To the simple Christian creed which they professed, was added in the Rossettis’ household the religion of an ardent and unwavering patriotism. From their earliest childhood the little ones were accustomed to hear around their own fireside high talks of national liberty and the popular cause. Their home, unpretentious but hospitable as it always was, became the resort of many a political refugee; a gathering-place for kindred souls oppressed with the same misfortunes, or fired with the supreme enthusiasm of a common ideal. Hither came Mazzini, the greatest patriot of the century, and one of her truest seers. All that was best in the young democracy of the mid-century, its eager idealism, its narrow but profound hero-worship, its poetry, its self-devotion, was here brought before the children’s eyes; its coarser elements eliminated by the personal distinction of such men as Gabriele Rossetti loved to gather to his side. The little circle was thus open, in those crucial years, to influences more potent upon art than was then apparent, since the humanitarian impulse first manifested in political and social life had not yet adjusted itself to pictorial expression. Nor was the literary side of Dante Rossetti’s genius less sympathetically nurtured in the home atmosphere. His father was an enthusiastic student and commentator of Dante, after whom he named his eldest son,—a baptism strangely prophetic of his destiny; of that fortuity of fate by which, in after years, bereft of love, maligned by criticism, robbed of health and power, he was made partaker in the sufferings as well as in the glory of the great Florentine poet. Thus was fostered in the young Dante of a later day that love of old romance and noble allegory which remained both with him and with his younger sister—perhaps the choicest of our women-poets—as an abiding passion and an inspiration to the highest artistic service.