with
life, and exhibiting a similitude of it, may best be learned from his
prefatory sonnet:--

A Sonnet is a moment's monument,--
Memorial from the Soul's eternity
To one dead deathless hour. Look that it be,
Whether for lustral rite or dire portent,
Of its own arduous fulness reverent:
Carve it in ivory or in ebony,
As Day or Night may rule; and let Time see
Its flowering crest impearled and orient.
A Sonnet is a coin; its face reveals
The soul,--its converse, to what Power 'tis due:--
Whether for tribute to the august appeals
Of Life, or dower in Love's high retinue,
It serve; or 'mid the dark wharfs cavernous breath,
In Charon's palm it pay the toll to Death.

Rossetti's sonnets are of varied metrical structure; but their
intellectual structure is uniform, comprising in each case a flow and
ebb of thought within the limits of a single conception. In this latter
respect they have a character almost peculiar to themselves among
English sonnets. Rossetti was not the first English writer who
deliberatively separated octave and sestet, but he was the first who
obeyed throughout a series of sonnets the canon of the contemporary
structure requiring that a sonnet shall present the twofold facet of a
single thought or emotion. This form of the sonnet Rossetti was at least
the first among English writers entirely to achieve and perfectly to
render. _The House of Life_ does not contain a sonnet which is not to
some degree informed by such an intellectual and musical wave; but the
following is an example more than usually emphatic:

Even as a child, of sorrow that we give
dead, but little in his heart can find,
Since without need of thought to his clear mind
Their turn it is to die and his to live:--
Even so the winged New Love smiles to receive
Along his eddying plumes the auroral wind,
Nor, forward glorying, casts one look behind
Where night-rack shrouds the Old Love fugitive.

There is a change in every hour's recall,
And the last cowslip in the fields we see
On the same day with the first corn-poppy.
Alas for hourly change! Alas for all
The loves that from his hand proud youth lets fall,
Even as the beads of a told rosary!

The distinguishing excellence of craftsmanship in Rossetti's sonnets
was early recognised; but the fertility of thought, and range of em