oned, of course, his own schemes
and ambitions, and he sent, as a sample of his powers, his poems of
"The Blessed Damozel," and "My Sister's Sleep," which he had written
about eighteen months before.

Mr. Scott tells me that his first feeling on receiving these poems,
written in English by an Italian boy of eighteen, was one of
amazement. I cannot wonder at it. If the "Blessed Damozel," when it
was published a quarter of a century later, seemed a masterpiece to
those who had, in the meanwhile, read so much that was vaguely
inspired by it, what must it have been in 1846? Certain pieces in
Tennyson's "Poems," of 1842, and a few fragments of Browning's "Bells
and Pomegranates" were the only English poems which can be supposed to
have given it birth, even indirectly. In its interpretation of
mystical thoughts by concrete images, in its mediaeval fervor and
consistence of fancy, in its peculiar metrical facility, it was
distinctly new--original as few poems except those by the acknowledged
masters of the craft can ever be.

"The sun was gone now; the curled moon
Was like a little feather
Fluttering far down the gulf; and now
She spoke through the clear weather.
Her voice was like the voice the stars
Had when they sang together."

This was a strange accent in 1846. Miss Barrett and Mr. Tennyson were
then the most accepted poets. Mr. Browning spoke fluently and
persistently, but only to a very little circle; Mr. Horne's "Orion"
and Mr. Bailey's "Festus" were the recent outcomes of Keats and
Goethe; the Spasmodic School, to be presently born of much unwise
study of "Festus," was still unknown; Mr. Clough, Mr. Matthew Arnold,
and Mr. Patmore were quite unapparent, taking form and voice in
solitude; and here was a new singer, utterly unlike them all, pouring
out his first notes with the precision and independence of the
new-fledged thrush in the woodland chorus.

In painting, the process was somewhat different. In this art, no less
than in poetry, Rossetti understood at once what it was that he wished
to do himself, and what he desired to see others doing; but the
difficulties of technique were in his way. He had begun to write in
childhood, but he had taken up design late in his youth, and he had
undergone no discipline in it. At the present day, when every student
has to pass a somewhat stringent examination in design, Rossetti, at
eighteen, could not have entered the schools of the Royal Academy.