And with what fine insight does Rossetti pierce the tender subtleties of the woman’s responsive heart! Has any other English poet discerned so well that retrospective instinct which clings to the early semblances of pure and non-sexual love?
—“She loves him, for her infinite soul is love.
* * * * * *
With wifely breast to breast
And circling arms, she welcomes all command
Of love,—her soul to answering ardours fanned:
Yet as morn springs or twilight sinks to rest,
Ah! who shall say she deems not loveliest
The hour of sisterly sweet hand-in-hand?”
In that hint lies the acknowledgment of the Platonic ideal,—that whatever dignifies and ennobles the affections must lie not in the outward conditions but within; that the senses are but the accessories of Love; the temporary channels, not the eternal stream. And this insistence on the spiritual aspects of passion affects the whole tone and temper of Rossetti’s poetry; raising it, in moments of intense feeling, almost to the mystic exaltation of a Pascal, and transfiguring all the world of consciousness by the knowledge and memory of an overmastering love. From the first to the last of the hundred sonnets we are shown steadfastly the outlook upon life of one to whom all life has been sanctified by that supreme experience. “Who can read ‘The House of Life’” (says Mr. F.W.H. Myers in his essay on “Rossetti and the Religion of Beauty”[[15]]) “and not feel that this poet has known love as love can be, not an enjoyment only or a triumph, but a worship and a regeneration?”