ABSTRACT
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, approaching poetry as a painter, and until near the end of his life, when trouble with eye-sight forced him back on poetry, inclining to believe that the day of English poetry was nearly over whereas that of English painting was but dawning, naturally carries pencil and brush into his verse. William Morris, though not till his first and, as strongest poetical inspiration was spent, habitually writes in the terms of the carver or weaver, so that his praise of a flower is in the epithet 'well-wrought'. In different ways and degrees Rossetti and William Morris and Algernon Charles Swinburne are influenced by the old literatures to which they reach back, so that the doom upon their characters is Greek or Norse or Dantesque or out of Border ballads or out of Malory or out of the Bible itself. And not the contrived doom which the modern mind, fed on realistic fiction, expects.
