sense of beauty as his own nature might successfully assimilate. I
have spoken of his assimilation and combination of the art of
Velasquez, and the entire art of Japan, but a still more striking
instance of the power of assimilation, which, strange as it may seem,
only the most original natures possess, is to hand in the early but
extremely beautiful picture, _La femme en blanc_. In the Chelsea
period of his life Mr. Whistler saw a great deal of that singular man,
Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Intensely Italian, though he had never seen
Italy; and though writing no language but ours, still writing it with
a strange hybrid grace, bringing into it the rich and voluptuous
colour and fragrance of the south, expressing in picture and poem
nothing but an uneasy haunting sense of Italy--opulence of women, not
of the south, nor yet of the north, Italian celebration, mystic altar
linen, and pomp of gold vestment and legendary pane. Of such hauntings
Rossetti's life and art were made.

His hold on poetic form was surer than his hold on pictorial form,
wherein his art is hardly more than poetic reminiscence of Italian
missal and window pane. Yet even as a painter his attractiveness
cannot be denied, nor yet the influence he has exercised on English
art. Though he took nothing from his contemporaries, all took from
him, poets and painters alike. Not even Mr. Whistler could refrain,
and in _La femme en blanc_ he took from Rossetti his manner of feeling
and seeing. The type of woman is the same--beauty of dreaming eyes and
abundant hair. And in this picture we find a poetic interest, a moral
sense, if I may so phrase it, nowhere else to be detected, though you
search Mr. Whistler's work from end to end. The woman stands idly
dreaming by her mirror. She is what is her image in the glass, an
appearance that has come, and that will go leaving no more trace than
her reflection on the glass when she herself has moved away. She sees