Then Love said, ‘Now shall all things be made clear: Come, and behold our lady where she lies These ‘wildering phantasies Then carried me to see my lady dead. Even as I there was led, Her ladies with a veil were covering her; And with her was such very humbleness That she appeared to say, ‘I am at peace.’ (Dante and his Circle.) The trance proves to be a premonition of the event, for, shortly after writing the poem in which his imaginings find record, Dante says, “The Lord God of Justice called my most gracious lady unto Himself.” It is with the incidents of the dream that Rossetti has dealt. The principal personage in the picture is, of course, Dante himself. Of the poet’s face, two old and accredited witnesses remain to us--the portrait of Giotto and the mask supposed to be copied from a similar one taken after death. Giotto’s portrait represents Dante at the age of twenty-seven. The face has a feminine delicacy of outline, yet is full of manly beauty; strength and tenderness are seen blended in its lineaments. It might be that of a poet, a scholar, a courtier, or yet a soldier; and in Dante it is all combined. Such, as seen in Giotto, was the great Florentine when Beatrice beheld him. The familiar mask represents that youthful beauty as somewhat saddened by years of exile, by the accidents of an unequal fortune, and by the long brooding memory of his life’s one, deep, irreparable loss. We see in it the warrior who served in the great battle of Campaldino: the mourner who sought refuge from grief in the action and danger of the war waged by Florence upon Pisa: the magistrate whose justice proved his ruin: the exile who ate bitter bread when Florence banished the greatest of her sons. The mask is as full as the portrait of intellect and feeling, of strength and character, but it lacks something of the early sweetness and sensibility. Rossetti’s portraiture retains the salient qualities of both portrait and mask. It represents Dante in his twenty-seventh year; the face gives hint of both poet and soldier, for behind clear-cut features capable of strengthening into resolve and rigour lie whole depths of tenderest sympathy. The abstracted air, the self-centred look, the eyes that seem to see only what the mind conceives and casts forward from itself; the slow, uncertain, half-reluctant gait,--these are profoundly true to the man and the dream.