The second number of “The Germ,” though no less interesting and significant in subject-matter, did not increase the scant support accorded to the venture by the public at large; and since the expense of such an issue was too heavy to be borne by the little band of young and struggling aspirants responsible for its existence, the future of the magazine had to be seriously reconsidered by the Brotherhood. Mr. Tupper, however, to whose hands the printing had been entrusted, came to the rescue, and gave “The Germ” a new lease of life under the title of “Art and Poetry.” The change did not serve to commend the somewhat crude propaganda to the mind of the British Philistine, and after the April number the issue was reluctantly given up; but not until its pages had glowed with the first fires, at least, of Rossetti’s noblest poetic inspiration. Here first appeared “The Blessed Damozel,” for which we might surely paraphrase the words of Holman Hunt on Millais, and call it “the most wonderful poem that any youth still under twenty years of age ever did in the world.” Here, too, were the lyric first-fruits of his continental tour (if sonnets may, by elasticity of definition, be included in lyric poetry), “The Carillon,” “From the Cliffs—Noon,” afterwards called “Sea-Limits,” “Pax Vobis,” largely rewritten later and entitled “World’s Worth,” and the sonnets on “A Virgin and Child,” “A Marriage of St. Katherine,” “A Dance of Nymphs” (from Andrea Mantegna, in the Louvre), “A Venetian Pastoral” (from Giorgione, in the Louvre), and “Ruggiero and Angelica” (from the picture by Ingres). Among other contents of “The Germ” and “Art and Poetry” may be mentioned Ford Madox Brown’s paper on “The Structure of an Historical Picture,” John Orchard’s “Dialogue on Art,” and Coventry Patmore’s “Criticism of Macbeth.” Mr. F.G. Stephens wrote under the pseudonym of “John Seward,” and the publication was edited by W.M. Rossetti, then twenty years of age. Yet one more poet remains in the list of contributors, James Collinson, whose somewhat desultory but genuinely imaginative lines, “The Child Jesus: a record typical of the five sorrowful mysteries,” together with an etching by the same hand, illustrate very markedly the peculiar phase of religious symbolism, combined with half-ascetic, half- æsthetic melancholy, upon which the Pre-Raphaelites were entering at this period, and which remained with one, at least, of their leaders, as a permanent and dominating element in the artistic work of a lifetime.