A careful study of Rossetti reveals him also, like them, early and profoundly preoccupied with death. The richly lighted chambers of his mind are in their dark moments visited repeatedly by its pity and its melancholy. Space does not admit of citing here the many evidences; but if ever a mind was visited, preoccupied, and at last mastered by a strong idea, a dominant persuasion, the mind of Dante Gabriel Rossetti was so haunted—so dominated—by the idea of death.
When we turn to Keats's life and writings, they offer examples hardly less notable. For as Rossetti was haunted by the idea of death, so Keats would seem from the first to have been preoccupied by the idea of beauty. By his own memorable confession he had worshiped the spirit of it in all things; he has not the slightest feeling of humility, he says, toward anything in existence with three exceptions only: The Eternal Being, the Memory of Great Men, and the Principle of Beauty.
There is further and ample evidence throughout his writings that he was perpetually possessed by certain definite forms of beauty: by the beauty of mead and moon, the wash of waters at their priestly task, the splendor of the night's starred face; but very especially and more often, it would seem, was he haunted by that most intimate and tangible of all lovelinesses—the loveliness of flowers.
There is constant reference to them, a constant recurring delight in them. Their influence again and again visited him and pervaded his most delicate observations. The memory of flowers again and again laid a detaining hand upon him, and must have ministered to him unrecorded in how many a night hour, mindful, reminiscential, with what gentle ministerings!
They bloom in his lines everywhere, familiar as the name of the beloved on the lips. It will be recalled that they stand among those things of beauty which he names with so much devotion as 'joys forever'; 'daffodils, with the green world they live in' shedding an ethereal sunlight across the more sombre beauty of 'the dooms we have imagined for the mighty dead.'
So, too, 'hushed cool rooted flowers, fragrant-eyed,' touch his memory with an ever-freshening sensibility. The greatest pleasure he has experienced in life, he tells us, is in watching the growth of flowers; and to him—as Hazlitt recalls—Hebrew poetry was faulty because it made so little mention of them; and for the converse reason, it would seem likely, Chaucer and Spenser were forever his delight.
What he specially longs for now, he writes,—he has been ill, and is within a year of his death,—is 'the simple flowers of Spring.'
In the same letter we get a glimpse of certain early personal associations not fully followed, which would seem to lend an added loveliness to flowers which he had always found in themselves so lovely.
'How astonishingly,' he writes, ' ...does the chance of leaving the world impress a sense of its natural beauties upon us! Like poor Falstaff, though I do not "babble," I think of green fields; I muse with the greatest affection on every flower I have known from my infancy—their shapes and colors are as new to me as if I had just created them with a superhuman fancy. It is because they are connected with the most thoughtless and happiest moments of our lives. I have seen foreign flowers in hothouses, of the most beautiful nature, but I do not care a straw for them. The simple flowers of our Spring are what I want to see again!'
He did see them once again, and then no more.