“All other pleasures are not worth its pain.” He enjoyed happiness, and suffered despair, not merely in the outward circumstances of his love, but in a more subtle and irretrievable way. The fallacy dies hard, that leads us to imagine that the unvaryingly sad and gloomy natures are the supreme sufferers of the world. On the contrary, the acuteness of pain is measured by its victim’s capacity for mirth. And there are some natures so finely organized, so highly-strung, that even joy is almost painful to them. They cannot lose themselves in a moment’s rapture, but are beset with contrasts behind and before; are haunted with the cost of every ecstasy, and rarely learn that calm and self-possessing wisdom which is the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, and through which may come at last, in many channels of temperament, in many forms of faith and duty, the power to subdue the evil to the good. Such were Shelley and Keats, Leopardi and Heine, James Thomson and Philip Bourke Marston: such also was Dante Gabriel Rossetti. It would be superfluous to dwell at length on the extraordinary richness of Rossetti’s metaphor and simile. The imagery in the “House of Life” is for the most part sensuous, fervid, and almost tropical in colour and atmosphere. Here are a crowd of variously portentous spirits,— ... “Fame, whose loud wings fan the ashen Past To signal fires;” ... “Song, whose hair Blew like a flame and blossomed like a wreath;” ... “Love, smiling to receive Along his eddying plumes the auroral wind;” And— ... “Life herself, the spirit’s friend and love, Even still as Spring’s authentic harbinger Glows with fresh hours for hope to glorify; Though pale she lay when in the winter grove Her funeral flowers were snowflakes shed on her And the red wings of frost-fire rent the sky.” We follow the soul of the lover— ... “where wan water trembles in the grove, And the wan moon is all the light thereof,” ... “o’er the sea of love’s tumultuous trance,” “Upon the devious coverts of dismay” across “death’s haggard hills”; among “Shadows and shoals that edge eternity,” and through ... “that last Wild pageant of the accumulated past That clangs and flashes for a drowning man.” The superb climax just quoted terminates one of the most vivid and haunting of the “House of Life” series,—“The Soul’s Sphere,”— illustrative of the vast range of consciousness known to one “Who, sleepless, hath ... anguished to appease Tragical shadow’s realm of sound and sight Conjectured in the lamentable night,”