In all these points, in the revolt against the emptiness of the _beauté suprême_ and the flowing lines of the accepted routine of composition, they were at one with Courbet and Millet. It was only in further developments that the French and English parted company; English realism received a specifically English tinge. Since every form of Classicism--for to this point they were led by the train of their ideas--declares the ideal completion of form, of physical presentment, to be its highest aim, the standard-bearers of realism were obliged to seek the highest aim of their art, founded exclusively on the study of nature, in the representation of moral and intellectual life, in a thoughtful form of spiritual creation. The blending of realism with profundity of ideas, of uncompromising truth to nature in form with philosophic and poetic substance, is of the very essence of the pre-Raphaelites. They are transcendental naturalists, equally widely removed from Classicism, which deals only with beautiful bodies, as from realism proper, which only proposes to represent a fragment of nature. From opposition to abstract beauty of form they insist upon what is characteristic, energetic, angular; but their figures painted faithfully from nature are the vehicles of a metaphysical idea. From the first they saturated themselves with poetry. Holman Hunt has an enthusiasm for Keats and the Bible, Rossetti for Dante, Millais for the mediæval poems of chivalry. [Illustration: HOLMAN HUNT. THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD. (_By permission of Mr. L. H. Lefèvre, the owner of the copyright._)] [Illustration: _Mag. of Art._ FORD MADOX BROWN. PORTRAIT OF HIMSELF. (_By permission of Theodore Watts Dunton, Esq., the owner of the picture._)]