THE WORKS

OF

DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI

   

D. G. Rossetti

From a Photograph by Downey 1862

PRINTED AND BOUND BY

HAZELL, WATSON AND VINEY, LD

LONDON AND AYLESBURY.

DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI

DIED 9 APRIL 1882 AGED 53

FRANCES MARY LAVINIA ROSSETTI

DIED 8 APRIL 1886 AGED 85

TO

THE MOTHER'S SACRED MEMORY

THIS COLLECTED EDITION OF

THE SON'S WORKS

IS DEDICATED BY

THE SURVIVING SON AND BROTHER

W M R

The most adequate mode of prefacing the Collected Works

of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, as of most authors, would probably

be to offer a broad general view of his writings, and to analyse

with some critical precision his relation to other writers,

contemporary or otherwise, and the merits and defects of his

performances. In this case, as in how few others, one would

also have to consider in what degree his mind worked con-

sentaneously or diversely in two several arts—the art of poetry

and the art of painting. But the hand of a brother is not

the fittest to undertake any work of this scope. My preface

will not therefore deal with themes such as these, but will

be confined to minor matters, which may nevertheless be

relevant also within their limits. And first may come a very

brief outline of the few events of an outwardly uneventful

life.

Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti, who, at an early stage of

his professional career, modified his name into Dante Gabriel

Rossetti, was born on 12th May 1828, at No. 38 Charlotte

Street (now 110 Hallam Street), Portland Place, London.

In blood he was three-fourths Italian, and only one-fourth

English; being on the father's side wholly Italian (Abruzzese),

and on the mother's side half Italian (Tuscan) and half

English. His father was Gabriele Rossetti, born in 1783 at

Vasto, in the Abruzzi, Adriatic coast, in the then kingdom

of Naples. Gabriele Rossetti (died 1854) was a man of letters,

a custodian of ancient bronzes in the Museo Borbonico of

Naples, and a poet; he distinguished himself by patriotic

lays which fostered the popular movement resulting in the

grant of a constitution by Ferdinand I. of Naples in 1820.

The King, after the fashion of Bourbons and tyrants, revoked

the constitution in 1821, and persecuted the abettors of it,

and Rossetti had to escape for his freedom, or perhaps even

for his life. He settled in London in 1824, married, and

became Professor of Italian in King's College, London,

publishing also various works of bold speculation in the way

of Dantesque commentary and exposition. His wife was

Frances Mary Lavinia Polidori (died 1886), daughter of

Gaetano Polidori (died 1853), a teacher of Italian and literary

man who had in early youth been secretary to the poet

Alfieri, and who published various books, including a com-

plete translation of Milton's poems. Frances Polidori was

English on the side of her mother, whose maiden name was

Pierce. The family of Rossetti and his wife consisted of four

children, born in four successive years—Maria Francesca

(died 1876), Dante Gabriel, William Michael, and Christina

Georgina (died 1894). Few more affectionate husbands and

fathers have lived, and no better wife and mother, than

Gabriele and Frances Rossetti. The means of the family

were always strictly moderate, and became scanty towards

1843, when the father's health began to fail. In 1842 (or

perhaps 1841) Dante Gabriel left King's College School, where

he had learned Latin, French, and a beginning of Greek;

and he entered upon the study of the art of painting, to

which he had from earliest childhood exhibited a very marked

bent. After a while he was admitted to the school of the

Royal Academy, but never proceeded beyond its antique

section. In 1848 Rossetti co-operated with two of his fellow-

students in painting, John Everett Millais and William Hol-

man Hunt, and with the sculptor Thomas Woolner, in form-

ing the so-called Præraphaelite Brotherhood. There were

three other members of the Brotherhood—James Collinson,

Frederic George Stephens, and the present writer. Ford

Madox Brown, the historical painter, was known to Rossetti

a little before the Præraphaelite scheme was started, and

bore an important part both in directing his studies and in

upholding the movement, but he did not think fit to join

the Brotherhood in any direct or complete sense. Through

a fellow-painter, Walter Howell Deverell, Rossetti came to

know Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal, daughter of a Sheffield cutler,

herself a milliner's assistant, gifted with some artistic and

some poetic faculty: in the Spring of 1860, after a long

engagement, they married. Their wedded life was of short

duration, as she died in February 1862, having meanwhile

given birth to a still-born child. For several years up to this

date Rossetti, designing and painting many works, in oil-

colour or as yet more frequently in water-colour, had resided

at No. 14 Chatham Place, Blackfriars Bridge, a line of street

now demolished. In the autumn of 1862 he removed to

No. 16 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea. At first certain apartments in

the house were occupied by Mr. George Meredith the novelist,

Mr. Swinburne the poet, and myself. This arrangement did

not last long, although I myself remained a partial inmate of

the house up to 1873. My brother continued domiciled in

Cheyne Walk until his death; but from 1871 he was some-

times away at Kelmscot manorhouse, in Oxfordshire, not far

from Lechlade, occupied jointly by himself, and by the poet

Mr. William Morris with his family. From the autumn of

1872 till the summer of 1874 he was wholly settled at

Kelmscot, scarcely visiting London at all. He then returned

to London, and Kelmscot passed out of his ken.

In the early months of 1850 the members of the Præraphae-

lite Brotherhood, with the co-operation of some friends,

brought out a short-lived magazine named The Germ (after-

wards Art and Poetry); here appeared the first verses and

the first prose published by Rossetti, including The Blessed

Damozel and Hand and Soul . In 1856 he contributed a little

to The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine , printing there The

Burden of Nineveh and Staff and Scrip. In 1861, during his

married life, he published his volume of translations The

Early Italian Poets , now entitled Dante and his Circle . By

the time therefore of the death of his wife he had a certain

restricted yet far from inconsiderable reputation as a poet,

along with his recognized position as a painter—a non-

exhibiting painter, for, after the first two or three years of

his professional course, he adhered with practical uniformity

to the plan of abstaining from exhibition altogether. He

had contemplated bringing out in or about 1862 a volume of

original poems; but, in the grief and dismay which over-

whelmed him in losing his wife, he determined to sacrifice to

her memory this long-cherished project, and he buried in

her coffin the manuscripts which would have furnished forth

the volume. With the lapse of years he came to see that,

as a final settlement of the matter, this was neither obligatory

nor desirable; so in 1869 the manuscripts were disinterred,

and in 1870 his volume named Poems was issued. For some

considerable while it was hailed with general and lofty praise,

chequered by only moderate stricture or demur; but late

in 1871 Mr. Robert Buchanan published under a pseudonym,

in the Contemporary Review , a very hostile article named

The Fleshly School of Poetry , attacking the poems on literary

and more especially on moral grounds. The article, in an

enlarged form, was afterwards reissued as a pamphlet. The

assault produced on Rossetti an effect altogether dispropor-

tionate to its intrinsic importance; indeed, it developed in

his character an excess of sensitiveness and of distempered

brooding which his nearest relatives and friends had never

before surmised,—for hitherto he had on the whole had an

ample sufficiency of high spirits, combined with a certain

underlying gloominess or abrupt moodiness of nature and out-

look. Unfortunately there was in him already only too much

of morbid material on which this venom of detraction was

to work. For some years the state of his eyesight had given

very grave cause for apprehension, he himself fancying from

time to time that the evil might end in absolute blindness, a

fate with which our father had been formidably threatened

in his closing years. From this or other causes insomnia had

ensued, coped with by far too free a use of chloral, which may

have begun towards the spring of 1870. In the summer of

1872 he had a dangerous crisis of illness; and from that

time forward, but more especially from the middle of 1874,

he became secluded in his habits of life, and often depressed,

fanciful, and gloomy. Not indeed that there were no in-

tervals of serenity, even of brightness; for in fact he was

often genial and pleasant, and a most agreeable companion

with as much bonhomie as acuteness for wiling an evening

away. He continued also to prosecute his pictorial work

with ardour and diligence, and at times he added to his

product as a poet. The second of his original volumes,

Ballads and Sonnets , was published in the autumn of 1881.

About the same time he sought change of air and scene in

the Vale of St. John, near Keswick, Cumberland; but he

returned to town more shattered in health and in mental tone

than he had ever been before. In December a shock of a

quasi-paralytic character struck him down. He rallied

sufficiently to remove to Birchington-on-Sea, near Margate.

The hand of death was then upon him, and was to be relaxed

no more. The last stage of his maladies was uræmia. Tended

by his mother and his sister Christina, with the constant

companionship at Birchington of Mr. Hall Caine, and in the

presence likewise of Mr. Theodore Watts-Dunton, Mr.

Frederic Shields, and myself, he died on Easter Sunday,

April 9th 1882. His sister-in-law, the daughter of Madox

Brown, arrived immediately after his latest breath had been

drawn. He lies buried in the churchyard of Birchington.

Few brothers were more constantly together, or shared

one another's feelings and thoughts more intimately, in child-

hood, boyhood, and well on into mature manhood, than

Dante Gabriel and myself. I have no idea of limning his

character here at any length, but will define a few of its

leading traits. He was always and essentially of a dominant

turn, in intellect and in temperament a leader. He was im-

petuous and vehement, and necessarily therefore impatient;

easily angered, easily appeased, although the embittered

feelings of his later years obscured this amiable quality to

some extent; constant and helpful as a friend where he per-

ceived constancy to be reciprocated; free-handed and heed-

less of expenditure, whether for himself or for others; in

family affection warm and equable, and (except in relation

to our mother, for whom he had a fondling love) not demon-

strative. Never on stilts in matters of the intellect or of

aspiration, but steeped in the sense of beauty, and loving,

if not always practising, the good; keenly alive also to the

laughable as well as the grave or solemn side of things;

superstitious in grain, and anti-scientific to the marrow.

Throughout his youth and early manhood I considered him

to be markedly free from vanity, though certainly well

equipped in pride; the distinction between these two ten-

dencies was less definite in his closing years. Extremely

natural and therefore totally unaffected in tone and manner,

with the naturalism characteristic of Italian blood; good-

natured and hearty, without being complaisant or accommo-

dating; reserved at times, yet not haughty; desultory enough

in youth, diligent and persistent in maturity; self-centred

always, and brushing aside whatever traversed his purpose

or his bent. He was very generally and very greatly liked

by persons of extremely diverse character; indeed, I think

it can be no exaggeration to say that no one ever disliked

him. Of course I do not here confound the question of liking

a man's personality with that of approving his conduct out-

and-out.

Of his manner I can perhaps convey but a vague impression.

I have said that it was natural; it was likewise eminently

easy, and even of the free-and-easy kind. There was a

certain British bluffness, streaking the finely poised Italian

suppleness and facility. As he was thoroughly unconven-

tional, caring not at all to fall in with the humours or pre-

possessions of any particular class of society, or to conciliate

or approximate the socially distinguished, there was little in

him of any veneer or varnish of elegance; none the less he

was courteous and well-bred, meeting all sorts of persons

upon equal terms— i.e., upon his own terms; and I am

satisfied that those who are most exacting in such matters

found in Rossetti nothing to derogate from the standard of

their requirements. In habit of body he was indolent and

lounging, disinclined to any prescribed or trying exertion of

any sort, and very difficult to stir out of his ordinary groove,

yet not wanting in active promptitude whenever it suited

his liking. He often seemed totally unoccupied, especially

of an evening; no doubt the brain was busy enough.

The appearance of my brother was to my eye rather Italian

than English, though I have more than once heard it said

that there was nothing observable to bespeak foreign blood.

He was of rather low middle stature, say five feet seven and

a half, like our father; and, as the years advanced, he re-

sembled our father not a little in a characteristic way, yet

with highly obvious divergences. Meagre in youth, he was

at times decidedly fat in mature age. The complexion, clear

and warm, was also dark, but not dusky or sombre. The

hair was dark and somewhat silky; the brow grandly spacious

and solid; the full-sized eyes blueish-grey; the nose shapely,

decided, and rather projecting, with an aquiline tendency

and large nostrils, and perhaps no detail in the face was more

noticeable at a first glance than the very strong indentation

at the spring of the nose below the forehead; the mouth

moderately well-shaped, but with a rather thick and un-

moulded under-lip; the chin unremarkable; the line of the

jaw, after youth was passed, full, rounded, and sweeping; the

ears well-formed and rather small than large. His lips were

wide, his hands and feet small; the hands very much those

of the artist or author type, white, delicate, plump, and soft

as a woman's. His gait was resolute and rapid, his general

aspect compact and determined, the prevailing expression of

the face that of a fiery and dictatorial mind concentrated

into repose. Some people regarded Rossetti as eminently

handsome; few, I think, would have refused him the epithet

of well-looking. It rather surprises me to find from Mr.

Caine's book of Recollections that that gentleman, when he

first saw Rossetti in 1880, considered him to look full ten

years older than he really was,—namely, to look as if sixty-

two years old. To my own eye nothing of the sort was

apparent. He wore moustaches from early youth, shaving his

cheeks; from 1873 or thereabouts he grew whiskers and beard,

moderately full and auburn-tinted, as well as moustaches.

His voice was deep and harmonious; in the reading of poetry,

remarkably rich, with rolling swell and musical cadence.

My brother was very little of a traveller; he disliked

the interruption of his ordinary habits of life, and the flurry

or discomfort, involved in locomotion; moreover, he was a

bad sailor. In boyhood he knew Boulogne: he was in Paris

three or four times, and twice visited some principal cities

of Belgium. This was the whole extent of his foreign travel-

ling. He crossed the Scottish border more than once and

knew various parts of England pretty well—Hastings, Bath,

Oxford, Matlock, Stratford-on-Avon, Newcastle-on-Tyne,

Bognor, Herne Bay; Kelmscot, Keswick, and Birchington-

on-Sea have been already mentioned. From 1878 or there-

abouts he became, until he went to the neighbourhood of

Keswick, an absolute home-keeping recluse, never even

straying outside the large garden of his own house, except to

visit from time to time our mother in the central part of

London.

From an early period of life he had a large circle of friends,

and could always have commanded any amount of inter-

course with any number of ardent or kindly well-wishers, had

he but felt elasticity or cheerfulness of mind enough for the

purpose. I should do injustice to my own feelings if I were

not to mention here some of his leading friends. First and

foremost I name Mr. Madox Brown, his chief intimate through-

out life, on the unexhausted resources of whose affection and

converse he drew incessantly for long years; they were at

last separated by the removal of Mr. Brown to Manchester,

for the purpose of painting the Town Hall frescoes. The

Præraphaelites—Millais, Hunt, Woolner, Stephens, Collinson

—were on terms of unbounded familiarity with him in youth;

owing to death or other causes, he lost sight eventually of all

of them except Mr. Stephens. Mr. William Bell Scott was,

like Mr. Brown, a close friend from a very early period until

the last; Scott being both poet and painter, there was a

strict bond of affinity between him and Rossetti. Mr. Ruskin

was extremely intimate with my brother from 1854 till about

1865, and was of material help to his professional career.

As he rose towards celebrity, Rossetti knew Burne Jones,

and through him Morris and Swinburne, all staunch and

fervently sympathetic friends. Mr. Shields was a rather later

acquaintance, who soon became an intimate, equally re-

spected and cherished. Then Mr. Hueffer the musical critic

(afterwards a close family connection, editor of the Tauchnitz

edition of Rossetti's works), and Dr. Hake the poet. Through

the latter my brother came to know Mr. Theodore Watts-

Dunton, whose intellectual companionship and incessant

assiduity of friendship did more than anything else towards

assuaging the discomforts and depression of his closing years.

In the latest period the most intimate among new acquaint-

ances were Mr. William Sharp and Mr. Hall Caine, both of

them known to Rossettian readers as his biographers. Nor

should I omit to speak of the extremely friendly relation in

which my brother stood to some of the principal purchasers

of his pictures—Mr. Leathart, Mr. Rae, Mr. Leyland, Mr.

Graham, Mr. Valpy, Mr. Turner, and his early associate Mr.

Boyce. Other names crowd upon me—James Hannay, John

Tupper, Patmore, Thomas and John Seddon, Mrs. Bodichon,

Browning, John Marshall, Tebbs, Mrs. Gilchrist, Miss Boyd,

Sandys, Whistler, Joseph Knight, Fairfax Murray, Mr. and

Mrs. Stillman, Treffry Dunn, Lord and Lady Mount-Temple,

Oliver Madox Brown, the Marstons, father and son—but I

forbear.

Before proceeding to some brief account of the sequence

etc. of my brother's writings, it may be worth while to speak

of the poets who were particularly influential in nurturing

his mind and educing its own poetic endowment. The first

poet with whom he became partially familiar was Shakespear.

Then followed the usual boyish fancies for Walter Scott and

Byron. The Bible was deeply impressive to him, perhaps

above all Job, Ecclesiastes, and the Apocalypse. Byron gave

place to Shelley when my brother was about sixteen years

of age; and Mrs. Browning and the old English or Scottish

ballads rapidly ensued. It may have been towards this

date, say 1845, that he first seriously applied himself to

Dante, and drank deep of that inexhaustible well-head of

poesy and thought; for the Florentine, though familiar to

him as a name, and in some sense as a pervading penetrative

influence, from earliest childhood, was not really assimilated

until boyhood was practically past. Bailey's Festus was

enormously relished about the same time—read again and

yet again; also Faust, Victor Hugo, Alfred de Musset (and

along with them a swarm of French novelists), and Keats,

whom my brother for the most part, though not without

some compunctious visitings now and then, truly preferred

to Shelley. The only classical poet whom he took to in any

degree worth speaking of was Homer, the Odyssey consider-

ably more than the Iliad. Tennyson reigned along with

Keats, and Edgar Poe and Coleridge along with Tennyson.

In the long run he perhaps enjoyed and revered Coleridge

beyond any other modern poet whatsoever; but Coleridge

was not so distinctly or separately in the ascendant, at any

particular period of youth, as several of the others. Blake

likewise had his peculiar meed of homage, and Charles Wells,

the influence of whose prose style, in the Stories after Nature,

I trace to some extent in Rossetti's Hand and Soul . Lastly

came Browning, and for a time, like the serpent-rod of Moses,

swallowed up all the rest. This was still at an early stage

of life; for I think the year 1847 cannot certainly have been

passed before my brother was deep in Browning. The

readings or fragmentary recitations of Bells and Pomegranates,

Paracelsus, and above all Sordello, are something to remember

from a now distant past. My brother lighted upon Pauline

(published anonymously) in the British Museum, copied it

out, recognized that it must be Browning's, and wrote to the

great poet at a venture to say so, receiving a cordial response,

followed by a genial and friendly intercourse for several

years. One prose-work of great influence upon my brother's

mind, and upon his product as a painter, must not be left

unspecified—Malory's Mort d'Arthur, which he knew to some

extent in boyhood, and which engrossed him towards 1856.

The only poet whom I feel it needful to add to the above is

Chatterton. In the last two or three years of his life my

brother entertained an abnormal—I think an exaggerated—

admiration of Chatterton. It appears to me that (to use a

very hackneyed phrase) he “evolved this from his inner

consciousness” at that late period; certainly in youth and

early manhood he had no such feeling. He then read the

poems of Chatterton with cursory glance and unexcited

spirit, recognizing them as very singular performances for

their date in English literature, and for the author's boyish

years, but beyond that laying no marked stress upon them.

The reader may perhaps be surprised to find some names

unmentioned in this list: I have stated the facts as I re-

member and know them. Chaucer, Spenser, the Elizabethan

dramatists (other than Shakespear), Milton, Dryden, Pope,

Wordsworth, are unnamed. It should not be supposed that

he read them not at all, or cared not for any of them; but,

if we except Chaucer in a rather loose way and (at a late

period of life) Marlowe in some of his non-dramatic poems,

they were comparatively neglected. Thomas Hood he valued

highly; also very highly Burns in mature years, but he was

not a constant reader of the Scottish lyrist. Of Italian poets

he earnestly loved none save Dante: Cavalcanti in his degree,

and also Poliziano and Michelangelo—not Petrarca, Boccaccio,

Ariosto, Tasso, or Leopardi, though in boyhood he delighted

well enough in Ariosto. Of French poets, none beyond

Hugo and Alfred de Musset; except Villon, and partially

Dumas, whose novels ranked among his favourite reading.

In German poetry he read nothing currently in the original,

although (as our pages bear witness) he had in earliest youth

so far mastered the language as to make some translations.

Calderon, in Fitzgerald's version, he admired deeply; but

this was only at a late date. He had no liking for the

specialities of Scandinavian, nor indeed of Teutonic, thought

and work, and little or no curiosity about Oriental—such as

Indian, Persian, or Arabic—poetry. Any writing about

devils, spectres, or the supernatural generally, whether in

poetry or in prose, had always a fascination for him; at one

time, say 1844, his supreme delight was the blood-curdling

romance of Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer.

I now pass to a specification of my brother's own writings.

Of his merely childish or boyish performances I need have

said nothing, were it not that they have been mentioned in

other books regarding Rossetti. First then there was The

Slave , a “drama” which he composed and wrote out in or

about the seventh year of his age. It is of course simple

nonsense. “Slave” and “traitor” were two words which

he found passim in Shakespear; so he gave to his principal

characters the names of Slave and Traitor. If what they do

is meaningless, what they say (when they deviate from

prose) is not exactly unmetrical. Towards his thirteenth

year he began a romantic prose-tale named Roderick and

Rosalba . I hardly think that he composed anything else

prior to the ballad narrative Sir Hugh the Heron , founded on

a tale by Allan Cunningham. Our grandfather printed it

in 1843, which is some couple of years after the date of its

composition. It is correctly enough versified, but has no

merit, and little that could even be called promise. Soon

afterwards a prose-tale named Sorrentino , in which the devil

played a conspicuous part, was begun, and carried to some

length; it was of course boyish, but it must, I think, have

shown some considerable degree of cleverness. In 1844 there

was the translation of Bürger's Lenore , spirited and fairly

efficient; and in November 1845 was begun a translation of

the Nibelungenlied , almost deserving (if my memory serves me)

to be considered good. Several hundred lines of it must

certainly have been written. My brother was by this time

a practised and competent versifier, at any rate, and his

mere prentice-work may count as finished.

Other original verse, not in any large quantity, succeeded,

along with the version of Der Arme Heinrich , and the begin-

ning of his translations from the early Italians. These must,

I think, have been in full career in the first half of 1847, and

may even have begun in 1845. They show a keen sensitive-

ness to whatsoever is poetic in the originals, and a sinuous

strength and ease in providing English equivalents, with the

command of a rich and romantic vocabulary. In his nine-

teenth year, or before 12th May 1847, he wrote The Blessed

Damozel . As that is universally recognized as one of his

typical or consummate productions, marking the high level

of his faculty whether inventive or executive, I may here

close this record of preliminaries; the poems, with such

slight elucidations as my notes supply, being left to speak

for themselves. I will only add that for some while, more

especially in the latter part of 1848 and in 1849, my brother

practised his pen to no small extent in writing sonnets to

bouts-rimés. He and I would sit together in our bare little

room at the top of No. 50 Charlotte Street, I giving him the

rhymes for a sonnet, and he me the rhymes for another;

and we would write off our emulous exercises with consider-

able speed, he constantly the more rapid of the two. From

five to eight minutes may have been the average time for

one of his sonnets; not unfrequently more, and sometimes

hardly so much. In fact, the pen scribbled away at its

fastest. Several of his bouts-rimés sonnets still exist in

my possession, a little touched up after the first draft: I

present most of them in this re-edition. Some have a faux

air of intensity of meaning, as well as of expression; but

their real core of significance is necessarily small, the only

wonder being how he could spin so deftly with so weak a

thread. I may be allowed to mention that most of my own

sonnets (and not sonnets alone) published in The Germ were

bouts-rimés experiments such as above described. In poetic

tone they are of course inferior to my brother's work of like

fashioning; in point of sequence or self-congruity of mean-

ing, the comparison might be less to my disadvantage.

Dante Rossetti's published works were as follows: three

volumes, chiefly of poetry. I shall transcribe the title-pages

verbatim.

(1 ^a) The Early Italian Poets from Ciullo d'Alcamo to

Dante Alighieri (1100—1200—1300) in the Original Metres.

Together with Dante's Vita Nuova. Translated by D. G.

Rossetti. Part I. Poets chiefly before Dante. Part II.

Dante and his Circle. London: Smith, Elder and Co.

65, Cornhill. 1861. The rights of translation and reproduc-

tion, as regards all editorial parts of this work, are reserved.

(1 ^b) Dante and his Circle, with the Italian Poets preceding

him (1100—1200—1300). A Collection of Lyrics, edited,

and translated in the original metres, by Dante Gabriel

Rossetti. Revised and rearranged edition. Part I. Dante's

Vita Nuova, &c. Poets of Dante's Circle. Part II. Poets

chiefly before Dante. London: Ellis and White, 29, New

Bond Street. 1874.

(2 ^a) Poems by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. London: F. S.

Ellis, 33, King Street, Covent Garden. 1870.

(2 ^b) Poems by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. A new edition.

London: Ellis and White, 29, New Bond Street. 1881.

(3) Ballads and Sonnets by Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

London: Ellis and White, 29, New Bond Street, W. 1881.

The reader will understand that 1 ^b is essentially the same

book as 1 ^a, but altered in arrangement, chiefly by inverting

the order in which the poems of Dante and of the Dantesque

epoch, and those of an earlier period, are printed. In the

present collection, I reprint 1 ^b, taking no further count of 1 ^a.

The volume 2 ^b is to a great extent the same as 2 ^a, yet by

no means identical with it. 2 ^a contained a section named

Sonnets and Songs, towards a work to be called “The House

of Life.” In 1881, when 2 ^b and 3 were published simul-

taneously, The House of Life was completed, was made to

consist solely of sonnets, and was transferred to 3; while the

gap thus left in 2 ^b was filled up by other poems. This essential

modification of The House of Life clearly governed my action.

It thus became impossible for me to reproduce 2 ^a: but the

question had to be considered whether I should reprint 2 ^b and

3 exactly as they stood in 1881, adding after them a section

of poems not hitherto printed in any one of my brother's

volumes; or whether I should recast, in point of arrange-

ment, the entire contents of 2 ^b and 3, inserting here and

there, in their most appropriate sequence, the poems hitherto

unprinted. I have chosen the latter alternative, as being

in my own opinion the only arrangement which is thoroughly

befitting for an edition of Collected Works. I am aware that

some readers would have preferred to see the old order— i.e.,

the order of 1881—retained, so that the two volumes of that

year could be perused as they then stood. Indeed, one of

my brother's friends, most worthy, whether as friend or as

critic, to be consulted on such a subject, decidedly advocated

that plan. On the other hand, I found my own view con-

firmed by my sister Christina, who, both as a member of the

family and as a poetess, deserved an attentive hearing. The

reader who inspects my table of contents will be readily able

to follow the method of arrangement which is here adopted.

I have divided the materials into Principal Poems, Miscel-

laneous Poems, Translations, and some minor headings; and

have in each section arranged the poems—and the same has

been done with the prose-writings—in the order of the dates

of their composition. This order of date is certainly near to

being correct; though some allowance, especially in the case

of The House of Life , must be made for differences of period

when the poems were begun and were brought into their final

form. The few translations which were printed in 2 ^b (as

also in 2 ^a) have been removed to follow on after 1 ^b.

There are two poems by my brother which I am unable

to include among his Collected Works. One of these is a

grotesque ballad about a Dutchman, Jan van Hunks , begun

at a very early date, and finished in his last illness. The

other is a brace of sonnets, interesting in subject, and as

being the very latest thing that he wrote. These works were

presented as a gift of love and gratitude to Mr. Watts-Dunton,

with whom it remains to publish them at his own discretion:

he has already brought out Jan van Hunks in The English

Review .

Dante Rossetti was a very fastidious writer, and, I might

add, a very fastidious painter. He did not indeed “cudgel

his brains” for the idea of a poem or the structure or diction

of a stanza. He wrote out of a large fund or reserve of

thought and consideration, which would culminate in a clear

impulse or (as we say) an inspiration. In the execution he

was always heedful and reflective from the first, and he

spared no after-pains in clarifying and perfecting. He ab-

horred anything straggling, slipshod, profuse, or uncondensed.

He often recurred to his old poems, and was reluctant to

leave them merely as they were. A natural concomitant

of this state of mind was a great repugnance to the notion of

publishing, or of having published after his death, whatever

he regarded as juvenile, petty, or inadequate. As editor of

his Collected Works, I have had to regulate myself to a large

extent by these feelings of his, whether my own entirely

correspond with them or not. The amount of unpublished

work which he left behind him was by no means large; out

of the moderate bulk I have been careful to select only such

examples as I suppose that he would himself have approved

for the purpose, or would, at any rate, not gravely have

objected to. A few, which he might have objected to, figure

as Juvenilia. Some details regarding the new items will be

found among my notes. Some projects or arguments of

poems which he never executed are also printed among his

prose-writings. These particular projects had, I think, been

practically abandoned by him in all the later years of his

life; but there was one subject which he had seriously at

heart, and for which he had collected some materials, and he

would perhaps have put it into shape had he lived a year or

two longer—a ballad on the subject of Joan of Arc to match

The White Ship and The King's Tragedy .

I have not unfrequently heard my brother say that he

considered himself more essentially a poet than a painter.

To vary the form of expression, he thought that he had

mastered the means of embodying poetical conceptions in the

verbal and rhythmical vehicle more thoroughly than in form

and design, perhaps more thoroughly than in colour.

I add here the dedications to Rossetti's volumes 1 ^a, 2 ^a,

2 ^b, and 3. The dedication to 1 ^b appears in its proper place.

1 ^a.— The Early Italian Poets:

Whatever is mine in this book is inscribed to my Wife.—

D.G.R. 1861.

2 ^a.— Poems , 1870 :

To William Michael Rossetti, these Poems, to so many of

which, so many years back, he gave the first brotherly hearing,

are now at last dedicated.

2 ^b.— Poems , 1881 :

Same dedication, adding the dates “1870—1881.”

3.— Ballads and Sonnets:

To Theodore Watts, the Friend whom my verse won for me,

these few more pages are affectionately inscribed.

In the Poems, 1881, appeared the ensuing “Advertise-

ment”:

“‘Many poems in this volume were written between 1847 and

1853. Others are of recent date, and a few belong to the inter-

vening period. It has been thought unnecessary to specify the

earlier work, as nothing is included which the author believes to

be immature.’

“The above brief note was prefixed to these poems when first

published in 1870. They have now been for some time out of

print.

“The fifty sonnets of The House of Life , which first appeared

here, are now embodied with the full series in the volume entitled

Ballads and Sonnets .

“The fragment of The Bride's Prelude , now first printed, was

written very early, and is here associated with other work of the

same date; though its publication in an unfinished form needs

some indulgence.”

The pieces marked thus * are now printed for the first time;

those marked † have appeared in print before, but are now first in-

cluded in the Collected Works.