“Jenny,” perhaps, being cast in a more meditative form, lacks the poignancy and fervour of the utterance which comes, in “A Last Confession,” from the lips of the sinner himself instead of from the spectator merely, but it surpasses all contemporary studies of its kind in its bold and masterly handling of a difficult theme. Both, however, are distinct from the lyric poems in that their abruptness of movement and irregularity of structure are the abruptness and irregularity of quick dramatic thought, impatient of metrical elaboration, surcharging the poetic vehicle with subject matter; an effect which must not be confused with the ruggedness of the true ballad-form, whose broken music haunts the ear by its very waywardness and variety of rhythm, and gains its end by a studied artlessness the more exquisite for its apparent unconstraint. Nor is the effect of Rossetti’s universal preference for assonance over rhyme—a special characteristic of romantic poetry— identical in the ballads, sonnets and monologues just quoted. In the sonnets it relieves the rigid tension of the rhyme-system with an overtone of delicate caprice. In “Jenny” and “A Last Confession” it heightens the suggestion of impulse, and even haste of thought and emotion outrunning the metrical order which it chose. In the ballads, it is the result of the finest workmanship, not of accident or pressure of thought upon speech; it is the rich inlaying of the most highly-wrought woof of imaginative language with the brilliance of a perpetual surprise. Rossetti is too near to us for a final estimate of his place among the century’s poets. Enough has been said to illustrate the range and consistency of his art, as a whole, and the intimate relation of his poetry to his painting. The dominant æsthetic motives are the same in “Dante’s Dream” and “The House of Life,” in “Dis Manibus” and “The King’s Tragedy,” in “Beata Beatrix” and “The Blessed Damozel.” He was the prophet of a natural idealism, based upon the frank acceptance and pursuit of the highest earthly good, subject only and absolutely to moral and spiritual law. He stood apart, as we have seen, from the intellectual struggles of his day. Philosophical controversies seldom troubled him. To theological speculation and historical discovery he was alike indifferent. But his isolation, his specialism even, are but evidences of the intensity of the new life to which he was awakened, and the reality of the visions which he saw. He sets before us in all its significance the problem of the dual possibilities of womanhood, by the simple, irresistible, pictorial statement of the contrast between the shameful actuality of “Found” and the noble ideal of “Sibylla Palmifera” and “Monna Vanna.” His lamentation for the manhood of his age is that,—