阅读理解　　Since her own era, Christina Rossetti''s devout Christianity has often been seen as a characteristic setting her apart from the other avowedly non-Christian members of the Pre-Raphaelite circle. In designating their movement a form of"aesthetic mysticism", one established critic, Alice Law described the place Pre-Raphaelitism holds in the development of Victorian artistic culture as a movement away from a predominantly religious and moralizing function toward a culture of aestheticism―precisely what Rossetti''s work has long been thought to reject. The Pre-Raphaelites'' attention to picturesque detail, the medievalist atmosphere and settings, the pervasive melancholy of their works, and their awareness of their art''s primarily Christian literary and pictorial origins―all these have been traditionally downplayed in their similarity to the characteristics of Christina Rossetti''s poetry. 　　This belief persists, despite the distinctly religious "atmosphere" of much of the work produced by both generations of Pre-Raphaelites: its employment of biblical images and typology; of religious figural language; and, more especially and pervasively, of medievalist backgrounds and settings that were seen by their early audiences to have clearly devotional, if not dangerously "Romanist", associations. When discussing Pre-Raphaelitism as an historical movement, we must remember that the first brotherhood was inspired largely by a sacramental aesthetic that tended to alienate Victorian society, which generally abhorred the notion of sacrifice. It is true that Rossetti''s traditional solution to the Romantic and Victorian literary problem of alienation from nature and the more characteristically Victorian problem of despair at life''s meaninglessness, was fundamentally Christian. But with few exceptions, Rossetti relied on the colloquial and angst-ridden language of both generations of Pre-Raphaelites. Even Swinburne, the Pre-Raphaelite whose anti-orthodoxy and iconoclasm seem to conflict most profoundly with Rossetti''s values, enthusiastically hailed her. 　　That most Victorians themselves perceived Christina Rossetti as unequivocally Pre-Raphaelite in her poetic affinities is clear, for throughout her poetry and much of her prose Christina Rossetti demonstrated true and deep affinities with Pre-Raphaelite aesthetic values, in both innovative and traditional ways. We must not forget her "pictorial" modes of representation, the medieval atmosphere and settings that appear repeatedly in her poems, her appreciation of the world''s physical beauty and its expression in lush images, the intensity of her poems, which seems inseparable from their "sincerity", and not least her preoccupation with love. To a greater extent than figures more peripheral to the Pre-Raphaelite circle, Christina Rossetti produced works that appear to be dominated by the same aesthetic consciousness and literary values that make Pre-Raphaelitism the central movement which unintentionally spawned the aestheticism of the 1880s and 1890s. Pre-Raphaelitism, in fact, influenced aesthetic thought in a way that made the movement central to the transition from the sentimental moral idealism of the Victorian mainstream to the variously nihilistic, skeptical, and ironic value systems that dominate modern poetry.