Before following his fortunes further in this direction we must go back and note what Rossetti's activities in literature had amounted to during this period. These are no less than astonishing. To take the greatest first, they include the bulk of the verse translations from the early Italian poets, first published in 1861, and afterwards republished under the altered title of "Dante and his Circle." Although worked on and revised from time to time, these translations remain in all essentials much as Rossetti compiled them between the years 1845 and 1849, and they rank among the finest work of the kind in the English language, being no less remarkable for their high poetic qualities than for the subtle dexterity of phrase by which the sound and sense of the originals have been transplanted into a naturally colder tongue. Rossetti's translation of the "Vita Nuova" alone might stand as a monument of industry in such a case, for it breathes a new spirit of language, a voluptuous and exotic style such as has never been excelled for conveying the emotional mysticism and introspective sentiment of a southern lover; but to this he added that great mass of verse translations and sonnets, involving many days spent over musty volumes at the British Museum. Even this was not all, for between the same years he began a translation in verse of the Nibelungenlied, and finished a translation of von Aue's "Arme Heinrich," which has been thought worthy of a place amongst his collected works. Besides these, in 1847, before he was nineteen years old, he had written his best-known poem, "The Blessed Damozel," together with several others, including, "My Sister's Sleep," "The Portrait," and considerable portions of "Ave," "A Last Confession," and the "Bride's Prelude." The performance of these literary efforts is so finished, the sentiment so profound and mature, that one can hardly understand the ambition which kept painting in the foremost place and made poetry the _parergon_. The ease with which versification came to Rossetti may have blinded him at first to the merits of his work in this art, as happened later in the case of William Morris; but however that may be, he was not encouraged to abandon painting as a means of livelihood, and having made the arrangement already described with Madox Brown, he settled down with a characteristic mixture of enthusiasm and despair to the pursuit of art.