iece as "The Bride's
Prelude," is a good deal more like "Isabella" and "The Eve of St. Agnes"
than it is like "The Ancient Mariner" or "Christabel" or "The Lay of the
Last Minstrel." Rossetti got little from Milton and Dryden, or even from
Chaucer and Spenser. Wordsworth he valued hardly at all. In the last
two or three years of his life he came to have an exaggerated admiration
for Chatterton. Rossetti's taste, like his temperament, was tinctured
with morbidness. He sought the intense, the individual, the symbolic,
the mystical. These qualities he found in a supreme degree in Dante.
Probably it was only his austere artistic conscience which saved him from
the fantastic--the merely peculiar or odd--and kept him from going astray
after false gods like Poe and Baudelaire. Chaucer was a mediaeval poet
and Spenser certainly a romantic one, but their work was too broad, too
general in its appeal, too healthy, one might almost say, to come home to
Rossetti.[17] William Rossetti testifies that "any writing about devils,
spectres, or the supernatural generally . . . had always a fascination
for him." Sharp remarks that work more opposite than Rossetti's to the
Greek spirit can hardly be imagined. "The former [the Greek spirit]
looked to light, clearness, form in painting, sculpture, architecture; to
intellectual conciseness and definiteness in poetry; the latter
[Rossetti] looked mainly to diffused colour, gradated to almost
indefinite shades in his art, finding the harmonies thereof more akin
than severity of outline and clearness of form; while in his poetry the
Gothic love of the supernatural, the Gothic delight in sensuous images,
the Gothic instinct of indefiniteness and elaboration, carried to an
extreme, prevailed. . . . He would take more pleasure in a design
by . . . William Blake . . . than in the more strictly artistic drawing
of some revered classicist; more enjoyment in the weird or dramatic
Scottish ballad than in Pindaric or Horatian ode; and he would certainly
rather have had Shakspere than Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides put
together."

Rossetti's office in the later and further development of romantic art
was threefold: First, to revive and express, both in painting and poetry,
the religious spirit of the early Florentine schools; secondly, to give a
more intimate interpretation of Dante to the English public, and
especially of Dante's life and personality and of his minor poetry, like
the "Vita