ith crossed scarlet or
flame-coloured wings." [21]

Rossetti's powerful ballad, "The King's Tragedy," was suggested by the
mural paintings (encaustic) with which William Bell Scott decorated the
circular staircase of Penkill Castle in 1865-68. These were a series of
scenes from "The Kinges Quair" once attributed to James I. of Scotland.
The photogravure reproduction, from a painting by Arthur Hughes of a
section of the Penkill Castle staircase, represents the king looking from
the window of his prison in Windsor Castle at Lady Jane Beaufort walking
with her handmaidens in a very Pre-Raphaelite garden. At the left of the
picture, Cupid aims an arrow at the royal lover. Rossetti, Hunt, and
Millais were all great lovers of Keats. Hunt says that his "Escape of
Madeline and Prospero" was the first subject from Keats ever painted, and
was highly acclaimed by Rossetti. At the formation of the P.-R B. in
1848, it was agreed that the first work of the Brotherhood should be in
illustration of "Isabella," and a series of eight subjects was selected
from the poem. Millais executed at once his "Lorenzo and Isabella," but
Hunt's "Isabella and the Pot of Basil" was not finished till 1867, and
Rossetti's part of the programme was never carried out. Rossetti's "La
Belle Dame sans Merci," Mr. J. M. Strudwick's "Madness of Isabella,"
Arthur Hughes' triptych of "The Eve of St. Agnes," and Millais' great
painting, "St. Agnes' Eve," were other tributes of Pre-Raphaelite art to
the young master of romantic verse.

Whether this interpenetration of poetry and painting is of advantage to
either, may admit of question. Emerson said to Scott: "We [Americans]
scarcely take to the Rossetti poetry; it does not come home to us; it is
exotic." The sonnets of "The House of Life" have appeared to many
readers obscure and artificial, the working out in language of
conceptions more easily expressible by some other art; expressed here, at
all events, through imagery drawn from a special and even technical range
of associations. Such readers are apt to imagine that Rossetti suffers
from a hesitation between poetry and painting; as Sidney Lanier is
thought by some to have been injured artistically by halting midway
between music and verse. The method proper to one art intrudes into the
other; everything that the artist does has the air of an experiment; he
paints poems and writes pictures.

A department of Rossetti's verse consists of sonnets wri