Page:The Fleshly school of poetry - Buchanan - 1872.djvu/83

 with them. What Mr. Rossetti says in explanation is only to the point in so far as it is deplorably convincing that he himself is utterly unconscious of his own offences; does not, in fact, discriminate between passion and sensuality; and endeavours, writhing under what he thinks an unmerited imputation, to save himself on the plea of personal purity and dramatic motive.No one can rejoice more than I do to hear that Mr. Rossetti attaches a certain importance to the soul as distinguished from the body, only I should like very much to know what he means by the soul; for I fear, from the sonnet he quotes, that he regards the feeling for a young woman's person, face, heart, and mind, as in itself quite a spiritual sentiment. In the poem entitled "Love-Lily" he expressly observes that Love cannot tell Lily's "body from her soul"—they are so inextricably blended. It is precisely this confusion of the two which, filling Mr. Rossetti as it eternally does with what he calls "riotous longing," becomes so intolerable to readers with a less mystic sense of animal function.

Belial came last, than whom a spirit more lewd Fell not from heaven, or more gross to love Vice for itself."Paradise Lost.

thus carefully gone through Mr. Rossetti's poetry, not because it is by any means the best or worst verse of its kind, but because, being avowedly "mature," and having had the benefit of many years' revision, it is perhaps more