Dante Gabriel, not Christina, possessed the most purely poetical nature in the Rossetti family, and his moral conceptions were the typical aesthetic ones, as incomprehensible to the puritan as they were to Ruskin, who exclaimed, "I don't say you do wrong, because you don't seem to know what is wrong, but you do just whatever you like as far as possible--as puppies and tomtits do." [Footnote: See E. L. Cary, The Rossettis, p.79.] To poets themselves however, there appears nothing incomprehensible about the inevitable rightness of their conduct, for they have not passed out of the happy stage of Wordsworth's _Ode to Duty,_ When love is an unerring light, And joy its own felicity. For the most part, whenever the puritan imagines that the poet has capitulated, he is mistaken, and the apparent self-denial in the poet's life is really an exquisite sort of epicureanism. The likelihood of such misunderstanding by the world is indicated by Browning in _Sordello,_ wherein the hero refuses to taste the ordinary pleasures of life, because he wishes to enjoy the flavor of the highest pleasure untainted. He resolves, The world shall bow to me conceiving all Man's life, who see its blisses, great and small Afar--not tasting any; no machine To exercise my utmost will is mine, Be mine mere consciousness: Let men perceive What I could do, a mastery believe Asserted and established to the throng By their selected evidence of song, Which now shall prove, whate'er they are, or seek To be, I am. The claims of the puritans being set aside, the poet must, finally, meet the objection of his third disputant, the philosopher, the one accuser whose charges the poet is wont to treat with respect. What validity, the philosopher asks, can be claimed for apprehension of truth, of the good-beautiful, secured not through the intellect, but through emotion? What proof has the poet that feeling is as unerring in detecting the essential nature of the highest good as is the reason? There is great variance in the breach between philosophers and poets on this point. Between the philosopher of purely rationalistic temper, and the poet who dares to take Life's rule from passion craved for passion's sake, [Footnote: Said of Byron. Wordsworth, _Not in the Lucid Intervals._]