hing ever attempted in the field of romance.
Goethe, too, found himself face to face with outspoken distrust of his
continuation of _Faust_; and even Cervantes had perforce to challenge
the popular judgment which long refused to allow that the second part
of _Don Quixote_, with all its added significance, was adequate to
his original simple conception. Indeed that author must be considered
fortunate who effects a reversal of the public judgment against
the completion of a fragment, and the repetition of a complete and
conspicuous success.

When Rossetti published his first volume of poems in 1870, he left only
his _House of Life_ incomplete; but amongst the readers who then offered
spontaneous tribute to that series of sonnets, and still treasured it
as a work of all but faultless symmetry, built up by aid of a blended
inspiration caught equally from Shakspeare and from Dante, with a
superadded psychical quality peculiar to its author, there were many,
even amongst the friendliest in sympathy, who heard of the completed
sequence with a sense of doubt. Such is the silent and unreasoning and
all but irrevocable edict of all popular criticism against continuations
of works which have in fragmentary form once made conquest of the
popular imagination. Moreover, Rossetti's first volume achieved a
success so signal and unexpected as to subject this second and maturer
book to the preliminary ordeal of such a questioning attitude of mind
as we speak of, as the unfailing and ungracious reward of a conspicuous
triumph. In the interval of eleven years, Rossetti had essayed no
notable achievement, and his name had been found attached only to such
fugitive efforts as may have lived from time to time a brief life in the
pages of the _Athenaeum_ and _Fortnightly_. Of the works in question
two only come now within our province to mention. The first and most
memorable was the poem _Cloud Confines_. Inadequate as the critical
attention necessarily was which this remarkable lyric obtained,
indications were not wanting that it had laid unconquerable siege to the
sympathies of that section of the public in whose enthusiasm the life of
every creative work is seen chiefly to abide. There was in it a lyrical
sweetness scarcely ever previously compassed by its author, a cadent
undertoned symphony that first gave testimony that the poet held the
power of conveying by words a sensible eflfect of great music, even
as former works of his had given t