touched upon.  He stands at the head of those who are organized to see more clearly than we can ourselves see the wonder of the ‘world at hand.’  Of the poets whose wonder is of the simply terrene kind, those whose eyes are occupied by the beauty of the earth and the romance of human life, he is the English king.  But it is not the wonder of Chaucer that is to be specially discussed in the following sentences.  It is the spiritual wonder which in our literature came afterwards.  It is that kind of wonder which filled the souls of Spenser, of Marlowe, of Shakespeare, of Webster, of Ford, of Cyril Tourneur, and of the old ballads: it is that poetical attitude which the human mind assumes when confronting those unseen powers of the universe who, if they did not weave the web in which man finds himself entangled, dominate it.  That this high temper should have passed and given place to a temper of prosaic acceptance is quite inexplicable, save by the theory of the action and reaction of the two great warring impulses advanced in the foregoing extract from the Introduction to ‘Aylwin.’  Perhaps the difference between the temper of the Elizabethan period and the temper of the Chaucerian on the one hand, and Augustanism on the other, will be better understood by a brief reference to the humour of the respective periods.”

Then come luminous remarks upon his theory of absolute and relative humour, which I shall deal with in relation to that type of absolute humour, his own Mrs. Gudgeon in ‘Aylwin.’

I will now quote a passage from an article in the ‘Quarterly Review’ on William Morris by one of Morris’s intimate friends:—

“The decorative renascence in England is but an expression of the spirit of the pre-Raphaelite movement—a movement which has been defined by the most eminent of living critics as the renascence of the ‘spirit of wonder’ in poetry and art.  So defined, it falls into proper relationship with the continuous development of English literature, and of the romantic movement, during the last century and a half, and is no longer to be considered an isolated phenomenon called into being by an erratic genius.  The English Romantic school, from its first inception with Chatterton, Macpherson, and the publication of the Percy ballads, does not, as Mr. Watts-Dunton has finely pointed out, aim merely at the revival of natural language; it seeks rather to reach through art and the forgotten world of old romance, that world of wonder and mystery and spiritual beauty of which poets gain glimpses through

         magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.”

In an essay on Rossetti, Mr. Watts-Dunton says:—

“It was by inevitable instinct that Rossetti turned to that mysterious side of nature and man’s life which to other painters of his time had been a mere fancy-land, to be visited, if at all, on the wings of sport.  It is not only in such masterpieces of his maturity as Dante’s Dream, La Pia, etc., but in such early designs as How they Met Themselves, La Belle Dame sans Merci, Cassandra, etc., that Rossetti shows how important a figure he is in the history of modern art, if modern art claims to be anything more than a mechanical imitation of the facts of nature.

For if there is any permanent vitality in the Renascence of Wonder in modern Europe, if it is not a mere passing mood, if it is really the inevitable expression of the soul of man in a certain stage of civilization (when the sanctions which have made and moulded society are found to be not absolute and eternal, but relative, mundane, ephemeral, and subject to the higher sanctions of unseen powers that work behind ‘the shows of things’), then perhaps one of the first questions to ask in regard to any imaginative painter of the nineteenth century is, In what relation does he stand to the newly-awakened spirit of romance?  Had he a genuine and independent sympathy with that temper of wonder and mystery which all over Europe had preceded and now followed the temper of imitation, prosaic acceptance, pseudo-classicism, and domestic materialism?  Or was his apparent sympathy with the temper of wonder, reverence and awe the result of artistic environment dictated to him by other and more powerful and original souls around him?  I do not say that the mere fact of a painter’s or poet’s showing but an imperfect sympathy with the Renascence of Wonder is sufficient to place him below a poet in whom that sympathy is more nearly complete, because we should then be driven to place some of the disciples of Rossetti above our great realistic painters, and we should be driven to place a poet like the author of ‘The Excursion’ and ‘The Prelude’ beneath a poet like the author of ‘The Queen’s Wake’; but we do say that, other things being equal or anything like equal, a painter or poet of our time is to be judged very much by his sympathy with that great movement which we call the Renascence of Wonder—call it so because the word romanticism never did express it even before it had been vulgarized by French poets, dramatists, doctrinaires, and literary harlequins.

To struggle against the prim traditions of the eighteenth century, the unities of Aristotle, the delineation of types instead of character, as Chateaubriand, Madame de Staël, Balzac, and Hugo struggled, was well.  But in studying Rossetti’s works we reach the very key of those ‘high palaces of romance’ which the English mind had never, even in the eighteenth century, wholly forgotten, but whose mystic gates no Frenchman ever yet unlocked.  Not all the romantic feeling to be found in all the French romanticists (with their theory that not earnestness but the grotesque is the life-blood of romance) could equal the romantic spirit expressed in a single picture or drawing of Rossetti’s, such, for instance, as Beata Beatrix or Pandora.

For while the French romanticists—inspired by the theories (drawn from English exemplars) of Novalis, Tieck, and Herder—cleverly simulated the old romantic feeling, the ‘beautifully devotional feeling’ which Holman Hunt speaks of, Rossetti was steeped in it: he was so full of the old frank childlike wonder and awe which preceded the great renascence of materialism that he might have lived and worked amidst the old masters.  Hence, in point of design, so original is he that to match such ideas as are expressed in Lilith, Hesterna Rosa, Michael Scott’s Wooing, the Sea Spell, etc., we have to turn to the sister art of poetry, where only we can find an equally powerful artistic representation of the idea at the core of the old romanticism—the idea of the evil forces of nature assailing man through his sense of beauty.  We must turn, we say, not to art—not even to the old masters themselves—but to the most perfect efflorescence of the poetry of wonder and mystery—to such ballads as ‘The Demon Lover,’ to Coleridge’s ‘Christabel’ and ‘Kubla Khan,’ to Keats’s ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci,’ for parallels to Rossetti’s most characteristic designs.”

These words about Coleridge recall to the students of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s work a splendid illustration of the true wonder of the great poetic temper which he gives in the before-mentioned essay on The Renascence of Wonder in Chambers’s ‘Cyclopædia of English Literature’:—

“Coleridge’s ‘Christabel,’ ‘The Ancient Mariner,’ and ‘Kubla Khan’ are, as regards the romantic spirit, above—and far above—any work of