characteristical, perhaps
less indigenous and appreciable.

In the years 1845-49 inclusive, Rossetti made the larger part of his
translations (published in 1861) from the early Italian poets, and
though he afterwards spoke of them as having been the work of the
leisure moments of many years, of their subsequent revision alone,
perhaps, could this be altogether true. The _Vita Nuova_, together with
the many among Dante's _Lyrics_ and those of his contemporaries which
elucidate their personal intercourse; were translated, as well as a
great body of the sonnets of poets later than Dante. {*} This early and
indirect apprenticeship to the sonnet, as a form of composition, led
to his becoming, in the end, perhaps the most perfect of English
sonnet-writers. In youth, it was one of his pleasures to engage in
exercises of sonnet-skill with his brother William and his sister
Christina, and, even then, he attained to such proficiency, in the mere
mechanism of sonnet structure, that he could sometimes dash off a sonnet
in ten minutes--rivalling, in this particular, the impromptu productions
of Hartley Coleridge. It is hardly necessary to say that the poems
produced, under such conditions of time and other tests, were rarely,
if ever, adjudged worthy of publication, by the side of work to which he
gave adequate deliberation. But several of the sonnets on pictures--as,
for example, the fine one on a Venetian pastoral by Giorgione--and the
political sonnet, Miltonic in spirit, _On the Refusal of Aid between
Nations_, were written contemporaneously with the experimental sonnets
in question.

* Rossetti often remarked that he had intended to translate
the sonnets of Michael Angelo, until he saw Mr. Symonds's
translation, when he was so much impressed by its excellence
that he forthwith abandoned the purpose.

As _The House of Life_ was composed in great part at the period with
which we are now dealing (though published in the complete sequence
nearly twenty-five years later), it may be best to traverse it at this
stage. Though called a full series of sonnets, there is no intimation
that it is not fragmentary as to design; the title is an astronomical,
not an architectural figure. The work is at once Shakspearean and
Dantesque. Whilst electively akin to the _Vita Nuova_, it is broader
in range, the life involved being life idealised in all phases. What
Rossetti's idea was of the mission of the sonnet, as associated