alled upon to be. At a time when poetic originality in England
might seem to have had its utmost play, here was certainly one new poet
more, with a structure and music of verse, a vocabulary, an accent,
unmistakably novel, yet felt to be no mere tricks of manner adopted
with a view to forcing attention--an accent which might rather count as
the very seal of reality on one man's own proper speech; as that speech
itself was the wholly natural expression of certain wonderful things he
really felt and saw. Here was one, who had a matter to present to his
readers, to himself at least, in the first instance, so valuable, so
real and definite, that his primary aim, as regards form or expression
in his verse, would be but its exact equivalence to those data within.
That he had this gift of transparency in language--the control of a
style which did but obediently shift and shape itself to the mental
motion, as a well-trained hand can follow on the tracing-paper the
outline of an original drawing below it, was proved afterwards by a
volume of typically perfect translations from the delightful but
difficult [207] "early Italian poets:" such transparency being indeed
the secret of all genuine style, of all such style as can truly belong
to one man and not to another. His own meaning was always personal and
even recondite, in a certain sense learned and casuistical, sometimes
complex or obscure; but the term was always, one could see,
deliberately chosen from many competitors, as the just transcript of
that peculiar phase of soul which he alone knew, precisely as he knew
it.

One of the peculiarities of The Blessed Damozel was a definiteness of
sensible imagery, which seemed almost grotesque to some, and was
strange, above all, in a theme so profoundly visionary. The gold bar
of heaven from which she leaned, her hair yellow like ripe corn, are
but examples of a general treatment, as naively detailed as the
pictures of those early painters contemporary with Dante, who has shown
a similar care for minute and definite imagery in his verse; there,
too, in the very midst of profoundly mystic vision. Such definition of
outline is indeed one among many points in which Rossetti resembles the
great Italian poet, of whom, led to him at first by family
circumstances, he was ever a lover--a "servant and singer," faithful as
Dante, "of Florence and of Beatrice"--with some close inward
conformities of genius also, independent of any mere cir