imes a near approach (may it be said?) to such insanity of realism--

Pity and love shall burn
In her pressed cheek and cherishing hands;
And from the living spirit of love that stands
Between her lips to soothe and yearn,
Each separate breath shall clasp me round in turn
And loose my spirit's bands.

[210] But even if we concede this; even if we allow, in the very plan
of those two compositions, something of the literary conceit--what
exquisite, what novel flowers of poetry, we must admit them to be, as
they stand! In the one, what a delight in all the natural beauty of
water, all its details for the eye of a painter; in the other, how
subtle and fine the imaginative hold upon all the secret ways of sleep
and dreams! In both of them, with much the same attitude and tone,
Love--sick and doubtful Love--would fain inquire of what lies below the
surface of sleep, and below the water; stream or dream being forced to
speak by Love's powerful "control"; and the poet would have it foretell
the fortune, issue, and event of his wasting passion. Such artifices,
indeed, were not unknown in the old Provencal poetry of which Dante had
learned something. Only, in Rossetti at least, they are redeemed by a
serious purpose, by that sincerity of his, which allies itself readily
to a serious beauty, a sort of grandeur of literary workmanship, to a
great style. One seems to hear there a really new kind of poetic
utterance, with effects which have nothing else like them; as there is
nothing else, for instance, like the narrative of Jacob's Dream in
Genesis, or Blake's design of the Singing of the Morning Stars, or
Addison's Nineteenth Psalm.

With him indeed, as in some revival of the old mythopoeic age, common
things--dawn, [211] noon, night--are full of human or personal
expression, full of sentiment. The lovely little sceneries scattered
up and down his poems, glimpses of a landscape, not indeed of broad
open-air effects, but rather that of a painter concentrated upon the
picturesque effect of one or two selected objects at a time--the
"hollow brimmed with mist," or the "ruined weir," as he sees it from
one of the windows, or reflected in one of the mirrors of his "house of
life" (the vignettes for instance seen by Rose Mary in the magic beryl)
attest, by their very freshness and simplicity, to a pictorial or
descriptive power in dealing with the inanimate world, which is
certainly also one half of the charm, in tha