It is not easy for a succeeding generation to understand with what enthusiasm, with what delight and invigoration, the little company of painter-poets plunged into the writings of Browning when, following Rossetti, who was first on the track of the new fount of refreshment, they discovered therein the tonic which they needed. No better antidote to the sensuous mysticism into which some of the Pre-Raphaelites were threatening to lapse could have been found than the wholesome modernity and salutary brusquerie of the author of “Pauline” and “Bells and Pomegranates.” It was probably because they stood most in need of his gospel that the influence of Browning was at first more strong upon the readers than that of Tennyson, who affected them in the direction of pure romance, and distilled for them all that was sanest and noblest in the mediæval world. In the autumn of 1850 Rossetti began, during his stay with Hunt and F.G. Stephens at Sevenoaks, a number of sketches with a view to a large and elaborate picture of “Kate the Queen,” from Browning’s well-known lyric. But he could never satisfy himself with the design, and after much toil, disheartenment, and perplexity, the subject was abandoned, like many more promising themes which from time to time inspired Rossetti. The entire year, save for the success of “Ecce Ancilla Domini,” had been one of disappointment to him, and of disconsolate struggles for a new departure. He had made many futile attempts at designs for “The Germ,” but none pleased him, and now he was casting about for new matter and media. For, as his standard of excellence rose higher, he began to feel more acutely his technical shortcomings,—the results partly of his incomplete training and desultory study in youth, partly of singular ill-luck in his figure-models, and partly also of a curious constitutional deficiency—not of industry _per se_, but of the faculty to direct and apply his industry along right lines. No modern artist has disproved more completely than Rossetti the barren platitude which defines genius as “the capacity for taking infinite pains.” Comparison between Rossetti and Browning in their struggle with mental tendencies unfavourable to lucid and well-ordered art is too obvious to demand pursuit in detail. Both took the prescribed “infinite pains,” but neither in the most profitable directions. Browning was over-charged with thought; Rossetti with imagination; and both were cumbered with the difficulties of artistic speech. The art of Browning has frequently been pronounced crude, raw, and “undigested.” One would hesitate to apply such terms to any work of Rossetti’s; for his, even at its most elemental stages, generally erred in the direction of strained and laboured purism, being over-wrought rather than unripe in conception or performance. In both artists, an exuberant activity of output was combined with a curious inability to undergo the full discipline of just and coherent expression.