rthur Clough, or of Christina Rossetti, who was fully aware of the
disagreeableness of the standards which she set up for herself. She
reflected grimly,

Does the road wind uphill all the way?
Yes, to the very end!
Will the day's journey take the whole long day?
From morn till night, my friend.
[Footnote: _Uphill._]

It cannot be accidental, however, that wherever a poet voices a stern
conception of virtue, he is a poet whose sensibility to physical beauty
is not noteworthy. This is obviously true in the case of both Clough
and Christina Rossetti. At intervals it was true of Wordsworth, whereas
in the periods of his inspiration he expressed his belief that goodness
is as a matter of good taste. The pleasures of the imagination were then
so intense that they destroyed in him all desire for dubious delights.
Thus in the _Prelude_ he described an unconscious purification of
his life by his worship of physical beauty, saying of nature,

If in my youth I have been pure in heart,
If, mingling with the world, I am content
With my own modest pleasures, and have lived
With God and Nature communing, removed
From little enmities and low desires,
The gift is yours.

Dante Gabriel, not Christina, possessed the most purely poetical nature
in the Rossetti family, and his moral conceptions were the typical
aesthetic ones, as incomprehensible to the puritan as they were to
Ruskin, who exclaimed, "I don't say you do wrong, because you don't seem
to know what is wrong, but you do just whatever you like as far as
possible--as puppies and tomtits do." [Footnote: See E. L. Cary, The
Rossettis, p.79.] To poets themselves however, there appears nothing
incomprehensible about the inevitable rightness of their conduct, for
they have not passed out of the happy stage of Wordsworth's _Ode to
Duty,_

When love is an unerring light,
And joy its own felicity.

For the most part, whenever the puritan imagines that the poet has
capitulated, he is mistaken, and the apparent self-denial in the poet's
life is really an exquisite sort of epicureanism. The likelihood of such
misunderstanding by the world is indicated by Browning in _Sordello,_
wherein the hero refuses to taste the ordinary pleasures of life,
because he wishes to enjoy the flavor of the highest pleasure untainted.
He resolves,

The world shall bow to me conceiving all
Man's life, who see its blisses, great and small
Afar--not tasting any; no machi