cumstances of
education. It was said by a critic of the last century, not wisely
though agreeably to the practice of his time, [208] that poetry
rejoices in abstractions. For Rossetti, as for Dante, without question
on his part, the first condition of the poetic way of seeing and
presenting things is particularisation. "Tell me now," he writes, for
Villon's

Dictes-moy ou, n'en quel pays,
Est Flora, la belle Romaine--

Tell me now, in what hidden way is
Lady Flora the lovely Roman:

--"way," in which one might actually chance to meet her; the
unmistakably poetic effect of the couplet in English being dependent on
the definiteness of that single word (though actually lighted on in the
search after a difficult double rhyme) for which every one else would
have written, like Villon himself, a more general one, just equivalent
to place or region.

And this delight in concrete definition is allied with another of his
conformities to Dante, the really imaginative vividness, namely, of his
personifications--his hold upon them, or rather their hold upon him,
with the force of a Frankenstein, when once they have taken life from
him. Not Death only and Sleep, for instance, and the winged spirit of
Love, but certain particular aspects of them, a whole "populace" of
special hours and places, "the hour" even "which might have been, yet
might not be," are living creatures, with hands and eyes and articulate
voices.

[209]

Stands it not by the door--
Love's Hour--till she and I shall meet;
With bodiless form and unapparent feet
That cast no shadow yet before,
Though round its head the dawn begins to pour
The breath that makes day sweet?--

Nay, why
Name the dead hours? I mind them well:
Their ghosts in many darkened doorways dwell
With desolate eyes to know them by.

Poetry as a mania--one of Plato's two higher forms of "divine"
mania--has, in all its species, a mere insanity incidental to it, the
"defect of its quality," into which it may lapse in its moment of
weakness; and the insanity which follows a vivid poetic
anthropomorphism like that of Rossetti may be noted here and there in
his work, in a forced and almost grotesque materialising of
abstractions, as Dante also became at times a mere subject of the
scholastic realism of the Middle Age.

In Love's Nocturn and The Stream's Secret, congruously perhaps with a
certain feverishness of soul in the moods they present, there is at
t