the school of experience also; fraught with inestimable joy and sorrow to his own soul. “At an age,” says one writing of that hard probation, “when most men have outlived the romances of their youth, Rossetti was laying, in ‘The House of Life,’ the foundations of a new school of love-poetry.” He was in fact re-creating the æsthetic life of a nation; restoring to it, through the alembic of mediæval and Renaissance thought, the lost glory of all that was abidingly precious in the Platonic world. For in this wondrous cycle of sonnets is re-coined the whole language of ideal love. From the last echo of the “Vita Nuova” it takes up the same pure strain, and sings again the song of Dante for the Blessed Beatrice; hymning the very apotheosis of spiritual passion, and harmonizing once more in English poetry the intellectual with the sensuous world. Never, in the superb visions of “The House of Life”—in which the soul of man is pictured sojourning awhile during its solemn and fateful passage through eternity—never does the physical love become the stumbling-block to the spiritual, but always the key to it. The “body’s beauty” is only precious as the witness of the “soul’s beauty;” the physical bond is nothing if not the symbol of a spiritual affinity, a sacred kinship, fore-ordained, if not eternal, sealed in Heaven and consecrated to the divinest purposes; the sensuous rapture is but a symbolic worship,—“the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace” which to reject or betray is to profane the inmost sanctuary of the God of Love: “Even so, when first I saw you, seemed it, love, That among souls allied to mine was yet One nearer kindred than life hinted of. O born with me somewhere that men forget, And though in years of sight and sound unmet, Known for my soul’s birth-partner well enough!” Love the revealer of unseen verities, the binder of invisible bonds; Love the deliverer from material trammels, the opener of the gate of life; these are to him the gracious manifestations of the same deity: “O what from thee the grace, to me the prize, And what to Love the glory,—when the whole Of the deep stair thou tread’st to the dim shoal And weary water of the place of sighs, And there dost work deliverance, as thine eyes Draw up my prisoned spirit to thy soul!”