himself who sees her thus, as in a dream, and tells us how,— “She bowed herself, and stooped Out of the circling charm, Until her bosom must have made The bar she leaned on warm,” and how, on the mystic borderland between earth and heaven,— “The souls mounting up to God Went by her like thin flames.” The glories of the upper air have no charm for her until he shares them. Still gazing downward from “the ramparts of God’s house,” she sees— “The tides of day and night With flame and darkness ridge The void, as low as where this earth Spins like a fretful midge;” she knows the angels who “sit circlewise”— “To fashion the birth-robes for them Who are just born, being dead!” Her one prayer is for the old companionship, the old, simple, earthly happiness,— “Only to live as once on earth With Love,—only to be, As then awhile, for ever now, Together, I and he.” It was not until many years later that “The Blessed Damozel” afforded the subject of the picture by which Rossetti is most popularly and superficially known to the outer world. It was his habit to inscribe his pictures with some original verse, generally in sonnet form; and some of his best descriptive sonnets, such as “Pandora,” “Fiametta,” “Found,” “Astarte Syriaca,” and “Mary Magdalene,” had such an origin. “The Blessed Damozel” is said to be only instance of a picture executed after instead of before the correlative poem. Two important works stand yet apart, alike from what we have classed as introspective and personal poetry, and from the splendid ballads in which consists Rossetti’s most immortal contribution to English literature. “Jenny” and “A Last Confession” exemplify his use of the dramatic monologue, and alone among his compositions bear in a marked degree the influence of Browning. Especially is this influence notable in “A Last Confession.” The Italy of this wonderful fragment—placed by critics of authority in the front rank of Rossetti’s work—is, _par excellence_, Browning’s Italy, with all the intense humanness and distinction of character which dominates its furies and its loves, with all the Saxon intellect and reason stamped into and burning through the irresponsible passion of the South. Just as in his ballads and sonnets Rossetti grafted the clean-cut Saxon diction on to the long and languorous habit of the Latin tongue, so in “A Last Confession” does he graft vivid thought and piercing argument upon the deep pathos and terror of the theme. It is a death-bed story told in a priest’s ear; a story of passion and crime, and of a girl’s shallow laugh that drove her lover to kill her in a frenzy of despair. For he remembered how, awhile before,—