It is not a sufficient explanation of this to say merely that Rossetti was a painter as well as a poet. Nor was it wholly that he, beyond the example of any poet before him, sought to wring the last voluptuous essence out of the very nature of words themselves. Nor, finally, was diction of this kind simply the inevitable consequence of the deliberate Pre-Raphaelite pact. Beyond all these contributary causes, there was in Rossetti a native distrust of common life, kept by his artistic vitality just this side of morbidity, that led him to the creation of a world, lustrous, brooding, its _fauna_ and _flora_ always a little fabulous, a world of murmured incantations and living heraldry. Here Rossetti suffered the pangs and gathered the compensations common to humanity, but his emotion, simple in character though it was, found its natural element in this embroidered and incense-laden world, and could not easily fulfil itself elsewhere. And in the diction of his poetry Rossetti delineated his world exactly, with its “twilit hidden glimmering visages.” Hardly any other poet, I suppose, could have praised the beloved for her “sultry hair.” Morris was profoundly influenced by Rossetti in his art, and there was a close personal sympathy between them, and yet two poets could not well be more unlike each other in natural temperament. Rossetti’s heavy-lidded indolence, his exotic preference for odd beasts in the garden, his savour of the apothecary’s shop, were far removed from the robust worldliness of Morris, who loved Socialist meetings, and Cotswold winds, and the dye-vats in a Staffordshire mill, and fishing for pike in the Thames, and even a row in a police-court. But the instinct for definite outline and exact detail that made him whole-hearted in his sympathy with the Pre-Raphaelite painters in their revolt from what they considered to be a smudgy and lazy impressionism, made him also very susceptible to the luminous and graphic quality of Rossetti’s diction, and, in that measure, guided him to his own development of the “florid and flowing” Tennysonian idiom. But once the impulse was working, it sent Morris along his own way of discovery, one upon which he had no company of importance. As he progressed in his art from _The Lady of Shalott_ and _The Blessed Damozel_, from the lovely exercise of-- Green holly in Alicia’s hand, _When the Sword went out to sea_, With sere oak-leaves did Ursula stand; O! yet alas for me! I did but bear a peel’d white wand, _When the Sword went out to sea_....