hood. He was an insatiable reader, and his study of Helvetius, Malebranche, and the eighteenth-century philosophers entirely destroyed his faith. He escaped from France and his destined profession, went to Geneva, married, lost his fortune, and turned to his pen for support. He wrote Obermann, his most famous book, in 1804. Matthew Arnold shows his great admiration for Senancour in his two poems, In Memory of the Author of Obermann and Obermann once more. ROSSETTI. 565. GABRIEL CHARLES DANTE ROSSETTI, or DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI as he is more generally known, was born in London in 1828. He was the son of an Italian exile, -a poet, Dante scholar, and man of letters,-who, forced to leave Italy for political reasons, had settled in London as a teacher of Italian. Much that the father thus exemplified, eutered by inheritance and early surroundings into the character of his more distinguished son, and found expression in his art. From childhood Dante Rossetti's ambition was to be a painter, and at fifteen he left school and began the study of art. Through these studies he became acquainted with the young painters John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt, and with them he started the so-called Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. The artistic reforms which the Brotherhood hoped to effect included poetry as well as painting, and Rossetti-who loved and excelled in both arts-expressed these ideas in both. On the side of literature, the bent of Rossetti's taste is shown by the publication in 1861 of his translations from the early Italian poets, afterwards published as Dante and his Circle. His original work in poetry began early, but his first book of poems (many of them written years before) was not published until 1870. Another volume, containing some of his best ballads and the remarkable sonnet-sequence The House of Life, appeared in 1881. He died in the spring of the following year. Rossetti is as distinctly an exponent of the Romantic as Arnold is of the Classic spirit. Like Keats he surrounds mediæval subjects with a glow of warmth and color; like Keats, too, he is a pictorial poet. But he reaches the Middle Ages through Italy, and the atmosphere of early Italian religion, poetry, and art, is almost inseparable from his work. THE BLESSED DAMOZEL. Rossetti wrote this poem in the nineteenth year of his age, or in the early half of 1847. His brother, Mr. W. M. Rossetti, is quite right in saying that it "ranks as highly remarkable among the works of juvenile writers," especially when its "total unlikeness to any other poem then extant is taken into account." Mr. Hall Caine is the authority for the statement that the Blessed Damozel grew out of Rossetti's youthful love for Poe's Raven. "I saw," Rossetti said to Mr. Caine, "that Poe had done the utmost it was possible to do with the grief of the lover on earth, so I determined to reverse the conditions, and give utterance to the groaning of the loved one in heaven." The poem was published in the second number of The Germ, in February 1850; it next appeared in The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, 1856, and finally in the Poems of 1870. In each case, Rossetti made some changes. Mr. Joseph Knight, after remarking that the poem seems to have no literary prototype," adds: "Such inspiration as is traceable to any Source whatever belongs assumably to the pictures of those early Italian painters whom Rossetti had lovingly studied, and to domestic influences to which he yielded. (Life of "Rossetti" in Great Writers.) 64 1. Blessed. Specifically, one of the blessed in paradise. Cf. Ancient Mariner : "I thought that I had died in sleep See also Par. Lost, III. 136.-3. Her eyes were deeper, etc. It is instructive to note the poet's changes in these two lines. In the first version they stood: "Her grave blue eyes were deeper much This was changed to: "Her eyes knew more of rest and shade 13. Herseemed it seemed to her. The word appears to have been coined by Rossetti, as I can find no authority for its use. 566.-19. To one. In these parenthetical verses, we are suddenly transported to earth, and hear the bereft lover speak. -25. It was the rampart, etc. Mr. Knight cites this description as "marvellously daring and original."-49. From the fixed place, etc. This is one of the most strikingly imaginative conceptions in the poem, and one of the most admired. The idea was apparently suggested by the Ptolomaic cosmology, which has an assured place in the imagination of readers of poetry, through Dante and Milton. According to the Ptolomæan ideas, the earth, the centre of the universe, was encompassed by a series of hollow crystalline spheres; the tenth sphere or primum mobile was supposed to impart its motion to the others, while the fixed heaven, or Empyrean, lay outside of them all. The music of the spheres was supposed to have been produced by the vibration arising from the rubbing of the one against the other. This music seems to be alluded to at the end of the stanza. 568.-86. That living mystic tree. The poet may possibly have been led to this conception by the Tree of Life (Gen. ii. 9), or by the tree Yggdrasil of the Scandinavian mythology, which bound together heaven, earth, and hell. In the latter case it may have been intended to symbolize the mystic union of spiritual existence, every leaf or part of which is said to respond in praise to the breath of the Divine Spirit. In Rossetti's picture founded on this poem, a glimpse is caught (above the figure of the Blessed Damozel) of the groves of paradise, wherein, beneath the shade of the spreading branches of a vast tree, the newly-met lovers embrace and rejoice with each other, on separation over and union made perfect at last." (See Shairp's description of this picture in his Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 251.) THE SEA LIMITS. 576. This poem appeared in the volume of 1870. The sound within the shell, alluded to in the last stanza, is a favorite illustration with the poets: see the instances given in Stedman's Nature and Elements of Poetry, 255. WILLIAM MORRIS. 573. WILLIAM MORRIS, one of the most perfect representatives of the æsthetic and archaic sympathies which have so largely affected the English art of the last half-century, was born at Walthamstow, near London, in 1834. At Oxford, where he was educated, he formed a lasting friendship with Edward Burne-Jones, the painter. After successively attempting and abandoning painting and architecture, his artist-nature found in poetry a medium apparently more suited to his powers, and his first book, Guenevere and Other Poems, appeared in 1858, the year in which Tennyson published the first of his Idylls of the King. Unlike Tennyson, however, Morris, in his treatment of medieval or old-world themes, sought pure delight, as a respite from present problems, in a fair world of the past. The ugliness of modern life jarred on his beautyioving nature, and in 1863, with Rossetti, Ford Maddox Brown, and Edward Burne-Jones, he founded in London an ~ establishment for household decoration. Morris steadfastly continued in the work of infusing a greater beauty into English life until the last, and his firm became a powerful agency for the spread of Pre-Raphaelite ideas. In spite of this and other interests he found time to produce an astonishing quantity of literary work. Among this we may mention The Earthly Paradise, a series of twenty-four tales, which appeared between 1868 and 1870; his translations of the Eneid and the Odyssey; his version of Icelandic Sagas; his own sagas and mediæval romances, which may be described as prosepoems; and various works illustrating or expounding his socialistic theories. It was a life of enormous labor, easily and buoyantly done. He died October 3, 1896. RUDYARD KIPLING. 576. RUDYARD KIPLING was born in Bombay, India, in 1865. His first book of verse, Departmental Ditties, was published in 1886, Barrack-Room Ballads in 1891, and his Seven Seas in 1896. RECESSIONAL. This poem was written in 1897, in celebration of the sixtieth anniversary of Queen Victoria's reign. It appeared in the London Times in a place of honor immediately beneath a letter from the Queen. The Times remarked, in commenting editorially upon the poem : "At this moment of imperial exaltation, Mr. Kipling does well to remind his countrymen that we have something more to do than to build battle-ships and multiply guns." Perhaps no English single poem since Tennyson's Crossing the Bar has won such an instantaneous and wide-spread recognition. Ballad, Alice Brand (Lady of the Lake). Ballade of Charitie. Tennyson. 510 Bruce's Address to his Army at Bannockburn....Burns. 289 Bugle Song (The Princess).. Castaway, The.... Character of a Happy Life, The.. Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (Selections). Cowper. 262 E. B. Browning. 541 1 ...Byron. 388 |