A tour on the Continent with Holman Hunt in September, 1849, gave Rossetti fresh inspiration from the early Italian masters and the best representatives of the Dutch school. The impressions made upon him in his twenty-first year by travel in France and Belgium are recorded for us in the wonderfully vivid and sharply-cut vignette-poems of this period. Eager as ever for emotional experience, and with the divine passion of hero-worship strong upon him, his holiday among the great painters was a delightsome pilgrimage, full of suggestion and stimulus for future work. In Paris, the sight of Giorgione’s great idyll in the Louvre, “A Venetian Pastoral,” drew from the young tourist a sonnet unsurpassed for sheer verbal colour and atmosphere by any of his later poems. Here, too, were written the great memorial sonnets, “Place de la Bastille,” and “The Staircase of Notre Dame.” On the cliffs at Boulogne Rossetti wrote “Sea-Limits.” He —“climbed the stair in Antwerp church, What time the circling thews of sound At sunset seem to heave it round. Far up, the carillon did search The wind, and the birds came to perch Far under, where the gables wound.” Van Eyck and Memmeling at Bruges, Leonardo, Fra Angelico, Giorgione, and Titian in Paris, lacked no due meed of homage from Rossetti and Hunt. It is remarkable that Rossetti never visited Italy, nor even retained, in later years, the patriotic sentiment which had so strongly pervaded the home life of his boyhood.