o reach. Rossetti belongs to the
ornamental school of poetry. He writes more like a man who has gone into
a library than like one who has gone out to Nature, and ornamentalism in
poetry is simply the result of seeing life, not directly, but through
the coloured glass of literature and the other arts. Rossetti was the
forerunner of all those artists and authors of recent times, who, in
greater or less degree, looked on art as a weaving of patterns, an
arrangement of wonderful words and sounds and colours. Pater in his
early writings, William Morris, Oscar Wilde, and all those others who
dreamed that it was the artist's province to enrich the world with
beautiful furniture--for conduct itself seemed, in the philosophy of
these writers, to aspire after the quality of tapestry--are implicit in
_The Blessed Damozel_ and _Troy Town._ It is not that Rossetti could
command words like Pater or Wilde. His phrasing, if personal, is
curiously empty of the graces. He often does achieve graces of phrase;
but some of his most haunting poems owe their power over us to their
general pattern, and not to any persistent fine workmanship. How
beautiful _Troy Town_ is, for instance, and yet how lacking in beautiful
verses! The poet was easily content in his choice of words who could
leave a verse like:--

Venus looked on Helen's gift;
_(O Troy Town!)_
Looked and smiled with subtle drift,
Saw the work of her heart's desire:--
"There thou kneel'st for Love to lift!"
_(O Troy's down,
Tall Troy's on fire!)_

Rossetti never wrote; a poem that was fine throughout. There is nothing
to correspond to _The Skylark_ or the _Ode to a Grecian Urn_ or _Childe
Roland to the Dark Tower Came_ in his work. The truth is, he was not a
great poet, because he was not a singer. He was capable of decorations
in verse, but he was not capable of song. His sonnets, it may be argued,
are more than decorations. But even they are laden with beauty; they are
never, as it were, light and alight with it, as are _Shall I compare
thee to a summer's day?_ and _Where lies the land to which yon ship must
go?_ They have flagging pulses like desire itself, and are often weary
before the fourteenth line. Only rarely do we get a last six lines
like:--

O love, my love! if I no more should see
Thyself, nor on the earth the shadow of thee,
Nor image of thine eyes in any spring,--
How then should sound upon L