The visible burthen of the sun grown cold,
And the moon’s labouring gaze;”
or—
“The soul hears the night’s disconsolate cry,
And feels the branches, wringing wet,
Cast on its brow, that may not once forget,
Blind tears from the blind sky.”
In “Dante at Verona” Rossetti portrays in a somewhat diffuse and irregular string of descriptive stanzas, some incidents, historic and imaginary, but always congruous with our best ideals of Dante,—of his exile from Florence and his sojourn at the Court of Verona after the death of Beatrice. The poem lacks balance and unity of plan, but abounds in passages of exquisite feeling, wrought through the keen vision of those significant accessories that make a great, if fragmentary picture of the commanding personality so near akin in many aspects to his modern namesake and disciple, yet strangely removed from him in temperament and character. How far in either case the lover’s worship was fulfilled and consummated in a single earthly embodiment of the ideal, or whether such a brief apparent gain served but to feed the fires of the insatiable idealism behind it, is hardly for the historian to estimate. But whatever the actual channels found by the dominant passion of their poetry, however diverse the conditions under which it sought its outlet towards the infinite sea, both Dante and Rossetti may be counted with the isolated band of dreamers, who, as Shelley once said aptly of himself, “are always in love with something or other; their error consists in seeking in a mortal image the likeness of what is, perhaps, eternal.” They “have loved Antigone before they visited this earth, and are ever demanding of life more than it can give.”
On such a pilgrimage the sombre figure of “Dante at Verona” passes before us, through the palaces and gardens of Can Grande della Scala, ever remote, self-absorbed, austere; “with set brows lordlier than a frown;” and we are shown his vigils, his spiritual isolation among the gross luxuries and corruptions of the table, the chamber, and the hall; and how his presence half won, half awed the women of the court;
“And when the music had its sign