Page:The Poetry of Dante Rossetti by Hall Caine.pdf/9

 that shall yet be heard; forecasts the short, sweet hour that will soon be passed. Through the eyes of others we can see her, and in our vision of her she is beautiful. But it is the beauty of fair cheeks from which the canker frets the soft tenderness of colour; the loveliness of golden hair that has lost its radiance; the sweetness of eyes once dripping with the dew of the spirit, now dry, and cold, and lustreless. In her face we may see the mark of a great wrong, and, as visible, the relentless vengeance that pursues the faithless. That vengeance shall know no ending until the time doth come when the naked soul shall flee from hence more fast than the waxen knave she burns; and when the Judge of all things shall do right. Fire, then, shall forgive him as she forgives, whose heart for his pleasure fared the same. Her love has turned to hate; no more; but few can know the love she bore him, and fewer feel the hate it turned to. How much she loved we cannot know, or know only in the sad picture of her hate; and to be wroth with one she loved doth work like madness in the brain. But her's is the hate that is born of love, and though it follows its victim to the last and the bitterest, yet is it one with love: the same and indivisible. "But he and I are sadder still Little brother." The sonnet requires perhaps the highest art outside dramatic poetry. It asks a stronger grasp of theme, a completer moulding of material. Imagination in the sonnet should rise higher than the fixities and realities of memory, and yet keep ideal probability always in sight—be true, namely, to the possibilities of nature if false to its facts. The sonnet should be intense; its passion focused not diffused. The sonnet that needs to be propped up or explained by what goes before it or comes after is a poem of prescribed dimensions, not a sonnet. The art of Mr. Rossetti's sonnets has perhaps never been surpassed in English literature outside Shakspere, and a page or two of Wordsworth. Even the heat of spiritual life, and the magic in Shakspere's sonnets, do not overmatch the warm purple passion of " Supreme Surrender" and the fiery perception of some parts of " Lost Days."

Of all forms of composition the sonnet seems to me the most appropriate for the expression of what is called pre-Raphaelite feeling in poetry. There are two essential principles which govern this fitness. First, the sonnet should ask the utmost finish of execution—a finish involving patient and honest work. Here it is a jealous mistress, and yields its best charms to those