and idealised by death into the type of heavenly love, made an enduring impression upon Rossetti’s imagination.  Shelley, in his “Epipsychidion,” had appealed to this great love story, so characteristic at once of the mediaeval mysticism and of the Platonic spirit of the early Renaissance.  But Rossetti was the first to give a thoroughly sympathetic interpretation of it to English readers.  It became associated most intimately with his own love and loss.  We see it in a picture like “Beata Beatrix,” and a poem like “The Portrait,” written many years before his wife’s death, but subsequently retouched.  Who can read the following stanza without thinking of Beatrice and the “Paradiso”?

    “Even so, where Heaven holds breath and hears
      The beating heart of Love’s own breast,—­
    Where round the secret of all spheres
      All angels lay their wings to rest,—­
    How shall my soul stand rapt and awed,
    When, by the new birth borne abroad
  Throughout the music of the suns,
  It enters in her soul at once
    And knows the silence there for God!”

Rossetti’s ballads and ballad-romances, all intensely mediaeval in spirit, fall, as regards their manner, into two very different classes.  Pieces like “The Blessed Damozel,” “The Bride’s Prelude,” “Rose Mary,” and “The Staff and Scrip” (from a story in the “Gesta Romanorum”) are art poems, rich, condensed, laden with ornament, pictorial.  Every attitude of every figure is a pose; landscapes and interiors are painted with minute Pre-Raphaelite finish.  “The Bride’s Prelude”—­a fragment—­opens with the bride’s confession to her sister, in the ’tiring-room sumptuous with gold and jewels and brocade, where the air is heavy with musk and myrrh, and sultry with the noon.  In the pauses of her tale stray lute notes creep in at the casement, with noises from the tennis court and the splash of a hound swimming in the moat.  In “Rose Mary,” which employs the superstition in the old lapidaries as to the prophetic powers of the beryl-stone, the colouring and imagery are equally opulent, and, in passages, Oriental.

On the other hand, “Stratton Water,” “Sister Helen,” “The White Ship,” and “The King’s Tragedy” are imitations of popular poetry, done with a simulated roughness and simplicity.  The first of these adopts a common ballad motive, a lover’s desertion of his sweetheart through the contrivances of his wicked kinsfolk: 

  “And many’s the good gift, Lord Sands,
    You’ve promised oft to me;
  But the gift of yours I keep to-day
    Is the babe in my body.” . . .

  “Look down, look down, my false mother,
    That bade me not to grieve: 
  You’ll look up when our marriage fires
    Are lit to-morrow eve.”