fancy
or figure of speech, a real country, a veritable expansion of, or
addition to, our waking life; and he did well perhaps to wait carefully
upon sleep, for the lack [215] of it became mortal disease with him.
One may even recognise a sort of morbid and over-hasty making-ready for
death itself, which increases on him; thoughts concerning it, its
imageries, coming with a frequency and importunity, in excess, one
might think, of even the very saddest, quite wholesome wisdom.

And indeed the publication of his second volume of Ballads and Sonnets
preceded his death by scarcely a twelvemonth. That volume bears
witness to the reverse of any failure of power, or falling-off from his
early standard of literary perfection, in every one of his then
accustomed forms of poetry--the song, the sonnet, and the ballad. The
newly printed sonnets, now completing The House of Life, certainly
advanced beyond those earlier ones, in clearness; his dramatic power in
the ballad, was here at its height; while one monumental, gnomic piece,
Soothsay, testifies, more clearly even than the Nineveh of his first
volume, to the reflective force, the dry reason, always at work behind
his imaginative creations, which at no time dispensed with a genuine
intellectual structure. For in matters of pure reflection also,
Rossetti maintained the painter's sensuous clearness of conception; and
this has something to do with the capacity, largely illustrated by his
ballads, of telling some red-hearted story of impassioned action with
effect.

Have there, in very deed, been ages, in which [216] the external
conditions of poetry such as Rossetti's were of more spontaneous growth
than in our own? The archaic side of Rossetti's work, his preferences
in regard to earlier poetry, connect him with those who have certainly
thought so, who fancied they could have breathed more largely in the
age of Chaucer, or of Ronsard, in one of those ages, in the words of
Stendhal--ces siecles de passions ou les ames pouvaient se livrer
franchement a la plus haute exaltation, quand les passions qui font la
possibilite We may think, perhaps, that such old time as that has never
really existed except in the fancy of poets; but it was to find it,
that Rossetti turned so often from modern life to the chronicle of the
past. Old Scotch history, perhaps beyond any other, is strong in the
matter of heroic and vehement hatreds and love, the tragic Mary herself
being but the perfect