romanticists together do not equal the romantic feeling in a single picture of Rossetti’s; and he somewhat capriciously defines the idea at the core of romanticism as that of the evil forces of nature assailing man through his sense of beauty.  Analysis run mad!  As to Poe, Rossetti certainly preferred him to Wordsworth.  Hall Caine testifies that he used to repeat “Ulalume” and “The Raven” from memory; and that the latter suggested his “Blessed Damozel.”  “I saw that Poe had done the utmost it was possible to do with the grief of the lover on earth, and so I determined to reverse the conditions, and give utterance to the yearning of the loved one in heaven” ("Recollections,” p. 384).

[18] “Recollections,” p. 140.

[19] Caine’s “Recollections,” p. 266.

[20] Burne-Jones had been attracted by Rossetti’s illustration of Allingham’s poem, “The Maids of Elfinmere,” and had obtained an introduction to him at London in 1856.  It was by Rossetti’s persuasion that he gave up the church for the career of an artist.  Rossetti and Swinburne some years later (1862) became housemates for a time at Chelsea; and Rossetti and Morris for a number of years, off and on, at Kelmscott.

[21] Sharp’s “Dante Gabriel Rossetti,” p. 190.

[22] See especially Morris’ poem “Rapunzel” in “The Defence of Guenevere.”

[23] “I can’t say,” wrote William Morris, “how it was that Rossetti took no interest in politics; but so it was:  of course he was quite Italian in his general turn of thought; though I think he took less interest in Italian politics than in English. . . .  The truth is, he cared for nothing but individual and personal matters; chiefly of course in relation to art and literature.”

[24] “The Liberal Movement in English Literature,” by W. J. Courthope, London, 1885, p. 230.

[25] “Keats was a great poet who sometimes nodded. . . .  Coleridge was a muddle-brained metaphysician who, by some strange freak of fortune, turned out a few real poems amongst the dreary flood of inanity which was his wont. . . .  I have been through the poems, and find that the only ones which have any interest for me are:  (1) ‘Ancient Mariner’; (2) ‘Christabel’; (3) ‘Kubla Khan’; and (4) the poem called ‘Love’” (Mackail’s “Life of Morris,” vol. ii., p. 310).

[26] “The Life of William Morris,” by W. J. Mackail, London, 1899, vol. ii., p. 171.

[27] For the Chaucerian manipulation of classical subjects by Pre-Raphaelite artists see “Edward Burne-Jones,” by Malcolm Bell, London, 1899.

[28] “The slough of despond which we call the eighteenth century” ("Hopes and Fears for Art,” p. 211).  “The English language, which under the hands of sycophantic verse-makers had been reduced to a miserable jargon . . . flowed clear, pure, and simple along with the music of Blake and Coleridge.  Take those names, the earliest in date among ourselves, as a type of the change that has happened in literature since the time of George II.” (ibid., p. 82).