and probes the memory for images whose calm splendour may bring forgetfulness of self. The subject is that of Wordsworth’s well-known sonnet, “A flock of sheep that leisurely pass by;” and the contrast between the visions conjured up by the two very diverse poets exactly illustrates the difference of temperament which set them at opposite poetic poles. The mind of Wordsworth rests in the contemplation of familiar things, gains peace in the common incidents of pastoral life, loves Nature best in her ordinary moods, and seeks always the homeliest of consolations, the most universal joys. The mind of Rossetti craves ever for the superlative, the exceptional, the intense, and can find no ease in anything very simple and quiet. The value of a poet’s verdict on his own poems is not always to be measured by his critical faculty when applied to general literature. The friends of Rossetti have been unanimous in his praise as a critic both of prose and of poetry, though his desultory reading and vehemence of judgment led him sometimes into extravagances of worship or condemnation, and blunted his discrimination of relative merits in divergent schools. Hence his persistent and quite explicable antipathy to Wordsworth, and his exaggerated estimate of Chatterton in later life. But in his criticism of his own work it is inevitable that a poet should be somewhat biassed by associations and memories bearing upon its production. It is difficult to take seriously Rossetti’s admission to the indiscreet admirer of one of his shorter poems,—“You are right: ‘The Cloud Confines’ _is_ my very best thing.” Lyrically unimpeachable indeed it is, though not more so than the exquisite “Autumn Song,” “A New Year’s Burden,” “Insomnia,” “Three Shadows,” or “Sunset Wings;” and therefore are we fain to take Rossetti’s judgment as based largely on technical considerations when, in selecting his own favourites from among the “House of Life” series, he adds to the noble sonnet “Lost Days” (already quoted) the less impassioned but more coherent and melodious “Still-born Love,” “The One Hope,” and “Known in Vain.” These certainly excel in some of the highest qualities of the sonnet form— unity of idea, and the steady set of the rhythmic flow and ebb in motive and application; though in none of these does the sestet conform to the pure Guittonian model on three-rhyme-sounds, blending the first and fourth, second and fifth, and third and sixth lines in a double tercet, as it does with signal success in “Lost on Both Sides,” “The Portrait,” and “Hope Overtaken;” and in only one out of his chosen four (“The One Hope”) does Rossetti attain what he personally preferred as the most perfect order of sestet rhymes, based upon two terminal sounds, and rhyming the first, fourth, and fifth lines against the second, third, and sixth; thus opening the sestet with a quatrain harmonizing in structure with the octet above, and yet avoiding the rhymed couplet at