in 1872. After a long convalescence, she published in 1874 two works of minor importance, Annns Domini and Speaking Likenesses. The former is the earliest of a series of theological works in prose, of which the second was Seek and Find in 1879. In 1881 she published a third collection of poems, A Pageant, in which there was evidence of slackening lyrical power. She now gave herself almost entirely to religious disquisition. The most interesting and personal of her prose publications (but it contained verse also) was Time Flies (1885)—a sort of symbolic diary or collection of brief homilies. In 1890 the S.P.C.K. published a volume of her religious verse. She collected her poetical writings in 1891. In 1892 she was led to publish a very bulky commentary on the Apocalypse, entitled The Face of the Deep. After this she wrote little. Her last years were spent in retirement at 30 Torrington Square, Bloomsbury, which was her home from 1876 to her death. In 1892 her health broke down finally, and she had to endure terrible suffering. From this she was released on the 29th of December 1894. Her New Poems were published posthumously in 1896. In spite of her manifest limitations of sympathy and experience, Christina Rossetti takes rank among the foremost poets of her time. In the purity and solidity of her finest lyrics, the glow and music in which she robes her moods of melancholy reverie, her extraordinary mixture of austerity with sweetness and of sanctity of tone with sensuousness of colour, Christina Rossetti, in her best pieces, may challenge comparison with the most admirable of our poets. The union of fixed religious faith with a hold upon physical beauty and the richer parts of nature has been pointed to as the most original feature of her poetry. Hers was a cloistered spirit, timid, nun-like, bowed down by suffering and humility; her character was so retiring as to be almost invisible. All that we really need to know about her, save that she was a great saint, was that she was a great poet. (E. G.)
See the Poetical Works of C. G. R., with Memoir by W. M. Rossetti (1903). Also Edmund Gosse’s Critical Kit-Kats (1896); an article by Ford Madox Hueffer in the Fortnightly Review (March 1904); and another in The Christian Society (Oct. 1904). The Family Letters of Christina Rossetti were edited by W. M. Rossetti in 1908.
ROSSETTI, DANTE GABRIEL (1828–1882), English poet
and painter, whose full baptismal name was Gabriel Charles Dante, was born on the '12th of May 1828, at 38 Charlotte Street, Portland Place, London. He was the first of the two sons and the second of the four children of Gabriele Rossetti (1783–1854), an Italian poet and liberal, who, about 1824, after many vicissitudes connected with the part he played in
the Naples reform movement against Ferdinand I., came to
England, where he married in 1826 Frances Mary Polidori
(d. 1886), sister of Byron’s physician, Dr John Polidori, and
daughter of a Tuscan, Gaetano Polidori, who had in early
youth been Alfieri’s secretary and who had married an English
lady. In 1831 he became professor of Italian in King’s College,
London, and afterwards achieved a recognized position as a
subtle and original, if eccentric, commentator on Dante. In
1852 he published a volume of Italian religious poems. His
family, besides Dante Gabriel, consisted of Maria Francesca
(1827–1876), who eventually entered an Anglican sisterhood—she
is known to Dante scholars by her valuable Shadow of
Dante; William Michael (b. 1829), a well-known man of
letters who from 1845 to 1894 was in the Inland Revenue
Office—he married a daughter of Ford Madox Brown; and
Christina (q.v.), the poet. The literary spirit was strongly
entrenched here; and the talent which was always distinguished
in William Michael rose to the height of rare genius in Dante
Gabriel and Christina.
Dante Rossetti’s education was begun at a private school in Foley Street, Portland Place, where he remained, however, only nine months, from the autumn of 1835 to the summer of 1836. He next went (in the autumn of 1836) to King’s College School, where he remained till the summer of 1843, having reached the fourth class. From early childhood he had displayed a marked propensity for drawing and painting. It had therefore from the first been tacitly assumed that his future career would be an artistic one, and he left school early. In Latin, however, he was already fairly proficient for his age; French he knew well; Italian he had spoken from childhood, and he had some German lessons about 1844–45. But, although he learned enough German to be able to translate the Arme Heinrich of Hartmann von Aue, and some portions of the Nibelungenlied, he afterwards forgot the language almost entirely. His Greek too, such as it had been, he lost. On leaving school he went (1843) to Cary’s Art Academy (previously called Sass’s), near Bedford Square, and thence obtained admission to the Royal Academy Antique School towards 1846. Of the artistic education of foreign travel Rossetti had very little. But in early life he made a short tour in Belgium, where he was indubitably much impressed and influenced by the works of Van Eyck at Ghent and Memling at Bruges.
It may be convenient to interpolate here a continuous account of Rossetti’s career as a pictorial artist. Being much impressed by some of the early works of Ford Madox Brown exhibited at the Academy (1841), Westminster Hall (1844–45) and the British Institution (1845), he sought from that master of technique technical instruction of a more direct and stringent kind than he had previously submitted to. Brown, ever generous in that way, undertook without a fee the training of Rossetti as a painter, and set him to work upon such rudimentary studies as pickle-pots and other “still life.” The pupil’s course of such work was, as might be expected, short; the master’s example and that of Millais, together with the uncompromising energy of Holman Hunt, with both of whom Rossetti became intimate about this time, helping and encouraging him. Most of all, perhaps, so far as his temporary impressions were concerned, a picture of Brown’s which was shown at the “Free Exhibition,” Hyde Park Corner, in the spring of 1848 profoundly affected Rossetti. This was, of course, months before the formation of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in the autumn of the last-named year, when five painter-students, a sculptor (Thomas Woolner) and a layman (W. M. Rossetti) agreed upon certain principles they desired should obtain in art. None of the five owed the initiative of his views to any of the others or to Brown, whose impulse was purely technical and connected with Rossetti only; neither Millais, Holman Hunt, J. Collinson nor F. G. Stephens needed the help of Madox Brown. The point of Pre-Raphaelite crystallization which had so great though brief an influence upon Rossetti’s life and art was found at a chance meeting of Rossetti, Millais and Holman Hunt in Millais’s house in Gower Street, where certain prints from early Italian frescoes were studied. The enthusiasm of Rossetti led him to propose the formation of a “Brotherhood” with more or less definite views and much loftier aims than artists generally venture to announce. This took effect; the views of the remaining three men were already known, and in a few days they joined the new society and took their shares in the obloquy which attended the doings of Millais, Hunt and Collinson. Brown, though invited, declined to become a P-R.B. Rossetti’s first effort was by means of “The Girlhood of Mary, Virgin,” which in March 1849 was exhibited at Hyde Park Corner. It was a picture which attested the prodigious value of his studies since the previous October, and the native genius of the painter and the sincere passion with which he had accepted the obligations of Pre-Raphaelitism, as they were then, but not for long, understood. Nothing of his producing was more independent than the inception of “The Girlhood of Mary, Virgin”; indeed the design for it was made some half a year before the meeting in Gower Street, though the execution of this work owed not a little to the influence, if not the actual help, of Millais and Hunt. Its mysticism was Rossetti’s own, its technique owed something to Brown. On the whole, there can be no doubt that in this work was the first pronouncement of a new View of art, a fresh technique and power rapidly developing itself. Of course, the style of this noteworthy and epoch-marking picture was
