estimony to his power of conveying a
sensible eflfect by great painting. But to these metrical excellencies
was added an element new to Rossetti's poetry, or seen here for the
first time conspicuously. Insight and imagination of a high order,
together with a poetic instinct whose promptings were sure, had already
found expression in more than one creation moulded into an innate
chasteness of perfected parts and wedded to nature with an unerring
fidelity. But the range of nature was circumscribed, save only in the
one exception of a work throbbing with the sufferings and sorrows of
a shadowed side of modern life. To this lyric, however, there came
as basis a fundamental conception that made aim to grapple with the
pro-foundest problems compassed by the mysteries of life and death, and
a temper to yield only where human perception fails. Abstract indeed
in theme the lyric is, but few are the products of thought out of which
imagination has delved a more concrete and varied picturesqueness:

What of the heart of hate
That beats in thy breast, O Time?--
Bed strife from the furthest prime,
And anguish of fierce debate; that shatters her slain,
And peace that grinds them as grain,
And eyes fixed ever in vain
On the pitiless eyes of Fate.

The second of the fugitive efforts alluded to was a prose work entitled
_Hand and Soul_. More poem than story, this beautiful idyl may be
briefly described as mainly illustrative of the struggles of the
transition period through which, as through a slough, all true artists
must pass who have been led to reflect deeply upon the aims and ends of
their calling before they attain that goal of settled purpose in which
they see it to be best to work from their own heart simply, without
regard for the spectres that would draw them apart into quagmires of
moral aspiration. These two works and an occasional sonnet, such as that
on the greatly gifted and untimely lost Oliver Madox Brown, made the sum
of all {*} that was done, in the interval of eleven years between the
dates of the first volume and of that which was now to be published, to
keep before the public a name which rose at once into distinction, and
had since, without feverish periodical bolstering, grown not less
but more in the ardent upholding of sincere men who, in number and
influence, comprised a following as considerable perhaps as owned
allegiance to any contemporary.

* A ball