a
concatenation of circumstances did for Rossetti's earlier work a service
which could not attend his subsequent one. But the explanation was
inadequate, and had for its immediate outcome a charge of narrowed range
of poetic sympathy with which Rossetti's admirers had not laid their
account.

A renaissance of mediaeval feeling the movement in art assuredly
involved, but the essential part of it was another thing, of which
mediaevalism was palpably independent. How it came to be considered the
fundamental element is not difficult to show. In an eminent degree
the originators of the new school in painting were colourists, having,
perhaps, in their effects, a certain affinity to the early Florentine
masters, and this accident of native gift had probably more to do in
determining the precise direction of the _intellectual_ sympathy than
any external agency. The art feeling which formed the foundation of the
movement existed apart from it, or bore no closer relation to it than
kinship of powers induced. When Rossetti's poetry came it was seen to
be animated by a choice of subject-matter akin to that which gave
individual character to his painting, but this was because coeval
efforts in two totally distinct arts must needs bear the family
resemblance, each to each, which belong to all the offspring of a
thoroughly harmonised mind. The poems and the pictures, however, had not
more in common than can be found in the early poems and early dramas of
Shakspeare. Nay, not so much; for whereas in his poems Shakspeare was
constantly evolving certain shades of feeling and begetting certain
movements of thought which were soon to find concrete and final
collocation in the dramatic creations, in his pictures Rossetti was
first of all a dissenter from all prescribed canons of taste, whilst in
his poems he was in harmony with the catholic spirit which was as old
as Shakspeare himself, and found revival, after temporary eclipse, in
Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, and Tennyson. Choice of mediaeval theme would
not in itself have been enough to secure a reversal of popular feeling
against work that contained no germs of the sensational; and hence we
must conclude that Mr. Swinburne accounted more satisfactorily for the
instant popularity of Rossetti's poetry when he claimed for it those
innate utmost qualities of beauty and strength which are always
the first and last constituents of poetry that abides. Indeed those
qualities and none other, who