But there was as yet a strong practical cohesion between the grave and gentle Hunt, the brilliant, warm-hearted, and impressionable Millais, and the ardent, mercurial, and passionately imaginative Rossetti, whose personal magnetism was the immediate welding-force of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. Rossetti’s proselytizing powers, and his inexhaustible enthusiasm (at least in youth) for dogmatic propaganda, were indeed a source of some embarrassment and many disappointments in the progress of artistic reform. The doctrine of Pre-Raphaelitism, however, if we may so call it—namely that in the age preceding Raphael would be found the touchstone of art, grew up too imperceptibly through mutual influences and interchange of thought to be attributed as a special tenet to Rossetti or any other of the student-band. It was in the year 1847, before the formation of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, that the spell of Keats had come with special power upon its future leaders. Rossetti, an omnivorous reader of poetry, had already perceived both in Keats and Coleridge the essential elements of the highest romance. It is the more remarkable that Chatterton, now acclaimed as the herald of the romantic revival in poetry, as was Blake in art, had no such charm for Rossetti until quite late in life, when the tardy discovery led to an exaggerated worship. But in Keats, whose life (by Lord Houghton) Rossetti, Holman Hunt, and Millais had been reading together about this time, they found the supreme example in English poetry of that attainment of harmony between the classic and the romantic temper which was their aim in art. Eager as they now were for subject-matter whereon to exercise the artistic principles as yet but crudely formulated in their minds, they turned with new delight to the wonder-world revealed to them by the spirit of Keats, and looked with him through —“magic casements, opening on the foam Of perilous seas in faëry lands forlorn.” They saw that the reconciliation of the flesh to the spirit, which is the task of the second Renaissance as of the first, had already been achieved in poetry, and was waiting its translation into pictorial art. Keats had attained that perfect blending of the Greek spirit with the temper of romance which Rossetti was to reach in “Venus Astarte” and “Pandora.”