ur Lady of Pity," and the other life-size, half-length
figure paintings in oil which were the masterpieces of his maturer style.
The languid pose, the tragic eyes with their mystic, brooding intensity
in contrast with the full curves of the lips and throat, give that union
of sensuousness and spirituality which is a constant trait of Rossetti's
poetry. The Pre-Raphaelites were accused of exaggerating the height of
their figures. In Burne-Jones, whose figures are eight and a half heads
high, the exaggeration is deliberate. In Morris' and Swinburne's early
poems all the lines of the female face and figure are long--the hand, the
foot, the throat, the "curve from chin to ear," and above all, the
hair.[22] The hair in these paintings of Rossetti seems a romantic
exaggeration, too; immense, crinkly waves of it spreading off to left and
right. William Morris' beautiful wife is said to have been his model in
the pieces above named.

The first collection of original poems by Rossetti was published in 1870.
The manuscripts had been buried with his wife in 1862. When he finally
consented to their publication, the coffin had to be exhumed and the
manuscripts removed. In 1881 a new edition was issued with changes and
additions; and in the same year the volume of "Ballads and Sonnets" was
published, including the sonnet sequence of "The House of Life." Of the
poems in these two collections which treat directly of Dante the most
important is "Dante at Verona," a noble and sustained piece in
eighty-five stanzas, slightly pragmatic in manner, in which are enwoven
the legendary and historical incidents of Dante's exile related by the
early biographers, together with many personal allusions from the "Divine
Comedy." But Dante is nowhere very far off either in Rossetti's painting
or in his poetry. In particular, the history of Dante's passion for
Beatrice, as told in the "Vita Nuova," in which the figure of the girl is
gradually transfigured and idealised by death into the type of heavenly
love, made an enduring impression upon Rossetti's imagination. Shelley,
in his "Epipsychidion," had appealed to this great love story, so
characteristic at once of the mediaeval mysticism and of the Platonic
spirit of the early Renaissance. But Rossetti was the first to give a
thoroughly sympathetic interpretation of it to English readers. It
became associated most intimately with his own love and loss. We see it
in a picture like "Beata Be