the fleet of Edward the Third, among the gaily painted medieval sails, that we pass to a reserved fragment of Greece, which by some divine good fortune lingers on in the western sea into the Middle Age.  There the stories of The Earthly Paradise are told, Greek story and romantic alternating; and for the crew of the Rose Garland, coming across the sins of the earlier world with the sign of the cross, and drinking Rhine-wine in Greece, the two worlds of sentiment are confronted.

[227] One characteristic of the pagan spirit the aesthetic poetry has, which is on its surface—­the continual suggestion, pensive or passionate, of the shortness of life.  This is contrasted with the bloom of the world, and gives new seduction to it—­the sense of death and the desire of beauty:  the desire of beauty quickened by the sense of death.  But that complexion of sentiment is at its height in another “aesthetic” poet of whom I have to speak next, Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

1868.

Notes

213. +This essay appeared only in the 1889 edition of Appreciations.

219. Fauriel’s Histoire de la Poesie Provencale, tome ii. ch. xviii.