But because man is parcelled out in men
Even thus; because, for any wrongful blow,
No one not stricken asks, ‘I would be told
Why thou dost strike’; but his heart whispers then,
‘He is he, I am I.’ By this we know
That the earth falls asunder, being old.”
Mr. Rosetti has adopted, as we have already indicated, more fully than a Catholic could approve, a principle which is obtaining a very dangerous prominence amongst the rising generation of English poets, that art is justified of her children—that to the artist all things are chaste. Thus inevitably there are some lines one could wish unwritten, and more that one would not have every one read. Yet for all this the ethos of the book is chaste and noble, nor do we know any poet by whom purity is more honestly appreciated and worshipped. The volume is a remarkable example of the extent to which a love of the Madonna and the ascetic inspiration of Dante can counteract and restrain the growing sensuousness of English poetry.
If Mr. Rosetti is sometimes obscure, it is not that his touch is ever otherwise than delicate and precise, but because his art is rather the art of the musician than of the painter. His changes of key, so to speak, are so [pg 272] swift and subtle, and the harmonies with which the theme is clothed are so manifold and so quaint, that his compositions have sometimes the difficulty of a sonata of Beethoven, and require considerable familiarity before their proportions can be grasped. Indeed, we must confess that there are passages the meaning of which we despair of ever grasping with any precision; we must be content to accept them as a sort of hieroglyphic, for splendor or purity, like the scroll and lily-work of a mediæval goldsmith. This is the more provoking, as obscurity is not here, as often in Mr. Browning's poems, covered by an oracular use of certain crabbed expressions, which at least indicate the nut that is to be cracked, but coexists with a diction consistently pure and flowing.
Although we have compared Mr. Rosetti's art to that of the musician rather than to that of the painter, we have been told that he is a painter of a high order. Anyhow, his fondness for painting is proved by the number of sonnets which he has made upon pictures, ancient and modern. We cannot more fitly conclude our review than with his sonnet, “For our Lady of the Rocks, by Leonardo da Vinci”:
“Mother, is this the darkness of the end,