This taste for beautiful and deeply lustrous colours and rich accessories is, indeed, the one purely pictorial quality which this painter-poet has, if one understands by pictorial qualities the capacity for intoxicating one's self with the beauty of the visible world. His drawing is often faulty; and his bodies, enveloped in rich and heavy garments, are, perhaps, not invariably in accordance with anatomy. What explains Rossetti's fabulous success is purely the condition of spirit which went to the making of his works--that nervous vibration, that ecstasy of opium, that combination of suffering and sensuousness, and that romanticism drunk with beauty, which pervade his paintings. When they appeared they seemed like a revelation of a beautiful land, only one could not say where it existed--a revelation, indeed, for it revealed for the first time a world of story which was in no sense fabulous: there came a romanticism which was something real; a style arose which seemed as though it were woven of tones and colours, a style rioting in an everlasting exhilaration of spirit, breaking out sometimes in a glow of flame and sometimes in delicate, tremulous longing. Even where he paints a Madonna she is merely a woman in his eyes, and he endows her with the glowing fire of passionate fervour, with a trace of the joy of the earth, which no painter has ever given her before; and through this union of refined modern sensuousness and Catholic mysticism he has created a new thrill of beauty. His painting was a drop of a most precious essence, in its hues enchanting and intoxicating, the strongest spiritual potion ever brewed in English art. The intensity of his overstrained sensibility, and the wonderful Southern mosaic of form into which he poured this sensibility with elaborate refinement, make him seem own brother to Baudelaire. [Illustration: BURNE-JONES. PYGMALION (THE SOUL ATTAINS). (_By permission of Mr. F. Hollyer, the owner of the copyright._)] [Illustration: _Pageant._ BURNE-JONES. PERSEUS AND ANDROMEDA.]