DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.61290#0328
DANTE ROSSETTI
276
blessed the world, as the death of Edward King
blessed it in Milton’s “ Lycidas,” and in far greater
measure the death of Arthur Hallam blessed it in
Tennyson’s “ In Memoriam.” Forwhile sometimes
the expression of personal pain may be put into
such perfect art as to afford in its very poignancy
of feeling a sort of aesthetic consolation, the test of
the highest poetic grief is that it shall lose the
smart of personal injury in a strong sense of
brotherhood with fellow-sufferers, and shall trans-
late the revolt against individual pain into a wide
compassion with the sorrows of a nation or of all
humanity.
Nor can we avoid comparison of “The House
of Life’’ with the two great kindred cycles of love-
sonnets in the English language,—the sonnets
of Shakespeare, and Mrs. Browning’s “Sonnets
from the Portuguese ; ” the one celebrating a
hopeless and desolating passion, the other a fortu-
nate and consummated love. Rossetti touches
both these precedents, in that he knew alike the
depths and heights, the hell and heaven, of that
passion of which the poets say,—
“All other pleasures are not worth its pain.”
He enjoyed happiness, and suffered despair, not
merely in the outward circumstances of his love,
but in a more subtle and irretrievable way. The
fallacy dies hard, that leads us to imagine that the
276
blessed the world, as the death of Edward King
blessed it in Milton’s “ Lycidas,” and in far greater
measure the death of Arthur Hallam blessed it in
Tennyson’s “ In Memoriam.” Forwhile sometimes
the expression of personal pain may be put into
such perfect art as to afford in its very poignancy
of feeling a sort of aesthetic consolation, the test of
the highest poetic grief is that it shall lose the
smart of personal injury in a strong sense of
brotherhood with fellow-sufferers, and shall trans-
late the revolt against individual pain into a wide
compassion with the sorrows of a nation or of all
humanity.
Nor can we avoid comparison of “The House
of Life’’ with the two great kindred cycles of love-
sonnets in the English language,—the sonnets
of Shakespeare, and Mrs. Browning’s “Sonnets
from the Portuguese ; ” the one celebrating a
hopeless and desolating passion, the other a fortu-
nate and consummated love. Rossetti touches
both these precedents, in that he knew alike the
depths and heights, the hell and heaven, of that
passion of which the poets say,—
“All other pleasures are not worth its pain.”
He enjoyed happiness, and suffered despair, not
merely in the outward circumstances of his love,
but in a more subtle and irretrievable way. The
fallacy dies hard, that leads us to imagine that the