ens and George Eliot were proclaiming in all
their novels. Her last two volumes were _Poems before Congress_ (1860), and
_Last Poems_, published after her death. She died suddenly in 1861 and was
buried in Florence. Browning's famous line, "O lyric love, half angel and
half bird," may well apply to her frail life and aerial spirit.

ROSSETTI. Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882), the son of an exiled Italian
painter and scholar, was distinguished both as a painter and as a poet. He
was a leader in the Pre-Raphaelite movement[238] and published in the first
numbers of _The Germ_ his "Hand and Soul," a delicate prose study, and his
famous "The Blessed Damozel," beginning,

The blessed damozel leaned out
From the gold bar of Heaven;
Her eyes were deeper than the depth
Of waters stilled at even;
She had three lilies in her hand,
And the stars in her hair were seven.

These two early works, especially "The Blessed Damozel," with its
simplicity and exquisite spiritual quality, are characteristic of the
ideals of the Pre-Raphaelites.

In 1860, after a long engagement, Rossetti married Elizabeth Siddal, a
delicate, beautiful English girl, whom he has immortalized both in his
pictures and in his poetry. She died two years later, and Rossetti never
entirely recovered from the shock. At her burial he placed in her coffin
the manuscripts of all his unpublished poems, and only at the persistent
demands of his friends did he allow them to be exhumed and printed in 1870.
The publication of this volume of love poems created a sensation in
literary circles, and Rossetti was hailed as one of the greatest of living
poets. In 1881 he published his _Ballads and Sonnets_, a remarkable volume
containing, among other poems, "The Confession," modeled after Browning;
"The Ballad of Sister Helen," founded on a mediaeval superstition; "The
King's Tragedy," a masterpiece of dramatic narrative; and "The House of
Life," a collection of one hundred and one sonnets reflecting the poet's
love and loss. This last collection deserves to rank with Mrs. Browning's
_Sonnets from the Portuguese_ and with Shakespeare's _Sonnets_, as one of
the three great cycles of love poems in our language. It has been well said
that both Rossetti and Morris paint pictures as well in their poems as on
their canvases, and this pictorial quality of their verse is its chief
characteristic.

MORRIS. William Morris (1834-1896) is a most interesti