The imagery of the poem is right out of the picture world;

  “The clear ranged, unnumbered heads
  Bowed with their aureoles.”

The imaginations are Dantesque: 

  “And the souls, mounting up to God,
  Went by her like thin flames.”

  “The light thrilled towards her, filled
  With angels in strong, level flight.”

Even in “Jenny,” one of the few poems of Rossetti that deal with modern life, mediaeval art will creep in.

  “Fair shines the gilded aureole
  In which our highest painters place
  Some living woman’s simple face. 
  And the stilled features thus descried,
  As Jenny’s long throat droops aside—­
  The shadows where the cheeks are thin
  And pure wide curve from ear to chin—­
  With Raffael’s, Leonardo’s hand
  To show them to men’s souls might stand.”

The type of womanly beauty here described is characteristic; it is the type familiar to all in “Pandora,” “Proserpine,” “La Ghirlandata,” “The Day Dream,” “Our Lady of Pity,” and the other life-size, half-length figure paintings in oil which were the masterpieces of his maturer style.  The languid pose, the tragic eyes with their mystic, brooding intensity in contrast with the full curves of the lips and throat, give that union of sensuousness and spirituality which is a constant trait of Rossetti’s poetry.  The Pre-Raphaelites were accused of exaggerating the height of their figures.  In Burne-Jones, whose figures are eight and a half heads high, the exaggeration is deliberate.  In Morris’ and Swinburne’s early poems all the lines of the female face and figure are long—­the hand, the foot, the throat, the “curve from chin to ear,” and above all, the hair.[22] The hair in these paintings of Rossetti seems a romantic exaggeration, too; immense, crinkly waves of it spreading off to left and right.  William Morris’ beautiful wife is said to have been his model in the pieces above named.

The first collection of original poems by Rossetti was published in 1870.  The manuscripts had been buried with his wife in 1862.  When he finally consented to their publication, the coffin had to be exhumed and the manuscripts removed.  In 1881 a new edition was issued with changes and additions; and in the same year the volume of “Ballads and Sonnets” was published, including the sonnet sequence of “The House of Life.”  Of the poems in these two collections which treat directly of Dante the most important is “Dante at Verona,” a noble and sustained piece in eighty-five stanzas, slightly pragmatic in manner, in which are enwoven the legendary and historical incidents of Dante’s exile related by the early biographers, together with many personal allusions from the “Divine Comedy.”  But Dante is nowhere very far off either in Rossetti’s painting or in his poetry.  In particular, the history of Dante’s passion for Beatrice, as told in the “Vita Nuova,” in which the figure of the girl is gradually transfigured