By Dante G. Rossetti:  “My Sister’s Sleep.”  This purports to be No. 1 of “Songs of One Household.”  I do not much think that Dante Rossetti ever wrote any other poem which would have been proper to such a series.  “My Sister’s Sleep” was composed very soon after he emerged from a merely juvenile stage of work.  I believe that it dates before “The Blessed Damozel,” and therefore before May 1847.  It is not founded upon any actual event affecting the Rossetti family, nor any family of our acquaintance.  As I have said in my Memoir of my brother (1895), the poem was shown, perhaps early in 1848, by Major Calder Campbell to the editress of the “Belle Assemblee,” who heartily admired it, but, for one reason or another, did not publish it.  This composition is somewhat noticeable on more grounds than one; not least as being in a metre which was not much in use until it became famous in Tennyson’s “In Memoriam,” published in 1850, and of course totally unknown to Rossetti when he wrote “My Sister’s Sleep.”  In later years my brother viewed this early work with some distaste, and he only reluctantly reprinted it in his “Poems,” 1870.  He then wholly omitted the four stanzas 7, 8, 12, 13, beginning:  “Silence was speaking,” “I said, full knowledge,” “She stood a moment,” “Almost unwittingly”; and he made some other verbal alterations.{2} It will be observed that this poem was written long before the Praeraphaelite movement began.  None the less it shows in an eminent degree one of the influences which guided that movement:  the intimate intertexture of a spiritual sense with a material form; small actualities made vocal of lofty meanings.

{2} I may call attention to Stanza 16, “She stooped an instant.”  The word is “stooped” in “The Germ,” and in the “Poems” of 1870.  This is undoubtedly correct; but in my brother’s re-issue of the “Poems,” 1881, the word got mis-printed “stopped”; and I find the same mis-print in subsequent editions.

By Dante G. Rossetti:  “Hand and Soul.”  This tale was, I think, written with an express view to its appearing in No. 1 of our magazine, and Rossetti began making for it an etching, which, though not ready for No. 1, was intended to appear in some number later than the second.  He drew it in March 1850; but, being disgusted with the performance, he scratched the plate over, and tore up the prints.  The design showed Chiaro dell’ Erma in the act of painting his embodied Soul.  Though the form of this tale is that of romantic metaphor, its substance is a very serious manifesto of art-dogma.  It amounts to saying, The only satisfactory works of art are those which exhibit the very soul of the artist.  To work for fame or self-display is a failure, and to work for direct moral proselytizing is a failure; but to paint that which your own perceptions and emotions urge you to paint promises to be a success for yourself, and hence a benefit to the mass of beholders.  This was the core of the “Praeraphaelite”