olded across
her breast, and a glory of golden hair flowing over her shoulders. With
measured tread Dante approaches the couch led by the winged and scarlet
Love, but, as though fearful of so near and unaccustomed an approach,
draws slowly backward on his half-raised foot, while the mystical emblem
of his earthly passion stands droopingly between him the living, and his
lady the dead, and takes the kiss that he himself might never have. In
life they must needs be apart, but thus in death they are united, for
the hand of the pilgrim, who is the embodiment of his love, holds his
hand even as the master's lips touch her lips. Two ladies of the chamber
are covering her with a pall, and on the dreamer they fix sympathetic
eyes. The floor is strewn with poppies--emblems equally of the sleep in
which the lover walks, and of the sleep that is the sleep of death.
The may-bloom in the pall, the apple-blossom in the hand of Love, the
violets and roses in the frieze of the alcove, symbolise purity and
virginity, the life that is cut off in its spring, the love that is
consummated in death before the coming of fruit. Suspended from the roof
is a scroll, bearing the first words of the wail from the Lamentations
of Jeremiah, quoted by Dante himself:--"How doth the city sit solitary,
that was full of people! How is she become as a widow, she that was
great among the nations!" In the ascending and descending staircase on
either iand fly doves of the same glowing colour as Love, and these are
emblems of his presence in the house. Over all flickers the last beam of
a lamp which has burnt through the long night, and which the dawn of a
new day sees die away--fit symbol of the life that has now taken flight
with the heavenly host, leaving behind it only the burnt-out socket
where the live flame lived.

Full of symbol as this picture is, it is furthermore permeated by
a significance that is not occult. It bears witness to the possible
strength of a passion that is so spiritual as to be without taint of
sense; and to a confident belief in an immortality wherein the utmost
limits of a blessedness not of this world may be compassed. Such are
in this picture the simpler, yet deeper, symbols, that all who look may
read. Sir Noel Paton has written of this work:

I was so dumbfounded by the beauty of that great picture of Rosetti's,
called _Dante's Dream_, that I was usable to give any expression to the
emotions it excited--emotions such as I do n