To set Rossetti’s _Blessed Damozel_ beside one of Tennyson’s most highly decorative poems, _The Lady of Shalott_, for example, is to be aware of a new weight in an atmosphere already heavily charged. The graphic presentation of Tennyson’s poem is wrought with great ingenuity of artifice, but the landscape, although it no longer has the rain-washed clarity of Chaucer, is still in the open air. The golden sheaves and the Camelot road and the lilied island have something of the brightness of unfaded tapestry, but they have something also of summer in Cornwall. In _The Blessed Damozel_ we have passed out of day and night and are moving in a landscape of gold and blue and rose thickly laid on gesso and stuck over with precious stones. It glows through a mist of colour that is almost sensible to the touch, and has been passionately created, not by God in Cornwall, but by monks in mediæval cloisters. In Tennyson’s poem there is the artifice of a very expert poetic craftsman, applied to a vision that is direct and material, in Rossetti’s there is a genuine artificiality of imagination, expressing itself in a diction suffused with suggestion that is at once ethereal and strictly formal. The blessèd damozel lean’d out From the gold bar of Heaven; Her eyes were deeper than the depth Of waters still’d at even; She had three lilies in her hand, And the stars in her hair were seven. These are no waters of earth, nor are the lilies and the stars--the three and the seven--those of our familiar vision. The water is some pool beyond the well at the world’s end, and the lilies and the stars are such as might have been held one in each hand by the Prologue to a fourteenth-century mystery play at the church porch. Herself shall bring us, hand in hand, To Him round whom all souls Kneel, the clear-ranged unnumbered heads Bowed with their aureoles: And angels meeting us shall sing To their citherns and citoles.