In addition to the three great poems just traversed, Rossetti had written, before the completion of his twenty-sixth year, _The Staff and Scrip, The Burden of Nineveh, Troy Town, Eden Bower_ and _The Last Confession_, as well as a fragment of _The Bride’s Prelude_, to which it will be necessary to return. But, with a single exception, the poems just named may be said to exist beside the three that have been analysed, without being radically distinct from them, or touching higher or other levels, and hence it is not considered needful to dwell upon them at length. _The Last Confession_ covers another range of feeling, it is true, whereof it may be said that the nobler part is akin to that which finds expression in the pure and shattered love of Othello; but it is a range of feeling less characteristical, perhaps less indigenous and appreciable. In the years 1845-49 inclusive, Rossetti made the larger part of his translations (published in 1861) from the early Italian poets, and though he afterwards spoke of them as having been the work of the leisure moments of many years, of their subsequent revision alone, perhaps, could this be altogether true. The _Vita Nuova_, together with the many among Dante’s _Lyrics_ and those of his contemporaries which elucidate their personal intercourse; were translated, as well as a great body of the sonnets of poets later than Dante. {*} This early and indirect apprenticeship to the sonnet, as a form of composition, led to his becoming, in the end, perhaps the most perfect of English sonnet-writers. In youth, it was one of his pleasures to engage in exercises of sonnet-skill with his brother William and his sister Christina, and, even then, he attained to such proficiency, in the mere mechanism of sonnet structure, that he could sometimes dash off a sonnet in ten minutes--rivalling, in this particular, the impromptu productions of Hartley Coleridge. It is hardly necessary to say that the poems produced, under such conditions of time and other tests, were rarely, if ever, adjudged worthy of publication, by the side of work to which he gave adequate deliberation. But several of the sonnets on pictures--as, for example, the fine one on a Venetian pastoral by Giorgione--and the political sonnet, Miltonic in spirit, _On the Refusal of Aid between Nations_, were written contemporaneously with the experimental sonnets in question. * Rossetti often remarked that he had intended to translate the sonnets of Michael Angelo, until he saw Mr. Symonds’s translation, when he was so much impressed by its excellence that he forthwith abandoned the purpose.