and the _Poems_ appeared in 1870. Eleven years later another
volume of _Ballads and Sonnets_ was published, and Rossetti, whose
health in the interval had been much shattered, and who had
unfortunately sought refuge from insomnia in chloral, died next year in
April 1882. The last years of his life were not happy, and he was most
unnecessarily affected by attacks on the first arrangement of his
_Poems_.

These poems had a certain advantage in being presented to a public
already acquainted with the work of Mr. Morris and Mr. Swinburne; but
Rossetti was not merely older than his two friends, he was also to some
extent their master. At the same time the influences which acted on him
were naturally diverse from those which, independently of his own
influence, acted on them. For the French and English mediaeval
inspirations of Mr. Morris, for the classical and general study of Mr.
Swinburne, he had his ancestral Italians almost for sole teachers; and
for their varied interests he had his own art of painting for a
continual companion, reminder, and model. Yet the mediaeval impulse is
almost equally strong on all three, and its intensity shows that it was
the real dominant of the moment in English poetry. The opening poem of
Rossetti's first book, "The Blessed Damozel," which is understood to
have been written very early, though afterwards wrought up by touches
both of his love for his wife while living and of his regret for her
when dead, is almost a typical example of the whole style and school,
though it is individualised by the strong pictorial element rarely
absent from his work. The "Blessed Damozel" herself, who "leaned out
From the gold Bar of Heaven," is a figure from the _Paradiso_, divested
of the excessive abstraction of that part of Dante, and clothed partly
in the gayer colours and more fleshly personality of English and French
mediaevalism, partly in a mystical halo which is peculiar to these
nineteenth century re-creations of mediaeval thought and feeling. The
poem is of extreme beauty, and ornate as is its language in parts there
are touches, such as the poet's reflection

To one it is ten years of years,

which utter the simplest truth and tenderness; while others, such as the
enumeration of the Virgin's handmaidens (over which at the time the
hoofs of earless critics danced)--

With her five handmaidens, whose names
Are five sweet symphonies--
Cecily, Gertrude, Magdalen,
Margaret and