Rossetti is too near to us for a final estimate of his place among the century’s poets. Enough has been said to illustrate the range and consistency of his art, as a whole, and the intimate relation of his poetry to his painting. The dominant æsthetic motives are the same in “Dante’s Dream” and “The House of Life,” in “Dis Manibus” and “The King’s Tragedy,” in “Beata Beatrix” and “The Blessed Damozel.” He was the prophet of a natural idealism, based upon the frank acceptance and pursuit of the highest earthly good, subject only and absolutely to moral and spiritual law. He stood apart, as we have seen, from the intellectual struggles of his day. Philosophical controversies seldom troubled him. To theological speculation and historical discovery he was alike indifferent. But his isolation, his specialism even, are but evidences of the intensity of the new life to which he was awakened, and the reality of the visions which he saw. He sets before us in all its significance the problem of the dual possibilities of womanhood, by the simple, irresistible, pictorial statement of the contrast between the shameful actuality of “Found” and the noble ideal of “Sibylla Palmifera” and “Monna Vanna.” His lamentation for the manhood of his age is that,—

... “Man is parcelled out in men

To-day; because, for any wrongful blow,

No man not stricken asks, ‘I would be told

Why thou dost strike’; but his heart whispers then,

‘He is he, I am I.’”

Such words are but the reiteration of that moral collectivism, that principle that “soul must somehow pay for soul,” which Rossetti maintains unbrokenly as an assumption needing neither emphasis nor reserve. The problem which his work leaves to the next generation lies in the application of that principle to social and national ideals. The task of the twentieth century will be to do for society what Rossetti has done for art,—to restore to it the dignity and glory of a free life, embracing all that nature has to give, under the dominion of associated reason, and conscience, and will. And when Rossetti’s genius shall have fulfilled its share in that unification of all knowledge to which the paths of science and poetry, art and scholarship, tend alike in the progress of time, England and Italy may join in worthier recognition of his life-work, whose face was set towards the final triumph of humanity—the reconciliation of the physical with the spiritual world.

THE END.

INDEX.