To breathe upon them for more ease
Sometimes he turned and bade it cease.”
And he who followed steadfastly the inward vision of the lost Beatrice, to be regained in Paradise, cherished with the more integrity his love for the city of Beatrice,—Florence, that “sat solitary” when Beatrice died, and now seemed lost also. And he answered them that would win back the exiled patriot-poet,—
“That since no gate led, by God’s will,
To Florence, but the one whereat
The priests and money-changers sat,
He still would wander; for that still,
Even through the body’s prison-bars
His soul possessed the sun and stars.”
Here again is struck the keynote of romance, “the note of resistance and defiance” of external trammels and material bonds; the note of spiritual courage which can pierce through the finite to the infinite life, and “possess” what this world cannot remove or bestow. And in this high strain the personal accent, the autobiographic undertone, loses itself in a loftier music, and “Dante at Verona” is brought within measurable distance of Rossetti’s finest work—his great romantic ballads, “Rose Mary,” “The White Ship,” “The King’s Tragedy,” “Sister Helen,” “The Bride’s Prelude,” “The Staff and Scrip,” and “The Blessed Damozel.”