Page:The Fleshly school of poetry - Buchanan - 1872.djvu/69

the wonder of collegians, and fading out through sheer poetic impotence; Cowley shaking all England with his pindarics, and perishing with them; Waller, the famous, saved from oblivion by the natural note of one single song^[1]—and so on, through league after league of a flat and desolate country which once was prosperous, till we come again to these fantastic figures of the Fleshly School, with their droll mediæval garments, their funny archaic speech, and the fatal marks of literary consumption on every pale and delicate visage. My judgment on Mr. Rossetti, to whom I in the meantime confine my judgment, is substantially that of the North American Reviewer, who believes that "we have in him another poetical man, and a man markedly poetical, and of a kind apparently, though not radically, different from any of our secondary writers of poetry, but that we have not in him a new poet of any weight;" and that he is "so affected, sentimental, and painfully self-conscious, that the best to be done in his case is to hope that this book of his, having unpacked his bosom of so much that is unhealthy, may have done him more good than it has given others pleasure."^[2] Such, I say, is my opinion, which might very well be wrong, and have to undergo modification, if Mr. Rossetti were younger and less self-possessed. His "maturity" is fatal.

1. "Go, lovely Rose."
2. It is only fair to add that the Reviewer merely gives this as the judgment he was "inclined" to pronounce, only that to say so in as many words might lead to the misconception that Mr. Rossetti had no literary merit whatever.