of “Isabella,” and a series of eight subjects was selected from the poem.  Millais executed at once his “Lorenzo and Isabella,” but Hunt’s “Isabella and the Pot of Basil” was not finished till 1867, and Rossetti’s part of the programme was never carried out.  Rossetti’s “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” Mr. J. M. Strudwick’s “Madness of Isabella,” Arthur Hughes’ triptych of “The Eve of St. Agnes,” and Millais’ great painting, “St. Agnes’ Eve,” were other tributes of Pre-Raphaelite art to the young master of romantic verse.

Whether this interpenetration of poetry and painting is of advantage to either, may admit of question.  Emerson said to Scott:  “We [Americans] scarcely take to the Rossetti poetry; it does not come home to us; it is exotic.”  The sonnets of “The House of Life” have appeared to many readers obscure and artificial, the working out in language of conceptions more easily expressible by some other art; expressed here, at all events, through imagery drawn from a special and even technical range of associations.  Such readers are apt to imagine that Rossetti suffers from a hesitation between poetry and painting; as Sidney Lanier is thought by some to have been injured artistically by halting midway between music and verse.  The method proper to one art intrudes into the other; everything that the artist does has the air of an experiment; he paints poems and writes pictures.

A department of Rossetti’s verse consists of sonnets written for pictures, pictures by Botticelli, Mantegna, Giorgione, Burne-Jones, and others, and in many cases by himself, and giving thus a double rendering of the same invention.  But even when not so occasioned, his poems nearly always suggest pictures.  Their figures seem to have stepped down from some fifteenth-century altar piece bringing their aureoles and golden backgrounds with them.  This is to be pictorial in a very different sense from that in which Tennyson is said to be a pictorial poet.  Hall Caine informs us that Rossetti “was no great lover of landscape beauty.”  His scenery does not, like Wordsworth’s or Tennyson’s, carry an impression of life, of the real outdoors.  Nature with Rossetti has been passed through the medium of another art before it comes into his poetry; it is a doubly distilled nature.  It is nature as we have it in the “Roman de la Rose,” or the backgrounds of old Florentine painters:  flowery pleasances and orchard closes, gardens with trellises and singing conduits, where ladies are playing at the palm play.  In his most popular poem, “The Blessed Damosel”—­a theme which he both painted and sang—­the feeling is exquisitely and voraciously human.  The maiden is “homesick in heaven,” and yearns back towards the earth and her lover left behind.  Even so, with her symbolic stars and lilies, she is so like the stiff, sweet angels of Fra Angelico or Perugino, that one almost doubts when the poet says

    “—­her bosom must have made
  The bar she leaned on warm.”