gesture
in Pre-Raphaelite figure painting, which M. de la Sizeranne notices, was
only one more manifestation of the romantic desire for individuality and
concreteness as against the generalising academicism of the eighteenth
century.[12]

As poets, the Pre-Raphaelites derive from Keats rather than from Scott,
in their exclusive devotion to beauty, to art for art's sake; in their
single absorption in the passion of love; and in their attraction towards
the more esoteric side of mediaeval life, rather than towards its broad,
public, and military aspects.[13]

Rossetti's position in the romantic literature of the last half of the
ninetenth century is something like Coleridge's in the first half.
Unlike Coleridge, he was the leader of a school, the master of a definite
group of artists and poets. His actual performance, too, far exceeds
Coleridge's in amount, if not in value. But like Coleridge, he was a
seminal mind, a mind rich in original suggestions, which inspired and
influenced younger men to carry out its ideas, often with a fluency of
utterance and a technical dexterity both in art and letters which the
master himself did not possess. Holman Hunt, Millais, and Burne-Jones
among painters, Morris and Swinburne among poets, were disciples of
Rossetti who in some ways outdid him in execution. His pictures were
rarely exhibited, and no collection of his poems was published till 1870.
Meanwhile, however, many of these had circulated in manuscript, and
"secured a celebrity akin in kind and almost equal in extent to that
enjoyed by Coleridge's 'Christabel' during the many years preceding 1816
in which it lay in manuscript. Like Coleridge's poem in another
important particular, certain of Rossetti's ballads, while still unknown
to the public, so far influenced contemporary poetry that when they did
at length appear, they had all the seeming to the uninitiated of work
imitated from contemporary models, instead of being, as in fact they
were, the primary source of inspiration for writers whose names were
earlier established." [14] William Morris, _e.g._, had printed four
volumes of verse in advance of Rossetti, and the earliest of these, "The
Defence of Guenevere," which contains his most intensely Pre-Raphaelite
work and that most evidently done in the spirit of Rossetti's teachings,
saw the light (1858) twelve years before Rossetti's own. Swinburne, too,
had published three volumes of poetry before 1870, including th