The distinguishing excellence of craftsmanship in Rossetti’s sonnets was early recognised; but the fertility of thought, and range of emotion compassed by this part of his work constitute an excellence far higher than any that belongs to perfection of form, rhythm, or metre. Mr. Palgrave has well said that a poet’s story differs from a narrative in being in itself a creation; that it brings its own facts; that what we have to ask is not the true life of Laura, but how far Petrarch has truly drawn the life of love. So with Rossetti’s sonnets. They may or may not be “occasional.” Many readers who enter with sympathy into the series of feelings they present will doubtless insist upon regarding them as autobiographical. Others, who think they see the stamp of reality upon them, will perhaps accept them (as Hallam accepted the Sonnets of Shakspeare) as witnesses of excessive affection, redeemed sometimes by touches of nobler sentiments--if affection, however excessive, needs to be redeemed. Others again will receive them as artistic embodiments of ideal love upon which is placed the imprint of a passion as mythical as they believe to be attached to the autobiography of Dante’s early days. But the genesis and history of these sonnets (whether the emotion with which they are pervaded be actual or imagined) must be looked for within. Do they realise vividly Life representative in its many phases of love, joy, sorrow, and death? It must be conceded that _he House of Life_ touches many passions and depicts life in most of its changeful aspects. It would afford an adequate test of its comprehensiveness to note how rarely a mind in general sympathy with the author could come to its perusal without alighting upon something that would be in harmony with its mood. To traverse the work through its aspiration and foreboding, joy, grief, remorse, despair, and final resignation, would involve a task too long and difficult to be attempted here. Two sonnets only need be quoted as at once indicative of the range of thought and feeling covered, and of the sequent relation these poems bear each to each. By thine own tears thy song must tears beget, Singer! Magic mirror thou hast none Except thy manifest heart; and save thine own Anguish or ardour, else no amulet. Cisterned in Pride, verse is the feathery jet Of soulless air-flung fountains; nay, more dry Than the Dead Sea for throats that thirst and sigh, That song o’er which no singer’s lids grew wet. The Song-god--He the Sun-god--is no slave Of thine: thy Hunter he, who for thy soul Fledges his shaft: to the august control Of thy skilled hand his quivered store he gave: But if thy lips’ loud cry leap to his smart, The inspired record shall pierce thy brother’s heart.