otion
compassed by this part of his work constitute an excellence far higher
than any that belongs to perfection of form, rhythm, or metre. Mr.
Palgrave has well said that a poet's story differs from a narrative in
being in itself a creation; that it brings its own facts; that what
we have to ask is not the true life of Laura, but how far Petrarch has
truly drawn the life of love. So with Rossetti's sonnets. They may or
may not be "occasional." Many readers who enter with sympathy into the
series of feelings they present will doubtless insist upon regarding
them as autobiographical. Others, who think they see the stamp of
reality upon them, will perhaps accept them (as Hallam accepted the
Sonnets of Shakspeare) as witnesses of excessive affection, redeemed
sometimes by touches of nobler sentiments--if affection, however
excessive, needs to be redeemed. Others again will receive them as
artistic embodiments of ideal love upon which is placed the imprint of a
passion as mythical as they believe to be attached to the autobiography
of Dante's early days. But the genesis and history of these sonnets
(whether the emotion with which they are pervaded be actual or imagined)
must be looked for within. Do they realise vividly Life representative
in its many phases of love, joy, sorrow, and death? It must be conceded
that _he House of Life_ touches many passions and depicts life in
most of its changeful aspects. It would afford an adequate test of its
comprehensiveness to note how rarely a mind in general sympathy with the
author could come to its perusal without alighting upon something that
would be in harmony with its mood. To traverse the work through its
aspiration and foreboding, joy, grief, remorse, despair, and final
resignation, would involve a task too long and difficult to be attempted
here. Two sonnets only need be quoted as at once indicative of the range
of thought and feeling covered, and of the sequent relation these poems
bear each to each.

By thine own tears thy song must tears beget,
Singer! Magic mirror thou hast none
Except thy manifest heart; and save thine own
Anguish or ardour, else no amulet.

Cisterned in Pride, verse is the feathery jet
Of soulless air-flung fountains; nay, more dry
Than the Dead Sea for throats that thirst and sigh,
That song o'er which no singer's lids grew wet.

The Song-god--He the Sun-god--is no slave
Of thine: thy Hunter