tten for
pictures, pictures by Botticelli, Mantegna, Giorgione, Burne-Jones, and
others, and in many cases by himself, and giving thus a double rendering
of the same invention. But even when not so occasioned, his poems nearly
always suggest pictures. Their figures seem to have stepped down from
some fifteenth-century altar piece bringing their aureoles and golden
backgrounds with them. This is to be pictorial in a very different sense
from that in which Tennyson is said to be a pictorial poet. Hall Caine
informs us that Rossetti "was no great lover of landscape beauty." His
scenery does not, like Wordsworth's or Tennyson's, carry an impression of
life, of the real outdoors. Nature with Rossetti has been passed through
the medium of another art before it comes into his poetry; it is a doubly
distilled nature. It is nature as we have it in the "Roman de la Rose,"
or the backgrounds of old Florentine painters: flowery pleasances and
orchard closes, gardens with trellises and singing conduits, where ladies
are playing at the palm play. In his most popular poem, "The Blessed
Damosel"--a theme which he both painted and sang--the feeling is
exquisitely and voraciously human. The maiden is "homesick in heaven,"
and yearns back towards the earth and her lover left behind. Even so,
with her symbolic stars and lilies, she is so like the stiff, sweet
angels of Fra Angelico or Perugino, that one almost doubts when the poet
says

"--her bosom must have made
The bar she leaned on warm."

The imagery of the poem is right out of the picture world;

"The clear ranged, unnumbered heads
Bowed with their aureoles."

The imaginations are Dantesque:

"And the souls, mounting up to God,
Went by her like thin flames."

"The light thrilled towards her, filled
With angels in strong, level flight."

Even in "Jenny," one of the few poems of Rossetti that deal with modern
life, mediaeval art will creep in.

"Fair shines the gilded aureole
In which our highest painters place
Some living woman's simple face.
And the stilled features thus descried,
As Jenny's long throat droops aside--
The shadows where the cheeks are thin
And pure wide curve from ear to chin--
With Raffael's, Leonardo's hand
To show them to men's souls might stand."

The type of womanly beauty here described is characteristic; it is the
type familiar to all in "Pandora," "Proserpine," "La Ghirlandata," "The
Day Dream," "O