Rossetti’s position in the romantic literature of the last half of the ninetenth century is something like Coleridge’s in the first half.  Unlike Coleridge, he was the leader of a school, the master of a definite group of artists and poets.  His actual performance, too, far exceeds Coleridge’s in amount, if not in value.  But like Coleridge, he was a seminal mind, a mind rich in original suggestions, which inspired and influenced younger men to carry out its ideas, often with a fluency of utterance and a technical dexterity both in art and letters which the master himself did not possess.  Holman Hunt, Millais, and Burne-Jones among painters, Morris and Swinburne among poets, were disciples of Rossetti who in some ways outdid him in execution.  His pictures were rarely exhibited, and no collection of his poems was published till 1870.  Meanwhile, however, many of these had circulated in manuscript, and “secured a celebrity akin in kind and almost equal in extent to that enjoyed by Coleridge’s ‘Christabel’ during the many years preceding 1816 in which it lay in manuscript.  Like Coleridge’s poem in another important particular, certain of Rossetti’s ballads, while still unknown to the public, so far influenced contemporary poetry that when they did at length appear, they had all the seeming to the uninitiated of work imitated from contemporary models, instead of being, as in fact they were, the primary source of inspiration for writers whose names were earlier established.” [14] William Morris, e.g., had printed four volumes of verse in advance of Rossetti, and the earliest of these, “The Defence of Guenevere,” which contains his most intensely Pre-Raphaelite work and that most evidently done in the spirit of Rossetti’s teachings, saw the light (1858) twelve years before Rossetti’s own.  Swinburne, too, had published three volumes of poetry before 1870, including the “Poems and Ballads” of 1866, in which Rossetti’s influence is plainly manifest; and he had already secured a wide fame at a time when the elder poet’s reputation was still esoteric and mainly confined to the cenacle.  William M. Rossetti, in describing the literary influences which moulded his brother’s tastes, tells us that “in the long run he perhaps enjoyed and revered Coleridge beyond any other modern poet whatsoever.” [15]

It is worth while to trace these literary influences with some detail, since they serve to link the neo-romantic poetry of our own time to the product of that older generation which had passed away before Rossetti came of age.  It is interesting to find then, that at the age of fifteen (1843) he taught himself enough German to enable him to translate Buerger’s “Lenore,” as Walter Scott had done a half-century before.  This devil of a poem so haunts our history that it has become as familiar a spirit as Mrs. Radcliffe’s bugaboo apparitions, and our flesh refuses any longer to creep at it.  It is quite one of the family.  It would seem, indeed, as if Buerger’s ballad