Rossetti, whose criticisms on poets are as direct and inevitable as his finest verse, was always his own best critic. He who said finally: "The life-blood of rhymed translation is this--that a good poem shall not be turned into a bad one," was as finally right on himself, as he was on others, in his unsurpassable revision of one of the most imaginative sonnets ever written: "A Venetian Pastoral by Giorgione." Certainly no poem of his shows more plainly the strength and wealth of the workman's lavish yet studious hand. And, in this sonnet as in the one on Leonardo, there is the absolute transfusion of a spirit that seemed incommunicable from one master's hand to another's. Only in the Leonardo, which I shall quote, there is none of the sovereign oppression of absolute beauty and the nakedness of burning life that I find in the _Fête Champêtre._ For in this divine picture the romantic spirit is born, and with it modern art. Here we see Whistler and the Japanese: a picture content to be no more than a picture: "an instant made eternity," a moment of color, of atmosphere, of the noon's intense heat, of faultless circumstance. It is a pause in music, and life itself waits, while men and women are for a moment happy and content and without desire; these, content to be beautiful and to be no more than a strain of music; to those others, who are content to know only that the hour is music. Here, then, is Rossetti's version of the beauty of mysterious peace which broods over the _Virgin of the Rocks._ Mother, is this the darkness of the end, The Shadow of Death? and is that outer sea Infinite imminent Eternity? And does the death-pang by man's seed sustained In Time's each instant cause thy face to bend Its silent prayer upon the Son, while he Blesses the dead with his hand silently To his long day which hours no more offend? Mother of grace, the pass is difficult, Keen as these rocks, and the bewildered souls Throng it like echoes, blindly shuddering through. Thy name, O Lord, each spirit's voice extols, Whose peace abides in the dark avenue Amid the bitterness of things occult.