Into this atmosphere of revolt and aspiration, charged as with electric forces of long-gathering change, a little band of young painters and poets came, when the time was ripe, to play their part in the great _Aufklärung_ of the century. Students they were in more than the conventional significance of the word; men of widely different endowments, and of the most diverse mental quality, but sensitive at all points to the drift of thought beneath the surface of the life around them. Their task it was to translate into art the message already proclaimed in poetry, and to make, even of the poetic vehicle, a finer and more exquisite setting for the new evangel. The greatest poet of their company, if not in a literal sense the greatest painter also, was born within a year of Blake’s death,—on the 12th of May, 1828, at 38, Charlotte Street, Portland Place, London: the successor of Blake in English romance, yet an alien in the land of his birth. Rossetti suffered, as M. Gabrièl Sarrazin has aptly expressed it, a double banishment; remote alike from his country and his age. Essentially Italian by heritage and temperament, he belonged no less to the fifteenth century than to Tuscany, and bore about with him, though perhaps unconsciously, the burden of the exile as well as of the reformer and the pioneer. He was as one born out of due time; or rather, let us say, reborn; a spirit anew-incarnate from the golden age; brought back, indeed, from a still earlier re-birth, so that men almost deemed, as they saw his work and dimly understood its purport, that one of the prophets was risen from the dead.