worth speaking of was Homer, the ‘Odyssey’ considerably more than the ‘Iliad.’” This, I presume, he knew only in translation, but the preference is significant, since, as we have seen, the “Odyssey” is the most romantic of epics.  Among English poets, he preferred Keats to Shelley, as might have been expected.  Shelley was a visionary and Keats was an artist; Shelley often abstract, Keats always concrete.  Shelley had a philosophy, or thought he had; Keats had none, neither had Rossetti.  It is quite comprehensible that the sensuous element in Keats would attract a born colourist like Rossetti beyond anything in the English poetry of that generation; and I need not repeat that the latest Gothic or romantic schools have all been taking Keats’ direction rather than Scott’s, or even than Coleridge’s.  Rossetti’s work, I should say, e.g., in such a piece as “The Bride’s Prelude,” is a good deal more like “Isabella” and “The Eve of St. Agnes” than it is like “The Ancient Mariner” or “Christabel” or “The Lay of the Last Minstrel.”  Rossetti got little from Milton and Dryden, or even from Chaucer and Spenser.  Wordsworth he valued hardly at all.  In the last two or three years of his life he came to have an exaggerated admiration for Chatterton.  Rossetti’s taste, like his temperament, was tinctured with morbidness.  He sought the intense, the individual, the symbolic, the mystical.  These qualities he found in a supreme degree in Dante.  Probably it was only his austere artistic conscience which saved him from the fantastic—­the merely peculiar or odd—­and kept him from going astray after false gods like Poe and Baudelaire.  Chaucer was a mediaeval poet and Spenser certainly a romantic one, but their work was too broad, too general in its appeal, too healthy, one might almost say, to come home to Rossetti.[17] William Rossetti testifies that “any writing about devils, spectres, or the supernatural generally . . . had always a fascination for him.”  Sharp remarks that work more opposite than Rossetti’s to the Greek spirit can hardly be imagined.  “The former [the Greek spirit] looked to light, clearness, form in painting, sculpture, architecture; to intellectual conciseness and definiteness in poetry; the latter [Rossetti] looked mainly to diffused colour, gradated to almost indefinite shades in his art, finding the harmonies thereof more akin than severity of outline and clearness of form; while in his poetry the Gothic love of the supernatural, the Gothic delight in sensuous images, the Gothic instinct of indefiniteness and elaboration, carried to an extreme, prevailed. . . .  He would take more pleasure in a design by . . .  William Blake . . . than in the more strictly artistic drawing of some revered classicist; more enjoyment in the weird or dramatic Scottish ballad than in Pindaric or Horatian ode; and he would certainly rather have had Shakspere than Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides put together.”