On the return of the travellers to London, a new development was proposed and accomplished in the public propaganda of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. It was decided to issue a monthly magazine for the promulgation of Pre-Raphaelite principles in painting and poetry. Members and sympathizers met at Rossetti’s studio in Newman Street to discuss the project, and decide upon the title and contents of the manifesto. The suggestion of Mr. Cave Thomas was ultimately adopted, that it should be called “The Germ.” The first number, extending to forty-eight large octavo pages, illustrated with etchings, appeared in January, 1850, published by Messrs. Aylott and Jones, of 8, Paternoster Row. The primary tenet with regard to art was thus enunciated in the preface: “The endeavour held in view throughout the writings on Art will be to encourage and enforce an entire adherence to the simplicity of nature.” It would be captious, perhaps, to argue, in the face of so ingenuous an implication, that nature is not simple, but, alas! infinitely and fatefully complex without and within; presenting to the seer’s eye a tangled web of visible phenomena no less intricate than the secret woof of destiny whose threads are the lives of men. To young minds, as to a young world, the vision of nature broadly outlined in generalities and clear with purpose is one of the fairest of illusions. The sternest discipline of life is to discover chaos where we imagined order and lucidity: to find interminable mazes and cross-roads for our bewilderment where in the morning mirage we had seen a plain path, an open road to the Ideal. Then we cry that Nature, and not ourself, is altered: that “there hath passed away a glory from the earth.” Happily, this disillusionment was yet far off in the future of the Pre- Raphaelite Brotherhood. In the preface to “The Germ,” a special claim was made for poetry in its relation to the principles of simplicity of expression already enforced in painting; and with better reason, since painting must perforce speak exclusively by the representation of visible things, while poetry reaches directly to their inner significance. For while the painter strives so to order and depict the phenomena around him as to arrive at some sort of moral simplicity in the effect of his picture, the poet—if he be a seer—penetrates at once to the spirit of his theme, and clothes it at his own will with symbolic or dramatic expression. Hence the application of the Pre-Raphaelite principle to the writing of poetry was even more fruitful than in painting; and produced in modern English ballad and lyric verse, and even in the best prose of our own generation, a swift and incisive directness of touch, a broad and vivid clarity of impression, never so fully effected in the pictorial medium.