s mother, he bids her leave the
responsibility of things:

And God, who made me and my sire and thee,
May take the charge upon him.

1899-1908.

DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI

Rossetti's phrase about poetry, that it must be 'amusing'; his
'commandment' about verse translation, 'that a good poem shall not be
turned into a bad one'; his roughest and most random criticisms about
poets, are as direct and inevitable as his finest verse. Only Coleridge
among English poets has anything like the same definite grasp upon
whatever is essential in poetry. And it is this intellectual sanity
partly, this complete knowledge of the medium in which he worked, that
has given Rossetti a position of his own, a kind of leadership in art.

And, technically, Rossetti has done much for English poetry. Such a line
as

And when the night-vigil was done,

is a perfectly good metrical line if read without any displacement of
the normal accent in speaking, and the rhyme of 'of' to 'enough' is as
satisfying to the ear as the more commonly accepted rhyme of 'love' and
'move.' Rossetti did nothing but good by his troubling of many rhythms
which had become stagnant, and it is in his extraordinary subtlety of
rhythm, most accomplished where it seems most hesitating, that he has
produced his finest emotional effects, effects before his time found but
rarely, and for the most part accidentally, in English poetry.

Like Baudelaire and like Mallarme in France, Rossetti was not only a
wholly original poet, but a new personal force in literature. That he
stimulated the sense of beauty is true in a way it is not true of
Tennyson, for instance, as it is true of Baudelaire in a way it is not
true of Victor Hugo. In Rossetti's work, perhaps because it is not the
greatest, there is an actually hypnotic quality which exerts itself on
those who come within his circle at all; a quality like that of an
unconscious medium, or like that of a woman against whose attraction one
is without defence. It is the sound of a voice, rather than anything
said; and, when Rossetti speaks, no other voice, for the moment, seems
worth listening to. Even after one has listened, not very much seems to
have been said; but the world is not quite the same. He has stimulated a
new sense, by which a new mood of beauty can be apprehended.

Dreams are precise; it is only when we awake, when we go outside, that
they become vague. In a certain sense Rossetti, w