t other, more remote and
mystic, use of it. For with Rossetti this sense of lifeless nature,
after all, is translated to a higher service, in which it does but
incorporate itself with some phase of strong emotion. Every one
understands how this may happen at critical moments of life; what a
weirdly expressive soul may have crept, even in full noonday, into "the
white-flower'd elder-thicket," when Godiva saw it "gleam through the
Gothic archways in the wall," at the end of her terrible ride. To
Rossetti it is so always, because to him life is a crisis at every
moment. A sustained impressibility towards the mysterious conditions
of man's everyday life, towards the very mystery itself in it, gives a
singular gravity to all his work: those matters never became trite
[212] to him. But throughout, it is the ideal intensity of love--of
love based upon a perfect yet peculiar type of physical or material
beauty--which is enthroned in the midst of those mysterious powers;
Youth and Death, Destiny and Fortune, Fame, Poetic Fame, Memory,
Oblivion, and the like. Rossetti is one of those who, in the words of
Merimee, se passionnent pour la passion, one of Love's lovers.

And yet, again as with Dante, to speak of his ideal type of beauty as
material, is partly misleading. Spirit and matter, indeed, have been
for the most part opposed, with a false contrast or antagonism by
schoolmen, whose artificial creation those abstractions really are. In
our actual concrete experience, the two trains of phenomena which the
words matter and spirit do but roughly distinguish, play inextricably
into each other. Practically, the church of the Middle Age by its
aesthetic worship, its sacramentalism, its real faith in the
resurrection of the flesh, had set itself against that Manichean
opposition of spirit and matter, and its results in men's way of taking
life; and in this, Dante is the central representative of its spirit.
To him, in the vehement and impassioned heat of his conceptions, the
material and the spiritual are fused and blent: if the spiritual
attains the definite visibility of a crystal, what is material loses
its earthiness and impurity. And here again, by force of instinct,
Rossetti [213] is one with him. His chosen type of beauty is one,

Whose speech Truth knows not from her thought,
Nor Love her body from her soul.

Like Dante, he knows no region of spirit which shall not be sensuous
also, or material. The shadowy wo