[15] "The Collected Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti." Edited by W. M.
Rossetti, two vols., London, 1886.

[16] "Dante Gabriel Rossetti. A Record and a Study," p. 305.

[17] He wrote to Allingham in 1855, apropos of the latter's poem "The
Music Master": "I'm not sure that it is not too noble or too resolutely
healthy. . . . I must confess to a need in narrative dramatic
poetry . . . of something rather 'exciting,' and indeed, I believe,
something of the 'romantic' element, to rouse my mind to anything like
the moods produced by personal emotion in my own life. That sentence is
shockingly ill worded, but Keats' narratives would be of the kind I
mean." Theodore Watts ("Encyclopaedia Britannica," article "Rossetti")
says that "the purely romantic temper was with Rossetti a more permanent
and even a more natural temper than with any other nineteenth-century
poet, even including the author of 'Christabel' himself." He thinks that
all the French romanticists together do not equal the romantic feeling in
a single picture of Rossetti's; and he somewhat capriciously defines the
idea at the core of romanticism as that of the evil forces of nature
assailing man through his sense of beauty. Analysis run mad! As to Poe,
Rossetti certainly preferred him to Wordsworth. Hall Caine testifies
that he used to repeat "Ulalume" and "The Raven" from memory; and that
the latter suggested his "Blessed Damozel." "I saw that Poe had done the
utmost it was possible to do with the grief of the lover on earth, and so
I determined to reverse the conditions, and give utterance to the
yearning of the loved one in heaven" ("Recollections," p. 384).

[18] "Recollections," p. 140.

[19] Caine's "Recollections," p. 266.

[20] Burne-Jones had been attracted by Rossetti's illustration of
Allingham's poem, "The Maids of Elfinmere," and had obtained an
introduction to him at London in 1856. It was by Rossetti's persuasion
that he gave up the church for the career of an artist. Rossetti and
Swinburne some years later (1862) became housemates for a time at
Chelsea; and Rossetti and Morris for a number of years, off and on, at
Kelmscott.

[21] Sharp's "Dante Gabriel Rossetti," p. 190.

[22] See especially Morris' poem "Rapunzel" in "The Defence of Guenevere."

[23] "I can't say," wrote William Morris, "how it was that Rossetti took
no interest in politics; but so it was: of course he was quite Italian in
his general turn of thought; though I