Mrs. Browning entered with whole-souled enthusiasm into the aspirations of Italy in its struggle against the tyranny of Austria; and her Casa Guidi Windows (1851) is a combination of poetry and politics, both, it must be confessed, a little too emotional.  In 1856 she published Aurora Leigh, a novel in verse, having for its hero a young social reformer, and for its heroine a young woman, poetical and enthusiastic, who strongly suggests Elizabeth Barrett herself.  It emphasizes in verse precisely the same moral and social ideals which Dickens and George Eliot were proclaiming in all their novels.  Her last two volumes were Poems before Congress (1860), and Last Poems, published after her death.  She died suddenly in 1861 and was buried in Florence.  Browning’s famous line, “O lyric love, half angel and half bird,” may well apply to her frail life and aerial spirit.

ROSSETTI.  Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882), the son of an exiled Italian painter and scholar, was distinguished both as a painter and as a poet.  He was a leader in the Pre-Raphaelite movement[238] and published in the first numbers of The Germ his “Hand and Soul,” a delicate prose study, and his famous “The Blessed Damozel,” beginning,

    The blessed damozel leaned out
      From the gold bar of Heaven;
    Her eyes were deeper than the depth
      Of waters stilled at even;
    She had three lilies in her hand,
      And the stars in her hair were seven.

These two early works, especially “The Blessed Damozel,” with its simplicity and exquisite spiritual quality, are characteristic of the ideals of the Pre-Raphaelites.

In 1860, after a long engagement, Rossetti married Elizabeth Siddal, a delicate, beautiful English girl, whom he has immortalized both in his pictures and in his poetry.  She died two years later, and Rossetti never entirely recovered from the shock.  At her burial he placed in her coffin the manuscripts of all his unpublished poems, and only at the persistent demands of his friends did he allow them to be exhumed and printed in 1870.  The publication of this volume of love poems created a sensation in literary circles, and Rossetti was hailed as one of the greatest of living poets.  In 1881 he published his Ballads and Sonnets, a remarkable volume containing, among other poems, “The Confession,” modeled after Browning; “The Ballad of Sister Helen,” founded on a mediaeval superstition; “The King’s Tragedy,” a masterpiece of dramatic narrative; and “The House of Life,” a collection of one hundred and one sonnets reflecting the poet’s love and loss.  This last collection deserves to rank with Mrs. Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese and with Shakespeare’s Sonnets, as one of the three great cycles of love poems in our language.  It has been well said that both Rossetti and Morris paint pictures as well in their poems as on their canvases, and this pictorial quality of their verse is its chief characteristic.