lacency, and calling one day on his friends, he affected the direst
madness, strutted ominously up to her and with the wildest glare of his
wild eyes, the firmest and fiercest setting of his lower lip, and began
in measured and resonant accents to recite the lines--

Shall the hide of a fierce lion
Be stretched on a couch of wood,
For a daughter's foot to lie on,
Stained with a father's blood?

The poet's response is a soft "Ah, no!" but the girl, ignorant of course
of this, and wholly undisturbed by the bloodthirsty tone of the question
addressed to her, calmly fixed her eyes on the frenzied eyes before her,
and answered with a swift light accent and rippling laugh, "It shall
if you like, sir!" Rossetti's enjoyment of his discomfiture on this
occasion seemed never to grow less.

His life was twofold in intellectual effort, and of the directions in
which his energy went out the artistic alone has thus far been dealt
with. It has been said that he early displayed talent for writing as
well as painting, and, in truth, the poems that he wrote in early youth
are even more remarkable than the pictures that he painted. His poetic
genius developed rapidly after sixteen, and sprang at once to a singular
and perfect maturity. It is difficult to say whether it will add to the
marvel of mature achievement or deduct from the sense of reality of
personal experience, to make public the fact that _The Blessed Damozel_
was written when the poet was no more than nineteen. That poem is a
creation so pure and simple in the higher imagination, as to support the
contention that the author was electively related to Fra Angelico.
Described briefly, it may be said to embody the meditations of a
beautiful girl in Paradise, whose lover is in the same hour dreaming of
her on earth. How the poet lighted upon the conception shall be told by
himself in that portion of this book devoted to the writer's personal
recollections.

_The Blessed Damozel_ is a conception dilated to such spiritual
loveliness that it seems not to exist within things substantially
beautiful, or yet by aid of images that coalesce out of the evolving
memory of them, but outside of everything actual It is not merely that
the dream itself is one of ideal purity; the wave of impulse is pure,
and flows without taint of media that seem almost to know it not. The
lady says:--

We two will lie i' the shadow of
That living mystic tree
Within