e "Poems
and Ballads" of 1866, in which Rossetti's influence is plainly manifest;
and he had already secured a wide fame at a time when the elder poet's
reputation was still esoteric and mainly confined to the _cenacle_.
William M. Rossetti, in describing the literary influences which moulded
his brother's tastes, tells us that "in the long run he perhaps enjoyed
and revered Coleridge beyond any other modern poet whatsoever." [15]

It is worth while to trace these literary influences with some detail,
since they serve to link the neo-romantic poetry of our own time to the
product of that older generation which had passed away before Rossetti
came of age. It is interesting to find then, that at the age of fifteen
(1843) he taught himself enough German to enable him to translate
Buerger's "Lenore," as Walter Scott had done a half-century before. This
devil of a poem so haunts our history that it has become as familiar a
spirit as Mrs. Radcliffe's bugaboo apparitions, and our flesh refuses any
longer to creep at it. It is quite one of the family. It would seem,
indeed, as if Buerger's ballad was set as a school copy for every young
romanticist in turn to try his 'prentice hand upon. Fortunately,
Rossetti's translation has perished, as has also his version--some
hundred lines--of the earlier portion of the "Nibelungenlied." But a
translation which he made about the same time of the old Swabian poet,
Hartmann von Aue's "Der Arme Heinrich" (Henry the Leper) is preserved,
and was first published in 1886. This poem, it will be remembered, was
the basis of Longfellow's "Golden Legend" (1851). Rossetti did not keep
up his German, and in later years he never had much liking for
Scandinavian or Teutonic literature. He was a Latin, and he made it his
special task to interpret to modern Protestant England whatever struck
him as most spiritually intense and characteristic in the Latin Catholic
Middle Age. The only Italian poet whom he "earnestly loved" was Dante.
He did not greatly care for Petrarch, Boccaccio, Ariosto, and Tasso--the
Renaissance poets--though in boyhood he had taken delight in Ariosto,
just as he had in Scott and Byron. But that was a stage through which he
passed; none of these had any ultimate share in Rossetti's culture. At
fifteen he wrote a ballad entitled "Sir Hugh the Heron," founded on a
tale of Allan Cunningham, but taking its name and motto from the lines in
"Marmion"--

"Sir Hugh the Heron b