The Pre-Raphaelite Movement.--In 1848 three artists, Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882), William Holman-Hunt (1827-1910), and John Everett Millais (1829-1896), formed the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Others soon joined the movement which was primarily artistic, not literary. Painting had become imitative. The uppermost question in the artist's mind was, "How would Raphael or some other authority have painted this picture?" The new school determined to paint things from a direct study of nature, without a thought of the way in which any one else would have painted them. They decided to assume the same independence as the Pre-Raphaelite artists, who expressed their individuality in their own way. Keats was the favorite author of the new school. The artists painted subjects suggested by his poems, and Rossetti thought him "the one true heir of Shakespeare." When the Pre-Raphaelite paintings were violently attacked, Ruskin examined them and decided that they conformed to the principles which he had already laid down in the first two volumes of _Modern Painters_ (1843, 1846), so he wrote _Pre-Raphaelitism_ (1851) as the champion of the new school. It has been humorously said that some of the painters of this school, before beginning a new picture, took an oath "to paint the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth." The new movement in poetry followed this revolt in art. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the head of the literary Pre-Raphaelites, though born in London, was of Italian parentage in which there was a strain of English blood. His poem, _The Blessed Damozel_ (first published in 1850), has had the greatest influence of any Pre-Raphaelite literary production. This poem was suggested by _The Raven_ (1845), the work of the American, Edgar Allan Poe. Rossetti said:-- "I saw that Poe had done the utmost it was possible to do with the grief of the lover an earth, and I determined to reverse the conditions, and give utterance to the yearnings of the loved one in heaven." His Blessed Damozel, wearing a white rose, "Mary's gift," leaning out from the gold bar of heaven, watching with sad eyes, "deeper than the depth of waters stilled at even," for the coming of her lover, has left a lasting impression on many readers. Simplicity, beauty, and pathos are the chief characteristics of this poem, which, like Bryant's _Thanatopsis_, was written by a youth of eighteen. Painting was the chief work of Rossetti's life, but he wrote many other poems. Some of the most characteristic of these are the two semi-ballads, _Sister Helen_ and _The King's Tragedy, Rose Mary, Love's Nocturn_, and _Sonnets_. One of the earliest of these Sonnets, _Mary's Girlhood_, describes the child as:-- "An angel-watered lily, that near God Grows and is quiet."