rld, which he realises so powerfully,
has still the ways and houses, the land and water, the light and
darkness, the fire and flowers, that had so much to do in the moulding
of those bodily powers and aspects which counted for so large a part of
the soul, here.

For Rossetti, then, the great affections of persons to each other,
swayed and determined, in the case of his highly pictorial genius,
mainly by that so-called material loveliness, formed the great
undeniable reality in things, the solid resisting substance, in a world
where all beside might be but shadow. The fortunes of those
affections--of the great love so determined; its casuistries, its
languor sometimes; above all, its sorrows; its fortunate or unfortunate
collisions with those other great matters; how it looks, as the long
day of life goes round, in the light and shadow of them: all this,
conceived with an abundant imagination, and a deep, a philosophic,
reflectiveness, is the matter of his verse, and especially of what he
designed as his chief poetic work, "a work to be called The House of
Life," towards which the majority of his sonnets and songs were
contributions.

[214] The dwelling-place in which one finds oneself by chance or
destiny, yet can partly fashion for oneself; never properly one's own
at all, if it be changed too lightly; in which every object has its
associations--the dim mirrors, the portraits, the lamps, the books, the
hair-tresses of the dead and visionary magic crystals in the secret
drawers, the names and words scratched on the windows, windows open
upon prospects the saddest or the sweetest; the house one must quit,
yet taking perhaps, how much of its quietly active light and colour
along with us!--grown now to be a kind of raiment to one's body, as the
body, according to Swedenborg, is but the raiment of the soul--under
that image, the whole of Rossetti's work might count as a House of
Life, of which he is but the "Interpreter." And it is a "haunted"
house. A sense of power in love, defying distance, and those barriers
which are so much more than physical distance, of unutterable desire
penetrating into the world of sleep, however "lead-bound," was one of
those anticipative notes obscurely struck in The Blessed Damozel, and,
in his later work, makes him speak sometimes almost like a believer in
mesmerism. Dream-land, as we said, with its "phantoms of the body,"
deftly coming and going on love's service, is to him, in no mere