Page:The Poetry of Dante Rossetti by Hall Caine.pdf/3

 higher faculties, and the infinite affluence of subtler emotion before we can know in the same author the joy

"That in our embers Is something that doth live."

By attention and intelligence we may at any time read Pope's "Essay" and Cowper's "Task," and fear the disappointment of no expectation raised upon selected passages, but Browning's "Men and Women," and Tennyson's imperial legacy in In Memoriam ask our keenest perception and our highest heat of spiritual life. The reason is not far to seek. We are all endowed always with a great gift for apprehending positive and physical reality; and hence we can always appreciate the work in which the hold of fact is firmest. But emotion is liable to become too subtly attenuated for our commoner moods, in creations in which the poet unites to the weft of his inventive imagination only whatever of fact is serviceable to the truth of art. And so we may at any time without danger read the poets in whom the deepest thing is philosophy, or romance, or fact; but we must wait and watch, and think and feel, if we would read aright the poets who are poets first; and who because they are poets have had all these things added unto them. If for the rest it is asked when and how the poetry of Mr. Rossetti should be read, I answer—as it was written—lovingly. Life, not art, is the great giver and teacher; we can see only that which we bring with us eyes to see, and without the instinct and impulse, the spirit and sense which life can give art is an idle thing. But when "the world's great heart of rest and wrath" begins first to touch us, art is a fructifier of august thought, a purifier of exquisite emotion. Wait then, the ardent impulse to turn the leaves of these poems. And when the joy of life is strong within us and living seems a beautiful thing, read "Bridal Birth," "The Portrait," and "Love-Letter." When the glory and sweetness of youth and love swell through our aisles of sense like choral airs down Cathedral aisles, read "The Kiss," "Nuptial Sleep," "Supreme Surrender," and "The Song of the Bower." And when something of the sorrow and the bitterness of life overtake its winged joy of youth and beauty, read "Penumbra," "Broken Music," "Death in Love," and "Even So," and listen to the dying wail:—

"Could it be so now? Not if all beneath heaven's pall Lay dead but I and thou, Could it be so now!"