THE PRE-RAPHAELITES. In the middle of the nineteenth century, or in 1848 to be specific, a number of English poets and painters banded themselves together as a Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. [Footnote: The name was used earlier by some German artists, who worked together in Rome with the purpose of restoring art to the medieval simplicity and purity which, as was alleged, it possessed before the time of the Italian painter Raphael. The most famous artists of the English brotherhood were John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt.] They aimed to make all art more simple, sincere, religious, and to restore "the sense of wonder, reverence and awe" which, they believed, had been lost since medieval times. Their sincerity was unquestioned; their influence, though small, was almost wholly good; but unfortunately they were, as Morris said, like men born out of due season. They lived too much apart from their own age and from the great stream of common life out of which superior art proceeds. For there was never a great book or a great picture that was not in the best sense representative, that did not draw its greatness from the common ideals of the age in which it was produced. [Illustration: THE MANOR HOUSE OF WILLIAM MORRIS] [Sidenote: ROSSETTI] The first poet among the Pre-Raphaelites was Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882), the son of an exiled Italian writer. Like others of the group he was both painter and poet, and seemed to be always trying to put into his verse the rich coloring which belonged on canvas. Perhaps the most romantic episode of his life was, that upon the death of his wife (the beautiful model, Lizzie Siddal, who appears in Millais' picture "Ophelia") he buried his poetry with her. After some years his friends persuaded him that his poems belonged to the living, and he exhumed and published them (_Poems_, 1870). His most notable volume, _Ballads and Sonnets_, appeared eleven years later. The ballads are nearly all weird, uncanny, but with something in them of the witchery of Coleridge's "Ancient Mariner." The sonnets under the general title of "The House of Life" are devoted to the poet's lost love, and rank with Mrs. Browning's _From the Portuguese_. [Illustration: WILLIAM MORRIS From a photograph by Walker and Cockerell]