Mr. W. M. Rossetti omits to mention that the landscape which forms the predella to ‘The Blessed Damozel,’ a river winding in a peculiarly tortuous course through the cedars and other wide-spread trees of an English park, was taken from the scenery of Broadlands—that fairyland of soft beauty which lived in his memory as it must needs live in the memory of every one who has once known it. But the wonder is that such a mass of solid material has been compressed into so small a space. Mr. W. M. Rossetti’s paraphrase of ‘The House of Life’—done with so much admiration of his brother’s genius and affection for his memory—touches upon a question relating to poetic art which has been raised before—raised in connexion with prose renderings of Homer, Sophocles, and Dante: Are poetry and prose so closely related in method that one can ever be adequately turned into the other? Schiller no doubt wrote his dramas in prose and then turned them into rhetorical verse; but then there are those who affirm that Schiller’s rhetorical verse is scarcely poetry. The importance of the question will be seen when we call to mind that if such a transmutation of form were possible, translations of poetry would be possible; for though, owing to the tyrannous demands of form, the verse of one language can never be translated into the verse of another, it can always be rendered in the prose of another, only it then ceases to be poetry. That the intellectual, and even to some extent the emotional, substance of a poem can be seized and covered by a prose translation is seen in Prof. Jebb’s rendering of the ‘Œdipus Rex’; but, as we have before remarked, the fundamental difference between imaginative prose and poetry is that, while the one must be informed with intellectual life and emotional life, the other has to be informed with both these kinds of life, and with another life beyond these—rhythmic life. Now, if we wished to show that rhythmic life is in poetry the most important of all, our example would, we think, be Mr. W. M. Rossetti’s prose paraphrase of his brother’s sonnets. The obstacles against the adequate turning of poetry into prose can be best understood by considering the obstacles against the adequate turning of prose into poetry. Prose notes tracing out the course of the future poem may, no doubt, be made, and usefully made, by the poet (as Wordsworth said in an admirable letter to Gillies), unless, indeed, the notes form too elaborate an attempt at a full prose expression of the subject-matter, in which case, so soon as the poet tries to rise on his winged words, his wingless words are likely to act as a dead weight. For this reason, when Wordsworth said that the prose notes should be brief, he might almost as well have gone on to say that in expression they should be slovenly. This at least may be said, that the moment the language of the prose note is so “adequate” and rich that