tti's intellectual character which demands our closest attention.
Nor do I believe that this passion for the physical presentation of a
mystical idea was ever entirely supplanted by those other views of
life and art which came to occupy his maturer mind. In his latest
poems--in "Rose Mary," for instance--I see this first impulse
returning upon him with more than its early fascination. In his youth,
however, the mysticism was very naive and straightforward. It was
fostered by one of the very few excursions which Rossetti ever took--a
tour in Belgium in October, 1849. I am told that he and the
painter-friend who accompanied him were so purely devoted to the
mediaeval aspect of all they saw, that, in walking through the
galleries, they turned away their heads in approaching modern
pictures, and carefully closed their eyes while they were passing
Rubens's "Descent from the Cross." In Belgium, or as the result of his
tour there, Rossetti wrote several curious poems, which were so harsh
and forced that he omitted them from his collection when he first
published his "Poems," in 1870.

The effort in these early pieces is too marked. I remember once
hearing Rossetti say that he did not mind what people called him, if
only they would not call him "quaint." But the fact was that, if
quaintness be defined as the inability to conceal the labor of an art,
there is no doubt that both his poems and his designs occasionally
deserved this epithet. He was so excessively sincere an artist, so
determined not to permit anything like trickiness of effect or
meaningless smoothness to conceal the direct statement of an idea,
that his lack of initial discipline sometimes made itself felt in a
curious angular hardness.

And now it would be necessary, if I were attempting a complete study
of Gabriel Rossetti's intellectual career, to diverge into a
description of what has so much exercised popular curiosity, the
pre-Raphaelite movement of 1848. But there is no reason why, in a few
notes on character, I should repeat from hearsay what several of the
seven brothers have reported from authoritative memory. It is
admitted, by them and by all who have understood the movement, that
Gabriel Rossetti was the founder and, in the Shakespearian sense,
"begetter" of all that was done by this earnest band of young artists.
One of them, Mr. Millais, was already distinguished; two others, Mr.
Holman Hunt and Mr. Woolner, had at that time more training and
tec