ith all his keen
practical intelligence, was never wholly awake, had never gone outside
that house of dreams in which the only real things were the things of
the imagination. In the poetry of most poets there is a double kind of
existence, of which each half is generally quite distinct; a real world,
and a world of the imagination. But the poetry of Rossetti knows but one
world, and it inhabits a corner there, like a perfectly contented
prisoner, or like a prisoner to whom the sense of imprisonment is a joy.
The love of beauty, the love of love, because love is the supreme energy
of beauty, suffices for an existence in which every moment is a crisis;
for to him, as Pater has said, 'life is a crisis at every moment': life,
that is to say, the inner life, the life of imagination, in which the
senses are messengers from the outer world, from which they can but
bring disquieting tidings.

The whole of this poetry is tragic, though without pathos or even
self-pity. Every human attempt to maintain happiness is foredoomed to be
a failure, and this is an attempt to maintain ecstasy in a region where
everything which is not ecstasy is pain. In reading every other poet who
has written of love one is conscious of compensations: the happiness of
loving or of being loved, the honour of defeat, the help and comfort of
nature or of action. But here all energy is concentrated on the one
ecstasy, and this exists for its own sake, and the desire of it is like
thirst, which returns after every partial satisfaction. The desire of
beauty, the love of love, can but be a form of martyrdom when, as with
Rossetti, there is also the desire of possession.

Circumstances have very little to do with the making of a poet's
temperament or vision, and it would be enough to point to Christina
Rossetti, who was hardly more in the country than her brother, but to
whom a blade of grass was enough to summon the whole country about her,
and whose poetry is full of the sense of growing things. Rossetti
instinctively saw faces, and only faces, and he would have seen them if
he had lived in the loneliest countryside, and he would never have
learned to distinguish between oats and barley if he had had fields of
them about his door from childhood. It was in the beauty of women, and
chiefly in the mysterious beauty of faces, that Rossetti found the
supreme embodiment of beauty; and it was in the love of women, and not
in any more abstract love, of God, of nature