initial commit of ebook 25574HEADmain

12 files changed, 43364 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/.gitattributes b/.gitattributes
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6833f05
--- /dev/null
+++ b/.gitattributes
@@ -0,0 +1,3 @@
+* text=auto
+*.txt text
+*.md text
diff --git a/25574-0.txt b/25574-0.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..f8a86d7
--- /dev/null
+++ b/25574-0.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,8465 @@
+Project Gutenberg’s Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, by T. Hall Caine
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti
+       1883
+
+Author: T. Hall Caine
+
+Release Date: May 23, 2008 [EBook #25574]
+Last Updated: October 6, 2016
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK RECOLLECTIONS OF ROSSETTI ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+RECOLLECTIONS OF DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI
+
+By T. Hall Caine
+
+
+Roberts Brothers - 1883
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE.
+
+One day towards the close of 1881 Rossetti, who was then very ill, said
+to me:
+
+“How well I remember the beginning of our correspondence, and how little
+did I think it would lead to such relations between us as have ensued! I
+was at the time very solitary and depressed from various causes, and
+the letters of so young and ardent a well-wisher, though unknown to me
+personally, brought solace.”
+
+“Yours,” I said, “were very valuable to me.”
+
+“Mine to you were among the largest bodies of literary letters I ever
+wrote, others being often letters of personal interest.”
+
+“And so admirable in themselves,” I added, “and so free from the
+discussion of any but literary subjects that many of them would bear to
+be printed exactly as you penned them.”
+
+“That,” he said, “will be for you some day to decide.”
+
+This was the first hint of any intention upon my part of publishing the
+letters he had written to me; indeed, this was the first moment at which
+I had conceived the idea of doing so. Nothing further on the subject was
+said down to the morning of the Thursday preceding the Sunday on which
+he died, when we talked together for the last time on subjects of
+general interest,--subsequent interviews being concerned wholly with
+solicitous inquiries upon my part, in common with other anxious friends,
+as to the nature of his sufferings, and the briefest answers from him.
+
+“How long have we been friends?” he said.
+
+I replied, between three and four years from my first corresponding with
+him.
+
+“And how long did we correspond?”
+
+“Three years, nearly.”
+
+“What numbers of my letters you must possess! They may perhaps even yet
+be useful to you.”
+
+From this moment I regarded the publication of his letters as in some
+sort a trust; and though I must have withheld them for some years if I
+had consulted my own wishes simply, I yielded to the necessity that they
+should be published at once, rather than run any risk of their not been
+published at all.
+
+What I have just said will account for the circumstance that I, the
+youngest and latest of Rossetti’s friends, should be the first to seem
+to stand towards him in the relation of a biographer. I say _seem_ to
+stand, for this is not a biography. It was always known to be Rossetti’s
+wish that if at any moment after his death it should appear that the
+story of his life required to be written, the one friend who during many
+of his later years knew him most intimately, and to whom he unlocked the
+most sacred secrets of his heart, Mr. Theodore Watts, should write it,
+unless indeed it were undertaken by his brother William. But though
+I know that whenever Mr. Watts sets pen to paper in pursuance of
+such purpose, and in fulfilment of such charge, he will afford us a
+recognisable portrait of the man, vivified by picturesque illustration,
+the like of which few other writers could compass, I also know from
+what Rossetti often told me of his friend’s immersion in all kinds and
+varieties of life, that years (perhaps many years) may elapse before
+such a biography is given to the world. My own book is, I trust, exactly
+what it purports to be: a volume of Recollections, interwoven with
+letters and criticism, and preceded by such a summary of the leading
+facts in Rossetti’s life as seems necessary for the elucidation of
+subsequent records. I have drawn Rossetti precisely as I found him in
+each stage of our friendship, exhibiting his many contradictions of
+character, extenuating nothing, and, I need hardly add, setting down
+naught in malice. Up to this moment I have never inquired of myself
+whether to those who have known little or nothing of Rossetti
+hitherto, mine will seem to be on the whole favourable or unfavourable
+portraiture; but I have trusted my admiration of the poet and affection
+for the friend to penetrate with kindly and appreciative feeling every
+comment I have had to offer. I was attracted to Rossetti in the first
+case by ardent love of his genius, and retained to him ultimately by
+love of the man. As I have said in the course of these Recollections,
+it was largely his unhappiness that held me, with others, as by a spell,
+and only too sadly in this particular did he in his last year realise
+his own picture of Dante at Verona:
+
+     Yet of the twofold life he led
+       In chainless thought and fettered will
+       Some glimpses reach us,--somewhat still
+     Of the steep stairs and bitter bread,--
+       Of the soul’s quest whose stern avow
+       For years had made him haggard now.
+
+I am sensible of the difficulty and delicacy of the task I have
+undertaken, involving, as it does, many interests and issues; and in
+every reference to surviving relatives as well as to other persons now
+living, with whom Rossetti was in any way allied, I have exercised in
+all friendliness the best judgment at my command.
+
+Clement’s Inn, October 1882.
+
+     *** It has not been thought necessary to attach dates to the
+     letters printed in this volume, for not only would the
+     difficulty of doing so be great, owing to the fact that
+     Rossetti rarely dated his letters, but the utility of dates
+     in such a case would be doubtful, because the substance of
+     what is said is often quite impersonal, and, where
+     otherwise, is almost independent of the time of production.
+     It may be sufficient to say that the letters were written in
+     the years 1879,1880, and 1881.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+Gabriele Rossetti--Boyhood--The pre-Raphaelite Movement--Early
+Manhood--The Blessed Damozel--Jenny--Sister Helen--The Translations--The
+House of Life--The Germ--Oxford and Cambridge Magazine--Blackfriars
+Bridge--Married Life
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+Chelsea--Chloral--Dante’s Dream--Recovery of the Poems--Poems--The
+Contemporary Controversy--Mr. Theodore Watts--Rose Mary--The
+White Ship--The King’s Tragedy--Poetic Continuations--Cloud
+Confines--Journalistic Slanders
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+Early Intercourse--Poetic Impulses--Beginning of Correspondence--Early
+Letters
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+Inedited Poems--Inedited Ballads--Additions to Sister Helen--Hand
+and Soul--St. Agnes of Intercession--Catholic Opinion--Rossetti’s
+Catholicism--Cloud Confines--The Portrait
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+Coleridge--Wordsworth--Lamb and Coleridge--Charles Wells--Keats--Leigh
+Hunt and Keats--Keats’s Sister
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+Chatterton--Oliver Madox Brown--Gilchrist’s Blake--George Gilfillan--Old
+Periodicals--A Rustic Poet--Art and Politics--Letters in Biography
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+Cheyne Walk--The House--First Meeting--Rossetti’s Personality--His
+Reading--The Painter’s Craft--Mr. Ruskin--Rossetti’s Sensitiveness--His
+Garden--His Library
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+English Sonnets--Sonnet Structure--Shakspeare’s Sonnets--Wells’s
+Sonnet--Charles Whitehead--Ebenezer Jones--Mr. W. M. Rossetti--A New
+Sonnet--Mr. W. Davies--Canon Dixon--Miss Christina Rossetti--The Bride’s
+Prelude--The Supernatural in Poetry
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+Last Days--Vale of St John--In the Lake Country--Return to
+London--London--Birchington
+
+
+
+
+RECOLLECTIONS OF DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+Dante Gabriel Rossetti was the eldest son of Gabriele Rossetti and
+Frances Polidori, daughter of Alfieri’s secretary, and sister of the
+young physician who travelled with Lord Byron. Gabriele Rossetti was a
+native of Yasto, in the district of the Abruzzi, kingdom of Naples.
+He was a patriotic poet of very considerable distinction; and, as a
+politician, took a part in extorting from Ferdinand I. the Constitution
+of 1820. After the failure of the Neapolitan insurrection, owing to
+the treachery of the King (who asked leave of absence on a pretext
+of ill-health, and returned with an overwhelming Austrian army), the
+insurrectionists were compelled to fly. Some of them fell victims;
+others lay long in concealment. Rossetti was one of the latter; and,
+while he was in hiding, Sir Graham Moore, the English admiral, was lying
+with an English fleet in the bay. The wife of the admiral had long been
+a warm admirer of the patriotic hymns of Rossetti, and, when she learned
+his danger, she prevailed with her husband to make efforts to save him.
+Sir Graham thereupon set out with another English officer to the place
+of concealment, habited the poet in an English uniform, placed him
+between them in a carriage, and put him aboard a ship that sailed next
+day to Malta, where he obtained the friendship of the governor, John
+Hookham Frere, by whose agency valuable introductions were procured, and
+ultimately Rossetti established himself in England. Arrived in London
+about 1823, he lived a cheerful life as an exile, though deprived of the
+advantages of his Italian reputation. He married in 1826, and his eldest
+son was born May 12, 1828, in Charlotte Street, Portland Place, London.
+He was appointed Professor of Italian at King’s College, and died in
+1854. His house was for years the constant resort of Italian refugees;
+and the son used to say that it was from observation of these visitors
+of his father that he depicted the principal personage of his _Last
+Confession_. He did not live to see the returning glories of his country
+or the consummation we have witnessed of that great movement founded
+upon the principles for which he fought and suffered. His present
+position in Italy as a poet and patriot is a high one, a medal having
+been struck in his honour. An effort is even now afoot to erect a statue
+to him in his native place, and one of the last occasions upon which
+the son put pen to paper was when trying to make a reminiscent rough
+portrait for the use of the sculptor. Gabriele Rossetti spent his last
+years in the study of Dante, and his works on the subject are unique,
+exhibiting a peculiar view of Dante’s conception of Beatrice, which
+he believed to be purely ideal, and employed solely for purposes of
+speculative and political disquisition. Something of this interpretation
+was fixed undoubtedly upon the personage by Dante himself in his later
+writings, but whether the change were the result of a maturer and more
+complicated state of thought, and whether the real and ideal characters
+of Beatrice may not be compatible, are questions which the poetic mind
+will not consider it possible to decide. Coleridge, no doubt, took a
+fair view of Rossetti’s theory when he said: “Rossetti’s view of Dante’s
+meaning is in great part just, but he has pushed it beyond all bounds of
+common sense. How could a poet--and such a poet as Dante--have written
+the details of the allegory as conjectured by Rossetti? The boundaries
+between his allegory and his pure picturesque are plain enough, I think,
+at first reading.” It was, doubtless, due to his devotion to studies of
+the Florentine that Gabriele Rossetti named after him his eldest son.
+
+Dante Gabriel Rossetti, whose full baptismal name was Gabriel Charles
+Dante, was educated principally at King’s College School, London, and
+there attained to a moderate proficiency in the ordinary classical
+school-learning, besides a knowledge of French, which throughout life he
+spoke well. He learned at home some rudimentary German; Italian he had
+acquired at a very early age. There has always been some playful mention
+of certain tragedies and translations upon which he exercised himself
+from the ages of five to fifteen years; but it is hardly necessary
+to say that he himself never attached value to these efforts of his
+precocity; he even displayed, occasionally, a little irritation upon
+hearing them spoken of as remarkable youthful achievements.
+
+One of these productions of his adolescence, Sir Hugh the Heron, has
+been so frequently alluded to, that it seems necessary to tell the story
+of it, as the author himself, in conversation, was accustomed to do. At
+about twelve years of age, the young poet wrote a scrap of a poem under
+this title, and then cast it aside. His grandfather, Polidori, had seen
+the fragment, however, and had conceived a much higher opinion of
+its merits than even the natural vanity of the young author himself
+permitted him to entertain. It had then become one of the grandfather’s
+amusements to set up an amateur printing-press in his own house, and
+occupy his leisure in publishing little volumes of original verse for
+semi-public circulation. He urged his grandson to finish the poem
+in question, promising it, in a completed state, the dignity and
+distinction of type. Prompted by hope of this hitherto unexpected
+reward, Rossetti--then thirteen to fourteen years of age--finished
+the juvenile epic, and some bound copies of it got abroad. No more was
+thought of the matter, and in due time the little bard had forgotten
+that he had ever done it. But when a genuine distinction had been earned
+by poetry that was in no way immature, Rossetti discovered, by
+the gratuitous revelation of a friend, that a copy of the youthful
+production--privately printed and never published--was actually in the
+library of the British Museum. Amazed, and indeed appalled as he was by
+this disclosure, he was powerless to remedy the evil, which he foresaw
+would some day lead to the poem being unearthed to his injury, and
+printed as a part of his work. The utmost he could do to avert
+the threatened mischief he did, and this was to make an entry in a
+commonplace-book which he kept for such uses, explaining the origin and
+history of the poem, and expressing a conviction that it seemed to him
+to be remarkable only from its entire paucity of even ordinary poetic
+promise. But while this was indubitably a just estimate of these boyish
+efforts, it is no doubt true, as we shall presently see, that Rossetti’s
+genius matured itself early in life.
+
+Whilst still a child, his love of literature exhibited itself, and a
+story is told of a disaster occurring to him, when rather less than nine
+years of age, which affords amusing proof of the ardour of his poetic
+nature. Upon going with his brother and sisters to the house of his
+grandfather, where as children they occupied themselves with sports
+appropriate to their years, he proposed to improvise a part of a scene
+from _Othello_, and cast himself for the principal _rôle_. The scene
+selected was the closing one of the play, and began with the speech
+delivered to Lodovico, Montano, and Gratiano, when they are about to
+take Othello prisoner. Rossetti used to say that he delivered the lines
+in a frenzy of boyish excitement, and coming to the words--
+
+              Set you down this:
+     And say, besides,--that in Aleppo once,
+       Where a malignant and a turban’d Turk
+       Beat a Venetian, and traduced the state,
+       I took by the throat the circumcised dog,
+       And smote him--thus!--
+
+he snatched up an iron chisel, that lay somewhere at hand, and, to the
+consternation of his companions, smote himself with all his might on the
+chest, inflicting a wound from which he bled and fainted.
+
+He is described by those who remember him, at this period, as a boy of
+a gentle and affectionate nature, albeit prone to outbursts of
+masterfulness. The earliest existent portraits represent a comely youth,
+having redundant auburn hair curling all round the head, and eyes and
+forehead of extraordinary beauty. It is said that he was brave and
+manly of temperament, courageous as to personal suffering, eminently
+solicitous of the welfare of others, and kind and considerate to*such
+as he had claims upon. This is no doubt true portraiture, but it must
+be stated (however open to explanation, on grounds of laudable
+self-depreciation), that it is not the picture which he himself used
+to paint of his character as a boy. He often described himself as being
+destitute of personal courage when at school, as shrinking from the
+amusements of schoolfellows, and fearful of their quarrels; not wholly
+without generous impulses, but, in the main, selfish of nature and
+reclusive in habit of life. He was certainly free from the meaningless
+affectation--for such it too frequently is--of representing his
+school-days as the happiest of his life. If, after so much undervaluing
+of himself, it were possible to trust his estimate of his youthful
+character, he would have had you believe that school was to him a place
+of semi-purgatorial probation,--which nothing but love of his mother,
+and desire to meet her wishes, prevented him, as an irreclaimable
+antischoliast, from obstinately renouncing at a time when he had learned
+little Latin, and less Greek.
+
+Having from childhood shown a propensity towards painting, the strong
+inclination was fostered by his parents, and art was looked upon as his
+future profession. Upon leaving school about 1843, he studied first at
+an art academy near Bedford Square, and afterwards at the Eoyal Academy
+Antique School, never, however, going to the Eoyal Academy Life School.
+He appears to have been an assiduous student. In after life when his
+habit of late rising had become a stock subject of banter among his
+intimate friends, he would tell with unwonted pride how in earlier years
+he used to rise at six A.M. once a week in order to attend a life-class
+held before breakfast. On such occasions he was accustomed, he would
+say, to purchase a buttered roll and cup of coffee at some stall at a
+street corner, so as not to dislocate domestic arrangements by requiring
+the servants to get up in the middle of the night. He left the Academy
+about 1848 or 1849, and in the latter year exhibited his picture
+entitled the _Girlhood of Mary Virgin_. This painting is an admirable
+example of his early art, before the Gothicism of the early Italian
+painters became his quest. Better known to the public than the picture
+is the sonnet written upon it, containing the beautiful lines--
+
+       An angel-watered lily, that near God
+       Grows and is quiet.
+
+While Rossetti was still under age he associated with J. E. Millais,
+Holman Hunt, Thomas Woolner, James Collinson, F. G. Stephens, and his
+brother, W. M. Rossetti, in the movement called pre-Raphaelite. At the
+beginning of his career he recognised, in common with his associates,
+that the contemporary classicism had run to seed, and that, beyond an
+effort after perfection of _technique_, the art of the period was all
+but devoid of purpose, of thought, imagination, or spirituality. At such
+a moment it was matter for little surprise that ardent young intellects
+should go back for inspiration to the Gothicism of Giotto and the early
+painters. There, at least, lay feeling, aim, aspiration, such as did
+not concern itself primarily with any question of whether a subject were
+painted well or ill, if only it were first of all a subject at all--a
+subject involving manipulative excellence, perhaps, but feeling and
+invention certainly. This, then, stated briefly, was the meaning of
+pre-Raphaelitism. The name (as shall hereafter appear) was subsequently
+given to the movement more than half in jest. It has sometimes been
+stated that Mr. Ruskin was an initiator, but this is not strictly the
+case. The company of young painters and writers are said to have been
+ignorant of Mr. Ruskin’s writings when they began their revolt against
+the current classicism. It is a fact however, that, after perhaps a
+couple of years, Mr. Ruskin came to the rescue of the little brotherhood
+(then much maligned) by writing in their defence a letter in the
+_Times_. It is easy to make too much of these early endeavours of
+a company of young men, exceptionally gifted though the reformers
+undoubtedly were, and inspired by an ennobling enthusiasm. In later
+years Rossetti was not the most prominent of those who kept these
+beginnings of a movement constantly in view; indeed, it is hardly rash
+to say that there were moments when he seemed almost to resent the
+intrusion of them upon the maturity of aim and handling which, in common
+with his brother artists, he ultimately compassed. But it would be folly
+not to recognise the essential germs of a right aspiration which grew
+out of that interchange of feeling and opinion which, in its concrete
+shape, came to be termed pre-Raphaelitism. Rossetti is acknowledged to
+have taken the most prominent part in the movement, supplying, it is
+alleged, much of the poetic impulse as well as knowledge of mediaeval
+art. He occupied himself in these and following years mainly in the
+making of designs for pictures--the most important of them being
+_Dante’s Dream, Hamlet and Ophelia, Cassandra, Lucretia Borgia, Giotto
+painting Dante’s Portrait, The First Anniversary of the Death of
+Beatrice Mary Magdalene at the Door of Simon the Pharisee, The Death
+of Lady Macbeth, Desdemona’s Death-song_ and a great subject entitled
+_Found_, designed and begun at twenty-five, but left incomplete at
+death.
+
+All this occurred between the years 1849-1856, but three years before
+the earlier of these dates Rossetti, as a painter, had come under an
+influence which he was never slow to acknowledge operated powerfully
+on his art. In 1846, Mr. Ford Madox Brown exhibited designs in the
+Westminster competition, and his cartoons deeply impressed Rossetti The
+young painter, then nineteen years of age, wrote to the elder one, his
+senior by no more than seven years, begging to be permitted to become a
+pupil. An intimacy sprang up between the two, and for a while Rossetti
+worked in Brown’s studio; but though the friendship lasted throughout
+life the professional relationship soon terminated. The ardour of the
+younger man led him into the-brotherhood just referred to, but Brown
+never joined the pre-Raphaelites, mainly, it is said, from dislike of
+coterie tendencies.
+
+About 1856, Rossetti, with two or three other young painters,
+gratuitously undertook to paint designs on the walls of the Union
+Debating Hall at Oxford, and about the time he was engaged upon this
+task he made the acquaintance of Mr. William Morris, Mr. Burne Jones,
+and Mr. Swinburne, who were undergraduates at the University. Mr.
+Burne Jones was intended for a clerical career, but due to Rossett’s
+intercession Holy Orders were abandoned, to the great gain of English
+art. He has more than once generously allowed that he owed much to
+Rossetti at the beginning of his career, find regarded him to the last
+as leader of the movement with which his own name is now so eminently
+and distinctively associated. Together, and with the co-operation of Mr.
+William Morris and Canon Dixon, they started and carried on for about a
+year a monthly periodical called _The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine_,
+of which Canon Dixon, as one of the projectors, shall presently tell the
+history. At a subsequent period Mr. Burne Jones and Rossetti, together
+with Mr. Madox Brown and some three others, associated with Mr. Morris
+in establishing, from the smallest of all possible beginnings, the
+trading firm now so well known as Morris and Co., and they remained
+partners in this enterprise down to the year 1874, when a dissolution
+took place, leaving the business in the hands of the gentleman
+whose name it bore, and whose energy had from the first been mainly
+instrumental in securing its success.
+
+It may be said that almost from the outset Rossetti viewed the public
+exhibition of pictures as a distracting practice. Except the _Girlhood
+of Mary Virgin_, the _Annunciation_ was almost the only picture he
+exhibited in London, though three or four water-colour drawings were
+at an early period exhibited in Liverpool, and of these, by a curious
+coincidence, one was the first study for the _Dante’s Dream_, which
+was purchased by the corporation of the city within a few months of
+the painter’s death. To sum up all that remains at this stage to say
+of Rossetti as a pictorial artist down to his thirtieth year, we may
+describe him (as he liked best to hear himself described) simply as
+a poetic painter. If he had a special method, it might be called
+a distinct poetic abstraction, together with a choice of mediaeval
+subject, and an effort after no less vivid rendering of nature than was
+found in other painters. With his early designs (the outcome of such a
+quest as has been indicated) there came, perchance, artistic crudities
+enough, but assuredly there came a great spirituality also. By and by
+Rossetti perceived that he must make narrower the stream of his effort
+if he would have it flow deeper; and then, throughout many years, he
+perfected his technical methods by abandoning complex subject-designs,
+and confining himself to simple three-quarter-length pictures. More
+shall be said on this point in due course. Already, although unknown
+through the medium of the public picture-gallery, he was recognised as
+the leader of a school of rising young artists whose eccentricities were
+frequently a theme of discussion. He never invited publicity, yet he was
+rapidly attaining to a prominent position among painters.
+
+His personal character in early manhood is described by friends as one
+of peculiar manliness, geniality, and unselfishness. It is said that, on
+one occasion, he put aside important work of his own in order to
+spend several days in the studio of a friend, whose gifts were quite
+inconsiderable compared with his, and whose prospects were all but
+hopeless,--helping forward certain pictures, which were backward, for
+forthcoming exhibition. Many similar acts of self-sacrifice are still
+remembered with gratitude by those who were the recipients of them.
+Rossetti was king of his circle, and it must be said, that in all that
+properly constituted kingship, he took care to rule. There was then
+a certain determination of purpose which occasionally had the look of
+arbitrariness, and sometimes, it is alleged, a disregard of opposing
+opinion which partook of tyranny: but where heart and not head were in
+question, he was assuredly the most urbane and amiable of monarchs.
+In matters of taste in art, or criticism in poetry, he would brook no
+opposition from any quarter; nor did he ever seem to be conscious of the
+unreasonableness of compelling his associates to swallow his opinions
+as being absolute and final. This disposition to govern his circle
+co-existed, however, with the most lavish appreciation of every good
+quality displayed by the members of it, and all the little uneasiness
+to which his absolutism may sometimes have given rise was much more than
+removed by constantly recurring acts of good-fellowship,--indeed it was
+forgotten in the presence of them.
+
+A photograph which exists of Rossetti at twenty-seven conveys the idea
+of a nature rather austere and taciturn than genial and outspoken. The
+face is long and the cheeks sunken, the whole figure being attenuated
+and slightly stooping; the eyes have the inward look which belonged to
+them in later life, but the mouth, which is free from the concealment of
+moustache or beard, is severe. The impression conveyed is of a powerful
+intellect and ambitious nature at war with surroundings and not wholly
+satisfied with the results. It ought to be added that, at the period in
+question, health was uncertain with Rossetti: and this fact, added to
+the circumstance of his being at the time in the very throes of those
+difficulties with his art which he was soon to surmount, must be
+understood to account for the austerity of his early portrait. Rossetti
+was not in a distinct sense a humourist, but there came to him at
+intervals, in earlier manhood, those outbursts of volatility, which, to
+serious natures, act as safety-valves after prolonged tension of all the
+powers of the mind. At such moments of levity he is described as almost
+boyish in recklessness, plunging into any madcap escapade that might be
+afoot with heedlessness of all consequences. Stories of misadventures,
+quips and quiddities of every kind, were then his delight, and of these
+he possessed a fund which no man knew better how to use. He would tell
+a funny story with wonderful spirit and freshness of resource, always
+leading up to the point with watchful care of the finest shades of
+covert suggestion or innuendo, and, when the climax was reached, never
+denying himself a hearty share in the universal laughter. One of his
+choicest pleasures at a dinner or other such gathering was to improvise
+rhymes on his friends, and of these the fun usually lay in the
+improvisatore’s audacious ascription of just those qualities which his
+subject did not possess. Though far from devoid of worldly wisdom, and
+indeed possessed of not a little shrewdness in his dealings with his
+buyers (often exhibiting that rarest quality of the successful trader,
+the art of linking one transaction with another), he was sometimes
+amusingly deficient in what is known as common sense. In later life he
+used to tell with infinite zest a story of a blunder of earlier years
+which might easily have led to serious if not fatal results. He had
+been suffering from nervous exhaustion and had been ordered to take a
+preparation of nux vomica. The dose was to be taken three times daily:
+in the morning, at noon, and in the evening. One afternoon he was about
+to start out for the house of a friend with whom he had promised to
+lunch, when he remembered that he had not taken his first daily dose
+of medicine. He forthwith took it, and upon setting down the glass,
+reflected that the second dose was due, and so he took that also.
+Putting on his hat and preparing to sally forth he further reflected
+that before he could return the third dose ought in ordinary course to
+be taken, and so without more deliberation he poured himself a final
+portion and drank it off. He had thereupon scarcely turned himself
+about, when to his horror he discovered that his limbs were growing
+rigid and his jaw stiff. In the utmost agitation he tried to walk across
+the studio and found himself almost incapable of the effort. His eyes
+seemed to leap out of their sockets and his sight grew dim. Appalled
+and in agony, he at length sprang up from the couch upon which he had
+dropped down a moment before, and fled out of the house. The violent
+action speedily induced a copious perspiration, and this being by much
+the best thing that could have happened to him, carried off the poison
+and so saved his life. He could never afterwards be induced to return to
+the drug in question, and in the last year of his life was probably more
+fearfully aghast at seeing the present writer take a harmless dose of it
+than he would have been at learning that 50 grains of chloral had been
+taken.
+
+He had, in early manhood, the keenest relish of a funny prank, and one
+such he used to act over again in after life with the greatest vivacity
+of manner. Every one remembers the story told by Jefferson Hogg how
+Shelley got rid of the old woman with the onion basket who took a place
+beside him in a stage coach in Sussex, by seating himself on the floor
+and fixing a tearful, woful face upon his companion, addressing her in
+thrilling accents thus--
+
+     For heaven’s sake, let us sit upon the ground,
+     And tell sad stories of the death of kings.
+
+Rossetti’s frolic was akin to this, though the results were amusingly
+different. It would appear that when in early years, Mr. William Morris
+and Mr. Burne Jones occupied a studio together, they had a young servant
+maid whose manners were perennially vivacious, whose good spirits no
+disaster could damp, and whose pertness nothing could banish or
+check. Rossetti conceived the idea of frightening the girl out of her
+complacency, and calling one day on his friends, he affected the direst
+madness, strutted ominously up to her and with the wildest glare of his
+wild eyes, the firmest and fiercest setting of his lower lip, and began
+in measured and resonant accents to recite the lines--
+
+     Shall the hide of a fierce lion
+     Be stretched on a couch of wood,
+     For a daughter’s foot to lie on,
+     Stained with a father’s blood?
+
+The poet’s response is a soft “Ah, no!” but the girl, ignorant of course
+of this, and wholly undisturbed by the bloodthirsty tone of the question
+addressed to her, calmly fixed her eyes on the frenzied eyes before her,
+and answered with a swift light accent and rippling laugh, “It shall
+if you like, sir!” Rossetti’s enjoyment of his discomfiture on this
+occasion seemed never to grow less.
+
+His life was twofold in intellectual effort, and of the directions in
+which his energy went out the artistic alone has thus far been dealt
+with. It has been said that he early displayed talent for writing as
+well as painting, and, in truth, the poems that he wrote in early youth
+are even more remarkable than the pictures that he painted. His poetic
+genius developed rapidly after sixteen, and sprang at once to a singular
+and perfect maturity. It is difficult to say whether it will add to the
+marvel of mature achievement or deduct from the sense of reality of
+personal experience, to make public the fact that _The Blessed Damozel_
+was written when the poet was no more than nineteen. That poem is a
+creation so pure and simple in the higher imagination, as to support the
+contention that the author was electively related to Fra Angelico.
+Described briefly, it may be said to embody the meditations of a
+beautiful girl in Paradise, whose lover is in the same hour dreaming of
+her on earth. How the poet lighted upon the conception shall be told by
+himself in that portion of this book devoted to the writer’s personal
+recollections.
+
+_The Blessed Damozel_ is a conception dilated to such spiritual
+loveliness that it seems not to exist within things substantially
+beautiful, or yet by aid of images that coalesce out of the evolving
+memory of them, but outside of everything actual It is not merely that
+the dream itself is one of ideal purity; the wave of impulse is pure,
+and flows without taint of media that seem almost to know it not. The
+lady says:--
+
+     We two will lie i’ the shadow of
+        That living mystic tree
+     Within whose secret growth the Dove
+        Is sometimes felt to be,
+     While every leaf that His plumes touch
+        Saith His Name audibly.
+
+Here the love involved is so etherealised as scarcely to be called
+human, save only on the part of the mortal dreamer, in whose yearning
+ecstasy the ear thinks it recognises a more earthly note. The lover
+rejoins.--
+
+     (Alas! We two, we two, thou say’st!
+        Yea, one wast thou with me
+     That once of old. But shall God lift
+        To endless unity
+     The soul whose likeness with thy soul
+        Was but its love for thee?)
+
+It is said of the few existent examples of the art of Giorgione that,
+around some central realisation of human passion gathers always a
+landscape which is not merely harmonised to it, but a part of it,
+sharing the joy or the anguish, lying silent to the breathless
+adoration, or echoing the rapturous voice of the full pleasure of those
+who are beyond all height and depth more than it. Something of this
+passive sympathy of environing objects comes out in the poem:
+
+     Around her, lovers, newly met
+        ‘Mid deathless love’s acclaims,
+     Spoke evermore among themselves
+        Their rapturous new names;
+     And the souls mounting up to God
+        Went by her like thin flames.
+
+     And still she bowed herself and stooped
+        Out of the circling charm;
+     Until her bosom must have made
+        The bar she leaned on warm,
+     And the lilies lay as if asleep
+        Along her bended arm.
+
+The sense induced by such imagery is akin to that which comes of rapt
+contemplation of the deep em-blazonings of a fine stained window when
+the sun’s warm gules glides off before the dim twilight. And this sense
+as of a thing existent, yet passing stealthily out of all sight away,
+the metre of the poem helps to foster. Other metres of Rossetti’s have
+a strenuous reality, and rejoice in their self-assertiveness, and seem,
+almost, in their resonant strength, to tell themselves they are very
+good; but this may almost be said to be a disembodied voice, that
+lives only on the air, and, like the song of a bird, is gone before its
+accents have been caught. Of the four-and-twenty stanzas of the poem,
+none is more calmly musical than this:
+
+      When round his head the aureole clings,
+        And he is clothed in white,
+      I ‘ll take his hand and go with him
+        To the deep wells of light;
+      We will step down as to a stream,
+        And bathe there in God’s sight.
+
+Perhaps Rossetti never did anything more beautiful and spiritual than
+this little work of his twentieth year; and more than once in later life
+he painted the beautiful lady who is the subject of it, with the lilies
+lying along her arm.
+
+A first draft of _Jenny_ was struck off when the poet was scarcely more
+than a boy, and taken up again years afterwards, and almost entirely
+re-written--the only notable passage of the early poem that now remains
+being the passage on lust. It is best described in the simplest phrase,
+as a man’s meditations on the life of a courtesan whom he has met at a
+dancing-garden and accompanied home. While he sits on a couch, she lies
+at his feet with her head on his knee and sleeps. When the morning dawns
+he rises, places cushions beneath her head, puts some gold among
+her hair, and leaves her. It is wisest to hazard at the outset all
+unfavourable comment by the frankest statement of the story of the
+poem. But the _motif_ of it is a much higher thing. _Jenny_ embodies
+an entirely distinct phase of feeling, yet the poet’s root impulse
+is therein the same as in the case of _The Blessed Damozel_. No two
+creations could stand more widely apart as to outward features than
+the dream of the sainted maiden and the reality of the frail and fallen
+girl; yet the primary prompting and the ultimate outcome are the same.
+The ardent longing after ideal purity in womanhood, which in the one
+gave birth to a conception whereof the very sorrow is but excess of
+joy found expression in the other through a vivid presentment of the
+nameless misery of unwomanly dishonour:--
+
+     Behold the lilies of the field,
+     They toil not neither do they spin;
+     (So doth the ancient text begin,--
+     Not of such rest as one of these Can share.)
+     Another rest and ease
+     Along each summer-sated path
+     From its new lord the garden hath,
+     Than that whose spring in blessings ran
+     Which praised the bounteous husbandman,
+     Ere yet, in days of hankering breath,
+     The lilies sickened unto death.
+
+It was indeed a daring thing the author proposed to himself to do, and
+assuredly no man could have essayed it who had not consciously united
+to an unfailing and unshrinking insight, a relativeness of mind such as
+right-hearted people might approve. To take a fallen woman, a cipher of
+man’s sum of lust, befouled with the shameful knowledge of the streets,
+yet young, delicate, “apparelled beyond parallel,” unblessed, with a
+beauty which, if copied by a Da Vinci’s hand, might stand whole ages
+long “for preachings of what God can do,” and then to endow such a one
+with the sensitiveness of a poet’s own mind, make her read afresh as
+though by lightning, and in a dream, that story of the old pure days--
+
+      Much older than any history
+      That is written in any book,
+
+and lastly, to gather about her an overwhelming sense of infinite solace
+for the wronged and lost, and of the retributive justice with which
+man’s transgressions will be visited--this is, indeed, to hazard all
+things in the certainty of an upright purpose and true reward.
+
+      Shall no man hold his pride forewarn’d
+      Till in the end, the Day of Days,
+      At Judgment, one of his own race,
+      As frail and lost as you, shall rise,--
+      His daughter with his mother’s eyes!
+
+Yet Rossetti made no treaty with puritanism, and in this respect his
+_Jenny_ has something in common with Hawthorne’s _Scarlet Letter_--than
+which nothing, perhaps, that is so pure, without being puritanical,
+has reached us even from the land that gave _Evangeline_ to the English
+tongue. The guilty love of Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale is never
+for an instant condoned, but, on the other hand, the rigorous severity
+of the old puritan community is not dwelt upon with favour. Relentless
+remorse must spend itself upon the man before the whole measure of his
+misery is full, and on the woman the brand of a public shame must be
+borne meekly to the end. But though no rancour is shown towards the
+austere and blind morality which puts to open discharge the guilty
+mother whilst unconsciously nourishing the yet more guilty father, we
+see the tenderness of a love that palliates the baseness of the amour,
+and the bitter depths of a penitence that cannot be complete until it
+can no longer be concealed. And so with Jenny. She may have transient
+flashes of remorseful consciousness, such as reveal to her the trackless
+leagues that separate what she was from what she is, but no effort is
+made to hide the plain truth that she is a courtesan, skilled only
+in the lures and artifices peculiar to her shameful function. No
+reformatory promptings fit her for a place at the footstool of the
+puritan. Nothing tells of winter yet; on the other hand, no virulent
+diatribes are cast forth against the society that shuts this woman out,
+as the puritan settlement turned its back on Hester Prynne. But we
+see her and know her for what she is, a woman like unto other women:
+desecrated but akin.
+
+This dramatic quality of sitting half-passively above their creations
+and of leaving their ethics to find their own channels (once assured
+that their impulses are pure), the poet and the romancer possess in
+common. If there is a point of difference between their attitudes of
+mind, it is where Rossetti seems to reserve his whole personal feeling
+for the impeachment of lust;--
+
+     Like a toad within a stone
+     Seated while Time crumbles on;
+     Which sits there since the earth was cursed
+     For Man’s transgression at the first;
+     Which, living through all centuries,
+     Not once has seen the sun arise;
+     Whose life, to its cold circle charmed,
+     The earth’s whole summers have not warmed;
+     Which always--whitherso the stone
+     Be flung--sits there, deaf, blind, alone;--
+     Ay, and shall not be driven out
+     Till that which shuts him round about
+     Break at the very Master’s stroke,
+     And the dust thereof vanish as smoke,
+     And the seed of Man vanish as dust:--
+     Even so within this world is Lust.
+
+_Sister Helen_ was written somewhat later than _The Blessed Damozel_
+and the first draft of _Jenny_, and probably belonged to the poet’s
+twenty-fourth or twenty-fifth year. The ballad involves a story of
+witchcraft A girl has been first betrayed and then deserted by her
+lover; so, to revenge herself upon him and his newly-married bride, she
+burns his waxen image three days over a fire, and during that time he
+dies in torment In _Sister Helen_ we touch the key-note of Rossetti’s
+creative gift. Even the superstition which forms the basis of the ballad
+owes something of its individual character to the invention and poetic
+bias of the poet. The popular superstitions of the Middle Ages were
+usually of two kinds only. First, there were those that arose out of a
+jealous Catholicism, always glancing towards heresy; and next there were
+those that laid their account neither with orthodoxy nor unbelief, and
+were purely pagan. The former were the offspring of fanaticism; the
+latter of an appeal to appetite or passion, or fancy, or perhaps
+intuitive reason directed blindly or unconsciously towards natural
+phenomena. The superstition involved in _Sister Helen_ partakes wholly
+of neither character, but partly of both, with an added element of
+demonology. The groundwork is essentially catholic, the burden of the
+ballad showing that the tragic event lies between Hell and Heaven:--
+
+                  (O Mother, Mary Mother,
+      Three days to-day, between Hell and Heaven!)
+
+But the superstructural overgrowth is totally undisturbed by any
+animosity against heresy, and is concerned only with a certain ultimate
+demoniacal justice visiting the wrongdoer. Thus far the elemental tissue
+of the superstition has something in common with that of the German
+secret tribunal of the steel and cord; with this difference, however,
+that whereas the latter punishes in secret, even _as the deity_, the
+former makes conscious compact with the powers of evil, that whatever
+justice shall be administered upon the wicked shall first be purchased
+by sacrifice of the good. Sister Helen may burn, alive, the body and
+soul of her betrayer, but the dying knell that tells of the false soul’s
+untimely flight, tolls the loss of her own soul also:--
+
+      “Ah! what white thing at the door has cross’d,
+            Sister Helen?
+      Ah! what is this that sighs in the frost!”
+       “A soul that’s lost as mine is lost,
+            Little brother!”
+             (O Mother, Mary Mother,
+      Lost, lost, all lost, between Hell and Heaven!)
+
+Here lies the divergence between the lines of this and other compacts
+with evil powers; this is the point of Rossetti’s departure from the
+scheme that forms the underplot of Goethe’s _Faust_, and of Marlowe’s
+_Faustus_, and was intended to constitute the plan of Coleridge’s
+_Michael Scott_. It has been well said that the theme of the Faust is
+the consequence of a misology, or hatred of knowledge, resulting upon
+an original thirst for knowledge baffled. Faust never does from the
+beginning love knowledge for itself, but he loves it for the means it
+affords for the acquisition of power. This base purpose defeats itself;
+and when Faust finds that learning fails to yield him the domination he
+craves, he hates and contemns it. Away, henceforth, with all pretence to
+knowledge! Then follows the compact, the articles to which are absolute
+servility of the Devil on the one part, and complete possession of the
+soul of Faust on the other. Faust is little better than a wizard from
+the first, for if knowledge had given him what he: sought, he had never
+had recourse to witchcraft! Helen, however, partakes in some sort
+of the triumphant nobility of an avenging deity who has cozened hell
+itself, and not in vain. In the whole majesty of her great wrong, she
+loses the originally vulgar character of the witch. It is not as the
+consequence of a poison-speck in her own heart that she has recourse to
+sorcery. She does not love witchery for its own sake; she loves it only
+as the retributive channel for the requital of a terrible offence. It
+is throughout the last hour of her three-days’ conflict, merely, that we
+see her, but we know her then not more for the revengeful woman she is
+than for the trustful maiden she has been. When she becomes conscious of
+the treason wrought against her, we feel that she suffers change. In
+the eyes of others we can see her, and in our vision of her she is
+beautiful; but hers is the beauty of fair cheeks, from which the canker
+frets the soft tenderness of colour, the loveliness of golden hair that
+has lost its radiance, the sweetness of eyes once dripping with the
+dews of the spirit, now pale, and cold, and lustreless. Very soon the
+wrongdoer shall reap the harvest of a twofold injury: this day another
+bride shall stand by his side. Is there, then, no way to wreak the just
+revenge of a broken heart? _That_ suggests sorcery. Yes, the body and
+soul of the false lover may melt as before a flame; but the price of
+vengeance is horrible. Yet why? Has not love become devilish? Is not
+life a curse? Then wherefore shrink? The resolute wronged woman must
+go through with it. And when the last hour comes, nature itself is
+portentous of the virulent ill. In the wind’s wake, the moon flies
+through a rack of night clouds. One after one the suppliants crave
+pardon for the distant dying lover, and last of these comes the
+three-days’ bride.
+
+In addition to the three great poems just traversed, Rossetti had
+written, before the completion of his twenty-sixth year, _The Staff
+and Scrip, The Burden of Nineveh, Troy Town, Eden Bower_ and _The Last
+Confession_, as well as a fragment of _The Bride’s Prelude_, to which
+it will be necessary to return. But, with a single exception, the
+poems just named may be said to exist beside the three that have been
+analysed, without being radically distinct from them, or touching
+higher or other levels, and hence it is not considered needful to dwell
+upon them at length. _The Last Confession_ covers another range of
+feeling, it is true, whereof it may be said that the nobler part is
+akin to that which finds expression in the pure and shattered love of
+Othello; but it is a range of feeling less characteristical, perhaps
+less indigenous and appreciable.
+
+In the years 1845-49 inclusive, Rossetti made the larger part of his
+translations (published in 1861) from the early Italian poets, and
+though he afterwards spoke of them as having been the work of the
+leisure moments of many years, of their subsequent revision alone,
+perhaps, could this be altogether true. The _Vita Nuova_, together with
+the many among Dante’s _Lyrics_ and those of his contemporaries which
+elucidate their personal intercourse; were translated, as well as a
+great body of the sonnets of poets later than Dante. {*} This early and
+indirect apprenticeship to the sonnet, as a form of composition, led
+to his becoming, in the end, perhaps the most perfect of English
+sonnet-writers. In youth, it was one of his pleasures to engage in
+exercises of sonnet-skill with his brother William and his sister
+Christina, and, even then, he attained to such proficiency, in the mere
+mechanism of sonnet structure, that he could sometimes dash off a sonnet
+in ten minutes--rivalling, in this particular, the impromptu productions
+of Hartley Coleridge. It is hardly necessary to say that the poems
+produced, under such conditions of time and other tests, were rarely,
+if ever, adjudged worthy of publication, by the side of work to which he
+gave adequate deliberation. But several of the sonnets on pictures--as,
+for example, the fine one on a Venetian pastoral by Giorgione--and the
+political sonnet, Miltonic in spirit, _On the Refusal of Aid between
+Nations_, were written contemporaneously with the experimental sonnets
+in question.
+
+     * Rossetti often remarked that he had intended to translate
+     the sonnets of Michael Angelo, until he saw Mr. Symonds’s
+     translation, when he was so much impressed by its excellence
+     that he forthwith abandoned the purpose.
+
+As _The House of Life_ was composed in great part at the period with
+which we are now dealing (though published in the complete sequence
+nearly twenty-five years later), it may be best to traverse it at this
+stage. Though called a full series of sonnets, there is no intimation
+that it is not fragmentary as to design; the title is an astronomical,
+not an architectural figure. The work is at once Shakspearean and
+Dantesque. Whilst electively akin to the _Vita Nuova_, it is broader
+in range, the life involved being life idealised in all phases. What
+Rossetti’s idea was of the mission of the sonnet, as associated with
+life, and exhibiting a similitude of it, may best be learned from his
+prefatory sonnet:--
+
+    A Sonnet is a moment’s monument,--
+      Memorial from the Soul’s eternity
+      To one dead deathless hour. Look that it be,
+    Whether for lustral rite or dire portent,
+    Of its own arduous fulness reverent:
+      Carve it in ivory or in ebony,
+      As Day or Night may rule; and let Time see
+    Its flowering crest impearled and orient.
+    A Sonnet is a coin; its face reveals
+      The soul,--its converse, to what Power ‘tis due:--
+    Whether for tribute to the august appeals
+      Of Life, or dower in Love’s high retinue,
+    It serve; or ‘mid the dark wharfs cavernous breath,
+    In Charon’s palm it pay the toll to Death.
+
+Rossetti’s sonnets are of varied metrical structure; but their
+intellectual structure is uniform, comprising in each case a flow and
+ebb of thought within the limits of a single conception. In this latter
+respect they have a character almost peculiar to themselves among
+English sonnets. Rossetti was not the first English writer who
+deliberatively separated octave and sestet, but he was the first who
+obeyed throughout a series of sonnets the canon of the contemporary
+structure requiring that a sonnet shall present the twofold facet of a
+single thought or emotion. This form of the sonnet Rossetti was at least
+the first among English writers entirely to achieve and perfectly to
+render. _The House of Life_ does not contain a sonnet which is not to
+some degree informed by such an intellectual and musical wave; but the
+following is an example more than usually emphatic:
+
+    Even as a child, of sorrow that we give
+        dead, but little in his heart can find,
+        Since without need of thought to his clear mind
+    Their turn it is to die and his to live:--
+    Even so the winged New Love smiles to receive
+        Along his eddying plumes the auroral wind,
+        Nor, forward glorying, casts one look behind
+    Where night-rack shrouds the Old Love fugitive.
+
+     There is a change in every hour’s recall,
+        And the last cowslip in the fields we see
+        On the same day with the first corn-poppy.
+     Alas for hourly change! Alas for all
+     The loves that from his hand proud youth lets fall,
+        Even as the beads of a told rosary!
+
+The distinguishing excellence of craftsmanship in Rossetti’s sonnets
+was early recognised; but the fertility of thought, and range of emotion
+compassed by this part of his work constitute an excellence far higher
+than any that belongs to perfection of form, rhythm, or metre. Mr.
+Palgrave has well said that a poet’s story differs from a narrative in
+being in itself a creation; that it brings its own facts; that what
+we have to ask is not the true life of Laura, but how far Petrarch has
+truly drawn the life of love. So with Rossetti’s sonnets. They may or
+may not be “occasional.” Many readers who enter with sympathy into the
+series of feelings they present will doubtless insist upon regarding
+them as autobiographical. Others, who think they see the stamp of
+reality upon them, will perhaps accept them (as Hallam accepted the
+Sonnets of Shakspeare) as witnesses of excessive affection, redeemed
+sometimes by touches of nobler sentiments--if affection, however
+excessive, needs to be redeemed. Others again will receive them as
+artistic embodiments of ideal love upon which is placed the imprint of a
+passion as mythical as they believe to be attached to the autobiography
+of Dante’s early days. But the genesis and history of these sonnets
+(whether the emotion with which they are pervaded be actual or imagined)
+must be looked for within. Do they realise vividly Life representative
+in its many phases of love, joy, sorrow, and death? It must be conceded
+that _he House of Life_ touches many passions and depicts life in
+most of its changeful aspects. It would afford an adequate test of its
+comprehensiveness to note how rarely a mind in general sympathy with the
+author could come to its perusal without alighting upon something that
+would be in harmony with its mood. To traverse the work through its
+aspiration and foreboding, joy, grief, remorse, despair, and final
+resignation, would involve a task too long and difficult to be attempted
+here. Two sonnets only need be quoted as at once indicative of the range
+of thought and feeling covered, and of the sequent relation these poems
+bear each to each.
+
+    By thine own tears thy song must tears beget,
+       Singer! Magic mirror thou hast none
+       Except thy manifest heart; and save thine own
+    Anguish or ardour, else no amulet.
+
+    Cisterned in Pride, verse is the feathery jet
+       Of soulless air-flung fountains; nay, more dry
+       Than the Dead Sea for throats that thirst and sigh,
+    That song o’er which no singer’s lids grew wet.
+
+    The Song-god--He the Sun-god--is no slave
+       Of thine: thy Hunter he, who for thy soul
+       Fledges his shaft: to the august control
+    Of thy skilled hand his quivered store he gave:
+       But if thy lips’ loud cry leap to his smart,
+       The inspired record shall pierce thy brother’s heart.
+
+This is not meant to convey the same idea as Shelley’s “learn in
+suffering,” etc., but merely that a poem must move the writer in its
+composition if it is to move the reader.
+
+With the following _The House of Life_ is made to close:
+
+    When vain desire at last and vain regret
+       Go hand in hand to death, and all is vain,
+       What shall assuage the unforgotten pain
+    And teach the unforgetful to forget?
+
+    Shall Peace be still a sunk stream long unmet,--
+       Or may the soul at once in a green plain
+       Stoop through the spray of some sweet life-fountain,
+    And cull the dew-drenched flowering amulet?
+
+    Ah! when the wan soul in that golden air
+       Between the scriptured petals softly blown
+       Peers breathless for the gift of grace unknown,--
+    Ah! let none other alien spell soe’er
+    But only the one Hope’s one name be there,--
+       Not less nor more, but even that word alone.
+
+A writer must needs be loath to part from this section of Rossett’s work
+without naming some few sonnets that seem to be in all respects on a
+level with those to which attention has been drawn. Of such, perhaps,
+the most conspicuous are:--_A Day of Love; Mid-Rapture; Her Gifts; The
+Dark Glass; True Woman; Without Her; Known in Vain; The Heart of
+the Night; The Landmark; Stillborn Love; Lost Days_. But it would be
+difficult to formulate a critical opinion in support of the superiority
+of almost any of these’ sonnets over the others,--so balanced is their
+merit, so equal their appeal to the imagination and heart. Indeed, it
+were scarcely rash to say that in the language (outside Shakspeare)
+there exists no single body of sonnets characterised by such sustained
+excellence of vision and presentment. It must have been strange enough
+if the all but unexampled ardour and constancy with which Rossetti
+pursued the art of the sonnet-writer had not resulted in absolute
+mastery.
+
+In 1850 _The Germ_ was started under the editorship of Mr. William
+Michael Rossetti, and to the four issues, which were all that were
+published of this monthly magazine (designed to advocate the views of
+the pre-Raphaelite brotherhood), Rossetti contributed certain of
+his early poems--_The Blessed Damozel_ among the number. In 1856 he
+contributed many of the same poems, together with others, to _The Oxford
+and Cambridge Magazine_, of which Canon Dixon has kindly undertaken to
+tell the history. He says:
+
+My knowledge of Dante Gabriel Rossetti was begun in connection with _The
+Oxford and Cambridge Magazine_, a monthly periodical, which was started
+in January 1856, and lasted a year. The projectors of this periodical
+were Mr. William Morris, Mr. Ed. Burne Jones, and myself. The editor was
+Mr. (now the Rev.) William Fulford. Among the original contributors were
+the late Mr. Wilfred Heeley of Cambridge, Mr. Faulkner, now Fellow
+of University College, Oxford, and Mr. Cormel Price. We were all
+undergraduates. The publishers of the magazine were the late firm of
+Bell and Daldy. We gradually associated with ourselves several other
+contributors: above all, D. G. Rossetti.
+
+Of this undertaking the central notion was, I think, to advocate moral
+earnestness and purpose in literature, art, and society. It was founded
+much on Mr. Ruskin’s teaching: it sprang out of youthful impatience, and
+exhibited many signs of immaturity and ignorance: but perhaps it was
+not without value as a protest against some things. The pre-Raphaelite
+movement was then in vigour: and this Magazine came to be considered as
+the organ of those who accepted the ideas which were brought into art
+at that time; and, as in a manner, the successor of _The Germ_, a small
+periodical which had been published previously by the first beginners
+of the movement. Rossetti, in many respects the most memorable of the
+pre-Raphaelites, became connected with our Magazine when it had been
+in existence about six months: and he contributed to it several of the
+finest of the poems that were afterwards collected in the former of
+his two volumes of poems: namely, _The Burden of Nineveh, The Blessed
+Damozel, and The Staff and Scrip_. I think that one of them, _The
+Blessed Damozel_, had appeared previously in _The Germ_. All these
+poems, as they now stand in the author’s volume, have been greatly
+altered from what they were in the Magazine: and, in being altered, not
+always improved, at least in the verbal changes. The first of them, a
+sublime meditation of peculiar metrical power, has been much altered,
+and in general happily, as to the arrangement of stanzas: but not always
+so happily as to the words. It is, however, pleasing to notice that in
+the alterations some touches of bitterness have been effaced. The second
+of these pieces has been brought with great skill into regular form by
+transposition: but again one repines to find several touches gone that
+once were there. The last of them, _The Staff and Scrip_, is, in my
+judgment, the finest of all Rossetti’s poems, and one of the most
+glorious writings in the language. It exhibits in flawless perfection
+the gift that he had above all other writers, absolute beauty and pure
+action. Here again it is not possible to see without regret some of the
+verbal alterations that have been made in the poem as it now stands,
+although the chief emendation, the omission of one stanza and the
+insertion of another, adds clearness, and was all that was wanted to
+make the poem perfect in structure.
+
+I saw Rossetti for the first time in his lodgings over Blackfriars
+Bridge. It was impossible not to be impressed with the freedom and
+kindness of his manner, not less than by his personal appearance. His
+frank greeting, bold, but gentle glance, his whole presence, produced a
+feeling of confidence and pleasure. His voice had a great charm, both
+in tone, and from the peculiar cadences that belonged to it I think that
+the leading features of his character struck me more at first than
+the characteristics of his genius; or rather, that my notion of the
+character of the man was formed first, and was then applied to his
+works, and identified with them. The main features of his character
+were, in my apprehension, fearlessness, kindliness, a decision that
+sometimes made him seem somewhat arbitrary, and condensation or
+concentration. He was wonderfully self-reliant. These moral qualities,
+guiding an artistic temperament as exquisite as was ever bestowed on
+man, made him what he was, the greatest inventor of abstract beauty,
+both in form and colour, that this age, perhaps that the world, has
+seen. They would also account for some peculiarities that must be
+admitted in some of his works, want of nature, for instance. I heard him
+once remark that it was “astonishing how much the least bit of nature
+helped if one put it in;” which seemed like an acknowledgment that he
+might have gone more to nature. Hence, however, his works always seem
+abstract, always seem to embody some kind of typical aim, and acquire a
+sort of sacred character.
+
+I saw a good deal of Rossetti in London, and afterwards in Oxford,
+during the painting of the Union debating-room. In later years our
+personal intercourse was broken off through distance; though I saw him
+occasionally almost to the time of his lamented death, and we had some
+correspondence. My recollection of him is that of greatness, as might be
+expected of one of the few who have been “illustrious in two arts,” and
+who stands by himself and has earned an independent name in both. His
+work was great: the man was greater. His conversation had a wonderful
+ease, precision, and felicity of expression. He produced thoughts
+perfectly enunciated with a deliberate happiness that was indescribable,
+though it was always simple conversation, never haranguing or
+declamation. He was a natural leader because he was a natural teacher.
+When he chose to be interested in anything that was brought before him,
+no pains were too great for him to take. His advice was always given
+warmly and freely, and when he spoke of the works of others it was
+always in the most generous spirit of praise. It was in fact impossible
+to have been more free from captiousness, jealousy, envy, or any other
+form of pettiness than this truly noble man. The great painter who first
+took me to him said, “We shall see the greatest man in Europe.” I have
+it on the same authority that Rossetti’s aptitude for art was considered
+amongst painters to be no less extraordinary than his imagination. For
+example, that he could take hold of the extremity of the brush, and be
+as certain of his touch as if it had been held in the usual way; that he
+never painted a picture without doing something in colour that had
+never been done before; and, in particular, that he had a command of the
+features of the human face such as no other painter ever possessed. I
+also remember some observations by the same assuredly competent judge,
+to the effect that Rossetti might be set against the great painters
+of the fifteenth century, as equal to them, though unlike them: the
+difference being that while they represented the characters, whom
+they painted, in their ordinary and unmoved mood, he represented his
+characters under emotion, and yet gave them wholly. It may be added,
+perhaps, that he had a lofty standard of beauty of his own invention,
+and that he both elevated and subjected all to beauty. Such a man was
+not likely to be ignorant of the great root of power in art, and I
+once saw him very indignant on hearing that he had been accused of
+irreligion, or rather of not being a Christian. He asked with great
+earnestness, “Do not my works testify to my Christianity?” I wish that
+these imperfect recollections may be of any avail to those who cherish
+the memory of an extraordinary genius.
+
+Besides his contributions to _The Germ_, and to _The Oxford and
+Cambridge Magazine_, Rossetti contributed _Sister Helen_, in 1853, to a
+German Annual. Beyond this he made little attempt to publish his poetry.
+He had written it for the love of writing, or in obedience to the
+inherent impulse compelling him to do so, but of actual hope of
+achieving by virtue of it a place among English poets he seems to
+have had none, or next to none. In later life he used to say that Mr.
+Browning’s greatness and the splendour of Mr. Tennyson’s merited renown
+seemed to him in those early years to render all attempt on his part
+to secure rank by their side as hopeless as presumptuous. This, he
+asserted, was the cause that operated to restrain him from publication
+between 1853 and 1862, and after that (as will presently be seen),
+another and more serious obstacle than self-depreciation intervened. But
+in putting aside all hope of the reward of poetic achievement, he did
+not wholly banish the memory of the work he had done. He made two or
+more copies of the most noticeable of the poems he had written, and sent
+them to friends eminent in letters. To Leigh Hunt he sent _The Blessed
+Damozel_, and received in acknowledgment a letter full of appreciative
+comment, and foretelling a brilliant future. His literary friends at
+this time were Mr. Ruskin, Mr. and Mrs. Browning; he used to see Mr.
+Tennyson and Carlyle at intervals, and was in constant intercourse with
+the younger writers, Mr. Swinburne and Mr. Morris, whose reputations had
+then to be made; Mr. Arnold, Sir Henry Taylor, Mr. Aubrey de Vere, Mr.
+E. Brough, Mr. J. Hannay, and Mr. Monckton Milnes (Lord Houghton),
+he met occasionally; Dobell he knew only by correspondence. Though
+unpublished, his poems were not unknown, for besides the semi-publicity
+they obtained by circulation “among his private friends,” he was nothing
+loath to read or recite them at request, and by such means a few of
+them secured a celebrity akin in kind and almost equal in extent to that
+enjoyed by Coleridge’s _Christabel_ during the many years preceding
+1816 in which it lay in manuscript. Like Coleridge’s poem in another
+important particular, certain of Rossetti’s ballads, whilst still
+unknown to the public, so far influenced contemporary poetry that when
+they did at length appear they had all the appearance to the uninitiated
+of work imitated from contemporary models, instead of being, as in fact
+they were, the primary source of inspiration for writers whose names
+were earlier established.
+
+Towards the beginning of his artistic career Rossetti occupied a studio,
+with residential chambers, at Black-friars Bridge. The rooms overlooked
+the river, and the tide rose almost to the walls of the house, which,
+with nearly all its old surroundings, has long disappeared.
+
+A story is told of Rossetti amidst these environments which aptly
+illustrates almost every trait of his character: his impetuosity,
+and superstition especially. It was his daily habit to ransack
+old book-stalls, and carry off to his studio whatever treasures he
+unearthed, but when, upon further investigation, he found he had been
+deceived as to the value of a book that at first looked promising, he
+usually revenged himself by throwing the volume through a window into
+the river running below--a habit which he discovered (to his amusement,
+and occasionally to his distress), that his friends, Mr. Swinburne
+especially, imitated from him and practised at his rooms on his behalf.
+On one occasion he discovered in some odd nook a volume long sought
+for, and having inscribed it with his name and address, he bore it off
+joyfully to his chambers; but finding a few days later that in some
+respects it disappointed his expectations, he flung it through the
+window, and banished all further thought of it. The tide had been at the
+flood when the book disappeared, and when it ebbed, the offending volume
+was found by a little mud-lark imbedded in the refuse of the river. The
+boy washed it and took it back to the address it contained, expecting to
+find it eagerly reclaimed; but, impatient and angry at sight of what he
+thought he had destroyed, Rossetti snatched the book out of the muddy
+hand that proffered it and flung it again into the Thames, with rather
+less than the courtesy which might have been looked for as the reward of
+an act that was meant so well. But the haunting volume was not even
+yet done with. Next morning, an old man of the riverside labourer class
+knocked at the door, bearing in his hands a small parcel rudely made
+up in a piece of newspaper that was greasy enough to have previously
+contained his morning’s breakfast. He had come from where he was working
+below London Bridge: he had found something that might have been lost
+by Mr. Rossetti. It was the tormenting volume: the indestructible,
+unrelenting phantom that would not be laid! Rossetti now perceived that
+higher agencies were at work: it was _not meant_ that he should get rid
+of the book: why should he contend against the inevitable? Reverently
+and with both hands he took the besoiled parcel from the brown palm
+of the labourer, placed half-a-crown there instead, and restored the
+fearful book to its place on his shelf.
+
+And now we come to incidents in Rossetti’s career of which it is
+necessary to treat as briefly as tenderly. Among the models who sat to
+him was Miss Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal, a young lady of great personal
+beauty, in whom he discovered a natural genius for painting and a
+noticeable love of the higher poetic literature. He felt impelled
+to give her lessons, and she became as much his pupil as model. Her
+water-colour drawings done under his tuition gave proof of a wonderful
+eye for colour, and displayed a marked tendency to style. The subjects,
+too, were admirably composed and often exhibited unusual poetic feeling.
+It was very natural that such a connection between persons of kindred
+aspirations should lead to friendship and finally to love.
+
+Rossetti and Miss Siddal were married in 1860. They visited France and
+Belgium; and this journey, together with a similar one undertaken in the
+company of Mr. Holman Hunt in 1849, and again another in 1863, when his
+brother was his companion, and a short residence on the Continent when
+a boy, may be said to constitute almost the whole sum of Rossetti’s
+travelling. Very soon the lady’s health began to fail, and she became
+the victim of neuralgia. To meet this dread enemy she resorted to
+laudanum, taking it at first in small quantities, but eventually in
+excess. Her spirits drooped, her art was laid aside, and much of the
+cheerfulness of home was lost to her. There was a child, but it was
+stillborn, and not long after this disaster, it was found that Mrs.
+Rossetti had taken an overdose of her accustomed sleeping potion and
+was lying dead in her bed. This was in 1862, and after two years only of
+married life. The blow was a terrible one to Rossetti, who was the first
+to discover what fate had reserved for him. It was some days before he
+seemed fully to realise the loss that had befallen him, and then his
+grief knew no bounds. The poems he had written, so far as they were
+poems of love, were chiefly inspired by and addressed to her. At her
+request he had copied them into a little book presented to him for the
+purpose, and on the day of the funeral he walked into the room where
+the body lay, and, unmindful of the presence of friends, he spoke to
+his dead wife as though she heard, saying, as he held the book, that the
+words it contained were written to her and for her, and she must take
+them with her for they could not remain when she had gone. Then he put
+the volume into the coffin between her cheek and beautiful hair, and it
+was that day buried with her in Highgate Cemetery.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+It was long before Rossetti recovered from the shock of his wife’s
+sudden death. The loss sustained appeared to change the whole course
+of his life. Previously he had been of a cheerful temperament, and
+accustomed to go abroad at frequent intervals to visit friends; but
+after this event he seemed to become for a time morose, and by nature
+reclusive. Not a great while afterwards he removed from Blackfriars
+Bridge, and after a temporary residence in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, he took
+up his abode in the house he occupied during the twenty remaining years
+of his life, at 16 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea. This home of Rossetti’s shall
+be fully described in subsequent personal recollections. It was called
+Tudor House when he became its tenant, from the tradition that Elizabeth
+Tudor had lived in it, and it is understood to be the same that
+Thackeray describes in _Esmond_ as the home of the old Countess of
+Chelsey. A large garden, which recently has been cut off for building
+purposes, lay at the back, and, doubtless, it was as much due to
+the attractions of this piece of pleasant ground, dotted over with
+lime-trees, and enclosed by a high wall, that Rossetti went so far
+afield, for at that period Chelsea was not the rallying ground of
+artists and men of letters. He wished to live a life of retirement, and
+thought the possession of a garden in which he could take sufficient
+daily exercise would enable him to do so. In leaving Blackfriars
+he destroyed many things associated with his residence there, and
+calculated to remind him of his life’s great loss. He burnt a great body
+of letters, and among them were many valuable ones from almost all
+the men and women then eminent in literature and art. His great grief
+notwithstanding, upon settling at Chelsea he began almost insensibly to
+interest himself in furnishing the house in a beautiful and novel style.
+Old oak then became for a time his passion, and in hunting it up he
+rummaged the brokers’ shops round London for miles, buying for trifles
+what would eventually (when the fashion he started grew to be general)
+have fetched large sums. Cabinets of all conceivable superannuated
+designs--so old in material or pattern that no one else would look at
+them--were unearthed in obscure corners, bolstered up by a joiner,
+and consigned to their places in the new residence. Following old oak,
+Japanese furniture became Rossetti’s quest, and following this came blue
+china ware (of which he had perhaps the first fine collection made),
+and then ecclesiastical and other brasses, incense-burners, sacramental
+cups, crucifixes, Indian spice boxes, mediaeval lamps, antique bronzes,
+and the like. In a few years he had filled his house with so much
+curious and beautiful furniture that there grew up a widespread desire
+to imitate his methods; and very soon artists, authors, and men of
+fortune having no other occupation, were found rummaging, as he had
+rummaged, for the neglected articles of the centuries gone by. What he
+did was done, as he used to say, less from love of the things hunted
+for, than from love of the pursuit, which, from its difficulty, gave
+rise to a pleasurable excitement. Thus did he grieve down his loss, and
+little did they think who afterwards followed the fashion he set them,
+and carried his passion for antique furniture to an excess at which he
+must have laughed, that his’ primary impulse was so far from a desire to
+“live up to his blue ware,” that it was more like an effort to live down
+to it.
+
+It was during the earlier years of his residence at Chelsea that
+Rossetti formed a habit of life which clung to him almost to the last,
+and did more than aught else to blight his happiness. What his intimate
+friend has lately characterised in _The Daily News_ as that great curse
+of the literary and artistic temperament, insomnia, had been hanging
+about him since the death of his wife, and was becoming each year more
+and more alarming. He had tried opiates, but in sparing quantities, for
+had he not the most serious cause to eschew them? Towards 1868 he heard
+of the then newly found drug chloral, which was accredited with all the
+virtues and none of the vices of other known narcotics. Here then was
+the thing he wanted; this was the blessed discovery that was to save
+him from days of weariness and nights of misery and tears. Eagerly he
+procured it, took it nightly in single small doses of ten grains each,
+and from it he received pleasant and refreshing sleep. He made no
+concealment of his habit; like Coleridge under similar conditions, he
+preferred to talk of it. Not yet had he learned the sad truth, too soon
+to force itself upon him, that the fumes of this dreadful drug would
+one day wither up his hopes and joys in life: deluding him with a
+short-lived surcease of pain only to impose a terrible legacy of
+suffering from which there was to be no respite. Had Rossetti been
+master of the drug and not mastered by it, perhaps he might have
+turned it to account at a critical juncture, and laid it aside when the
+necessity to employ it had gradually been removed. But, alas! he gave
+way little by little to the encroachments of an evil power with which,
+when once it had gained the ascendant, he fought down to his dying day a
+single-handed and losing fight.
+
+It was not, however, for some years after he began the use of it that
+chloral produced any sensible effects of an injurious kind, and meantime
+he pursued as usual his avocation as a painter. Mention has been made
+of the fact that Rossetti abandoned at an early age subject designs for
+three-quarter-length figures. Of the latter, in the period of which we
+are now treating, he painted great numbers: among them, produced at this
+time and later, were _Sibylla Palmifera and The Beloved_ (the property
+of Mr. George Rae), _La Pia and The Salutation of Beatrice_ (Mr. F. E.
+Leyland), _The Dying Beatrice_ (Lord Mount Temple), _Venus Astarte_
+(Mr. Fry), _Fiammetta_ (Mr. Turner), _Proserpina_ (Mr. Graham). Of these
+works, solidity may be said to be the prominent characteristic. The
+drapery of Rossetti’s pictures is wonderfully powerful and solid; his
+colour may be said to be at times almost matchable with that of certain
+of the Venetian painters, though different in kind. He hated beyond most
+things the “varnishy” look of some modern work; and his own oil pictures
+had so much of the manner of frescoes in their lustreless depth, that
+they were sometimes mistaken for water-colours, while, on the other
+hand, his water-colours had often so much depth and brilliancy as
+sometimes to be mistaken for oil. It is alleged in certain quarters
+that Rossetti was deficient in some qualities of drawing, and this is
+no doubt a just allegation; but it is beyond question that no English
+painter has ever been a greater master of the human face, which in his
+works (especially those painted in later years) acquires a splendid
+solemnity and spiritual beauty and significance all but peculiar to
+himself. It seems proper to say in such a connexion, that his success
+in this direction was always attributed by him to the fact that the most
+memorable of his faces were painted from a well-known friend.
+
+Only one of his early designs, the _Dante’s Dream_, was ever painted by
+Rossetti on a scale commensurate with its importance, and the solemnity
+and massive grandeur of that work leave only a feeling of regret that,
+whether from personal indisposition on the part of the painter or lack
+of adequate recognition on that of the public, the three or four other
+finest designs made in youth were never carried out. As the picture in
+question stands alone among Rossetti’s pictorial works as a completed
+conception, it may be well to devote a few pages to a description of it.
+
+It is essential to an appreciation of _Dante’s Dream_, that we should
+not only fully understand the nature of the particular incident depicted
+in the picture, but also possess a general knowledge of the lives and
+relations of the two principal personages concerned in it. What we know,
+to most purpose, of the early life and love of Dante, we learn from the
+autobiography which he entitled _La Vita Nuova_. Boccaccio, however,
+writing fifty years after the death of the great Florentine, affords
+a more detailed statement than is furnished by Dante himself of the
+circumstances of the poets first meeting with the lady he called
+Beatrice. He says that it was the custom of citizens in Florence, when
+the time of spring came round, to form social gatherings in their own
+quarters for purposes of merry-making; that in this way Folco Portinari,
+a citizen of mark, had collected his neighbours at his house upon the
+first of May, 1274, for pastime and rejoicing: that amongst those who
+came to him was Alighiero Alighieri, father of Dante Alighieri, who
+lived within fifty yards; that it was common for children to accompany
+their parents at such merrymakings, and that Dante, then scarce nine
+years old, was in the house on the day in question engaged in sports,
+appropriate to his years, with other children, amongst whom was a little
+daughter of Folco Portinari, eight years old. The child is described as
+being, even at this period, in aspect extremely beautiful, and winning
+and graceful in her ways. Not to dwell upon these passages of childhood,
+it may be sufficient to say that the boy, young as he was, is said
+to have then conceived so deep a passion for the child that maturer
+attachments proved powerless to efface it. Such was the origin of a love
+that grew from childlike tenderness to manly ardour, and, surviving all
+the buffetings of an untoward fate, is known to us now and for all
+time in a record of so much reality and purity, as seems to every
+right-hearted nature to be equally the story of his personal attachment
+as the history of a passion that in Florence, six centuries ago, for its
+mortal put on immortality.
+
+The Portinari and Alighieri were immediate neighbours, yet it does not
+appear that the young Dante encountered the lady in any marked way until
+nine years later, and then, in the first bloom of a gracious womanhood,
+she is described as affording him in the street a salutation of such
+unspeakable courtesy that he left the place where for the instant he had
+stood sorely abashed, as one intoxicated with a love that now at first
+knew itself for what it was. The incidents of the attachment are few in
+facts; numerous only in emotions, and therein too uncertain and liable
+to change to be counted. In order not to disclose a passion, which other
+reasons than those given by the poet may have tempted him to conceal,
+Dante affects an attachment to another lady of the city, and the
+rumour of this brings about an estrangement with the real object of his
+desires, which reduces the poet to such an abject condition of mind, as
+finally results in his laying aside all counterfeiting. Portinari, the
+father, now dies, and witnessing the tenderness with which the beautiful
+Beatrice mourns him, Dante becomes affected with a painful infirmity,
+wherein his mind broods over his enfeebled body, and, perceiving how
+frail a thing life is, even though health keep with it, his brain begins
+to travail in many imaginings, and he says within himself, “Certainly
+it must some time come to pass that the very gentle Beatrice will die.”
+ Feeling bewildered, he closes his eyes, and, in a trance, he conceives
+that a friend comes to him, and says, “Hast thou not heard? She that
+was thine excellent lady has been taken out of life.” Then as he looks
+towards Heaven in imagination, he beholds a multitude of angels who are
+returning upwards, having before them an exceedingly white cloud; and
+these angels are singing, and the words of their song are, “Osanna in
+excelsis.” So strong is his imagining, that it seems to him that he goes
+to look upon the body where it has its abiding-place.
+
+     The sun ceased, and the stars began to gather,
+     And each wept at the other;
+       And birds dropp’d at midflight out of the sky;
+       And earth shook suddenly;
+          And I was ‘ware of one, hoarse and tired out,
+     Who ask’d of me: ‘Hast thou not heard it said--
+     Thy lady, she that was so fair, is dead?
+
+
+     Then lifting up mine eyes, as the tears came,
+        I saw the angels, like a rain of manna
+        In a long flight flying back Heavenward,
+     Having a little cloud in front of them,
+        After the which they went, and said ‘Hosanna;’
+        And if they had said more, you should have heard.
+
+
+        Then Love said, ‘Now shall all things be made clear:
+     Come, and behold our lady where she lies
+     These ‘wildering phantasies
+        Then carried me to see my lady dead.
+        Even as I there was led,
+            Her ladies with a veil were covering her;
+     And with her was such very humbleness
+     That she appeared to say, ‘I am at peace.’
+                        (Dante and his Circle.)
+
+The trance proves to be a premonition of the event, for, shortly after
+writing the poem in which his imaginings find record, Dante says, “The
+Lord God of Justice called my most gracious lady unto Himself.”
+
+It is with the incidents of the dream that Rossetti has dealt. The
+principal personage in the picture is, of course, Dante himself. Of the
+poet’s face, two old and accredited witnesses remain to us--the portrait
+of Giotto and the mask supposed to be copied from a similar one
+taken after death. Giotto’s portrait represents Dante at the age of
+twenty-seven. The face has a feminine delicacy of outline, yet is
+full of manly beauty; strength and tenderness are seen blended in its
+lineaments. It might be that of a poet, a scholar, a courtier, or yet a
+soldier; and in Dante it is all combined.
+
+Such, as seen in Giotto, was the great Florentine when Beatrice beheld
+him. The familiar mask represents that youthful beauty as somewhat
+saddened by years of exile, by the accidents of an unequal fortune, and
+by the long brooding memory of his life’s one, deep, irreparable loss.
+We see in it the warrior who served in the great battle of Campaldino:
+the mourner who sought refuge from grief in the action and danger of the
+war waged by Florence upon Pisa: the magistrate whose justice proved his
+ruin: the exile who ate bitter bread when Florence banished the greatest
+of her sons. The mask is as full as the portrait of intellect and
+feeling, of strength and character, but it lacks something of the early
+sweetness and sensibility. Rossetti’s portraiture retains the salient
+qualities of both portrait and mask. It represents Dante in his
+twenty-seventh year; the face gives hint of both poet and soldier, for
+behind clear-cut features capable of strengthening into resolve and
+rigour lie whole depths of tenderest sympathy. The abstracted air,
+the self-centred look, the eyes that seem to see only what the
+mind conceives and casts forward from itself; the slow, uncertain,
+half-reluctant gait,--these are profoundly true to the man and the
+dream.
+
+Of Beatrice, no such description is given either in the _Vita Nuova_ or
+the _Commedia_ as could afford an artist a definite suggestion. Dante’s
+love was an idealised passion; it concerned itself with spiritual
+beauty, whereof the emotions excited absorbed every merely physical
+consideration. The beauty of Beatrice in the _Vita Nuova_ is like a
+ray of sunshine flooding a landscape--we see it only in the effect it
+produces. All we know with certainty is that her hair was light, that
+her face was pale, and that her smile was one of thoughtful sweetness.
+These hints of a beautiful person Rossetti has wrought into a creation
+of such purity that, lovely as she is in death, as in life, we think
+less of her loveliness than of her loveableness.
+
+The personage of Love, who plays throughout the _Vita Nuova_ a mystical
+part is not the Pagan Love, but a youth and Christian Master, as Dante
+terms him, sometimes of severe and terrible aspect. He is represented in
+the picture as clad in a flame-coloured garment (for it is in a mist
+of the colour of fire that he appears to the lover), and he wears the
+pilgrim’s scallop-shell on his shoulder as emblem of that pilgrimage on
+earth which Love is.
+
+The chamber wherein the body of Beatrice has its abiding-place is, to
+Dante’s imaginings, a chamber of dreams. Visionary as the mind of the
+dreamer, it discloses at once all that goes forward within its own
+narrow compass, together with the desolate streets of the city of
+Florence, which, to his fancy, sits silent for his loss, and the long
+flight of angels above that bear away the little cloud, to which is
+given a vague semblance of the beatified Beatrice. As if just fallen
+back in sleep, the beautiful lady lies in death, her hands folded across
+her breast, and a glory of golden hair flowing over her shoulders. With
+measured tread Dante approaches the couch led by the winged and scarlet
+Love, but, as though fearful of so near and unaccustomed an approach,
+draws slowly backward on his half-raised foot, while the mystical emblem
+of his earthly passion stands droopingly between him the living, and his
+lady the dead, and takes the kiss that he himself might never have. In
+life they must needs be apart, but thus in death they are united, for
+the hand of the pilgrim, who is the embodiment of his love, holds his
+hand even as the master’s lips touch her lips. Two ladies of the chamber
+are covering her with a pall, and on the dreamer they fix sympathetic
+eyes. The floor is strewn with poppies--emblems equally of the sleep in
+which the lover walks, and of the sleep that is the sleep of death.
+The may-bloom in the pall, the apple-blossom in the hand of Love, the
+violets and roses in the frieze of the alcove, symbolise purity and
+virginity, the life that is cut off in its spring, the love that is
+consummated in death before the coming of fruit. Suspended from the roof
+is a scroll, bearing the first words of the wail from the Lamentations
+of Jeremiah, quoted by Dante himself:--“How doth the city sit solitary,
+that was full of people! How is she become as a widow, she that was
+great among the nations!” In the ascending and descending staircase on
+either iand fly doves of the same glowing colour as Love, and these are
+emblems of his presence in the house. Over all flickers the last beam of
+a lamp which has burnt through the long night, and which the dawn of a
+new day sees die away--fit symbol of the life that has now taken flight
+with the heavenly host, leaving behind it only the burnt-out socket
+where the live flame lived.
+
+Full of symbol as this picture is, it is furthermore permeated by
+a significance that is not occult. It bears witness to the possible
+strength of a passion that is so spiritual as to be without taint of
+sense; and to a confident belief in an immortality wherein the utmost
+limits of a blessedness not of this world may be compassed. Such are
+in this picture the simpler, yet deeper, symbols, that all who look may
+read. Sir Noel Paton has written of this work:
+
+I was so dumbfounded by the beauty of that great picture of Rosetti’s,
+called _Dante’s Dream_, that I was usable to give any expression to the
+emotions it excited--emotions such as I do not think any other picture,
+except the _Madonna di San Sisto_ at Dresden, ever stirred within me.
+The memory of such a picture is like the memory of sublime and perfect
+music; it makes any one who _fully_ feels it--_silent_. Fifty years
+hence it will be named among the half-dozen supreme pictures of the
+world.
+
+Rossetti had buried the only complete copy of his poems with his wife at
+Highgate, and for a time he had been able to put by the thought of them;
+but as one by one his friends, Mr. Morris, Mr. Swinburne, and others,
+attained to distinction as poets, he began to hanker after poetic
+reputation, and to reflect with pain and regret upon the hidden
+fruits of his best effort. Rossetti--in all love of his memory be
+it spoken--was after all a frail mortal; of unstable character: of
+variable purpose: a creature of impulse and whim, and with a plentiful
+lack of the backbone of volition. With less affection he would not have
+buried his book; with more strength of will he had not done so; or,
+having done so, he had never wished to undo what he had done; or having
+undone it, he would never have tormented himself with the memory of it
+as of a deed of sacrilege. But Rossetti had both affection enough to
+do it and weakness enough to have it undone. After an infinity of
+self-communions he determined to have the grave opened, and the book
+extracted. Endless were the preparations necessary before such a work
+could be begun. Mr. Home Secretary Bruce had to be consulted. At length
+preliminaries were complete, and one night, seven and a half years after
+the burial, a fire was built by the side of the grave, and then the
+coffin was raised and opened. The body is described as perfect upon
+coming to light.
+
+Whilst this painful work was being done the unhappy author of it was
+sitting alone and anxious, and full of self-reproaches at the house of
+the friend who had charge of it. He was relieved and thankful when told
+that all was over. The volume was not much the worse for the years it
+had lain in the grave. Deficiencies were filled in from memory, the
+manuscript was put in the press, and in 1870 the reclaimed work was
+issued under the simple title of _Poems_.
+
+The success of the book was almost without precedent; seven editions
+were called for in rapid succession. It was reviewed with enthusiasm in
+many quarters. Yet that was a period in which fresh poetry and new poets
+arose, even as they now arise, with all the abundance and timeliness
+of poppies in autumn. It is probable enough that of the circumstances
+attending the unexampled early success of this first volume only
+the remarkable fact is still remembered that, from a bookseller’s
+standpoint, it ran a neck-and-neck race with Disraeli’s _Lothair_ at
+a time when political romance was found universally appetising, and
+poetry, as of old, a drug. But it will not be forgotten that certain
+subsidiary circumstances were thought to have contributed to the former
+success. Of these the most material was the reputation Rossetti had
+already achieved as a painter by methods which awakened curiosity
+as much as they aroused enthusiasm. The public mind became sensibly
+affected by the idea that the poems of the new poet were not to be
+regarded as the emanations of a single individual, but as the result of
+a movement in which Rossetti had played one of the most prominent parts.
+Mr. F. Hueffer, in prefacing the Tauchnitz edition of the poems with
+a pleasant memoir, has comprehensively denominated that movement
+the _renaissance of mediæval feeling_, but at the outset it
+acquired popularly, for good or ill, the more rememberable name of
+pre-Raphaelitism. What the shibboleth was of the originators of the
+school that grew out of it concerned men but little to ascertain; and
+this was a condition of indifference as to the logic of the movement
+which was occasioned partly by the known fact that the most popular of
+its leaders, Mr. Millais, had long been shifting ground. It was
+enough that the new sect had comprised dissenters from the creed once
+established, that the catholic spirit of art which lived with the
+lives of Elmore, Goodall, and Stone was long dead, and that none of the
+coteries for love of which the old faith, exemplified in the works of
+men such as these, had been put aside, possessed such an appeal for
+the imagination as this, now that twenty years of fairly consistent
+endeavour had cleared away the cloud of obloquy that gathered about it
+when it began. And so it came to be thought that the poems of Rossetti
+were to exhibit a new phase of this movement, involving kindred issues,
+and opening up afresh in the poetic domain the controversies which had
+been waged and won in the pictorial. Much to this purpose was said at
+the time to account for the success of a book whose popular qualities
+were I manifestly inconsiderable; and much to similar purpose
+will doubtless long be said by those who affect to believe that a
+concatenation of circumstances did for Rossetti’s earlier work a service
+which could not attend his subsequent one. But the explanation was
+inadequate, and had for its immediate outcome a charge of narrowed range
+of poetic sympathy with which Rossetti’s admirers had not laid their
+account.
+
+A renaissance of mediæval feeling the movement in art assuredly
+involved, but the essential part of it was another thing, of which
+mediævalism was palpably independent. How it came to be considered the
+fundamental element is not difficult to show. In an eminent degree
+the originators of the new school in painting were colourists, having,
+perhaps, in their effects, a certain affinity to the early Florentine
+masters, and this accident of native gift had probably more to do in
+determining the precise direction of the _intellectual_ sympathy than
+any external agency. The art feeling which formed the foundation of the
+movement existed apart from it, or bore no closer relation to it than
+kinship of powers induced. When Rossetti’s poetry came it was seen to
+be animated by a choice of subject-matter akin to that which gave
+individual character to his painting, but this was because coeval
+efforts in two totally distinct arts must needs bear the family
+resemblance, each to each, which belong to all the offspring of a
+thoroughly harmonised mind. The poems and the pictures, however, had not
+more in common than can be found in the early poems and early dramas of
+Shakspeare. Nay, not so much; for whereas in his poems Shakspeare was
+constantly evolving certain shades of feeling and begetting certain
+movements of thought which were soon to find concrete and final
+collocation in the dramatic creations, in his pictures Rossetti was
+first of all a dissenter from all prescribed canons of taste, whilst in
+his poems he was in harmony with the catholic spirit which was as old
+as Shakspeare himself, and found revival, after temporary eclipse, in
+Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, and Tennyson. Choice of mediaeval theme would
+not in itself have been enough to secure a reversal of popular feeling
+against work that contained no germs of the sensational; and hence we
+must conclude that Mr. Swinburne accounted more satisfactorily for the
+instant popularity of Rossetti’s poetry when he claimed for it those
+innate utmost qualities of beauty and strength which are always
+the first and last constituents of poetry that abides. Indeed those
+qualities and none other, wholly independent of auxiliary aids, must now
+as then go farthest to determine Rossetti’s final place among poets.
+
+Such as is here described was the first reception given to Rossetti’s
+volume of poetry; but at the close of 1871, there arose out of it a
+long and acrimonious controversy. It seems necessary to allude to this
+painful matter, because it involved serious issues; but an effort alike
+after brevity and impartiality of comment shall be observed in what is
+said of it. In October of the year mentioned, an article entitled _The
+Fleshly School of Poetry_, and signed “Thomas Maitland,” appeared
+in _The Contemporary Review_. {*} It consisted in the main of an
+impeachment of Rossetti’s poetry on the ground of sensuality, though it
+embraced a broad denunciation of the sensual tendencies of the age in
+art, music, poetry, the drama, and social life generally. Sensuality was
+regarded as the phenomenon of the age. “It lies,” said the writer, “on
+the drawing-room table, shamelessly naked and dangerously fair. It is
+part of the pretty poem which the belle of the season reads, and it
+breathes away the pureness of her soul like the poisoned breath of
+the girl in Hawthorne’s tale. It covers the shelves of the great
+Oxford-Street librarian, lurking in the covers of three-volume novels.
+It is on the French booksellers’ counters, authenticated by the
+signature of the author of the _Visite de Noces_. It is here, there,
+and everywhere, in art, literature, life, just as surely as it is in
+the _Fleurs de Mal_, the Marquis de Sade’s _Justine_, or the _Monk_ of
+Lewis. It appeals to all tastes, to all dispositions, to all ages. If
+the querulous man of letters has his Baudelaire, the pimpled clerk has
+his _Day’s Doings_, and the dissipated artisan his _Day and Night._”
+ When the writer set himself to inquire into the source of this social
+cancer, he refused to believe that English society was honeycombed and
+rotten. He accounted for the portentous symptoms that appalled him by
+attributing the evil to a fringe of real English society, chiefly, if
+not altogether, resident in London: “a sort of demi-monde, not composed,
+like that other in France, of simple courtesans, but of men and women of
+indolent habits and aesthetic tastes, artists, literary persons, novel
+writers, actors, men of genius and men of talent, butterflies and
+gadflies of the human kind, leading a lazy existence from hand to
+mouth.” It was to this Bohemian fringe of society that the writer
+attributed the “gross and vulgar conceptions of life which are
+formulated into certain products of art, literature, and criticism.”
+ Dealing with only one form of the social phenomenon, with sensualism so
+far as it appeared to affect contemporary poetry, the writer proceeded
+with a literary retrospect intended to show that the fair dawn of
+our English poetry in Chaucer and the Elizabethan dramatists had been
+overclouded by a portentous darkness, a darkness “vaporous,” “miasmic,”
+ coming from a “fever-cloud generated first in Italy and then blown
+westward,” sucking up on its way “all that was most unwholesome from the
+soil of France.”
+
+     * In this summary, the pamphlet reprint has been followed in
+     preference to the original article as it appeared in the
+     Review.
+
+Just previously to and contemporaneously with the rise of Dante, there
+had flourished a legion of poets of greater or less ability, but all
+more or less characterised by affectation, foolishness, and moral
+blindness: singers of the falsetto school, with ballads to their
+mistress’s eyebrow, sonnets to their lady’s lute, and general songs of a
+fiddlestick; peevish men for the most part, as is the way of all fleshly
+and affected beings; men so ignorant of human subjects and materials
+as to be driven in their sheer bankruptcy of mind to raise Hope, Love,
+Fear, Rage (everything but Charity) into human entities, and to
+treat the body and upholstery of a dollish woman as if, in itself, it
+constituted a whole universe.
+
+After tracing the effect of the “moral poison” here seen in its
+inception through English poetry from Surrey and Wyat to Cowley, the
+writer recognised a “tranquil gleam of honest English light” in Cowper,
+who “spread the seeds of new life” soon to re-appear in Wordsworth,
+Coleridge, Southey, Lamb, and Scott. In his opinion the “Italian disease
+would now have died out altogether,” but for a “fresh importation of the
+obnoxious matter from France.”
+
+At this stage came a denunciation of the representation of “abnormal
+types of diseased lust and lustful disease” as seen in Charles
+Baudelaire’s _Fleurs de Mal_, with the conclusion that out of “the
+hideousness of _Femmes Damnées_” came certain English poems. “This,”
+ said the writer, “is our double misfortune--to have a nuisance, and to
+have it at second-hand. We might have been more tolerant to an unclean
+thing if it had been in some sense a product of the soil” All that is
+here summarised, however, was but preparatory to the real object of the
+article, which was to assail Rossetti’s new volume.
+
+The poems were traversed in detail, with but little (and that the most
+grudging) admission of their power and beauty, and the very sharpest
+accentuation of their less spiritual qualities. Since the publication
+of the article in question, events have taken such a turn that it is no
+longer either necessary or wise to quote the strictures contained in it,
+however they might be fenced by juster views. The gravamen of the charge
+against Rossetti, Mr. Swinburne, and Mr. Morris alike--setting aside
+all particular accusations, however serious--was that they had “bound
+themselves into a solemn league and covenant to extol fleshliness as
+the distinct and supreme end of poetic and pictorial art; to aver that
+poetic expression is greater than poetic thought, and by inference that
+the body is greater than the soul, and sound superior to sense.”
+
+Such, then, is a synopsis of the hostile article of which the nucleus
+appeared in _The Contemporary Review_, and it were little less than
+childish to say that events so important as the publication of the
+article and subsequent pamphlet, and the controversy that arose out
+of them, should, from their unpleasantness and futility, from the bad
+passions provoked by them, or yet from the regret that followed after
+them, be passed over in sorrow and silence. For good or ill, what was
+written on both sides will remain. It has stood and will stand. Sooner
+or later the story of this literary quarrel will be told in detail and
+in cold blood, and perhaps with less than sufficient knowledge of either
+of the parties concerned in it, or sympathy with their aims. No better
+fate, one might think, could befall it than to be dealt with, however
+briefly, by a writer whose affections were warmly engaged on one side,
+while his convictions and bias of nature forced him to recognise the
+justice of the other--stripped, of course, of the cruelties with which
+literary error but too obviously enshrouded it.
+
+Whatever the effect produced upon the public mind by the article
+in question (and there seems little reason to think it was at all
+material), the effect upon two of the writers attacked was certainly
+more than commensurate with the assault. Mr. Morris wisely attempted
+no reply to the few words of adverse criticism in which his name was
+specifically involved; but Mr. Swinburne retorted upon his adversary
+with the torrents of invective of which he has a measureless command.
+Rossetti’s course was different. Greatly concerned at the bitterness,
+as well as startled by the unexpectedness of the attack, he wrote in the
+first moments of indignation a full and point-for-point rejoinder, and
+this he printed in the form of a pamphlet, and had a great number struck
+off; but with constitutional irresolution (wisely restraining him in
+this case), he destroyed every copy, and contented himself with writing
+a temperate letter on the subject to _The Athenæum_, December 16, 1871.
+He said:
+
+A sonnet, entitled _Nuptial Sleep_, is quoted and abused at page 338
+of the Review, and is there dwelt upon as a “whole poem,” describing
+“merely animal sensations.” It is no more a whole poem in reality than
+is any single stanza of any poem throughout the book. The poem, written
+chiefly in sonnets, and of which this is one sonnet-stanza, is entitled
+_The House of Life_; and even in my first published instalment of the
+whole work (as contained in the volume under notice), ample evidence
+is included that no such passing phase of description as the one headed
+_Nuptial Sleep_ could possibly be put forward by the author of _The
+House of Life_ as his own representative view of the subject of love.
+In proof of this I will direct attention (among the love-sonnets of this
+poem), to Nos. 2, 8, 11, 17, 28, and more especially 13. [Here _Love
+Sweetness_ is printed.] Any reader may bring any artistic charge he
+pleases against the above sonnet; but one charge it would be impossible
+to maintain against the writer of the series in which it occurs, and
+that is, the wish on his part to assert that the body is greater than
+the soul. For here all the passionate and just delights of the body are
+declared--somewhat figuratively, it is true, but unmistakeably--to be
+as naught if not ennobled by the concurrence of the soul at all times.
+Moreover, nearly one half of this series of sonnets has nothing to do
+with love, but treats of quite other life-influences. I would defy any
+one to couple with fair quotation of sonnets 29, 30, 31, 39, 40, 43, or
+others, the slander that their author was not impressed, like all other
+thinking men, with the responsibilities and higher mysteries of life;
+while sonnets 35, 36, and 37, entitled _The Choice_, sum up the general
+view taken in a manner only to be evaded by conscious insincerity. Thus
+much for _The House of Life_, of which the sonnet _Nuptial Sleep_ is one
+stanza, embodying, for its small constituent share, a beauty of natural
+universal function, only to be reprobated in art if dwelt on (as I have
+shown that it is not here), to the exclusion of those other highest
+things of which it is the harmonious concomitant.
+
+It had become known that the article in the _Review_ was not the work
+of the unknown Thomas Maitland, whose name it bore, and on this head
+Rossetti wrote:
+
+Here a critical organ, professedly adopting the principle of open
+signature, would seem, in reality, to assert (by silent practice,
+however, not by annunciation) that if the anonymous in criticism
+was--as itself originally indicated--but an early caterpillar stage,
+the nominate too is found to be no better than a homely transitional
+chrysalis, and that the ultimate butterfly form for a critic who
+likes to sport in sunlight, and yet elude the grasp, is after all the
+pseudonymous.
+
+It transpired, in subsequent correspondence (of which there was more
+than enough), that the actual writer was Mr. Robert Buchanan, then
+a young author who had risen into distinction as a poet, and who was
+consequently suspected, by the writers and disciples of the Rossetti
+school, of being actuated much more by feelings of rivalry than
+by desire for the public good. Mr. Buchanan’s reply to the serious
+accusation of having assailed a brother-poet pseudonymously was that the
+false signature was affixed to the article without his knowledge,
+“in order that the criticism might rest upon its own merits, and gain
+nothing from the name of the real writer.”
+
+It was an unpleasant controversy, and what remains as an impartial
+synopsis of it appears to be this: that there was actually manifest
+in the poetry of certain writers a tendency to deviate from wholesome
+reticence, and that this dangerous tendency came to us from France,
+where deep-seated unhealthy passion so gave shape to the glorification
+of gross forms of animalism as to excite alarm that what had begun with
+the hideousness of _Femmes Damnées_ would not even end there; finally,
+that the unpleasant truth demanded to be spoken--by whomsoever had
+courage enough to utter it--that to deify mere lust was an offence and
+an outrage. So much for the justice on Mr. Buchanan’s side; with the
+mistaken criticism linking the writers of Dante’s time with French
+writers of the time of Baudelaire it is hardly necessary to deal. On the
+other hand, it must be said that the sum-total of all the English
+poetry written in imitation of the worst forms of this French excess was
+probably less than one hundred lines; that what was really reprehensible
+in the English imitation of the poetry of the French School was,
+therefore, too inconsiderable to justify a wholesale charge against it
+of an endeavour to raise the banner of a black ambition whose only aim
+was to ruin society; that Rossetti, who was made to bear the brunt
+of attack, was a man who never by direct avowal, or yet by inference,
+displayed the faintest conceivable sympathy with the French excesses in
+question, and who never wrote a line inspired by unwholesome passion.
+As the pith of Mr. Buchanan’s accusation of 1871 lay here, and as Mr.
+Buchanan has, since then, very manfully withdrawn it, {*} we need hardly
+go further; but, as more recent articles in prominent places,
+_The Edinburgh Review, The British Quarterly Review, and again The
+Contemporary Review_, have repeated what was first said by him on the
+alleged unwholesomeness of Rossetti’s poetic impulses, it may be as well
+to admit frankly, and at once (for the subject will arise in the future
+as frequently as this poetry is under discussion) that love of bodily
+beauty did underlie much of the poet’s work. But has not the same
+passion made the back-bone of nine-tenths of the noblest English poetry
+since Chaucer? If it is objected that Rossetti’s love of physical
+beauty took new forms, the rejoinder is that it would have been equally
+childish and futile to attempt to prescribe limits for it. All this
+we grant to those unfriendly critics who refuse to see that spiritual
+beauty and not sensuality was Rossetti’s actual goal.
+
+     * Writing to me on this subject since Rossetti’s death, Mr.
+     Buchanan says:--“In perfect frankness, let me say a few
+     words concerning our old quarrel. While admitting freely
+     that my article in the C. R. was unjust to Rossetti’s claims
+     as a poet, I have ever held, and still hold, that it
+     contained nothing to warrant the manner in which it was
+     received by the poet and his circle. At the time it was
+     written, the newspapers were full of panegyric; mine was a
+     mere drop of gall in an ocean of _eau sucrée_. That it could
+     have had on any man the effect you describe, I can scarcely
+     believe; indeed, I think that no living man had so little to
+     complain of as Rossetti, on the score of criticism. Well, my
+     protest was received in a way which turned irritation into
+     wrath, wrath into violence; and then ensued the paper war
+     which lasted for years. If you compare what I have written
+     of Rossetti with what his admirers have written of myself, I
+     think you will admit that there has been some cause for me
+     to complain, to shun society, to feel bitter against the
+     world; but happily, I have a thick epidermis, and the
+     courage of an approving conscience. I was unjust, as I have
+     said; most unjust when I impugned the purity and
+     misconceived the passion of writings too hurriedly read and
+     reviewed currente calamo; but I was at least honest and
+     fearless, and wrote with no personal malignity. Save for the
+     action of the literary defence, if I may so term it, my
+     article would have been as ephemeral as the mood which
+     induced its composition. I make full admission of Rossetti’s
+     claims to the purest kind of literary renown, and if I were
+     to criticise his poems now, I should write very differently.
+     But nothing will shake my conviction that the cruelty, the
+     unfairness, the pusillanimity has been on the other side,
+     not on mine. The amende of my Dedication in God and the Man
+     was a sacred thing; between his spirit and mine; not between
+     my character and the cowards who have attacked it. I thought
+     he would understand,--which would have been, and indeed is,
+     sufficient. I cried, and cry, no truce with the horde of
+     slanderers who hid themselves within his shadow. That is
+     all. But when all is said, there still remains the pity that
+     our quarrel should ever have been. Our little lives are too
+     short for such animosities. Your friend is at peace with
+     God,--that God who will justify and cherish him, who has
+     dried his tears, and who will turn the shadow of his sad
+     life-dream into full sunshine. My only regret now is that we
+     did not meet,--that I did not take him by the hand; but I am
+     old-fashioned enough to believe that this world is only a
+     prelude, and that our meeting may take place--even yet.”
+
+To Rossetti, the poet, the accusation of extolling fleshliness as
+the distinct and supreme end of art was, after all, only an error of
+critical judgment; but to Rossetti, the man, the charge was something
+far more serious. It was a cruel and irremediable wound inflicted upon a
+fine spirit, sensitive to attack beyond all sensitiveness hitherto known
+among poets. He who had withheld his pictures from exhibition from dread
+of the distracting influences of popular opinion, he who for fifteen
+years had withheld his poems from print in obedience first to an
+extreme modesty of personal estimate and afterwards to the commands of
+a mastering affection was likely enough at forty-two years of age (after
+being loaded by the disciples that idolised him with only too much of
+the “frankincense of praise and myrrh of flattery”) to feel deeply the
+slander that he had unpacked his bosom of unhealthy passions. But to say
+that Rossetti felt the slander does not express his sense of it. He had
+replied to his reviewer and had acted unwisely in so doing; but when
+one after one--in the _Quarterly Review, the North American Review_,
+and elsewhere, in articles more or less ignorant, uncritical, and
+stupid--the accusations he had rebutted were repeated with increased
+bitterness, he lost all hope of stemming the torrent of hostile
+criticism. He had, as we have seen, for years lived in partial
+retirement, enjoying at intervals a garden party behind the house, or
+going about occasionally to visit relatives and acquaintances, but now
+he became entirely reclusive, refusing to see any friends except the
+three or four intimate ones who were constantly with him. Nor did the
+mischief end there. We have spoken of his habitual use of chloral,
+which was taken at first in small doses as a remedy for insomnia and
+afterwards indulged in to excess at moments of physical prostration or
+nervous excitement. To that false friend he came at this time with only
+too great assiduity, and the chloral, added to the seclusive habit of
+life, induced a series of terrible though intermittent illnesses and a
+morbid condition of mind in which for a little while he was the victim
+of many painful delusions. It was at this time that the soothing
+friendship of Dr. Gordon Hake, and his son Mr. George Hake, was of such
+inestimable service to Rossetti. Having appeared myself on the scene
+much later I never had the privilege of knowing either of these two
+gentlemen, for Mr. George Hake was already gone away to Cyprus and Dr.
+Hake had retired very much into the bosom of his own family where, as is
+rumoured, he has been engaged upon a literary work which will establish
+his fame. But I have often heard Mr. Theodore Watts speak with deep
+emotion and eloquent enthusiasm of the tender kindness and loyal zeal
+shown to Rossetti during this crisis by Mr. Bell Scott, and by Dr. Hake
+and his son. As to Mr. Theodore Watts, whose brotherly devotion to him,
+and beneficial influence over him from that time forward are so well
+known, this must be considered by those who witnessed it to be almost
+without precedent or parallel even in the beautiful story of literary
+friendships, and it does as much honour to the one as to the other. No
+light matter it must have been to lay aside one’s own long-cherished
+life-work and literary ambitions to be Rossetti’s closest friend and
+brother, at a moment like the present, when he imagined the world to be
+conspiring against him; but through these evil days, and long after them
+down to his death, the friend that clung closer than a brother was with
+him, as he himself said, to protect, to soothe, to comfort, to divert,
+to interest, and inspire him--asking, meantime, no better reward than
+the knowledge that a noble mind and nature was by such sacrifice lifted
+out of sorrow. Among the world’s great men the greatest are sometimes
+those whose names are least on our lips, and this is because selfish
+aims have been so subordinate in their lives to the welfare of others
+as to leave no time for the personal achievements that win personal
+distinction; but when the world comes to the knowledge of the price
+that has been paid for the devotion that enables others to enjoy their
+renown, shall it not reward with a double meed of gratitude the fine
+spirits to whom ambition has been as nothing against fidelity of
+friendship? Among the latest words I heard from Rossetti was this:
+“Watts is a hero of friendship;” and indeed he has displayed his
+capacity for participation in the noblest part of comradeship, that
+part, namely, which is far above the mere traffic that too often goes by
+the name, and wherein self-love always counts upon being the gainer. If
+in the end it should appear that he has in his own person done less than
+might have been hoped for from one possessed of his splendid gifts,
+let it not be overlooked that he has influenced in a quite incalculable
+degree, and influenced for good, several of the foremost among those who
+in their turn have influenced the age. As Rossetti’s faithful friend,
+and gifted medical adviser, Mr. John Marshall has often declared, there
+were periods when Rossetti’s very life may be said to have hung upon Mr.
+Watts’s power to cheer and soothe.
+
+Efforts were afoot about the year 1872 to induce Rossetti to visit
+Italy--a journey which, strangely enough, he had never made--but this
+he could not be prevailed upon to do. In the hope of diverting his mind
+from the unwholesome matters that too largely engaged it, his brother
+and friends, prominent among whom at this time were Mr. Bell Scott, Mr.
+Ford Madox Brown, Mr. W. Graham, and Dr. Gordon Hake, as well as his
+assistant and friend, Mr. H. T. Dunn, and Mr. George Hake, induced him
+to seek a change in Scotland, and there he speedily recovered tone.
+
+Immediately upon the publication of his first volume, and incited
+thereto by the early success of it, he had written the poem _Rose Mary_,
+as well as two lyrics published at the time in _The Fortnightly Review_;
+but he suffered so seriously from the subsequent assaults of criticism,
+that he seemed definitely to lay aside all hope of producing further
+poetry, and, indeed, to become possessed of the delusion that he had for
+ever lost all power of doing so. It is an interesting fact, well known
+in his own literary circle, that his taking up poetry afresh was
+the result of a fortuitous occurrence. After one of his most serious
+illnesses, and in the hope of drawing off his attention from himself,
+and from the gloomy forebodings which in an invalid’s mind usually
+gather about his own too absorbing personality, a friend prevailed upon
+him, with infinite solicitation, to try his hand afresh at a sonnet. The
+outcome was an effort so feeble as to be all but unrecognisable as the
+work of the author of the sonnets of _The House of Life_, but with
+more shrewdness and friendliness (on this occasion) than frankness,
+the critic lavished measureless praise upon it, and urged the poet to
+renewed exertion. One by one, at longer or shorter intervals, sonnets
+were written, and this exercise did more towards his recovery than
+any other medicine, with the result besides that Rossetti eventually
+regained all his old dexterity and mastery of hand. The artifice had
+succeeded beyond every expectation formed of it, serving, indeed, the
+twofold end of improving the invalid’s health by preventing his brooding
+over unhealthy matters, and increasing the number of his accomplished
+works. Encouraged by such results, the friend went on to induce Rossetti
+to write a ballad, and this purpose he finally achieved by challenging
+the poet’s ability to compose in the simple, direct, and emphatic style,
+which is the style of the ballad proper, as distinguished from the
+elaborate, ornate, and condensed diction which he had hitherto worked
+in. Put upon his mettle, the outcome of this second artifice practised
+upon him, was that he wrote _The White Ship_, and afterwards _The King’s
+Tragedy_.
+
+Thus was Rossetti already immersed in this revived occupation of poetic
+composition, and had recovered a healthy* tone of body, before he became
+conscious of what was being done with him. It is a further amusing fact
+that one day he requested to be shown the first sonnet which, in view of
+the praise lavished upon it by the friend on whose judgment he reposed,
+had encouraged him to renewed effort. The sonnet was bad: the critic
+knew it was bad, and had from the first hour of its production kept it
+carefully out of sight, and was now more than ever unwilling to show it.
+Eventually, however, by reason of ceaseless importunity, he returned it
+to its author, who, upon reading it, cried: “You fraud! you said this
+sonnet was good, and it’s the worst I _ever_ wrote.” “The worst ever
+written would perhaps be a truer criticism,” was the reply, as the
+studio resounded with a hearty laugh, and the poem was committed to the
+flames. It would appear that to this occurrence we probably owe a large
+portion of the contents of the volume of 1881.
+
+As we say, _Rose Mary_ was the first to be written of the leading poems
+that found places in his final volume. This ballad (or ballad romance,
+for ballad it can hardly be called) is akin to _Sister Helen_ in
+_motif_. The superstition involved owes something in this case as in
+the other to the invention and poetic bias of the poet. It has, however,
+less of what has been called the Catholic element, and is more purely
+Pagan. It is, therefore, as entirely undisturbed by animosity against
+heresy, and is concerned only with an ultimate demoniacal justice
+visiting the wrongdoer. The main point of divergency lies in the
+circumstance that Rose Mary, unlike Helen, is the undesigning instrument
+of evil powers, and that her blind deed is the means by which her
+own and her lover’s sin and his treachery become revealed. A further
+material point of divergency lies in the fact that unlike Helen, who
+loses her soul (as the price of revenge, directed against her betrayer),
+Rose Mary loses her life (as the price of vengeance directed against
+the evil race), whilst her soul gains rest. The superstition is that
+associated with the beryl stone, wherein the pure only may read the
+future, and from which sinful eyes must chase the spirits of grace and
+leave their realm to be usurped by the spirits of fire, who seal up the
+truth or reveal it by contraries. Rose Mary, who has sinned with her
+lover, is bidden to look in the beryl and learn where lurks the ambush
+that waits to take his life as he rides at break of day. Hiding, but
+remembering her transgression, she at first shrinks, but at length
+submits, and the blessed spirits by whom the stone has been tenanted
+give place to the fiery train. The stone is not sealed to her; and the
+long spell being ministered, she is satisfied. But she has read the
+stone by contraries, and her lover falls into the hand of his enemy.
+By his death is their secret sin made known. And then a newer shame is
+revealed, not to her eyes, but to her mother’s: even the treachery of
+the murdered man. Ignorant of this to the end, Eose Mary seeks to work a
+twofold ransoming by banishing from the beryl the evil powers. With the
+sword of her father (by whom the accursed gift had been brought from
+Palestine), she cleaves the heart of the stone, and with the broken
+spell her own life breaks.
+
+It will readily be seen that the scheme of the ballad does not afford
+opportunity for a memorable incursion in the domain of character. Rose
+Mary herself as a creation is not comparable with Helen. But the ballad
+throughout is nevertheless a triumph of the higher imagination. Nowhere
+else (to take the lowest ground) has Rossetti displayed so great a gift
+of flashing images upon the mind at once by a single expression.
+
+     Closely locked, they clung without speech,
+     And the mirrored souls shook each to each,
+     As the cloud-moon and the water-moon
+     Shake face to face when the dim stars swoon
+     In stormy bowers of the night’s mid-noon.
+
+     Deep the flood and heavy the shock
+     When sea meets sea in the riven rock:
+     But calm is the pulse that shakes the sea
+     To the prisoned tide of doom set free
+     In the breaking heart of Rose Mary.
+
+     She knew she had waded bosom-deep
+     Along death’s bank in the sedge of sleep.
+     And now in Eose Mary’s lifted eye
+     ‘Twas shadow alone that made reply
+     To the set face of the soul’s dark shy.
+
+Nor has Rossetti anywhere displayed a more sustained picturesqueness.
+One episode stands forth vividly even among so many that are
+conspicuous. The mother has left her daughter in a swoon to seek help of
+the priest who has knelt unweariedly by the dead body of her daughter’s
+lover, now lying on the ingle-bench in the hall. When the priest has
+gone and the castle folk have left her alone, the lady sinks to her
+knees beside the corpse. Great wrong the dead man has done to her and
+hers, and perhaps God has wrought this doom of his for a sign; but well
+she knows, or thinks she knows, that if life had remained with him his
+love would have been security for their honour. She stoops with a sob to
+kiss the dead, but before her lips touch the cold brow she sees a packet
+half-hidden in the dead man’s breast. It is a folded paper about which
+the blood from a spear-thrust has grown clotted, and inside is a tress
+of golden hair. Some pledge of her child’s she thinks it, and proceeds
+to undo the paper’s folds, and then learns the treachery of the fallen
+knight and suffers a bitterer pang than came of the knowledge of her
+daughter’s dishonour. It is a love-missive from the sister of his foe
+and murderer.
+
+     She rose upright with a long low moan,
+     And stared in the dead man’s face new-known.
+     Had it lived indeed? she scarce could tell:
+     ‘Twas a cloud where fiends had come to dwell,--
+     A mask that hung on the gate of Hell.
+
+     She lifted the lock of gleaming hair,
+     And smote the lips and left it there.
+     “Here’s gold that Hell shall take for thy toll!
+     Full well hath thy treason found its goal,
+     O thou dead body and damned soul!”
+
+Anything finer than this it would be hard to discover in English
+narrative poetry. Every word goes to build up the story: every line is
+quintessential: every flash of thought helps to heighten the emotion.
+Indeed the closing lines rise entirely above the limits of ballad poetry
+into the realm of dramatic diction. But perhaps the crowning glory and
+epic grandeur of the poem comes at the close. Awakened from her swoon,
+Rose Mary makes her way to the altar-cell and there she sees the
+beryl-stone lying between the wings of some sculptured beast. Within the
+fated glass she beholds Death, Sorrow, Sin and Shame marshalled past in
+the glare of a writhing flame, and thereupon follows a scene scarcely
+less terrible than Juliet’s vision of the tomb of the Capulets. But she
+has been told within this hour that her weak hand shall send hence the
+evil race by whom the stone is possessed, and with a stern purpose she
+reaches her father’s dinted sword. Then when the beryl is cleft to the
+core, and Rose Mary lies in her last gracious sleep--
+
+     With a cold brow like the snows ere May,
+     With a cold breast like the earth till spring,
+     With such a smile as the June days bring--
+     A clear voice pronounces her beatitude:
+
+     Already thy heart remembereth
+     No more his name thou sought’st in death:
+     For under all deeps, all heights above,--
+     So wide the gulf in the midst thereof,--
+     Are Hell of Treason and Heaven of Love.
+
+     Thee, true soul, shall thy truth prefer
+     To blessed Mary’s rose-bower:
+     Warmed and lit is thy place afar
+     With guerdon-fires of the sweet love-star,
+     Where hearts of steadfast lovers are.
+
+The White Ship was written in 1880; _The King’s Tragedy_ in the spring
+of 1881. These historical ballads we must briefly consider together. The
+memorable events of which Rossetti has made poetic record are, in _The
+White Ship_, those associated with the wreck of the ship in which the
+son and daughter of Henry I. of England set sail from France, and in
+_The King’s Tragedy_, with the death of James the First of Scots. The
+story of the one is told by the sole survivor, Herold, the butcher of
+Rouen; and of the other by Catherine Douglas, the maid of honour who
+received popularly the name of Kate Barlass, in recognition of her
+heroic act when she barred the door with her arm against the murderers
+of the King. It is scarcely possible to conceive in either case a
+diction more perfectly adapted to the person by whom it is employed.
+If we compare the language of these ballads with that of the sonnets or
+other poems spoken in the author’s own person, we find it is not first
+of all gorgeous, condensed, emphatic. It is direct, simple, pure and
+musical; heightened, it is true, by imagery acquired in its passage
+through the medium of the poet’s mind, but in other respects essentially
+the language of the historical personages who are made to speak. The
+diction belongs in each case to the period of the ballad in which it
+is employed, and yet there is no wanton use of archaisms, or any
+disposition manifested to resort to meretricious artifices by which to
+impart an appearance of probability to the story other than that which
+comes legitimately of sheer narrative excellence. The characterisation
+is that of history with the features softened that constituted the prose
+of real life, and with the salient, moral, and intellectual lineaments
+brought into relief. Herein the ballad may do that final justice which
+history itself withholds. Thus the King Henry of _The White Ship_ is
+governed by lust of dominion more than by parental affection; and the
+Prince, his son, is a lawless, shameless youth; intolerant, tyrannical,
+luxurious, voluptuous, yet capable of self-sacrifice even amidst peril
+of death.
+
+     When he should be King, he oft would vow,
+     He ‘d yoke the peasant to his own plough.
+     O’er him the ships score their furrows now.
+     God only knows where his soul did wake,
+     But I saw him die for his sister’s sake.
+
+The King James of _The King’s Tragedy_ is of a righteous and fearless
+nature, strong yet sensitive, unbending before the pride and hate of
+powerful men, resolute, and ready even where fate itself declares that
+death lurks where his road must lie; his beautiful Queen Jane is sweet,
+tender, loving, devoted--meet spouse for a poet and king. The incidents
+too are those of history: the choice and final collocation of them, and
+the closing scene in which the queen mourns her husband, being the sum
+of the author’s contribution. And those incidents are in the highest
+degree varied and picturesque. The author has not achieved a more vivid
+pictorial presentment than is displayed in these latest ballads from his
+pen. It would be hard to find in his earlier work anything bearing more
+clearly the stamp of reality than the descriptions of the wreck in _The
+White Ship_, of the two drowning men together on the mainyard, of the
+morning dawning over the dim sea-sky--
+
+     At last the morning rose on the sea
+     Like an angel’s wing that beat towards me--
+
+and of the little golden-haired boy in black whose foot patters down
+the court of the king. Certainly Rossetti has never attained a higher
+pictorial level than he reaches in the descriptions of the summoned
+Parliament in _The King’s Tragedy_, of the journey to the Charterhouse
+of Perth, of the woman on the rock of the black beach of the Scottish
+sea, of the king singing to the queen the song he made while immured by
+Bolingbroke at Windsor, of the knock of the woman at the outer gate,
+of her voice at night beneath the window, of the death in _The Pit
+of Fortune’s Wheel_. But all lesser excellencies must make way in our
+regard before a distinguishing spiritualising element which exists
+in these ballads only, or mainly amongst the author’s works. Natural
+portents are here first employed as factors of poetic creation.
+Presentiment, foreboding, omen become the essential tissue of works
+that are lifted by them into the higher realm of imagination. These
+supernatural constituents penetrate and pervade _The White Ship_; and
+_The King’s Tragedy_ is saturated in the spirit of them. We do not speak
+of the incidents associated with the wraith that haunts the isles, but
+of the less palpable touches which convey the scarce explicable
+sense of a change of voice when the king sings of the pit that is under
+fortune’s wheel:
+
+     And under the wheel, beheld I there
+        An ugly Pit as deep as hell,
+     That to behold I quaked for fear:
+        And this I heard, that who therein fell
+     Came no more up, tidings to tell:
+     Whereat, astound of the fearful sight,
+     I wot not what to do for fright.
+               (The King’s Quair.)
+
+It is the shadow of the supernatural that hangs over the king, and very
+soon it must enshroud him. One of the most subtle and impressive of the
+natural portents is that which presents itself to the eyes of Catherine
+when the leaguers have first left the chamber, and the moon goes out and
+leaves black the royal armorial shield on the painted window-pane:
+
+     And the rain had ceased, and the moonbeams lit
+        The window high in the wall,--
+     Bright beams that on the plank that I knew
+        Through the painted pane did fall
+     And gleamed with the splendour of Scotland’s crown
+        And shield armorial.
+
+     But then a great wind swept up the skies,
+        And the climbing moon fell back;
+     And the royal blazon fled from the floor,
+        And nought remained on its track;
+     And high in the darkened window-pane
+        The shield and the crown were black.
+
+It has been said that _Sister Helen_ strikes the keynote of Rossetti’s
+creative gift; it ought to be added that _The King’s Tragedy_ touches
+his highest reach of imagination.
+
+Having in the early part of 1881 brought together a sufficient quantity
+of fresh poetry to fill a volume, Rossetti began negotiations for
+publishing it. Anticipatory announcements were at that time constantly
+appearing in many quarters, not rarely accompanied by an outspoken
+disbelief in the poet’s ability to achieve a second success equal to his
+first. In this way it often happens to an author, that, having achieved
+a single conspicuous triumph, the public mind, which has spontaneously
+offered him the tribute of a generous recognition, forthwith gravitates
+towards a disposition to become silently but unmistakeably sceptical
+of his power to repeat it. Subsequent effort in such a case is rarely
+regarded with that confidence which might be looked for as the reward
+of achievement, and which goes far to prepare the mind for the ready
+acceptance of any genuine triumph. Indeed, a jealous attitude is often
+unconsciously adopted, involving a demand for special qualities, for
+which, perchance, the peculiar character of the past success has created
+an appetite, or obedience to certain arbitrary tests, which, though
+passively present in the recognised work, have grown mainly out of
+critical analysis of it, and are neither radical nor essential. Where,
+moreover, such conspicuous success has been followed by an interval
+of years distinguished by no signal effort, the sceptical bias of the
+public mind sometimes complacently settles into a conviction (grateful
+alike to its pride and envy, whilst consciously hurtful to its more
+generous impulses), that the man who made it lived once indeed upon the
+mountains, but has at length come down to dwell finally upon the plain.
+Literary biography furnishes abundant examples of this imperfection
+of character, a foible, indeed, which in its multiform manifestations,
+probably goes as far as anything else to interfere with the formation of
+a just and final judgment of an author’s merit within his own lifetime.
+When it goes the length of affirming that even a great writer’s creative
+activity usually finds not merely central realisation, but absolute
+exhaustion within the limits of some single work, to reason against it
+is futile, and length of time affords it the only satisfying refutation.
+One would think that it could scarcely require to be urged that creative
+impulse, once existent within a mind, can never wholly depart from it,
+but must remain to the end, dependent, perhaps, for its expression in
+some measure on external promptings, variable with the variations of
+physical environments, but always gathering innate strength for the
+hour (silent perchance, or audible only within other spheres), when the
+inventive faculty shall be harmonised, animated, and lubricated to
+its utmost height. Nevertheless, Coleridge encountered the implied
+doubtfulness of his contemporaries, that the gift remained with him
+to carry to its completion the execution of that most subtle mid-day
+witchery, which, as begun in _Christabel_, is probably the most
+difficult and elusive thing ever attempted in the field of romance.
+Goethe, too, found himself face to face with outspoken distrust of his
+continuation of _Faust_; and even Cervantes had perforce to challenge
+the popular judgment which long refused to allow that the second part
+of _Don Quixote_, with all its added significance, was adequate to
+his original simple conception. Indeed that author must be considered
+fortunate who effects a reversal of the public judgment against
+the completion of a fragment, and the repetition of a complete and
+conspicuous success.
+
+When Rossetti published his first volume of poems in 1870, he left only
+his _House of Life_ incomplete; but amongst the readers who then offered
+spontaneous tribute to that series of sonnets, and still treasured it
+as a work of all but faultless symmetry, built up by aid of a blended
+inspiration caught equally from Shakspeare and from Dante, with a
+superadded psychical quality peculiar to its author, there were many,
+even amongst the friendliest in sympathy, who heard of the completed
+sequence with a sense of doubt. Such is the silent and unreasoning and
+all but irrevocable edict of all popular criticism against continuations
+of works which have in fragmentary form once made conquest of the
+popular imagination. Moreover, Rossetti’s first volume achieved a
+success so signal and unexpected as to subject this second and maturer
+book to the preliminary ordeal of such a questioning attitude of mind
+as we speak of, as the unfailing and ungracious reward of a conspicuous
+triumph. In the interval of eleven years, Rossetti had essayed no
+notable achievement, and his name had been found attached only to such
+fugitive efforts as may have lived from time to time a brief life in the
+pages of the _Athenæum_ and _Fortnightly_. Of the works in question
+two only come now within our province to mention. The first and most
+memorable was the poem _Cloud Confines_. Inadequate as the critical
+attention necessarily was which this remarkable lyric obtained,
+indications were not wanting that it had laid unconquerable siege to the
+sympathies of that section of the public in whose enthusiasm the life of
+every creative work is seen chiefly to abide. There was in it a lyrical
+sweetness scarcely ever previously compassed by its author, a cadent
+undertoned symphony that first gave testimony that the poet held the
+power of conveying by words a sensible eflfect of great music, even
+as former works of his had given testimony to his power of conveying a
+sensible eflfect by great painting. But to these metrical excellencies
+was added an element new to Rossetti’s poetry, or seen here for the
+first time conspicuously. Insight and imagination of a high order,
+together with a poetic instinct whose promptings were sure, had already
+found expression in more than one creation moulded into an innate
+chasteness of perfected parts and wedded to nature with an unerring
+fidelity. But the range of nature was circumscribed, save only in the
+one exception of a work throbbing with the sufferings and sorrows of
+a shadowed side of modern life. To this lyric, however, there came
+as basis a fundamental conception that made aim to grapple with the
+pro-foundest problems compassed by the mysteries of life and death, and
+a temper to yield only where human perception fails. Abstract indeed
+in theme the lyric is, but few are the products of thought out of which
+imagination has delved a more concrete and varied picturesqueness:
+
+     What of the heart of hate
+        That beats in thy breast, O Time?--
+        Bed strife from the furthest prime,
+     And anguish of fierce debate; that shatters her slain,
+        And peace that grinds them as grain,
+        And eyes fixed ever in vain
+     On the pitiless eyes of Fate.
+
+The second of the fugitive efforts alluded to was a prose work entitled
+_Hand and Soul_. More poem than story, this beautiful idyl may be
+briefly described as mainly illustrative of the struggles of the
+transition period through which, as through a slough, all true artists
+must pass who have been led to reflect deeply upon the aims and ends of
+their calling before they attain that goal of settled purpose in which
+they see it to be best to work from their own heart simply, without
+regard for the spectres that would draw them apart into quagmires of
+moral aspiration. These two works and an occasional sonnet, such as that
+on the greatly gifted and untimely lost Oliver Madox Brown, made the sum
+of all {*} that was done, in the interval of eleven years between the
+dates of the first volume and of that which was now to be published, to
+keep before the public a name which rose at once into distinction, and
+had since, without feverish periodical bolstering, grown not less
+but more in the ardent upholding of sincere men who, in number and
+influence, comprised a following as considerable perhaps as owned
+allegiance to any contemporary.
+
+     * A ballad appeared in The Dark Blue.
+
+Having brought these biographical and critical notes to the point at
+which they overlap the personal recollections that form the body of this
+volume, it only remains to say that during the years in which the poems
+just reviewed were being written Rossetti was living at his house in
+Chelsea a life of unbroken retirement. At this time, however (1877-81),
+his seclusion was not so complete as it had been when he used to see
+scarcely any one but Mr. Watts and his own family, with an occasional
+visit from Lord and Lady Mount Temple, Mrs. Sumner, etc. Once weekly he
+was now visited by his brother William, twice weekly by his attached
+and gifted friend Frederick J. Shields, occasionally by his old friends
+William Bell Scott and Ford Madox Brown. For the rest, he rarely if
+ever left the precincts of his home. It was a placid and undisturbed
+existence such as he loved. Health too (except for one serious attack
+in 1877), was good with him, and his energies were, as we have seen, at
+their best.
+
+His personal amiability was, perhaps, never more conspicuous than
+in these tranquil years; yet this was the very time when paragraphs
+injurious to his character found their way into certain journals. Among
+the numerous stories illustrative of his alleged barbarity of manners
+was the one which has often been repeated both in conversation and in
+print to the effect that H.E.H. the Princess Louise was rudely repulsed
+from his door. Rossetti was certainly not easy to approach, but the
+geniality of his personal bearing towards those who had commands upon
+his esteem was always unfailing, and knowledge of this fact must
+have been enough to give the lie to the injurious calumny just named.
+Nevertheless, Rossetti, who was deeply moved by the imputation, thought
+it necessary to contradict it emphatically, and as the letter in which
+he did this is a thoroughly outspoken and manly one, and touches an
+important point in his character, I reprint it in this place:
+
+     16 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, S.W., December 28, 1878.
+
+     My attention has been directed to the following paragraph
+     which has appeared in the newspapers:--“A very disagreeable
+     story is told about a neighbour of Mr. Whistler’s, whose
+     works are not exhibited to the vulgar herd; the Princess
+     Louise in her zeal, therefore, graciously sought them at the
+     artist’s studio, but was rebuffed by a ‘Not at home’ and an
+     intimation that he was not at the beck and call of
+     princesses. I trust it is not true,” continues the writer of
+     the paragraph, “that so medievally minded a gentleman is
+     really a stranger to that generous loyalty to rank and sex,
+     that dignified obedience,” etc.
+
+     The story is certainly “disagreeable” enough; but if I am
+     pointed at as the “near neighbour of Mr. Whistler’s” who
+     rebuffed, in this rude fashion, the Princess Louise, I can
+     only say that it is a _canard_ devoid of the smallest
+     nucleus of truth. Her Royal Highness has never called upon
+     me; and I know of only two occasions when she has expressed
+     a wish to do so. Some years ago Mr. Theodore Martin spoke to
+     me upon the subject; but I was at that time engaged upon an
+     important work, and the delays thence arising caused the
+     matter to slip through. And I heard no more upon the subject
+     till last summer, when Mr. Theodore Watts told me that the
+     Princess, in conversation, had mentioned my name to him, and
+     that he had then assured her that I should “feel honoured
+     and charmed to see her,” and suggested her making an
+     appointment. Her Royal Highness knew that Mr. Watts, as one
+     of my most intimate friends, would not have thus expressed
+     himself without feeling fully warranted in so doing; and had
+     she called she would not, I trust, have found me wanting in
+     that “generous loyalty” which is due not more to her exalted
+     position than to her well-known charm of character and
+     artistic gifts. It is true enough that I do not run after
+     great people on account of their mere social position, but I
+     am, I hope, never rude to them; and the man who could rebuff
+     the Princess Louise must be a curmudgeon indeed.
+
+     D. G. Rossetti.
+
+At the very juncture in question Lord Lome was suddenly and unexpectedly
+appointed Governor-General of Canada, and, leaving England, Her Royal
+Highness did not return until Rossetti’s health had somewhat suddenly
+broken down, and it was impossible for him to see any but his most
+intimate friends.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+My intercourse with Rossetti, epistolary and personal, extended over a
+period of between three and four years. During the first two of these
+years I was, as this volume must show, his constant correspondent,
+during the third year his attached friend, and during the portion of
+the fourth year of our acquaintance terminating with his life, his daily
+companion and housemate. It is a part of my purpose to help towards the
+elucidation of Rossetti’s personal character by a simple, and I
+trust, unaffected statement of my relations to him, and so I begin by
+explaining that my knowledge of the man was the sequel to my admiration
+of the poet. Not accident (the agency that usually operates in such
+cases), but his genius and my love of it, began the friendship between
+us. Of Rossetti’s pictorial art I knew little, until very recent years,
+beyond what could be gathered from a few illustrations to books. My
+acquaintance with his poetry must have been made at the time of the
+publication of the first volume in 1870, but as I did not then possess a
+copy of the book, and do not remember to have seen one, my knowledge of
+the work must have been merely such as could be gleaned from the reading
+of reviews. The unlucky controversy, that subsequently arose out of it,
+directed afresh my attention, in common with that of others, to Rossetti
+and his school of poetry, with the result of impressing my mind with
+qualities of the work that were certainly quite outside the issues
+involved in the discussion. Some two or three years after that
+acrimonious controversy had subsided, an accident, sufficiently curious
+to warrant my describing it, produced the effect of converting me from a
+temperate believer in the charm of music and colour in Rossetti’s lyric
+verse, to an ardent admirer of his imaginative genius as displayed in
+the higher walks of his art.
+
+I had set out with a knapsack to make one of my many periodical walking
+tours of the beautiful lake country of Westmoreland and Cumberland.
+Beginning the journey at Bowness--as tourists, if they will accept the
+advice of one who knows perhaps the whole of the country, ought always
+to do--I walked through Dungeon Ghyll, climbed the Stake Pass, descended
+into Borrowdale, and traced the course of the winding Derwent to that
+point at which it meets the estuary of the lake, and where stands the
+Derwentwater Hotel. A rain and thunder storm was gathering over the
+Black Sail and Great Gable as I reached the summit of the Pass, and
+travelling slowly northwards it had overtaken me. Before I reached the
+hotel, my resting-place for the night, I was certainly as thoroughly
+saturated as any one in reasonable moments could wish to be. I remember
+that as I passed into the shelter of the porch an elderly gentleman, who
+was standing there, remarked upon the severity of the storm, inquired
+what distance I had travelled, and expressed amazement that on such a
+day, when mists were floating, any one could have ventured to cover so
+much dangerous mountain-country,--which he estimated as nearly thirty
+miles in extent. Beyond observing that my interlocutor was friendly
+in manner and knew the country intimately, I do not remember to have
+reflected either then or afterwards upon his personality except
+perhaps that he might have answered to Wordsworth’s scarcely definite
+description of his illustrious friend as “a noticeable man,” with
+the further parallel, I think, of possessing “large grey eyes.” After
+attending to the obvious necessity of dry garments in exchange for wet
+ones, and otherwise comforting myself after a fatiguing day’s march, I
+descended to the drawing-room of the hotel, where a company of persons
+were trying, with that too formal cordiality peculiar to English people,
+who are accidentally thrown together in the course of a holiday, to get
+rid of the depression which results upon dishearteningly unpropitious
+weather. Music, as usual, was the gracious angel employed to banish the
+fiend of ennui, but among those who took no part either in the singing
+or playing, other than that of an enforced auditor, was the elderly
+gentleman, my quondam acquaintance of the porch, who stood apart in an
+alcove looking through a window. I stepped up to him and renewed our
+talk. The storm had rather increased than abated since my arrival; the
+thunder which before had rumbled over the distant Langdale Pikes was
+breaking in sharp peals over our heads, and flashes of sheeted lightning
+lit up the gathering darkness that lay between us and Castle Crag.
+A playful allusion to “poor Tom” and to King Lear’s undisputed sole
+enjoyment of such a scene (except as viewed from the ambush of a
+comfortable hotel) led to the discovery, very welcome to both at a
+moment when we were at bay for an evening’s occupation, that besides
+knowledge and love of the country round about us, we had in common
+some knowledge and much love of the far wider realm of books. Thereupon
+ensued a talk chiefly on authors and their works which lasted until long
+after the music had ceased, until the elemental as well as instrumental
+storm had passed, and the guests had slipped away one after one, and the
+last remaining servant of the house had, by the introduction of a
+couple of candles, given us a palpable hint that in the opinion of that
+guardian of a country inn the hour was come and gone when well-regulated
+persons should betake themselves to bed. To my delight my friend
+knew nearly every prominent living author, could give me personal
+descriptions of them, as well as scholarly and well-digested criticisms
+of their works. He was certainly no ordinary man, but who he was I have
+never learned with certainty, though I cherish the agreeable impression
+that I could give a shrewd guess. At one moment the talk turned on
+_Festus_, and then I heard the most lucid and philosophical account of
+that work I have ever listened to or read. I was told that the author
+of _Festus_ had never (in all the years that had elapsed since its
+publication, when he was in his earliest manhood, though now he is
+grown elderly) ceased to emend it, notwithstanding the protestations
+of critics; and that an improved and enlarged edition of the poem might
+probably appear after his death. Struck with the especial knowledge
+displayed of the author in question, I asked if he happened to be
+a friend. Then, with a scarcely perceptible smile playing about the
+corners of the mouth (a circumstance without significance for me at the
+time and only remembered afterwards), my new acquaintance answered:
+“He is my oldest and dearest friend.” Next morning I saw my night-long
+conversationalist in company with a clergyman get on to the Buttermere
+coach and wave his hand to me as they vanished under the trees that
+overhung the Buttermere road, but in answer to many inquiries the utmost
+I could learn of my interesting acquaintance was that he was somehow
+understood to be a great author, and a friend of Charles Kingsley, who,
+I think they said, was or had been with him there or elsewhere that
+year. Whether besides being the “oldest and dearest friend” of the
+author of _Festus_, my delightful companion was Philip James Bailey
+himself I have never learned to this day, and can only cherish a
+pleasant trust; but what remains as really important in this connexion
+is that whosoever he was he originated my first real love of Rossetti’s
+poetry, and gave me my first realisable idea of the man. Taking up from
+the table some popular _Garland, Casket, Treasury_, or other anthology
+of English poetry, he pointed out a sonnet entitled _Lost Days_ (to
+which, indeed, a friend at home had directed my attention), and dwelt
+upon its marvellous strength of spiritual insight, and power of symbolic
+phrase. Of course the sonnet was Rossetti’s. It is impossible for me
+to describe the effect produced upon me by sonnet and exposition. I
+resolved not to live many days longer without acquiring a knowledge
+of the body of Rossetti’s work. Perceiving that the gentleman knew
+something of the poet, I put questions to him which elicited the
+fact that he had met him many years earlier at, I think he said, Mrs.
+Gaskell’s, when Rossetti was a rather young man, known only as a painter
+and the leader of an eccentric school in art. He described him as a
+little dark man, with fine eyes under a broad brow, with a deep voice,
+and Bohemian habits--“a little Italian, in short.” [Little, by the way,
+Rossetti could not properly be said to be, but opinions as to physical
+proportions being so liable to vary, I may at once mention that he was
+exactly five feet eight inches in height, and except in early manhood,
+when he was somewhat attenuated, well built in proportion.] He further
+described Rossetti’s manners as those of a man in deliberate revolt
+against society; delighting in an opportunity to startle well-ordered
+persons out of their propriety, and to silence by sheer vehemence of
+denunciation the seemly protests of very good and very gentle folk. The
+portraiture seems to me now to bear the impress of truth, unlike as it
+is in some particulars to the man as I knew him. When once, however,
+years after the event recorded, I bantered Rossetti on the amiable
+picture of him I had received from a stranger, he admitted that it
+was in the main true to his character early in life, and recounted an
+instance in which, from sheer perversity, or at best for amusement, he
+had made the late Dean Stanley aghast with horror at the spectacle of a
+young man, born in a Christian country, and in the nineteenth century,
+defending (in sport) the vices of Neronian Home.
+
+The outcome of this first serious and sufficient introduction to
+Rossetti’s poetry was that I forthwith devoted time to reading and
+meditating upon it. Ultimately I lectured twice or thrice on the subject
+in Liverpool, first at the Royal Institution, and afterwards at the
+Free Library. The text of that lecture I still preserve, and as in all
+probability it did more than anything else to originate the friendship I
+afterwards enjoyed with the poet, I shall try to convey very briefly an
+idea of its purpose.
+
+Against both friendly and unfriendly critics of Rossetti I held that to
+place him among the “aesthetic” poets was an error of classification.
+It seemed to me that, unlike the poets properly so described, he had
+nothing in common with the Caliban of Mr. Browning, who worked “for
+work’s sole sake;” and, unlike them yet further, the topmost thing
+in him was indeed love of beauty, but the deepest thing was love of
+uncomely right. The fusion of these elements in Rossetti softened the
+mythological Italian Catholicism that I recognised as a leading thing in
+him, and subjugated his sensuous passion. I thought it wrong to say that
+Rossetti had part or lot with those false artists, or no artists, who
+assert, without fear or shame, that the manner of doing a thing should
+be abrogated or superseded by the moral purpose of its being done. On
+the other hand, Rossetti appeared to make no conscious compromise with
+the Puritan principle of doing good; and to demand first of his work the
+lesson or message it had for us were wilfully to miss of pleasure while
+we vainly strove for profit. He was too true an artist to follow art
+into its byeways of moral significance, and thereby cripple its broader
+arms; but at the same time all this absorption of the artist in his art
+seemed to me to live and work together with the personal instincts of
+the man. An artist’s nature cannot escape the colouring it gets from the
+human side of his nature, because it is of the essence of art to appeal
+to its own highest faculties largely through the channel of moral
+instincts: that music is exquisite and colour splendid, first, because
+they have an indescribable significance, and next because they respond
+to mere sense. But it appeared to me to be one thing to work for “work’s
+sole sake,” with an overruling moral instinct that gravitates, as Mr.
+Arnold would say, towards conduct, and quite another thing to absorb art
+in moral purposes. I thought that Rossetti’s poetry showed how possible
+it is, without making conscious compromise with that puritan principle
+of doing good of which Keats at one period became enamoured, to
+be unconsciously making for moral ends. There was for me a passive
+puritanism in _Jenny_ which lived and worked together with the poet’s
+purely artistic passion for doing his work supremely well. Every thought
+in _Dante at Verona_ and _The Last Confession_ seemed mixed with and
+coloured by a personal moral instinct that was safe and right.
+
+This was perhaps the only noticeable feature of my lecture, and knowing
+Rossetti’s nature, as since the lecture I have learned to know it,
+I feel no great surprise that such pleading for the moral impulses
+animating his work should have been of all things the most likely to
+engage his affections. Just as Coleridge always resented the imputation
+that he had ever been concerned with Wordsworth and Southey in the
+establishment of a school of poetry, and contended that, in common with
+his colleagues, he had been inspired by no desire save that of imitating
+the best examples of Greece and Home, so Rossetti (at least throughout
+the period of my acquaintance with him) invariably shrank from
+classification with the poetry of æstheticism, and aspired to the fame
+of a poet who had been prompted primarily by the highest of spiritual
+emotions, and to whom the sensations of the body were as naught, unless
+they were sanctified by the concurrence of the soul. My lecture was
+printed, but quite a year elapsed after its preparation before
+it occurred to me that Rossetti himself might derive a moment’s
+gratification from knowledge of the fact that he had one ardent upholder
+and sincere well-wisher hitherto unknown to him. At length I sent him a
+copy of the magazine containing my lecture on his poetry. A post or two
+later brought me the following reply:
+
+     Dear Mr. Caine,--
+
+     I am much struck by the generous enthusiasm displayed in
+     your Lecture, and by the ability with which it is written.
+     Your estimate of the impulses influencing my poetry is such
+     as I should wish it to suggest, and this suggestion, I
+     believe, it will have always for a true-hearted nature. You
+     say that you are grateful to me: my response is, that I am
+     grateful to you: for you have spoken up heartily and
+     unfalteringly for the work you love.
+
+     I daresay you sometimes come to London. I should be very
+     glad to know you, and would ask you, if you thought of
+     calling, to give me a day’s notice when to expect you, as I
+     am not always able to see visitors without appointment. The
+     afternoon, about 5, might suit me, or else the evening about
+     9.30. With all best wishes, yours sincerely,
+
+     D. G. Rossetti.
+
+This was the first of nearly two hundred letters in all received from
+Rossetti in the course of our acquaintance. A day or two later the
+following supplementary note reached me:
+
+     I return your article. In reading it, I feel it a
+     distinction that my minute plot in the poetic field should
+     have attracted the gaze of one who is able to traverse its
+     widest ranges with so much command. I shall be much pleased
+     if the plan of calling on me is carried out soon--at any
+     rate I trust it will be so eventually.... Have you got, or
+     do you know, my book of translations called _Dante and his
+     Circle?_ If not, I ‘ll send you one....
+
+     I have been reading again your article on _The Supernatural
+     in Poetry_. It is truly admirable--such work must soon make
+     you a place. The dramatic paper I thought suffered from some
+     immaturity.
+
+It is hardly necessary to say that I was equally delighted with the
+warmth of the reception accorded to my essay, and with the revelation
+the letters appeared to contain of a sincere and unselfish nature. My
+purpose, however, which was a modest one, had been served, and I made
+no further attempt to continue the correspondence, least of all did I
+expect or desire to originate anything of the nature of a friendship. In
+my reply to his note, however, I had asked him to accept the dedication
+of a little work of mine, and when, with abundant courtesy, he had
+declined to do so on very sufficient grounds, I felt satisfied that
+matters between us should rest where they were. It is a pleasing
+recollection, nevertheless, that Rossetti himself had taken a different
+view of the relation that had grown up between us, and by many generous
+appeals induced me to put by all further thoughts of abandoning the
+correspondence out of regard for him. There had ensued an interval in
+which I did not write to him, whereupon he addressed to me a hurried
+note, saying:
+
+     Let me have a line from you. I am haunted by the idea, that
+     in declining the dedication, I may have hurt you. I assure
+     you I should be proud to be associated in any way with your
+     work, but gave you my very reasons.
+
+     I shall be pleased if you do not think them sufficient, and
+     still carry out your original intention.... At least write
+     to me.
+
+I replied to this letter (containing, as it did, the expression of so
+much more than the necessary solicitude), by saying that I too had been
+haunted, but it had been by the fear that I had been asking too much
+of his attention. As to the dedication, so far from feeling hurt, by
+Rossetti’s declining it, I had grown to see that such was the only
+course that remained to him to take. The terms in which he had replied
+to my offer of it (so far from being of a kind to annoy or hurt me),
+had, to my thinking, been only generous, sympathetic, and beautiful.
+Again he wrote:
+
+     My dear Caine,--
+
+     Let me assure you at once that correspondence with yourself
+     is one of my best pleasures, and that you cannot write too
+     much or too often for _me_; though after what you have told
+     me as to the apportioning of your time, I should be
+     unwilling to encroach unduly upon it. Neither should I on my
+     side prove very tardy in reply, as you are one to whom I
+     find there _is_ something to say when I sit down with a pen
+     and paper. I have a good deal of enforced evening leisure,
+     as it is seldom I can paint or draw by gaslight. It would
+     not be right in me to refrain from saying that to meet with
+     one so “leal and true” to myself as you are has been a
+     consolation amid much discouragement.... I perceive you have
+     had a complete poetic career which you have left behind to
+     strike out into wider waters.... The passage on Night, which
+     you say was written under the planet Shelley, seems to me
+     (and to my brother, to whom I read it) to savour more of the
+     “mortal moon”--that is, of a weird and sombre
+     Elizabethanism, of which Beddoes may be considered the
+     modern representative. But we both think it has an
+     unmistakeable force and value; and if you can write better
+     poetry than this, let your angel say unto you, _Write_.
+
+I take it that it would be wholly unwise of me in selecting excerpts
+from Rossetti’s letters entirely to withhold the passages that concern
+exclusively (so far as their substance goes) my own early doings or
+try-ings-to-do; for it ought to be a part of my purpose to lay bare the
+beginnings of that friendship by virtue of which such letters exist.
+I can only ask the readers of these pages to accept my assurance, that
+whatever the number and extent of the passages which I publish that are
+necessarily in themselves of more interest to myself personally than to
+the public generally, they are altogether disproportionate to the number
+and extent of those I withhold. I cannot, however, resist the conclusion
+that such picture as they afford of a man beyond the period of middle
+life capable of bending to a new and young friend, and of thinking with
+and for him, is not without an exceptional literary interest as being so
+contrary to every-day experience. Hence, I am not without hope that the
+occasional references to myself which in the course of these extracts I
+shall feel it necessary to introduce, may be understood to be employed
+by me as much for their illustrative value (being indicative of
+Rossetti’s character), as for any purpose less purely impersonal.
+
+The passage of verse referred to was copied out for Rossetti in reply to
+an inquiry as to whether I had written poetry. Prompted no doubt by the
+encouragement derived in this instance, I submitted from time to time
+other verses to Rossetti, as subsequent letters show, but it says
+something for the value of his praise that whatever the measure of
+it when his sympathies were fairly aroused, and whatever his natural
+tendency to look for the characteristic merits rather than defects of
+compositions referred to his judgment, his candour was always prominent
+among his good qualities when censure alone required to be forthcoming.
+Among many frank utterances of an opinion early formed, that whatever
+my potentialities as a writer of prose, I had but small vocation as a
+writer of poetry, I preserve one such utterance, which will, I trust, be
+found not less interesting to other readers from affording a glimpse of
+the writer’s attitude towards the old controversy touching the several
+and distinguishing elements that contribute to make good prose on the
+one hand and good verse on the other.
+
+On one occasion he had sent me his fine sonnet on Keats, then just
+written, and, in acknowledging the receipt of it with many expressions
+of admiration, I remarked that for some days I had been struggling
+desperately, in all senses, to incubate a sonnet on the same somewhat
+hackneyed subject. I had not written a line or put pen to paper for the
+purpose, but I could tell him, in general terms, what my unaccomplished
+marvel of sonnet-craft was to be about.
+
+Rossetti replied saying that the scheme for a sonnet was “extremely
+beautiful,” and urging me to “do it at once.” Alas for my intrepidity,
+“do it” I did, with the result of awakening my correspondent to the
+certainty that, whatever embowerings I had in my mind, that shy bird the
+sonnet would seek in vain for a nest to hide in there. It asked so much
+special courage to send a first attempt at sonneteering to the greatest
+living master of the sonnet that moral daring alone ought to have got me
+off lightly, but here is Rossetti’s reply, valuable now, as well for the
+view it affords of the poet’s attitude towards the sonnet as a medium of
+expression, as for other reasons already assigned. The opening passage
+alludes to a lyric of humble life.
+
+You may be sure I do not mean essential discouragement when I say that,
+full as _Nell_ is of reality and pathos, your swing of arm seems to me
+firmer and freer in prose than in verse. I do think I see your field to
+lie chiefly in the achievements of fervid and impassioned prose.... I am
+sure that, when sending me your first sonnet, you wished me to say quite
+frankly what I think of it. Well, I do not think it shows a special
+vocation for this condensed and emphatic form. The prose version you
+sent me seems to say much more distinctly what this says with some
+want of force. The octave does not seem to me very clearly put, and the
+sestet does not emphasize in a sufficiently striking way the idea which
+the prose sketch conveyed to me,--that of Keats’s special privilege in
+early death: viz., the lovely monumentalized image he bequeathed to us
+of the young poet. Also I must say that more special originality and
+even _newness_ (though this might be called a vulgarizing word), of
+thought and picture in individual lines--more of this than I find
+here--seems to me the very first qualification of a sonnet--otherwise it
+puts forward no right to be so short, but might seem a severed passage
+from a longer poem depending on development. I would almost counsel you
+to try the same theme again--or else some other theme in sonnet-form.
+I thought the passage on Night you sent showed an aptitude for choice
+imagery. I should much like to see something which you view as your best
+poetic effort hitherto. After all, there is no need that every gifted
+writer should take the path of poetry--still less of sonneteering. I am
+confident in your preference for frankness on my part.
+
+I tried the theme again before I abandoned it, and was so fortunate as
+to get him to admit a degree of improvement such as led to his
+desiring to recall his conjectural judgment on my possibilities as a
+sonnet-writer, but as the letters in which he characterises the
+advance are neither so terse in criticism, nor so interesting from the
+exposition of principles, as the one quoted, I pass them by. With
+more confidence in my ultimate comparative success than I had ever
+entertained, Rossetti was only anxious that I should engage in that work
+to which I. could address myself with a sense of command; and I think it
+will be agreed that, where temperate confidence in what the future may
+legitimately hold for one is united to earnest and rightly directed
+endeavour in the present, it is often a good thing for the man who
+stands on the threshold of life (to whom, nevertheless, the path passed
+seems ever to stretch out of sight backwards) to be told the extent
+to which, little enough at the most, his clasp (to use a phrase of Mr.
+Browning) may be equal to his grasp.
+
+My residing, as I did, at a distance from London, was at once the
+difficulty which for a time prevented our coming together and the
+necessity for correspondence by virtue of which these letters exist.
+As I failed, however, from hampering circumstance, to meet at once with
+himself, Rossetti invariably displayed a good deal of friendly anxiety
+to bring me into contact with his friends as frequently as occasion
+rendered it feasible to do so. In this way I met with Mr. Madox
+Brown, who was at the moment engaged on his admirable frescoes in the
+Manchester Town Hall, and in this way also I met with other friends
+of his resident in my neighbourhood. When I came to know him more
+intimately I perceived that besides the kindliness of intention which
+had prompted him to bring me into what he believed to be agreeable
+associations, he had adopted this course from the other motive of
+desiring to be reassured as to the comparative harmlessness of my
+personality, for he usually followed the introduction to a friend by a
+private letter of thanks for the reception accorded me, and a number of
+dexterously manipulated allusions, which always, I found, produced the
+desired result of eliciting the required information (to be gleaned
+only from personal intercourse) as to my manner and habits. Later in our
+acquaintance, I found that he, like all meditative men, had the greatest
+conceivable dread of being taken unawares, and that there was no safer
+way for any fresh acquaintance to insure his taking violently against
+him, than to take the step of coming down upon him suddenly, and
+without appointment, or before a sufficient time had elapsed between the
+beginning of the friendship and the actual personal encounter, to admit
+of his forming preconceived ideas of the manner of man to expect. The
+agony he suffered upon the unexpected visit of even the most ardent of
+well-wishers could scarcely be realised at the moment, from the apparent
+ease, and assumed indifference of his outward bearing, and could only
+be known to those who were with him after the trying ordeal had
+been passed, or immediately before the threatened intrusion had been
+consummated.
+
+Early in our correspondence a friend of his, an art critic of
+distinction, visited Liverpool with the purpose of lecturing on the
+valuable examples of Byzantine art in the Eoyal Institution of that
+city. The lecture was, I fear, almost too good and quite too technical
+for some of the hearers, many of whom claim (and with reason) to be
+lovers of art, and cover the walls of their houses with beautiful
+representations of lovely landscape, but at the same time erect huge
+furnaces which emit vast volumes of black smoke such as prevent the sky
+of any Liverpool landscape being for an instant lovely. I doubt if the
+lecture could have been treated more popularly, but there was manifestly
+a lack of merited appreciation. The archaisms of some of the pictures
+chosen for illustration (early Byzantine examples exclusively) appeared
+to cause certain of the audience to smile at much of the lecturer’s
+enthusiasm. Fortunately the man chiefly concerned seemed unconscious of
+all this. And indeed, however he fared in public, in private he was only
+too “dreadfully attended.” After the lecture a good many folks gave him
+the benefit of their invaluable opinions on various art questions, and
+some, as was natural, made pitiful slips. I observed with secret and
+scarcely concealed satisfaction his courageous loyalty in defence of his
+friends, and his hitting out in their defence when he believed them to
+be assailed. One superlative intelligence, eager to do honour to the
+guest, yet ignorant of his claim to such honour, gave him a wonderfully
+facile and racy comment on the pre-Raphaelite painters, and, in
+particular, made the ridiculous blunder of a deliberate attack upon
+Rossetti, and then paused for breath and for the lecturer’s appreciative
+response; of course, Rossetti’s friend was not to be drawn into such
+disloyalty for an instant, even to avoid the risk of ruffling the
+plumage of the mightiest of the corporate cacklers. Rossetti had
+permitted me in his name to meet his friend, and in writing subsequently
+I alluded to the affection with which he had been mentioned, also to
+something that had been said of his immediate surroundings, and to that
+frank championing of his claims which I have just described. Rossetti’s
+reply to this is interesting as affording a pathetic view of his
+isolation of life and of the natural affectionateness of his nature:
+
+     I am very glad you were welcomed by dear staunch S------, as
+     I felt sure you would be. He holds the honourable position
+     of being almost the only living art-critic who has really
+     himself worked through the art-schools practically, and
+     learnt to draw and paint. He is one of my oldest and best
+     friends, of whom few can be numbered at my age, from causes
+     only too varying.
+
+          Go from me, summer friends, and tarry not,--
+          I am no summer friend, but wintry cold, etc.
+
+     So be it, as needs must be,--not for all, let us hope, and
+     not with all, as good S------ shews. I have not seen him
+     since his return. I wrote him a line to thank him for his
+     friendly reception of you, and he wrote in return to thank
+     me for your acquaintance, and spoke very pleasantly of you.
+     Your youth seems to have surprised him. I sent a letter of
+     his to your address. I hope you may see more of him. . . .
+     You mention something he said to you of me and my
+     surroundings. They are certainly _quiet_ enough as fax as
+     retirement goes, and I have often thought I should enjoy the
+     presence of a congenial and intellectual housefellow and
+     boardfellow in this big barn of mine, which is actually
+     going to rack and ruin for want of use. But where to find
+     the welcome, the willing, and the able combined in one? . . .
+     I was truly concerned to hear of the attack of ill-health
+     you have suffered from, though you do not tell me its exact
+     nature. I hope it was not accompanied by any such symptoms
+     as you mentioned before. . . . I myself have had similar
+     symptoms (though not so fully as you describe), and have
+     spat blood at intervals for years, but now think nothing of
+     it--nor indeed ever did,--waiting for further alarm signals
+     which never came.
+
+     . . . By-the-bye, I have since remembered that Burne Jones,
+     many years ago, had such an experience as you spoke of
+     before--quite as bad certainly. He was weak for some time
+     after, and has frequently been reminded in minor ways of it,
+     but seems now (at about forty-six or forty-seven) to be more
+     settled in health and stronger, perhaps, than ever
+     before.... Your letter holds out the welcome probability of
+     meeting you here ere long.
+
+This friendly solicitude regarding my health was excited by the
+revelation of what seemed to me at the time a startling occurrence, but
+has doubtless frequently happened to others, and has certainly
+since happened to myself without provoking quite so much outcry. The
+blood-spitting to which Rossetti here alleges he was liable was of
+a comparatively innocent nature. In later years he was assuredly not
+altogether a hero as to personal suffering, and I afterwards found that,
+upon the periodical recurrence of the symptom, he never failed to become
+convinced that he spat arterial blood, and that on each occasion he had
+received his death-warrant. Proof enough was adduced that the blood came
+from the minor vessels of the throat, and this was undoubtedly the case
+in the majority of instances, but whether the same explanation applied
+to one alarming occurrence which I shall now recount, seems to me
+uncertain.
+
+During the two or three weeks preceding our departure for Cumberland,
+in the autumn of 1881, during the time of our residence there and during
+the first few weeks after our return to London, Rossetti was afflicted
+by a violent cough. I noticed that it troubled him almost exclusively in
+the night-time, and after the taking of chloral; that it was sometimes
+attended by vomiting; and that it invariably shook his whole system
+so terribly as to leave him for a while entirely prostrate from sheer
+physical exhaustion. The spectacle was a painful one, and I watched
+closely its phenomena, with the result of convincing myself that
+whatever radical mischief lay at the root of it, the damage done was
+seriously augmented by a conscious giving way to it, induced, I thought,
+by hope of the relief it sometimes afforded the stomach to get rid of
+the nauseous drug at a moment of reduced digestive vitality. Then it
+became my fear that in these violent and prolonged retchings internal
+injury might be sustained, and so I begged him to try to restrain the
+tendency to cough so much and often. He took the remonstrance with great
+goodnature (observing that he perceived I thought he was putting it on),
+but I was not conscious that at any moment he acted upon my suggestion.
+At the time in question I was under the necessity of leaving him for
+a day or two every week in order to fulfil, a course of lecturing
+engagements at a distance; and upon my return in each instance I was
+told much of all that had happened to him in the interval. On one
+occasion, however, I was conscious that something had occurred of which
+he desired to make a disclosure, for amongst the gifts that Rossetti
+had not got was that of concealing from his intimate friends any event,
+however trifling, or however important, which weighed upon his mind.
+At length I begged him to say what had happened, whereupon, with great
+reluctance and many protestations of his intention to observe silence,
+and constant injunctions as to secrecy, he told me that during the night
+of my absence, in the midst of one of his bouts of coughing, he had
+discharged an enormous quantity of blood. “I know this is the final
+signal,” he said, “and I shall die.” I did my utmost to compose him
+by recounting afresh the personal incident hinted at, with many added
+features of (I trust) justifiable exaggeration, but it is hardly
+necessary to say that I did not hold the promise I gave him as to
+secrecy sufficiently sacred, or so exclusive, as to forbid my revealing
+the whole circumstance to his medical attendant. I may add that from
+that moment the cough entirely disappeared.
+
+To return from this reminiscence of a later period to the beginnings,
+three years earlier, of our correspondence, I will bring the present
+chapter to a close by quoting short passages from three letters written
+on the eve of my first visit to Rossetti, in 1880:
+
+     I will be truly glad to meet you when you come to town. You
+     will recognise the hole-and-cornerest of all existences; but
+     I’ll read you a ballad or two, and have Brown’s report to
+     back my certainty of liking you.... I would propose that you
+     should dine with me at 8.30 on the Monday of your visit, and
+     spend the evening.... Better come at 5.30 to 6 (if feasible
+     to you), that I may try to show you a picture by daylight...
+     Of course, when I speak of your dining with me, I mean tête-
+     à-tête, and without ceremony of any kind. I usually dine in
+     my studio, and in my painting coat. I judge this will reach
+     you in time for a note to reach _me_. Telegrams I hate. In
+     hope of the pleasure of a meeting, yours ever.
+
+How that “hole-and-cornerest of all existences” struck an ardent admirer
+of the poet-painter’s genius, and a devoted lover of his personal
+character, as then revealed to me, I hope to describe in a later section
+of this book. Meantime I must proceed to cull from the epistolary
+treasures I possess a number of interesting passages on literary
+subjects, called forth in the course of an intercourse which, at that
+stage, had few topics of a private nature to divert it from a channel
+of impersonal discussion. It is a fact that the letters written to me by
+Rossetti in the year 1880 deal so largely with literary affairs (chiefly
+of the past) as to be almost capable of _verbatim_ reproduction, even
+at the present short interval after his death. If they were to be
+reproduced, they would be found to cover two hundred pages of the
+present volume, and to be so easy, fluent, varied, and wholly felicitous
+as to style, and full of research and reflection as to substance, as
+probably to earn for the writer a foremost place for epistolary power.
+Indeed, I am not without hope that this accession of a fresh reputation
+may result even upon the excerpts I have decided to introduce.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+It was very natural that our earliest correspondence should deal chiefly
+with Rossetti’s own works, for those works gave rise to it. He sent me
+a copy of his translations from early Italian poets (_Dante and his
+Circle_), and a copy of his story, entitled _Hand and Soul_. In posting
+the latter, he said:
+
+     I don’t know if you ever saw a sort of story of mine called
+     _Hand and Soul_. I send you one with this, as printed to go
+     in my poems (though afterwards omitted, being, nevertheless,
+     more poem than story). I printed it since in the
+     _Fortnightly_--and, I believe, abolished one or two extra
+     sentimentalities. You may have seen it there. In case it’s
+     stale, I enclose with this a sonnet which _must_ be new, for
+     I only wrote it the other day.
+
+     I have already, in the proper place in this volume, said how
+     the story first struck me. Perhaps I had never before
+     reading it seen quite so clearly the complete mission as
+     well as enforced limitations of true art. All the many
+     subtle gradations in the development of purpose were there
+     beautifully pictured in a little creation that was charming
+     in the full sense of a word that has wellnigh lost its
+     charm. For all such as cried out against pursuits
+     originating in what Keats had christened “the infant chamber
+     of sensation,” and for all such as demanded that everything
+     we do should be done to “strengthen God among men,” the
+     story provided this answer: “When at any time hath He cried
+     unto thee, saying, ‘My son, lend me thy shoulder, for I
+     fall’?”
+
+     The sonnet sent, and spoken of as having just been written
+     (the letter bears post-mark February 1880), was the sonnet
+     on the sonnet. It is throughout beautiful and in two of its
+     lines (those depicting the dark wharf and the black Styx)
+     truly magnificent. It appears most to be valued, however, as
+     affording a clue to the attitude of mind adopted towards
+     this form of verse by the greatest master of it in modern
+     poetry. I think it is Mr. Pater who says that a fine poem in
+     manuscript carries an aroma with it, and a sensation of
+     music. I must have enjoyed the pleasure of such a presence
+     somewhat frequently about this period, for many of the poems
+     that afterwards found places in the second volume of ballads
+     and sonnets were sent to me from time to time.
+
+     I should like to know what were the three or four vols. on
+     Italian poetry which you mentioned in a former letter, and
+     which my book somewhat recalled to your mind. I was not
+     aware of any such extensive _English_ work on the subject.
+     Or do you perhaps mean Trucchi’s Italian _Dugento Poésie
+     inédite?_ I am sincerely delighted at your rare interest in
+     what I have sent you--both the translations, story, etc.--I
+     enclose three printed pieces meant for my volume but
+     omitted:--the ballad, because it deals trivially with a base
+     amour (it was written _very_ early) and is therefore really
+     reprehensible to some extent; the Shakspeare sonnet, because
+     of its incongruity with the rest of the poems, and also
+     because of the insult (however jocose) to the worshipful
+     body of tailors; and the political sonnet for reasons which
+     are plain enough, though the date at which I wrote it (not
+     without feeling) involves now a prophetic value. In a MS.
+     vol. I have a sonnet (1871) _After the German Subjugation of
+     France_, which enforces the prophecy by its fulfilment. In
+     this MS. vol. are a few pieces which were the only ones I
+     copied in doubt as to their admission when I printed the
+     poems, but none of which did I admit. One day I ‘ll send it
+     for you to look at. It contains a few sonnets bearing on
+     public matters, but only a few. Tell me what you think on
+     reading my things. All you said in your letter of this
+     morning was very grateful to me. I have a fair amount by me
+     in the way of later MS. which I may shew you some day when
+     we meet. Meanwhile I feel that your energies are already in
+     full swing--work coming on the heels of work--and that your
+     time cannot long be deferred as regards your place as a
+     writer.
+
+The ballad of which Rossetti here speaks as dealing trivially with a
+base amour is entitled _Dennis Shand_. Though an early work, it affords
+perhaps the best evidence extant of the poet’s grasp of the old ballad
+style: it runs easiest of all his ballads, and is in some respects his
+best. Mr. J. A. Symonds has, in my judgment, made the error of speaking
+of Rossetti as incapable of reproducing the real note of such ballads
+as _Chevy Chase_ and _Sir Patrick Spens_. Mr. Symonds was right in his
+eloquent comments (_Macmillan’s Magazine_, February 1882), so far as
+they concern the absence from _Rose Mary, The King’s Tragedy, and The
+White Ship_ of the sinewy simplicity of the old singers. But in those
+poems Rossetti attempted quite another thing. There is a development of
+the English ballad that is entirely of modern product, being far more
+complex than the primitive form, and getting rid to some extent of the
+out-worn notion of the ballad being actually sung to set music, but
+retaining enough of the sweep of a free rhythm to carry a sensible
+effect as of being chanted when read. This is a sort of ballad-romance,
+such as _Christabel_ and _The Lay of the Last Minstrel_; and this, and
+this only, was what Rossetti aimed after, and entirely compassed in his
+fine works just mentioned. But (as Rossetti himself remarked to me in
+conversation when I repeated Mr. Symonds’s criticism, and urged my own
+grounds of objection to it), that the poet was capable of the directness
+and simplicity which characterise the early ballad-writers, he had
+given proof in _The Staff and Scrip and Stratton Water. Dennis Shand_
+is valuable as evidence going in the same direction, but the author’s
+objection to it, on ethical grounds, must here prevail to withhold it
+from publication.
+
+The Shakspeare sonnet, spoken of in the letter as being withheld on
+account of its incongruity with the rest of the poems, was published
+in an early _Academy_, notwithstanding its jocose allusion to the
+worshipful body of tailors. As it is little known, and really very
+powerful in itself, and interesting as showing the author’s power over
+words in a new direction, I print it in this place.
+
+             ON THE SITE OF A MULBERRY TREE.
+
+     Planted by Wm. Shakspeare; felled by the Rev. F. Gastrell.
+     This tree, here fall’n, no common birth or death
+        Shared with its kind. The world’s enfranchised son,
+        Who found the trees of Life and Knowledge one,
+     Here set it, frailer than his laurel-wreath.
+
+     Shall not the wretch whose hand it fell beneath
+        Rank also singly--the supreme unhung?
+        Lo! Sheppard, Turpin, pleading with black tongue
+     This viler thief’s unsuffocated breath!
+
+     We ‘U search thy glossary, Shakspeare! whence almost,
+        And whence alone, some name shall be reveal’d
+          For this deaf drudge, to whom no length of ears
+          Sufficed to catch the music of the spheres;
+        Whose soul is carrion now,--too mean to yield
+     Some tailor’s ninth allotment of a ghost.
+
+                   Stratford-on-Avon.
+
+The other sonnets referred to, those, namely, on the _French Liberation
+of Italy_, and the _German Subjugation of France_, display all
+Rossetti’s mastery of craftsmanship. In strength of vision, in fertility
+of rhythmic resource, in pliant handling, these sonnets are, in my
+judgment, among the best written by the author; and if I do not quote
+them here, or altogether regret that they do not appear in the author’s
+works, it is not because I have any sense of their possibly offending
+against the delicate sensibilities of an age in which it seems necessary
+to hide out of sight whatever appears to impinge upon the domain of what
+is called our lower nature.
+
+The circumstance has hardly obtained even so much as a passing mention
+that Rossetti made certain very important additions to the ballad of
+_Sister Helen_, just before passing the old volume through the press
+afresh for publication, contemporaneously with the new book. The
+letters I am now to quote show the origin of those additions, and are
+interesting, as affording a view of the author’s estimate of the gain in
+respect of completeness of conception, and sterner tragic spirit which
+resulted upon their adoption.
+
+I was very glad to have the three articles together, including the one
+in which you have written on myself. Looking at this again, it seems to
+me you must possess the _best_ edition (the Tauchnitz, which has my last
+emendations). Otherwise I have been meaning all along to offer you a
+copy of this edition, as I have some. Who was your informant as to dates
+of the poems, etc.? They are not correct, yet show some inkling. _Jenny_
+(in a first form) was written almost as early as _The Blessed Damozel_,
+which I wrote (and have altered little since), when I was eighteen. It
+was first printed when I was twenty-one. Of the first _Jenny_, perhaps
+fifty lines survive here and there, but I felt it was quite beyond me
+then (a world I was then happy enough to be a stranger to), and later
+I re-wrote it completely. I will give you correct particulars at some
+time. _Sister Helen_, I may mention, was written either in 1851 or
+beginning of 1852, and was printed in something called _The Düsseldorf
+Annual_ {*} (published in Germany) in 1853; though since much revised
+in detail--not in the main. You will be horror-struck to hear that
+the first main addition to this poem was made by me only a few days
+ago!--eight stanzas (six together, and two scattered ones) involving
+a new incident!! Your hair is on end, I know, but if you heard the
+stanzas, they would smooth if not curl it. The gain is immense.
+
+     * In The Düsseldorf Annual the poem was signed H. H. H., and
+     in explanation of this signature Rossetti wrote on his own
+     copy the following characteristic note:--“The initials as
+     above were taken from the lead-pencil.”
+
+In reply to this I told Rossetti that, as a “jealous honourer” of his,
+I confessed to some uneasiness when I read that he had been making
+important additions to _Sister Helen_. That I could not think of a stage
+of the story that would bear so to be severed from what goes before or
+comes after it as to admit of interpolation might not of itself go for
+much; but the entire ballad was so rounded into unity, one incident so
+naturally begetting the next, and the combined incidents so properly
+building up a fabric of interest of which the meaning was all inwoven,
+that I could not but fear that whatever the gain in certain directions,
+the additions of any stanzas involving a new incident might, in
+some measure, cripple the rest. Even though the new stanzas were as
+beautiful, or yet more beautiful than the old ones, and the incident as
+impressive as any that goes before it, or comes after it, the gain to
+the poem as an individual creation was not, I thought, assured because
+people used to say my style was hard.
+
+Rossetti was mistaken in supposing that I possessed the latest and
+best edition of his _Poems_, but I had seen the latest of all English
+editions, and had noted in it several valuable emendations which, in
+subsequent quotation, I had been careful to employ. One of these seemed
+to me to involve an immeasurable gain. A stanza of _Sister Helen_, in
+its first form, ran:
+
+     Oh, the wind is sad in the iron chill,
+          Sister Helen,
+     And weary sad they look by the hill;
+     But Keith of Ewern ‘s sadder still,
+          Little brother.--etc. etc.
+
+In the later edition the fourth line of this stanza ran:
+
+     But he and I are sadder still.
+
+The change adds enormously to one’s estimate of the characterisation.
+All through the ballad one wants to feel that, despite the bitterness
+of her speech, the heart of the relentless witch is breaking. Like _The
+Broken Heart_ of Ford, the ballad with the amended line was a masterly
+picture of suppressed emotion. I hoped the new incident touched the same
+chord. Rossetti replied:
+
+     Thanks for your present letter, which I will answer with
+     pleasurable care. At present I send you the Tauchnitz
+     edition of my things. The bound copy is hideous, but more
+     convenient--the other pretty. You will find a good many
+     things bettered (I believe) even on the _latest_ English
+     edition. I did not remember that the line you quote from
+     _Sister Helen_ appeared in the new form at all in an English
+     issue. I am greatly pleased at your thinking it, as I do,
+     quite a transfiguring change... The next point I have marked
+     in your letter is that about the additions to _Sister
+     Helen_. Of course I knew that your hair must arise from your
+     scalp in protest. But what should you say if Keith of Ewern
+     were a three days’ bridegroom--if the spell had begun on the
+     wedding-morning--and if the bride herself became the last
+     pleader for mercy? I fancy you will see your way now. The
+     culminating, irresistible provocation helps, I think, to
+     humanize Helen, besides lifting the tragedy to a yet sterner
+     height.
+
+If I had felt (as Rossetti predicted I should) an uneasy sensation
+about the roots of the hair upon hearing that he was making important
+additions to the ballad which seemed to me to be the finest of his
+works, the sensation in that quarter was not less, but more, upon
+learning the nature of those additions. But I mistook the character of
+the new incidents. That Sister Helen should be herself the abandoned
+_bride_ of Ewern (for so I understood the poet’s explanation), and, as
+such, the last pleader for mercy, pointed, I thought, in the direction
+of the humanizing emendation (“But he and I are sadder still “)
+which had given me so much pleasure. That Keith of Ewern should be a
+three-days’ bridegroom, and that the spell should begin on the wedding
+morning, were incidents that seemed to intensify every line of the
+poem. In this view of Rossetti’s account of the additions, there were
+certainly difficulties out of which I could see no way, but I seemed
+to realise that Helen’s hate, like Macbeth’s ambition, had overleaped
+itself, and fallen on the other side, and that she would undo her work,
+if to return were not harder than to go on; her initiate sensibility had
+gained hard use, but even as hate recoils on love, so out of the ashes
+of hate love had arisen. In this view of the characterisation of Helen,
+the parallel with Macbeth struck me more and more as I thought of it.
+When Macbeth kills Duncan, and hears the grooms of the chamber cry in
+their sleep--“God bless us,” he cannot say “Amen,”
+
+     I had most need of blessing, and Amen
+     Stuck in my throat.
+
+Helen pleading too late for mercy against the potency of the spell she
+herself had raised, seemed to me an incident that raised her to the
+utmost height of tragic creation. But Rossetti’s purpose was at once
+less ambitious and more satisfying.
+
+     Your passage as to the changes in _Sister Helen_ could not
+     well (with all its fine suggestiveness) be likely to meet
+     exactly a reality which had not been submitted to your eye
+     in the verses themselves. It is the _bride of Keith_ who is
+     the last pleader--as vainly as the others, and with a yet
+     more exulting development of vengeance in the forsaken
+     witch. The only acknowledgment by her of a mutual misery is
+     still found in the line you spotted as so great a gain
+     before, and in the last line she speaks. I ought to have
+     sent the stanzas to explain them properly, but have some
+     reluctance to ventilate them at present, much as I should
+     like the opportunity of reading them to you. They will meet
+     your eye in due course, and I am sure of your approval also
+     as regards their value to the ballad.... Don’t let the
+     changes in _Helen_ get wind overmuch. I want them to be new
+     when published. Answer this when you can. I like getting
+     your epistles.
+
+The fresh stanzas in question, which had already obtained the suffrages
+of his brother, of Mr. Bell Scott, and other qualified critics, were
+subsequently sent to me. They are as follows. After Keith of Keith,
+the father of Sister Helen’s sometime lover, has pleaded for his son in
+vain, the last suppliant to arrive is his son’s bride:
+
+     A lady here, by a dark steed brought,
+          Sister Helen,
+     So darkly clad I saw her not.
+     “See her now or never see aught,
+          Little brother!”
+           (_O Mother, Mary Mother_,
+     _Whit more to see, between Hell and Heaven?_)
+
+     “Her hood falls back, and the moon shines fair,
+          Sister Helen,
+     On the Lady of Ewern’s golden hair.”
+      “Blest hour of my power and her despair,
+          Little brother!”
+           (O Mother, Mary Mother,
+     Hour blest and bann’d, between Hell and Heaven!)
+
+     “Pale, pale her cheeks, that in pride did glow,
+          Sister Helen,
+     ‘Neath the bridal-wreath three days ago.”
+      “One morn for pride and three days for woe,
+          Little brother!”
+           (O Mother, Mary Mother,
+     Three days, three nights, between Hell and Heaven!)
+
+     “Her clasp’d hands stretch from her bending head,
+          Sister Helen;
+     With the loud wind’s wail her sobs are wed.”
+      “What wedding-strains hath her bridal bed,
+          Little brother?”
+           (O Mother, Mary Mother,
+     What strain but death’s, between Hell and Heaven?)
+
+     “She may not speak, she sinks in a swoon,
+          Sister Helen,--
+     She lifts her lips and gasps on the moon.”
+      “Oh! might I but hear her soul’s blithe tune,
+          Little brother!”
+           (O Mother, Mary Mother,
+     Her woe’s dumb cry, between Hell and Heaven!)
+
+     “They’ve caught her to Westholm’s saddle-bow,
+     Sister Helen,
+     And her moonlit hair gleams white in its flow.”
+      “Let it turn whiter than winter snow,
+          Little brother!”
+           (O Mother, Mary Mother,
+     Woe-withered gold, between Hell and Heaven!)
+
+Besides these there are two new stanzas, one going before, and the other
+following after, the six stanzas quoted, but as the scattered passages
+involve no farther incident, and are rather of interest as explaining
+and perfecting the idea here expressed, than valuable in themselves, I
+do not reprint them.
+
+I think it must be allowed, by fit judges, that nothing more subtly
+conceived than this incident can be met with in English poetry, though
+something akin to it was projected by Coleridge in an episode of his
+contemplated _Michael Scott_. It is--in the full sense of an abused
+epithet--too weird to be called picturesque. But the crowning merit of
+the poem still lies, as I have said, in the domain of character. Through
+all the outbursts of her ignescent hate Sister Helen can never lose the
+ineradicable relics of her human love:
+
+          But he and I are sadder still.
+
+As Rossetti from time to time made changes in his poems, he transcribed
+the amended verses in a copy of the Tauchnitz edition which he kept
+constantly by him. Upon reference to this little volume some days after
+his death, I discovered that he had prefaced _Sister Helen_ with a
+note written in pencil, of which he had given me the substance in
+conversation about the time of the publication of the altered version,
+but which he abandoned while passing the book through the press. The
+note (evidently designed to precede the ballad) runs:
+
+     It is not unlikely that some may be offended at seeing the
+     additions made thus late to the ballad of _S. H._ My best
+     excuse is that I believe some will wonder with myself that
+     such a climax did not enter into the first conception.
+
+At the foot of the poem this further note is written:
+
+     I wrote this ballad either in 1851 or early in 1852. It was
+     printed in a thing called _The Düsseldorf Annual_ in (I
+     think) 1853--published in Germany. {*}
+
+     * In the same private copy of the Poems the following
+     explanatory passage was written over the much-discussed
+     sonnet, entitled, The Monochord:--“That sublimated mood of
+     the soul in which a separate essence of itself seems as it
+     were to oversoar and survey it.” Neither the style nor the
+     substance is characteristic of Rossetti, and though I do not
+     at the moment remember to have met with the passage
+     elsewhere, I doubt not it is a quotation. That quotation
+     marks are employed is not in itself evidence of much moment,
+     for Rossetti had Coleridge’s enjoyment of a literary
+     practical joke, and on one occasion prefixed to a story in
+     manuscript a long passage on noses purporting to be from
+     Tristram Shandy, but which is certainly not discoverable in
+     Sterne’s story.
+
+The next letter I shall quote appears to explain itself:
+
+     There is a last point in your long letter which I have not
+     noticed, though it interested me much: viz., what you say of
+     your lecture on my poetry; your idea of possibly returning
+     to and enlarging it would, if carried out, be welcome to me.
+     I suppose ere long I must get together such additional work
+     as I have to show--probably a good deal added to the old
+     vol. (which has been for some time out of print) and one
+     longer poem by itself. _The House of Life_, when next
+     issued, will I trust be doubled in number of sonnets; it is
+     nearly so already. Your writing that essay in one day, and
+     the information as to subsequent additions, I noted, and
+     should like to see the passage on _Jenny_ which you have not
+     yet used, if extant. The time taken in composition reminds
+     me of the fact (so long ago!) that I wrote the tale of _Hand
+     and Soul_ (with the exception of an opening page or two) all
+     in one night in December 1849, beginning I suppose about 2
+     A.M. and ending about 7. In such a case a landscape and sky
+     all unsurmised open gradually in the mind--a sort of
+     spiritual _Turner_, among whose hills one ranges and in
+     whose waters one strikes out at unknown liberty; but I have
+     found this only in nightlong work, which I have seldom
+     attempted, for it leaves one entirely broken, and this state
+     was mine when I described the like of it at the close of the
+     story, ah! once again, how long ago! I have thought of
+     including this story in next issue of poems, but am
+     uncertain. What think you?
+
+It seemed certain that _Hand and Soul_ ought not to continue to lie in
+the back numbers, of a magazine. The story, being more poem than aught
+else, might properly lay claim to a place in any fresh collection of
+the author’s works. I could see no natural objection on the score of
+its being written in prose. As Coleridge and Wordsworth both aptly said,
+prose is not the antithesis of poetry; science and poetry may stand
+over-against each other, as Keats implied by his famous toast:
+“Confusion to the man who took the poetry out of the moon,” but prose
+and poetry surely are or may be practically one. We know that in
+rhythmic flow they sometimes come very close together, and nowhere
+closer than in the heightened prose and the poetry of Rossetti. Poetic
+prose may not be the best prose, just as (to use a false antithesis)
+dull poetry is called prosaic; but there is no natural antagonism
+between prose and verse as literary mediums, provided always that the
+spirit that animates them be akin. Rossetti himself constantly urged
+that in prose the first necessity was that it should be direct, and he
+knew no reproach of poetry more damning than to say it was written in
+proseman’s diction. This was the key to his depreciation of Wordsworth,
+and doubtless it was this that ultimately operated with him to exclude
+the story from his published works. I took another view, and did not
+see that an accidental difference of outward form ought to prevent his
+uniting within single book-covers productions that had so much of their
+essential spirit in common. Unlike the Chinese, we do not read by sight
+only, and there is in the story such richness, freshness, and variety
+of cadence, as appeal to the ear also. Prose may be the lowest order
+of rhythmic composition, but we know it is capable of such purity,
+sweetness, strength, and elasticity, as entitle it to a place as a
+sister art with poetry. Milton, however, although he wrote the noblest
+of English prose, seemed more than half ashamed of it, as of a kind of
+left-handed performance. Goethe and Wordsworth, on the other hand, not
+to speak of Coleridge and Shelley (or yet of Keats, whose letters are
+among the very best examples extant of the English epistolary style),
+wrote prose of wonderful beauty and were not ashamed of it. In Milton’s
+case the subjects, I imagine, were to blame for his indifference to his
+achievements in prose, for not even the Westminster Convention, or
+the divorce topics of _Tetrachordon_, or yet the liberty of the press,
+albeit raised to a level of philosophic first principles, were quite up
+to those fixed stars of sublimity about which it was Milton’s pleasure
+to revolve. _Hand and Soul_ is in faultless harmony with Rossetti’s work
+in verse, because distinguished by the same strength of imagination.
+That it was written in a single night seems extraordinary when viewed
+in relation to its sustained beauty; but it is done in a breath, and has
+all the excellencies of fervour and force that result upon that method
+of composition only.
+
+A year or two later than the date of the correspondence with which I am
+now dealing, Rossetti read aloud a fragment of a story written about
+the period of _Hand and Soul_. It was to be entitled _St. Agnes of
+Intercession_, and it dealt in a mystic way with the doctrine of the
+transmigration of souls. He constantly expressed his intention of
+finishing the story, and said that, although in its existing condition
+it was fully as long as the companion story, it would require twice as
+much more to complete it. During the time of our stay at Birchington, at
+the beginning of 1882, he seemed anxious to get to work upon it, and had
+the manuscript sent down from London for that purpose; but the packet
+lay unopened until after his death, when I glanced at it again
+to refresh my memory as to its contents. The fragment is much too
+inconclusive as to design to admit of any satisfying account of its
+plot, of which there is more, than in _Hand and Soul_. As far as it
+goes, it is the story of a young English painter who becomes the victim
+of a conviction that his soul has had a prior existence in this world.
+The hallucination takes entire possession of him, and so unsettles
+his life that he leaves England in search of relic or evidence of his
+spiritual “double.” Finally, in a picture-gallery abroad, he comes face
+to face with a portrait which’ he instantly recognises as the portrait
+of himself, both as he is now and as he was in the time of his
+antecedent existence. Upon inquiry, the portrait proves to be that of a
+distinguished painter centuries dead, whose work had long been the young
+Englishman’s guiding beacon in methods of art. Startled beyond measure
+at the singular discovery of a coincidence which, superstition apart,
+might well astonish the most unsentimental, he sickens to a fever. Here
+the fragment ends. Late one evening, in August 1881, Rossetti gave me
+a full account of the remaining incidents, but I find myself without
+memoranda of what was said (it was never my habit to keep record of his
+or of any man’s conversation), and my recollection of what passed is
+too indefinite in some salient particulars to make it safe to attempt
+to complete the outlines of the story. I consider the fragment in all
+respects finer than _Hand and Soul_, and the passage descriptive of the
+artist’s identification of his own personality in the portrait on
+the walls of the gallery among the very finest pieces of picturesque,
+impassioned, and dramatic writing that Rossetti ever achieved. On one
+occasion I remarked incidentally upon something he had said of his
+enjoyment of rivers of morning air {*} in the spring of the year, that
+it would be an inquiry fraught with a curious interest to find out how
+many of those who have the greatest love of the Spring were born in it.
+
+     * Within the period of my personal knowledge of Rossetti’s
+     habits, he certainly never enjoyed any “rivers of morning
+     air” at all, unless they were such as visited him in a
+     darkened bedchamber.
+
+One felt that one could name a goodly number among the English poets
+living and dead. It would be an inquiry, as Hamlet might say, such as
+would become a woman. To this Rossetti answered that he was born on old
+May-day (May 12), 1828; and thereupon he asked the date of my own birth.
+
+     The comparative dates of our births are curious.... I myself
+     was born on old May-Day (12th), in the year (1828) after
+     that in which Blake died.... You were born, in fact, just as
+     I was giving up poetry at about 25, on finding that it
+     impeded attention to what constituted another aim and a
+     livelihood into the bargain, _i.e._ painting. From that date
+     up to the year when I published my poems, I wrote extremely
+     little,--I might almost say nothing, except the renovated
+     _Jenny_ in 1858 or ‘59. To this again I added a passage or
+     two when publishing in 1870.
+
+Often since Rossetti’s death I have reflected upon the fact that in that
+lengthy correspondence between us which preceded personal intimacy,
+he never made more than a single passing allusion to those adverse
+criticisms which did so much at one period to sadden and alter his life.
+Barely, indeed, in conversation did he touch upon that sore subject, but
+it was obvious enough to the closer observer, as well from his silence
+as from his speech, that though the wounds no longer rankled, they
+did not wholly heal. I take it as evidence of his desire to put by
+unpleasant reflections (at least whilst health was whole with him, for
+he too often nourished melancholy retrospects when health was broken
+or uncertain), that in his correspondence with me, as a young friend
+who knew nothing at first hand of his gloomier side, he constantly dwelt
+with radiant satisfaction and hopefulness on the friendly words that had
+been said of him. And as frequently as he called my attention to such
+favourable comment, he did so without a particle of vanity, and with
+only such joy as he may feel who knows in his secret heart he has
+depreciators, to find that he has ardent upholders too. In one letter he
+says:
+
+I should say that between the appearance of the poems and your lecture,
+there was one article on the subject, of a very masterly kind indeed,
+by some very scholarly hand (unknown to me), in the _New York Catholic
+World_ (I think in 1874). I retain this article, and will some day send
+it you to read.
+
+He sent me the article, and I found it, as he had found it, among the
+best things written on the subject. Naturally, the criticism was best
+where the subject dealt with impinged most upon the spirit of mediæval
+Catholicism. Perhaps Catholicism is itself essentially mediæval, and
+perhaps a man cannot possibly be, what the _Catholic World_ article
+called Rossetti, a “mediæval artist heart and soul,” without partaking
+of a strong religious feeling that is primarily Catholic--so much were
+the religion and art of the middle ages knit each to each. Yet, upon
+reading the article, I doubted one of the writer’s inferences, namely,
+that Rossetti had inherited a Catholic devotion to the Madonna. Not his
+_Ave_ only seemed to me to live in an atmosphere of tender and sensitive
+devotion, but I missed altogether in it, as in other poems of Rossetti,
+that old, continual, and indispensable Catholic note of mystic Divine
+love lost in love of humanity which, I suppose, Mr. Arnold would call
+anthropomorphism. Years later, when I came to know Rossetti personally,
+I perceived that the writer of the article in question had not made
+a bad shot for the truth. True it was, that he had inherited a strong
+religious spirit--such as could only be called Catholic--inherited
+I say, for, though from his immediate parents, he assuredly did not
+inherit any devotion to the Madonna, his own submission to religious
+influences was too unreasoning and unquestioning to be anything but
+intuitive. Despite some worldly-mindedness, and a certain shrewdness in
+the management of the more important affairs of daily life, Rossetti’s
+attitude towards spiritual things was exactly the reverse of what we
+call Protestant. During the last months of his life, when the prospect
+of leaving the world soon, and perhaps suddenly, impressed upon his
+mind a deep sense of his religious position, he yielded himself up
+unhesitatingly to the intuitive influences I speak of; and so far from
+being touched by the interminable controversies which have for ages been
+upsetting and uprearing creeds, he seemed both naturally incapable of
+comprehending differences of belief, and unwilling to dwell upon them
+for an instant. Indeed, he constantly impressed me during the last days
+of his life with the conviction, that he was by religious bias of nature
+a monk of the middle ages.
+
+As to the article in _The Catholic Magazine_ I thought I perceived from
+a curious habit of biblical quotation that it must have been written by
+an Ecclesiastic. A remark in it to the effect that old age is usually
+more indulgent than middle life to the work of first manhood, and that,
+consequently, Rossetti would be a less censorious judge of his early
+efforts at a later period of life, seemed to show that the writer
+himself was no longer a young man. Further, I seemed to see that the
+reviewer was not a professional critic, for his work displayed few of
+the well-recognised trade-marks with which the articles of the literary
+market are invariably branded. As a small matter one noticed the
+somewhat slovenly use of the editorial _we_, which at the fag-end of
+passages sometimes dropped into _I_. [Upon my remarking upon this to
+Rossetti he remembered incidentally that a similar confounding of
+the singular and plural number of the pronoun produces marvellously
+suggestive effects in a very different work, _Macbeth_, where the kingly
+_we_ is tripped up by the guilty _I_ in many places.] Rossetti wrote:
+
+I am glad you liked the _Catholic World_ article, which I certainly view
+as one of rare literary quality. I have not the least idea who is the
+writer, but am sorry now I never wrote to him under cover of the editor
+when I received it. I did send the _Dante and Circle_, but don’t know
+if it was ever received or reviewed. As you have the vols, of
+_Fortnightly_, look up a little poem of mine called the _Cloud
+Confines_, a few months later, I suppose, than the tale. It is one of my
+favourites, among my own doings.
+
+I noticed at this early period, as well as later, that in Rossetti’s
+eyes a favourable review was always enhanced in value if the writer
+happened to be a stranger to him; and I constantly protested that a
+friend’s knowledge of one’s work and sympathy with it ought not to be
+less delightful, as such, than a stranger’s, however less surprising,
+though at the same time the tribute that is true to one’s art without
+auxiliary aids being brought to bear in its formation must be at once
+the most satisfying assurance of the purity, strength, and completeness
+of the art itself, and of the safe and enduring quality of the
+appreciation. It is true that friends who are accustomed to our habit of
+thought and manner of expression sometimes catch our meaning before we
+have expressed it Not rarely, before our thought has reached that stage
+at which it becomes intelligible to a stranger, a word, a look, or a
+gesture will convey it perfectly and fully to a friend. And what goes on
+between minds that exist in more or less intimate communion, goes on
+to a greater degree within the individual mind where the metaphysical
+equivalents to a word or a look answer to, and are answered by, the
+half-realised conception. Hence it often happens that even where our
+touch seems to ourselves delicate and precise, a mind not initiated
+in our self-chosen method of abbreviation finds only impenetrable
+obscurity. It is then in the tentative condition of mind just indicated
+that the spirit of art comes in, and enables a man so to clothe his
+thought in lucid words and fitting imagery that strangers may know, when
+they see it, all that it is, and how he came by it. Although, therefore,
+the praise of friends should not be less delightful, as praise, than
+that tendered by strangers, there is an added element of surprise and
+satisfaction in the latter which the former cannot bring. Rossetti
+certainly never over-valued the applause of his own immediate circle,
+but still no man was more sensible of the value of the good opinion of
+one or two of his immediate friends. Returning to the correspondence, he
+says:
+
+     In what I wrote as to critiques on my poems, I meant to
+     express _special_ gratification from those written by
+     strangers to myself and yet showing full knowledge of the
+     subject and full sympathy with it. Such were Formans at the
+     time, the American one since (and far from alone in America,
+     but this the best) and more lately your own. Other known and
+     unknown critics of course wrote on the book when it
+     appeared, some very favourably and others _quite_
+     sufficiently abusive.
+
+As to _Cloud Confines_, I told Rossetti that I considered it in
+philosophic grasp the most powerful of his productions, and interesting
+as being (unlike the body of his works) more nearly akin to the spirit
+of music than that of painting.
+
+     By the bye, you are right about _Cloud Confines_, which _is_
+     my very best thing--only, having been foolishly sent to a
+     magazine, no notice whatever resulted.
+
+Rossetti was not always open to suggestions as to the need of clarifying
+obscure phrases in his verses, but on one or two occasions, when I was
+so bold as to hint at changes, I found him in highly tractable moods.
+I called his attention to what I imagined might prove to be merely a
+printer’s slip in his poem (a great favourite of mine) entitled _The
+Portrait_. The second stanza ran:
+
+     Yet this, of all love’s perfect prize,
+     Remains; save what in mournful guise
+     Takes counsel with my soul alone,--
+     Save what is secret and unknown,
+     Below the earth, above the sky.
+
+The words “yet” and “save” seemed to me (and to another friend) somewhat
+puzzling, and I asked if “but” in the sense of _only_ had been meant. He
+wrote:
+
+     That is a very just remark of yours about the passage in
+     _Portrait_ beginning _yet_. I meant to infer _yet only_, but
+     it certainly is truncated. I shall change the line to
+
+          Yet only this, of love’s whole prize,
+          Remains, etc.
+
+     But would again be dubious though explicable. Thanks for the
+     hint.... I shall be much obliged to you for any such hints
+     of a verbal nature.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+The letters printed in the foregoing chapter are valuable as settling
+at first-hand all question of the chronology of the poems of Rossetti’s
+volume of 1870. The poems of the volume of 1881 (Rose Mary and certain
+of the sonnets excepted) grew under his hand during the period of my
+acquaintance with him, and their origin I shall in due course record.
+The two preceding chapters have been for the most part devoted to such
+letters (and such explanatory matter as must needs accompany them) as
+concern principally, perhaps, the poet and his correspondent; but I
+have thrown into two further chapters a great body of highly interesting
+letters on subjects of general literary interest (embracing the fullest
+statement yet published of Rossetti’s critical opinions), and have
+reserved for a more advanced section of the work a body of further
+letters on sonnet literature which arose out of the discussion of an
+anthology that I was at the time engaged in compiling.
+
+It was very natural that Coleridge should prove to be one of the first
+subjects discussed by Rossetti, who admired him greatly, and when it
+transpired that Coleridge was, perhaps, my own chief idol, and that
+whilst even yet a child I had perused and reperused not only his poetry
+but even his mystical philosophy (impalpable or obscure even to his
+maturer and more enlightened, if no more zealous, admirers), the
+disposition to write upon him became great upon both sides. “You can
+never say too much about Coleridge for me,” Rossetti would write, “for
+I worship him on the right side of idolatry, and I perceive you know
+him well.” Upon this one of my first remarks was that there was much in
+Coleridge’s higher descriptive verse equivalent to the landscape art
+of Turner. The critical parallel Rossetti warmly approved of, adding,
+however, that Coleridge, at his best as a pictorial artist, was a
+spiritualised Turner. He instanced his,
+
+     We listened and looked sideways up,
+     The moving moon went up the sky
+     And no where did abide,
+     Softly she was going up,
+     And a star or two beside--
+     The charmed water burnt alway
+     A still and awful red.
+
+I remarked that Shelley possessed the same power of impregnating
+landscape with spiritual feeling, and this Rossetti readily allowed;
+but when I proceeded to say that Wordsworth sometimes, though rarely,
+displayed a power akin to it, I found him less warmly responsive. “I
+grudge Wordsworth every vote he gets,” {*} Rossetti frequently said to
+me, both in writing, and afterwards in conversation. “The three
+greatest English imaginations,” he would sometimes add, “are Shakspeare,
+Coleridge, and Shelley.” I have heard him give a fourth name, Blake.
+
+     * There is a story frequently told of how, seeing two camels
+     walking together in the Zoological Gardens, keeping step in
+     a shambling way, and conversing with one another, Rossetti
+     exclaimed: “There’s Wordsworth and Ruskin virtuously taking
+     a walk!”
+
+He thought Wordsworth was too much the High Priest of Nature to be
+her lover: too much concerned to transfigure into poetry his
+pantheo-Christian philosophy regarding Nature, to drop to his knees in
+simple love of her to thank God that she was beautiful. It was hard to
+side with Rossetti in his view of Wordsworth, partly because one feared
+he did not practise the patience necessary to a full appreciation of
+that poet, and was consequently apt to judge of him by fugitive lines
+read at random. In the connection in question, I instanced the lines
+(much admired by Coleridge) beginning
+
+     Suck, little babe, O suck again!
+     It cools my blood, it cools my brain,
+
+and ending--
+
+     The breeze I see is in the tree,
+     It comes to cool my babe and me.
+
+But Rossetti would not see that this last couplet denoted the point of
+artistic vision at which the poet of nature identified himself with her,
+in setting aside or superseding all proprieties of mere speech. To him
+Wordsworth’s Idealism (which certainly had the German trick of keeping
+close to the ground) only meant us to understand that the forsaken
+woman through whose mouth the words are spoken (in _The Affliction of
+Margaret_ ------ of ------) saw _the breeze shake the tree_ afar off.
+And this attitude towards Wordsworth Rossetti maintained down to the
+end. I remember that sometime in March of the year in which he died, Mr.
+Theodore Watts, who was paying one of his many visits to see him in his
+last illness at the sea-side, touched, in conversation, upon the power
+of Wordsworth’s style in its higher vein, and instanced a noble passage
+in the _Ode to Duty_, which runs:
+
+     Stern Lawgiver! yet thou dost wear
+     The Godhead’s most benignant grace;
+     Nor know we anything so fair
+     As is the smile upon thy face;
+     Flowers laugh before thee on their beds;
+     And fragrance in thy footing treads;
+     Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong;
+     And the most ancient heavens, through Thee, are
+               fresh and strong.
+
+Mr. Watts spoke with enthusiasm of the strength and simplicity, the
+sonorousness and stately march of these lines; and numbered them, I
+think, among the noblest verses yet written, for every highest quality
+of style.
+
+But Rossetti was unyielding, and though he admitted the beauty of the
+passage, and was ungrudging in his tribute to another passage which I
+had instanced--
+
+          O joy that in our embers--
+
+he would not allow that Wordsworth ever possessed a grasp of the
+great style, or that (despite the Ode on Immortality and the sonnet on
+_Toussaint L’Ouverture_, which he placed at the head of the poet’s work)
+vital lyric impulse was ever fully developed in his muse. He said:
+
+     As to Wordsworth, no one regards the great Ode with more
+     special and unique homage than I do, as a thing absolutely
+     alone of its kind among all greatest things. I cannot say
+     that anything else of his with which I have ever been
+     familiar (and I suffer from long disuse of all familiarity
+     with him) seems at all on a level with this.
+
+In all humility I regard his depreciatory opinion, not at all as a
+valuable example of literary judgment, but as indicative of a clear
+radical difference of poetic bias between the two poets, such as must
+in the same way have made Wordsworth resist Rossetti if he had appeared
+before him. I am the more confirmed in this view from the circumstance
+that Rossetti, throughout the period of my acquaintance with him, seemed
+to me always peculiarly and, if I may be permitted to say so without
+offence, strangely liable to Mr. Watts’s influence in his critical
+estimates, and that the case instanced was perhaps the only one in
+which I knew him to resist Mr. Watts’s opinion upon a matter of poetical
+criticism, which he considered to be almost final, as his letters to
+me, printed in Chapter VIII. of this volume, will show. I had a striking
+instance of this, and of the real modesty of the man whom I had heard
+and still hear spoken of as the most arrogant man of genius of his
+day, on one of the first occasions of my seeing him. He read out to me
+an additional stanza to the beautiful poem _Cloud Confines_: As he
+read it, I thought it very fine, and he evidently was very fond of it
+himself. But he surprised me by saying that he should not print it. On
+my asking him why, he said:
+
+“Watts, though he admits its beauty, thinks the poem would be better
+without it.”
+
+“Well, but you like it yourself,” said I.
+
+“Yes,” he replied; “but in a question of gain or loss to a poem, I feel
+that Watts must be right.”
+
+And the poem appeared in _Ballads and Sonnets_ without the stanza in
+question. The same thing occurred with regard to the omission of the
+sonnet _Nuptial Sleep_ from the new edition of the Poems in 1881. Mr.
+Watts took the view (to Rossetti’s great vexation at first) that this
+sonnet, howsoever perfect in structure and beautiful from the artistic
+point of view, was “out of place and altogether incongruous in a group
+of sonnets so entirely spiritual as _The House of Life_,” and Rossetti
+gave way: but upon the subject of Wordsworth in his relations to
+Coleridge, Keats, and Shelley, he was quite inflexible to the last.
+
+In a letter treating of other matters, Rossetti asked me if I thought
+“Christabel” really existed as a mediæval name, or existed at all
+earlier than Coleridge. I replied that I had not met with it earlier
+than the date of the poem. I thought Coleridge’s granddaughter must
+have been the first person to bear the name. The other names in the poem
+appear to belong to another family of names,--names with a different
+origin and range of expression,--Leoline, Géraldine, Roland, and most
+of all Bracy. It seemed to me very possible that Coleridge invented
+the name, but it was highly probable that he brought it to England from
+Germany, where, with Wordsworth, he visited Klopstock in 1798, about
+the period of the first part of the poem. The Germans have names of a
+kindred etymology and, even if my guess proved wide of the truth,
+it might still be a fact that the name had German relations. Another
+conjecture that seemed to me a reasonable one was that Coleridge evolved
+the name out of the incidents of the opening passages of the poem.
+The beautiful thing, not more from its beauty than its suggestiveness,
+suited his purpose exactly. Rossetti replied:
+
+     Resuming the thread of my letter, I come to the question of
+     the name Christabel, viz.:--as to whether it is to be found
+     earlier than Coleridge. I have now realized afresh what I
+     knew long ago, viz.:--that in the grossly garbled ballad of
+     _Syr Cauline_, in Percy’s _Reliques_, there is a Ladye
+     Chrystabelle, but as every stanza in which her name appears
+     would seem certainly to be Percy’s own work, I suspect him
+     to be the inventor of the name, which is assuredly a much
+     better invention than any of the stanzas; and from this
+     wretched source Coleridge probably enriched the sphere of
+     symbolic nomenclature. However, a genuine source may turn
+     up, but the name does not sound to me like a real one. As to
+     a German origin, I do not know that language, but would not
+     the second syllable be there the one accented? This seems to
+     render the name shapeless and improbable.
+
+I mentioned an idea that once possessed me despotically. It was that
+where Coleridge says
+
+     Her silken robe and inner vest
+     Dropt to her feet, and full in view
+     Behold! her bosom and half her side--
+     A sight to dream of and not to tell,. . .
+     Shield the Lady Christabel!
+
+he meant ultimately to show _eyes_ in the _bosom_ of the witch. I
+fancied that if the poet had worked out this idea in the second part,
+or in his never-compassed continuation, he must have electrified his
+readers. The first part of the poem is of course immeasurably superior
+in witchery to the second, despite two grand things in the latter--the
+passage on the severance of early friendships, and the conclusion;
+although the dexterity of hand (not to speak of the essential spirit of
+enchantment) which is everywhere present in the first part, and nowhere
+dominant in the second, exhibits itself not a little in the marvellous
+passage in which Géraldine bewitches Christabel. Touching some jocose
+allusion by Rossetti to the necessity which lay upon me to startle
+the world with a continuation of the poem based upon the lines of my
+conjectural scheme, I asked him if he knew that a continuation was
+actually published in Coleridge’s own paper, _The Morning Post_. It
+appeared about 1820, and was satirical of course--hitting off many
+peculiarities of versification, if no more. With Coleridge’s playful
+love of satirising himself anonymously, the continuation might even be
+his own. Rossetti said:
+
+     I do not understand your early idea of _eyes_ in the bosom
+     of Géraldine. It is described as “that bosom old,” “that
+     bosom cold,” which seems to show that its withered character
+     as combined with Geraldine’s youth, was what shocked and
+     warned Christabel. The first edition says--
+
+          A sight to dream of, not to tell:--
+          And she is to sleep with Christabel!
+
+     I dare say Coleridge altered this, because an idea arose,
+     which I actually heard to have been reported as Coleridge’s
+     real intention by a member of contemporary circles (P. G.
+     Patmore, father of Coventry P. who conveyed the report to
+     me)--viz., that Géraldine was to turn out to be a man!! I
+     believe myself that the conclusion as given by Gillman from
+     Coleridge’s account to him is correct enough, only not
+     picturesquely worded. It does not seem a bad conclusion by
+     any means, though it would require fine treatment to make it
+     seem a really good one. Of course the first part is so
+     immeasurably beyond the second, that one feels Chas. Lamb’s
+     view was right, and it should have been abandoned at that
+     point. The passage on sundered friendship is one of the
+     masterpieces of the language, but no doubt was written quite
+     separately and then fitted into _Christabel_. The two lines
+     about Roland and Sir Leoline are simply an intrusion and an
+     outrage. I cannot say that I like the conclusion nearly so
+     well as this. It hints at infinite beauty, but somehow
+     remains a sort of cobweb. The conception, and partly the
+     execution, of the passage in which Christabel repeats by
+     fascination the serpent-glance of Géraldine, is magnificent;
+     but that is the only good narrative passage in part two. The
+     rest seems to have reached a fatal facility of jingling, at
+     the heels whereof followed Scott.
+
+There are, I believe, many continuations of _Christabel_. Tupper did
+one! I myself saw a continuation in childhood, long before I saw the
+original, and was all agog to see it for years. Our household was all of
+Italian, not English environment, and it was only when I went to school
+later that I began to ransack bookstalls. The continuation in question
+was by one Eliza Stewart, and appeared in a shortlived monthly thing
+called _Smallwood’s Magazine_, to which my father contributed
+some Italian poetry, and so it came into the house. I thought the
+continuation spirited then, and perhaps it may have been so. This must
+have been before 1840 I think.
+
+The other day I saw in a bookseller’s catalogue--_Christabess_, by S. T.
+Colebritche, translated from the Doggrel by Sir Vinegar Sponge (1816).
+This seems a parody, not a continuation, in the very year of the poem’s
+first appearance! I did not think it worth two shillings,--which was the
+price.... Have you seen the continuation of _Christabel_ in _European
+Magazine?_ of course it _might_ have been Coleridge’s, so far as the
+date of the composition of the original was concerned; but of course it
+was not his.
+
+I imagine the “Sir Vinegar Sponge” who translated “_Christabess_ from
+the _Doggerel_” must belong to the family of Sponges described by
+Coleridge himself, who give out the liquid they take in much dirtier
+than they imbibe it. I thought it very possible that Coleridge’s epigram
+to this effect might have been provoked by the lampoon referred to, and
+Rossetti also thought this probable. Immediately after meeting with the
+continuation of _Christabel_ already referred to, I came across great
+numbers of such continuations, as well as satires, parodies, reviews,
+etc., in old issues of _Blackwood, The Quarterly, and The Examiner_.
+They seemed to me, for the most part, poor in quality--the highest reach
+of comicality to which they attained being concerned with side slaps at
+_Kubla Khan_:
+
+     Better poetry I make
+     When asleep than when awake.
+     Am I sure, or am I guessing?
+     Are my eyes like those of Lessing?
+
+This latter elegant couplet was expected to serve as a scorching satire
+on a letter in the _Biographia Literaria_ in which Coleridge says he
+saw a portrait of Lessing at Klopstock’s, in which the eyes seemed
+singularly like his own. The time has gone by when that flight of
+egotism on Coleridge’s part seemed an unpardonable offence, and to our
+more modern judgment it scarcely seems necessary that the author of
+_Christabel_ should be charged with a desire to look radiant in the
+glory reflected by an accidental personal resemblance to the author of
+_Laokoon_. Curiously enough I found evidence of the Patmore version
+of Coleridge’s intentions as to the ultimate disclosure of the sex of
+Géraldine in a review in the _Examiner_. The author was perhaps Hazlitt,
+but more probably the editor himself, but whether Hazlitt or Hunt,
+he must have been within the circle that found its rallying point at
+Highgate, and consequently acquainted with the earliest forms of the
+poem. The review is an unfavourable one, and Coleridge is told in it
+that he is the dog-in-the-manger of literature, and that his poem is
+proof of the fact that he can write better nonsense poetry than any man
+in England. The writer is particularly wroth with what he considers
+the wilful indefiniteness of the author, and in proof of a charge of
+a desire not to let the public into the secret of the poem, and of
+a conscious endeavour to mystify the reader, he deliberately accuses
+Coleridge of omitting one line of the poem as it was written, which,
+if printed, would have proved conclusively that Géraldine had seduced
+Christabel after getting drunk with her,--for such sequel is implied if
+not openly stated. I told Rossetti of this brutality of criticism, and
+he replied:
+
+     As for the passage in _Christabel_, I am not sure we quite
+     understand each other. What I heard through the Patmores (a
+     complete mistake I am sure), was that Coleridge meant
+     Géraldine to prove to be a man bent on the seduction of
+     Christabel, and presumably effecting it. What I inferred (if
+     so) was that Coleridge had intended the line as in first
+     ed.: “And she is to sleep with Christabel!” as leading up
+     too nearly to what he meant to keep back for the present.
+     But the whole thing was a figment.
+
+What is assuredly not a figment is, that an idea, such as the elder
+Patmore referred to, really did exist in the minds of Coleridge’s
+so-called friends, who after praising the poem beyond measure whilst
+it was in manuscript, abused it beyond reason or decency when it was
+printed. My settled conviction is that the _Examiner_ criticism, and
+_not_ the sudden advent of the idea after the first part was written,
+was the cause of Coleridge’s adopting the correction which Rossetti
+mentions.
+
+Rossetti called my attention to a letter by Lamb, about which he
+gathered a good deal of interesting conjecture:
+
+     There is (given in _Cottle_) an inconceivably sarcastic,
+     galling, and admirable letter from Lamb to Coleridge,
+     regarding which I never could learn how the deuce their
+     friendship recovered from it. Cottle says the only reason he
+     could ever trace for its being written lay in the three
+     parodied sonnets (one being _The House that Jack Built_)
+     which Coleridge published as a skit on the joint volume
+     brought out by himself, Lamb, and Lloyd. The whole thing was
+     always a mystery to me. But I have thought that the passage
+     on division between friends was not improbably written by
+     Coleridge on this occasion. Curiously enough (if so) Lamb,
+     who is said to have objected greatly to the idea of a second
+     part of _Christabel_, thought (on seeing it) that the
+     mistake was redeemed by this very passage. He _may_ have
+     traced its meaning, though, of course, its beauty alone was
+     enough to make him say so.
+
+The three satirical sonnets which Rossetti refers to appear not only in
+_Cottle_ but in a note to the _Biographia Literaria_ They were published
+first under a fictitious name in _he Monthly Magazine_ They must be
+understood as almost wholly satirical of three distinct facets of
+Coleridge’s own manner, for even the sonnet in which occur the words
+
+     Eve saddens into night, {*}
+
+has its counterpart in _The Songs of the Pixies_--
+
+     Hence! thou lingerer, light!
+     Eve saddens into night,
+
+and nearly all the phrases satirised are borrowed from Coleridge’s
+own poetry, not from that of Lamb or Lloyd. Nevertheless, Cottle was
+doubtless right as to the fact that Lamb took offence at Coleridge’s
+conduct on this account, and Rossetti almost certainly made a good shot
+at the truth when he attributed to the rupture thereupon ensuing the
+passage on severed friendship. The sonnet on _The House that Jack Built_
+is the finest of the three as a satire.
+
+     * So in the Biographia Literaria; in Cottle, “Eve darkens
+     into night.”
+
+Indeed, the figure used therein as an equipoise to “the hindward charms”
+ satirises perfectly the style of writing characterised by inflated
+thought and imagery. It may be doubted if there exists anything more
+comical; but each of the companion sonnets is good in its way. The
+egotism, which was a constant reproach urged by _The Edinburgh_ critics
+and by the “Cockney Poets” against the poets of the Lake School, is
+splendidly hit off in the first sonnet; the low and creeping meanness,
+or say, simpleness, as contrasted with simplicity, of thought and
+expression, which was stealing into Wordsworth’s work at that period,
+is equally cleverly ridiculed in the second sonnet. In reproducing the
+sonnets, Coleridge claims only to have satirised types. As to Lamb’s
+letter, it is, indeed, hard to realise the fact that the “gentle-hearted
+Charles,” as Coleridge himself named him, could write a galling letter
+to the “inspired charity-boy,” for whom at an early period, and again at
+the end, he had so profound a reverence. Every word is an outrage, and
+every syllable must have hit Coleridge terribly. I called Rossetti’s
+attention to the surprising circumstance that in a letter written
+immediately after the date of the one in question, Loyd tells Cottle
+that he has never known Lamb (who is at the moment staying with him) so
+happy before as _just then!_ There can hardly be a doubt, however,
+that Rossetti’s conjecture is a just one as to the origin of the great
+passage in the second part of _Christabel_. Touching that passage I
+called his attention to an imperfection that I must have perceived, or
+thought I perceived long before,--an imperfection of craftsmanship that
+had taken away something of my absolute enjoyment of its many beauties.
+The passage ends--
+
+     They parted, ne’er to meet again!
+     But never either found another
+     To free the hollow heart from paining--
+     They stood aloof, the scars remaining,
+     Like cliffs which had been rent asunder;
+     A dreary sea now flows between,
+     But neither heat, nor frost, nor thunder,
+     Shall wholly do away, I ween,
+     The marks of that which once hath been.
+
+This is, it is needless to say, in almost every respect, finely felt,
+but the words italicised appeared to display some insufficiency of
+poetic vision. First, nothing but an earthquake would (speaking within
+limits of human experience) unite the two sides of a ravine; and though
+_frost_ might bring them together temporarily, _heat and thunder_ must
+be powerless to make or to unmake the _marks_ that showed the cliffs to
+have once been one, and to have been violently torn apart. Next, _heat_
+(supposing _frost_ to be the root-conception) was obviously used merely
+as a balancing phrase, and _thunder_ simply as the inevitable rhyme to
+_asunder_. I have not seen this matter alluded to, though it may have
+been mentioned, and it is certainly not important enough to make any
+serious deduction from the pleasure afforded by a passage that is in
+other respects so rich in beauty as to be able to endure such modest
+discounting. Rossetti replied:
+
+     Your geological strictures on Coleridge’s “friendship”
+      passage are but too just, and I believe quite new. But I
+     would fain think that this is “to consider too nicely.” I am
+     certainly willing to bear the obloquy of never having been
+     struck by what is nevertheless obvious enough. {*}... Lamb’s
+     letter _is_ a teazer. The three sonnets in _The Monthly
+     Magazine_ were signed “Nehemiah Higginbotham,” and were
+     meant to banter good-humouredly the joint vol. issued by
+     Coleridge, Lamb, and Lloyd,--C. himself being, of course,
+     the most obviously ridiculed. I fancy you have really hit
+     the mark as regards Coleridge’s epigram and Sir Vinegar
+     Sponge. He might have been worth two shillings after all....
+     _I_ also remember noting Lloyd’s assertion of Lamb’s
+     exceptional happiness just after that letter. It is a
+     puzzling affair. However C. and Lamb got over it (for I
+     certainly believe they were friends later in life) no one
+     seems to have recorded. The second vol. of Cottle, after the
+     raciness of the first, is very disappointing.
+
+     * In a note on this passage, Canon Dixon writes: What is
+     meant is that in cliffs, actual cliffs, the action of these
+     agents, heat, cold, thunder even, might have an obliterating
+     power; but in the severance of friendship, there is nothing
+     (heat of nature, frost of time, thunder of accident or
+     surprise) that can wholly have the like effect.
+
+On one occasion Rossetti wrote, saying he had written a sonnet on
+Coleridge, and I was curious to learn what note he struck in dealing
+with so complex a subject. The keynote of a man’s genius or character
+should be struck in a poetic address to him, just as the expressional
+individuality of a man’s features (freed of the modifying or emphasising
+effects of passing fashions of dress), should be reproduced in his
+portrait; but Coleridge’s mind had so many sides to it, and his
+character had such varied aspects--from keen and beautiful sensibility
+to every form of suffering, to almost utter disregard of the calls of
+domestic duty--that it seemed difficult to think what kind of idea,
+consistent with the unity of the sonnet and its simplicity of scheme,
+would call up a picture of the entire man. It goes against the grain to
+hint, adoring the man as we must, that Coleridge’s personal character
+was anything less than one of untarnished purity, and certainly the
+persons chiefly concerned in the alleged neglect, Southey and his own
+family, have never joined in the strictures commonly levelled against
+him: but whatever Coleridge’s personal ego may have been, his creative
+ego was assuredly not single in kind or aim. He did some noble things
+late in life (instance the passage on “Youth and Age,” and that on “Work
+without Hope”), but his poetic genius seemed to desert him when Kant
+took possession of him as a gigantic windmill to do battle with, and
+it is now hard to say which was the deeper thing in him: the poetry to
+which he devoted the sunniest years of his young life, or the philosophy
+which he firmly believed it to be the main business of his later life
+to expound. In any discussion of the relative claims of these two to
+the gratitude of the ages that follow, I found Rossetti frankly took one
+side, and constantly said that the few unequal poems Coleridge had left
+us, were a legacy more stimulating, solacing, and enduring, than his
+philosophy could have been, even if he had perfected that attempt of his
+to reconcile all learning and revelation, and if, when perfected, the
+whole effort had not proved to be a work of supererogation. I doubt if
+Rossetti quite knew what was meant by Coleridge’s “system,” as it was
+so frequently called, and I know that he could not be induced by any
+eulogiums to do so much as look at the _Biographia Literaria_, though
+once he listened whilst I read a chapter from it. He had certainly
+little love of the German elements in Coleridge’s later intellectual
+life, and hence it is small matter for surprise that in his sonnet
+he chose for treatment the more poetic side of Coleridge’s genius.
+Nevertheless, I think it remains an open question whether the philosophy
+of the author of _The Ancient Mariner_ was more influenced by his
+poetry, or his poetry by his philosophy; for the philosophy is always
+tinged by the mysticism of his poetry, and his poetry is always
+adumbrated by the disposition, which afterwards become paramount, to
+dig beneath the surface for problems of life and character, and for
+“suggestions of the final mystery of existence.” I have heard Rossetti
+say that what came most of all uppermost in Coleridge, was his wonderful
+intuitive knowledge and love of the sea, whose billowy roll, and break,
+and sibilation, seemed echoed in the very mechanism of his verse. Sleep,
+too, Rossetti thought, had given up to Coleridge her utmost secrets; and
+perhaps it was partly due to his own sad experience of the dread curse
+of insomnia, as well as to keen susceptibility to poetic beauty, that
+tears so frequently filled his eyes, and sobs rose to his throat when he
+recited the lines beginning
+
+     O sleep! it is a gentle thing--
+
+affirming, meantime, that nothing so simple and touching had ever been
+written on the subject. As to the sonnet, he wrote:
+
+     About Coleridge (whom I only view as a poet, his other
+     aspects being to my apprehension mere bogies) I conceive the
+     leading point about his work is its human love, and the
+     leading point about his career, the sad fact of how little
+     of it was devoted to that work. These are the points made in
+     my sonnet, and the last is such as I (alas!) can sympathise
+     with, though what has excluded more poetry with me
+     (_mountains_ of it I don’t want to heap) has chiefly been
+     livelihood necessity. I ‘ll copy the sonnet on opposite
+     page, only I ‘d rather you kept it to yourself. _Five_ years
+     of _good_ poetry is too long a tether to give his Muse, I
+     know.
+
+     His Soul fared forth (as from the deep home-grove
+          The father Songster plies the hour-long quest)
+          To feed his soul-brood hungering in the nest;
+     But his warm Heart, the mother-bird above
+     Their callow fledgling progeny still hove
+          With tented roof of wings and fostering breast
+          Till the Soul fed the soul-brood. Richly blest
+     From Heaven their growth, whose food was Human Love.
+
+     Tet ah! Like desert pools that shew the stars
+          Once in long leagues--even such the scarce-snatched hours
+          Which deepening pain left to his lordliest powers:--
+     Heaven lost through spider-trammelled prison-bars!
+          Five years, from seventy saved! yet kindling skies
+          Own them, a beacon to our centuries.
+
+As a minor point I called Rossetti’s attention to the fact that
+Coleridge lived to be scarcely more than sixty, and that his poetic
+career really extended over six good years; and hence the thirteenth
+line was amended to
+
+          Six years from sixty saved.
+
+I doubted if “deepening pain” could be charged with the whole burden
+of Coleridge’s constitutional procrastination, and to this objection
+Rossetti replied:
+
+     Line eleven in my first reading was “deepening _sloth_;” but
+     it seemed harsh--and--damn it all! much too like the spirit
+     of Banquo!
+
+Before Coleridge, however, as to warmth of admiration, and before him
+also as to date of influence, Keats was Rossetti’s favourite among
+modern English poets. Our friend never tired of writing or talking about
+Keats, and never wearied of the society of any one who could generate
+a fresh thought concerning him. But his was a robust and
+masculine admiration, having nothing in common with the effeminate
+extra-affectionateness that has of late been so much ridiculed. His
+letters now to be quoted shall speak for themselves as to the qualities
+in Keats whereon Rossetti’s appreciation of him was founded: but I may
+say in general terms that it was not so much the wealth of expression
+in the author of _Endymion_ which attracted the author of _Rose Mary_
+as the perfect hold of the supernatural which is seen in _La Belle Dame
+Sans Merci_ and in the fragment of the _Eve of St. Mark_. At the time of
+our correspondence, I was engaged upon an essay on Keats, and _à propos_
+of this Rossetti wrote:
+
+     I shall take pleasure in reading your Keats article when
+     ready. He was, among all his contemporaries who established
+     their names, the one true heir of Shakspeare. Another
+     (unestablished then, but partly revived since) was Charles
+     Wells. Did you ever read his splendid dramatic poem _Joseph
+     and his Brethren?_
+
+In this connexion, as a better opportunity may not arise, I take
+occasion to tell briefly the story of the revival of Wells. The facts
+to be related were communicated to me by Rossetti in conversation years
+after the date of the letter in which this first allusion to the
+subject was made. As a boy, Rossetti’s chief pleasure was to ransack
+old book-stalls, and the catalogues of the British Museum, for forgotten
+works in the bye-ways of English poetry. In this pursuit he became
+acquainted with nearly every curiosity of modern poetic literature, and
+many were the amusing stories he used to tell at that time, and in after
+life, of the titles and contents of the literary oddities he
+unearthed. If you chanced at any moment to alight upon any obscure book
+particularly curious from its pretentiousness and pomposity, from the
+audacity of its claim, or the obscurity and absurdity of its writing,
+you might be sure that Rossetti would prove familiar with it, and be
+able to recapitulate with infinite zest its salient features; but if you
+happened to drop upon ever so interesting an edition of a book (not of
+verse) which you supposed to be known to many a reader, the chances were
+at least equal that Rossetti would prove to know nothing of it but its
+name. In poring over the forgotten pages of the poetry of the beginning
+of the century, Rossetti, whilst still a boy, met with the scriptural
+drama of _Joseph and his Brethren_. He told me the title did not much
+attract him, but he resolved to glance at the contents, and with
+that swiftness of insight which throughout life distinguished him, he
+instantly perceived its great qualities. I think he said he then wrote a
+letter on the subject to one of the current literary journals, probably
+_The Literary Gazette_, and by this means came into correspondence with
+Charles Wells himself. Rather later a relative of Wells’s sought out the
+young enthusiast in London, intending to solicit his aid in an attempt
+to induce a publisher to undertake a reprint, but in any endeavours to
+this end he must have failed. For many years a copy of the poem, left
+by the author’s request at Rossetti’s lodgings, lay there untouched,
+and meantime the growing reputation of the young painter brought
+about certain removals from Blackfriars Bridge to other chambers, and
+afterwards to the house in Cheyne Walk. In the course of these changes
+the copy got hidden away, and it was not until numerous applications for
+it had been made that it was at length ferreted forth from the chaos of
+some similar volumes huddled together in a corner of the studio. Full of
+remorse for having so long abandoned a laudable project, Rossetti
+then took up afresh the cause of the neglected poem, and enlisted
+Mr. Swinburne’s interest so warmly as to prevail with him to use his
+influence to secure its publication. This failed however; but in _The
+Athenæum_ of April 8, 1876, appeared Mr. Watts’s elaborate account of
+Wells and the poem and its vicissitudes, whereupon Messrs. Chatto and
+Windus offered to take the risk of publishing it, and the poem
+went forth with the noble commendatory essay of the young author of
+_Atalanta_, whose reputation was already almost at its height, though
+it lacked (doubtless from a touch of his constitutional procrastination)
+the appreciative comment of the discerning critic who first discovered
+it. To return to the Keats correspondence:
+
+     I am truly delighted to hear how young you are. In original
+     work, a man does some of his best things by your time of
+     life, though he only finds it out in a rage much later, at
+     some date when he expected to know no longer that he had
+     ever done them. Keats hardly died so much too early--not at
+     all if there had been any danger of his taking to the modern
+     habit eventually--treating material as product, and shooting
+     it all out as it comes. Of course, however, he wouldn’t; he
+     was getting always choicer and simpler, and my favourite
+     piece in his works is _La Belle Dame Sans Merci_--I suppose
+     about his last. As to Shelley, it is really a mercy that he
+     has not been hatching yearly universes till now. He might, I
+     suppose; for his friend Trelawny still walks the earth
+     without great-coat, stockings, or underclothing, this
+     Christmas (1879). In criticism, matters are different, as to
+     seasons of production.... I am writing hurriedly and
+     horribly in every sense. Write on the subject again and I’ll
+     try to answer better. All greetings to you.
+
+     P.S.--I think your reference to Keats new, and on a high
+     level It calls back to my mind an adaptation of his self-
+     chosen epitaph which I made in my very earliest days of
+     boyish rhyming, when I was rather proud to be as cockney as
+     Keats _could_ be. Here it is,--
+
+          Through one, years since damned and forgot
+               Who stabbed backs by the Quarter,
+          Here lieth one who, while Time’s stream
+               Still runs, as God hath taught her,
+          Bearing man’s fame to men, hath writ
+               His name upon that water.
+
+     Well, the rhyme is not so bad as Keats’s
+
+                     Ear
+          Of Goddess of Theræa!--
+
+     nor (tell it not in Gath!) as---
+
+          I wove a crown before her
+          For her I love so dearly,
+          A garland for Lenora!
+
+     Is it possible the laurel crown should now hide a venerated
+     and impeccable ear which was once the ear of a cockney?
+
+This letter was written in 1879, and the opening clauses of it were no
+doubt penned under the impression, then strong on Rossetti’s mind, that
+his first volume of poems would prove to be his only one; but when,
+within two years afterwards he completed _Rose Mary_, and wrote _The
+King’s Tragedy_ and _The White Ship_, this accession of material
+dissipated the notion that a man does much his best work before
+twenty-five. It can hardly escape the reader that though Rossetti’s
+earlier volume displayed a surprising maturity, the subsequent one
+exhibited as a whole infinitely more power and feeling, range of
+sympathy, and knowledge of life. The poet’s dramatic instinct developed
+enormously in the interval between the periods of the two books, and,
+being conscious of this, Rossetti used to say in his later years that he
+would never again write poems as from his own person.
+
+     You say an excellent thing [he writes] when you ask, “Where
+     can we look for more poetry per page than Keats furnishes?”
+      It is strange that there is not yet one complete edition of
+     him. {*} No doubt the desideratum (so far as care and
+     exhaustiveness go), will be supplied when
+
+     Forman’s edition appears. He is a good appreciator too, as I
+     have reason to say. You will think it strange that I have
+     not seen the Keats love-letters, but I mean to do so.
+     However, I am told they add nothing to one’s idea of his
+     epistolary powers.... I hear sometimes from Buxton Forman,
+     and was sending him the other day an extract (from a book
+     called _The Unseen World_) which doubtless bears on the
+     superstition which Keats intended to develope in his lovely
+     _Eve of St. Mark_--a fragment which seems to me to rank with
+     _La Belle Dame Sans Merci_, as a clear advance in direct
+     simplicity.... You ought to have my recent Keats sonnet, so
+     I send it. Your own plan, for one on the same subject, seems
+     to me most beautiful. Do it at once. You will see that mine
+     is again concerned with the epitaph, and perhaps my reviving
+     the latter in writing you was the cause of the sonnet.
+
+     * Rossetti afterwards admitted in conversation that the
+     Aldine Edition seemed complete, though I think he did not
+     approve of the chronological arrangement therein adopted; at
+     least he thought that arrangement had many serious
+     disadvantages.
+
+Rossetti formed a very different opinion of Keats’s love-letters, when,
+a year later, he came to read them. At first he shared the general view
+that letters so _intimes_ should never have been made public. Afterwards
+the book had irresistible charms for him, from the first page whereon
+his old friend, Mr. Bell Scott, has vigorously etched Severn’s drawing
+of the once redundant locks of rich hair, dank and matted over
+the forehead cold with the death-dew, down to the last line of the
+letterpress. He thought Mr. Forman’s work admirably done, and as for the
+letters themselves, he believed they placed Keats indisputably among
+the highest masters of English epistolary style. He considered that all
+Keats’s letters proved him to be no weakling, and that whatever walk
+he had chosen he must have been a master. He seemed particularly struck
+with the apparently intuitive perception of Shakspeare’s subtlest
+meanings, which certain of the letters display. In a note he said:
+
+     Forman gave me a copy of Keats’s letters to Fanny Brawne.
+     The silhouette given of the lady is sadly disenchanting, and
+     may be the strongest proof existing of how much a man may
+     know about abstract Beauty without having an artist’s eye
+     for the outside of it.
+
+The Keats sonnet, as first shown to me, ran as follows:
+
+     The weltering London ways where children weep,--
+        Where girls whom none call maidens laugh, where gain,
+        Hurrying men’s steps, is yet by loss o’erta’en:--
+     The bright Castalian brink and Latinos’ steep:--
+     Such were his paths, till deeper and more deep,
+        He trod the sands of Lethe; and long pain,
+        Weary with labour spurned and love found vain,
+     In dead Rome’s sheltering shadow wrapped his sleep.
+
+     O pang-dowered Poet, whose reverberant lips
+     And heart-strung lyre awoke the moon’s eclipse,--
+        Thou whom the daisies glory in growing o’er,--
+     Their fragrance clings around thy name, not writ,
+     But rumour’d in water, while the fame of it
+        Along Time’s flood goes echoing evermore.
+
+I need hardly say that this sonnet seemed to me extremely noble in
+sentiment, and in music a glorious volume of sound. I felt, however,
+that it would be urged against it that it did not strike the keynote of
+the genius of Keats; that it would be said that in all the particulars
+in which Rossetti had truthfully and pathetically described London,
+Keats was in rather than of it; and that it would be affirmed that Keats
+lived in a fairy world of his own inventing, caring little for the storm
+and stress of London life. On the other hand, I knew it could be replied
+that Keats was not indifferent to the misery of city life; that it bore
+heavily upon him; that it came out powerfully and very sadly in his _Ode
+to the Nightingale_, and that it may have been from sheer torture in
+the contemplation of it that he fled away to a poetic world of his own
+creating. Moreover, Rossetti’s sonnet touched the life, rather than
+the genius, of Keats, and of this it struck the keynote in the opening
+lines. I ventured to think that the second and third lines wanted a
+little clarifying in the relation in which they stood. They seemed to
+be a sudden focussing of the laughter and weeping previously mentioned,
+rather than, what they were meant to be, a natural and necessary
+equipoise showing the inner life of Keats as contrasted with his outer
+life. To such an objection as this, Rossetti said:
+
+     I am rather aghast for my own lucidity when I read what you
+     say as to the first quatrain of my Keats sonnet. However, I
+     always take these misconceptions as warnings to the Muse,
+     and may probably alter the opening as below:
+
+          The weltering London ways where children weep
+          And girls whom none call maidens laugh,--strange road,
+          Miring his outward steps who inly trode
+          The bright Castalian brink and Latinos’ steep:--
+          Even such his life’s cross-paths: till deathly deep
+          He toiled through sands of Lethe, etc.
+          I ‘ll say more anent Keats anon.
+
+About the period of this portion of the correspondence (1880) I was
+engaged reading up old periodicals dating from 1816 to 1822. My purpose
+was to get at first-hand all available data relative to the life of
+Keats. I thought I met with a good deal of fresh material, and as the
+result of my reading I believed myself able to correct a few errors
+as to facts into which previous writers on the subject had fallen. Two
+things at least I realised--first, that Keats’s poetic gift developed
+very rapidly, more rapidly perhaps than that of Shelley; and, next, that
+Keats received vastly more attention and appreciation in his day than is
+commonly supposed. I found it was quite a blunder to say that the first
+volume of miscellaneous poems fell flat. Lord Houghton says in error
+that the book did not so much as seem to signal the advent of a new
+Cockney poet! It is a fact, however, that this very book, in conjunction
+with one of Shelley’s and one of Hunt’s, all published 1816-17, gave
+rise to the name “The Cockney School of Poets,” which was invented by
+the writer signing “Z.” in _Blackwood_ in the early part of 1818. Nor
+had Keats to wait for the publication of the volume before attaining
+to some poetic distinction. At the close of 1816, an article, under
+the head of “Young Poets,” appeared in _The Examiner_, and in this
+both Shelley and Keats were dealt with. Then _The Quarterly_ contained
+allusions to him, though not by name, in reviews of Leigh Hunt’s work,
+and _Blackwood_ mentioned him very frequently in all sorts of places as
+“Johnny Keats”--all this (or much of it) before he published anything
+except occasional sonnets and other fugitive poems in _The Examiner_ and
+elsewhere. And then when _Endymion_ appeared it was abundantly reviewed.
+_The Edinburgh_ reviewers had nothing on it (the book cannot have been
+sent to them, for in 1820 they say they have only just met with it),
+and I could not find anything in the way of _original_ criticism in
+_The Examiner_; but many provincial papers (in Manchester, Exeter, and
+elsewhere) and some metropolitan papers retorted on _The Quarterly_. All
+this, however, does not disturb the impression which (Lord Houghton and
+Mr. W. M. Rossetti notwithstanding) I have been from the first compelled
+to entertain, namely, that “labour spurned” did more than all else to
+kill Keats _in 1821_.
+
+Most men who rightly know the workings of their own minds will agree
+that an adverse criticism rankles longer than a flattering notice
+soothes; and though it be shown that Keats in 1820 was comparatively
+indifferent to the praise of _The Edinburgh_, it cannot follow that in
+1818 he must have been superior to the blame of _The Quarterly_. It is
+difficult to see why a man may not be keenly sensitive to what the world
+says about him, and yet retain all proper manliness as a part of his
+literary character. Surely it was from the mistaken impression that
+this could not be, and that an admission of extreme sensitiveness to
+criticism exposed Keats to a charge of effeminacy that Lord Houghton
+attempted to prove, against the evidence of all immediate friends,
+against the publisher’s note to _Hyperion_, against the | poet’s
+self-chosen epitaph, and against all but one or two of the most
+self-contained of his letters, that the soul of Keats was so far from
+being “snuffed out by an article,” that it was more than ordinarily
+impervious to hostile comment, even when it came in the shape of
+rancorous abuse. In all discussion of the effects produced upon Keats
+by the reviews in _Blackwood and The Quarterly_, let it be remembered,
+first, that having wellnigh exhausted his small patrimony, Keats was
+to be dependent upon literature for his future subsistence; next, that
+Leigh Hunt attempted no defence of Keats when the bread was being taken
+out of his mouth, and that Keats felt this neglect and remarked upon
+it in a letter in which he further cast some doubt upon the purity of
+Hunt’s friendship. Hunt, after Keats’s death, said in reference to this:
+“Had he but given me the hint!” The _hint_, forsooth! Moreover, I can
+find no sort of allusion in _The Examiner_ for 1821, to the death of
+Keats. I told Rossetti that by the reading of the periodicals of the
+time, I formed a poor opinion of Hunt. Previously I was willing to
+believe in his unswerving loyalty to the much greater men who were his
+friends, but even that poor confidence in him must perforce be shaken
+when one finds him silent at a moment when Keats most needs his voice,
+and abusive when Coleridge is a common subject of ridicule. It was
+all very well for Hunt to glorify himself in the borrowed splendour of
+Keats’s established fame when the poet was twenty years dead, and
+to make much of his intimacy with Coleridge after the homage of two
+generations had been offered him, but I know of no instance (unless in
+the case of Shelley) in which Hunt stood by his friends in the winter
+of their lives, and gave them that journalistic support which was, poor
+man, the only thing he ever had to give, whatever he might take. I have,
+however, heard Mr. H. A. Bright (one of Hawthorne’s intimate friends in
+England) say that no man here impressed the American romancer so much as
+Hunt for good qualities, both of heart and head. But what I have stated
+above, I believe to be facts; and I have gathered them at first-hand,
+and by the light of them I do not hesitate to say that there is no
+reason to believe that it was Keats’s illness alone that caused him to
+regard Hunt’s friendship with suspicion. It is true, however, that when
+one reads Hunt’s letter to Severn at Borne, one feels that he must be
+forgiven. On this pregnant subject Rossetti wrote:
+
+     Thanks for yours received to-day, and for all you say with
+     so much more kind solicitousness than the matter deserved,
+     about the opening of the Keats sonnet. I have now realized
+     that the new form is a gain in every way; and am therefore
+     glad that, though arising in accident, I was led to make the
+     change.... All you say of Keats shows that you have been
+     reading up the subject with good results. I fancy it would
+     hardly be desirable to add the sonnets you speak of (as
+     being worthless) at this date, though they might be valuable
+     for quotation as to the course of his mental and physical
+     state. I do not myself think that any poems now included
+     should be removed, but the reckless and tasteless plan of
+     the gatherings hitherto (in which the _Nightingale_ and other
+     such masterpieces are jostled indiscriminately, with such
+     wretched juvenile trash as _Lines to some Ladies on
+     receiving a Shelly etc_), should of course be amended, and
+     the rubbish (of which there is a fair quantity), removed to
+     a “Juvenile” or other such section. It is a curious fact
+     that among a poet’s early writings, some will really be
+     juvenile in this sense, while others, written at the same
+     time, will perhaps take rank at last with his best efforts.
+     This, however, was not substantially the case with Keats.
+
+     As to Leigh Hunt’s friendship for Keats, I think the points
+     you mention look equivocal; but Hunt was a many-laboured and
+     much belaboured man, and as much allowance as may be made on
+     this score is perhaps due to him--no more than that much.
+     His own powers stand high in various ways--poetically higher
+     perhaps than is I at present admitted, despite his
+     detestable flutter and airiness for the most part. But
+     assuredly by no means could he have stood so high in the
+     long-run, as by a loud and earnest defence of Keats. Perhaps
+     the best excuse for him is the remaining possibility of an
+     idea on his part, that any defence coming from one who had
+     himself so many powerful enemies might seem to Keats
+     rather to! damage than improve his position.
+
+     I have this minute (at last) read the first instalment of
+     your Keats paper, and return it.... One of the most marked
+     points in the early recognition of Keats’s claims, as
+     compared with the recognition given to other poets, is the
+     fact that he was the only one who secured almost at once a
+     _great_ poet as a close and obvious imitator--viz., Hood,
+     whose first volume is more identical with Keats’s work than
+     could be said of any other similar parallel. You quote some
+     of Keats’s sayings. One of the most characteristic I think
+     is in a letter to Haydon:--
+
+     “I value more the privilege of seeing great things in
+     loneliness, than the fame of a prophet.” I had not in mind
+     the quotations you give from Keats as bearing on the poetic
+     (or prophetic) mission of “doing good.” I must say that I
+     should not have thought a longer career thrown away upon him
+     (as you intimate) if he had continued to the age of anything
+     only to give joy. Nor would he ever have done any “good” at
+     all. Shelley did good, and perhaps some harm with it.
+     Keats’s joy was after all a flawless gift.
+
+     Keats wrote to Shelley:--“You, I am sure, will forgive me
+     for sincerely remarking that you might curb your magnanimity
+     and be more of an artist, and load every rift of your
+     subject with ore.” Cheeky!--but not so much amiss. Poetry,
+     and no prophecy however, must come of that mood,--and no
+     pulpit would have held Keats’s wings,--the body and mind
+     together were not heavy enough for a counterweight.... Did
+     you ever meet with
+
+<center>ENDIMION
+
+AN EXCELLENT FANCY FIRST COMPOSED IN FRENCH
+
+By Monsieur GOMBAULD
+
+AND NOW ELEGANTLY INTERPRETED
+
+By RICHARD HURST, Gentleman
+
+1639.
+
+?</center>
+
+     It has very finely engraved plates of the late Flemish type.
+     There is a poem of Vaughan’s on Gombauld’s _Endimion_, which
+     might make one think it more fascinating than it really is.
+     Though rather prolix, however, it has attractions as a
+     somewhat devious romantic treatment of the subject. The
+     little book is one of the first I remember in this world,
+     and I used to dip into it again and again as a child, but
+     never yet read it through. I still possess it. I dare say it
+     is not easily met with, and should suppose Keats had
+     probably never seen it. If he had, he might really have
+     taken a hint or two for his scheme, which is hardly so clear
+     even as Gombauld’s, though its endless digressions teem with
+     beauty.... I do not think you would benefit at all by seeing
+     Gombauld’s _Endimion_. Vaughan’s poem on it might be worth
+     quoting as showing what attention the subject had received
+     before Keats. I have the poem in Gilfillan’s _Less-Known
+     Poets_.
+
+Rossetti took a great interest in the fund started for the relief of
+Mme. de Llanos, Keats’s sister, whose circumstances were seriously
+reduced. He wrote:
+
+     By the bye, I don’t know whether the subscription for
+     Keats’s old and only surviving sister (Madme de Llanos) has
+     been at all ventilated in Liverpool. It flags sorely. Do you
+     think there would be any chance in your neighbourhood? If
+     so, prospectuses, etc., could be sent.
+
+I did not view the prospect of subscriptions as very hopeful, and so
+conceived the idea of a lecture in the interests of the fund. On this
+project, Rossetti wrote:
+
+     I enclose prospectuses as to the Keats subscription. I may
+     say that I did not know the list would accompany them--still
+     less that contributions would be so low generally as to
+     leave me near the head of the list--an unenviable sort of
+     parade.... My own opinion about the lecture question is
+     this. You know best whether such a lecture could be turned
+     to the purposes of your Keats article (now in progress), or
+     rather be so much deduction from the freshness of its
+     resources: and this should be the _absolute_ test of its
+     being done or not done.... I think, if it can be done
+     without impoverishing your materials, the method of getting
+     Lord Houghton to preside and so raising as much from it as
+     possible is doubtless the right one. Of course I view it as
+     far more hopeful than mere distribution of any number of
+     prospectuses.... Even £25 would be a great contribution to
+     the fund.
+
+The lecture project was not found feasible, and hence it was abandoned.
+Meantime the kindness of friends enabled me to add to the list a good
+number of subscriptions, but feeling scarcely satisfied with any such
+success as I might be likely to have in that direction, I opened, by
+the help of a friend, a correspondence with Lord Houghton with a view
+to inducing him to apply for a pension for the lady. It then transpired
+that Lord Houghton had already applied to Lord Beaconsfield for a
+pension for Mme. Llanos, and would doubtless have got it, had not Mr.
+Buxton Forman applied for a grant from the Royal Bounty, which was
+easier to give. I told Rossetti of this fact and he said:
+
+     I am not surprised about Lord H., and feel sure it is a pity
+     he was not left to try Beaconsfield, but I judge the
+     projectors on the other side knew nothing of his intentions.
+     However, _I_ was in no way a projector.
+
+In the end Lord Houghton repeated to Mr. Gladstone the application he
+had made to Lord Beaconsfield, and succeeded.
+
+Rossetti must have been among the earliest admirers of Keats. I remarked
+on one occasion that it was very natural that Lord Houghton should
+consider himself in a sense the first among men now living to champion
+the poet and establish his name, and Rossetti admitted that this was so,
+and was ungrudging in his tribute to Lord Houghton’s services towards
+the better appreciation of Keats; but he contended, nevertheless,
+that he had himself been one of the first writers of the generation
+succeeding the poet’s own to admire and uphold him, and that this was
+at a time when it made demand of some courage to class him among the
+immortals, when an original edition of any of his books could be bought
+for sixpence on a bookstall, and when only Leigh Hunt, Cowden Clarke,
+Hood, Benjamin Haydon, and perhaps a few others, were still living of
+those who recognised his great gifts.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+Rossetti’s primary interest in Chatterton dates back to an early period,
+as I find by the date, 1848, in the copy he possessed of the poet’s
+works. But throughout a long interval he neglected Chatterton, and
+it was not until his friend Theodore Watts, who had made Chatterton
+a special study, had undertaken to select from and write upon him in
+Ward’s _English Poets_, that he revived his old acquaintance. Whatever
+Rossetti did he did thoroughly, and hence he became as intimate perhaps
+with the Rowley antiques as any other man had ever been. His letters
+written during the course of his Chatterton researches must, I think,
+prove extremely interesting. He says:
+
+     Glancing at your Keats MS., I notice (in a series of
+     parallels) the names of Marlowe and Savage; but not the less
+     “marvellous” than absolutely miraculous Chatterton. Are you
+     up in his work? He is in the very first rank! Theod. Watts
+     is “doing him” for the new selection of poets by Arnold and
+     Ward, and I have contributed a sonnet to Watts’s article....
+     I assure you Chatterton’s name _must_ come in somewhere in
+     the parallel passage. He was as great as any English poet
+     whatever, and might absolutely, had he lived, have proved
+     the only man in England’s theatre of imagination who could
+     have bandied parts with Shakspeare. The best way of getting
+     at him is in Skeat’s Aldine edition (G. Bell and Co., 1875).
+     Read him carefully, and you will find his acknowledged work
+     essentially as powerful as his antiques, though less evenly
+     successful--the Rowley work having been produced in Bristol
+     leisure, however indigent, and the modern poetry in the very
+     fangs of London struggle. Strong derivative points are to be
+     found in Keats and Coleridge from the study of Chatterton. I
+     feel much inclined to send the sonnet (on Chatterton) as you
+     wish, but really think it is better not to ventilate these
+     things till in print. I have since written one on Blake. Not
+     to know Chatterton is to be ignorant of the _true_ day-
+     spring of modern romantic poetry.... I believe the 3d vol.
+     of Ward’s _Selections of English Poetry_, for which Watts is
+     selecting from Chatterton, will soon be out,--but these
+     excerpts are very brief, as are the notices. The rendering
+     from the Rowley antique will be much better than anything
+     formerly done. Skeat is a thorough philologist, but no hand
+     at all when substitution becomes unavoidable in the text....
+     Read the _Ballad of Charity, the Eclogues, the songs in
+     Ælla_, as a first taste. Among the modern poems _Narva and
+     Mared_, and the other _African Eclogues_. These are alone in
+     that section _poetry absolute_, and though they are very
+     unequal, it has been most truly said by Malone that to throw
+     the _African Eclogues_ into the Rowley dialect would be at
+     once a satisfactory key to the question whether Chatterton
+     showed in his own person the same powers as in the person of
+     Rowley. Among the satirical and light modern pieces there
+     are many of a first-. rate order, though generally unequal.
+     Perfect specimens, however, are _The Revenge, a Burletta,
+     Skeat, vol i; Verses to a Lady, p. 84; Journal Sixth, p. 33;
+     The Prophecy, p. 193; and opening of Fragment, p. 132._ I
+     would advise you to consult the original text.
+
+Mr. Watts, it seems, with all his admiration of Chatterton, finding that
+he could not go to Rossetti’s length in comparing him with Shakspeare,
+did not in the result consider the sonnet on Chatterton referred to in
+the foregoing letter, and given below, suitable to be embodied in his
+essay:
+
+     With Shakspeare’s manhood at a boy’s wild heart,--
+        Through Hamlet’s doubt to Shakspeare near allied,
+        And kin to Milton through his Satan’s pride,--
+     At Death’s sole door he stooped, and craved a dart;
+     And to the dear new bower of England’s art,--
+        Even to that shrine Time else had deified,
+        The unuttered heart that soared against his side,--
+     Drove the fell point, and smote life’s seals apart.
+
+     Thy nested home-loves, noble Chatterton,
+        The angel-trodden stair thy soul could trace
+        Up Redcliffe’s spire; and in the world’s armed space
+     Thy gallant sword-play:--these to many an one
+     Are sweet for ever; as thy grave unknown,
+        And love-dream of thine unrecorded face.
+
+Some mention was made in this connection of Rossetti’s young connection,
+Oliver Madox Brown, who wrote _Gabriel Denver_ (otherwise _The Black
+Swan_) at seventeen years of age. I mentioned the indiscreet remark of
+a friend who said that Oliver had enough genius to stock a good few
+Chattertons, and thereupon Rossetti sent me the following outburst:
+
+     You must take care to be on the right tack about Chatterton.
+     I am very glad to find the gifted Oliver M. B. already an
+     embryo classic, as I always said he would be; but those who
+     compare net results in such cases as his and Chatterton’s
+     cannot know what criticism means. The nett results of
+     advancing epochs, however permanent on accumulated
+     foundation-work, are the poorest of all tests as to relative
+     values. Oliver was the product of the most teeming hot-beds
+     of art and literature, and even of compulsory addiction to
+     the art of painting, in which nevertheless he was rapidly
+     becoming as much a proficient as in literature. What he
+     would have been if, like the ardent and heroic Chatterton,
+     he had had to fight a single-handed battle for art and bread
+     together against merciless mediocrity in high places,--what
+     he would _then_ have become, I cannot in the least
+     calculate; but we know what Chatterton became. Moreover, C.
+     at his death, was two years younger than Oliver--a whole
+     lifetime of advancement at that age frequently--indeed
+     always I believe in leading cases. There are few indeed whom
+     the facile enthusiasm for contemporary models does not
+     deaden to the truly balanced claims of successful efforts in
+     art. However, look at Watts’s remodelled extracts when the
+     vol comes out, and also at what he says in detail as to
+     Chatterton, Coleridge, and Keats.
+
+Of course Rossetti was right in what he said of comparative criticism
+when brought to bear in such cases as those of Chatterton and Oliver
+Madox Brown. Net results are certainly the poorest tests of relative
+values where the work done belongs to periods of development. We cannot,
+however, see or know any man except through and in his work, and net
+results must usually be accepted as the only concrete foundation for
+judging of the quality of his genius. Such judgment will always be
+influenced, nevertheless, by considerations such as Rossetti mentions.
+Touching Chatterton’s development, it were hardly rash to say that it
+appears incredible that the _African Eclogues_ should have been written
+by a boy of seventeen, and, in judging of their place in poetry, one is
+apt to be influenced by one’s first feeling of amazement. Is it possible
+that the Rowley poems may owe much of their present distinction to the
+early astonishment that a boy should have written them, albeit they have
+great intrinsic excellencies such as may insure them a high place when
+the romance, intertwined with their history, has been long forgotten?
+But Chatterton is more talked of than read, and this has been so from
+the first. The antiques are all but unknown; certain of the acknowledged
+poems are remembered, and regarded as fervid and vigorous, and many of
+the lesser pieces are thought slight, weak, and valueless. People do not
+measure the poorer things in Chatterton with his time and opportunities,
+or they would see only amazing strength and knowledge of the world in
+all he did. Those lesser pieces were many of them dashed off to answer
+the calls of necessity, to flatter the egotism of a troublesome friend,
+or to wile away a moment of vacancy. Certainly they must not be set
+against his best efforts. As for Chatterton’s life, the tragedy of it
+is perhaps the most moving example of what Coleridge might have
+termed the material pathetic. Pathetic, however, as his life was, and
+marvellous as was his genius, I miss in him the note of personal purity
+and majesty of character. I told Rossetti that, in my view, Chatterton
+lacked sincerity, and on this point he wrote:
+
+     I must protest finally about Chatterton, that he lacks
+     nothing because lacking the gradual growth of the emotional
+     in literature which becomes evident in Keats--still less its
+     excess, which would of course have been pruned, in Oliver.
+     The finest of the Rowley poems--_Eclogues, Ballad of
+     Charity, etc_., rank absolutely with the finest poetry in
+     the language, and gain (not lose) by moderation. As to what
+     you say of C.’s want of political sincerity (for I cannot
+     see to what other want you can allude), surely a boy up to
+     eighteen may be pardoned for exercising his faculty if he
+     happens to be the one among millions who can use grown men
+     as his toys. He was an absolute and untarnished hero, but
+     for that reckless defying vaunt. Certainly that most
+     vigorous passage commencing--
+
+          “Interest, thou universal God of men,” etc.
+
+     reads startlingly, and comes in a questionable shape. What
+     is the answer to its enigmatical aspect? Why, that he
+     _meant_ it, and that all would mean it at his age, who had
+     his power, his daring, and his hunger. Still it does,
+     perhaps, make one doubt whether his early death were well or
+     ill for him. In the matter of Oliver (whom no one
+     appreciates more than I do), remember that it was impossible
+     to have more opportunities than _he_ had, or on the other
+     side _fewer_ than Chatterton had. Chatterton at seventeen or
+     less said--
+
+          “Flattery’s a cloak, and I will put it on.”
+
+Blake (probably late in life) said--
+
+          “Innocence is a winter gown.”
+
+     ... I _have_ read the Chatterton article in the review
+     mentioned. If Watts had done it, it would have been
+     immeasurably better. There seems to me, who am very well up
+     in Chatterton, no point whatever made in the article. Why
+     does no one ever even allude to the two attributed portraits
+     of Chatterton--one belonging to Sir H. Taylor, and the other
+     in the Salford Museum? Both seem to be the same person
+     clearly, and a good find for Chatterton, but not conceivably
+     done from him. Nevertheless, I _suspect_ there may be a
+     sidelong genuineness in them. Chatterton was acquainted with
+     one Alcock, a miniature painter at Bristol, to whom he
+     addressed a poem. Had A. painted C. it would be among the
+     many recorded facts; but it would be singular even if, in
+     C.’s rapid posthumous fame, A. had never been asked to make
+     a reminiscent likeness of him. Prom such likeness by the
+     miniature painter these _portraits might_ derive--both being
+     life-sized oil heads. There is a savour of Keats in them,
+     though a friend, taking up the younger-looking of the two,
+     said it reminded him of Jack Sheppard! And not such a bad
+     Chatterton-compound either! But I begin to think I have said
+     all this before.... Oliver, or “Nolly,” as he was always
+     called, was a sort of spread-eagle likeness of his handsome
+     father, with a conical head like Walter Scott. I must
+     confess to you, that, in this world of books, the only one
+     of his I have read, is _Gabriel Denver_, afterwards
+     reprinted in its original and superior form as _The Black
+     Swan_, but published with the former title in his lifetime.
+
+Rossetti formed no such philosophic estimate of Chatterton’s
+contribution to the romantic movement in English poetry as has been
+formulated in the essay in Ward’s _Poets_. A critic, in the sense of one
+possessed of a natural gift of analysis, Rossetti assuredly! was not. No
+man’s instinct for what is good in poetry was ever swifter or surer than
+that of Rossetti. You might always distrust your judgment if you
+found it at variance with his where abstract power and beauty were in
+question. Sooner or later you would inevitably find yourself gravitating
+to his view. But here Rossetti’s function as a critic ended. His was
+at best only the criticism of the creator. Of the gift of ultimate
+classification he had none, and never claimed to have any, although now
+and again (as where he says that Chatterton was the day-spring of
+modern romantic poetry), he seems to give sign of a power of critical
+synthesis.
+
+Rossetti’s interest in Blake, both as poet and painter, dates back to
+an early period of his life. I have heard him say that at sixteen or
+seventeen years of age he was already one of Blake’s warmest admirers,
+and at the time in question, 1845, the author of the _Songs of
+Innocence_ had not many readers to uphold him. About four years later,
+Rossetti made an exceptionally lucky discovery, for he then found in
+the possession of Mr. Palmer, an attendant at the British Museum, an
+original manuscript scrap-book of Blake’s, containing a great body of
+unpublished poetry and many interesting designs, as well as three or
+four remarkably effective profile sketches of the author himself. The
+Mr. Palmer who held the little book was a relative of the landscape
+painter of the same name, who was Blake’s friend, and hence the
+authenticity of the manuscript was ascertainable on other grounds than
+the indisputable ones of its internal evidences. The book was offered to
+Rossetti for ten shillings, but the young enthusiast was at the time a
+student of art, and not much in the way of getting or spending even
+so inconsiderable a sum. He told me, however, that at this period his
+brother William, who was, unlike himself, engaged in some reasonably
+profitable occupation, was at all times nothing loath to advance small
+sums for the purchase of such literary or other treasures as he used
+to hunt up out of obscure corners: by his help the Blake manuscript was
+bought, and proved for years a source of infinite pleasure and profit,
+resulting, as it did, in many very important additions to Blake
+literature when Gilchrist’s _Life and Works_ of that author came to be
+published. It is an interesting fact, mention of which ought not to
+be omitted, that at the sale of Rossetti’s library, which took place
+a little while after his decease, the scrap-book acquired in the way I
+describe was sold for one hundred and five guineas.
+
+The sum was a large one, but the little book was undoubtedly the most
+valuable literary relic of Blake then extant. About the time when a new
+edition of Gilchrist’s _Life_ was in the press, Rossetti wrote:
+
+     My evenings have been rather trenched upon lately by helping
+     Mrs. Gilchrist with a new edition of the _Life of Blake_....
+     I don’t know if you go in much for him. The new edition of
+     the _Life_ will include a good number of additional letters
+     (from Blake to Hayley), and some addition (though not great)
+     to my own share in the work; as well as much important
+     carrying-on of my brother’s catalogue of Blake’s works. The
+     illustrations will, I trust, receive valuable additions
+     also, but publishers are apt to be cautious in such
+     expenses. I am writing late at night, to fill up a fag-end
+     of bedtime, and shall write again on this head.
+
+Rossetti’s “own share” in this work consisted of the writing of the
+supplementary chapter (left by Gilchrist, with one or two unimportant
+passages merely, at the beginning), and the editing of the poems. When
+there arose, subsequently, some idea of my reviewing the book, Rossetti
+wrote me the following letter, full of disinterested solicitude:
+
+     You will be quite delighted with an essay on Blake by Jas.
+     Smetham, which occurs in vol ii.; it is a noble thing; and
+     at the stupendous design called _Plague_ (vol. i.). I have
+     extracted a passage properly belonging to the same essay,
+     which is as fine as English _can_ be, and which I am sorry
+     to perceive (I think) that Mrs. G. has omitted from the body
+     of the essay because quoted in another place. This essay is
+     no less than a masterpiece. I wrote the supplementary
+     chapter (vol. i.), except a few opening paragraphs by
+     Gilchrist,--and in it have now made some mention of Smetham,
+     an old and dear friend of mine.
+
+     You will admire Shields’s paper on the wonderful series of
+     Young’s _Night Thoughts_. My brother and I both helped in
+     this new edition, but I added little to what I had done
+     before. I brought forward a portentous series of passages
+     about one “Scofield” in Blake’s _Jerusalem_, but did not
+     otherwise write that chapter, except as regards the
+     illustrations. However, don’t mention what I have done (in
+     case you write on the subject) except so far as the indices
+     show it, and of course I don’t wish to be put forward at
+     all. What I do wish is, that you should say everything that
+     can be gratifying to Mrs. G. as to her husband’s work. There
+     is a plate of Blake’s Cottage by young Gilchrist which is
+     truly excellent.
+
+As I have already said, Rossetti traversed the bypaths of English
+literature (particularly of English poetry) as few can ever have
+traversed them. A favourite work with him was Gilfillan’s _Less-Read
+British Poets_, a copy of which had been presented by Miss Boyd. He
+says:
+
+     Did you ever read Christopher Smart’s _Song to David_, the
+     only great _accomplished_ poem of the last century? The
+     accomplished ones are Chatterton’s,--of course I mean
+     earlier than Blake or Coleridge, and without reckoning so
+     exceptional a genius as Burns.... You will find Smart’s poem
+     a masterpiece of rich imagery, exhaustive resources, and
+     reverberant sound. It is to be met with in Gilfillan’s
+     _Specimens of the Less-Read British Poets_ (3 vols. Nichol,
+     Edin., 1860)....
+
+     I remember your mentioning Gilfillan as having encouraged
+     your first efforts. He was powerful, though sometimes rather
+     “tall” as a writer, generally most just as a critic, and
+     lastly, a much better man, intellectually and morally, than
+     Aytoun, who tried to “do for” him. His notice of Swift, in
+     the volume in question, has very great force and eloquence.
+     His whole edition of the _British Poets_ is the best of any
+     to read, being such fine type and convenient bulk and weight
+     (a great thing for an arm-chair reader). Unfortunately, he
+     now and then (in the _Less-Read Poets_) cuts down the
+     extracts almost to nothing, and in some cases excises
+     objectionabilities, which is unpardonable. Much better leave
+     the whole out. Also, the edition includes the usual array of
+     nobodies--Addison, Akenside, and the whole alphabet down to
+     Zany and Zero; whereas a great many of the _less-read_ would
+     have been much-read by every worthy reader if they had only
+     been printed in full. So well printed an edition of Donne
+     (for instance) would have been a great boon; but from him
+     Gilfillan only gives (among the _less-read_) the admirable
+     _Progress of the Soul_ and some of the pregnant _Holy
+     Sonnets_. Do you know Donne? There is hardly an English poet
+     better worth a thorough knowledge, in spite of his provoking
+     conceits and occasional jagged jargon.
+
+     The following paragraph on Whitehead is valuable:
+
+     Charles Whitehead’s principal poem is _The Solitary_, which
+     in its day had admirers. It perhaps most recalls Goldsmith.
+     He also wrote a supernatural poem called _Ippolito_. There
+     was a volume of his poems published about 1848, or perhaps a
+     little later, by Bentley. It is disappointing, on the whole,
+     from the decided superiority of its best points to the
+     rest.... But the novel of _Richard Savage_ is very
+     remarkable,--a real character really worked out.
+
+To aid me in certain researches I was at the time engaged in making in
+the back-numbers of almost forgotten periodicals, Rossetti wrote:
+
+     The old _Monthly Mag._ was the precursor of the _New
+     Monthly_, which started about 1830, or thereabouts I think,
+     after which the old one ailed, but went on till fatal old
+     Heraud finished it off by editing it, and fairly massacred
+     that elderly innocent. You speak, in a former letter
+     (touching the continuation of _Christabel_), of “a certain
+     European magazine.” Are you aware that it was as old a thing
+     as _The Gentleman’s_, and went on _ad infinitum?_ Other such
+     were the _Universal Magazine, the Scots’ Magazine_--all
+     endless in extent and beginning time out of mind,--to say
+     nothing of the _Ladies’ Magazine and Wits’ Magazine_. Then
+     there was the _Annual Register_. All these are quarters in
+     which you might prosecute researches, and might happen to
+     find something about Keats. _The Monthly Magazine_ must have
+     commenced almost as early, I believe. I cannot help thinking
+     there was a similar _Imperial Magazine_.
+
+The following letter possesses an interest independent of its subject,
+which to me, however, is interest enough. Mr. William Watson had sent
+Rossetti a copy of a volume of poems he had just published, and
+had received a letter in acknowledgment, wherein our friend, with
+characteristic appreciativeness, said many cordial words of it:
+
+     Your young friend Watson [he said in a subsequent letter]
+     wrote me in a very modest mood for one who can do as he can
+     at his age. I think I must have hurriedly mis-expressed
+     myself in writing to him, as he seems to think I wished to
+     dissuade him from following narrative poetry. Not in the
+     least--I only wished him to try his hand at clearer dramatic
+     life. The dreamy romantic really hardly needs more than one
+     vast Morris in a literature--at any rate in a century. Not
+     that I think him derivable from Morris--he goes straight
+     back to Keats with a little modification. The narrative,
+     whether condensed or developed, is at any rate a far better
+     impersonal form to work in than declamatory harangue,
+     whether calling on the stars or the Styx. I don’t know in
+     the least how Watson is faring with the critics. He must not
+     be discouraged, in any case, with his real and high gifts.
+
+The young poet, in whom Rossetti saw so much to applaud, can scarcely be
+said to have fared at all at the hands of the critics.
+
+Here is a pleasant piece of literary portraiture, as valuable from the
+peep it affords into Rossetti’s own character as from the description it
+gives of the rustic poet:
+
+     The other evening I had the pleasant experience of meeting
+     one to whom I have for about two years looked with interest
+     as a poet of the native rustic kind, but often of quite a
+     superior order. I don’t know if you noticed, somewhere about
+     the date referred to, in _The Athenæum_, a review of poems
+     by Joseph Skipsey. Skip-sey has exquisite--though, as in all
+     such cases (except of course Burns’s) not equal--powers in
+     several directions, but his pictures of humble life are the
+     best. He is a working miner, and describes rustic loves and
+     sports, and the perils and pathos of pit-life with great
+     charm, having a quiet humour too when needed. His more
+     ambitious pieces have solid merit of feeling, but are much
+     less artistic. The other night, as I say, he came here, and
+     I found him a stalwart son of toil, and every inch a
+     gentleman. In cast of face he recalls Tennyson somewhat,
+     though more bronzed and brawned. He is as sweet and gentle
+     as a woman in manner, and recited some beautiful things of
+     his own with a special freshness to which one is quite
+     unaccustomed.
+
+Mr. Skipsey was a miner of North Shields, and in the review referred to
+much was made, in a delicate way, of his stern environments. His volume
+of lyrics is marked by the quiet humour. Rossetti speaks of, as well as
+by a rather exasperating inequality. Perhaps the best piece in it is a
+poem entitled _Thistle and Nettle_, treating with peculiar freshness of
+a country courtship. The coming together of two such entirely opposite
+natures was certainly curious, and only to be accounted for on the
+ground of Rossetti’s breadth of poetic sympathy. It would be interesting
+to hear what the impressions were of such a rude son of toil upon
+meeting with one whose life must have seemed the incarnation of artistic
+luxury and indulgence. Later on I received the following:
+
+     Poor Skipsey! He has lost the friend who brought him to
+     London only the other day (T. Dixon), and who was his only
+     hold on intellectual life in his district. Dixon died
+     immediately on his return to the North, of a violent attack
+     of asthma to which he was subject. He was a rarely pure and
+     simple soul, and is doubtless gone to higher uses, though
+     few could have reached, with his small opportunities, to
+     such usefulness as he compassed here. He was Ruskin’s
+     correspondent in a little book called (I think) _Work by
+     Tyne and Wear_. I got a very touching note from Skipsey on
+     the subject.
+
+From Mr. Skipsey he received a letter only a little while before his
+death, and to him he addressed one of the last epistles he penned.
+
+The following letter explains itself, and is introduced as much for
+the sake of the real humour which it displays, as because it affords an
+excellent idea of Rossetti’s view of the true function of prose:
+
+     I don’t like your Shakspeare article quite as well as the
+     first _Supernatural_ one, or rather I should say it does not
+     greatly add to it in my (first) view, though both might gain
+     by embodiment in one. I think there is _some_ truth in the
+     charge of metaphysical involution--the German element as I
+     should call it--and surely you are strong enough to be
+     English pure and simple. I am sure I could write 100 essays,
+     on all possible subjects (I once did project a series under
+     the title, _Essays written in the intervals of
+     Elephantiasis, Hydro-phobia, and Penal Servitude_), without
+     once experiencing the “aching void” which is filled by such
+     words as “mythopoeic,” and “anthropomorphism.” I do not find
+     life long enough to know in the least what they mean. They
+     are both very long and very ugly indeed--the latter only
+     suggesting to me a Vampire or Somnambulant Cannibal. (To
+     speak rationally, would not “man-evolved Godhead” be an
+     _English_ equivalent?) “Euhemeristic” also found me somewhat
+     on my beam-ends, though explanation is here given; yet I
+     felt I could do without Euhemerus; and _you_ perhaps without
+     the _humerous_. You can pardon me now; for _so_ bad a pun
+     places me at your mercy indeed. But seriously, simple
+     English in prose writing and in all narrative poetry
+     (however monumental language may become in abstract verse)
+     seems to me a treasure not to be foregone in favour of
+     German innovations. I know Coleridge went in latterly for as
+     much Germanism as his time could master; but his best genius
+     had then left him.
+
+It seems necessary to mention that I lectured in 1880, on the relation
+of politics to art, and in printing the lecture I asked Rossetti to
+accept the dedication of it, but this he declined to do in the generous
+terms I have already referred to. The letter that accompanied his
+graceful refusal is, however, so full of interesting personal matter
+that I offer it in this place, with no further explanation than that my
+essay was designed to show that just as great artists in past ages
+had participated in political struggles, so now they should not hold
+themselves aloof from controversies which immediately concern them:
+
+     I must admit, at all hazards, that my friends here consider
+     me exceptionally averse to politics; and I suppose I must
+     be, for I never read a parliamentary debate in my life! At
+     the same time I will add that, among those whose opinions I
+     most value, some think me not altogether wrong when I
+     venture to speak of the momentary momentousness and eternal
+     futility of many noisiest questions. However, you must
+     simply view me as a nonentity in any practical relation to
+     such matters. You have spoken but too generously of a sonnet
+     of mine in your lecture just received. I have written a few
+     others of the sort (which by-the-bye would not prove me a
+     Tory), but felt no vocation--perhaps no right---to print
+     them. I have always reproached myself as sorely amenable to
+     the condemnations of a very fine poem by Barberino, _On
+     Sloth against Sin_, which I translated in the Dante volume.
+     Sloth, alas! has but too much to answer for with me; and is
+     one of the reasons (though I will not say the only one), why
+     I have always fallen back on quality instead of quantity in
+     the little I have ever done. I think often with Coleridge:
+
+          Sloth jaundiced all: and from my graspless hand
+          Drop friendship’s precious pearls like hour-glass sand.
+          I weep, yet stoop not: the faint anguish flows,
+          A dreamy pang in morning’s feverish doze.
+
+     However, for all I might desire in the direction spoken of,
+     volition is vain without vocation; and I had better really
+     stick to knowing how to mix vermilion and ultramarine for a
+     flesh-grey, and how to manage their equivalents in verse. To
+     speak without sparing myself,--my mind is a childish one, if
+     to be isolated in Art is child’s-play; at any rate I feel
+     that I do not attain to the more active and practical of the
+     mental functions of manhood. I can say this to you, because
+     I know you will make the best and not the worst of me; and
+     better than such feasible best I do not wish to appear. Thus
+     you see I don’t think my name ought to head your
+     introductory paragraph--and there an end. And now of your
+     new lecture, and of the long letter I lately had from you.
+     At some moment I should like to know which pieces among the
+     translations are specially your favourites. Of the three
+     names you leash together as somewhat those of sensualists,
+     Cecco Angiolieri is really the only one--as for the
+     respectable Cino, he would be shocked indeed, though
+     certainly there are a few oddities bearing that way in the
+     sonnets between him and Dante (who is again similarly
+     reproached by his friend Cavalcanti), but I really _do_
+     suspect that in some cases similar to the one in question
+     about Cino (though not Guido and Dante) politics were really
+     meant where love was used as a metaphor.... I assure you,
+     you cannot say too much to me of this or any other work of
+     yours; in fact, I wish that we should communicate about
+     them. I have been thinking yet more on the relations of
+     politics and art. I do think seriously on consideration that
+     not only my own sluggishness, but vital fact itself, must
+     set to a great extent a _veto_ against the absolute
+     participation of artists in politics. When has it ever been
+     effected? True, Cellini was a bravo and David a good deal
+     like a murderer, and in these capacities they were not
+     without their political use in very turbulent times. But
+     when the attempt was made to turn Michael Angelo into a
+     “utility man” of that kind, he did (it is true) some
+     patriotic duty in the fortification of Florence; but it is
+     no less a fact that, when he had done all that he thought
+     became him, he retired to a certain trackless and forgotten
+     tower, and there stayed in some sort of peace (though much
+     in request) till he could lead his own life again; nor
+     should we forget the occasion on which he did not hesitate
+     even to betake himself to Venice as a refuge. Yet M. Angelo
+     was in every way a patriot, a philosopher, and a hero. I do
+     not say this to undervalue the scope of your theory. I think
+     possibilities are generally so much behind desirabilities
+     that there is no harm in any degree of incitement in the
+     right _direction_; and that is assuredly mental activity of
+     _all_ kinds. I judge you cannot suspect _me_ of thinking the
+     apotheosis of the early Italian poets (though surely
+     spiritual beauty, and not sensuality, was their general aim)
+     of more importance than the “unity of a great nation.” But
+     it is in my minute power to deal successfully (I feel) with
+     the one, while no such entity, as I am, can advance or
+     retard the other; and thus mine must needs be the poorer
+     part. Nor (with alas, and again alas!) will Italy or another
+     twice have her day in its fulness.
+
+I happened to have said in speaking of self-indulgence among artists,
+that there probably existed those to whom it seemed more important to
+preserve such a pitiful possession as the poetical remains of Cecco
+Angiolieri than to secure the unity of a great nation. Rossetti half
+suspected I meant this for a playful backhanded blow at himself (for
+Cecco was a great favourite with him), and protested that no such
+individual could exist. I defended my charge by quoting Keats’s--
+
+           ... the silver flow
+     Of Hero’s tears, the swoon of Imogen,
+     Fair Pastorella in the bandit’s den,
+     Are things to brood on with more ardency
+     Than the death-day of empires.
+
+But Rossetti grew weary of the jest:
+
+     I must protest that what you quote from Keats about “Hero’s
+     tears,” etc., fails to meet the text. Neither Shakspeare nor
+     Spenser assuredly was a Cecco; Marlowe may be most meant as
+     to “Hero,” and he perhaps affords the shadow of a parallel
+     in career though not in work.
+
+The extract from Rosetti’s letters with which I shall close this chapter
+is perhaps the most interesting yet made:
+
+     One point I must still raise, viz., that I, for one, cannot
+     conceive, even as the Ghost of a Flea, the ideal individual
+     who considers the Poetical Remains of Cecco Angiolieri of
+     more importance than the unity of a great nation! I think
+     this would have been better if much modified. Say for
+     instance--“A thing of some moment even while the contest is
+     waging for the political unity of a great nation.” This is
+     the utmost reach surely of human comparative valuation. I
+     think you have brought in Benvenuto and Michael much to the
+     purpose. Shall I give you a parallel in your own style?
+
+     During the months for which poet Coleridge became private
+     Cumberback (a name in which he said his horse would have
+     concurred), it seems strange that, in such stirring times,
+     his regiment should not have been ordered off on foreign
+     service. In such case that pre-eminent member of the awkward
+     squad would assuredly have been the very first man killed.
+     Should we have been more the gainers by his patriotism or
+     the losers by his poetry? The very last man killed in the
+     last _sortie_ from Paris during the Prussian siege (he
+     _would_ go behind a buttress to “pot” a Prussian after
+     orders were given to retire, and so got “potted” himself)
+     was Henri Regnault, a painter, whose brilliant work was a
+     guiding beacon on the road of improvement in French methods
+     of art, if not in intellectual force. Who shall fail to
+     honour the noble ardour which drew him from the security of
+     his studies in Tunis to partake his country’s danger? Yet
+     who shall forbear to sigh in thinking that, but for this,
+     his progressing work might still yearly be an element in
+     art-progress for Europe? Gérome and others betook themselves
+     to England instead, and are still benefiting the cause for
+     which they were before all things born. It was David who
+     said, “Si on tirait à mitraille sur les artistes, on n’y
+     tuerait pas un seul patriote!” _He_ was a patriot homicide,
+     and spoke probably what was true in the sense in which he
+     meant it. As I said, I am glad you turned Ben and Mike to
+     account, but the above is in some respects an open question.
+
+I have, as I say, a further batch of letters to introduce, but as these
+were, for the most part, written after an event which forms a land-mark
+in our acquaintance (I mean the occasion of our first meeting), I judge
+it is best to reserve them for a later section of this book. There are
+two forms, and, so far as I know, two only, in which a body of letters
+can be published with justice to the writer. Of these the first and most
+obvious form is to offer them chronologically _in extenso_ or with only
+such eliminations as seem inevitable, and the second is to tabulate them
+according to subject-matter, and print them in the order not of date but
+substance. There are advantages attending each method, and corresponding
+disadvantages also. The temptation to adopt the first of these was, in
+this case of Rossetti’s letters, almost insurmountable, for nothing can
+be more charming in epistolary style than the easy grace with which the
+writer passes from point to point, evolving one idea out of another,
+interlinking subject with subject, and building up a fabric of which the
+meaning is everywhere inwoven. In this respect Rossetti’s letters are
+almost as perfect as anything that ever left his hand; and, in freedom
+of phrase, in power of throwing off parenthetical reflections always
+faultlessly enunciated, in play of humour, often in eloquence (never
+becoming declamatory, and calling on “Styx or Stars”), sometimes
+in pathos, Rossetti’s letters are, in a word, admirable. They
+are comparable in these respects with the best things yet done in
+English,--as pleasing and graceful as Cowper’s letters, broader in range
+of subject than the letters of Keats, easier and more colloquial than
+those of Coleridge, and with less appearance of being intended for the
+public eye than is the case with the letters of Byron and of Shelley.
+Rossetti’s letters have, moreover, a value quite apart from the merits
+of their epistolary style, in so far as they contain almost the only
+expression extant of his opinions on literary questions. And this is
+the circumstance that has chiefly weighed with me to offer them
+in fragmentary form interspersed with elucidatory comment bearing
+principally upon the occasions that called them forth.
+
+Such then as I have described was the nature of my intercourse with
+Rossetti during the first year and a half of our correspondence, and now
+the time had come when I was to meet my friend for the first time face
+to face. The elasticity of sympathy by which a man of genius, surrounded
+by constant friends, could yet bend to a new-comer who was a stranger
+and twenty-five years his junior, and think and feel with him; the
+generous appreciativeness by which he could bring himself to consider
+the first efforts of one quite unknown; and then the unselfishness that
+seemed always to prefer the claims of others to his own great claims,
+could command only the return of unqualified allegiance. Such were the
+feelings with which I went forth to my first meeting with Rossetti, and
+if at any later date, the ardour of my regard for him in any measure
+suffered modification, be sure when the time comes to touch upon it I
+shall make no more concealment of the causes that led to such a change
+than I have made of those circumstances, however personal in primary
+interest, that generated a friendship so unusual and to me so serious
+and important.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+It was in the autumn of 1880 that I saw Rossetti for the first time.
+Being then rather reduced in health I contemplated a visit to the
+sea-side and wrote saying that in passing through London I should avail
+myself of his oft-repeated invitation to visit him. I gave him this
+warning of my intention, remembering his declared dread of being taken
+unawares, but I came to know at a subsequent period that for one who was
+within the inner circle of his friends the necessity to advise him of
+a visit was by no means binding. His reception of my intimation of an
+intention to call upon him was received with an amount of epistolary
+ceremony which I recognise now by the light of further acquaintance as
+eminently characteristic of the man, although curiously contradictory of
+his unceremonious habits of daily life. The fact is that Rossetti was
+of an excessively nervous temperament, and rarely if ever underwent an
+ordeal more trying than a first meeting with any one to whom for some
+time previously he had looked forward with interest. Hence by return of
+the post that bore him my missive came two letters, the one obviously
+written and posted within an hour or two of the other. In the first of
+these he expressed courteously his pleasure at the prospect of seeing
+me, and appointed 8.30 p.m. the following evening as his dinner hour at
+his house in Cheyne Walk. The second letter begged me to come at 5.30 or
+6 p.m., so that we might have a long evening. “You will, I repeat,” he
+says, “recognise the hole-and-cornerest of all existences in this big
+barn of mine; but come early and I shall read you some ballads, and
+we can talk of many things.” An hour later than the arrival of these
+letters came a third epistle, which ran: “Of course when I speak of your
+dining with me, I mean tête-à-tête and without ceremony of any kind. I
+usually dine in my studio and in my painting coat!” I had before me a
+five hours’ journey to London, so that in order to reach Chelsea at 6
+P.M., I must needs set out at mid-day, but oblivious of this necessity,
+Rossetti had actually posted a fourth letter on the morning of the day
+on which we were to meet begging me not on any account to talk, in the
+course of our interview, of a certain personal matter upon which we had
+corresponded. This fourth and final message came to hand the morning
+after the meeting, when I had the satisfaction to reflect that (owing
+more perhaps to the plethora of other subjects of interest than to any
+suspicion of its being tabooed) I had luckily eschewed the proscribed
+topic.
+
+Cheyne Walk was unknown to me at the time in question, except as the
+locality in and near which many men and women eminent in literature
+resided. It seems hard to realise that this was the case as recently as
+two years ago, now that so short an interval has associated it in one’s
+mind with memories which seem to cover a large part of one’s life. The
+Walk is not now exactly as picturesque as it appears in certain familiar
+old engravings; the new embankment and the gardens that separate it from
+the main thoroughfare have taken something from its beauty, but it still
+possesses many attractions, and among them a look of age which contrasts
+agreeably with the spic-and-span newness of neighbouring places. I found
+Rossetti’s house, No. 16, answering in external appearances to the frank
+description he gave of it. It stands about mid-way between the Chelsea
+pier and the new redbrick mansions erected on the Chelsea embankment.
+It seems to be the oldest house in the Walk, and the exceptional
+proportions of its gate-piers, and the weight and mass of its gate and
+railings, suggests that probably at some period it stood alone, and
+commanded as grounds a large part of the space now occupied by the
+adjoining residences. Behind the house, during eighteen years of
+Rossetti’s occupancy, there was a garden of almost an acre in extent,
+covering by much the larger part of the space enclosed by a block of
+four streets forming a square. At No. 4 Maclise had lived and died; at
+the same house George Eliot, after her marriage with Mr. Cross, had come
+to live; at No. 5, in the second street to the westward, Thomas Carlyle
+was still living, and a little beyond Cheyne Row stood the modest
+cottage wherein Turner died. Rossetti’s house had to me the appearance
+of a plain Queen Anne erection, much mutilated by the introduction of
+unsightly bay-windows; the brickwork seemed to be falling into decay;
+the paint to be in serious need of renewal; the windows to be dull with
+the accumulation of the dust of years; the sills to bear the suspicion
+of cobwebs; the angles of the steps and the untrodden flags of the
+courtyard to be here and there overgrown with moss and weeds; and round
+the walls and up the reveals of doors and windows were creeping the
+tangled branches of the wildest ivy that ever grew untouched by shears.
+Such was the exterior of the home of the poet-painter when I walked up
+to it on the autumn evening of my first visit, and the interior of the
+house was at once like and unlike the exterior. The hall had a puzzling
+look of equal nobility and shabbiness. The floor was paved with
+beautiful white marble, which however, was partly covered with a strip
+of worn cocoa-nut matting; the ceiling was in one of its sections
+gracefully groined, and in each of the walls, which were lofty, there
+was an arched recess containing a piece of sculpture; an old inlaid
+rosewood clock filled a bulkhead on one side facing the door, and on the
+corresponding side stood a massive gas branch. A mezzotint lithograph by
+Legros was the only pictorial decoration of the walls, which were plain,
+and seemed not to have been distempered for many years. Three doors led
+out of the hall, one at each side, and one in front, and two corridors
+opened into it, but there was no sign of staircase, nor had it any light
+except such as was borrowed from the fanlight that looked into the
+porch. These facts I noted in the few minutes I stood waiting in the
+hall, but during the many months in which subsequently that house was my
+own home as well as Rossetti’s, I came to see that the changes which the
+building must have undergone since the period of its erection, had so
+filled it with crooks and corners as to bewilder the most ingenious
+observer to account for its peculiarities.
+
+Very soon Rossetti came to me through the doorway in front, which proved
+to be the entrance to his studio. Holding forth both hands and crying
+‘Hulloa,’ he gave me that cheery, hearty greeting which I came to
+recognise as his alone, perhaps, in warmth and unfailing geniality among
+all the men of our circle. It was Italian in its spontaneity, and yet it
+was English in its manly reserve, and I remember with much tenderness of
+feeling that never to the last (not even when sickness saddened him,
+or after an absence of a few days or even hours) did it fail him when
+meeting with those friends to whom to the last he was really attached.
+Leading the way into the studio, he introduced me to his brother, who
+was there upon one of the evening visits, which at intervals of a week
+he was at that time making, with unfailing regularity. I should have
+described Rossetti, at this time, as a man who looked quite ten years
+older than his actual age, which was fifty-two, of full middle height
+and inclining to corpulence, with a round face that ought, one thought,
+to be ruddy but was pale, large grey eyes with a steady introspecting
+look, surmounted by broad protrusive brows and a clearly-pencilled ridge
+over the nose, which was well cut and had large breathing nostrils. The
+mouth and chin were hidden beneath a heavy moustache and abundant beard,
+which grew up to the ears, and had been of a mixed black-brown and
+auburn, and were now streaked with grey. The forehead was large, round,
+without protuberances, and very gently receding to where thin black
+curls, that had once been redundant, began to tumble down to the ears.
+The entire configuration of the head and face seemed to me singularly
+noble, and from the eyes upwards, full of beauty. He wore a pair of
+spectacles, and, in reading, a second pair over the first: but these
+took little from the sense of power conveyed by those steady eyes,
+and that “bar of Michael Angelo.” His dress was not conspicuous, being
+however rather negligent than otherwise, and noticeable, if at all, only
+for a straight sack-coat buttoned at the throat, descending at least to
+the knees, and having large pockets cut into it perpendicularly at the
+sides. This garment was, I afterwards found, one of the articles of
+various kinds made to the author’s own design. When he spoke, even in
+exchanging the preliminary courtesies of an opening conversation, I
+thought his voice the richest I had ever known any one to possess.
+It was a full deep barytone, capable of easy modulation, and with
+undertones of infinite softness and sweetness, yet, as I afterwards
+found, with almost illimitable compass, and with every gradation of tone
+at command, for the recitation or reading of poetry. The studio was a
+large room probably measuring thirty feet by twenty, and structurally as
+puzzling as the other parts of the house. A series of columns and arches
+on one side suggested that the room had almost certainly been at some
+period the site of an important staircase with a wide well, and on the
+other side a broad mullioned window reaching to the ceiling, seemed
+certainly to bear record of the occupant’s own contribution to the
+peculiarities of the edifice. The fireplace was at an end of the room,
+and over and at each side of it were hung a number of fine drawings
+in chalk, chiefly studies of heads, with here and there a water-colour
+figure piece, all from Rossetti’s hand. At the opposite end of the room
+hung some symbolic designs in chalk, _Pandora_ and _Proserpina_ being
+among the number, and easels of various sizes, some very large, bearing
+pictures in differing stages of completion, occupied positions on
+all sides of the floor, leaving room only for a sofa, with a bookcase
+behind, two old cabinets, two large low easy chairs, and a writing desk
+and chair at a window at the side, which was heavily darkened by the
+thick foliage of the trees that grew in the garden beyond.
+
+Dropping down on the sofa with his head laid low and his feet thrown up
+in a favourite attitude on the back, which must, I imagine, have been at
+least as easy as it was elegant, he began the conversation by bantering
+me upon what he called my “robustious” appearance compared with what he
+had been led to expect from gloomy reports of uncertain health. After a
+series of playful touches (all done in the easiest conceivable way,
+and conveying any impression on earth save the right one, that a first
+meeting with any man, however young and harmless, was little less than a
+tragic event to Rossetti) he glanced one by one at certain of the topics
+that had arisen in the course of our correspondence. I perceived that he
+was a ready, fluent, and graceful talker, with a remarkable incisiveness
+of speech, and a trick of dignifying ordinary topics in words which,
+without rising above conversation, were so exactly, though freely
+enunciated, as would have admitted of their being reported exactly as
+they fell from his lips. In some of these respects I found his brother
+William resemble him, though, if I may describe the talk of a dead
+friend by contrasting it with that of a living one bearing a natural
+affinity to it, I will say that Gabriel’s conversation was perhaps more
+spontaneous, and had more variety of tone with less range of subject,
+together with the same precision and perspicuity. Very soon the talk
+became general, and then Rossetti spoke without appearance of reserve
+of his two or three intimate friends, telling me, among other things,
+of Theodore Watts, that he “had a head exactly like that of Napoleon I.,
+whom Watts,” he said with a chuckle, “detests more than any character
+in history; depend upon it,” he added, “such a head was not given to him
+for nothing;” that Frederick Shields was as emotional as Shelley, and
+Ford Madox Brown, whom I had met, as sententious as Dr. Johnson. I kept
+no sort of record of what passed upon the occasion in question, but I
+remember that Rossetti seemed to be playfully battering his friends in
+their absence in the assured consciousness that he was doing so in the
+presence of a well-wisher; and it was amusing to observe that, after any
+particularly lively sally, he would pause to say something in a sobered
+tone that was meant to convey the idea that he was really very jealous
+of his friends’ reputation, and was merely for the sake of amusement
+giving rein to a sportive fancy. During dinner (and contrary to his
+declared habit, we did not dine in the studio) he talked a good deal
+about Oliver Madox Brown, for whom I had conceived a warm admiration,
+and to whom I had about that time addressed a sonnet.
+
+“You had a sincere admiration of the boy’s gifts?” I asked.
+
+“Assuredly. I have always said that twenty years after his death his
+name will be a familiar one. _The Black Swan_ is a powerful story,
+although I must honestly say that it displays in its central incident a
+certain torpidity that to me is painful. Undoubtedly Oliver had genius,
+and must have done great things had he lived. His death was a grievous
+blow to his father. I’m glad you’ve written that sonnet; I wanted you to
+toss up your cap for Nolly.” He spoke of Oliver’s father as indisputably
+one of the greatest of living colourists, inquired earnestly into the
+progress of his frescoes at Manchester, for one of the figures in which
+I had sat, and showed me a little water-colour drawing made by Oliver
+himself when very young. Dinner being now over, I asked Rossetti to
+redeem his promise to read one of his new ballads; and as his brother,
+who had often heard it before, expressed his readiness to hear it again,
+he responded readily, and, taking a small manuscript volume out of a
+section of the bookcase that had been locked, read us _The White Ship_.
+I have spoken of the ballad as a poem at an earlier stage, but it
+remains to me, in this place, to describe the effect produced upon me by
+the author’s reading. It seemed to me that I never heard anything at all
+matchable with Rossetti’s elocution; his rich deep voice lent an added
+music to the music of the verse: it rose and fell in the passages
+descriptive of the wreck with something of the surge and sibilation of
+the sea itself; in the tenderer passages it was soft as a woman’s, and
+in the pathetic stanzas with which the ballad closes it was profoundly
+moving. Effective as the reading sounded in that studio, I remember at
+the moment to have doubted if it would prove quite so effective from a
+public platform. Perhaps there seemed to be so much insistence on the
+rhythm, and so prolonged a tension of the rhyme sounds, as would run
+the risk of a charge of monotony if falling on ears less concerned with
+points of metrical beauty than with fundamental substance. Personally,
+however, I found the reading in the very highest degree enjoyable and
+inspiring.
+
+The evening was gone by the time the ballad was ended; and it was
+arranged that upon my return to London from the house of a friend at
+the sea-side I should again dine with Rossetti, and sleep the night
+at Cheyne Walk. I was invited to come early in order to see certain
+pictures by day-light, and it was then I saw the painter’s most
+important work,--the _Dantés Dream_, which finally (and before Rossetti
+was made aware of any steps being taken to that end) I had prevailed
+with Alderman Samuelson to purchase for the public gallery at Liverpool.
+At my request, though only after some importunity, Rossetti read again
+his _White Ship_, and afterwards _Rose Mary_, the latter of which he
+told me had been written in the country shortly after the appearance of
+the first volume of poems. He remarked that it had occupied three weeks
+in the writing, and that the physical prostration ensuing had been more
+than he would care to go through again. I observed on this head, that
+though highly finished in every stanza, the ballad had an impetuous
+rush of emotion, and swift current of diction, suggesting speed in its
+composition, as contrasted with the laboured deliberation which the
+sonnets, for example, appeared to denote. I asked if his work usually
+took much out of him in physical energy.
+
+“Not my painting, certainly,” he replied, “though in early years it
+tormented me more than enough. Now I paint by a set of unwritten but
+clearly-defined rules, which I could teach to any man as systematically
+as you could teach arithmetic; indeed, quite recently I sat all day for
+that very purpose with Shields, who is not so great a colourist as he is
+a draughtsman: he is a great draughtsman--none better now living, unless
+it is Leighton or Sir Noel Paton.”
+
+“Still,” I said, “there’s usually a good deal in a picture of yours
+beside what you can do by rule.”
+
+“Fundamental conception, no doubt, but beyond that not much. In
+painting, after all, there is in the less important details something of
+the craft of a superior carpenter, and the part of a picture that is not
+mechanical is often trivial enough. I don’t wonder, now,” he added, with
+a suspicion of a twinkle in the eye, “if you imagine that one comes down
+here in a fine frenzy every morning to daub canvas?”
+
+“I certainly imagine,” I replied, “that a superior carpenter would find
+it hard to paint another _Dante’s Dream_, which some people consider the
+best example yet seen of the English school.”
+
+“That is friendly nonsense,” rejoined my frank host, “there is now no
+English school whatever.”
+
+“Well,” I said, “if you deny the name to others who lay more claim to
+it, will you not at least allow it to the three or four painters who
+started with you in life?”
+
+“Not at all, unless it is to Brown, and he’s more French than English;
+Hunt and Jones have no more claim to the name than I have. As for all
+the prattle about pre-Raphaelitism, I confess to you I am weary of it,
+and long have been. Why should we go on talking about the visionary
+vanities of half-a-dozen boys? We’ve all grown out of them, I hope, by
+now.”
+
+I remarked that the pre-Raphaelite movement was no doubt a serious one
+at the beginning.
+
+“What you call the movement was serious enough, but the banding together
+under that title was all a joke. We had at that time a phenomenal
+antipathy to the Academy, and in sheer love of being outlawed signed our
+pictures with the well-known initials.” I have preserved the substance
+of what Rossetti said on this point, and, as far as possible, the actual
+words have been given. On many subsequent occasions he expressed himself
+in the same way: assuredly with as much seeming depreciation of the
+painter’s “craft,” although certain examples of modern art called forth
+his warmest eulogies. In serious moods he would speak of pictures by
+Millais, Watts, Leighton, Burne Jones, and others, as works of the
+highest genius.
+
+Reverting to my inquiry as to whether his work took much out of him, he
+remarked that his poetry usually did. “In that respect,” he said, “I am
+the reverse of Swinburne. For his method of production inspiration is
+indeed the word. With me the case is different. I lie on the couch, the
+racked and tortured medium, never permitted an instant’s surcease of
+agony until the thing on hand is finished.”
+
+It was obvious that what Rossetti meant by being racked and tortured,
+was that his subject possessed him; that he was enslaved by his own
+“shaping imagination.” Assuredly he was the reverse of a costive poet:
+impulse was, to use his own phrase, fully developed in his muse.
+
+I made some playful allusion, assuredly not meant to involve Mr.
+Swinburne, to Sheridan’s epigram on easy writing and hard reading; and
+to the Abbé de Marolles, who exultingly told some poet that his verses
+cost no trouble: “They cost you what they are worth,” replied the bard.
+
+“One benefit I do derive,” Rossetti added, “as a result of my method of
+composition; my work becomes condensed. Probably the man does not live
+who could write what I have written more briefly than I have done.”
+
+Emphasis and condensation, I remarked, were indubitably the
+characteristics of his muse. He then read me a great body of the new
+sonnets of _The House of Life_. Sitting in that studio listening to his
+reading and looking up meantime at the chalk-drawings that hung on the
+walls, I realised how truly he had said, in correspondence, that the
+feeling pervading his pictures was such as his poetry ought to suggest.
+The affinity between the two seemed to me at that moment to be complete:
+the same half-sad, half-resigned view of life, the same glimpses of
+hope, the same foreshadowings of gloom.
+
+“You doubtless think it odd,” he said at one moment, “to hear an old
+fellow read such love-poetry as much of this is, but I may tell you that
+the larger part of it, though still unpublished, was written when I was
+as young as you are. When I print these sonnets, I shall probably affix
+a note saying, that though many of them are of recent production, not a
+few are obviously the work of earlier years.”
+
+I expressed admiration of the pathetic sonnet entitled _Without Her_.
+
+“I cannot tell you,” he said, “at what terrible moment it was wrung from
+me.”
+
+He had read it with tears of voice, subsiding at length into suppressed
+sobs and intervals of silence. As though to explain away this emotion he
+said:
+
+“All poetry, that is really poetry, affects me deeply and often to
+tears. It does not need to be pathetic or yet tender to produce such a
+result. I have known in my life two men, and two only, who are similarly
+sensitive--Tennyson, and my old friend and neighbour William Bell Scott.
+I once heard Tennyson read _Maud_, and whilst the fiery passages were
+delivered with a voice and vehemence which he alone of living men can
+compass, the softer passages and the songs made the tears course down
+his cheeks. Morris is a fine reader, and so, of his kind, though a
+little prone to sing-song, is Swinburne. Browning both reads and talks
+well--at least he did so when I knew him intimately as a young man.”
+
+Rossetti went on to say that he had been among Browning’s earliest
+admirers. As a boy he had seen something signed by the then unknown
+name of the author of _Paracelsus_, and wrote to him. The result was
+an intimacy. He spoke with warmest admiration of _Child Roland_; and
+referred to Elizabeth Barrett Browning in terms of regard, and, I think
+I may say, of reverence.
+
+I asked if he had ever heard Ruskin read. He replied:
+
+“I must have done so, but remember nothing clearly. On one occasion,
+however, I heard him deliver a speech, and that was something never
+to forget. When we were young, we helped Frederick Denison Maurice by
+taking classes at the Working Men’s College, and there Charles Kingsley
+and others made speeches and delivered lectures. Ruskin was asked to
+do something of the kind and at length consented. He made no sort of
+preparation for the occasion: I know he did not; we were together at his
+father’s house the whole of the day in question. At night we drove
+down to the College, and then he made the finest speech I ever heard. I
+doubted at the time if any written words of his were equal to it! such
+flaming diction! such emphasis! such appeal!--yet he had written his
+first and second volumes of _Modern Painters_ by that time.” I have
+reproduced the substance of what Rossetti said on the occasion of my
+return visit, and, by help of letters written at the time to a friend,
+I have in many cases recalled his exact words. A certain incisiveness of
+speech which distinguished his conversation, I confess myself scarcely
+able to convey more than a suggestion of; as Mr. Watts has said in _The
+Athenæum_, his talk showed an incisiveness so perfect that it had often
+the pleasurable surprise of wit. Rossetti had both wit and humour, but
+these, during the time that I knew him, were only occasionally present
+in his conversation, while the incisiveness was always conspicuous.
+A certain quiet play of sportive fancy, developing at intervals into
+banter, was sometimes observable in his talk with the younger and more
+familiar of his acquaintances, but for the most part his conversation
+was serious, and, during the time I knew him, often sad. I speedily
+observed that he was not of the number of those who lead or sustain
+conversation. He required to be constantly interrogated, but as a
+negative talker, if I may so describe him, he was by much the best I had
+heard. Catching one’s drift before one had revealed it, and anticipating
+one’s objections, he would go on from point to point, almost removing
+the necessity for more than occasional words. Nevertheless, as I say, he
+was not, in the conversations I have heard, a leading conversationalist;
+his talk was never more than talk, and in saying that it was uniformly
+sustained yet never declamatory, I think I convey an idea both of its
+merits and limitations.
+
+I understood that Rossetti had never at any period of his life been an
+early riser, and at the time of the interview in question he was more
+than ever before prone to reverse the natural order of waking and
+sleeping hours. I am convinced that during the time I was with him only
+the necessity of securing a certain short interval of daylight, by
+which it was possible to paint, prevailed with him to rise before noon.
+Alluding to this idiosyncrasy, he said: “I lie as long, or say as late,
+as Dr. Johnson used to do. You shall never know, until you discover it
+for yourself, at what hour I rise.” He sat up until four A.M. on this
+night of my second visit,--no unaccustomed thing, as I afterwards
+learned. I must not omit the mention of one feature of the conversation,
+revealing to me a new side of his character, or, more properly, a new
+phase of his mind, which gave me subsequently an infinity of anxiety and
+distress. Branching off at a late hour from some entirely foreign topic,
+he begged me to tell him the facts of some unlucky debate in which I
+had long before been engaged on a public platform with some one who had
+attacked him. He had heard a report of what passed at a time when
+my name was unknown to him, as also was that of his assailant. Being
+forewarned by William Rossetti of his brother’s peculiar sensitiveness
+to critical attack, and having, moreover, observed something of the kind
+myself, I tried to avoid a circumstantial statement of what passed. But
+Rossetti was, as has been said by one who knew him well, “of imagination
+all compact,” and my obvious desire to shelve the subject suggested to
+his mind a thousand inferences infinitely more damaging than the fact.
+To avoid such a result I told him all, and there was little in the
+way of attack to repeat beyond a few unwelcome strictures on his poem
+_Jenny_. He listened but too eagerly to what I was saying, and then in a
+voice slower, softer, and more charged, perhaps, with emotion than I had
+heard before, said it was the old story, which began ten years before,
+and would go on until he had been hunted and hounded to his grave.
+Startled, and indeed, appalled by so grave a view of what to me had
+seemed no more than an error of critical judgment, coupled perhaps, with
+some intemperance of condemnation, I prayed of him to think no more of
+the matter, reproached myself with having yielded to his importunity,
+and begged him to remember that if one man held the opinions I had
+repeated, many men held contrary ones.
+
+“It was right of you to tell me when I asked you,” he said, “though my
+friends usually keep such facts from my knowledge. As to _Jenny_, it is
+a sermon, nothing less. As I say, it is a sermon, and on a great world,
+to most men unknown, though few consider themselves ignorant of it. But
+of this conspiracy to persecute me--what remains to say but that it is
+widespread and remorseless--one cannot but feel it.”
+
+I assured him there existed no conspiracy to persecute him: that he had
+ardent upholders everywhere, though it was true that few men had found
+crueller critics. He shook his head, and said I knew that what he had
+alleged was true, namely that an organised conspiracy existed, having
+for its object to annoy and injure him. Growing a little impatient of
+this delusion, so tenaciously held, against all show of reason, I told
+him that it was no more than the fever of an oppressed brain brought
+about by his reclusive habits of life, by shunning intercourse with all
+save some half dozen or more friends. “You tell me,” I said, “that you
+have rarely been outside these walls for some years, and your brain has
+meanwhile been breeding a host of hallucinations, like cobwebs in a dark
+corner. You have only to go abroad, and the fresh air will blow these
+things away.” But continuing for some moments longer in the same strain,
+he came to closer quarters and distressed me by naming as enemies three
+or four men who had throughout life been his friends, who have spoken of
+him since his death in words of admiration and even affection, and who
+had for a time fallen away from him or called on him but rarely, from
+contingencies due to any cause but alienated friendship.
+
+At length the time had arrived when it was considered prudent to retire.
+“You are to sleep in Watts’s room to-night,” he said: and then in reply
+to a look of inquiry he added, “He comes here at least twice a week,
+talking until four o’clock in the morning upon everything from poetry
+to the Pleiades, and driving away the bogies, and as he lives at Putney
+Hill, it is necessary to have a bed for him.” Before going into my room
+he suggested that I should go and look, at his. It was entered from
+another and smaller room which he said that he used as a breakfast
+room. The outer room was made fairly bright and cheerful by a glittering
+chandelier (the property once, he told me, of David Garrick), and
+from the rustle of trees against the window-pane one perceived that it
+overlooked the garden; but the inner room was dark with heavy hangings
+around the walls as well as the bed, and thick velvet curtains before
+the windows, so that the candles in our hands seemed unable to light
+it, and our voices sounded thick and muffled. An enormous black oak
+chimney-piece of curious design, having an ivory crucifix on the largest
+of its ledges, covered a part of one side and reached to the ceiling.
+Cabinets, and the usual furniture of a bedroom, occupied places about
+the floor: and in the middle of it, and before a little couch, stood
+a small table on which was a wire lantern containing a candle which
+Rossetti lit from the open one in his hand--another candle meantime
+lying by its side. I remarked that he probably burned a light all night.
+He said that was so. “My curse,” he added, “is insomnia. Two or three
+hours hence I shall get up and lie on the couch, and, to pass away a
+weary hour, read this book”--a volume of Boswell’s _Johnson_ which I
+noticed he took out of the bookcase as we left the studio. It did not
+escape me that on the table stood two small bottles sealed and labelled,
+together with a little measuring-glass. Without looking further at it,
+but with a terrible suspicion growing over me, I asked if that were his
+medicine.
+
+“They say there is a skeleton in every cupboard,” he said in a low
+voice, “and that’s mine; it is chloral.”
+
+When I reached the room that I was to occupy during the night, I found
+it, like Rossetti’s bedroom, heavy with hangings, and black with antique
+picture panels, with a ceiling (unlike that of the other rooms in the
+house), out of all reach or sight, and so dark from various causes, that
+the candle seemed only to glimmer in it--indeed to add to the darkness
+by making it felt. Mr. Watts, as Rossetti told me, was entirely
+indifferent to these eerie surroundings, even if his fine subjective
+intellect, more prone to meditate than to observe, was ever for an
+instant conscious of them; but on myself I fear they weighed heavily,
+and augmented the feeling of closeness and gloom which had been creeping
+upon me since I entered the house. Scattered about the room in most
+admired disorder were some outlandish and unheard-of books, and all
+kinds of antiquarian and Oriental oddities, which books and oddities I
+afterwards learnt had been picked up at various times by the occupant in
+his ramblings about Chelsea and elsewhere, and never yet taken away by
+him, but left there apparently to scare the chambermaid: such as old
+carved heads and gargoyles of the most grinning and ghastly expression,
+Burmese and Chinese Buddhas in soapstone of every degree of placid
+ugliness, together, I am bound by force of truth to admit, with one
+piece of carved Italian marble in bas-relief, of great interest and
+beauty. Such was my bed-chamber for the night, and little wonder if it
+threatened to murder the innocent sleep. But it was later than 4 A.M.,
+and wearied nature must needs assert herself, and so I lay down amidst
+the odour of bygone ages.
+
+Presently Rossetti came in, for no purpose that I can remember, except
+to say that he had enjoyed my visit I replied that I should never forget
+it. “If you decide to settle in London,” he said, “I trust you ‘ll come
+and live with me, and then many such evenings must remove the memory
+of this one.” I laughed, for I thought what he hinted at to be of the
+remotest likelihood. “I have just taken sixty grains of chloral,” he
+said, as he was going out; “in four hours I take sixty more, and in four
+hours after that yet another sixty.”
+
+“Does not the dose increase with you?”
+
+“It has not done so perceptibly in recent years. I judge I’ve taken
+more chloral than any man whatever: Marshall says if I were put into a
+Turkish bath I should sweat it at every pore.”
+
+There was something in his tone suggesting that he was even proud of the
+accomplishment. To me it was a frightful revelation, accounting entirely
+for what had puzzled and distressed me in his delusions already referred
+to. And now let me say that whilst it would have been on my part the
+most pitiful weakness (because the most foolish tearfulness of injuring
+a great man who was strong enough to suffer a good deal to be discounted
+from his strength), to attempt to conceal this painful side of
+Rossetti’s mind, I shall not again allude to those delusions, unless
+it be to show that, coming to him with the drug which blighted half his
+life, they disappeared when it had been removed.
+
+None may rightly say to what the use of that drug was due, or what was
+due to it; the sadder side of his life was ever under its shadow; his
+occasional distrust of friends: his fear of enemies: his broken health
+and shattered spirits, all came of his indulgence in the pernicious
+thing. When I remember this I am more than willing to put by all thought
+of the little annoyances, which to me, as to other immediate friends,
+were constantly occurring through that cause, which seemed at the moment
+so vexatious and often so insupportable, but which are now forgotten.
+
+Next morning--(a clear autumn morning)--I strolled through the large
+garden at the back of the house, and of course I found it of a piece
+with what I had previously seen. A beautiful avenue of lime-trees opened
+into a grass plot of nearly an acre in extent. The trees were just as
+nature made them, and so was the grass, which in places was lying long,
+dry and withered under the sun, weeds creeping up in damp places, and
+the gravel of the pathway scattered upon the verges. This neglected
+condition of the garden was, I afterwards found, humorously charged upon
+Mr. Watts’s “reluctance to interfere with nature in her clever scheme of
+the survival of the fittest,” but I suspect it was due at least equally
+to the owner’s personal indifference to everything of the kind.
+
+Before leaving I glanced over the bookcase. Rossetti’s library was by
+no means a large one. It consisted, perhaps, of 1000 volumes, scarcely
+more; and though this was not large as comprising the library of one
+whose reading must have been in two arts pursued as special studies,
+and each involving research and minute original inquiry, it cannot be
+considered noticeably small, and it must have been sufficient. Rossetti
+differed strangely as a reader from the man to whom in bias of genius
+he was most nearly related. Coleridge was an omnivorous general reader:
+Rossetti was eclectic rather than desultory. His library contained a
+number of valuable old works of more interest to him from their plates
+than letterpress. Of this kind were _Gerard’s Herbal_ (1626), supposed
+to be the source of many a hint utilised by the Morris firm, of which
+Rossetti was a member; _Poliphili Hypnerotomachia_ (1467); Heywood’s
+_History of Women_ (1624); _Songe de Poliphile_ (1561); Bonnard’s
+_Costumes of 12th, 13th, and l4th Centuries; Habiti Antichi_ (of
+which the designs are said to be by Titian)--printed Venice, (1664);
+_Cosmographia_, a history of the peoples of the world (1572); _Ciceronis
+Officia_ (1534), a blackletter folio, with woodcuts by Burgkmaier;
+_Jost Amman’s Costumes_, with woodcuts coloured by hand; _Cento Novelle_
+(Venice, 1598); Francesco Barberino’s _Documenti (d’Amore_ (Rome, 1640);
+_Décoda de Titolivio_, a Spanish blackletter, without date, but probably
+belonging to the 16th century. Besides these were various vellum-bound
+works relating to Greek and Roman allegorical and mythological subjects,
+and a number of scrap-books and portfolios containing photographs from
+nearly all the picture-galleries of Europe, but chiefly of the pictures
+of the early Florentine and Venetian schools, with an admixture of
+Spanish art. Of Michael Angelo’s designs for the Sistine Chapel there
+was a fine set of photographs.
+
+These did not make up a very complete ancient artistic library, but
+Rossetti’s collection of the poets was more full and valuable. There was
+a pretty little early edition of Petrarch, which appeared to have
+been presented first by John Philip Kemble to Polidori (Rossetti’s
+grandfather) in 1812; then in 1853 by Polidori to his daughter,
+Rossetti’s mother, Frances Rossetti; and by her in 1870 to her son. A
+splendid edition (1552) of Boccaccio’s _Decamerone_ contained a number
+of valuable marginal notes, chiefly by Rossetti, the first being as
+follows:
+
+This volume contains 40 woodcuts besides many initial letters. The
+greater number, if not the whole, must certainly be by Holbein. I am
+in doubt as to the pictures heading the chapters, but think these most
+probably his, only following the usual style of such illustrations
+to Boccaccio, and consequently more Italianised than the others. The
+initial letters present for the most part games of strength or skill.
+
+There were various editions of Dante, including a very large folio
+edition of the _Commedia_, dated Florence, 1481, and the works of a
+number of Dante’s contemporaries. Besides two or three editions of
+Shakspeare (the best being Dyce’s, in 9 vols.), there were some of the
+Elizabethan dramatists. Coming to later poetry, I found a complete
+set of Gilfillan’s _Poets_, in 45 vols. There was the curious little
+manuscript quarto (much like a shilling school-exercise book) labelled
+_Blake_, and this was, perhaps, by far the most valuable volume in the
+library. The contents and history of this book have already been given.
+
+There were two editions of Gilchrist’s _Blake_; complete (or almost
+complete) sets of the works of William Morris and A. C. Swinburne,
+inscribed in the authors’ autographs--the copy of _Atalanta in Calydon_
+being marked by the poet, “First copy; printed off before the dedication
+was in type.” It may be remembered that Robert Brough translated
+Béranger’s songs, and dedicated his volume in affectionate terms
+to Rossetti. The presentation copy of this book bore the following
+inscription:--“To D. G. Rossetti, meaning in my _heart_ what I have
+tried to say in print. Et. B. Brough. 1856.” There were also several
+presentation copies from Robert Browning, Coventry Patmore, W. B. Scott,
+Sir Henry Taylor, Aubrey de Vere, Tom Taylor, Westland Marston, F.
+Locker, A. O’Shaughnessy, Sir Theodore Martin; besides volumes bearing
+the names of nearly every well-known younger writer of prose or verse.
+
+Five volumes of _Modern Painters_, together with _The Seven Lamps of
+Architecture_ and the tract on _Pre-Raphaelitism_, bore the author’s
+name and Rossetti’s in Mr. Ruskin’s autograph. There was a fine copy in
+ten volumes of Violet-le-Duc’s _Dictionnaire de l’Architecture_, and
+also of the _Biographie Générale_ in forty-six volumes, besides several
+dictionaries, concordances, and the like. There was also a copy of
+Fitzgerald’s _Calderon_. Rossetti seemed to be a reader of Swedenborg,
+as White’s book on the great mystic testified; also to have been at one
+time interested in the investigation of the phenomena of Spiritualism.
+Of one writer of fiction he must have been an ardent reader, for there
+were at least 100 volumes by Alexandre Dumas. German writers were
+conspicuously absent, Goethe’s _Faust_ and Carlyle’s translation of
+_Wilhelm, Meister_, being about the only notable German works in the
+library. Rossetti did not appear to be a collector of first editions,
+nor did it seem that he attached much importance to the mere outsides of
+his books, but of the insides he was master indeed. The impression left
+upon the mind after a rapid survey of the poet-painter’s library was
+that he was a careful, but slow and thorough reader (as was seen by the
+marginal annotations which nearly every volume contained), and that,
+though very far from affected by bibliomania, he was not without pride
+in the possession of rare and valuable books.
+
+When I left the house at a late hour that morning Rossetti was not yet
+stirring, and so some months passed before I saw him again. If I had
+tried to formulate the idea--or say sensation--that possessed me at the
+moment, I think I should have said, in a word or two, that outside the
+air breathed freely. Within, the gloom, the mediaeval furniture, the
+brass censers, sacramental cups, lamps; and crucifixes conspired, I
+thought, to make the atmosphere heavy and unwholesome. As for the
+man himself who was the central spirit amidst these anachronistic
+environments, he had, if possible, attached me yet closer to himself by
+contact. Before this I had been attracted to him in admiration of his
+gifts: but now I was drawn to him, in something very like pity, for
+his isolation and suffering. Not that at this time he consciously
+made demand of much compassion, and least of all from me. Health was
+apparently whole with him, his spirits were good, and his energies were
+at their best. He had not yet known the full bitterness of the shadowed
+valley: not yet learned what it was to hunger for any cheerful society
+that would relieve him of the burden of the flesh. All that came later.
+Rossetti was one of the most magnetic of men, but it was not more his
+genius than his unhappiness that held certain of his friends by a spell.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+It was characteristic of Rossetti that he addressed me in the following
+terms probably before I had left his house: for the letter was, no
+doubt, written in that interval of sleeplessness which he had spoken of
+as his nightly visitant:
+
+I forgot to say--Don’t, please, spread details as to story of _Rose
+Mary_. I don’t want it to be stale or to get forestalled in the
+travelling of report from mouth to mouth. I hope it won’t be too long
+before you visit town again,--I will not for an instant question that
+you would then visit me also.
+
+Six months or more intervened, however, before I was able to visit
+Rossetti again. In the meantime we corresponded as fully as before: the
+subject upon which we most frequently exchanged opinions being now the
+sonnet.
+
+     By-the-bye [he says], I cannot understand what you say of
+     Milton’s, Keats’s, and Coleridge’s sonnets. The last, it is
+     true, was _always_ poor as a sonnetteer (I don’t see much in
+     the _Autumnal Moon_). My own only exception to this verdict
+     (much as I adore Coleridge’s genius) would be the ludicrous
+     sonnet on _The House that Jack built_, which is a
+     masterpiece in its way. I should not myself number the one
+     you mention of Keats’s among his best half-dozen (many of
+     his are mere drafts, strange to say); and cannot at all
+     enter into your verdict on those of Milton, which seem to me
+     to be every one of exceptional excellence, though a few are
+     even finer than the rest, notably, of course, the one you
+     name. Pardon an egotistic sentence (in answer to what you
+     say so generously of _Lost Days_), if I express an opinion
+     that _Known in Vain_ and _Still-born Love_ may perhaps be
+     said to head the series in value, though _Lost Days_ might
+     be equally a favourite with me if I did not remember in what
+     but too opportune juncture it was wrung out of me. I have a
+     good number of sonnets for _The House of Life_ still in MS.,
+     which I have worked on with my best effort, and, I think,
+     will fully sustain their place. These and other things I
+     should like to show you whenever we meet again. The MS. vol.
+     I proposed to send is merely an old set of (chiefly)
+     trifles, about which I should like an opinion as to whether
+     any should be included in the future.
+
+I had spoken of Keats’s sonnet beginning
+
+     To one who has been long in city pent,
+
+with its exquisite last lines--
+
+     E’en like the passage of an angel’s tear
+     That falls through the clear ether silently,
+
+reminding one of a less spiritual figure--
+
+     Kings like a golden jewel
+     Down a golden stair.
+
+After his bantering me, as of old he had done, on the use of long and
+crabbed words, I hinted that he was in honour bound to agree at least
+with my disparaging judgment upon _Tetrachordon_, if only because of the
+use of words that would “have made Quintillian stare.”
+
+I further instanced--
+
+     “Harry whose tuneful and well-measured song;” and
+     “Lawrence, of virtuous father virtuous son,”
+
+as examples of Milton at his weakest as a sonnet-writer. He replied:
+
+     I am sorry I must still differ somewhat from you about
+     Milton’s sonnets. I think the one on _Tetrachordon_ a very
+     vigorous affair indeed. The one to Mr. H. Lawes I am half
+     disposed to give you, but not altogether--its close is
+     sweet. As to _Lawrence_, it is curious that my sister was
+     only the other day expressing to me a special relish for
+     this sonnet, and I do think it very fresh and wholesomely
+     relishing myself. It is an awful fact that sun, moon, or
+     candlelight once looked down on the human portent of Dr.
+     Johnson and Mrs. Hannah More convened in solemn conclave
+     above the outspread sonnets of Milton, with a meritorious
+     and considerate resolve of finding out for him “why they
+     were so bad.” This is so stupendous a warning, that perhaps
+     it may even incline one to find some of them better than
+     they are.
+
+     Coming to Coleridge, I must confess at once that I never
+     meet in any collection with the sonnet on Schiller’s
+     _Robbers_ without heading it at once with the words
+     “unconscionably bad.” The habit has been a life-long one.
+     That you mention beginning--“Sweet mercy,” etc., I have
+     looked for in the only Coleridge I have by me (my brother’s
+     cheap edition, for all the faults of which _he_ is not at
+     all answerable), and do not find it there, nor have I it in
+     mind.
+
+     To pass to Keats. The ed. of 1868 contains no sonnet on the
+     Elgin Marbles. Is it in a later edition? Of course that on
+     Chapman’s _Homer_ is supreme. It ought to be preceded {*} in
+     all editions by the one _To Homer_,
+
+          “Standing aloof in giant ignorance,” etc.
+     which contains perhaps the greatest single line in Keats:
+
+          “There is a budding morrow in midnight.”
+
+     * I pointed out that it was written later than the one on
+     Chapman’s Homer (notwithstanding its first line) and
+     therefore should follow after it, not go before.
+
+     Other special favourites with me are--“Why did I laugh to-
+     night?”--” As Hermes once,”--“Time’s sea hath been,” and
+     the one _On the Flower and, Leaf_.
+
+     It is odd that several of these best ones seem to have been
+     early work, and rejected by Keats in his lifetime, while
+     some of those he printed are absolutely sorry drafts.
+
+     I had admired Coleridge’s sonnet on Schiller’s _Robbers_ for
+     the perhaps minor excellence of bringing vividly before the
+     mind the scenes it describes. If the sonnet is
+     unconscionably bad so perhaps is the play, the beautiful
+     scene of the setting sun notwithstanding. Eventually,
+     however, I abandoned my belligerent position as to Milton’s
+     sonnets: the army of authorities I found ranged against the
+     modest earth-works within which I had entrenched myself must
+     of itself have made me quail. My utmost contention had been
+     that Milton wrote the most impassioned sonnet (_Avenge, O
+     Lord_), the two most nobly pathetic sonnets (_When I
+     consider_ and _Methought I saw_), and one of the poorest
+     sonnets (_Harry, whose tuneful_, etc.) in English poetry.
+
+     At this time (September 1880) Mr. J. Ashcroft Noble
+     published an essay on _The Sonnet in England_ in _The
+     Contemporary Review_, and relating thereto Rossetti wrote:
+
+     I have just been reading Mr. Noble’s article on the sonnet.
+     As regards my own share in it, I can only say that it greets
+     me with a gratifying ray of generous recognition. It is all
+     the more pleasant to me as finding  a place in the very
+     Review which years ago opened its pages to a pseudonymous
+     attack on my poems and on myself. I see a passage in the
+     article which seems meant to indicate the want of such a
+     work on the sonnet as you are wishing to supply. I only
+     trust that you may do so, and that Mr. Noble may find a
+     field for continued poetic criticism. I am very proud to
+     think that, after my small and solitary book has been a good
+     many years published and several years out of print, it yet
+     meets with such ardent upholding by young and sincere men.
+
+     With the verdicts given throughout the article, I generally
+     sympathise, but not with the unqualified homage to
+     Wordsworth. A reticence almost invariably present is fatal
+     in my eyes to the highest pretensions on behalf of his
+     sonnets. Reticence is but a poor sort of muse, nor is
+     tentativeness (so often to be traced in his work) a good
+     accompaniment in music. Take the sonnet on _Toussaint
+     L’Ouverture_ (in my opinion his noblest, and very noble
+     indeed) and study (from Main’s note) the lame and fumbling
+     changes made in various editions of the early lines, which
+     remain lame in the end. Far worse than this, study the
+     relation of the closing lines of his famous sonnet _The
+     World is too much with us_, etc., to a passage in Spenser,
+     and say whether plagiarism was ever more impudent or
+     manifest (again I derive from Main’s excellent exposition of
+     the point), and then consider whether a bard was likely to
+     do this once and yet not to do it often. Primary vital
+     impulse was surely not fully developed in his muse.
+
+     I will venture to say that I wish my sister’s sonnet work
+     had met with what I consider the justice due to it. Besides
+     the unsurpassed quality (in my opinion) of her best sonnets,
+     my sister has proved her poetic importance by solid and
+     noble inventive work of many kinds, which I should be proud
+     indeed to reckon among my life’s claims.
+
+     I have a great weakness myself for many of Tennyson-Turner’s
+     sonnets, though of course what Mr. Noble says of them is in
+     the main true, and he has certainly quoted the very finest
+     one, which has a more fervent appeal for me than I could
+     easily derive from Wordsworth in almost any case.
+
+     Will you give my thanks to Mr. Noble for his frank and
+     outspoken praise?
+
+     Let me hear of your doings and intentions.
+
+     Ever sincerely yours.
+
+
+Three names notably omitted in the article are those of Dobell, W. B.
+Scott, and Swinburne.
+
+The allusion in the foregoing letter to the work on the Sonnet which
+I was aiming to supply, bears reference to the anthology subsequently
+published under the title of _Sonnets of Three Centuries_. My first
+idea was simply to write a survey of the art and history of the
+sonnet, printing only such examples as might be embraced by my critical
+comments. Rossetti’s generous sympathy was warmly engaged in this
+enterprise.
+
+     It would really warm me up much [he writes] to know of
+     _your_ editing a sonnet book You would have my best
+     cooperation as to suggesting examples, but I certainly think
+     that English sonnets (original and exceptionally translated
+     ones, the latter only _perhaps_) should be the sole scheme.
+     Curiously enough, some one wrote me the other day as to a
+     projected series of living sonneteers (other collections
+     being only of those preceding our time). I have half
+     committed myself to contributing, but not altogether as yet.
+     The name of the projector, S. Waddington, is new to me, and
+     I don’t know who is to publish.... Really you ought to do
+     the sonnet-book you aspire to do. I know but of one London
+     critic (Theodore Watts) whom I should consider the leading
+     man for such a purpose, and I have tried to incite him to it
+     so often that I know now he won’t do it; but I have always
+     meant _a complete_ series in which the dead poets must, of
+     course, predominate. As to a series of the living only, I
+     told you of a Mr. Waddington who seems engaged on such a
+     supplementary scheme. What his gifts for it may be I know
+     not, but I suppose he knows it is in requisition. However,
+     there need not be but one such if you felt your hand in for
+     it. His view happens to be also (as you suggest) about 160
+     sonnets. In reply to your query, I certainly think there
+     must be 20 living writers (male and female--my sister a
+     leader, I consider) who have written good sonnets such as
+     would afford an interesting and representative selection,
+     though assuredly not such as would all take the rank of
+     classics by any means. The number of sonnets now extant,
+     written by poets who did not exist as such a dozen years
+     ago, I believe to be almost infinite, and in sufficiently
+     numerous instances good, however derivative. One younger
+     poet among them, Philip Marston, has written many sonnets
+     which yield to few or none by any poet whatever; but he has
+     printed such a large number in the aggregate, and so unequal
+     one with the other, that the great ones are not to be found
+     by opening at random. “How are they (the poets) to be
+     approached?--” you innocently ask. Ye heavens! how does the
+     cat’s-meat-man approach Grimalkin?--and what is that
+     relation in life when compared to the _rapport_ established
+     between the living bard and the fellow-creature who is
+     disposed to cater to his caterwauling appetite for
+     publicity? However, to be serious, I must at least exonerate
+     the bard, I am sure, from any desire to appropriate an
+     “interest in the proceeds.” There are some, I feel certain,
+     to whom the collector might say with a wink, “What are you
+     going to stand?”
+
+I do not myself think that a collection of sonnets inserted at intervals
+in an essay is a good form for the purpose. Such a book is from one
+chief point a book of instantaneous reference,--it would only, perhaps,
+be read _through_ once in a lifetime. For this purpose a well-indexed
+current series is best, with any desirable essay prefixed and notes
+affixed.... I once conceived of a series, to be entitled,
+
+<center>
+
+THE ENGLISH CASTALY: A QUINTESSENCE:
+
+BEING A COLLECTION OF ALL THAT IS BEST IN ALL ENGLISH POETS,
+
+EXCEPTING WORKS OF GREAT LENGTH.
+
+</center>
+
+I still think this a good idea, but, of course, it would be an extensive
+undertaking.
+
+Later on, he wrote:
+
+     I have thought of a title for your book. What think you of
+     this?
+
+<center>
+
+A SONNET SEQUENCE
+
+FROM ELDER TO MODERN WORK,
+
+WITH FIFTY HITHERTO UNPRINTED SONNETS BY
+
+LIVING WRITERS.
+
+</center>
+
+     That would not be amiss. Tell me if you think of using the
+     title _A Sonnet Sequence_, as otherwise I might use it in
+     the _House of Life_.... What do you think of this
+     alternative title:
+
+<center>
+
+THE ENGLISH SONNET MUSE
+
+FROM ELIZABETH’S REIGN TO VICTORIA’S.
+
+</center>
+
+     I think _Castalia_ much too euphuistic, and though I
+     shouldn’t like the book to be called simply still I have a
+     great prejudice against very florid titles for such
+     gatherings. _Treasury_ has been sadly run upon.
+
+I did not like _Sonnet Sequence_ for such a collection, and relinquished
+the title; moreover, I had had from the first a clearly defined scheme
+in mind, carrying its own inevitable title, which was in due course
+adopted. I may here remark that I never resisted any idea of Rossetti’s
+at the moment of its inception, since resistance only led to a temporary
+outburst of self-assertion on his part. He was a man of so much
+impulse,--impulse often as violent as lawless--that to oppose him merely
+provoked anger to no good purpose, for as often as not the position
+at first adopted with so much pertinacity was afterwards silently
+abandoned, and your own aims quietly acquiesced in. On this subject of a
+title he wrote a further letter, which is interesting from more than one
+point of view:
+
+     I don’t like _Garland_ at all C. Patmore collected a
+     _Children’s Garland._ I think
+
+<center>
+
+ENGLISH SONNET’S
+
+PRESENT AND PAST, WITH--ETC.,
+
+</center>
+
+     would be a good title. I think I prefer _Present and Past_,
+     or _of the P. and P.,_ to _New and Old_ for your purpose;
+     but I own I am partly influenced by the fact that I have
+     settled to call my own vol. _Poems New and Old_, and don’t
+     want it to get staled; but I really do think the other at
+     least as good for your purpose--perhaps more dignified.
+
+Again, in reply to a proposal of my own, he wrote:
+
+     I think _Sonnets of the Century_ an excellent idea and
+     title. I must say a mass of Wordsworth over again, like
+     Main’s, is a little disheartening,--still the _best_
+     selection from him is what one wants. There is some book
+     called _A Century of Sonnets_, but this, I suppose, would
+     not matter....
+
+     I think sometimes of your sonnet-book, and have formed
+     certain views. I really would not in your place include old
+     work at all: it would be but a scanty gathering, and I feel
+     certain that what is really in requisition is a supplement
+     to Main, containing living writers (printed and un-printed)
+     put together under their authors’ names (not separately) and
+     rare gleanings from those more recently dead.
+
+I fear I did not attach importance to this decision, for I now knew my
+correspondent too well to rely upon his being entirely in the same mind
+for long. Hence I was not surprised to receive the following a day or
+two later:
+
+     I lately had a conversation with Watts about your sonnet-
+     book, and find his views to be somewhat different from what
+     I had expressed, and I may add I think now he is right. He
+     says there should be a very careful selection of the elder
+     sonnets and of everything up to present century. I think he
+     is right.
+
+The fact is, that almost from the first I had taken a view similar to
+Mr. Watts’s as to the design of my book, and had determined to call the
+anthology by the title it now bears. On one occasion, however, I acted
+rather without judgment in sending Rossetti a synopsis of certain
+critical tests formulated by Mr. Watts in a letter of great power and
+value.
+
+In the letter in question Mr. Watts seemed to be setting himself to
+confute some extremely ill-considered remarks made in a certain quarter
+upon the structure of the sonnet, where (following Macaulay) the critic
+says that there exists no good reason for requiring that even the
+conventional limit as to length should be observed, and that the only
+use in art of the legitimate model is to “supply a poet with something
+to do when his invention fails.” I confess to having felt no little
+amazement that one so devoid of a perception of the true function of the
+sonnet should have been considered a proper person to introduce a great
+sonnet-writer; and Mr. Watts (who, however, made no mention of the
+writer) clearly demonstrated that the true sonnet has the foundation
+of its structure in a fixed metrical law, and hence, that as it is
+impossible (as Keats found out for himself) to improve upon the accepted
+form, that model--known as the Petrarchian--should, with little or no
+variation, be worked upon. Rossetti took fire, however, from a mistaken
+notion that Mr. Watts’s canons, as given in the letter in question,
+and merely reported by me, were much more inflexible than they really
+proved.
+
+     Sonnets of mine _could not appear_ in any book which
+     contained such rigid rules as to rhyme, as are contained in
+     Watts’s letter. I neither follow them, nor agree with them
+     as regards the English language. Every sonnet-writer should
+     show full capability of conforming to them in many
+     instances, but never to deviate from them in English must
+     pinion both thought and diction, and, (mastery once proved)
+     a series gains rather than loses by such varieties as do not
+     lessen the only absolute aim--that of beauty. The English
+     sonnet too much tampered with becomes a sort of bastard
+     madrigal. Too much, invariably restricted, it degenerates
+     into a Shibboleth.
+
+     Dante’s sonnets (in reply to your question--not as part of
+     the above point) vary in arrangement. I never for a moment
+     thought of following in my book the rhymes of each
+     individual sonnet.
+
+     If sonnets of mine remain admissible, I should prefer
+     printing the two _On Cassandra to The Monochord_ and _Wine
+     of Circe_.
+
+     I would not be too anxious, were I you, about anything in
+     choice of sonnets except the brains and the music.
+
+Again he wrote:
+
+     I talked to Watts about his letter. He seems to agree with
+     me as to advisable variation of form in preference to
+     transmuting valuable thought. It would not be afc all found
+     that my best sonnets are always in the mere form which I
+     think the best. The question with me is regulated by what I
+     have to say. But in truth, if I have a distinction as a
+     sonnet-writer, it is that I never admit a sonnet which is
+     not fully on the level of every other.... Again, as to this
+     blessed question, though no one ever took more pleasure in
+     continually using the form I prefer when not interfering
+     with thought, to insist on it would after a certain point be
+     ruin to common sense.
+
+     As to what you say of _The One Hope_--it is fully equal to
+     the very best of my sonnets, or I should not have wound up
+     the series with it. But the fact is, what is peculiar
+     chiefly in the series is, that scarcely one is worse than
+     any other. You have much too great a habit of speaking of a
+     special octave, sestette, or line. Conception, my boy,
+     _fundamental brainwork_, that is what makes the difference
+     in all art. Work your metal as much as you like, but first
+     take care that it is gold and worth working. A Shakspearean
+     sonnet is better than the most perfect in form, because
+     Shakspeare wrote it.
+
+     As for Drayton, of course his one incomparable sonnet is the
+     _Love-Parting_. That is almost the best in the language, if
+     not quite. I think I have now answered queries, and it is
+     late. Good-night!
+
+Rossetti had somewhat mistaken the scope of the letter referred to,
+and when he came to know exactly what was intended, I found him in warm
+agreement with the views therein taken. I have said at an earlier stage
+that Rossetti’s instinct for what was good in poetry was unfailing,
+whatever the value of his opinions on critical principles, and hence I
+felt naturally anxious to have the benefit of his views on certain of
+the elder writers. He said:
+
+     I am sorry I am no adept in elder sonnet literature. Many of
+     Donne’s are remarkable--no doubt you glean some. None of
+     Shakspeare’s is more indispensable than the wondrous one on
+     _Last_ (129). Hartley Coleridge’s finest is
+
+          “If I have sinned in act, I may repent.”
+
+     There is a fine one by Isaac Williams, evidently on the
+     death of a worldly man, and he wrote other good ones. To
+     return to the old, I think Stillingfleet’s _To Williamson_
+     very fine....
+
+     I would like to send you a list of my special favourites
+     among Shakspeare’s sonnets--viz.:--
+
+     15, 27, 29, 30, 36, 44, 45, 49, 50, 52, 55, 56, 59, 61, 62,
+     64, 65, 66, 68, 71, 73, 76, 77, 90, 93, 94, 97, 98, 99, 102,
+     107, 110, 116, 117, 119, 120, 123, 129, 135, 136, 138, 144,
+     145.
+
+     I made the selection long ago, and of course love them in
+     varying degrees.
+
+     There should be an essential reform in the printing of
+     Shakspeare’s sonnets. After sonnet 125 should occur the
+     words _End of Part I_. The couplet-piece, numbered 126,
+     should be called _Epilogue to Part I._. Then, before 127,
+     should be printed Part II. After 152, should be put End of
+     Part II.--and the two last sonnets should be called Epilogue
+     to Part II. About these two last I have a theory of my own.
+
+     Did you ever see the excellent remarks on these sonnets in
+     my brother’s _Lives of Famous Poets?_ I think a simple point
+     he mentions (for first time) fixes Pembroke clearly as the
+     male friend. I am glad you like his own two fine sonnets. I
+     wish he would write more such. By the bye, you speak with
+     great scorn of the closing couplet in sonnets. I do not
+     certainly think that form the finest, but I do think this
+     and every variety desirable in a series, and have often used
+     it myself. I like your letters on sonnets; write on all
+     points in question. The two last of Shakspeare’s sonnets
+     seem to me to have a very probable (and rather elaborate)
+     meaning never yet attributed to them. Some day, when I see
+     you, we will talk it over. Did you ever see a curious book
+     by one Brown (I don’t mean Armitage Brown) on Shakspeare’s
+     sonnets? By the bye, he is not the source of my notion as
+     above, but a matter of fact he names helps in it. I never
+     saw Massey’s book on the subject, but fancy his views and
+     Brown’s are somewhat allied. You should look at what my
+     brother says, which is very concise and valuable. I hope I
+     am not omitting to answer you in any essential point, but my
+     writing-table is a chaos into which your last letters have,
+     for the moment, sunk beyond recovery.
+
+     I consider the foregoing, perhaps, the most valuable of
+     Rossetti’s letters to me. I cannot remember that we ever
+     afterwards talked over the two last sonnets of Shakspeare;
+     if we did so, the meaning attached to them by him did not
+     fix itself very definitely upon my memory.
+
+     In explanation of my alleged dislike of the closing couplet,
+     I may say that a rhymed couplet at the close of a sonnet has
+     an effect upon my ear similar to that produced by the
+     couplets at the ends of some of the acts of Shakspeare’s
+     plays, which were in many instances interpolated by the
+     actors to enable them to make emphatic exits.
+
+     I must now group together a number of short notes on
+     sonnets:
+
+     I think Blanco White’s sonnet difficult to overrate in
+     _thought_--probably in this respect unsurpassable, but easy
+     to overrate as regards its workmanship. Of course there is
+     the one fatally disenchanting line:
+
+          While fly and leaf and insect stood revealed.
+
+     The poverty of vision which could not see at a glance that
+     fly and insect were one and the same, is, as you say, enough
+     to account for its being the writer’s only sonnet (there is
+     one more however which I don’t know).
+
+     I’ll copy you overpage a sonnet which I consider a very fine
+     one, but which may be said to be quite unknown. It is by
+     Charles Whitehead, who wrote the very admirable and
+     exceptional novel of _Richard Savage_, published somewhere
+     about 1840.
+
+          Even as yon lamp within my vacant room
+             With arduous flame disputes the doubtful night,
+             And can with its involuntary light
+          But lifeless things that near it stand illume;
+          Yet all the while it doth itself consume,
+             And ere the sun hath reached his morning height
+             With courier beams that greet the shepherd’s sight,
+          There where its life arose must be its tomb:--
+          So wastes my life away, perforce confined
+             To common things, a limit to its sphere,
+          It gleams on worthless trifles undesign’d,
+             With fainter ray each hour imprison’d here.
+          Alas to know that the consuming mind
+             Must leave its lamp cold ere the sun appear!
+
+     I am sure you will agree with me in admiring _that_. I quote
+     from memory, and am not sure that I have given line 6 quite
+     correctly....
+
+     I have just had Blanco White’s only other sonnet (_On being
+     called an Old Man at 50_) copied out for you. I do certainly
+     think it ought to go in, though no better than so-so, as you
+     say. But it is just about as good as the former one, but for
+     the leading and splendid thought in the latter. Both are but
+     proseman’s diction.
+
+     There is a sonnet of Chas. Wells’s _On Chaucer_ which is not
+     worthy of its writer, but still you should have it. It
+     occurs among some prefatory tributes in _Chaucer
+     Modernised_, edited by E. H. Home. I don’t know how you are
+     to get a copy, but the book is in the British Museum Reading
+     Room. The sonnet is signed C. W. only.
+
+     The sonnet by Wells seemed to me in every respect poor, and
+     as it was no part of my purpose (as an admirer of Wells) to
+     advertise what the poet could not do, I determined--against
+     Rossetti’s judgment--not to print the sonnet.
+
+     You certainly, in my opinion, ought to print Wells’s sonnet.
+     Certainly nothing so disjointed ever gave itself the name
+     before, but it ought to be available for reference, and I do
+     not agree with you in considering it weak in any sense
+     except that of structure.
+
+     There is a sonnet by Ebenezer Jones, beginning “I never
+     wholly feel that summer is high,” which, though very jagged,
+     has decided merit to warrant its insertion.
+
+     As for Tennyson, he seems to have given leave for a sonnet
+     to appear in Main’s book. Why not in yours? But I have long
+     ceased to know him, nor is any friend of mine in
+     communication with him.... My brother has written in his
+     time a few sonnets. Two of them I think very fine--
+     especially the one called _Shelley’s Heart_, which he has
+     lately worked upon again with immense advantage.... You do
+     not tell me from whom you have received sonnets. The reason
+     which prevents my coming forward, in such a difficulty, with
+     a new sonnet of my own, is this:--which indeed you have
+     probably surmised: I know nothing would gratify malevolence,
+     after the controversy which ensued on your lecture, more
+     than to be able to assert, however falsely, that we had been
+     working in concert all along, that you were known to me from
+     the first, and that your advocacy had no real
+     spontaneity.... When you first entered on the subject, and
+     wrote your lecture, you were a perfect stranger to me, and
+     that fact greatly enhanced my pleasure in its enthusiastic
+     tone. I hope sincerely that we may have further and close
+     opportunities of intercourse, but should like whatever you
+     may write of me to come from the old source of intellectual
+     affinity only. That you should think the subject worthy of
+     further labour is a pleasure to me, but I only trust it may
+     not be a disadvantage to your book in unfriendly eyes,
+     particularly if that view happened to be the proposed
+     publisher’s, in which case I should much prefer that this
+     section of your work were withdrawn for a more propitious
+     occasion.... I am very glad Brown is furthering your sonnet-
+     book--he knows so many bards. Of course if I were you, I
+     should keep an eye on the mouths even of gift-horses; but
+     were a creditable stud to be trotted out, of course I should
+     be willing; as were I one among many, the objection I noted
+     would not exist. I do not mean for a moment to say that many
+     very fine sonnets might not be obtained from poets not yet
+     known or not widely known; but known names would be the
+     things to parry the difficulty.
+
+Later he wrote:
+
+     As you know, I want to contribute to your volume if I can do
+     so without fear of the consequences hinted at in a former
+     letter as likely to ensue, so I now enclose a sonnet of my
+     own. If you are out in March 1881, you may be before my new
+     edition, but I am getting my stock together. Not a word of
+     this however, as it mustn’t get into gossip paragraphs at
+     present. _The House of Life_ is now a hundred sonnets--all
+     lyrics being removed. Besides this series, I have forty-five
+     sonnets extra. I think, as you are willing, I shall use the
+     title I sent you--_A Sonnet Sequence_. I fancy the
+     alternative title would be briefer and therefore better as
+
+<center>
+
+OUR SONNET-MUSE
+
+PROM ELIZABETH TO VICTORIA
+
+</center>
+
+I could not be much concerned about the unwillingness to give me a new
+sonnet which Rossetti at first exhibited, for I knew full well that
+sooner or later the sonnet would come. Not that I recognised in him the
+faintest scintillation of the affectation so common among authors as
+to the publication of work. But the fear of any appearance of collusion
+between himself and his critics was, as he said, a bugbear that
+constantly haunted him. Owing to this, a stranger often stood a better
+chance of securing his ready and open co-operation than the most
+intimate of friends. I frequently yielded to his desire that in anything
+that I might write his name should not be mentioned--too frequently
+by far, to my infinite vexation at the time, and now to my deep and
+ineradicable regret. The sonnet-book out of which arose much of the
+correspondence printed in this chapter, contains in its preface and
+notes hardly an allusion to him, and yet he was, in my judgment, out of
+all reach and sight, the greatest sonnet-writer of his time. The sonnet
+first sent was _Pride of Youth_, but as this formed part of _The House
+of Life_ series, it was withdrawn, and _Raleigh’s Cell in the Tower_
+was substituted The following hitherto unpublished sonnet was also
+contributed but withdrawn at the last moment, because of its being out
+of harmony with the sonnets selected to accompany it:
+
+               ON CERTAIN ELIZABETHAN REVIVALS.
+
+          O ruff-embastioned vast Elizabeth,
+             Bush to these bushel-bellied casks of wine,
+             Home-growth, ‘tis true, but rank as turpentine,--
+          What would we with such skittle-plays at death %
+          Say, must we watch these brawlers’ brandished lathe,
+             Or to their reeking wit our ears incline,
+             Because all Castaly flowed crystalline
+          In gentle Shakspeare’s modulated breath!
+          What! must our drama with the rat-pit vie,
+             Nor the scene close while one is left to kill!
+                Shall this be poetry % And thou--thou--man
+                Of blood, thou cannibalic Caliban,
+          What shall be said to thee?--a poet?--Fie!
+             “An honourable murderer, if you will”
+
+     I mentioned to you [he says] William Davies, author of
+     _Songs of a Wayfarer_ (by the bye, another man has since
+     adopted his title). He has many excellent sonnets, and is a
+     valued friend of mine. I shall send you, on his behalf, a
+     copy of the book for selection of what you may please.... It
+     is very unequal, but the best truly excellent. The sonnets
+     are numerous, and some good, though the best work in the
+     book is not among them. There are two poems--_The Garden_,
+     and another called, I think, _On a dried-up Spring_, which
+     are worthy of the most fastidious collections. Many of the
+     poems are unnamed, and the whole has too much of a Herrick
+     air. . . .
+
+     It is quite refreshing to find you so pleased with my good
+     friend Davies’s book, and I wish he were in London, as I
+     would have shown him what you say, which I know would have
+     given him pleasure. He is a man who suffers much from moods
+     of depression, in spite of his philosophic nature. I have
+     marked fifty pieces of different kinds throughout his book,
+     and of these twenty-nine are sonnets. Had those fifty been
+     alone printed, Davies would now be remembered and not
+     forgotten: but all poets now-a-days are redundant except
+     Tennyson. ...
+
+     I am this evening writing to Davies, who is in Rome, and
+     could not resist enclosing what you say, with so much
+     experimental appreciativeness of his book, and of his
+     intention to fill it with moral sunshine. I am sure he ‘ll
+     send a new sonnet if he has one, but I fancy his bardic day
+     is over. I should think he was probably not subject to
+     melancholy when he wrote the _Wayfarer_. However, he tells
+     me that his spirits have improved in Italy. One other little
+     book of Herrickian verse he has written, called _The
+     Shepherd!s Garden_, but there are no sonnets in it. Besides
+     this, he published a volume containing a record of travel of
+     a very interesting kind, and called _The Pilgrimage of the
+     Tiber_. This is well known. It is illustrated, many of the
+     drawings being by himself, for he is quite as much painter
+     as poet. He also wrote in _The Quarterly Review_ an article
+     on the sonnet (I should think about 1870 or so), and, a
+     little later, one which raised great wrath, on the English
+     School of Painting. These I have not seen. He “lacks
+     advancement,” however; having fertile powers and little
+     opportunity, and being none the luckier (I think) for a
+     small independence which keeps off _compulsion_ to work,
+     though of willingness he has abundance in many directions.
+
+     There is an admirable but totally unknown living poet named
+     Dixon. I will send you two small vols, of his which he gave
+     me long ago, but please take good care of them, and return
+     them as soon as done with. I value them highly. I forgot
+     till to-day that he had written any sonnets, but I see there
+     are three in one vol. and one in another. I have marked my
+     two favourites. He should certainly be represented in your
+     book. If I live, I mean to write something about him in some
+     quarter when I can. His finest passages are as fine as any
+     living man can do. He was a canon of Carlisle Cathedral, and
+     at present has a living somewhere. If you wanted to ask him
+     for an original sonnet, you might mention my name, and
+     address him at Carlisle with _Please forward_. Of course he
+     is a Rev.
+
+     You will be sorry to hear that Davies has abandoned the hope
+     of producing a new sonnet to his own satisfaction. I have
+     again, however, urged him to the onslaught, and told him how
+     deserving you are of his efforts.
+
+     Swinburne, who is a vast admirer of my sister’s, thinks the
+     _Advent_ perhaps the noblest of all her poems, and also
+     specially loves the _Passing Away_. I do not know that I
+     quite agree with your decided preference for the two sonnets
+     of hers you signalise,--the _World_ is very fine, but the
+     other, _Dead before Death_, a little sensational for her. I
+     think _After Death_ one of her noblest, and the one _After
+     Communion_. In my own view, the greatest of all her poems is
+     that on France after the siege--_To-Day for Me_. A very
+     splendid piece of feminine ascetic passion is _The Convent
+     Threshold_.
+
+     I have run the sonnet you like, _St. Luke the Painter_, into
+     a sequence with two more not yet printed, and given the
+     three a general title of _Old and New Art_, as well as
+     special titles to each. I shall annex them to _The House of
+     Life_.
+
+     Have you ever read Vaughan? He resembles Donne a good deal
+     as to quaintness, but with a more emotional personality.
+
+     I have altered the last line of octave in _Lost Days_. It
+     now runs--
+
+          “The undying throats of Hell, athirst alway.”
+
+     I always had it in my mind to make a change here, as the
+     _in_ standing in the line in its former reading clashed with
+     _in_ occurring in the previous line. I have done what I
+     think is a prime sonnet on the murdered Czar, which I
+     enclose, but don’t show it to a soul.
+
+     Theodore Watts is going to print a very fine sonnet of his
+     own in _The Athenæum_. It is the first verse he ever put in
+     print, though he wrote much (when a very young man). Tell me
+     how you like it. I think he is destined to shine in that
+     class of poetry.
+
+     I knew you must like Watts’s sonnets. They are splendid
+     affairs. I am not sure that I agree with you in liking the
+     first the better of the two: the second (_Natura Maligna_)
+     is perhaps the deeper and finer. I have asked Watts to give
+     you a new sonnet, and I think perhaps he will do so, or at
+     all events give you permission to use those he has printed.
+     He has just come into the room, and says he would like to
+     hear from you on the subject.
+
+     From one rather jocular sentence in your note I judge you
+     may include some sonnets of your own. I see no possible
+     reason why you should not. You are really now, at your
+     highest, among our best sonnet-writers, and have written two
+     or three sonnets that yield to few or none whatever. I am
+     forced, however, to request that you will not put in the one
+     referring to myself, from my constant bugbear of any
+     appearance of collusion. That sonnet is a very fine one--my
+     brother was showing it me again the other day. It is not my
+     personal gratification alone, though that is deep, because I
+     know you are sincere, which leads me to the conclusion that
+     it is your best, and very fine indeed. I think your
+     Cumberland sonnet admirable. The sonnet on Byron is
+     extremely musical in flow and the symbolic scenery of
+     exceptional excellence. The view taken is the question with
+     me. Byron’s vehement directness, at its best, is a lasting
+     lesson: and, dubious monument as _Don Juan_ may be, it
+     towers over the century. Of course there is truth in what
+     you say; but _ought_ it to be the case? and is it the case
+     in any absolute sense? You deal frankly with your sonnets,
+     and do not shrink from radical change. I think that on
+     Oliver much better than when I saw it before. The opening
+     phrases of both octave and sestette are very fine; but the
+     second quatrain and the second terzina, though with a
+     quality of beauty, both seem somewhat to lack distinctness.
+     The word _rivers_ cannot be used with elision--the v is a
+     hard pebble in the flow, and so are the closing consonants.
+     You must put up with _streams_ if you keep the line.
+
+     You should have Bailey’s dedicatory sonnet in _Festus_.
+
+     I am enclosing a fine sonnet by William Bell Scott, which I
+     wished him to let me send you for your book. It has not yet
+     been printed. I think I heard of some little chaffy matter
+     between him and you, but, doubtless, you have virtually
+     forgotten all about it. I must say frankly that I think the
+     day when you made the speech he told me of must have been
+     rather a wool-gathering one with you.... I suppose you know
+     that Scott has written a number of fine sonnets contained in
+     his vol of _Poems_ published about 1875, I think.
+
+     I directed the attention of Mr. Waddington (whom, however, I
+     don’t know personally) to a most noble sonnet by Fanny
+     Kemble, beginning, “Art thou already weary of the way?” He
+     has put it in, and several others of hers, but she is very
+     unequal, and I don’t know if the others should be there, but
+     you should take the one in question. It sadly wants new
+     punctuation, being vilely printed just as I first saw it
+     when a boy in some twopenny edition.
+
+     In a memoir of Gilchrist, appended now by his widow to the
+     _Life of Blake_, there is a sonnet by G., perhaps
+     interesting enough, as being exceptional, for you to ask for
+     it; but I don’t advise you, if you don’t think it worth.
+
+     I have received from Mrs. Meynell, a sister of Eliz.
+     Thompson, the painter, a most genuine little book of poems
+     containing some sonnets of true spiritual beauty. I must
+     send it you.
+
+     This book had just then been introduced to Rossetti with
+     much warmth of praise by Mr. Watts, and he took to it
+     vastly.
+
+This closes Rossetti’s interesting letters on sonnet literature. In
+reprinting his first volume of _Poems_ he had determined to remove
+the sonnets of _The House of Life_ to the new volume of _Ballads and
+Sonnets_, and fill the space with the fragment of a poem written in
+youth, and now called _The Bride’s Prelude_. He sent me a proof. The
+reader will remember that as a narrative fragment it is less
+remarkable for striking incident (though never failing of interest
+and picturesqueness) than for a slow and psychical development which
+ultimately gained a great hold of the sympathies. The poem leaves behind
+it a sense as of a sultry day. Judging first of its merits as a song
+(using the word in its broad and simple sense), the poem flows on the
+tongue with unbroken sweetness and with a variety of cadence and light
+and shade of melody which might admit of its pursuing its meanderings
+through five times its less than 50 pages, and still keeping one’s
+senses awake to the constantly recurring advent of new and pleasing
+literary forms. The story is a striking one, with a great wealth of
+highly effective incident,--notably the episode of the card-playing,
+and of the father striking down the sword which Raoul turns against the
+breast of the bride. Almost equally memorable are the scenes in which
+the lover appears, and the occasional interludes of incident in which,
+between the pauses of the narrative, the bridegroom’s retinue are heard
+sporting in the courtyard without.
+
+The whole atmosphere of the poem is saturated in a medievalism of spirit
+to which no lapse of modernism does violence, and the spell of romance
+which comes with that atmosphere of the middle ages is never broken, but
+preserved in the minutest most matter-of-fact details, such as the bowl
+of water that stood amidst flowers, and in which the sister Amelotte
+“slid a cup” and offered it to Aloyse to drink. But the one great charm
+of the poem lies in its subtle and most powerful psychical analysis,
+seen foreshadowed in the first mention of the bride sitting in the
+shade, but first felt strongly when she begs her sister to pray, and
+again when she tells how, at God’s hint, she had whispered something of
+the whole tale to her sister who slept
+
+The dread introspection pictured after the sin is in the highest degree
+tragic, and affects one like remorse in its relentlessness, although
+less remorse than fear of discovery. The sickness of the following
+condition, with its yearnings, longings, dizziness, is very nobly
+done, and delicate as is the theme, and demanding a touch of unerring
+strength, yet lightness, the part of the poem concerned with it contains
+certain of the most beautiful and stirring things. The madness (for it
+is not less than such) in which at the sea-side, believing Urscelyn to
+be lost, the bride tells the whole tale, whilst her curse laughed within
+her to see the amazement and anger of her brothers and of her father,
+is doubtless true enough to the frenzied state of her mind; but my
+sympathies go out less to that part of the poem than to the subsequent
+part, in which the bride-mother is described as leaning along in thought
+after her child, till tears, not like a wedded girl’s, fall among her
+curls. Highly dramatic, too, is the passage in which she fears to curse
+the evil men whose evil hands have taken her child, lest from evil lips
+the curse should be a blessing.
+
+The characterisation seemed to be highly powerful, and, so far as it
+went, finely contrasted. I could almost have wished that the love for
+which the bride suffers so much had been more dwelt upon, and Urscelyn
+had been made somehow more worthy of such love and sacrifice. The only
+point in which the poem struck me, after mature reflection, as less
+admirable than certain others of the author’s, lay in the circumstance
+that the narrative moves slowly, but, of course, it should be remembered
+that the poem is one of emotion, not incident. There are most magical
+flashes of imagery in the poem, notably in the passage beginning
+
+     Her thought, long stagnant, stirred by speech,
+        Gave her a sick recoil;
+     As, dip thy fingers through the green
+     That masks a pool, where they have been,
+     The naked depth is black between.
+
+Rossetti wrote a valuable letter on his scheme for the completion of
+_The Bride’s Prelude_:
+
+     I was much pleased with your verdict on _The Bride’s
+     Prelude_. I think the poem is saved by its picturesqueness,
+     but that otherwise the story up to the point reached is too
+     purely repellent. I have the sequel quite clear in my mind,
+     and in it the mere passionate frailty of Aloyse’s first love
+     would be followed by a true and noble love, rendered
+     calamitous by Urscelyn, who then (having become a powerful
+     soldier of fortune) solicits the hand of Aloyse. Thus the
+     horror which she expresses against him to her sister on the
+     bridal morning would be fully justified. Of course, Aloyse
+     would confess her fault to her second lover whose love
+     would, nevertheless, endure. The poem would gain so greatly
+     by this sequel that I suppose I must set to and finish it
+     one day, old as it is. I suppose it would be doubled, but
+     hardly more. I hate long poems.
+
+     I quite think the card-playing passage the best thing--as a
+     unit--in the poem: but your opinion encourages my own, that
+     it fails nowhere of good material. It certainly moves slowly
+     as you say, and this is quite against the rule I follow. But
+     here was no life condensed in an episode; but a story which
+     had necessarily to be told step by step, and a situation
+     which had unavoidably to be anatomised. If it is not
+     unworthy to appear with my best things, that is all I hope
+     for it. You have pitched curiously upon some of my favourite
+     touches, and very coincidently with Watts’s views.
+
+Early in 1881, he wrote:
+
+     I am writing a ballad on the death of James I. of Scots. It
+     is already twice the length of _The White Ship_, and has a
+     good slice still to come. It is called _The King’s Tragedy_,
+     and is a ripper I can tell you!
+
+     The other day I got from Italy a paper containing a really
+     excellent and exceptional notice of my poems, written by the
+     author of a volume also sent me containing, among other
+     translations from the English, _Jenny, Last Confession_,
+     etc.
+
+     I have been re-reading, after many years, Keats’s _Otho the
+     Great_, and find it a much better thing than I remembered,
+     though only a draft.
+
+     I am much exercised as to what you mention as to a _Michael
+     Scott_ scheme of Coleridge’s. Where does he speak of it, and
+     what is it? It is quite new to me; but curiously enough, I
+     have a complete scheme drawn up for a ballad, to be called
+     _Michael Scott’s Wooing_, not the one I proposed beginning
+     now--and also have long designed a picture under the same
+     title, but of quite different motif! Allan Cunningham wrote
+     a romance called _Sir Michael Scott_, but I never saw it.
+
+     I have heard from Walter Severn about a subscription
+     proposed to erect a gravestone to his father beside that of
+     Keats. I should like you to copy for me your sonnet on
+     Severn. I hear it is in _The Athenæum_, but have not seen
+     it. I was asked to prepare an inscription, which I send you.
+     Nothing would be so good as Severn’s own words.
+
+     I strongly urge you to go on with your book on the
+     _Supernatural_. The closing chapter should, I think, be on
+     the _weird_ element in its perfection, as shown by recent
+     poets in the mess--i.e. those who take any lead. Tennyson
+     has it certainly here and there in imagery, but there is no
+     great success in the part it plays through his _Idylls_. The
+     Old Romaunt beats him there. The strongest instance of this
+     feeling in Tennyson that I remember is in a few lines of
+     _The Palace of Art_:
+
+          And hollow breasts enclosing hearts of flame;
+             And with dim-fretted foreheads all
+          On corpses three months old at morn she came
+             That stood against the wall.
+
+     I won’t answer for the precise age of the corpses--perhaps I
+     have staled them somewhat.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+It is in the nature of these Recollections that they should be personal,
+and it can hardly occur to any reader to complain of them for being that
+which above all else they purport to be. I have hitherto, however, been
+conscious of a desire (made manifest to my own mind by the character of
+my selections from the letters written to me) to impart to this volume
+an interest as broad and general as may be. But my primary purpose is
+now, and has been from the first, to afford the best view at my command
+of Rossetti as a man; and more helpful to such purpose than any number
+of critical opinions, however interesting, have often been those
+passages in his letters where the writer has got closest to his
+correspondent in revealing most of himself. In the chapter I am now
+about to write I must perforce set aside all limitations of reserve if
+I am to convey such an idea of Rossetti’s last days as fills my mind; I
+must be content to speak almost exclusively of my personal relations to
+him, to the enforced neglect of the more intimate relations of others.
+
+About six months after my first visit, Rossetti invited me to spend
+a week with him at his house, and this I was glad to be able to do. I
+found him in many important particulars a changed man. His complexion
+was brighter than before, and this circumstance taken alone might have
+been understood to indicate improved bodily health, but in actual fact
+it rather denoted in his case a retrograde physical tendency, as being
+indicative chiefly of some recent excess in the use of his pernicious
+drug. He was distinctly less inclined to corpulence, his eyes were less
+bright, and had more frequently than formerly the appearance of gazing
+upon vacancy, and when he walked to and fro in the studio, as it was
+his habit to do at intervals of about an hour, he did so with a more
+laboured sidelong motion than I had previously noticed, as though the
+body unconsciously lost and then regained some necessary control and
+command at almost every step. Half sensible, no doubt, of a reduced
+condition, or guessing perhaps the nature of my reflections from a
+certain uneasiness which it baffled my efforts to conceal, he paused for
+an instant one evening in the midst of these melancholy perambulations
+and asked me how he struck me as to health. More frankly than
+judiciously I answered promptly, Less well than formerly. It was a
+luckless remark, for Rossetti’s prevailing wish at that moment was to
+conceal even from himself his lowered state, and the time was still to
+come when he should crave the questionable sympathy of those who said he
+looked even more ill than he felt. Just before this, my second visit,
+he had completed his _King’s Tragedy_, and I had heard from his own lips
+how prostrate the emotional strain involved in the production of the
+poem had first left him. Casting himself now on the couch in an attitude
+indicative of unusual exhaustion, he said the ballad had taken much out
+of him. “It was as though my life ebbed out with it,” he said, and in
+saying so much of the nervous tension occasioned by the work in question
+he did not overstate the truth as it presented itself to other eyes.
+Time after time while the ballad was in course of production, he had
+made effort to read it aloud to the friend to whose judgment his poetry
+was always submitted, but had as frequently failed to do so from the
+physical impossibility of restraining the tears that at every stage
+welled up out of an overwrought nature, for the poet never existed
+perhaps who, while at work, lived so vividly in the imagined situation.
+And the weight of that work was still upon him when we met again. His
+voice seemed to have lost much in quality, and in compass too to have
+diminished: or if the volume of sound remained the same, it appeared to
+have retired (so to express it) inwards, and to convey, when he spoke,
+the idea of a man speaking as much to himself as to others. More than
+ever now the scene of his life lacked for me some necessary vitality: it
+breathed an atmosphere of sorrow: it was like the dream of a distempered
+imagination out of which there came no welcome awakening, to say it was
+not true. On the side of his intellectual life Rossetti was obviously
+under less constraint with me than ever before. Previously he had seemed
+to make a conscious effort to speak generously of all contemporaries,
+and cordially of every friend with whom he was brought into active
+relations; and if, by force of some stray impulse, he was ever led to
+say a disparaging word of any one, he forthwith made a palpable, and
+sometimes amusing, effort so to obliterate the injurious impression
+as to convey the idea that he wished it to appear that he had not said
+anything at all. But now this restraint was thrown aside.
+
+I perceived that the drug by which he was enslaved caused what I may
+best characterise as intermittent waves of morbid suspiciousness as
+to the good faith of every individual, including his best, oldest,
+and truest friends, as to whom the most inexplicable delusions would
+suddenly come, and as suddenly go. He would talk in the gravest and most
+earnest way of the wrongs he had suffered at the hands of a dear friend,
+and then the moment his eloquence had drawn from me an exclamation of
+sympathy for him, he would turn round and heap upon the same individual
+an extravagance of praise for his fidelity and good faith. And now,
+he so classed his contemporaries as to leave no doubt that he was
+duly sensible of his own place amongst them, preserving, meantime, a
+dignified reticence as to the extent of his personal claims.
+
+His life was an anachronism. Such a man should have had no dealings with
+the nineteenth century: he belonged to the sixteenth, or perhaps the
+thirteenth, and in Italy not in England. It would, nevertheless, be
+wrong to say that he was wholly indifferent to important political
+issues, of which he took often a very judicial view. In dismissing
+further mention of this second and prolonged meeting with Rossetti,
+it only remains to me to say (as a necessary, if strictly personal,
+explanation of much that will follow), that on the evening preceding my
+departure, he asked me, in the event of my deciding to come to live in
+London, to take up my quarters at his house. To this proposal I made no
+reply: and neither his speech nor my silence needs any comment, and I
+shall offer none.
+
+A month or two later my own health gave way, and then, a change of
+residence being inevitable, Rossetti repeated his invitation; but a
+London campaign, under such conditions as were necessarily entailed
+by pitching one’s tent with him, got further and further away, until
+I seemed to see it through the inverse end of a telescope whereof the
+slides were being drawn out, out, every day further and further. I
+determined to spend half a year among’ the mountains of Cumberland,
+and went up to the Vale of St. John. Scarcely had I settled there when
+Rossetti wrote that he must himself soon leave London: that he was
+wearied out absolutely, and unable to sleep at night, that if he could
+only reach that secluded vale he would breathe a purer air mentally
+as well as physically. The mood induced by contemplation of the
+tranquillity of my retreat over-against the turmoil and distractions
+of the city _in_ which, though not _of_ which, he was, added to the
+deepening exhaustion which had already begun when I left him, had
+prevailed with him, he said, to ask me to come down to London, and
+travel back with him. “Supposing,” he wrote, “I were to ask you to come
+to town in a fortnight’s time from now--I returning with you for a while
+into the country--would that be feasible to you?”
+
+Once unsettled in the environments within which for years he had moved
+contentedly, a thousand reasons were found for the contemplated step,
+and simultaneously a thousand obstacles arose to impede the execution of
+it. “They have at length taken my garden,” he said, “as they have long
+threatened to do, and now they are really setting about building upon
+it. I do not in the least know what my plans may be.” And again: “It
+seems certain that I must leave this house and seek another. Is there
+any house in the neighbourhood of the Vale of St. John with a largish
+room one could paint in (to N. or NE.)?” The idea of his taking up his
+permanent abode so far out of the market circle was, I well knew, just
+one of those impracticable notions which, with Rossetti, were abandoned
+as soon as conceived, so I was not surprised to hear from him as
+follows, by the succeeding post: “In what I wrote yesterday I said
+something as to a possibility of leaving town, but I now perceive this
+is not practicable at present; therefore need not trouble you to take
+note of neighbouring houses.” Presently he wrote again: “Bedevilments
+thicken: the garden is ploughed up, and I ‘ve not stirred out of the
+house for a week: I must leave this place at once if I am to leave it
+alive.” {*}
+
+     * It is but just to say that, although Rossetti wrote thus
+     peevishly of what was quite inevitable,--the yielding up of
+     his fine garden,--he would at other times speak of the great
+     courtesy and good-nature of Messrs. Pemberton, in allowing
+     him the use of the garden after it had been severed from the
+     property he hired.
+
+“My present purpose is to take another house in London. Could you not
+come down and beat up agents for me? I know you will not deny me your
+help. I hear of a house at Brixton, with a garden of two acres, and only
+£130 a year.” In a day or two even this last hope had proved delusive:
+“I find the house at Brixton will not do, and I hear of nothing else....
+I am anxious as to having become perfectly deaf on the right side of
+my head. Partial approaches to this have sometimes occurred to me and
+passed away, so I will not be too much troubled at it.” A little later
+he wrote: “Now my housekeeper is leaving me, her mother being very ill.
+Can you not come to my assistance? Come at once and we will set sail
+in one boat.” I appear to have replied to this last appeal in a tone
+of some little scepticism as to his remaining long in the same mind
+relative to our mutual housemating, for subsequently he says: “At this
+writing I can see no likelihood of my not remaining in the mind that,
+in case of your coming to London, your quarters should be taken up here.
+The house is big enough for two, even if they meant to be strangers to
+each other. You would have your own rooms and we should meet just when
+we pleased. You have got a sufficient inkling of my exceptional habits
+not to be scared by them. It is true, at times my health and spirits are
+variable, but I am sure we should not be squabbling. However, it seems
+you have no intention of a quite immediate move, and we can speak
+farther of it.” I readily consented to do whatever seemed feasible
+to help him out of his difficulties, which existed, however, as I
+perceived, much more in his own mind than in actual fact. I thought
+a brief holiday in the solitude within which I was then located would
+probably be helpful in restoring a tranquil condition of mind, and as
+his brother, Mr. Scott, Mr. Watts, Mr. Shields, and other friends in
+London, were of a similar opinion, efforts were made to induce him
+to undertake the journey which he had been the first to think of.
+His oldest friend, Mr. Madox Brown (whose presence would have been as
+valuable now as it had proved to be on former occasions), was away at
+Manchester, and remained there throughout the time of his last illness.
+His moods at this time were too variable to be relied upon three days
+together, and so I find him writing:
+
+     Many thanks for the information as to your Shady Vale, which
+     seems a vision--a distant one, alas!--of Paradise. Perhaps I
+     may reach it yet.... I am now thinking of writing another
+     ballad-poem to add at the end of my volume. It is romantic,
+     not historical I have a clear scheme for it and believe your
+     scenery might help me much if I could get there. When you
+     hear that scheme, you will, I believe, pronounce it
+     precisely fitted to the scenery you describe as now
+     surrounding you. That scenery I hope to reach a little
+     later, but meantime should much like to see you in London
+     and return with you.
+
+The proposed ballad was to be called _The Orchard Pits_ and was to be
+illustrative of the serpent fascination of beauty, but it was never
+written. Contented now to await the issue of events, he proceeded to
+write on subjects of general interest:
+
+     Keats (page 154, vol. i., of Houghton’s Life, etc.) mentions
+     among other landscape features the Vale of St. John. So you
+     may think of him in the neighbourhood as well as (or, if you
+     like, rather than) Wordsworth.
+
+     I have been reading again Hogg’s Shelley. S. appears to have
+     been as mad at Keswick as everywhere else, but not madder;--
+     that he could not compass.
+
+At this juncture some unlooked-for hitch in the arrangements then
+pending for the sale of the _Dante’s Dream_ to the Corporation of
+Liverpool rendered my presence in London inevitable, and upon my arrival
+I found that Rossetti had fitted out rooms for my reception, although
+I had never down to that moment finally decided to avail myself of an
+offer which upon its first being broached, appeared to be too one-sided
+a bargain (in which of course the sacrifice seemed to be Rossetti’s) to
+admit of my entertaining it. In this way I drifted into my position as
+Rossetti’s housemate.
+
+The letters and scraps of notes I have embodied in the foregoing will
+probably convey a better idea of Rossetti’s native irresolution, as it
+was made manifest to me in the early part of 1881, than any abstract
+definition, however faithful and exact, could be expected to do.
+Irresolution was indubitably his most noticeable quality at the time
+when I came into active relation with him; and if I be allowed to have
+any perception of character and any acquaintance with the fundamental
+traits that distinguish man from man, I shall say unhesitatingly (though
+I well know how different is the opinion of others) that irresolution
+with melancholy lay at the basis of his nature. I have heard Mr.
+Swinburne speak of a cheerfulness of deportment in early life, which
+imparted an idea as of one who could not easily be depressed. I have
+heard Mr. Watts speak of the days at Kelmscott Manor House, where
+he first knew him, and where Rossetti was the most delightful of
+companions. I have heard Canon Dixon speak of a determination of purpose
+which yielded to no sort of obstacle, but carried its point by the sheer
+vehemence with which it asserted it. I can only say that I was witness
+to neither characteristic. Of traits the reverse of these, I was
+constantly receiving evidence; but let it be remembered that before I
+joined Rossetti (which was only in the last year of his life) in that
+intimate relation which revealed to my unwilling judgment every foible
+and infirmity of character, the whole nature of the man had been
+vitiated by an enervating drug. At my meeting with him the brighter
+side of his temperament had been worn away in the night-troubles of his
+unrestful couch; and of that needful volition, which establishes for
+a man the right to rule not others but himself, only the mockery and
+inexplicable vagaries of temper remained. When I knew him, Rossetti was
+devoid of resolution. At that moment at which he had finally summoned
+up every available and imaginable reason for pursuing any particular
+course, his purpose wavered and his heart gave way. When I knew him,
+Rossetti was destitute of cheerfulness or content. At that instant,
+at which the worst of his shadowy fears had been banished by some
+fortuitous occurrence that lit up with an unceasing radiation of hope
+every prospect of life, he conjured out of its very brightness fresh
+cause for fear and sadness. True, indeed, these may have been no more
+than symptoms of those later phenomena which came of disease, and
+foreshadowed death. Other minds may reduce to a statement of cause and
+effect what I am content to offer as fact.
+
+Upon settling with Rossetti in July 1881, I perceived that his health
+was weaker. His tendency to corpulence had entirely disappeared, his
+feebleness of step had become at certain moments painfully apparent,
+and his temper occasionally betrayed signs of bitterness. To myself,
+personally, he was at this stage as genial as of old, or if for an
+instant he gave vent to an unprovoked outburst of wrath, he would far
+more than atone for it by a look of inexpressible remorse and some
+feeling words of regret, whereof the import sometimes was--
+
+I wish you were indeed my son, for though then I should still have no
+right to address you so, I should at least have some right to expect
+your forgiveness.
+
+In such moods of more than needful solicitude for one’s acutest
+sensibilities, Rossetti was absolutely irresistible.
+
+As I have said, the occupant of this great gloomy house, in which I had
+now become a resident, had rarely been outside its doors for two years;
+certainly never afoot, and only in carriages with his friends. Upon the
+second night of my stay, I announced my intention of taking a walk on
+the Chelsea embankment, and begged him to accompany me. To my amazement
+he yielded, and every night for a week following, I succeeded in
+inducing him to repeat the now unfamiliar experience. It was obvious
+enough to himself that he walked totteringly, with infinite expenditure
+of physical energy, and returned in a condition of exhaustion that left
+him prostrate for an hour afterwards. The root of all this evil was soon
+apparent. He was exceeding with the chloral, and little as I expected or
+desired to exercise a moral guardianship over the habits of this great
+man, I found myself insensibly dropping into that office.
+
+Negotiations for the sale of the Liverpool picture were now complete;
+the new volume of poems and the altered edition of the old volume had
+been satisfactorily passed through the press; and it might have been
+expected that with the anxiety occasioned by these enterprises,
+would pass away the melancholy which in a nature like Rossetti’s they
+naturally induced. The reverse was the fact, He became more and more
+depressed as each palpable cause of depression was removed, and more
+and more liable to give way to excess with the drug. By his brother, Mr.
+Watts, Mr. Shields, and others who had only too frequently in times past
+had experience of similar outbreaks, this failure in spirits, with
+all its attendant physical weakness, was said to be due primarily to
+hypochondriasis. Hence the returning necessity to get him away (as
+Mr. Madox Brown had done at a previous crisis) for a change of air and
+scene. Once out of this atmosphere of gloom, we hoped that amid cheerful
+surroundings his health would speedily revive. Infinite were the efforts
+that had to be made, and countless the precautions that had to be taken
+before he could be induced to set out, but at length we found ourselves
+upon our way to Keswick, at nine p.m., one evening in September, in
+a special carriage packed with as many artist’s trappings and as many
+books as would have lasted for a year.
+
+We reached Penrith as the grey of dawn had overspread the sky. It was
+six o’clock as we got into the carriage that was to drive us through the
+vale of St. John to our destination at the Legberthwaite end of it. The
+morning was now calm, the mountains looked loftier, grander, and yet
+more than ever precipitous from the road that circled about their base.
+Nothing could be heard but the calls of the awakening cattle, the rumble
+of cataracts far away, and the rush and surge of those that were near.
+Rossetti was all but indifferent to our surroundings, or displayed only
+such fitful interest in them as must have been affected out of a kindly
+desire to please me. He said the chloral he had taken daring the journey
+was upon him, and he could not see. At length we reached the house that
+was for some months to be our home. It stood at the foot of a ghyll,
+which, when swollen by rain, was majestic in volume and sound. The
+little house we had rented was free from all noise other than the
+occasional voice of a child or bark of a dog. Here at least he might
+bury the memory of the distractions of the city that vexed him. Save
+for the ripple of the river that flowed at his feet, the bleating
+of sheep on Golden Howe, the echo of the axe of the woodman who was
+thinning the neighbouring wood, and the morning and evening mail-coach
+horn, he might delude himself into forgetfulness that he belonged any
+longer to this noisy earth.
+
+Next day Rossetti was exceptionally well, and astounded me by the
+proposal that we should ascend Golden Howe together--a little mountain
+of some 1000 feet that stands at the head of Thirlmere. With never a
+hope on my part of our reaching the summit, we set out for that purpose,
+but through no doubt the exhilarating effect of the mountain air, he
+actually compassed the task he had proposed to himself, and sat for an
+hour on that highest point from whence could be seen the Skiddaw range
+to the north, Haven’s Crag to the west, Styx Pass and Helvellyn to the
+east, and the Dunmail Raise to the south, with the lake below. Rossetti
+was struck by the variety of configuration in the hills, and even more
+by the variety of colour. But he was no great lover of landscape beauty,
+and the majestic scene before us produced less effect upon his mind than
+might perhaps have been expected. He seemed to be almost unconscious of
+the unceasing atmospheric changes that perpetually arrest and startle.
+the observer in whom love of external nature in her grander moods has
+not been weakened by disease. The complete extent of the Vale of St.
+John could be traversed by the eye from the eminence upon which we sat.
+The valley throughout its three-mile length is absolutely secluded: one
+has only the hills for company, and to say the truth they are sometimes
+fearful company too. Usually the landscape wears a cheerful aspect, but
+at times long fleecy clouds drive midway across the mountains, leaving
+the tops visible. The scenery is highly awakening to the imagination.
+Even the country people are imaginative, and the country is full
+of ghostly legend. I was never at any moment sensible that these
+environments affected Rossetti: assuredly they never agitated him, and
+no effort did he make to turn them to account for the purposes of
+the romantic ballad he had spoken of as likely to grow amidst such
+surroundings.
+
+Being much more than ordinarily cheerful during the first evenings of
+our stay in the North, he talked sometimes of his past life and of the
+men and women he had known in earlier years. Carlyle’s _Reminiscences_
+had not long before been published. Mrs. Carlyle, therein so
+extravagantly though naturally belauded, he described as a bitter
+little woman, with, however, the one redeeming quality of unostentatious
+charity: “The poor of Chelsea,” he said, “always spoke well of her.”
+ “George Eliot,” whose genius he much admired, he had ceased to know long
+before her death, but he spoke of the lady as modest and retiring, and
+amiable to a fault when the outer crust of reticence had been broken
+through. Longfellow had called upon him whilst he was painting the
+_Dante’s Dream_. The old poet was Courteous and complimentary in
+the last degree; he seemed, however, to know little or nothing about
+painting as an art, and also to have fallen into the error of thinking
+that Rossetti the painter and Sossetti the poet were different men; in
+short, that the Dante of that name was the painter, and the William the
+poet. Upon leaving the house, Longfellow had said: “I have been glad to
+meet you, and should like to have met your brother; pray, tell him how
+much I admire his beautiful poem, _The Blessed Damozel_” Giving no
+hint of the error, Rossetti said he had answered, “I will tell him.” He
+painted a little during our stay in the North, for it was whilst
+there that he began the beautiful replica of his _Proserpina_, now the
+property of Mr. Valpy. I found it one of my best pleasures to watch a
+picture growing under his hand, and thought it easy to see through
+the medium of his idealised heads, cold even in their loveliness,
+unsubstantial in their passion, that to the painter life had been a
+dream into which nothing entered that was not as impalpable as itself.
+Tainted by the touch of melancholy that is the blight that clings to the
+purest beauty, his pictured faces were, in my view, akin to his poetry,
+every line of which, as he sometimes recited it, seemed as though it
+echoed the burden of a bygone sorrow--the sorrow of a dream rather than
+that of a life, or of a life that had been itself a dream. I also then
+realised what Mr. Theodore Watts has said in a letter just now
+written to me from Sark, that, “apart from any question of technical
+shortcomings, one of Rossetti’s strongest claims to the attention of
+posterity was that of having invented, in the three-quarter-length
+pictures painted from one face, a type of female beauty which was akin
+to none other,--which was entirely new, in short,--and which, for
+wealth of sublime and mysterious suggestion, unaided by complex dramatic
+design, was unique in the art of the world.”
+
+On one occasion the talk turned on the eccentricities and affectations
+of men of genius, and I did my best to-ridicule them unsparingly, saying
+they were a purely modern extravagance, the highest intellects of other
+times being ever the sanest, Shakspeare, Cervantes, Goethe, Coleridge,
+Wordsworth; the root of the evil had been Shelley, who was mad, and in
+imitation of whose madness, modern men of genius must many of them
+be mad also, until it had come to such a pass-that if a gifted man
+conducted himself throughout life with probity and propriety we
+instantly began to doubt the value of his gifts. Rossetti evidently
+thought that in all this I was covertly hitting out at himself, and
+cut short the conversation with an unequivocal hint that he had no
+affectations, and could not account himself an authority with respect to
+them.
+
+With such talk a few of our evenings were spent, but too soon the
+insatiable craving for the drug came with renewed force, and then all
+pleasant intercourse was banished. Night after night we sat up until
+eleven, twelve, and one o’clock, watching the long hours go by with
+heavy steps; waiting, waiting, waiting for the time at which he could
+take his first draught, and drop into his pillowed place and snatch a
+dreamless sleep of three or four hours’ duration.
+
+In order to break the monotony of nights such as I describe I sometimes
+read from Fielding, Richardson, and Sterne, but more frequently induced
+Rossetti to recite. Thus, with failing voice, he would again and again
+attempt, at my request, his _Cloud Confines_, or passages from _The
+King’s Tragedy_, and repeatedly, also, Poe’s _Ulalume_ and _Raven_. I
+remember that, touching the last-mentioned of these poems, he remarked
+that out of his love of it while still a boy his own _Blessed Damozel_
+originated. “I saw,” he said, “that Poe had done the utmost it was
+possible to do with the grief of the lover on earth, and so I determined
+to reverse the conditions, and give utterance to the yearning of the
+loved one in heaven.” At that time of the year the night closed in as
+early as seven or eight o’clock, and then in that little house among
+the solitary hills his disconsolate spirit would sometimes sink beyond
+solace into irreclaimable depths of depression.
+
+It was impossible that such a condition of things should last, and it
+was with unspeakable relief that I heard Rossetti express a desire to
+return home. Mr. Watts, who at that time was at Stratford-upon-Avon, had
+promised to join us, but now wrote to say that this was impossible. Had
+it been otherwise, Rossetti would willingly have remained, but now he
+longed to get back to London. His life had lost its joys. The success of
+his Liverpool picture was almost as nothing to him, and the enthusiastic
+reception given to his book gave him not more than a passing pleasure,
+though he was deeply touched by the sympathetic and exhaustive criticism
+published by Professor Dowden in _The Academy_, as well as by Professor
+Colvin’s friendly monograph in _The World_. At length one night, a month
+after our arrival, we set out on our return, and well do I remember the
+pathos of his words as I helped him (now feebler than ever) into his
+house. “Thank God! home at last, and never shall I leave it again!”
+
+Very natural was the deep concern of his friends, especially of his
+brother and Mr. Shields, at finding him return even less well than he
+had set out. With deeper reliance on past knowledge of the man, Mr.
+Watts still took a hopeful view, attributing the physical prostration
+to hypochondriasis, which might, in common with all similar nervous
+ailments, impose as much pain upon the victim as if the sufferings
+complained of had a real foundation in positive disease, but might
+also give way at any moment when the victim could be induced to take
+a hopeful view of life. The cheerfulness of Mr. Watts’s society, after
+what I well know must have been the lugubrious nature of my own, had at
+first its usual salutary effect upon Rossetti’s spirits, and I will not
+forbear to say that I, too, welcomed it as a draught of healing morning
+air after a month-long imprisonment in an atmosphere of gloom. But I
+was not yet freed of my charge. The sense of responsibility which in the
+solitude of the mountains had weighed me down, was now indeed divided
+with his affectionate family and the friends who were Rossetti’s friends
+before they were mine, and who came at this juncture with willing
+help, prompted chiefly, of course, by devotion to the great man in sore
+trouble, but also--I must allow myself to think--in one or two cases by
+desire to relieve me of some of the burden of the task that had fallen
+so unexpectedly upon me. Foremost among such disinterested friends was
+of course the friend I have spoken of so frequently in these pages,
+and for whom I now felt a growing regard arising as much out of my
+perception of the loyalty of his comradeship as the splendour of his
+gifts. But after him in solicitous service to Rossetti, at this
+moment of great need, came Frederick Shields (the fine tissue of whose
+highly-strung nature must have been sorely tried by the strain to which
+it was subjected), Mr. W. B. Scott, whose visits were never more warmly
+welcomed by Rossetti than at this season, the good and gifted Miss Boyd,
+and of course Rossetti’s brother, sister, and mother, to each of whom he
+was affectionately attached. Strange enough it seemed that this man who,
+for years had shunned the world and chosen solitude when he might have
+had society, seemed at last to grow weary of his loneliness. But so it
+was. Rossetti became daily more and more dependent upon his friends
+for company that should not fail him, for never for an hour now could he
+endure to be alone. Remembering this, I almost doubt if by nature he was
+at any time a solitary. There are men who feel more deeply the sense of
+isolation amidst the busiest crowds than within the narrowest circle of
+intimates, and I have heard from Rossetti reminiscences of his earlier
+life that led me to believe that he was one of the number. Perhaps,
+after all, he wandered from the world rather from the dread than with
+the hope of solitude. In such pleasant intercourse as the visits of the
+friends I have named afforded, was the sadness of the day in a measure
+dissipated, but when night came I never failed to realise that no
+progress whatever had been made. I tried to check the craving for
+chloral, but I could as easily have checked the rising tide: and where
+the lifelong assiduity of older friends had failed to eradicate a
+morbid, ruinous, and fatal thirst, it was presumptous if not ridiculous
+to imagine that the task could be compassed by a frail creature with
+heart and nerves of wax. But the whole scene was now beginning to have
+an interest for me more personal and more serious than I have yet given
+hint of. The constant fret and fume of this life of baffled effort,
+of struggle with a deadly drug that had grown to have an objective
+existence in my mind as the existence of a fiend, was not without a
+sensible effect upon myself. I became ill for a few days with a low
+fever, but far worse than this was the fact that there was creeping over
+me the wild influence of Rossetti’s own distempered imaginings.
+
+Once conscious of such influence I determined to resist it, but how to
+do so I knew not without flying utterly away from an atmosphere in which
+my best senses seemed to stagnate, and burying the memory of it for
+ever.
+
+The crisis was pending, and sooner than we expected it came. A nurse
+was engaged. One evening Dr. Westland Marston and his son Philip Bourke
+Marston came to spend a few hours with Rossetti, For a while he seemed
+much cheered by their bright society, but later on he gave those
+manifestations of uneasiness which I had learned to know too well.
+Removing restlessly from seat to seat, he ultimately threw himself
+upon the sofa in that rather awkward attitude which I have previously
+described as characteristic of him in moments of nervous agitation.
+Presently he called out that his arm had become paralysed, and, upon
+attempting to rise, that his leg also had lost its power. We were
+naturally startled, but knowing the force of his imagination in its
+influence on his bodily capacity, we tried playfully to banish the idea.
+Raising him to his feet, however, we realised that from whatever cause,
+he had lost the use of the limbs in question, and in the utmost alarm
+we carried him to his bedroom, and hurried away for Mr. Marshall It was
+found that he had really undergone a species of paralysis, called, I
+think, loss of co-ordinative power. The juncture was a critical one, and
+it was at length decided by the able medical adviser just named, that
+the time had come when the chloral, which was at the root of all this
+mischief, should be decisively, entirely, and instantly cut off. To
+compass this end a young medical man, Mr. Henry Maudsley, was brought
+into the house as a resident to watch and manage the case in the
+intervals of Mr. Marshall’s visits. It is not for me to offer a
+statement of what was done, and done so ably at this period. I only know
+that morphia was at first injected as a substitute for the narcotic the
+system had grown to demand; that Rossetti was for many hours delirious
+whilst his body was passing through the terrible ordeal of having to
+conquer the craving for the former drug, and that three or four mornings
+after the experiment had been begun he awoke calm in body, and clear
+in mind, and grateful in heart. His delusions and those intermittent
+suspicions of his friends which I have before alluded to, were now gone,
+as things in the past of which he hardly knew whether in actual fact
+they had or had not been. Christmas Day was now nigh at hand, and, still
+confined to his room, he begged me to promise to spend that day with
+him; “otherwise,” he said, “how sad a day it must be for me, for I
+cannot fairly ask any other.” With a tenderness of sympathy I shall not
+forget, Mr. Scott had asked me to dine that day at his more cheerful
+house; but I reflected that this was to be my first Christmas in London
+and it might be Rossetti’s last, so I put by pleasanter considerations.
+We dined alone, but, somewhat later, William Rossetti, with true
+brotherly affection, left the guests at his own house, and ran down
+to spend an hour with the invalid. We could hear from time to time the
+ringing of the bells of the neighbouring churches, and I noticed that
+Rossetti was not disturbed by them as he had been formerly. Indeed, the
+drug once removed, he was in every sense a changed man. He talked that
+night brightly, and with more force and incisiveness, I thought, than he
+had displayed for months. There was the ring of affection in his tone as
+he said he had always had loyal friends; and then he spoke with feeling
+of Mr. Watts’s friendship, of Mr. Shields’s, and afterwards he spoke of
+Mr. Burne Jones who had just previously visited him, as well as of Mr.
+Madox Brown, and his friendship of a lifetime; of Mr. Swinburne, Mr.
+Morris, Mr. Stephens, Mr. Boyce, and other early friends. He said a word
+or two of myself which I shall not repeat, and then spoke with emotion
+of his mother and sister, and of his sister who was dead, and how they
+were supported through their sore trials by religious resignation. He
+asked if I, like Shields, was a believer, and seemed altogether in a
+softer and more spiritual mood than I remember to have noticed before.
+
+With such talk we passed the Christmas night of 1881. Rossetti recovered
+power in some measure, was able to get down to the studio, and see the
+friends who called--Mr. F. E. Leyland frequently, Lord and Lady Mount
+Temple, Mrs. Sumner, Mr. Boyce, Mr. F. G. Stephens, Mr. Gilchrist, Mr.
+and Mrs. Virtue Tebbs, Mrs. Stillman, Mrs. Coronio, and Mr. C. and Mr.
+A. Ionides occasionally, as well as those previously named. A visit
+from Dr. Hueffer of the _Times_ (of whose gifts he had a high opinion),
+enlivened him perceptibly. But he did not recover, and at the end of
+January 1882 it was definitely determined that he should go to the
+sea-side. I was asked to accompany him, and did so. At the right
+juncture Mr. J. P. Seddon very hospitably tendered the use of his
+handsome bungalow at Birchington-on-Sea, a little watering-place four
+miles west of Margate. There we spent nine weeks. At first going out he
+was able to take short walks on the cliffs, or round the road that winds
+about the churchyard, but his strength grew less and less every day
+and hour. We were constantly visited by Mr. Watts, whose devotion never
+failed, and Rossetti would brighten up at the prospect of one of his
+visits, and become sensibly depressed when he had gone. Mr. William
+Sharp, too (a young friend of whose gifts as a poet Rossetti had a
+genuine appreciation, and by whom he had been visited at intervals
+for some time), came out occasionally and cheered up the sufferer in
+a noticeable degree. Then his mother and sister came and stayed in the
+house during many weeks at the last. How shall I speak of the tenderness
+of their solicitude, of their unwearying attentions, in a word of their
+ardent and reciprocated love of the illustrious son and brother for whom
+they did the thousand gentle offices which they alone could have done!
+The end was drawing on, and we all knew the fact. Rossetti had actually
+taken to poetical composition afresh, and had written a facetious ballad
+(conceived years before) of the length of _The White Ship_, called _Jan
+Van Hunks_, embodying an eccentric story of a Dutchman’s wager to smoke
+against the devil. This was to appear in a miscellany of stories and
+poems by himself and Mr. Watts, a project which had been a favourite one
+of his for some years, and in which he now, in his last moments, took a
+revived interest strange and strong.
+
+About this time he derived great gratification from reading an article
+on him and his works in _Le Livre_ by Mr. Joseph Knight, an old friend
+to whom he was deeply attached, and for whose gifts he had a genuine
+admiration. Perhaps the very last letter Rossetti penned was written to
+Mr. Knight upon the subject of this article.
+
+His intellect was as powerful as in his best days, and freer than ever
+of hallucinations. But his bodily strength grew less and less. His sight
+became feebler, and then he abandoned the many novels that had recently
+solaced his idler hours, and Miss Rossetti read aloud to him. Among
+other books she read Dickens’s _Tale of Two Cities_, and he seemed
+deeply touched by Sidney Carton’s sacrifice, and remarked that he would
+like to paint the last scene of the story.
+
+On Wednesday morning, April 5th, I went into the bedroom to which he had
+for some days been confined, and wrote out to his dictation two sonnets
+which he had composed on a design of his called _The Sphinx_, and which
+he wished to give, together with the drawing and the ballad before
+described, to Mr. Watts for publication in the volume just mentioned.
+On the Thursday morning I found his utterance thick, and his speech from
+that cause hardly intelligible. It chanced that I had just been reading
+Mr. Buchanan’s new volume of poems, and in the course of conversation
+I told him the story of the ballad called _The Lights of Leith_, and
+he was affected by the pathos of it. He had heard of that author’s
+retractation{*} of the charges involved in the article published ten
+years earlier, and was manifestly touched by the dedication of the
+romance _God and the Man_. He talked long and earnestly that morning,
+and it was our last real interview. He spoke of his love of early
+English ballad literature, and of how when he first met with it he had
+said to himself: “There lies your line.”
+
+
+     * The retractation, which now has a peculiar literary
+     interest, was made in the following verses, and should, I
+     think, be recorded here:
+
+     To an old Enemy.
+
+          I would have snatch’d a bay-leaf from thy brow,
+             Wronging the chaplet on an honoured head;
+          In peace and charity I bring thee now
+               A lily-flower instead.
+          Pure as thy purpose, blameless as thy song,
+             Sweet as thy spirit, may this offering be;
+          Forget the bitter blame that did thee wrong,
+               And take the gift from me!
+
+     In a later edition of the romance the following verses are
+     added to the dedication:
+
+     To Dante Gabriel Rossetti:
+
+          Calmly, thy royal robe of death around thee,
+             Thou Bleekest, and weeping brethren round thee stand--
+          Gently they placed, ere yet God’s angel crown’d thee,
+               My lily in thy hand!
+          I never knew thee living, O my brother!
+             But on thy breast my lily of love now lies;
+          And by that token, we shall know each other,
+               When God’s voice saith “Arise!”
+
+“Can you understand me?” he asked abruptly, alluding to the thickness of
+his utterance.
+
+“Perfectly.”
+
+“Nurse Abrey cannot: what a good creature she is!”
+
+That night we telegraphed to Mr. Marshall, to Mr. W. M. Rossetti, and
+Mr. Watts, and wrote next morning to Mr. Shields, Mr. Scott, and Mr.
+Madox Brown. It had been found by the resident medical man, Dr. Harris,
+that in Rossetti’s case kidney disease had supervened. His dear mother
+and I sat up until early morning with him, and when we left him his
+sister took our place and remained with him the whole of that and
+subsequent nights. He sat up in bed most of the time and said a sort of
+stupefaction had removed all pain. He crooned over odd lines of poetry.
+“My own verses torment me,” he said. Then he half-sang, half-recited,
+snatches from one of Iago’s songs in _Othello_. “Strange things,” he
+murmured, “to come into one’s head at such a moment.” I told him his
+brother and Mr. Watts would be with him to-morrow. “Then you really
+think that I am dying? At _last_ you think so; but _I_ was right from
+the first.”
+
+Next day, Good Friday, the friends named did come, and weak as he was,
+he was much cheered by their presence. The following day Mr. Marshall
+arrived.
+
+That gentleman recognised the alarming position of affairs, but he was
+not without hope. He administered a sort of hot bath, and on Sunday
+morning Rossetti was perceptibly brighter. Mr. Shields had now arrived,
+and one after one of his friends, including Mr. Leyland, who was at the
+time staying at Ramsgate, and made frequent calls, visited him in his
+room and found him able to listen and sometimes to talk. In the evening
+the nurse gave a cheering report of his condition, and encouraged by
+such prospects, Mr. Watts, Mr. Shields, and myself, gave way to good
+spirits, and retired to an adjoining room. About nine o’clock Mr.
+Watts left us, and returning in a short time, said he had been in the
+sickroom, and had had some talk with Rossetti, and found him cheerful.
+An instant afterwards we heard a scream, followed by a loud rapping at
+our door. We hurried into Rossetti’s room and found him in convulsions.
+Mr. Watts raised him on one side, whilst I raised him on the other; his
+mother, sister, and brother, were immediately present (Mr. Shields had
+fled away for the doctor); there were a few moments of suspense, and
+then we saw him die in our arms. Mrs. William Rossetti arrived from
+Manchester at this moment.
+
+Thus on Easter Day Rossetti died. It was hard to realise that he was
+actually dead; but so it was, and the dreadful fact had at last come
+upon us with a horrible suddenness. Of the business of the next few
+days I need say nothing. I went up to London in the interval between the
+death and burial, and the old house at Chelsea, which, to my mind, in my
+time had always been desolate, was now more than ever so, that the man
+who had been its vitalising spirit lay dead eighty miles away by the
+side of the sea. It was decided to bury the poet in the churchyard
+of Birchington. The funeral, which was a private one, was attended by
+relatives and personal friends only, with one or two well-wishers from
+London.
+
+Next day we saw most of the friends away by train, and, some days later,
+Mr. Watts was with myself the last to leave. I thought we two were drawn
+the closer each to each from the loss of him by whom we were brought
+together. We walked one morning to the churchyard and found the grave,
+which nestles under the south-west porch, strewn with flowers.
+The church is an ancient and quaint early Gothic edifice, somewhat
+rejuvenated however, but with ivy creeping over its walls. The prospect
+to the north is of sea only: a broad sweep of landscape so flat and so
+featureless that the great sea dominates it. As we stood there, with the
+rumble of the rolling waters borne to us from the shore, we felt that
+though we had little dreamed that we should lay Rossetti in his last
+sleep here, no other place could be quite so fit. It was, indeed, the
+resting-place for a poet. In this bed, of all others, he must at length,
+after weary years of sleeplessness, sleep the only sleep that is deep
+and will endure. Thinking of the incidents which I have in this chapter
+tried to record, my mind reverted to a touching sonnet which the friend
+by my side had just printed; and then, for the first time, I was struck
+by its extraordinary applicability to him whom we had laid below. In its
+printed form it was addressed to Heine, and ran:
+
+     Thou knew’st that island far away and lone
+        Whose shores are as a harp, where billows break
+        In spray of music and the breezes shake
+     O’er spicy seas a woof of colour and tone,
+     While that sweet music echoes like a moan
+        In the island’s heart, and sighs around the lake
+        Where, watching fearfully a watchful snake,
+     A damsel weeps upon her emerald throne.
+
+     Life’s ocean, breaking round thy senses’ shore,
+        Struck golden song as from the strand of day:
+        For us the joy, for thee the fell foe lay--
+     Pain’s blinking snake around the fair isle’s core,
+        Turning to sighs the enchanted sounds that play
+     Around thy lovely island evermore.
+
+“How strangely appropriate it is,” I said, “to Rossetti, and now I
+remember how deeply he was moved on reading it.”
+
+“He guessed its secret; I addressed it, for disguise, to Heine, to whom
+it was sadly inapplicable. I meant it for _him_.”
+
+
+THE END.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, by
+T. Hall Caine
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK RECOLLECTIONS OF ROSSETTI ***
+
+***** This file should be named 25574-0.txt or 25574-0.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+        http://www.gutenberg.org/2/5/5/7/25574/
+
+Produced by David Widger
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.
+
+
+
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase “Project
+Gutenberg”), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
+http://gutenberg.org/license).
+
+
+Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B.  “Project Gutenberg” is a registered trademark.  It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
+paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation (“the Foundation”
+ or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase “Project Gutenberg” appears, or with which the phrase “Project
+Gutenberg” is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase “Project Gutenberg” associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+“Plain Vanilla ASCII” or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original “Plain Vanilla ASCII” or other
+form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
+     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
+     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+     address specified in Section 4, “Information about donations to
+     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.”
+
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+     License.  You must require such a user to return or
+     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+     of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+“Defects,” such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the “Right
+of Replacement or Refund” described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH F3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you ‘AS-IS’ WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need, is critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm’s
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation web page at http://www.pglaf.org.
+
+
+Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service.  The Foundation’s EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541.  Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
+http://pglaf.org/fundraising.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state’s laws.
+
+The Foundation’s principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at
+809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
+business@pglaf.org.  Email contact links and up to date contact
+information can be found at the Foundation’s web site and official
+page at http://pglaf.org
+
+For additional contact information:
+     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+     Chief Executive and Director
+     gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+
+Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit http://pglaf.org
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations.
+To donate, please visit: http://pglaf.org/donate
+
+
+Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart is the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone.  For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+     http://www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
diff --git a/25574-0.zip b/25574-0.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..b5ffa87
--- /dev/null
+++ b/25574-0.zip
diff --git a/25574-8.txt b/25574-8.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..afa054c
--- /dev/null
+++ b/25574-8.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,8464 @@
+Project Gutenberg's Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, by T. Hall Caine
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti
+       1883
+
+Author: T. Hall Caine
+
+Release Date: May 23, 2008 [EBook #25574]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK RECOLLECTIONS OF ROSSETTI ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+RECOLLECTIONS OF DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI
+
+By T. Hall Caine
+
+
+Roberts Brothers - 1883
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE.
+
+One day towards the close of 1881 Rossetti, who was then very ill, said
+to me:
+
+"How well I remember the beginning of our correspondence, and how little
+did I think it would lead to such relations between us as have ensued! I
+was at the time very solitary and depressed from various causes, and
+the letters of so young and ardent a well-wisher, though unknown to me
+personally, brought solace."
+
+"Yours," I said, "were very valuable to me."
+
+"Mine to you were among the largest bodies of literary letters I ever
+wrote, others being often letters of personal interest."
+
+"And so admirable in themselves," I added, "and so free from the
+discussion of any but literary subjects that many of them would bear to
+be printed exactly as you penned them."
+
+"That," he said, "will be for you some day to decide."
+
+This was the first hint of any intention upon my part of publishing the
+letters he had written to me; indeed, this was the first moment at which
+I had conceived the idea of doing so. Nothing further on the subject was
+said down to the morning of the Thursday preceding the Sunday on which
+he died, when we talked together for the last time on subjects of
+general interest,--subsequent interviews being concerned wholly with
+solicitous inquiries upon my part, in common with other anxious friends,
+as to the nature of his sufferings, and the briefest answers from him.
+
+"How long have we been friends?" he said.
+
+I replied, between three and four years from my first corresponding with
+him.
+
+"And how long did we correspond?"
+
+"Three years, nearly."
+
+"What numbers of my letters you must possess! They may perhaps even yet
+be useful to you."
+
+From this moment I regarded the publication of his letters as in some
+sort a trust; and though I must have withheld them for some years if I
+had consulted my own wishes simply, I yielded to the necessity that they
+should be published at once, rather than run any risk of their not been
+published at all.
+
+What I have just said will account for the circumstance that I, the
+youngest and latest of Rossetti's friends, should be the first to seem
+to stand towards him in the relation of a biographer. I say _seem_ to
+stand, for this is not a biography. It was always known to be Rossetti's
+wish that if at any moment after his death it should appear that the
+story of his life required to be written, the one friend who during many
+of his later years knew him most intimately, and to whom he unlocked the
+most sacred secrets of his heart, Mr. Theodore Watts, should write it,
+unless indeed it were undertaken by his brother William. But though
+I know that whenever Mr. Watts sets pen to paper in pursuance of
+such purpose, and in fulfilment of such charge, he will afford us a
+recognisable portrait of the man, vivified by picturesque illustration,
+the like of which few other writers could compass, I also know from
+what Rossetti often told me of his friend's immersion in all kinds and
+varieties of life, that years (perhaps many years) may elapse before
+such a biography is given to the world. My own book is, I trust, exactly
+what it purports to be: a volume of Recollections, interwoven with
+letters and criticism, and preceded by such a summary of the leading
+facts in Rossetti's life as seems necessary for the elucidation of
+subsequent records. I have drawn Rossetti precisely as I found him in
+each stage of our friendship, exhibiting his many contradictions of
+character, extenuating nothing, and, I need hardly add, setting down
+naught in malice. Up to this moment I have never inquired of myself
+whether to those who have known little or nothing of Rossetti
+hitherto, mine will seem to be on the whole favourable or unfavourable
+portraiture; but I have trusted my admiration of the poet and affection
+for the friend to penetrate with kindly and appreciative feeling every
+comment I have had to offer. I was attracted to Rossetti in the first
+case by ardent love of his genius, and retained to him ultimately by
+love of the man. As I have said in the course of these Recollections,
+it was largely his unhappiness that held me, with others, as by a spell,
+and only too sadly in this particular did he in his last year realise
+his own picture of Dante at Verona:
+
+     Yet of the twofold life he led
+       In chainless thought and fettered will
+       Some glimpses reach us,--somewhat still
+     Of the steep stairs and bitter bread,--
+       Of the soul's quest whose stern avow
+       For years had made him haggard now.
+
+I am sensible of the difficulty and delicacy of the task I have
+undertaken, involving, as it does, many interests and issues; and in
+every reference to surviving relatives as well as to other persons now
+living, with whom Rossetti was in any way allied, I have exercised in
+all friendliness the best judgment at my command.
+
+Clement's Inn, October 1882.
+
+     *** It has not been thought necessary to attach dates to the
+     letters printed in this volume, for not only would the
+     difficulty of doing so be great, owing to the fact that
+     Rossetti rarely dated his letters, but the utility of dates
+     in such a case would be doubtful, because the substance of
+     what is said is often quite impersonal, and, where
+     otherwise, is almost independent of the time of production.
+     It may be sufficient to say that the letters were written in
+     the years 1879,1880, and 1881.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+Gabriele Rossetti--Boyhood--The pre-Raphaelite Movement--Early
+Manhood--The Blessed Damozel--Jenny--Sister Helen--The Translations--The
+House of Life--The Germ--Oxford and Cambridge Magazine--Blackfriars
+Bridge--Married Life
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+Chelsea--Chloral--Dante's Dream--Recovery of the Poems--Poems--The
+Contemporary Controversy--Mr. Theodore Watts--Rose Mary--The
+White Ship--The King's Tragedy--Poetic Continuations--Cloud
+Confines--Journalistic Slanders
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+Early Intercourse--Poetic Impulses--Beginning of Correspondence--Early
+Letters
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+Inedited Poems--Inedited Ballads--Additions to Sister Helen--Hand
+and Soul--St. Agnes of Intercession--Catholic Opinion--Rossetti's
+Catholicism--Cloud Confines--The Portrait
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+Coleridge--Wordsworth--Lamb and Coleridge--Charles Wells--Keats--Leigh
+Hunt and Keats--Keats's Sister
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+Chatterton--Oliver Madox Brown--Gilchrist's Blake--George Gilfillan--Old
+Periodicals--A Rustic Poet--Art and Politics--Letters in Biography
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+Cheyne Walk--The House--First Meeting--Rossetti's Personality--His
+Reading--The Painter's Craft--Mr. Ruskin--Rossetti's Sensitiveness--His
+Garden--His Library
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+English Sonnets--Sonnet Structure--Shakspeare's Sonnets--Wells's
+Sonnet--Charles Whitehead--Ebenezer Jones--Mr. W. M. Rossetti--A New
+Sonnet--Mr. W. Davies--Canon Dixon--Miss Christina Rossetti--The Bride's
+Prelude--The Supernatural in Poetry
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+Last Days--Vale of St John--In the Lake Country--Return to
+London--London--Birchington
+
+
+
+
+RECOLLECTIONS OF DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+Dante Gabriel Rossetti was the eldest son of Gabriele Rossetti and
+Frances Polidori, daughter of Alfieri's secretary, and sister of the
+young physician who travelled with Lord Byron. Gabriele Rossetti was a
+native of Yasto, in the district of the Abruzzi, kingdom of Naples.
+He was a patriotic poet of very considerable distinction; and, as a
+politician, took a part in extorting from Ferdinand I. the Constitution
+of 1820. After the failure of the Neapolitan insurrection, owing to
+the treachery of the King (who asked leave of absence on a pretext
+of ill-health, and returned with an overwhelming Austrian army), the
+insurrectionists were compelled to fly. Some of them fell victims;
+others lay long in concealment. Rossetti was one of the latter; and,
+while he was in hiding, Sir Graham Moore, the English admiral, was lying
+with an English fleet in the bay. The wife of the admiral had long been
+a warm admirer of the patriotic hymns of Rossetti, and, when she learned
+his danger, she prevailed with her husband to make efforts to save him.
+Sir Graham thereupon set out with another English officer to the place
+of concealment, habited the poet in an English uniform, placed him
+between them in a carriage, and put him aboard a ship that sailed next
+day to Malta, where he obtained the friendship of the governor, John
+Hookham Frere, by whose agency valuable introductions were procured, and
+ultimately Rossetti established himself in England. Arrived in London
+about 1823, he lived a cheerful life as an exile, though deprived of the
+advantages of his Italian reputation. He married in 1826, and his eldest
+son was born May 12, 1828, in Charlotte Street, Portland Place, London.
+He was appointed Professor of Italian at King's College, and died in
+1854. His house was for years the constant resort of Italian refugees;
+and the son used to say that it was from observation of these visitors
+of his father that he depicted the principal personage of his _Last
+Confession_. He did not live to see the returning glories of his country
+or the consummation we have witnessed of that great movement founded
+upon the principles for which he fought and suffered. His present
+position in Italy as a poet and patriot is a high one, a medal having
+been struck in his honour. An effort is even now afoot to erect a statue
+to him in his native place, and one of the last occasions upon which
+the son put pen to paper was when trying to make a reminiscent rough
+portrait for the use of the sculptor. Gabriele Rossetti spent his last
+years in the study of Dante, and his works on the subject are unique,
+exhibiting a peculiar view of Dante's conception of Beatrice, which
+he believed to be purely ideal, and employed solely for purposes of
+speculative and political disquisition. Something of this interpretation
+was fixed undoubtedly upon the personage by Dante himself in his later
+writings, but whether the change were the result of a maturer and more
+complicated state of thought, and whether the real and ideal characters
+of Beatrice may not be compatible, are questions which the poetic mind
+will not consider it possible to decide. Coleridge, no doubt, took a
+fair view of Rossetti's theory when he said: "Rossetti's view of Dante's
+meaning is in great part just, but he has pushed it beyond all bounds of
+common sense. How could a poet--and such a poet as Dante--have written
+the details of the allegory as conjectured by Rossetti? The boundaries
+between his allegory and his pure picturesque are plain enough, I think,
+at first reading." It was, doubtless, due to his devotion to studies of
+the Florentine that Gabriele Rossetti named after him his eldest son.
+
+Dante Gabriel Rossetti, whose full baptismal name was Gabriel Charles
+Dante, was educated principally at King's College School, London, and
+there attained to a moderate proficiency in the ordinary classical
+school-learning, besides a knowledge of French, which throughout life he
+spoke well. He learned at home some rudimentary German; Italian he had
+acquired at a very early age. There has always been some playful mention
+of certain tragedies and translations upon which he exercised himself
+from the ages of five to fifteen years; but it is hardly necessary
+to say that he himself never attached value to these efforts of his
+precocity; he even displayed, occasionally, a little irritation upon
+hearing them spoken of as remarkable youthful achievements.
+
+One of these productions of his adolescence, Sir Hugh the Heron, has
+been so frequently alluded to, that it seems necessary to tell the story
+of it, as the author himself, in conversation, was accustomed to do. At
+about twelve years of age, the young poet wrote a scrap of a poem under
+this title, and then cast it aside. His grandfather, Polidori, had seen
+the fragment, however, and had conceived a much higher opinion of
+its merits than even the natural vanity of the young author himself
+permitted him to entertain. It had then become one of the grandfather's
+amusements to set up an amateur printing-press in his own house, and
+occupy his leisure in publishing little volumes of original verse for
+semi-public circulation. He urged his grandson to finish the poem
+in question, promising it, in a completed state, the dignity and
+distinction of type. Prompted by hope of this hitherto unexpected
+reward, Rossetti--then thirteen to fourteen years of age--finished
+the juvenile epic, and some bound copies of it got abroad. No more was
+thought of the matter, and in due time the little bard had forgotten
+that he had ever done it. But when a genuine distinction had been earned
+by poetry that was in no way immature, Rossetti discovered, by
+the gratuitous revelation of a friend, that a copy of the youthful
+production--privately printed and never published--was actually in the
+library of the British Museum. Amazed, and indeed appalled as he was by
+this disclosure, he was powerless to remedy the evil, which he foresaw
+would some day lead to the poem being unearthed to his injury, and
+printed as a part of his work. The utmost he could do to avert
+the threatened mischief he did, and this was to make an entry in a
+commonplace-book which he kept for such uses, explaining the origin and
+history of the poem, and expressing a conviction that it seemed to him
+to be remarkable only from its entire paucity of even ordinary poetic
+promise. But while this was indubitably a just estimate of these boyish
+efforts, it is no doubt true, as we shall presently see, that Rossetti's
+genius matured itself early in life.
+
+Whilst still a child, his love of literature exhibited itself, and a
+story is told of a disaster occurring to him, when rather less than nine
+years of age, which affords amusing proof of the ardour of his poetic
+nature. Upon going with his brother and sisters to the house of his
+grandfather, where as children they occupied themselves with sports
+appropriate to their years, he proposed to improvise a part of a scene
+from _Othello_, and cast himself for the principal _r�le_. The scene
+selected was the closing one of the play, and began with the speech
+delivered to Lodovico, Montano, and Gratiano, when they are about to
+take Othello prisoner. Rossetti used to say that he delivered the lines
+in a frenzy of boyish excitement, and coming to the words--
+
+              Set you down this:
+     And say, besides,--that in Aleppo once,
+       Where a malignant and a turban'd Turk
+       Beat a Venetian, and traduced the state,
+       I took by the throat the circumcised dog,
+       And smote him--thus!--
+
+he snatched up an iron chisel, that lay somewhere at hand, and, to the
+consternation of his companions, smote himself with all his might on the
+chest, inflicting a wound from which he bled and fainted.
+
+He is described by those who remember him, at this period, as a boy of
+a gentle and affectionate nature, albeit prone to outbursts of
+masterfulness. The earliest existent portraits represent a comely youth,
+having redundant auburn hair curling all round the head, and eyes and
+forehead of extraordinary beauty. It is said that he was brave and
+manly of temperament, courageous as to personal suffering, eminently
+solicitous of the welfare of others, and kind and considerate to*such
+as he had claims upon. This is no doubt true portraiture, but it must
+be stated (however open to explanation, on grounds of laudable
+self-depreciation), that it is not the picture which he himself used
+to paint of his character as a boy. He often described himself as being
+destitute of personal courage when at school, as shrinking from the
+amusements of schoolfellows, and fearful of their quarrels; not wholly
+without generous impulses, but, in the main, selfish of nature and
+reclusive in habit of life. He was certainly free from the meaningless
+affectation--for such it too frequently is--of representing his
+school-days as the happiest of his life. If, after so much undervaluing
+of himself, it were possible to trust his estimate of his youthful
+character, he would have had you believe that school was to him a place
+of semi-purgatorial probation,--which nothing but love of his mother,
+and desire to meet her wishes, prevented him, as an irreclaimable
+antischoliast, from obstinately renouncing at a time when he had learned
+little Latin, and less Greek.
+
+Having from childhood shown a propensity towards painting, the strong
+inclination was fostered by his parents, and art was looked upon as his
+future profession. Upon leaving school about 1843, he studied first at
+an art academy near Bedford Square, and afterwards at the Eoyal Academy
+Antique School, never, however, going to the Eoyal Academy Life School.
+He appears to have been an assiduous student. In after life when his
+habit of late rising had become a stock subject of banter among his
+intimate friends, he would tell with unwonted pride how in earlier years
+he used to rise at six A.M. once a week in order to attend a life-class
+held before breakfast. On such occasions he was accustomed, he would
+say, to purchase a buttered roll and cup of coffee at some stall at a
+street corner, so as not to dislocate domestic arrangements by requiring
+the servants to get up in the middle of the night. He left the Academy
+about 1848 or 1849, and in the latter year exhibited his picture
+entitled the _Girlhood of Mary Virgin_. This painting is an admirable
+example of his early art, before the Gothicism of the early Italian
+painters became his quest. Better known to the public than the picture
+is the sonnet written upon it, containing the beautiful lines--
+
+       An angel-watered lily, that near God
+       Grows and is quiet.
+
+While Rossetti was still under age he associated with J. E. Millais,
+Holman Hunt, Thomas Woolner, James Collinson, F. G. Stephens, and his
+brother, W. M. Rossetti, in the movement called pre-Raphaelite. At the
+beginning of his career he recognised, in common with his associates,
+that the contemporary classicism had run to seed, and that, beyond an
+effort after perfection of _technique_, the art of the period was all
+but devoid of purpose, of thought, imagination, or spirituality. At such
+a moment it was matter for little surprise that ardent young intellects
+should go back for inspiration to the Gothicism of Giotto and the early
+painters. There, at least, lay feeling, aim, aspiration, such as did
+not concern itself primarily with any question of whether a subject were
+painted well or ill, if only it were first of all a subject at all--a
+subject involving manipulative excellence, perhaps, but feeling and
+invention certainly. This, then, stated briefly, was the meaning of
+pre-Raphaelitism. The name (as shall hereafter appear) was subsequently
+given to the movement more than half in jest. It has sometimes been
+stated that Mr. Ruskin was an initiator, but this is not strictly the
+case. The company of young painters and writers are said to have been
+ignorant of Mr. Ruskin's writings when they began their revolt against
+the current classicism. It is a fact however, that, after perhaps a
+couple of years, Mr. Ruskin came to the rescue of the little brotherhood
+(then much maligned) by writing in their defence a letter in the
+_Times_. It is easy to make too much of these early endeavours of
+a company of young men, exceptionally gifted though the reformers
+undoubtedly were, and inspired by an ennobling enthusiasm. In later
+years Rossetti was not the most prominent of those who kept these
+beginnings of a movement constantly in view; indeed, it is hardly rash
+to say that there were moments when he seemed almost to resent the
+intrusion of them upon the maturity of aim and handling which, in common
+with his brother artists, he ultimately compassed. But it would be folly
+not to recognise the essential germs of a right aspiration which grew
+out of that interchange of feeling and opinion which, in its concrete
+shape, came to be termed pre-Raphaelitism. Rossetti is acknowledged to
+have taken the most prominent part in the movement, supplying, it is
+alleged, much of the poetic impulse as well as knowledge of mediaeval
+art. He occupied himself in these and following years mainly in the
+making of designs for pictures--the most important of them being
+_Dante's Dream, Hamlet and Ophelia, Cassandra, Lucretia Borgia, Giotto
+painting Dante's Portrait, The First Anniversary of the Death of
+Beatrice Mary Magdalene at the Door of Simon the Pharisee, The Death
+of Lady Macbeth, Desdemona's Death-song_ and a great subject entitled
+_Found_, designed and begun at twenty-five, but left incomplete at
+death.
+
+All this occurred between the years 1849-1856, but three years before
+the earlier of these dates Rossetti, as a painter, had come under an
+influence which he was never slow to acknowledge operated powerfully
+on his art. In 1846, Mr. Ford Madox Brown exhibited designs in the
+Westminster competition, and his cartoons deeply impressed Rossetti The
+young painter, then nineteen years of age, wrote to the elder one, his
+senior by no more than seven years, begging to be permitted to become a
+pupil. An intimacy sprang up between the two, and for a while Rossetti
+worked in Brown's studio; but though the friendship lasted throughout
+life the professional relationship soon terminated. The ardour of the
+younger man led him into the-brotherhood just referred to, but Brown
+never joined the pre-Raphaelites, mainly, it is said, from dislike of
+coterie tendencies.
+
+About 1856, Rossetti, with two or three other young painters,
+gratuitously undertook to paint designs on the walls of the Union
+Debating Hall at Oxford, and about the time he was engaged upon this
+task he made the acquaintance of Mr. William Morris, Mr. Burne Jones,
+and Mr. Swinburne, who were undergraduates at the University. Mr.
+Burne Jones was intended for a clerical career, but due to Rossett's
+intercession Holy Orders were abandoned, to the great gain of English
+art. He has more than once generously allowed that he owed much to
+Rossetti at the beginning of his career, find regarded him to the last
+as leader of the movement with which his own name is now so eminently
+and distinctively associated. Together, and with the co-operation of Mr.
+William Morris and Canon Dixon, they started and carried on for about a
+year a monthly periodical called _The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine_,
+of which Canon Dixon, as one of the projectors, shall presently tell the
+history. At a subsequent period Mr. Burne Jones and Rossetti, together
+with Mr. Madox Brown and some three others, associated with Mr. Morris
+in establishing, from the smallest of all possible beginnings, the
+trading firm now so well known as Morris and Co., and they remained
+partners in this enterprise down to the year 1874, when a dissolution
+took place, leaving the business in the hands of the gentleman
+whose name it bore, and whose energy had from the first been mainly
+instrumental in securing its success.
+
+It may be said that almost from the outset Rossetti viewed the public
+exhibition of pictures as a distracting practice. Except the _Girlhood
+of Mary Virgin_, the _Annunciation_ was almost the only picture he
+exhibited in London, though three or four water-colour drawings were
+at an early period exhibited in Liverpool, and of these, by a curious
+coincidence, one was the first study for the _Dante's Dream_, which
+was purchased by the corporation of the city within a few months of
+the painter's death. To sum up all that remains at this stage to say
+of Rossetti as a pictorial artist down to his thirtieth year, we may
+describe him (as he liked best to hear himself described) simply as
+a poetic painter. If he had a special method, it might be called
+a distinct poetic abstraction, together with a choice of mediaeval
+subject, and an effort after no less vivid rendering of nature than was
+found in other painters. With his early designs (the outcome of such a
+quest as has been indicated) there came, perchance, artistic crudities
+enough, but assuredly there came a great spirituality also. By and by
+Rossetti perceived that he must make narrower the stream of his effort
+if he would have it flow deeper; and then, throughout many years, he
+perfected his technical methods by abandoning complex subject-designs,
+and confining himself to simple three-quarter-length pictures. More
+shall be said on this point in due course. Already, although unknown
+through the medium of the public picture-gallery, he was recognised as
+the leader of a school of rising young artists whose eccentricities were
+frequently a theme of discussion. He never invited publicity, yet he was
+rapidly attaining to a prominent position among painters.
+
+His personal character in early manhood is described by friends as one
+of peculiar manliness, geniality, and unselfishness. It is said that, on
+one occasion, he put aside important work of his own in order to
+spend several days in the studio of a friend, whose gifts were quite
+inconsiderable compared with his, and whose prospects were all but
+hopeless,--helping forward certain pictures, which were backward, for
+forthcoming exhibition. Many similar acts of self-sacrifice are still
+remembered with gratitude by those who were the recipients of them.
+Rossetti was king of his circle, and it must be said, that in all that
+properly constituted kingship, he took care to rule. There was then
+a certain determination of purpose which occasionally had the look of
+arbitrariness, and sometimes, it is alleged, a disregard of opposing
+opinion which partook of tyranny: but where heart and not head were in
+question, he was assuredly the most urbane and amiable of monarchs.
+In matters of taste in art, or criticism in poetry, he would brook no
+opposition from any quarter; nor did he ever seem to be conscious of the
+unreasonableness of compelling his associates to swallow his opinions
+as being absolute and final. This disposition to govern his circle
+co-existed, however, with the most lavish appreciation of every good
+quality displayed by the members of it, and all the little uneasiness
+to which his absolutism may sometimes have given rise was much more than
+removed by constantly recurring acts of good-fellowship,--indeed it was
+forgotten in the presence of them.
+
+A photograph which exists of Rossetti at twenty-seven conveys the idea
+of a nature rather austere and taciturn than genial and outspoken. The
+face is long and the cheeks sunken, the whole figure being attenuated
+and slightly stooping; the eyes have the inward look which belonged to
+them in later life, but the mouth, which is free from the concealment of
+moustache or beard, is severe. The impression conveyed is of a powerful
+intellect and ambitious nature at war with surroundings and not wholly
+satisfied with the results. It ought to be added that, at the period in
+question, health was uncertain with Rossetti: and this fact, added to
+the circumstance of his being at the time in the very throes of those
+difficulties with his art which he was soon to surmount, must be
+understood to account for the austerity of his early portrait. Rossetti
+was not in a distinct sense a humourist, but there came to him at
+intervals, in earlier manhood, those outbursts of volatility, which, to
+serious natures, act as safety-valves after prolonged tension of all the
+powers of the mind. At such moments of levity he is described as almost
+boyish in recklessness, plunging into any madcap escapade that might be
+afoot with heedlessness of all consequences. Stories of misadventures,
+quips and quiddities of every kind, were then his delight, and of these
+he possessed a fund which no man knew better how to use. He would tell
+a funny story with wonderful spirit and freshness of resource, always
+leading up to the point with watchful care of the finest shades of
+covert suggestion or innuendo, and, when the climax was reached, never
+denying himself a hearty share in the universal laughter. One of his
+choicest pleasures at a dinner or other such gathering was to improvise
+rhymes on his friends, and of these the fun usually lay in the
+improvisatore's audacious ascription of just those qualities which his
+subject did not possess. Though far from devoid of worldly wisdom, and
+indeed possessed of not a little shrewdness in his dealings with his
+buyers (often exhibiting that rarest quality of the successful trader,
+the art of linking one transaction with another), he was sometimes
+amusingly deficient in what is known as common sense. In later life he
+used to tell with infinite zest a story of a blunder of earlier years
+which might easily have led to serious if not fatal results. He had
+been suffering from nervous exhaustion and had been ordered to take a
+preparation of nux vomica. The dose was to be taken three times daily:
+in the morning, at noon, and in the evening. One afternoon he was about
+to start out for the house of a friend with whom he had promised to
+lunch, when he remembered that he had not taken his first daily dose
+of medicine. He forthwith took it, and upon setting down the glass,
+reflected that the second dose was due, and so he took that also.
+Putting on his hat and preparing to sally forth he further reflected
+that before he could return the third dose ought in ordinary course to
+be taken, and so without more deliberation he poured himself a final
+portion and drank it off. He had thereupon scarcely turned himself
+about, when to his horror he discovered that his limbs were growing
+rigid and his jaw stiff. In the utmost agitation he tried to walk across
+the studio and found himself almost incapable of the effort. His eyes
+seemed to leap out of their sockets and his sight grew dim. Appalled
+and in agony, he at length sprang up from the couch upon which he had
+dropped down a moment before, and fled out of the house. The violent
+action speedily induced a copious perspiration, and this being by much
+the best thing that could have happened to him, carried off the poison
+and so saved his life. He could never afterwards be induced to return to
+the drug in question, and in the last year of his life was probably more
+fearfully aghast at seeing the present writer take a harmless dose of it
+than he would have been at learning that 50 grains of chloral had been
+taken.
+
+He had, in early manhood, the keenest relish of a funny prank, and one
+such he used to act over again in after life with the greatest vivacity
+of manner. Every one remembers the story told by Jefferson Hogg how
+Shelley got rid of the old woman with the onion basket who took a place
+beside him in a stage coach in Sussex, by seating himself on the floor
+and fixing a tearful, woful face upon his companion, addressing her in
+thrilling accents thus--
+
+     For heaven's sake, let us sit upon the ground,
+     And tell sad stories of the death of kings.
+
+Rossetti's frolic was akin to this, though the results were amusingly
+different. It would appear that when in early years, Mr. William Morris
+and Mr. Burne Jones occupied a studio together, they had a young servant
+maid whose manners were perennially vivacious, whose good spirits no
+disaster could damp, and whose pertness nothing could banish or
+check. Rossetti conceived the idea of frightening the girl out of her
+complacency, and calling one day on his friends, he affected the direst
+madness, strutted ominously up to her and with the wildest glare of his
+wild eyes, the firmest and fiercest setting of his lower lip, and began
+in measured and resonant accents to recite the lines--
+
+     Shall the hide of a fierce lion
+     Be stretched on a couch of wood,
+     For a daughter's foot to lie on,
+     Stained with a father's blood?
+
+The poet's response is a soft "Ah, no!" but the girl, ignorant of course
+of this, and wholly undisturbed by the bloodthirsty tone of the question
+addressed to her, calmly fixed her eyes on the frenzied eyes before her,
+and answered with a swift light accent and rippling laugh, "It shall
+if you like, sir!" Rossetti's enjoyment of his discomfiture on this
+occasion seemed never to grow less.
+
+His life was twofold in intellectual effort, and of the directions in
+which his energy went out the artistic alone has thus far been dealt
+with. It has been said that he early displayed talent for writing as
+well as painting, and, in truth, the poems that he wrote in early youth
+are even more remarkable than the pictures that he painted. His poetic
+genius developed rapidly after sixteen, and sprang at once to a singular
+and perfect maturity. It is difficult to say whether it will add to the
+marvel of mature achievement or deduct from the sense of reality of
+personal experience, to make public the fact that _The Blessed Damozel_
+was written when the poet was no more than nineteen. That poem is a
+creation so pure and simple in the higher imagination, as to support the
+contention that the author was electively related to Fra Angelico.
+Described briefly, it may be said to embody the meditations of a
+beautiful girl in Paradise, whose lover is in the same hour dreaming of
+her on earth. How the poet lighted upon the conception shall be told by
+himself in that portion of this book devoted to the writer's personal
+recollections.
+
+_The Blessed Damozel_ is a conception dilated to such spiritual
+loveliness that it seems not to exist within things substantially
+beautiful, or yet by aid of images that coalesce out of the evolving
+memory of them, but outside of everything actual It is not merely that
+the dream itself is one of ideal purity; the wave of impulse is pure,
+and flows without taint of media that seem almost to know it not. The
+lady says:--
+
+     We two will lie i' the shadow of
+        That living mystic tree
+     Within whose secret growth the Dove
+        Is sometimes felt to be,
+     While every leaf that His plumes touch
+        Saith His Name audibly.
+
+Here the love involved is so etherealised as scarcely to be called
+human, save only on the part of the mortal dreamer, in whose yearning
+ecstasy the ear thinks it recognises a more earthly note. The lover
+rejoins.--
+
+     (Alas! We two, we two, thou say'st!
+        Yea, one wast thou with me
+     That once of old. But shall God lift
+        To endless unity
+     The soul whose likeness with thy soul
+        Was but its love for thee?)
+
+It is said of the few existent examples of the art of Giorgione that,
+around some central realisation of human passion gathers always a
+landscape which is not merely harmonised to it, but a part of it,
+sharing the joy or the anguish, lying silent to the breathless
+adoration, or echoing the rapturous voice of the full pleasure of those
+who are beyond all height and depth more than it. Something of this
+passive sympathy of environing objects comes out in the poem:
+
+     Around her, lovers, newly met
+        'Mid deathless love's acclaims,
+     Spoke evermore among themselves
+        Their rapturous new names;
+     And the souls mounting up to God
+        Went by her like thin flames.
+
+     And still she bowed herself and stooped
+        Out of the circling charm;
+     Until her bosom must have made
+        The bar she leaned on warm,
+     And the lilies lay as if asleep
+        Along her bended arm.
+
+The sense induced by such imagery is akin to that which comes of rapt
+contemplation of the deep em-blazonings of a fine stained window when
+the sun's warm gules glides off before the dim twilight. And this sense
+as of a thing existent, yet passing stealthily out of all sight away,
+the metre of the poem helps to foster. Other metres of Rossetti's have
+a strenuous reality, and rejoice in their self-assertiveness, and seem,
+almost, in their resonant strength, to tell themselves they are very
+good; but this may almost be said to be a disembodied voice, that
+lives only on the air, and, like the song of a bird, is gone before its
+accents have been caught. Of the four-and-twenty stanzas of the poem,
+none is more calmly musical than this:
+
+      When round his head the aureole clings,
+        And he is clothed in white,
+      I 'll take his hand and go with him
+        To the deep wells of light;
+      We will step down as to a stream,
+        And bathe there in God's sight.
+
+Perhaps Rossetti never did anything more beautiful and spiritual than
+this little work of his twentieth year; and more than once in later life
+he painted the beautiful lady who is the subject of it, with the lilies
+lying along her arm.
+
+A first draft of _Jenny_ was struck off when the poet was scarcely more
+than a boy, and taken up again years afterwards, and almost entirely
+re-written--the only notable passage of the early poem that now remains
+being the passage on lust. It is best described in the simplest phrase,
+as a man's meditations on the life of a courtesan whom he has met at a
+dancing-garden and accompanied home. While he sits on a couch, she lies
+at his feet with her head on his knee and sleeps. When the morning dawns
+he rises, places cushions beneath her head, puts some gold among
+her hair, and leaves her. It is wisest to hazard at the outset all
+unfavourable comment by the frankest statement of the story of the
+poem. But the _motif_ of it is a much higher thing. _Jenny_ embodies
+an entirely distinct phase of feeling, yet the poet's root impulse
+is therein the same as in the case of _The Blessed Damozel_. No two
+creations could stand more widely apart as to outward features than
+the dream of the sainted maiden and the reality of the frail and fallen
+girl; yet the primary prompting and the ultimate outcome are the same.
+The ardent longing after ideal purity in womanhood, which in the one
+gave birth to a conception whereof the very sorrow is but excess of
+joy found expression in the other through a vivid presentment of the
+nameless misery of unwomanly dishonour:--
+
+     Behold the lilies of the field,
+     They toil not neither do they spin;
+     (So doth the ancient text begin,--
+     Not of such rest as one of these Can share.)
+     Another rest and ease
+     Along each summer-sated path
+     From its new lord the garden hath,
+     Than that whose spring in blessings ran
+     Which praised the bounteous husbandman,
+     Ere yet, in days of hankering breath,
+     The lilies sickened unto death.
+
+It was indeed a daring thing the author proposed to himself to do, and
+assuredly no man could have essayed it who had not consciously united
+to an unfailing and unshrinking insight, a relativeness of mind such as
+right-hearted people might approve. To take a fallen woman, a cipher of
+man's sum of lust, befouled with the shameful knowledge of the streets,
+yet young, delicate, "apparelled beyond parallel," unblessed, with a
+beauty which, if copied by a Da Vinci's hand, might stand whole ages
+long "for preachings of what God can do," and then to endow such a one
+with the sensitiveness of a poet's own mind, make her read afresh as
+though by lightning, and in a dream, that story of the old pure days--
+
+      Much older than any history
+      That is written in any book,
+
+and lastly, to gather about her an overwhelming sense of infinite solace
+for the wronged and lost, and of the retributive justice with which
+man's transgressions will be visited--this is, indeed, to hazard all
+things in the certainty of an upright purpose and true reward.
+
+      Shall no man hold his pride forewarn'd
+      Till in the end, the Day of Days,
+      At Judgment, one of his own race,
+      As frail and lost as you, shall rise,--
+      His daughter with his mother's eyes!
+
+Yet Rossetti made no treaty with puritanism, and in this respect his
+_Jenny_ has something in common with Hawthorne's _Scarlet Letter_--than
+which nothing, perhaps, that is so pure, without being puritanical,
+has reached us even from the land that gave _Evangeline_ to the English
+tongue. The guilty love of Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale is never
+for an instant condoned, but, on the other hand, the rigorous severity
+of the old puritan community is not dwelt upon with favour. Relentless
+remorse must spend itself upon the man before the whole measure of his
+misery is full, and on the woman the brand of a public shame must be
+borne meekly to the end. But though no rancour is shown towards the
+austere and blind morality which puts to open discharge the guilty
+mother whilst unconsciously nourishing the yet more guilty father, we
+see the tenderness of a love that palliates the baseness of the amour,
+and the bitter depths of a penitence that cannot be complete until it
+can no longer be concealed. And so with Jenny. She may have transient
+flashes of remorseful consciousness, such as reveal to her the trackless
+leagues that separate what she was from what she is, but no effort is
+made to hide the plain truth that she is a courtesan, skilled only
+in the lures and artifices peculiar to her shameful function. No
+reformatory promptings fit her for a place at the footstool of the
+puritan. Nothing tells of winter yet; on the other hand, no virulent
+diatribes are cast forth against the society that shuts this woman out,
+as the puritan settlement turned its back on Hester Prynne. But we
+see her and know her for what she is, a woman like unto other women:
+desecrated but akin.
+
+This dramatic quality of sitting half-passively above their creations
+and of leaving their ethics to find their own channels (once assured
+that their impulses are pure), the poet and the romancer possess in
+common. If there is a point of difference between their attitudes of
+mind, it is where Rossetti seems to reserve his whole personal feeling
+for the impeachment of lust;--
+
+     Like a toad within a stone
+     Seated while Time crumbles on;
+     Which sits there since the earth was cursed
+     For Man's transgression at the first;
+     Which, living through all centuries,
+     Not once has seen the sun arise;
+     Whose life, to its cold circle charmed,
+     The earth's whole summers have not warmed;
+     Which always--whitherso the stone
+     Be flung--sits there, deaf, blind, alone;--
+     Ay, and shall not be driven out
+     Till that which shuts him round about
+     Break at the very Master's stroke,
+     And the dust thereof vanish as smoke,
+     And the seed of Man vanish as dust:--
+     Even so within this world is Lust.
+
+_Sister Helen_ was written somewhat later than _The Blessed Damozel_
+and the first draft of _Jenny_, and probably belonged to the poet's
+twenty-fourth or twenty-fifth year. The ballad involves a story of
+witchcraft A girl has been first betrayed and then deserted by her
+lover; so, to revenge herself upon him and his newly-married bride, she
+burns his waxen image three days over a fire, and during that time he
+dies in torment In _Sister Helen_ we touch the key-note of Rossetti's
+creative gift. Even the superstition which forms the basis of the ballad
+owes something of its individual character to the invention and poetic
+bias of the poet. The popular superstitions of the Middle Ages were
+usually of two kinds only. First, there were those that arose out of a
+jealous Catholicism, always glancing towards heresy; and next there were
+those that laid their account neither with orthodoxy nor unbelief, and
+were purely pagan. The former were the offspring of fanaticism; the
+latter of an appeal to appetite or passion, or fancy, or perhaps
+intuitive reason directed blindly or unconsciously towards natural
+phenomena. The superstition involved in _Sister Helen_ partakes wholly
+of neither character, but partly of both, with an added element of
+demonology. The groundwork is essentially catholic, the burden of the
+ballad showing that the tragic event lies between Hell and Heaven:--
+
+                  (O Mother, Mary Mother,
+      Three days to-day, between Hell and Heaven!)
+
+But the superstructural overgrowth is totally undisturbed by any
+animosity against heresy, and is concerned only with a certain ultimate
+demoniacal justice visiting the wrongdoer. Thus far the elemental tissue
+of the superstition has something in common with that of the German
+secret tribunal of the steel and cord; with this difference, however,
+that whereas the latter punishes in secret, even _as the deity_, the
+former makes conscious compact with the powers of evil, that whatever
+justice shall be administered upon the wicked shall first be purchased
+by sacrifice of the good. Sister Helen may burn, alive, the body and
+soul of her betrayer, but the dying knell that tells of the false soul's
+untimely flight, tolls the loss of her own soul also:--
+
+      "Ah! what white thing at the door has cross'd,
+            Sister Helen?
+      Ah! what is this that sighs in the frost!"
+      "A soul that's lost as mine is lost,
+            Little brother!"
+            (O Mother, Mary Mother,
+      Lost, lost, all lost, between Hell and Heaven!)
+
+Here lies the divergence between the lines of this and other compacts
+with evil powers; this is the point of Rossetti's departure from the
+scheme that forms the underplot of Goethe's _Faust_, and of Marlowe's
+_Faustus_, and was intended to constitute the plan of Coleridge's
+_Michael Scott_. It has been well said that the theme of the Faust is
+the consequence of a misology, or hatred of knowledge, resulting upon
+an original thirst for knowledge baffled. Faust never does from the
+beginning love knowledge for itself, but he loves it for the means it
+affords for the acquisition of power. This base purpose defeats itself;
+and when Faust finds that learning fails to yield him the domination he
+craves, he hates and contemns it. Away, henceforth, with all pretence to
+knowledge! Then follows the compact, the articles to which are absolute
+servility of the Devil on the one part, and complete possession of the
+soul of Faust on the other. Faust is little better than a wizard from
+the first, for if knowledge had given him what he: sought, he had never
+had recourse to witchcraft! Helen, however, partakes in some sort
+of the triumphant nobility of an avenging deity who has cozened hell
+itself, and not in vain. In the whole majesty of her great wrong, she
+loses the originally vulgar character of the witch. It is not as the
+consequence of a poison-speck in her own heart that she has recourse to
+sorcery. She does not love witchery for its own sake; she loves it only
+as the retributive channel for the requital of a terrible offence. It
+is throughout the last hour of her three-days' conflict, merely, that we
+see her, but we know her then not more for the revengeful woman she is
+than for the trustful maiden she has been. When she becomes conscious of
+the treason wrought against her, we feel that she suffers change. In
+the eyes of others we can see her, and in our vision of her she is
+beautiful; but hers is the beauty of fair cheeks, from which the canker
+frets the soft tenderness of colour, the loveliness of golden hair that
+has lost its radiance, the sweetness of eyes once dripping with the
+dews of the spirit, now pale, and cold, and lustreless. Very soon the
+wrongdoer shall reap the harvest of a twofold injury: this day another
+bride shall stand by his side. Is there, then, no way to wreak the just
+revenge of a broken heart? _That_ suggests sorcery. Yes, the body and
+soul of the false lover may melt as before a flame; but the price of
+vengeance is horrible. Yet why? Has not love become devilish? Is not
+life a curse? Then wherefore shrink? The resolute wronged woman must
+go through with it. And when the last hour comes, nature itself is
+portentous of the virulent ill. In the wind's wake, the moon flies
+through a rack of night clouds. One after one the suppliants crave
+pardon for the distant dying lover, and last of these comes the
+three-days' bride.
+
+In addition to the three great poems just traversed, Rossetti had
+written, before the completion of his twenty-sixth year, _The Staff
+and Scrip, The Burden of Nineveh, Troy Town, Eden Bower_ and _The Last
+Confession_, as well as a fragment of _The Bride's Prelude_, to which
+it will be necessary to return. But, with a single exception, the
+poems just named may be said to exist beside the three that have been
+analysed, without being radically distinct from them, or touching
+higher or other levels, and hence it is not considered needful to dwell
+upon them at length. _The Last Confession_ covers another range of
+feeling, it is true, whereof it may be said that the nobler part is
+akin to that which finds expression in the pure and shattered love of
+Othello; but it is a range of feeling less characteristical, perhaps
+less indigenous and appreciable.
+
+In the years 1845-49 inclusive, Rossetti made the larger part of his
+translations (published in 1861) from the early Italian poets, and
+though he afterwards spoke of them as having been the work of the
+leisure moments of many years, of their subsequent revision alone,
+perhaps, could this be altogether true. The _Vita Nuova_, together with
+the many among Dante's _Lyrics_ and those of his contemporaries which
+elucidate their personal intercourse; were translated, as well as a
+great body of the sonnets of poets later than Dante. {*} This early and
+indirect apprenticeship to the sonnet, as a form of composition, led
+to his becoming, in the end, perhaps the most perfect of English
+sonnet-writers. In youth, it was one of his pleasures to engage in
+exercises of sonnet-skill with his brother William and his sister
+Christina, and, even then, he attained to such proficiency, in the mere
+mechanism of sonnet structure, that he could sometimes dash off a sonnet
+in ten minutes--rivalling, in this particular, the impromptu productions
+of Hartley Coleridge. It is hardly necessary to say that the poems
+produced, under such conditions of time and other tests, were rarely,
+if ever, adjudged worthy of publication, by the side of work to which he
+gave adequate deliberation. But several of the sonnets on pictures--as,
+for example, the fine one on a Venetian pastoral by Giorgione--and the
+political sonnet, Miltonic in spirit, _On the Refusal of Aid between
+Nations_, were written contemporaneously with the experimental sonnets
+in question.
+
+     * Rossetti often remarked that he had intended to translate
+     the sonnets of Michael Angelo, until he saw Mr. Symonds's
+     translation, when he was so much impressed by its excellence
+     that he forthwith abandoned the purpose.
+
+As _The House of Life_ was composed in great part at the period with
+which we are now dealing (though published in the complete sequence
+nearly twenty-five years later), it may be best to traverse it at this
+stage. Though called a full series of sonnets, there is no intimation
+that it is not fragmentary as to design; the title is an astronomical,
+not an architectural figure. The work is at once Shakspearean and
+Dantesque. Whilst electively akin to the _Vita Nuova_, it is broader
+in range, the life involved being life idealised in all phases. What
+Rossetti's idea was of the mission of the sonnet, as associated with
+life, and exhibiting a similitude of it, may best be learned from his
+prefatory sonnet:--
+
+    A Sonnet is a moment's monument,--
+      Memorial from the Soul's eternity
+      To one dead deathless hour. Look that it be,
+    Whether for lustral rite or dire portent,
+    Of its own arduous fulness reverent:
+      Carve it in ivory or in ebony,
+      As Day or Night may rule; and let Time see
+    Its flowering crest impearled and orient.
+    A Sonnet is a coin; its face reveals
+      The soul,--its converse, to what Power 'tis due:--
+    Whether for tribute to the august appeals
+      Of Life, or dower in Love's high retinue,
+    It serve; or 'mid the dark wharfs cavernous breath,
+    In Charon's palm it pay the toll to Death.
+
+Rossetti's sonnets are of varied metrical structure; but their
+intellectual structure is uniform, comprising in each case a flow and
+ebb of thought within the limits of a single conception. In this latter
+respect they have a character almost peculiar to themselves among
+English sonnets. Rossetti was not the first English writer who
+deliberatively separated octave and sestet, but he was the first who
+obeyed throughout a series of sonnets the canon of the contemporary
+structure requiring that a sonnet shall present the twofold facet of a
+single thought or emotion. This form of the sonnet Rossetti was at least
+the first among English writers entirely to achieve and perfectly to
+render. _The House of Life_ does not contain a sonnet which is not to
+some degree informed by such an intellectual and musical wave; but the
+following is an example more than usually emphatic:
+
+    Even as a child, of sorrow that we give
+        dead, but little in his heart can find,
+        Since without need of thought to his clear mind
+    Their turn it is to die and his to live:--
+    Even so the winged New Love smiles to receive
+        Along his eddying plumes the auroral wind,
+        Nor, forward glorying, casts one look behind
+    Where night-rack shrouds the Old Love fugitive.
+
+     There is a change in every hour's recall,
+        And the last cowslip in the fields we see
+        On the same day with the first corn-poppy.
+     Alas for hourly change! Alas for all
+     The loves that from his hand proud youth lets fall,
+        Even as the beads of a told rosary!
+
+The distinguishing excellence of craftsmanship in Rossetti's sonnets
+was early recognised; but the fertility of thought, and range of emotion
+compassed by this part of his work constitute an excellence far higher
+than any that belongs to perfection of form, rhythm, or metre. Mr.
+Palgrave has well said that a poet's story differs from a narrative in
+being in itself a creation; that it brings its own facts; that what
+we have to ask is not the true life of Laura, but how far Petrarch has
+truly drawn the life of love. So with Rossetti's sonnets. They may or
+may not be "occasional." Many readers who enter with sympathy into the
+series of feelings they present will doubtless insist upon regarding
+them as autobiographical. Others, who think they see the stamp of
+reality upon them, will perhaps accept them (as Hallam accepted the
+Sonnets of Shakspeare) as witnesses of excessive affection, redeemed
+sometimes by touches of nobler sentiments--if affection, however
+excessive, needs to be redeemed. Others again will receive them as
+artistic embodiments of ideal love upon which is placed the imprint of a
+passion as mythical as they believe to be attached to the autobiography
+of Dante's early days. But the genesis and history of these sonnets
+(whether the emotion with which they are pervaded be actual or imagined)
+must be looked for within. Do they realise vividly Life representative
+in its many phases of love, joy, sorrow, and death? It must be conceded
+that _he House of Life_ touches many passions and depicts life in
+most of its changeful aspects. It would afford an adequate test of its
+comprehensiveness to note how rarely a mind in general sympathy with the
+author could come to its perusal without alighting upon something that
+would be in harmony with its mood. To traverse the work through its
+aspiration and foreboding, joy, grief, remorse, despair, and final
+resignation, would involve a task too long and difficult to be attempted
+here. Two sonnets only need be quoted as at once indicative of the range
+of thought and feeling covered, and of the sequent relation these poems
+bear each to each.
+
+    By thine own tears thy song must tears beget,
+       Singer! Magic mirror thou hast none
+       Except thy manifest heart; and save thine own
+    Anguish or ardour, else no amulet.
+
+    Cisterned in Pride, verse is the feathery jet
+       Of soulless air-flung fountains; nay, more dry
+       Than the Dead Sea for throats that thirst and sigh,
+    That song o'er which no singer's lids grew wet.
+
+    The Song-god--He the Sun-god--is no slave
+       Of thine: thy Hunter he, who for thy soul
+       Fledges his shaft: to the august control
+    Of thy skilled hand his quivered store he gave:
+       But if thy lips' loud cry leap to his smart,
+       The inspired record shall pierce thy brother's heart.
+
+This is not meant to convey the same idea as Shelley's "learn in
+suffering," etc., but merely that a poem must move the writer in its
+composition if it is to move the reader.
+
+With the following _The House of Life_ is made to close:
+
+    When vain desire at last and vain regret
+       Go hand in hand to death, and all is vain,
+       What shall assuage the unforgotten pain
+    And teach the unforgetful to forget?
+
+    Shall Peace be still a sunk stream long unmet,--
+       Or may the soul at once in a green plain
+       Stoop through the spray of some sweet life-fountain,
+    And cull the dew-drenched flowering amulet?
+
+    Ah! when the wan soul in that golden air
+       Between the scriptured petals softly blown
+       Peers breathless for the gift of grace unknown,--
+    Ah! let none other alien spell soe'er
+    But only the one Hope's one name be there,--
+       Not less nor more, but even that word alone.
+
+A writer must needs be loath to part from this section of Rossett's work
+without naming some few sonnets that seem to be in all respects on a
+level with those to which attention has been drawn. Of such, perhaps,
+the most conspicuous are:--_A Day of Love; Mid-Rapture; Her Gifts; The
+Dark Glass; True Woman; Without Her; Known in Vain; The Heart of
+the Night; The Landmark; Stillborn Love; Lost Days_. But it would be
+difficult to formulate a critical opinion in support of the superiority
+of almost any of these' sonnets over the others,--so balanced is their
+merit, so equal their appeal to the imagination and heart. Indeed, it
+were scarcely rash to say that in the language (outside Shakspeare)
+there exists no single body of sonnets characterised by such sustained
+excellence of vision and presentment. It must have been strange enough
+if the all but unexampled ardour and constancy with which Rossetti
+pursued the art of the sonnet-writer had not resulted in absolute
+mastery.
+
+In 1850 _The Germ_ was started under the editorship of Mr. William
+Michael Rossetti, and to the four issues, which were all that were
+published of this monthly magazine (designed to advocate the views of
+the pre-Raphaelite brotherhood), Rossetti contributed certain of
+his early poems--_The Blessed Damozel_ among the number. In 1856 he
+contributed many of the same poems, together with others, to _The Oxford
+and Cambridge Magazine_, of which Canon Dixon has kindly undertaken to
+tell the history. He says:
+
+My knowledge of Dante Gabriel Rossetti was begun in connection with _The
+Oxford and Cambridge Magazine_, a monthly periodical, which was started
+in January 1856, and lasted a year. The projectors of this periodical
+were Mr. William Morris, Mr. Ed. Burne Jones, and myself. The editor was
+Mr. (now the Rev.) William Fulford. Among the original contributors were
+the late Mr. Wilfred Heeley of Cambridge, Mr. Faulkner, now Fellow
+of University College, Oxford, and Mr. Cormel Price. We were all
+undergraduates. The publishers of the magazine were the late firm of
+Bell and Daldy. We gradually associated with ourselves several other
+contributors: above all, D. G. Rossetti.
+
+Of this undertaking the central notion was, I think, to advocate moral
+earnestness and purpose in literature, art, and society. It was founded
+much on Mr. Ruskin's teaching: it sprang out of youthful impatience, and
+exhibited many signs of immaturity and ignorance: but perhaps it was
+not without value as a protest against some things. The pre-Raphaelite
+movement was then in vigour: and this Magazine came to be considered as
+the organ of those who accepted the ideas which were brought into art
+at that time; and, as in a manner, the successor of _The Germ_, a small
+periodical which had been published previously by the first beginners
+of the movement. Rossetti, in many respects the most memorable of the
+pre-Raphaelites, became connected with our Magazine when it had been
+in existence about six months: and he contributed to it several of the
+finest of the poems that were afterwards collected in the former of
+his two volumes of poems: namely, _The Burden of Nineveh, The Blessed
+Damozel, and The Staff and Scrip_. I think that one of them, _The
+Blessed Damozel_, had appeared previously in _The Germ_. All these
+poems, as they now stand in the author's volume, have been greatly
+altered from what they were in the Magazine: and, in being altered, not
+always improved, at least in the verbal changes. The first of them, a
+sublime meditation of peculiar metrical power, has been much altered,
+and in general happily, as to the arrangement of stanzas: but not always
+so happily as to the words. It is, however, pleasing to notice that in
+the alterations some touches of bitterness have been effaced. The second
+of these pieces has been brought with great skill into regular form by
+transposition: but again one repines to find several touches gone that
+once were there. The last of them, _The Staff and Scrip_, is, in my
+judgment, the finest of all Rossetti's poems, and one of the most
+glorious writings in the language. It exhibits in flawless perfection
+the gift that he had above all other writers, absolute beauty and pure
+action. Here again it is not possible to see without regret some of the
+verbal alterations that have been made in the poem as it now stands,
+although the chief emendation, the omission of one stanza and the
+insertion of another, adds clearness, and was all that was wanted to
+make the poem perfect in structure.
+
+I saw Rossetti for the first time in his lodgings over Blackfriars
+Bridge. It was impossible not to be impressed with the freedom and
+kindness of his manner, not less than by his personal appearance. His
+frank greeting, bold, but gentle glance, his whole presence, produced a
+feeling of confidence and pleasure. His voice had a great charm, both
+in tone, and from the peculiar cadences that belonged to it I think that
+the leading features of his character struck me more at first than
+the characteristics of his genius; or rather, that my notion of the
+character of the man was formed first, and was then applied to his
+works, and identified with them. The main features of his character
+were, in my apprehension, fearlessness, kindliness, a decision that
+sometimes made him seem somewhat arbitrary, and condensation or
+concentration. He was wonderfully self-reliant. These moral qualities,
+guiding an artistic temperament as exquisite as was ever bestowed on
+man, made him what he was, the greatest inventor of abstract beauty,
+both in form and colour, that this age, perhaps that the world, has
+seen. They would also account for some peculiarities that must be
+admitted in some of his works, want of nature, for instance. I heard him
+once remark that it was "astonishing how much the least bit of nature
+helped if one put it in;" which seemed like an acknowledgment that he
+might have gone more to nature. Hence, however, his works always seem
+abstract, always seem to embody some kind of typical aim, and acquire a
+sort of sacred character.
+
+I saw a good deal of Rossetti in London, and afterwards in Oxford,
+during the painting of the Union debating-room. In later years our
+personal intercourse was broken off through distance; though I saw him
+occasionally almost to the time of his lamented death, and we had some
+correspondence. My recollection of him is that of greatness, as might be
+expected of one of the few who have been "illustrious in two arts," and
+who stands by himself and has earned an independent name in both. His
+work was great: the man was greater. His conversation had a wonderful
+ease, precision, and felicity of expression. He produced thoughts
+perfectly enunciated with a deliberate happiness that was indescribable,
+though it was always simple conversation, never haranguing or
+declamation. He was a natural leader because he was a natural teacher.
+When he chose to be interested in anything that was brought before him,
+no pains were too great for him to take. His advice was always given
+warmly and freely, and when he spoke of the works of others it was
+always in the most generous spirit of praise. It was in fact impossible
+to have been more free from captiousness, jealousy, envy, or any other
+form of pettiness than this truly noble man. The great painter who first
+took me to him said, "We shall see the greatest man in Europe." I have
+it on the same authority that Rossetti's aptitude for art was considered
+amongst painters to be no less extraordinary than his imagination. For
+example, that he could take hold of the extremity of the brush, and be
+as certain of his touch as if it had been held in the usual way; that he
+never painted a picture without doing something in colour that had
+never been done before; and, in particular, that he had a command of the
+features of the human face such as no other painter ever possessed. I
+also remember some observations by the same assuredly competent judge,
+to the effect that Rossetti might be set against the great painters
+of the fifteenth century, as equal to them, though unlike them: the
+difference being that while they represented the characters, whom
+they painted, in their ordinary and unmoved mood, he represented his
+characters under emotion, and yet gave them wholly. It may be added,
+perhaps, that he had a lofty standard of beauty of his own invention,
+and that he both elevated and subjected all to beauty. Such a man was
+not likely to be ignorant of the great root of power in art, and I
+once saw him very indignant on hearing that he had been accused of
+irreligion, or rather of not being a Christian. He asked with great
+earnestness, "Do not my works testify to my Christianity?" I wish that
+these imperfect recollections may be of any avail to those who cherish
+the memory of an extraordinary genius.
+
+Besides his contributions to _The Germ_, and to _The Oxford and
+Cambridge Magazine_, Rossetti contributed _Sister Helen_, in 1853, to a
+German Annual. Beyond this he made little attempt to publish his poetry.
+He had written it for the love of writing, or in obedience to the
+inherent impulse compelling him to do so, but of actual hope of
+achieving by virtue of it a place among English poets he seems to
+have had none, or next to none. In later life he used to say that Mr.
+Browning's greatness and the splendour of Mr. Tennyson's merited renown
+seemed to him in those early years to render all attempt on his part
+to secure rank by their side as hopeless as presumptuous. This, he
+asserted, was the cause that operated to restrain him from publication
+between 1853 and 1862, and after that (as will presently be seen),
+another and more serious obstacle than self-depreciation intervened. But
+in putting aside all hope of the reward of poetic achievement, he did
+not wholly banish the memory of the work he had done. He made two or
+more copies of the most noticeable of the poems he had written, and sent
+them to friends eminent in letters. To Leigh Hunt he sent _The Blessed
+Damozel_, and received in acknowledgment a letter full of appreciative
+comment, and foretelling a brilliant future. His literary friends at
+this time were Mr. Ruskin, Mr. and Mrs. Browning; he used to see Mr.
+Tennyson and Carlyle at intervals, and was in constant intercourse with
+the younger writers, Mr. Swinburne and Mr. Morris, whose reputations had
+then to be made; Mr. Arnold, Sir Henry Taylor, Mr. Aubrey de Vere, Mr.
+E. Brough, Mr. J. Hannay, and Mr. Monckton Milnes (Lord Houghton),
+he met occasionally; Dobell he knew only by correspondence. Though
+unpublished, his poems were not unknown, for besides the semi-publicity
+they obtained by circulation "among his private friends," he was nothing
+loath to read or recite them at request, and by such means a few of
+them secured a celebrity akin in kind and almost equal in extent to that
+enjoyed by Coleridge's _Christabel_ during the many years preceding
+1816 in which it lay in manuscript. Like Coleridge's poem in another
+important particular, certain of Rossetti's ballads, whilst still
+unknown to the public, so far influenced contemporary poetry that when
+they did at length appear they had all the appearance to the uninitiated
+of work imitated from contemporary models, instead of being, as in fact
+they were, the primary source of inspiration for writers whose names
+were earlier established.
+
+Towards the beginning of his artistic career Rossetti occupied a studio,
+with residential chambers, at Black-friars Bridge. The rooms overlooked
+the river, and the tide rose almost to the walls of the house, which,
+with nearly all its old surroundings, has long disappeared.
+
+A story is told of Rossetti amidst these environments which aptly
+illustrates almost every trait of his character: his impetuosity,
+and superstition especially. It was his daily habit to ransack
+old book-stalls, and carry off to his studio whatever treasures he
+unearthed, but when, upon further investigation, he found he had been
+deceived as to the value of a book that at first looked promising, he
+usually revenged himself by throwing the volume through a window into
+the river running below--a habit which he discovered (to his amusement,
+and occasionally to his distress), that his friends, Mr. Swinburne
+especially, imitated from him and practised at his rooms on his behalf.
+On one occasion he discovered in some odd nook a volume long sought
+for, and having inscribed it with his name and address, he bore it off
+joyfully to his chambers; but finding a few days later that in some
+respects it disappointed his expectations, he flung it through the
+window, and banished all further thought of it. The tide had been at the
+flood when the book disappeared, and when it ebbed, the offending volume
+was found by a little mud-lark imbedded in the refuse of the river. The
+boy washed it and took it back to the address it contained, expecting to
+find it eagerly reclaimed; but, impatient and angry at sight of what he
+thought he had destroyed, Rossetti snatched the book out of the muddy
+hand that proffered it and flung it again into the Thames, with rather
+less than the courtesy which might have been looked for as the reward of
+an act that was meant so well. But the haunting volume was not even
+yet done with. Next morning, an old man of the riverside labourer class
+knocked at the door, bearing in his hands a small parcel rudely made
+up in a piece of newspaper that was greasy enough to have previously
+contained his morning's breakfast. He had come from where he was working
+below London Bridge: he had found something that might have been lost
+by Mr. Rossetti. It was the tormenting volume: the indestructible,
+unrelenting phantom that would not be laid! Rossetti now perceived that
+higher agencies were at work: it was _not meant_ that he should get rid
+of the book: why should he contend against the inevitable? Reverently
+and with both hands he took the besoiled parcel from the brown palm
+of the labourer, placed half-a-crown there instead, and restored the
+fearful book to its place on his shelf.
+
+And now we come to incidents in Rossetti's career of which it is
+necessary to treat as briefly as tenderly. Among the models who sat to
+him was Miss Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal, a young lady of great personal
+beauty, in whom he discovered a natural genius for painting and a
+noticeable love of the higher poetic literature. He felt impelled
+to give her lessons, and she became as much his pupil as model. Her
+water-colour drawings done under his tuition gave proof of a wonderful
+eye for colour, and displayed a marked tendency to style. The subjects,
+too, were admirably composed and often exhibited unusual poetic feeling.
+It was very natural that such a connection between persons of kindred
+aspirations should lead to friendship and finally to love.
+
+Rossetti and Miss Siddal were married in 1860. They visited France and
+Belgium; and this journey, together with a similar one undertaken in the
+company of Mr. Holman Hunt in 1849, and again another in 1863, when his
+brother was his companion, and a short residence on the Continent when
+a boy, may be said to constitute almost the whole sum of Rossetti's
+travelling. Very soon the lady's health began to fail, and she became
+the victim of neuralgia. To meet this dread enemy she resorted to
+laudanum, taking it at first in small quantities, but eventually in
+excess. Her spirits drooped, her art was laid aside, and much of the
+cheerfulness of home was lost to her. There was a child, but it was
+stillborn, and not long after this disaster, it was found that Mrs.
+Rossetti had taken an overdose of her accustomed sleeping potion and
+was lying dead in her bed. This was in 1862, and after two years only of
+married life. The blow was a terrible one to Rossetti, who was the first
+to discover what fate had reserved for him. It was some days before he
+seemed fully to realise the loss that had befallen him, and then his
+grief knew no bounds. The poems he had written, so far as they were
+poems of love, were chiefly inspired by and addressed to her. At her
+request he had copied them into a little book presented to him for the
+purpose, and on the day of the funeral he walked into the room where
+the body lay, and, unmindful of the presence of friends, he spoke to
+his dead wife as though she heard, saying, as he held the book, that the
+words it contained were written to her and for her, and she must take
+them with her for they could not remain when she had gone. Then he put
+the volume into the coffin between her cheek and beautiful hair, and it
+was that day buried with her in Highgate Cemetery.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+It was long before Rossetti recovered from the shock of his wife's
+sudden death. The loss sustained appeared to change the whole course
+of his life. Previously he had been of a cheerful temperament, and
+accustomed to go abroad at frequent intervals to visit friends; but
+after this event he seemed to become for a time morose, and by nature
+reclusive. Not a great while afterwards he removed from Blackfriars
+Bridge, and after a temporary residence in Lincoln's Inn Fields, he took
+up his abode in the house he occupied during the twenty remaining years
+of his life, at 16 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea. This home of Rossetti's shall
+be fully described in subsequent personal recollections. It was called
+Tudor House when he became its tenant, from the tradition that Elizabeth
+Tudor had lived in it, and it is understood to be the same that
+Thackeray describes in _Esmond_ as the home of the old Countess of
+Chelsey. A large garden, which recently has been cut off for building
+purposes, lay at the back, and, doubtless, it was as much due to
+the attractions of this piece of pleasant ground, dotted over with
+lime-trees, and enclosed by a high wall, that Rossetti went so far
+afield, for at that period Chelsea was not the rallying ground of
+artists and men of letters. He wished to live a life of retirement, and
+thought the possession of a garden in which he could take sufficient
+daily exercise would enable him to do so. In leaving Blackfriars
+he destroyed many things associated with his residence there, and
+calculated to remind him of his life's great loss. He burnt a great body
+of letters, and among them were many valuable ones from almost all
+the men and women then eminent in literature and art. His great grief
+notwithstanding, upon settling at Chelsea he began almost insensibly to
+interest himself in furnishing the house in a beautiful and novel style.
+Old oak then became for a time his passion, and in hunting it up he
+rummaged the brokers' shops round London for miles, buying for trifles
+what would eventually (when the fashion he started grew to be general)
+have fetched large sums. Cabinets of all conceivable superannuated
+designs--so old in material or pattern that no one else would look at
+them--were unearthed in obscure corners, bolstered up by a joiner,
+and consigned to their places in the new residence. Following old oak,
+Japanese furniture became Rossetti's quest, and following this came blue
+china ware (of which he had perhaps the first fine collection made),
+and then ecclesiastical and other brasses, incense-burners, sacramental
+cups, crucifixes, Indian spice boxes, mediaeval lamps, antique bronzes,
+and the like. In a few years he had filled his house with so much
+curious and beautiful furniture that there grew up a widespread desire
+to imitate his methods; and very soon artists, authors, and men of
+fortune having no other occupation, were found rummaging, as he had
+rummaged, for the neglected articles of the centuries gone by. What he
+did was done, as he used to say, less from love of the things hunted
+for, than from love of the pursuit, which, from its difficulty, gave
+rise to a pleasurable excitement. Thus did he grieve down his loss, and
+little did they think who afterwards followed the fashion he set them,
+and carried his passion for antique furniture to an excess at which he
+must have laughed, that his' primary impulse was so far from a desire to
+"live up to his blue ware," that it was more like an effort to live down
+to it.
+
+It was during the earlier years of his residence at Chelsea that
+Rossetti formed a habit of life which clung to him almost to the last,
+and did more than aught else to blight his happiness. What his intimate
+friend has lately characterised in _The Daily News_ as that great curse
+of the literary and artistic temperament, insomnia, had been hanging
+about him since the death of his wife, and was becoming each year more
+and more alarming. He had tried opiates, but in sparing quantities, for
+had he not the most serious cause to eschew them? Towards 1868 he heard
+of the then newly found drug chloral, which was accredited with all the
+virtues and none of the vices of other known narcotics. Here then was
+the thing he wanted; this was the blessed discovery that was to save
+him from days of weariness and nights of misery and tears. Eagerly he
+procured it, took it nightly in single small doses of ten grains each,
+and from it he received pleasant and refreshing sleep. He made no
+concealment of his habit; like Coleridge under similar conditions, he
+preferred to talk of it. Not yet had he learned the sad truth, too soon
+to force itself upon him, that the fumes of this dreadful drug would
+one day wither up his hopes and joys in life: deluding him with a
+short-lived surcease of pain only to impose a terrible legacy of
+suffering from which there was to be no respite. Had Rossetti been
+master of the drug and not mastered by it, perhaps he might have
+turned it to account at a critical juncture, and laid it aside when the
+necessity to employ it had gradually been removed. But, alas! he gave
+way little by little to the encroachments of an evil power with which,
+when once it had gained the ascendant, he fought down to his dying day a
+single-handed and losing fight.
+
+It was not, however, for some years after he began the use of it that
+chloral produced any sensible effects of an injurious kind, and meantime
+he pursued as usual his avocation as a painter. Mention has been made
+of the fact that Rossetti abandoned at an early age subject designs for
+three-quarter-length figures. Of the latter, in the period of which we
+are now treating, he painted great numbers: among them, produced at this
+time and later, were _Sibylla Palmifera and The Beloved_ (the property
+of Mr. George Rae), _La Pia and The Salutation of Beatrice_ (Mr. F. E.
+Leyland), _The Dying Beatrice_ (Lord Mount Temple), _Venus Astarte_
+(Mr. Fry), _Fiammetta_ (Mr. Turner), _Proserpina_ (Mr. Graham). Of these
+works, solidity may be said to be the prominent characteristic. The
+drapery of Rossetti's pictures is wonderfully powerful and solid; his
+colour may be said to be at times almost matchable with that of certain
+of the Venetian painters, though different in kind. He hated beyond most
+things the "varnishy" look of some modern work; and his own oil pictures
+had so much of the manner of frescoes in their lustreless depth, that
+they were sometimes mistaken for water-colours, while, on the other
+hand, his water-colours had often so much depth and brilliancy as
+sometimes to be mistaken for oil. It is alleged in certain quarters
+that Rossetti was deficient in some qualities of drawing, and this is
+no doubt a just allegation; but it is beyond question that no English
+painter has ever been a greater master of the human face, which in his
+works (especially those painted in later years) acquires a splendid
+solemnity and spiritual beauty and significance all but peculiar to
+himself. It seems proper to say in such a connexion, that his success
+in this direction was always attributed by him to the fact that the most
+memorable of his faces were painted from a well-known friend.
+
+Only one of his early designs, the _Dante's Dream_, was ever painted by
+Rossetti on a scale commensurate with its importance, and the solemnity
+and massive grandeur of that work leave only a feeling of regret that,
+whether from personal indisposition on the part of the painter or lack
+of adequate recognition on that of the public, the three or four other
+finest designs made in youth were never carried out. As the picture in
+question stands alone among Rossetti's pictorial works as a completed
+conception, it may be well to devote a few pages to a description of it.
+
+It is essential to an appreciation of _Dante's Dream_, that we should
+not only fully understand the nature of the particular incident depicted
+in the picture, but also possess a general knowledge of the lives and
+relations of the two principal personages concerned in it. What we know,
+to most purpose, of the early life and love of Dante, we learn from the
+autobiography which he entitled _La Vita Nuova_. Boccaccio, however,
+writing fifty years after the death of the great Florentine, affords
+a more detailed statement than is furnished by Dante himself of the
+circumstances of the poets first meeting with the lady he called
+Beatrice. He says that it was the custom of citizens in Florence, when
+the time of spring came round, to form social gatherings in their own
+quarters for purposes of merry-making; that in this way Folco Portinari,
+a citizen of mark, had collected his neighbours at his house upon the
+first of May, 1274, for pastime and rejoicing: that amongst those who
+came to him was Alighiero Alighieri, father of Dante Alighieri, who
+lived within fifty yards; that it was common for children to accompany
+their parents at such merrymakings, and that Dante, then scarce nine
+years old, was in the house on the day in question engaged in sports,
+appropriate to his years, with other children, amongst whom was a little
+daughter of Folco Portinari, eight years old. The child is described as
+being, even at this period, in aspect extremely beautiful, and winning
+and graceful in her ways. Not to dwell upon these passages of childhood,
+it may be sufficient to say that the boy, young as he was, is said
+to have then conceived so deep a passion for the child that maturer
+attachments proved powerless to efface it. Such was the origin of a love
+that grew from childlike tenderness to manly ardour, and, surviving all
+the buffetings of an untoward fate, is known to us now and for all
+time in a record of so much reality and purity, as seems to every
+right-hearted nature to be equally the story of his personal attachment
+as the history of a passion that in Florence, six centuries ago, for its
+mortal put on immortality.
+
+The Portinari and Alighieri were immediate neighbours, yet it does not
+appear that the young Dante encountered the lady in any marked way until
+nine years later, and then, in the first bloom of a gracious womanhood,
+she is described as affording him in the street a salutation of such
+unspeakable courtesy that he left the place where for the instant he had
+stood sorely abashed, as one intoxicated with a love that now at first
+knew itself for what it was. The incidents of the attachment are few in
+facts; numerous only in emotions, and therein too uncertain and liable
+to change to be counted. In order not to disclose a passion, which other
+reasons than those given by the poet may have tempted him to conceal,
+Dante affects an attachment to another lady of the city, and the
+rumour of this brings about an estrangement with the real object of his
+desires, which reduces the poet to such an abject condition of mind, as
+finally results in his laying aside all counterfeiting. Portinari, the
+father, now dies, and witnessing the tenderness with which the beautiful
+Beatrice mourns him, Dante becomes affected with a painful infirmity,
+wherein his mind broods over his enfeebled body, and, perceiving how
+frail a thing life is, even though health keep with it, his brain begins
+to travail in many imaginings, and he says within himself, "Certainly
+it must some time come to pass that the very gentle Beatrice will die."
+Feeling bewildered, he closes his eyes, and, in a trance, he conceives
+that a friend comes to him, and says, "Hast thou not heard? She that
+was thine excellent lady has been taken out of life." Then as he looks
+towards Heaven in imagination, he beholds a multitude of angels who are
+returning upwards, having before them an exceedingly white cloud; and
+these angels are singing, and the words of their song are, "Osanna in
+excelsis." So strong is his imagining, that it seems to him that he goes
+to look upon the body where it has its abiding-place.
+
+     The sun ceased, and the stars began to gather,
+     And each wept at the other;
+       And birds dropp'd at midflight out of the sky;
+       And earth shook suddenly;
+          And I was 'ware of one, hoarse and tired out,
+     Who ask'd of me: 'Hast thou not heard it said--
+     Thy lady, she that was so fair, is dead?
+
+
+     Then lifting up mine eyes, as the tears came,
+        I saw the angels, like a rain of manna
+        In a long flight flying back Heavenward,
+     Having a little cloud in front of them,
+        After the which they went, and said 'Hosanna;'
+        And if they had said more, you should have heard.
+
+
+        Then Love said, 'Now shall all things be made clear:
+     Come, and behold our lady where she lies
+     These 'wildering phantasies
+        Then carried me to see my lady dead.
+        Even as I there was led,
+            Her ladies with a veil were covering her;
+     And with her was such very humbleness
+     That she appeared to say, 'I am at peace.'
+                        (Dante and his Circle.)
+
+The trance proves to be a premonition of the event, for, shortly after
+writing the poem in which his imaginings find record, Dante says, "The
+Lord God of Justice called my most gracious lady unto Himself."
+
+It is with the incidents of the dream that Rossetti has dealt. The
+principal personage in the picture is, of course, Dante himself. Of the
+poet's face, two old and accredited witnesses remain to us--the portrait
+of Giotto and the mask supposed to be copied from a similar one
+taken after death. Giotto's portrait represents Dante at the age of
+twenty-seven. The face has a feminine delicacy of outline, yet is
+full of manly beauty; strength and tenderness are seen blended in its
+lineaments. It might be that of a poet, a scholar, a courtier, or yet a
+soldier; and in Dante it is all combined.
+
+Such, as seen in Giotto, was the great Florentine when Beatrice beheld
+him. The familiar mask represents that youthful beauty as somewhat
+saddened by years of exile, by the accidents of an unequal fortune, and
+by the long brooding memory of his life's one, deep, irreparable loss.
+We see in it the warrior who served in the great battle of Campaldino:
+the mourner who sought refuge from grief in the action and danger of the
+war waged by Florence upon Pisa: the magistrate whose justice proved his
+ruin: the exile who ate bitter bread when Florence banished the greatest
+of her sons. The mask is as full as the portrait of intellect and
+feeling, of strength and character, but it lacks something of the early
+sweetness and sensibility. Rossetti's portraiture retains the salient
+qualities of both portrait and mask. It represents Dante in his
+twenty-seventh year; the face gives hint of both poet and soldier, for
+behind clear-cut features capable of strengthening into resolve and
+rigour lie whole depths of tenderest sympathy. The abstracted air,
+the self-centred look, the eyes that seem to see only what the
+mind conceives and casts forward from itself; the slow, uncertain,
+half-reluctant gait,--these are profoundly true to the man and the
+dream.
+
+Of Beatrice, no such description is given either in the _Vita Nuova_ or
+the _Commedia_ as could afford an artist a definite suggestion. Dante's
+love was an idealised passion; it concerned itself with spiritual
+beauty, whereof the emotions excited absorbed every merely physical
+consideration. The beauty of Beatrice in the _Vita Nuova_ is like a
+ray of sunshine flooding a landscape--we see it only in the effect it
+produces. All we know with certainty is that her hair was light, that
+her face was pale, and that her smile was one of thoughtful sweetness.
+These hints of a beautiful person Rossetti has wrought into a creation
+of such purity that, lovely as she is in death, as in life, we think
+less of her loveliness than of her loveableness.
+
+The personage of Love, who plays throughout the _Vita Nuova_ a mystical
+part is not the Pagan Love, but a youth and Christian Master, as Dante
+terms him, sometimes of severe and terrible aspect. He is represented in
+the picture as clad in a flame-coloured garment (for it is in a mist
+of the colour of fire that he appears to the lover), and he wears the
+pilgrim's scallop-shell on his shoulder as emblem of that pilgrimage on
+earth which Love is.
+
+The chamber wherein the body of Beatrice has its abiding-place is, to
+Dante's imaginings, a chamber of dreams. Visionary as the mind of the
+dreamer, it discloses at once all that goes forward within its own
+narrow compass, together with the desolate streets of the city of
+Florence, which, to his fancy, sits silent for his loss, and the long
+flight of angels above that bear away the little cloud, to which is
+given a vague semblance of the beatified Beatrice. As if just fallen
+back in sleep, the beautiful lady lies in death, her hands folded across
+her breast, and a glory of golden hair flowing over her shoulders. With
+measured tread Dante approaches the couch led by the winged and scarlet
+Love, but, as though fearful of so near and unaccustomed an approach,
+draws slowly backward on his half-raised foot, while the mystical emblem
+of his earthly passion stands droopingly between him the living, and his
+lady the dead, and takes the kiss that he himself might never have. In
+life they must needs be apart, but thus in death they are united, for
+the hand of the pilgrim, who is the embodiment of his love, holds his
+hand even as the master's lips touch her lips. Two ladies of the chamber
+are covering her with a pall, and on the dreamer they fix sympathetic
+eyes. The floor is strewn with poppies--emblems equally of the sleep in
+which the lover walks, and of the sleep that is the sleep of death.
+The may-bloom in the pall, the apple-blossom in the hand of Love, the
+violets and roses in the frieze of the alcove, symbolise purity and
+virginity, the life that is cut off in its spring, the love that is
+consummated in death before the coming of fruit. Suspended from the roof
+is a scroll, bearing the first words of the wail from the Lamentations
+of Jeremiah, quoted by Dante himself:--"How doth the city sit solitary,
+that was full of people! How is she become as a widow, she that was
+great among the nations!" In the ascending and descending staircase on
+either iand fly doves of the same glowing colour as Love, and these are
+emblems of his presence in the house. Over all flickers the last beam of
+a lamp which has burnt through the long night, and which the dawn of a
+new day sees die away--fit symbol of the life that has now taken flight
+with the heavenly host, leaving behind it only the burnt-out socket
+where the live flame lived.
+
+Full of symbol as this picture is, it is furthermore permeated by
+a significance that is not occult. It bears witness to the possible
+strength of a passion that is so spiritual as to be without taint of
+sense; and to a confident belief in an immortality wherein the utmost
+limits of a blessedness not of this world may be compassed. Such are
+in this picture the simpler, yet deeper, symbols, that all who look may
+read. Sir Noel Paton has written of this work:
+
+I was so dumbfounded by the beauty of that great picture of Rosetti's,
+called _Dante's Dream_, that I was usable to give any expression to the
+emotions it excited--emotions such as I do not think any other picture,
+except the _Madonna di San Sisto_ at Dresden, ever stirred within me.
+The memory of such a picture is like the memory of sublime and perfect
+music; it makes any one who _fully_ feels it--_silent_. Fifty years
+hence it will be named among the half-dozen supreme pictures of the
+world.
+
+Rossetti had buried the only complete copy of his poems with his wife at
+Highgate, and for a time he had been able to put by the thought of them;
+but as one by one his friends, Mr. Morris, Mr. Swinburne, and others,
+attained to distinction as poets, he began to hanker after poetic
+reputation, and to reflect with pain and regret upon the hidden
+fruits of his best effort. Rossetti--in all love of his memory be
+it spoken--was after all a frail mortal; of unstable character: of
+variable purpose: a creature of impulse and whim, and with a plentiful
+lack of the backbone of volition. With less affection he would not have
+buried his book; with more strength of will he had not done so; or,
+having done so, he had never wished to undo what he had done; or having
+undone it, he would never have tormented himself with the memory of it
+as of a deed of sacrilege. But Rossetti had both affection enough to
+do it and weakness enough to have it undone. After an infinity of
+self-communions he determined to have the grave opened, and the book
+extracted. Endless were the preparations necessary before such a work
+could be begun. Mr. Home Secretary Bruce had to be consulted. At length
+preliminaries were complete, and one night, seven and a half years after
+the burial, a fire was built by the side of the grave, and then the
+coffin was raised and opened. The body is described as perfect upon
+coming to light.
+
+Whilst this painful work was being done the unhappy author of it was
+sitting alone and anxious, and full of self-reproaches at the house of
+the friend who had charge of it. He was relieved and thankful when told
+that all was over. The volume was not much the worse for the years it
+had lain in the grave. Deficiencies were filled in from memory, the
+manuscript was put in the press, and in 1870 the reclaimed work was
+issued under the simple title of _Poems_.
+
+The success of the book was almost without precedent; seven editions
+were called for in rapid succession. It was reviewed with enthusiasm in
+many quarters. Yet that was a period in which fresh poetry and new poets
+arose, even as they now arise, with all the abundance and timeliness
+of poppies in autumn. It is probable enough that of the circumstances
+attending the unexampled early success of this first volume only
+the remarkable fact is still remembered that, from a bookseller's
+standpoint, it ran a neck-and-neck race with Disraeli's _Lothair_ at
+a time when political romance was found universally appetising, and
+poetry, as of old, a drug. But it will not be forgotten that certain
+subsidiary circumstances were thought to have contributed to the former
+success. Of these the most material was the reputation Rossetti had
+already achieved as a painter by methods which awakened curiosity
+as much as they aroused enthusiasm. The public mind became sensibly
+affected by the idea that the poems of the new poet were not to be
+regarded as the emanations of a single individual, but as the result of
+a movement in which Rossetti had played one of the most prominent parts.
+Mr. F. Hueffer, in prefacing the Tauchnitz edition of the poems with
+a pleasant memoir, has comprehensively denominated that movement
+the _renaissance of medi�val feeling_, but at the outset it
+acquired popularly, for good or ill, the more rememberable name of
+pre-Raphaelitism. What the shibboleth was of the originators of the
+school that grew out of it concerned men but little to ascertain; and
+this was a condition of indifference as to the logic of the movement
+which was occasioned partly by the known fact that the most popular of
+its leaders, Mr. Millais, had long been shifting ground. It was
+enough that the new sect had comprised dissenters from the creed once
+established, that the catholic spirit of art which lived with the
+lives of Elmore, Goodall, and Stone was long dead, and that none of the
+coteries for love of which the old faith, exemplified in the works of
+men such as these, had been put aside, possessed such an appeal for
+the imagination as this, now that twenty years of fairly consistent
+endeavour had cleared away the cloud of obloquy that gathered about it
+when it began. And so it came to be thought that the poems of Rossetti
+were to exhibit a new phase of this movement, involving kindred issues,
+and opening up afresh in the poetic domain the controversies which had
+been waged and won in the pictorial. Much to this purpose was said at
+the time to account for the success of a book whose popular qualities
+were I manifestly inconsiderable; and much to similar purpose
+will doubtless long be said by those who affect to believe that a
+concatenation of circumstances did for Rossetti's earlier work a service
+which could not attend his subsequent one. But the explanation was
+inadequate, and had for its immediate outcome a charge of narrowed range
+of poetic sympathy with which Rossetti's admirers had not laid their
+account.
+
+A renaissance of medi�val feeling the movement in art assuredly
+involved, but the essential part of it was another thing, of which
+medi�valism was palpably independent. How it came to be considered the
+fundamental element is not difficult to show. In an eminent degree
+the originators of the new school in painting were colourists, having,
+perhaps, in their effects, a certain affinity to the early Florentine
+masters, and this accident of native gift had probably more to do in
+determining the precise direction of the _intellectual_ sympathy than
+any external agency. The art feeling which formed the foundation of the
+movement existed apart from it, or bore no closer relation to it than
+kinship of powers induced. When Rossetti's poetry came it was seen to
+be animated by a choice of subject-matter akin to that which gave
+individual character to his painting, but this was because coeval
+efforts in two totally distinct arts must needs bear the family
+resemblance, each to each, which belong to all the offspring of a
+thoroughly harmonised mind. The poems and the pictures, however, had not
+more in common than can be found in the early poems and early dramas of
+Shakspeare. Nay, not so much; for whereas in his poems Shakspeare was
+constantly evolving certain shades of feeling and begetting certain
+movements of thought which were soon to find concrete and final
+collocation in the dramatic creations, in his pictures Rossetti was
+first of all a dissenter from all prescribed canons of taste, whilst in
+his poems he was in harmony with the catholic spirit which was as old
+as Shakspeare himself, and found revival, after temporary eclipse, in
+Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, and Tennyson. Choice of mediaeval theme would
+not in itself have been enough to secure a reversal of popular feeling
+against work that contained no germs of the sensational; and hence we
+must conclude that Mr. Swinburne accounted more satisfactorily for the
+instant popularity of Rossetti's poetry when he claimed for it those
+innate utmost qualities of beauty and strength which are always
+the first and last constituents of poetry that abides. Indeed those
+qualities and none other, wholly independent of auxiliary aids, must now
+as then go farthest to determine Rossetti's final place among poets.
+
+Such as is here described was the first reception given to Rossetti's
+volume of poetry; but at the close of 1871, there arose out of it a
+long and acrimonious controversy. It seems necessary to allude to this
+painful matter, because it involved serious issues; but an effort alike
+after brevity and impartiality of comment shall be observed in what is
+said of it. In October of the year mentioned, an article entitled _The
+Fleshly School of Poetry_, and signed "Thomas Maitland," appeared
+in _The Contemporary Review_. {*} It consisted in the main of an
+impeachment of Rossetti's poetry on the ground of sensuality, though it
+embraced a broad denunciation of the sensual tendencies of the age in
+art, music, poetry, the drama, and social life generally. Sensuality was
+regarded as the phenomenon of the age. "It lies," said the writer, "on
+the drawing-room table, shamelessly naked and dangerously fair. It is
+part of the pretty poem which the belle of the season reads, and it
+breathes away the pureness of her soul like the poisoned breath of
+the girl in Hawthorne's tale. It covers the shelves of the great
+Oxford-Street librarian, lurking in the covers of three-volume novels.
+It is on the French booksellers' counters, authenticated by the
+signature of the author of the _Visite de Noces_. It is here, there,
+and everywhere, in art, literature, life, just as surely as it is in
+the _Fleurs de Mal_, the Marquis de Sade's _Justine_, or the _Monk_ of
+Lewis. It appeals to all tastes, to all dispositions, to all ages. If
+the querulous man of letters has his Baudelaire, the pimpled clerk has
+his _Day's Doings_, and the dissipated artisan his _Day and Night._"
+When the writer set himself to inquire into the source of this social
+cancer, he refused to believe that English society was honeycombed and
+rotten. He accounted for the portentous symptoms that appalled him by
+attributing the evil to a fringe of real English society, chiefly, if
+not altogether, resident in London: "a sort of demi-monde, not composed,
+like that other in France, of simple courtesans, but of men and women of
+indolent habits and aesthetic tastes, artists, literary persons, novel
+writers, actors, men of genius and men of talent, butterflies and
+gadflies of the human kind, leading a lazy existence from hand to
+mouth." It was to this Bohemian fringe of society that the writer
+attributed the "gross and vulgar conceptions of life which are
+formulated into certain products of art, literature, and criticism."
+Dealing with only one form of the social phenomenon, with sensualism so
+far as it appeared to affect contemporary poetry, the writer proceeded
+with a literary retrospect intended to show that the fair dawn of
+our English poetry in Chaucer and the Elizabethan dramatists had been
+overclouded by a portentous darkness, a darkness "vaporous," "miasmic,"
+coming from a "fever-cloud generated first in Italy and then blown
+westward," sucking up on its way "all that was most unwholesome from the
+soil of France."
+
+     * In this summary, the pamphlet reprint has been followed in
+     preference to the original article as it appeared in the
+     Review.
+
+Just previously to and contemporaneously with the rise of Dante, there
+had flourished a legion of poets of greater or less ability, but all
+more or less characterised by affectation, foolishness, and moral
+blindness: singers of the falsetto school, with ballads to their
+mistress's eyebrow, sonnets to their lady's lute, and general songs of a
+fiddlestick; peevish men for the most part, as is the way of all fleshly
+and affected beings; men so ignorant of human subjects and materials
+as to be driven in their sheer bankruptcy of mind to raise Hope, Love,
+Fear, Rage (everything but Charity) into human entities, and to
+treat the body and upholstery of a dollish woman as if, in itself, it
+constituted a whole universe.
+
+After tracing the effect of the "moral poison" here seen in its
+inception through English poetry from Surrey and Wyat to Cowley, the
+writer recognised a "tranquil gleam of honest English light" in Cowper,
+who "spread the seeds of new life" soon to re-appear in Wordsworth,
+Coleridge, Southey, Lamb, and Scott. In his opinion the "Italian disease
+would now have died out altogether," but for a "fresh importation of the
+obnoxious matter from France."
+
+At this stage came a denunciation of the representation of "abnormal
+types of diseased lust and lustful disease" as seen in Charles
+Baudelaire's _Fleurs de Mal_, with the conclusion that out of "the
+hideousness of _Femmes Damn�es_" came certain English poems. "This,"
+said the writer, "is our double misfortune--to have a nuisance, and to
+have it at second-hand. We might have been more tolerant to an unclean
+thing if it had been in some sense a product of the soil" All that is
+here summarised, however, was but preparatory to the real object of the
+article, which was to assail Rossetti's new volume.
+
+The poems were traversed in detail, with but little (and that the most
+grudging) admission of their power and beauty, and the very sharpest
+accentuation of their less spiritual qualities. Since the publication
+of the article in question, events have taken such a turn that it is no
+longer either necessary or wise to quote the strictures contained in it,
+however they might be fenced by juster views. The gravamen of the charge
+against Rossetti, Mr. Swinburne, and Mr. Morris alike--setting aside
+all particular accusations, however serious--was that they had "bound
+themselves into a solemn league and covenant to extol fleshliness as
+the distinct and supreme end of poetic and pictorial art; to aver that
+poetic expression is greater than poetic thought, and by inference that
+the body is greater than the soul, and sound superior to sense."
+
+Such, then, is a synopsis of the hostile article of which the nucleus
+appeared in _The Contemporary Review_, and it were little less than
+childish to say that events so important as the publication of the
+article and subsequent pamphlet, and the controversy that arose out
+of them, should, from their unpleasantness and futility, from the bad
+passions provoked by them, or yet from the regret that followed after
+them, be passed over in sorrow and silence. For good or ill, what was
+written on both sides will remain. It has stood and will stand. Sooner
+or later the story of this literary quarrel will be told in detail and
+in cold blood, and perhaps with less than sufficient knowledge of either
+of the parties concerned in it, or sympathy with their aims. No better
+fate, one might think, could befall it than to be dealt with, however
+briefly, by a writer whose affections were warmly engaged on one side,
+while his convictions and bias of nature forced him to recognise the
+justice of the other--stripped, of course, of the cruelties with which
+literary error but too obviously enshrouded it.
+
+Whatever the effect produced upon the public mind by the article
+in question (and there seems little reason to think it was at all
+material), the effect upon two of the writers attacked was certainly
+more than commensurate with the assault. Mr. Morris wisely attempted
+no reply to the few words of adverse criticism in which his name was
+specifically involved; but Mr. Swinburne retorted upon his adversary
+with the torrents of invective of which he has a measureless command.
+Rossetti's course was different. Greatly concerned at the bitterness,
+as well as startled by the unexpectedness of the attack, he wrote in the
+first moments of indignation a full and point-for-point rejoinder, and
+this he printed in the form of a pamphlet, and had a great number struck
+off; but with constitutional irresolution (wisely restraining him in
+this case), he destroyed every copy, and contented himself with writing
+a temperate letter on the subject to _The Athen�um_, December 16, 1871.
+He said:
+
+A sonnet, entitled _Nuptial Sleep_, is quoted and abused at page 338
+of the Review, and is there dwelt upon as a "whole poem," describing
+"merely animal sensations." It is no more a whole poem in reality than
+is any single stanza of any poem throughout the book. The poem, written
+chiefly in sonnets, and of which this is one sonnet-stanza, is entitled
+_The House of Life_; and even in my first published instalment of the
+whole work (as contained in the volume under notice), ample evidence
+is included that no such passing phase of description as the one headed
+_Nuptial Sleep_ could possibly be put forward by the author of _The
+House of Life_ as his own representative view of the subject of love.
+In proof of this I will direct attention (among the love-sonnets of this
+poem), to Nos. 2, 8, 11, 17, 28, and more especially 13. [Here _Love
+Sweetness_ is printed.] Any reader may bring any artistic charge he
+pleases against the above sonnet; but one charge it would be impossible
+to maintain against the writer of the series in which it occurs, and
+that is, the wish on his part to assert that the body is greater than
+the soul. For here all the passionate and just delights of the body are
+declared--somewhat figuratively, it is true, but unmistakeably--to be
+as naught if not ennobled by the concurrence of the soul at all times.
+Moreover, nearly one half of this series of sonnets has nothing to do
+with love, but treats of quite other life-influences. I would defy any
+one to couple with fair quotation of sonnets 29, 30, 31, 39, 40, 43, or
+others, the slander that their author was not impressed, like all other
+thinking men, with the responsibilities and higher mysteries of life;
+while sonnets 35, 36, and 37, entitled _The Choice_, sum up the general
+view taken in a manner only to be evaded by conscious insincerity. Thus
+much for _The House of Life_, of which the sonnet _Nuptial Sleep_ is one
+stanza, embodying, for its small constituent share, a beauty of natural
+universal function, only to be reprobated in art if dwelt on (as I have
+shown that it is not here), to the exclusion of those other highest
+things of which it is the harmonious concomitant.
+
+It had become known that the article in the _Review_ was not the work
+of the unknown Thomas Maitland, whose name it bore, and on this head
+Rossetti wrote:
+
+Here a critical organ, professedly adopting the principle of open
+signature, would seem, in reality, to assert (by silent practice,
+however, not by annunciation) that if the anonymous in criticism
+was--as itself originally indicated--but an early caterpillar stage,
+the nominate too is found to be no better than a homely transitional
+chrysalis, and that the ultimate butterfly form for a critic who
+likes to sport in sunlight, and yet elude the grasp, is after all the
+pseudonymous.
+
+It transpired, in subsequent correspondence (of which there was more
+than enough), that the actual writer was Mr. Robert Buchanan, then
+a young author who had risen into distinction as a poet, and who was
+consequently suspected, by the writers and disciples of the Rossetti
+school, of being actuated much more by feelings of rivalry than
+by desire for the public good. Mr. Buchanan's reply to the serious
+accusation of having assailed a brother-poet pseudonymously was that the
+false signature was affixed to the article without his knowledge,
+"in order that the criticism might rest upon its own merits, and gain
+nothing from the name of the real writer."
+
+It was an unpleasant controversy, and what remains as an impartial
+synopsis of it appears to be this: that there was actually manifest
+in the poetry of certain writers a tendency to deviate from wholesome
+reticence, and that this dangerous tendency came to us from France,
+where deep-seated unhealthy passion so gave shape to the glorification
+of gross forms of animalism as to excite alarm that what had begun with
+the hideousness of _Femmes Damn�es_ would not even end there; finally,
+that the unpleasant truth demanded to be spoken--by whomsoever had
+courage enough to utter it--that to deify mere lust was an offence and
+an outrage. So much for the justice on Mr. Buchanan's side; with the
+mistaken criticism linking the writers of Dante's time with French
+writers of the time of Baudelaire it is hardly necessary to deal. On the
+other hand, it must be said that the sum-total of all the English
+poetry written in imitation of the worst forms of this French excess was
+probably less than one hundred lines; that what was really reprehensible
+in the English imitation of the poetry of the French School was,
+therefore, too inconsiderable to justify a wholesale charge against it
+of an endeavour to raise the banner of a black ambition whose only aim
+was to ruin society; that Rossetti, who was made to bear the brunt
+of attack, was a man who never by direct avowal, or yet by inference,
+displayed the faintest conceivable sympathy with the French excesses in
+question, and who never wrote a line inspired by unwholesome passion.
+As the pith of Mr. Buchanan's accusation of 1871 lay here, and as Mr.
+Buchanan has, since then, very manfully withdrawn it, {*} we need hardly
+go further; but, as more recent articles in prominent places,
+_The Edinburgh Review, The British Quarterly Review, and again The
+Contemporary Review_, have repeated what was first said by him on the
+alleged unwholesomeness of Rossetti's poetic impulses, it may be as well
+to admit frankly, and at once (for the subject will arise in the future
+as frequently as this poetry is under discussion) that love of bodily
+beauty did underlie much of the poet's work. But has not the same
+passion made the back-bone of nine-tenths of the noblest English poetry
+since Chaucer? If it is objected that Rossetti's love of physical
+beauty took new forms, the rejoinder is that it would have been equally
+childish and futile to attempt to prescribe limits for it. All this
+we grant to those unfriendly critics who refuse to see that spiritual
+beauty and not sensuality was Rossetti's actual goal.
+
+     * Writing to me on this subject since Rossetti's death, Mr.
+     Buchanan says:--"In perfect frankness, let me say a few
+     words concerning our old quarrel. While admitting freely
+     that my article in the C. R. was unjust to Rossetti's claims
+     as a poet, I have ever held, and still hold, that it
+     contained nothing to warrant the manner in which it was
+     received by the poet and his circle. At the time it was
+     written, the newspapers were full of panegyric; mine was a
+     mere drop of gall in an ocean of _eau sucr�e_. That it could
+     have had on any man the effect you describe, I can scarcely
+     believe; indeed, I think that no living man had so little to
+     complain of as Rossetti, on the score of criticism. Well, my
+     protest was received in a way which turned irritation into
+     wrath, wrath into violence; and then ensued the paper war
+     which lasted for years. If you compare what I have written
+     of Rossetti with what his admirers have written of myself, I
+     think you will admit that there has been some cause for me
+     to complain, to shun society, to feel bitter against the
+     world; but happily, I have a thick epidermis, and the
+     courage of an approving conscience. I was unjust, as I have
+     said; most unjust when I impugned the purity and
+     misconceived the passion of writings too hurriedly read and
+     reviewed currente calamo; but I was at least honest and
+     fearless, and wrote with no personal malignity. Save for the
+     action of the literary defence, if I may so term it, my
+     article would have been as ephemeral as the mood which
+     induced its composition. I make full admission of Rossetti's
+     claims to the purest kind of literary renown, and if I were
+     to criticise his poems now, I should write very differently.
+     But nothing will shake my conviction that the cruelty, the
+     unfairness, the pusillanimity has been on the other side,
+     not on mine. The amende of my Dedication in God and the Man
+     was a sacred thing; between his spirit and mine; not between
+     my character and the cowards who have attacked it. I thought
+     he would understand,--which would have been, and indeed is,
+     sufficient. I cried, and cry, no truce with the horde of
+     slanderers who hid themselves within his shadow. That is
+     all. But when all is said, there still remains the pity that
+     our quarrel should ever have been. Our little lives are too
+     short for such animosities. Your friend is at peace with
+     God,--that God who will justify and cherish him, who has
+     dried his tears, and who will turn the shadow of his sad
+     life-dream into full sunshine. My only regret now is that we
+     did not meet,--that I did not take him by the hand; but I am
+     old-fashioned enough to believe that this world is only a
+     prelude, and that our meeting may take place--even yet."
+
+To Rossetti, the poet, the accusation of extolling fleshliness as
+the distinct and supreme end of art was, after all, only an error of
+critical judgment; but to Rossetti, the man, the charge was something
+far more serious. It was a cruel and irremediable wound inflicted upon a
+fine spirit, sensitive to attack beyond all sensitiveness hitherto known
+among poets. He who had withheld his pictures from exhibition from dread
+of the distracting influences of popular opinion, he who for fifteen
+years had withheld his poems from print in obedience first to an
+extreme modesty of personal estimate and afterwards to the commands of
+a mastering affection was likely enough at forty-two years of age (after
+being loaded by the disciples that idolised him with only too much of
+the "frankincense of praise and myrrh of flattery") to feel deeply the
+slander that he had unpacked his bosom of unhealthy passions. But to say
+that Rossetti felt the slander does not express his sense of it. He had
+replied to his reviewer and had acted unwisely in so doing; but when
+one after one--in the _Quarterly Review, the North American Review_,
+and elsewhere, in articles more or less ignorant, uncritical, and
+stupid--the accusations he had rebutted were repeated with increased
+bitterness, he lost all hope of stemming the torrent of hostile
+criticism. He had, as we have seen, for years lived in partial
+retirement, enjoying at intervals a garden party behind the house, or
+going about occasionally to visit relatives and acquaintances, but now
+he became entirely reclusive, refusing to see any friends except the
+three or four intimate ones who were constantly with him. Nor did the
+mischief end there. We have spoken of his habitual use of chloral,
+which was taken at first in small doses as a remedy for insomnia and
+afterwards indulged in to excess at moments of physical prostration or
+nervous excitement. To that false friend he came at this time with only
+too great assiduity, and the chloral, added to the seclusive habit of
+life, induced a series of terrible though intermittent illnesses and a
+morbid condition of mind in which for a little while he was the victim
+of many painful delusions. It was at this time that the soothing
+friendship of Dr. Gordon Hake, and his son Mr. George Hake, was of such
+inestimable service to Rossetti. Having appeared myself on the scene
+much later I never had the privilege of knowing either of these two
+gentlemen, for Mr. George Hake was already gone away to Cyprus and Dr.
+Hake had retired very much into the bosom of his own family where, as is
+rumoured, he has been engaged upon a literary work which will establish
+his fame. But I have often heard Mr. Theodore Watts speak with deep
+emotion and eloquent enthusiasm of the tender kindness and loyal zeal
+shown to Rossetti during this crisis by Mr. Bell Scott, and by Dr. Hake
+and his son. As to Mr. Theodore Watts, whose brotherly devotion to him,
+and beneficial influence over him from that time forward are so well
+known, this must be considered by those who witnessed it to be almost
+without precedent or parallel even in the beautiful story of literary
+friendships, and it does as much honour to the one as to the other. No
+light matter it must have been to lay aside one's own long-cherished
+life-work and literary ambitions to be Rossetti's closest friend and
+brother, at a moment like the present, when he imagined the world to be
+conspiring against him; but through these evil days, and long after them
+down to his death, the friend that clung closer than a brother was with
+him, as he himself said, to protect, to soothe, to comfort, to divert,
+to interest, and inspire him--asking, meantime, no better reward than
+the knowledge that a noble mind and nature was by such sacrifice lifted
+out of sorrow. Among the world's great men the greatest are sometimes
+those whose names are least on our lips, and this is because selfish
+aims have been so subordinate in their lives to the welfare of others
+as to leave no time for the personal achievements that win personal
+distinction; but when the world comes to the knowledge of the price
+that has been paid for the devotion that enables others to enjoy their
+renown, shall it not reward with a double meed of gratitude the fine
+spirits to whom ambition has been as nothing against fidelity of
+friendship? Among the latest words I heard from Rossetti was this:
+"Watts is a hero of friendship;" and indeed he has displayed his
+capacity for participation in the noblest part of comradeship, that
+part, namely, which is far above the mere traffic that too often goes by
+the name, and wherein self-love always counts upon being the gainer. If
+in the end it should appear that he has in his own person done less than
+might have been hoped for from one possessed of his splendid gifts,
+let it not be overlooked that he has influenced in a quite incalculable
+degree, and influenced for good, several of the foremost among those who
+in their turn have influenced the age. As Rossetti's faithful friend,
+and gifted medical adviser, Mr. John Marshall has often declared, there
+were periods when Rossetti's very life may be said to have hung upon Mr.
+Watts's power to cheer and soothe.
+
+Efforts were afoot about the year 1872 to induce Rossetti to visit
+Italy--a journey which, strangely enough, he had never made--but this
+he could not be prevailed upon to do. In the hope of diverting his mind
+from the unwholesome matters that too largely engaged it, his brother
+and friends, prominent among whom at this time were Mr. Bell Scott, Mr.
+Ford Madox Brown, Mr. W. Graham, and Dr. Gordon Hake, as well as his
+assistant and friend, Mr. H. T. Dunn, and Mr. George Hake, induced him
+to seek a change in Scotland, and there he speedily recovered tone.
+
+Immediately upon the publication of his first volume, and incited
+thereto by the early success of it, he had written the poem _Rose Mary_,
+as well as two lyrics published at the time in _The Fortnightly Review_;
+but he suffered so seriously from the subsequent assaults of criticism,
+that he seemed definitely to lay aside all hope of producing further
+poetry, and, indeed, to become possessed of the delusion that he had for
+ever lost all power of doing so. It is an interesting fact, well known
+in his own literary circle, that his taking up poetry afresh was
+the result of a fortuitous occurrence. After one of his most serious
+illnesses, and in the hope of drawing off his attention from himself,
+and from the gloomy forebodings which in an invalid's mind usually
+gather about his own too absorbing personality, a friend prevailed upon
+him, with infinite solicitation, to try his hand afresh at a sonnet. The
+outcome was an effort so feeble as to be all but unrecognisable as the
+work of the author of the sonnets of _The House of Life_, but with
+more shrewdness and friendliness (on this occasion) than frankness,
+the critic lavished measureless praise upon it, and urged the poet to
+renewed exertion. One by one, at longer or shorter intervals, sonnets
+were written, and this exercise did more towards his recovery than
+any other medicine, with the result besides that Rossetti eventually
+regained all his old dexterity and mastery of hand. The artifice had
+succeeded beyond every expectation formed of it, serving, indeed, the
+twofold end of improving the invalid's health by preventing his brooding
+over unhealthy matters, and increasing the number of his accomplished
+works. Encouraged by such results, the friend went on to induce Rossetti
+to write a ballad, and this purpose he finally achieved by challenging
+the poet's ability to compose in the simple, direct, and emphatic style,
+which is the style of the ballad proper, as distinguished from the
+elaborate, ornate, and condensed diction which he had hitherto worked
+in. Put upon his mettle, the outcome of this second artifice practised
+upon him, was that he wrote _The White Ship_, and afterwards _The King's
+Tragedy_.
+
+Thus was Rossetti already immersed in this revived occupation of poetic
+composition, and had recovered a healthy* tone of body, before he became
+conscious of what was being done with him. It is a further amusing fact
+that one day he requested to be shown the first sonnet which, in view of
+the praise lavished upon it by the friend on whose judgment he reposed,
+had encouraged him to renewed effort. The sonnet was bad: the critic
+knew it was bad, and had from the first hour of its production kept it
+carefully out of sight, and was now more than ever unwilling to show it.
+Eventually, however, by reason of ceaseless importunity, he returned it
+to its author, who, upon reading it, cried: "You fraud! you said this
+sonnet was good, and it's the worst I _ever_ wrote." "The worst ever
+written would perhaps be a truer criticism," was the reply, as the
+studio resounded with a hearty laugh, and the poem was committed to the
+flames. It would appear that to this occurrence we probably owe a large
+portion of the contents of the volume of 1881.
+
+As we say, _Rose Mary_ was the first to be written of the leading poems
+that found places in his final volume. This ballad (or ballad romance,
+for ballad it can hardly be called) is akin to _Sister Helen_ in
+_motif_. The superstition involved owes something in this case as in
+the other to the invention and poetic bias of the poet. It has, however,
+less of what has been called the Catholic element, and is more purely
+Pagan. It is, therefore, as entirely undisturbed by animosity against
+heresy, and is concerned only with an ultimate demoniacal justice
+visiting the wrongdoer. The main point of divergency lies in the
+circumstance that Rose Mary, unlike Helen, is the undesigning instrument
+of evil powers, and that her blind deed is the means by which her
+own and her lover's sin and his treachery become revealed. A further
+material point of divergency lies in the fact that unlike Helen, who
+loses her soul (as the price of revenge, directed against her betrayer),
+Rose Mary loses her life (as the price of vengeance directed against
+the evil race), whilst her soul gains rest. The superstition is that
+associated with the beryl stone, wherein the pure only may read the
+future, and from which sinful eyes must chase the spirits of grace and
+leave their realm to be usurped by the spirits of fire, who seal up the
+truth or reveal it by contraries. Rose Mary, who has sinned with her
+lover, is bidden to look in the beryl and learn where lurks the ambush
+that waits to take his life as he rides at break of day. Hiding, but
+remembering her transgression, she at first shrinks, but at length
+submits, and the blessed spirits by whom the stone has been tenanted
+give place to the fiery train. The stone is not sealed to her; and the
+long spell being ministered, she is satisfied. But she has read the
+stone by contraries, and her lover falls into the hand of his enemy.
+By his death is their secret sin made known. And then a newer shame is
+revealed, not to her eyes, but to her mother's: even the treachery of
+the murdered man. Ignorant of this to the end, Eose Mary seeks to work a
+twofold ransoming by banishing from the beryl the evil powers. With the
+sword of her father (by whom the accursed gift had been brought from
+Palestine), she cleaves the heart of the stone, and with the broken
+spell her own life breaks.
+
+It will readily be seen that the scheme of the ballad does not afford
+opportunity for a memorable incursion in the domain of character. Rose
+Mary herself as a creation is not comparable with Helen. But the ballad
+throughout is nevertheless a triumph of the higher imagination. Nowhere
+else (to take the lowest ground) has Rossetti displayed so great a gift
+of flashing images upon the mind at once by a single expression.
+
+     Closely locked, they clung without speech,
+     And the mirrored souls shook each to each,
+     As the cloud-moon and the water-moon
+     Shake face to face when the dim stars swoon
+     In stormy bowers of the night's mid-noon.
+
+     Deep the flood and heavy the shock
+     When sea meets sea in the riven rock:
+     But calm is the pulse that shakes the sea
+     To the prisoned tide of doom set free
+     In the breaking heart of Rose Mary.
+
+     She knew she had waded bosom-deep
+     Along death's bank in the sedge of sleep.
+     And now in Eose Mary's lifted eye
+     'Twas shadow alone that made reply
+     To the set face of the soul's dark shy.
+
+Nor has Rossetti anywhere displayed a more sustained picturesqueness.
+One episode stands forth vividly even among so many that are
+conspicuous. The mother has left her daughter in a swoon to seek help of
+the priest who has knelt unweariedly by the dead body of her daughter's
+lover, now lying on the ingle-bench in the hall. When the priest has
+gone and the castle folk have left her alone, the lady sinks to her
+knees beside the corpse. Great wrong the dead man has done to her and
+hers, and perhaps God has wrought this doom of his for a sign; but well
+she knows, or thinks she knows, that if life had remained with him his
+love would have been security for their honour. She stoops with a sob to
+kiss the dead, but before her lips touch the cold brow she sees a packet
+half-hidden in the dead man's breast. It is a folded paper about which
+the blood from a spear-thrust has grown clotted, and inside is a tress
+of golden hair. Some pledge of her child's she thinks it, and proceeds
+to undo the paper's folds, and then learns the treachery of the fallen
+knight and suffers a bitterer pang than came of the knowledge of her
+daughter's dishonour. It is a love-missive from the sister of his foe
+and murderer.
+
+     She rose upright with a long low moan,
+     And stared in the dead man's face new-known.
+     Had it lived indeed? she scarce could tell:
+     'Twas a cloud where fiends had come to dwell,--
+     A mask that hung on the gate of Hell.
+
+     She lifted the lock of gleaming hair,
+     And smote the lips and left it there.
+     "Here's gold that Hell shall take for thy toll!
+     Full well hath thy treason found its goal,
+     O thou dead body and damned soul!"
+
+Anything finer than this it would be hard to discover in English
+narrative poetry. Every word goes to build up the story: every line is
+quintessential: every flash of thought helps to heighten the emotion.
+Indeed the closing lines rise entirely above the limits of ballad poetry
+into the realm of dramatic diction. But perhaps the crowning glory and
+epic grandeur of the poem comes at the close. Awakened from her swoon,
+Rose Mary makes her way to the altar-cell and there she sees the
+beryl-stone lying between the wings of some sculptured beast. Within the
+fated glass she beholds Death, Sorrow, Sin and Shame marshalled past in
+the glare of a writhing flame, and thereupon follows a scene scarcely
+less terrible than Juliet's vision of the tomb of the Capulets. But she
+has been told within this hour that her weak hand shall send hence the
+evil race by whom the stone is possessed, and with a stern purpose she
+reaches her father's dinted sword. Then when the beryl is cleft to the
+core, and Rose Mary lies in her last gracious sleep--
+
+     With a cold brow like the snows ere May,
+     With a cold breast like the earth till spring,
+     With such a smile as the June days bring--
+     A clear voice pronounces her beatitude:
+
+     Already thy heart remembereth
+     No more his name thou sought'st in death:
+     For under all deeps, all heights above,--
+     So wide the gulf in the midst thereof,--
+     Are Hell of Treason and Heaven of Love.
+
+     Thee, true soul, shall thy truth prefer
+     To blessed Mary's rose-bower:
+     Warmed and lit is thy place afar
+     With guerdon-fires of the sweet love-star,
+     Where hearts of steadfast lovers are.
+
+The White Ship was written in 1880; _The King's Tragedy_ in the spring
+of 1881. These historical ballads we must briefly consider together. The
+memorable events of which Rossetti has made poetic record are, in _The
+White Ship_, those associated with the wreck of the ship in which the
+son and daughter of Henry I. of England set sail from France, and in
+_The King's Tragedy_, with the death of James the First of Scots. The
+story of the one is told by the sole survivor, Herold, the butcher of
+Rouen; and of the other by Catherine Douglas, the maid of honour who
+received popularly the name of Kate Barlass, in recognition of her
+heroic act when she barred the door with her arm against the murderers
+of the King. It is scarcely possible to conceive in either case a
+diction more perfectly adapted to the person by whom it is employed.
+If we compare the language of these ballads with that of the sonnets or
+other poems spoken in the author's own person, we find it is not first
+of all gorgeous, condensed, emphatic. It is direct, simple, pure and
+musical; heightened, it is true, by imagery acquired in its passage
+through the medium of the poet's mind, but in other respects essentially
+the language of the historical personages who are made to speak. The
+diction belongs in each case to the period of the ballad in which it
+is employed, and yet there is no wanton use of archaisms, or any
+disposition manifested to resort to meretricious artifices by which to
+impart an appearance of probability to the story other than that which
+comes legitimately of sheer narrative excellence. The characterisation
+is that of history with the features softened that constituted the prose
+of real life, and with the salient, moral, and intellectual lineaments
+brought into relief. Herein the ballad may do that final justice which
+history itself withholds. Thus the King Henry of _The White Ship_ is
+governed by lust of dominion more than by parental affection; and the
+Prince, his son, is a lawless, shameless youth; intolerant, tyrannical,
+luxurious, voluptuous, yet capable of self-sacrifice even amidst peril
+of death.
+
+     When he should be King, he oft would vow,
+     He 'd yoke the peasant to his own plough.
+     O'er him the ships score their furrows now.
+     God only knows where his soul did wake,
+     But I saw him die for his sister's sake.
+
+The King James of _The King's Tragedy_ is of a righteous and fearless
+nature, strong yet sensitive, unbending before the pride and hate of
+powerful men, resolute, and ready even where fate itself declares that
+death lurks where his road must lie; his beautiful Queen Jane is sweet,
+tender, loving, devoted--meet spouse for a poet and king. The incidents
+too are those of history: the choice and final collocation of them, and
+the closing scene in which the queen mourns her husband, being the sum
+of the author's contribution. And those incidents are in the highest
+degree varied and picturesque. The author has not achieved a more vivid
+pictorial presentment than is displayed in these latest ballads from his
+pen. It would be hard to find in his earlier work anything bearing more
+clearly the stamp of reality than the descriptions of the wreck in _The
+White Ship_, of the two drowning men together on the mainyard, of the
+morning dawning over the dim sea-sky--
+
+     At last the morning rose on the sea
+     Like an angel's wing that beat towards me--
+
+and of the little golden-haired boy in black whose foot patters down
+the court of the king. Certainly Rossetti has never attained a higher
+pictorial level than he reaches in the descriptions of the summoned
+Parliament in _The King's Tragedy_, of the journey to the Charterhouse
+of Perth, of the woman on the rock of the black beach of the Scottish
+sea, of the king singing to the queen the song he made while immured by
+Bolingbroke at Windsor, of the knock of the woman at the outer gate,
+of her voice at night beneath the window, of the death in _The Pit
+of Fortune's Wheel_. But all lesser excellencies must make way in our
+regard before a distinguishing spiritualising element which exists
+in these ballads only, or mainly amongst the author's works. Natural
+portents are here first employed as factors of poetic creation.
+Presentiment, foreboding, omen become the essential tissue of works
+that are lifted by them into the higher realm of imagination. These
+supernatural constituents penetrate and pervade _The White Ship_; and
+_The King's Tragedy_ is saturated in the spirit of them. We do not speak
+of the incidents associated with the wraith that haunts the isles, but
+of the less palpable touches which convey the scarce explicable
+sense of a change of voice when the king sings of the pit that is under
+fortune's wheel:
+
+     And under the wheel, beheld I there
+        An ugly Pit as deep as hell,
+     That to behold I quaked for fear:
+        And this I heard, that who therein fell
+     Came no more up, tidings to tell:
+     Whereat, astound of the fearful sight,
+     I wot not what to do for fright.
+               (The King's Quair.)
+
+It is the shadow of the supernatural that hangs over the king, and very
+soon it must enshroud him. One of the most subtle and impressive of the
+natural portents is that which presents itself to the eyes of Catherine
+when the leaguers have first left the chamber, and the moon goes out and
+leaves black the royal armorial shield on the painted window-pane:
+
+     And the rain had ceased, and the moonbeams lit
+        The window high in the wall,--
+     Bright beams that on the plank that I knew
+        Through the painted pane did fall
+     And gleamed with the splendour of Scotland's crown
+        And shield armorial.
+
+     But then a great wind swept up the skies,
+        And the climbing moon fell back;
+     And the royal blazon fled from the floor,
+        And nought remained on its track;
+     And high in the darkened window-pane
+        The shield and the crown were black.
+
+It has been said that _Sister Helen_ strikes the keynote of Rossetti's
+creative gift; it ought to be added that _The King's Tragedy_ touches
+his highest reach of imagination.
+
+Having in the early part of 1881 brought together a sufficient quantity
+of fresh poetry to fill a volume, Rossetti began negotiations for
+publishing it. Anticipatory announcements were at that time constantly
+appearing in many quarters, not rarely accompanied by an outspoken
+disbelief in the poet's ability to achieve a second success equal to his
+first. In this way it often happens to an author, that, having achieved
+a single conspicuous triumph, the public mind, which has spontaneously
+offered him the tribute of a generous recognition, forthwith gravitates
+towards a disposition to become silently but unmistakeably sceptical
+of his power to repeat it. Subsequent effort in such a case is rarely
+regarded with that confidence which might be looked for as the reward
+of achievement, and which goes far to prepare the mind for the ready
+acceptance of any genuine triumph. Indeed, a jealous attitude is often
+unconsciously adopted, involving a demand for special qualities, for
+which, perchance, the peculiar character of the past success has created
+an appetite, or obedience to certain arbitrary tests, which, though
+passively present in the recognised work, have grown mainly out of
+critical analysis of it, and are neither radical nor essential. Where,
+moreover, such conspicuous success has been followed by an interval
+of years distinguished by no signal effort, the sceptical bias of the
+public mind sometimes complacently settles into a conviction (grateful
+alike to its pride and envy, whilst consciously hurtful to its more
+generous impulses), that the man who made it lived once indeed upon the
+mountains, but has at length come down to dwell finally upon the plain.
+Literary biography furnishes abundant examples of this imperfection
+of character, a foible, indeed, which in its multiform manifestations,
+probably goes as far as anything else to interfere with the formation of
+a just and final judgment of an author's merit within his own lifetime.
+When it goes the length of affirming that even a great writer's creative
+activity usually finds not merely central realisation, but absolute
+exhaustion within the limits of some single work, to reason against it
+is futile, and length of time affords it the only satisfying refutation.
+One would think that it could scarcely require to be urged that creative
+impulse, once existent within a mind, can never wholly depart from it,
+but must remain to the end, dependent, perhaps, for its expression in
+some measure on external promptings, variable with the variations of
+physical environments, but always gathering innate strength for the
+hour (silent perchance, or audible only within other spheres), when the
+inventive faculty shall be harmonised, animated, and lubricated to
+its utmost height. Nevertheless, Coleridge encountered the implied
+doubtfulness of his contemporaries, that the gift remained with him
+to carry to its completion the execution of that most subtle mid-day
+witchery, which, as begun in _Christabel_, is probably the most
+difficult and elusive thing ever attempted in the field of romance.
+Goethe, too, found himself face to face with outspoken distrust of his
+continuation of _Faust_; and even Cervantes had perforce to challenge
+the popular judgment which long refused to allow that the second part
+of _Don Quixote_, with all its added significance, was adequate to
+his original simple conception. Indeed that author must be considered
+fortunate who effects a reversal of the public judgment against
+the completion of a fragment, and the repetition of a complete and
+conspicuous success.
+
+When Rossetti published his first volume of poems in 1870, he left only
+his _House of Life_ incomplete; but amongst the readers who then offered
+spontaneous tribute to that series of sonnets, and still treasured it
+as a work of all but faultless symmetry, built up by aid of a blended
+inspiration caught equally from Shakspeare and from Dante, with a
+superadded psychical quality peculiar to its author, there were many,
+even amongst the friendliest in sympathy, who heard of the completed
+sequence with a sense of doubt. Such is the silent and unreasoning and
+all but irrevocable edict of all popular criticism against continuations
+of works which have in fragmentary form once made conquest of the
+popular imagination. Moreover, Rossetti's first volume achieved a
+success so signal and unexpected as to subject this second and maturer
+book to the preliminary ordeal of such a questioning attitude of mind
+as we speak of, as the unfailing and ungracious reward of a conspicuous
+triumph. In the interval of eleven years, Rossetti had essayed no
+notable achievement, and his name had been found attached only to such
+fugitive efforts as may have lived from time to time a brief life in the
+pages of the _Athen�um_ and _Fortnightly_. Of the works in question
+two only come now within our province to mention. The first and most
+memorable was the poem _Cloud Confines_. Inadequate as the critical
+attention necessarily was which this remarkable lyric obtained,
+indications were not wanting that it had laid unconquerable siege to the
+sympathies of that section of the public in whose enthusiasm the life of
+every creative work is seen chiefly to abide. There was in it a lyrical
+sweetness scarcely ever previously compassed by its author, a cadent
+undertoned symphony that first gave testimony that the poet held the
+power of conveying by words a sensible eflfect of great music, even
+as former works of his had given testimony to his power of conveying a
+sensible eflfect by great painting. But to these metrical excellencies
+was added an element new to Rossetti's poetry, or seen here for the
+first time conspicuously. Insight and imagination of a high order,
+together with a poetic instinct whose promptings were sure, had already
+found expression in more than one creation moulded into an innate
+chasteness of perfected parts and wedded to nature with an unerring
+fidelity. But the range of nature was circumscribed, save only in the
+one exception of a work throbbing with the sufferings and sorrows of
+a shadowed side of modern life. To this lyric, however, there came
+as basis a fundamental conception that made aim to grapple with the
+pro-foundest problems compassed by the mysteries of life and death, and
+a temper to yield only where human perception fails. Abstract indeed
+in theme the lyric is, but few are the products of thought out of which
+imagination has delved a more concrete and varied picturesqueness:
+
+     What of the heart of hate
+        That beats in thy breast, O Time?--
+        Bed strife from the furthest prime,
+     And anguish of fierce debate; that shatters her slain,
+        And peace that grinds them as grain,
+        And eyes fixed ever in vain
+     On the pitiless eyes of Fate.
+
+The second of the fugitive efforts alluded to was a prose work entitled
+_Hand and Soul_. More poem than story, this beautiful idyl may be
+briefly described as mainly illustrative of the struggles of the
+transition period through which, as through a slough, all true artists
+must pass who have been led to reflect deeply upon the aims and ends of
+their calling before they attain that goal of settled purpose in which
+they see it to be best to work from their own heart simply, without
+regard for the spectres that would draw them apart into quagmires of
+moral aspiration. These two works and an occasional sonnet, such as that
+on the greatly gifted and untimely lost Oliver Madox Brown, made the sum
+of all {*} that was done, in the interval of eleven years between the
+dates of the first volume and of that which was now to be published, to
+keep before the public a name which rose at once into distinction, and
+had since, without feverish periodical bolstering, grown not less
+but more in the ardent upholding of sincere men who, in number and
+influence, comprised a following as considerable perhaps as owned
+allegiance to any contemporary.
+
+     * A ballad appeared in The Dark Blue.
+
+Having brought these biographical and critical notes to the point at
+which they overlap the personal recollections that form the body of this
+volume, it only remains to say that during the years in which the poems
+just reviewed were being written Rossetti was living at his house in
+Chelsea a life of unbroken retirement. At this time, however (1877-81),
+his seclusion was not so complete as it had been when he used to see
+scarcely any one but Mr. Watts and his own family, with an occasional
+visit from Lord and Lady Mount Temple, Mrs. Sumner, etc. Once weekly he
+was now visited by his brother William, twice weekly by his attached
+and gifted friend Frederick J. Shields, occasionally by his old friends
+William Bell Scott and Ford Madox Brown. For the rest, he rarely if
+ever left the precincts of his home. It was a placid and undisturbed
+existence such as he loved. Health too (except for one serious attack
+in 1877), was good with him, and his energies were, as we have seen, at
+their best.
+
+His personal amiability was, perhaps, never more conspicuous than
+in these tranquil years; yet this was the very time when paragraphs
+injurious to his character found their way into certain journals. Among
+the numerous stories illustrative of his alleged barbarity of manners
+was the one which has often been repeated both in conversation and in
+print to the effect that H.E.H. the Princess Louise was rudely repulsed
+from his door. Rossetti was certainly not easy to approach, but the
+geniality of his personal bearing towards those who had commands upon
+his esteem was always unfailing, and knowledge of this fact must
+have been enough to give the lie to the injurious calumny just named.
+Nevertheless, Rossetti, who was deeply moved by the imputation, thought
+it necessary to contradict it emphatically, and as the letter in which
+he did this is a thoroughly outspoken and manly one, and touches an
+important point in his character, I reprint it in this place:
+
+     16 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, S.W., December 28, 1878.
+
+     My attention has been directed to the following paragraph
+     which has appeared in the newspapers:--"A very disagreeable
+     story is told about a neighbour of Mr. Whistler's, whose
+     works are not exhibited to the vulgar herd; the Princess
+     Louise in her zeal, therefore, graciously sought them at the
+     artist's studio, but was rebuffed by a 'Not at home' and an
+     intimation that he was not at the beck and call of
+     princesses. I trust it is not true," continues the writer of
+     the paragraph, "that so medievally minded a gentleman is
+     really a stranger to that generous loyalty to rank and sex,
+     that dignified obedience," etc.
+
+     The story is certainly "disagreeable" enough; but if I am
+     pointed at as the "near neighbour of Mr. Whistler's" who
+     rebuffed, in this rude fashion, the Princess Louise, I can
+     only say that it is a _canard_ devoid of the smallest
+     nucleus of truth. Her Royal Highness has never called upon
+     me; and I know of only two occasions when she has expressed
+     a wish to do so. Some years ago Mr. Theodore Martin spoke to
+     me upon the subject; but I was at that time engaged upon an
+     important work, and the delays thence arising caused the
+     matter to slip through. And I heard no more upon the subject
+     till last summer, when Mr. Theodore Watts told me that the
+     Princess, in conversation, had mentioned my name to him, and
+     that he had then assured her that I should "feel honoured
+     and charmed to see her," and suggested her making an
+     appointment. Her Royal Highness knew that Mr. Watts, as one
+     of my most intimate friends, would not have thus expressed
+     himself without feeling fully warranted in so doing; and had
+     she called she would not, I trust, have found me wanting in
+     that "generous loyalty" which is due not more to her exalted
+     position than to her well-known charm of character and
+     artistic gifts. It is true enough that I do not run after
+     great people on account of their mere social position, but I
+     am, I hope, never rude to them; and the man who could rebuff
+     the Princess Louise must be a curmudgeon indeed.
+
+     D. G. Rossetti.
+
+At the very juncture in question Lord Lome was suddenly and unexpectedly
+appointed Governor-General of Canada, and, leaving England, Her Royal
+Highness did not return until Rossetti's health had somewhat suddenly
+broken down, and it was impossible for him to see any but his most
+intimate friends.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+My intercourse with Rossetti, epistolary and personal, extended over a
+period of between three and four years. During the first two of these
+years I was, as this volume must show, his constant correspondent,
+during the third year his attached friend, and during the portion of
+the fourth year of our acquaintance terminating with his life, his daily
+companion and housemate. It is a part of my purpose to help towards the
+elucidation of Rossetti's personal character by a simple, and I
+trust, unaffected statement of my relations to him, and so I begin by
+explaining that my knowledge of the man was the sequel to my admiration
+of the poet. Not accident (the agency that usually operates in such
+cases), but his genius and my love of it, began the friendship between
+us. Of Rossetti's pictorial art I knew little, until very recent years,
+beyond what could be gathered from a few illustrations to books. My
+acquaintance with his poetry must have been made at the time of the
+publication of the first volume in 1870, but as I did not then possess a
+copy of the book, and do not remember to have seen one, my knowledge of
+the work must have been merely such as could be gleaned from the reading
+of reviews. The unlucky controversy, that subsequently arose out of it,
+directed afresh my attention, in common with that of others, to Rossetti
+and his school of poetry, with the result of impressing my mind with
+qualities of the work that were certainly quite outside the issues
+involved in the discussion. Some two or three years after that
+acrimonious controversy had subsided, an accident, sufficiently curious
+to warrant my describing it, produced the effect of converting me from a
+temperate believer in the charm of music and colour in Rossetti's lyric
+verse, to an ardent admirer of his imaginative genius as displayed in
+the higher walks of his art.
+
+I had set out with a knapsack to make one of my many periodical walking
+tours of the beautiful lake country of Westmoreland and Cumberland.
+Beginning the journey at Bowness--as tourists, if they will accept the
+advice of one who knows perhaps the whole of the country, ought always
+to do--I walked through Dungeon Ghyll, climbed the Stake Pass, descended
+into Borrowdale, and traced the course of the winding Derwent to that
+point at which it meets the estuary of the lake, and where stands the
+Derwentwater Hotel. A rain and thunder storm was gathering over the
+Black Sail and Great Gable as I reached the summit of the Pass, and
+travelling slowly northwards it had overtaken me. Before I reached the
+hotel, my resting-place for the night, I was certainly as thoroughly
+saturated as any one in reasonable moments could wish to be. I remember
+that as I passed into the shelter of the porch an elderly gentleman, who
+was standing there, remarked upon the severity of the storm, inquired
+what distance I had travelled, and expressed amazement that on such a
+day, when mists were floating, any one could have ventured to cover so
+much dangerous mountain-country,--which he estimated as nearly thirty
+miles in extent. Beyond observing that my interlocutor was friendly
+in manner and knew the country intimately, I do not remember to have
+reflected either then or afterwards upon his personality except
+perhaps that he might have answered to Wordsworth's scarcely definite
+description of his illustrious friend as "a noticeable man," with
+the further parallel, I think, of possessing "large grey eyes." After
+attending to the obvious necessity of dry garments in exchange for wet
+ones, and otherwise comforting myself after a fatiguing day's march, I
+descended to the drawing-room of the hotel, where a company of persons
+were trying, with that too formal cordiality peculiar to English people,
+who are accidentally thrown together in the course of a holiday, to get
+rid of the depression which results upon dishearteningly unpropitious
+weather. Music, as usual, was the gracious angel employed to banish the
+fiend of ennui, but among those who took no part either in the singing
+or playing, other than that of an enforced auditor, was the elderly
+gentleman, my quondam acquaintance of the porch, who stood apart in an
+alcove looking through a window. I stepped up to him and renewed our
+talk. The storm had rather increased than abated since my arrival; the
+thunder which before had rumbled over the distant Langdale Pikes was
+breaking in sharp peals over our heads, and flashes of sheeted lightning
+lit up the gathering darkness that lay between us and Castle Crag.
+A playful allusion to "poor Tom" and to King Lear's undisputed sole
+enjoyment of such a scene (except as viewed from the ambush of a
+comfortable hotel) led to the discovery, very welcome to both at a
+moment when we were at bay for an evening's occupation, that besides
+knowledge and love of the country round about us, we had in common
+some knowledge and much love of the far wider realm of books. Thereupon
+ensued a talk chiefly on authors and their works which lasted until long
+after the music had ceased, until the elemental as well as instrumental
+storm had passed, and the guests had slipped away one after one, and the
+last remaining servant of the house had, by the introduction of a
+couple of candles, given us a palpable hint that in the opinion of that
+guardian of a country inn the hour was come and gone when well-regulated
+persons should betake themselves to bed. To my delight my friend
+knew nearly every prominent living author, could give me personal
+descriptions of them, as well as scholarly and well-digested criticisms
+of their works. He was certainly no ordinary man, but who he was I have
+never learned with certainty, though I cherish the agreeable impression
+that I could give a shrewd guess. At one moment the talk turned on
+_Festus_, and then I heard the most lucid and philosophical account of
+that work I have ever listened to or read. I was told that the author
+of _Festus_ had never (in all the years that had elapsed since its
+publication, when he was in his earliest manhood, though now he is
+grown elderly) ceased to emend it, notwithstanding the protestations
+of critics; and that an improved and enlarged edition of the poem might
+probably appear after his death. Struck with the especial knowledge
+displayed of the author in question, I asked if he happened to be
+a friend. Then, with a scarcely perceptible smile playing about the
+corners of the mouth (a circumstance without significance for me at the
+time and only remembered afterwards), my new acquaintance answered:
+"He is my oldest and dearest friend." Next morning I saw my night-long
+conversationalist in company with a clergyman get on to the Buttermere
+coach and wave his hand to me as they vanished under the trees that
+overhung the Buttermere road, but in answer to many inquiries the utmost
+I could learn of my interesting acquaintance was that he was somehow
+understood to be a great author, and a friend of Charles Kingsley, who,
+I think they said, was or had been with him there or elsewhere that
+year. Whether besides being the "oldest and dearest friend" of the
+author of _Festus_, my delightful companion was Philip James Bailey
+himself I have never learned to this day, and can only cherish a
+pleasant trust; but what remains as really important in this connexion
+is that whosoever he was he originated my first real love of Rossetti's
+poetry, and gave me my first realisable idea of the man. Taking up from
+the table some popular _Garland, Casket, Treasury_, or other anthology
+of English poetry, he pointed out a sonnet entitled _Lost Days_ (to
+which, indeed, a friend at home had directed my attention), and dwelt
+upon its marvellous strength of spiritual insight, and power of symbolic
+phrase. Of course the sonnet was Rossetti's. It is impossible for me
+to describe the effect produced upon me by sonnet and exposition. I
+resolved not to live many days longer without acquiring a knowledge
+of the body of Rossetti's work. Perceiving that the gentleman knew
+something of the poet, I put questions to him which elicited the
+fact that he had met him many years earlier at, I think he said, Mrs.
+Gaskell's, when Rossetti was a rather young man, known only as a painter
+and the leader of an eccentric school in art. He described him as a
+little dark man, with fine eyes under a broad brow, with a deep voice,
+and Bohemian habits--"a little Italian, in short." [Little, by the way,
+Rossetti could not properly be said to be, but opinions as to physical
+proportions being so liable to vary, I may at once mention that he was
+exactly five feet eight inches in height, and except in early manhood,
+when he was somewhat attenuated, well built in proportion.] He further
+described Rossetti's manners as those of a man in deliberate revolt
+against society; delighting in an opportunity to startle well-ordered
+persons out of their propriety, and to silence by sheer vehemence of
+denunciation the seemly protests of very good and very gentle folk. The
+portraiture seems to me now to bear the impress of truth, unlike as it
+is in some particulars to the man as I knew him. When once, however,
+years after the event recorded, I bantered Rossetti on the amiable
+picture of him I had received from a stranger, he admitted that it
+was in the main true to his character early in life, and recounted an
+instance in which, from sheer perversity, or at best for amusement, he
+had made the late Dean Stanley aghast with horror at the spectacle of a
+young man, born in a Christian country, and in the nineteenth century,
+defending (in sport) the vices of Neronian Home.
+
+The outcome of this first serious and sufficient introduction to
+Rossetti's poetry was that I forthwith devoted time to reading and
+meditating upon it. Ultimately I lectured twice or thrice on the subject
+in Liverpool, first at the Royal Institution, and afterwards at the
+Free Library. The text of that lecture I still preserve, and as in all
+probability it did more than anything else to originate the friendship I
+afterwards enjoyed with the poet, I shall try to convey very briefly an
+idea of its purpose.
+
+Against both friendly and unfriendly critics of Rossetti I held that to
+place him among the "aesthetic" poets was an error of classification.
+It seemed to me that, unlike the poets properly so described, he had
+nothing in common with the Caliban of Mr. Browning, who worked "for
+work's sole sake;" and, unlike them yet further, the topmost thing
+in him was indeed love of beauty, but the deepest thing was love of
+uncomely right. The fusion of these elements in Rossetti softened the
+mythological Italian Catholicism that I recognised as a leading thing in
+him, and subjugated his sensuous passion. I thought it wrong to say that
+Rossetti had part or lot with those false artists, or no artists, who
+assert, without fear or shame, that the manner of doing a thing should
+be abrogated or superseded by the moral purpose of its being done. On
+the other hand, Rossetti appeared to make no conscious compromise with
+the Puritan principle of doing good; and to demand first of his work the
+lesson or message it had for us were wilfully to miss of pleasure while
+we vainly strove for profit. He was too true an artist to follow art
+into its byeways of moral significance, and thereby cripple its broader
+arms; but at the same time all this absorption of the artist in his art
+seemed to me to live and work together with the personal instincts of
+the man. An artist's nature cannot escape the colouring it gets from the
+human side of his nature, because it is of the essence of art to appeal
+to its own highest faculties largely through the channel of moral
+instincts: that music is exquisite and colour splendid, first, because
+they have an indescribable significance, and next because they respond
+to mere sense. But it appeared to me to be one thing to work for "work's
+sole sake," with an overruling moral instinct that gravitates, as Mr.
+Arnold would say, towards conduct, and quite another thing to absorb art
+in moral purposes. I thought that Rossetti's poetry showed how possible
+it is, without making conscious compromise with that puritan principle
+of doing good of which Keats at one period became enamoured, to
+be unconsciously making for moral ends. There was for me a passive
+puritanism in _Jenny_ which lived and worked together with the poet's
+purely artistic passion for doing his work supremely well. Every thought
+in _Dante at Verona_ and _The Last Confession_ seemed mixed with and
+coloured by a personal moral instinct that was safe and right.
+
+This was perhaps the only noticeable feature of my lecture, and knowing
+Rossetti's nature, as since the lecture I have learned to know it,
+I feel no great surprise that such pleading for the moral impulses
+animating his work should have been of all things the most likely to
+engage his affections. Just as Coleridge always resented the imputation
+that he had ever been concerned with Wordsworth and Southey in the
+establishment of a school of poetry, and contended that, in common with
+his colleagues, he had been inspired by no desire save that of imitating
+the best examples of Greece and Home, so Rossetti (at least throughout
+the period of my acquaintance with him) invariably shrank from
+classification with the poetry of �stheticism, and aspired to the fame
+of a poet who had been prompted primarily by the highest of spiritual
+emotions, and to whom the sensations of the body were as naught, unless
+they were sanctified by the concurrence of the soul. My lecture was
+printed, but quite a year elapsed after its preparation before
+it occurred to me that Rossetti himself might derive a moment's
+gratification from knowledge of the fact that he had one ardent upholder
+and sincere well-wisher hitherto unknown to him. At length I sent him a
+copy of the magazine containing my lecture on his poetry. A post or two
+later brought me the following reply:
+
+     Dear Mr. Caine,--
+
+     I am much struck by the generous enthusiasm displayed in
+     your Lecture, and by the ability with which it is written.
+     Your estimate of the impulses influencing my poetry is such
+     as I should wish it to suggest, and this suggestion, I
+     believe, it will have always for a true-hearted nature. You
+     say that you are grateful to me: my response is, that I am
+     grateful to you: for you have spoken up heartily and
+     unfalteringly for the work you love.
+
+     I daresay you sometimes come to London. I should be very
+     glad to know you, and would ask you, if you thought of
+     calling, to give me a day's notice when to expect you, as I
+     am not always able to see visitors without appointment. The
+     afternoon, about 5, might suit me, or else the evening about
+     9.30. With all best wishes, yours sincerely,
+
+     D. G. Rossetti.
+
+This was the first of nearly two hundred letters in all received from
+Rossetti in the course of our acquaintance. A day or two later the
+following supplementary note reached me:
+
+     I return your article. In reading it, I feel it a
+     distinction that my minute plot in the poetic field should
+     have attracted the gaze of one who is able to traverse its
+     widest ranges with so much command. I shall be much pleased
+     if the plan of calling on me is carried out soon--at any
+     rate I trust it will be so eventually.... Have you got, or
+     do you know, my book of translations called _Dante and his
+     Circle?_ If not, I 'll send you one....
+
+     I have been reading again your article on _The Supernatural
+     in Poetry_. It is truly admirable--such work must soon make
+     you a place. The dramatic paper I thought suffered from some
+     immaturity.
+
+It is hardly necessary to say that I was equally delighted with the
+warmth of the reception accorded to my essay, and with the revelation
+the letters appeared to contain of a sincere and unselfish nature. My
+purpose, however, which was a modest one, had been served, and I made
+no further attempt to continue the correspondence, least of all did I
+expect or desire to originate anything of the nature of a friendship. In
+my reply to his note, however, I had asked him to accept the dedication
+of a little work of mine, and when, with abundant courtesy, he had
+declined to do so on very sufficient grounds, I felt satisfied that
+matters between us should rest where they were. It is a pleasing
+recollection, nevertheless, that Rossetti himself had taken a different
+view of the relation that had grown up between us, and by many generous
+appeals induced me to put by all further thoughts of abandoning the
+correspondence out of regard for him. There had ensued an interval in
+which I did not write to him, whereupon he addressed to me a hurried
+note, saying:
+
+     Let me have a line from you. I am haunted by the idea, that
+     in declining the dedication, I may have hurt you. I assure
+     you I should be proud to be associated in any way with your
+     work, but gave you my very reasons.
+
+     I shall be pleased if you do not think them sufficient, and
+     still carry out your original intention.... At least write
+     to me.
+
+I replied to this letter (containing, as it did, the expression of so
+much more than the necessary solicitude), by saying that I too had been
+haunted, but it had been by the fear that I had been asking too much
+of his attention. As to the dedication, so far from feeling hurt, by
+Rossetti's declining it, I had grown to see that such was the only
+course that remained to him to take. The terms in which he had replied
+to my offer of it (so far from being of a kind to annoy or hurt me),
+had, to my thinking, been only generous, sympathetic, and beautiful.
+Again he wrote:
+
+     My dear Caine,--
+
+     Let me assure you at once that correspondence with yourself
+     is one of my best pleasures, and that you cannot write too
+     much or too often for _me_; though after what you have told
+     me as to the apportioning of your time, I should be
+     unwilling to encroach unduly upon it. Neither should I on my
+     side prove very tardy in reply, as you are one to whom I
+     find there _is_ something to say when I sit down with a pen
+     and paper. I have a good deal of enforced evening leisure,
+     as it is seldom I can paint or draw by gaslight. It would
+     not be right in me to refrain from saying that to meet with
+     one so "leal and true" to myself as you are has been a
+     consolation amid much discouragement.... I perceive you have
+     had a complete poetic career which you have left behind to
+     strike out into wider waters.... The passage on Night, which
+     you say was written under the planet Shelley, seems to me
+     (and to my brother, to whom I read it) to savour more of the
+     "mortal moon"--that is, of a weird and sombre
+     Elizabethanism, of which Beddoes may be considered the
+     modern representative. But we both think it has an
+     unmistakeable force and value; and if you can write better
+     poetry than this, let your angel say unto you, _Write_.
+
+I take it that it would be wholly unwise of me in selecting excerpts
+from Rossetti's letters entirely to withhold the passages that concern
+exclusively (so far as their substance goes) my own early doings or
+try-ings-to-do; for it ought to be a part of my purpose to lay bare the
+beginnings of that friendship by virtue of which such letters exist.
+I can only ask the readers of these pages to accept my assurance, that
+whatever the number and extent of the passages which I publish that are
+necessarily in themselves of more interest to myself personally than to
+the public generally, they are altogether disproportionate to the number
+and extent of those I withhold. I cannot, however, resist the conclusion
+that such picture as they afford of a man beyond the period of middle
+life capable of bending to a new and young friend, and of thinking with
+and for him, is not without an exceptional literary interest as being so
+contrary to every-day experience. Hence, I am not without hope that the
+occasional references to myself which in the course of these extracts I
+shall feel it necessary to introduce, may be understood to be employed
+by me as much for their illustrative value (being indicative of
+Rossetti's character), as for any purpose less purely impersonal.
+
+The passage of verse referred to was copied out for Rossetti in reply to
+an inquiry as to whether I had written poetry. Prompted no doubt by the
+encouragement derived in this instance, I submitted from time to time
+other verses to Rossetti, as subsequent letters show, but it says
+something for the value of his praise that whatever the measure of
+it when his sympathies were fairly aroused, and whatever his natural
+tendency to look for the characteristic merits rather than defects of
+compositions referred to his judgment, his candour was always prominent
+among his good qualities when censure alone required to be forthcoming.
+Among many frank utterances of an opinion early formed, that whatever
+my potentialities as a writer of prose, I had but small vocation as a
+writer of poetry, I preserve one such utterance, which will, I trust, be
+found not less interesting to other readers from affording a glimpse of
+the writer's attitude towards the old controversy touching the several
+and distinguishing elements that contribute to make good prose on the
+one hand and good verse on the other.
+
+On one occasion he had sent me his fine sonnet on Keats, then just
+written, and, in acknowledging the receipt of it with many expressions
+of admiration, I remarked that for some days I had been struggling
+desperately, in all senses, to incubate a sonnet on the same somewhat
+hackneyed subject. I had not written a line or put pen to paper for the
+purpose, but I could tell him, in general terms, what my unaccomplished
+marvel of sonnet-craft was to be about.
+
+Rossetti replied saying that the scheme for a sonnet was "extremely
+beautiful," and urging me to "do it at once." Alas for my intrepidity,
+"do it" I did, with the result of awakening my correspondent to the
+certainty that, whatever embowerings I had in my mind, that shy bird the
+sonnet would seek in vain for a nest to hide in there. It asked so much
+special courage to send a first attempt at sonneteering to the greatest
+living master of the sonnet that moral daring alone ought to have got me
+off lightly, but here is Rossetti's reply, valuable now, as well for the
+view it affords of the poet's attitude towards the sonnet as a medium of
+expression, as for other reasons already assigned. The opening passage
+alludes to a lyric of humble life.
+
+You may be sure I do not mean essential discouragement when I say that,
+full as _Nell_ is of reality and pathos, your swing of arm seems to me
+firmer and freer in prose than in verse. I do think I see your field to
+lie chiefly in the achievements of fervid and impassioned prose.... I am
+sure that, when sending me your first sonnet, you wished me to say quite
+frankly what I think of it. Well, I do not think it shows a special
+vocation for this condensed and emphatic form. The prose version you
+sent me seems to say much more distinctly what this says with some
+want of force. The octave does not seem to me very clearly put, and the
+sestet does not emphasize in a sufficiently striking way the idea which
+the prose sketch conveyed to me,--that of Keats's special privilege in
+early death: viz., the lovely monumentalized image he bequeathed to us
+of the young poet. Also I must say that more special originality and
+even _newness_ (though this might be called a vulgarizing word), of
+thought and picture in individual lines--more of this than I find
+here--seems to me the very first qualification of a sonnet--otherwise it
+puts forward no right to be so short, but might seem a severed passage
+from a longer poem depending on development. I would almost counsel you
+to try the same theme again--or else some other theme in sonnet-form.
+I thought the passage on Night you sent showed an aptitude for choice
+imagery. I should much like to see something which you view as your best
+poetic effort hitherto. After all, there is no need that every gifted
+writer should take the path of poetry--still less of sonneteering. I am
+confident in your preference for frankness on my part.
+
+I tried the theme again before I abandoned it, and was so fortunate as
+to get him to admit a degree of improvement such as led to his
+desiring to recall his conjectural judgment on my possibilities as a
+sonnet-writer, but as the letters in which he characterises the
+advance are neither so terse in criticism, nor so interesting from the
+exposition of principles, as the one quoted, I pass them by. With
+more confidence in my ultimate comparative success than I had ever
+entertained, Rossetti was only anxious that I should engage in that work
+to which I. could address myself with a sense of command; and I think it
+will be agreed that, where temperate confidence in what the future may
+legitimately hold for one is united to earnest and rightly directed
+endeavour in the present, it is often a good thing for the man who
+stands on the threshold of life (to whom, nevertheless, the path passed
+seems ever to stretch out of sight backwards) to be told the extent
+to which, little enough at the most, his clasp (to use a phrase of Mr.
+Browning) may be equal to his grasp.
+
+My residing, as I did, at a distance from London, was at once the
+difficulty which for a time prevented our coming together and the
+necessity for correspondence by virtue of which these letters exist.
+As I failed, however, from hampering circumstance, to meet at once with
+himself, Rossetti invariably displayed a good deal of friendly anxiety
+to bring me into contact with his friends as frequently as occasion
+rendered it feasible to do so. In this way I met with Mr. Madox
+Brown, who was at the moment engaged on his admirable frescoes in the
+Manchester Town Hall, and in this way also I met with other friends
+of his resident in my neighbourhood. When I came to know him more
+intimately I perceived that besides the kindliness of intention which
+had prompted him to bring me into what he believed to be agreeable
+associations, he had adopted this course from the other motive of
+desiring to be reassured as to the comparative harmlessness of my
+personality, for he usually followed the introduction to a friend by a
+private letter of thanks for the reception accorded me, and a number of
+dexterously manipulated allusions, which always, I found, produced the
+desired result of eliciting the required information (to be gleaned
+only from personal intercourse) as to my manner and habits. Later in our
+acquaintance, I found that he, like all meditative men, had the greatest
+conceivable dread of being taken unawares, and that there was no safer
+way for any fresh acquaintance to insure his taking violently against
+him, than to take the step of coming down upon him suddenly, and
+without appointment, or before a sufficient time had elapsed between the
+beginning of the friendship and the actual personal encounter, to admit
+of his forming preconceived ideas of the manner of man to expect. The
+agony he suffered upon the unexpected visit of even the most ardent of
+well-wishers could scarcely be realised at the moment, from the apparent
+ease, and assumed indifference of his outward bearing, and could only
+be known to those who were with him after the trying ordeal had
+been passed, or immediately before the threatened intrusion had been
+consummated.
+
+Early in our correspondence a friend of his, an art critic of
+distinction, visited Liverpool with the purpose of lecturing on the
+valuable examples of Byzantine art in the Eoyal Institution of that
+city. The lecture was, I fear, almost too good and quite too technical
+for some of the hearers, many of whom claim (and with reason) to be
+lovers of art, and cover the walls of their houses with beautiful
+representations of lovely landscape, but at the same time erect huge
+furnaces which emit vast volumes of black smoke such as prevent the sky
+of any Liverpool landscape being for an instant lovely. I doubt if the
+lecture could have been treated more popularly, but there was manifestly
+a lack of merited appreciation. The archaisms of some of the pictures
+chosen for illustration (early Byzantine examples exclusively) appeared
+to cause certain of the audience to smile at much of the lecturer's
+enthusiasm. Fortunately the man chiefly concerned seemed unconscious of
+all this. And indeed, however he fared in public, in private he was only
+too "dreadfully attended." After the lecture a good many folks gave him
+the benefit of their invaluable opinions on various art questions, and
+some, as was natural, made pitiful slips. I observed with secret and
+scarcely concealed satisfaction his courageous loyalty in defence of his
+friends, and his hitting out in their defence when he believed them to
+be assailed. One superlative intelligence, eager to do honour to the
+guest, yet ignorant of his claim to such honour, gave him a wonderfully
+facile and racy comment on the pre-Raphaelite painters, and, in
+particular, made the ridiculous blunder of a deliberate attack upon
+Rossetti, and then paused for breath and for the lecturer's appreciative
+response; of course, Rossetti's friend was not to be drawn into such
+disloyalty for an instant, even to avoid the risk of ruffling the
+plumage of the mightiest of the corporate cacklers. Rossetti had
+permitted me in his name to meet his friend, and in writing subsequently
+I alluded to the affection with which he had been mentioned, also to
+something that had been said of his immediate surroundings, and to that
+frank championing of his claims which I have just described. Rossetti's
+reply to this is interesting as affording a pathetic view of his
+isolation of life and of the natural affectionateness of his nature:
+
+     I am very glad you were welcomed by dear staunch S------, as
+     I felt sure you would be. He holds the honourable position
+     of being almost the only living art-critic who has really
+     himself worked through the art-schools practically, and
+     learnt to draw and paint. He is one of my oldest and best
+     friends, of whom few can be numbered at my age, from causes
+     only too varying.
+
+          Go from me, summer friends, and tarry not,--
+          I am no summer friend, but wintry cold, etc.
+
+     So be it, as needs must be,--not for all, let us hope, and
+     not with all, as good S------ shews. I have not seen him
+     since his return. I wrote him a line to thank him for his
+     friendly reception of you, and he wrote in return to thank
+     me for your acquaintance, and spoke very pleasantly of you.
+     Your youth seems to have surprised him. I sent a letter of
+     his to your address. I hope you may see more of him. . . .
+     You mention something he said to you of me and my
+     surroundings. They are certainly _quiet_ enough as fax as
+     retirement goes, and I have often thought I should enjoy the
+     presence of a congenial and intellectual housefellow and
+     boardfellow in this big barn of mine, which is actually
+     going to rack and ruin for want of use. But where to find
+     the welcome, the willing, and the able combined in one? . . .
+     I was truly concerned to hear of the attack of ill-health
+     you have suffered from, though you do not tell me its exact
+     nature. I hope it was not accompanied by any such symptoms
+     as you mentioned before. . . . I myself have had similar
+     symptoms (though not so fully as you describe), and have
+     spat blood at intervals for years, but now think nothing of
+     it--nor indeed ever did,--waiting for further alarm signals
+     which never came.
+
+     . . . By-the-bye, I have since remembered that Burne Jones,
+     many years ago, had such an experience as you spoke of
+     before--quite as bad certainly. He was weak for some time
+     after, and has frequently been reminded in minor ways of it,
+     but seems now (at about forty-six or forty-seven) to be more
+     settled in health and stronger, perhaps, than ever
+     before.... Your letter holds out the welcome probability of
+     meeting you here ere long.
+
+This friendly solicitude regarding my health was excited by the
+revelation of what seemed to me at the time a startling occurrence, but
+has doubtless frequently happened to others, and has certainly
+since happened to myself without provoking quite so much outcry. The
+blood-spitting to which Rossetti here alleges he was liable was of
+a comparatively innocent nature. In later years he was assuredly not
+altogether a hero as to personal suffering, and I afterwards found that,
+upon the periodical recurrence of the symptom, he never failed to become
+convinced that he spat arterial blood, and that on each occasion he had
+received his death-warrant. Proof enough was adduced that the blood came
+from the minor vessels of the throat, and this was undoubtedly the case
+in the majority of instances, but whether the same explanation applied
+to one alarming occurrence which I shall now recount, seems to me
+uncertain.
+
+During the two or three weeks preceding our departure for Cumberland,
+in the autumn of 1881, during the time of our residence there and during
+the first few weeks after our return to London, Rossetti was afflicted
+by a violent cough. I noticed that it troubled him almost exclusively in
+the night-time, and after the taking of chloral; that it was sometimes
+attended by vomiting; and that it invariably shook his whole system
+so terribly as to leave him for a while entirely prostrate from sheer
+physical exhaustion. The spectacle was a painful one, and I watched
+closely its phenomena, with the result of convincing myself that
+whatever radical mischief lay at the root of it, the damage done was
+seriously augmented by a conscious giving way to it, induced, I thought,
+by hope of the relief it sometimes afforded the stomach to get rid of
+the nauseous drug at a moment of reduced digestive vitality. Then it
+became my fear that in these violent and prolonged retchings internal
+injury might be sustained, and so I begged him to try to restrain the
+tendency to cough so much and often. He took the remonstrance with great
+goodnature (observing that he perceived I thought he was putting it on),
+but I was not conscious that at any moment he acted upon my suggestion.
+At the time in question I was under the necessity of leaving him for
+a day or two every week in order to fulfil, a course of lecturing
+engagements at a distance; and upon my return in each instance I was
+told much of all that had happened to him in the interval. On one
+occasion, however, I was conscious that something had occurred of which
+he desired to make a disclosure, for amongst the gifts that Rossetti
+had not got was that of concealing from his intimate friends any event,
+however trifling, or however important, which weighed upon his mind.
+At length I begged him to say what had happened, whereupon, with great
+reluctance and many protestations of his intention to observe silence,
+and constant injunctions as to secrecy, he told me that during the night
+of my absence, in the midst of one of his bouts of coughing, he had
+discharged an enormous quantity of blood. "I know this is the final
+signal," he said, "and I shall die." I did my utmost to compose him
+by recounting afresh the personal incident hinted at, with many added
+features of (I trust) justifiable exaggeration, but it is hardly
+necessary to say that I did not hold the promise I gave him as to
+secrecy sufficiently sacred, or so exclusive, as to forbid my revealing
+the whole circumstance to his medical attendant. I may add that from
+that moment the cough entirely disappeared.
+
+To return from this reminiscence of a later period to the beginnings,
+three years earlier, of our correspondence, I will bring the present
+chapter to a close by quoting short passages from three letters written
+on the eve of my first visit to Rossetti, in 1880:
+
+     I will be truly glad to meet you when you come to town. You
+     will recognise the hole-and-cornerest of all existences; but
+     I'll read you a ballad or two, and have Brown's report to
+     back my certainty of liking you.... I would propose that you
+     should dine with me at 8.30 on the Monday of your visit, and
+     spend the evening.... Better come at 5.30 to 6 (if feasible
+     to you), that I may try to show you a picture by daylight...
+     Of course, when I speak of your dining with me, I mean t�te-
+     �-t�te, and without ceremony of any kind. I usually dine in
+     my studio, and in my painting coat. I judge this will reach
+     you in time for a note to reach _me_. Telegrams I hate. In
+     hope of the pleasure of a meeting, yours ever.
+
+How that "hole-and-cornerest of all existences" struck an ardent admirer
+of the poet-painter's genius, and a devoted lover of his personal
+character, as then revealed to me, I hope to describe in a later section
+of this book. Meantime I must proceed to cull from the epistolary
+treasures I possess a number of interesting passages on literary
+subjects, called forth in the course of an intercourse which, at that
+stage, had few topics of a private nature to divert it from a channel
+of impersonal discussion. It is a fact that the letters written to me by
+Rossetti in the year 1880 deal so largely with literary affairs (chiefly
+of the past) as to be almost capable of _verbatim_ reproduction, even
+at the present short interval after his death. If they were to be
+reproduced, they would be found to cover two hundred pages of the
+present volume, and to be so easy, fluent, varied, and wholly felicitous
+as to style, and full of research and reflection as to substance, as
+probably to earn for the writer a foremost place for epistolary power.
+Indeed, I am not without hope that this accession of a fresh reputation
+may result even upon the excerpts I have decided to introduce.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+It was very natural that our earliest correspondence should deal chiefly
+with Rossetti's own works, for those works gave rise to it. He sent me
+a copy of his translations from early Italian poets (_Dante and his
+Circle_), and a copy of his story, entitled _Hand and Soul_. In posting
+the latter, he said:
+
+     I don't know if you ever saw a sort of story of mine called
+     _Hand and Soul_. I send you one with this, as printed to go
+     in my poems (though afterwards omitted, being, nevertheless,
+     more poem than story). I printed it since in the
+     _Fortnightly_--and, I believe, abolished one or two extra
+     sentimentalities. You may have seen it there. In case it's
+     stale, I enclose with this a sonnet which _must_ be new, for
+     I only wrote it the other day.
+
+     I have already, in the proper place in this volume, said how
+     the story first struck me. Perhaps I had never before
+     reading it seen quite so clearly the complete mission as
+     well as enforced limitations of true art. All the many
+     subtle gradations in the development of purpose were there
+     beautifully pictured in a little creation that was charming
+     in the full sense of a word that has wellnigh lost its
+     charm. For all such as cried out against pursuits
+     originating in what Keats had christened "the infant chamber
+     of sensation," and for all such as demanded that everything
+     we do should be done to "strengthen God among men," the
+     story provided this answer: "When at any time hath He cried
+     unto thee, saying, 'My son, lend me thy shoulder, for I
+     fall'?"
+
+     The sonnet sent, and spoken of as having just been written
+     (the letter bears post-mark February 1880), was the sonnet
+     on the sonnet. It is throughout beautiful and in two of its
+     lines (those depicting the dark wharf and the black Styx)
+     truly magnificent. It appears most to be valued, however, as
+     affording a clue to the attitude of mind adopted towards
+     this form of verse by the greatest master of it in modern
+     poetry. I think it is Mr. Pater who says that a fine poem in
+     manuscript carries an aroma with it, and a sensation of
+     music. I must have enjoyed the pleasure of such a presence
+     somewhat frequently about this period, for many of the poems
+     that afterwards found places in the second volume of ballads
+     and sonnets were sent to me from time to time.
+
+     I should like to know what were the three or four vols. on
+     Italian poetry which you mentioned in a former letter, and
+     which my book somewhat recalled to your mind. I was not
+     aware of any such extensive _English_ work on the subject.
+     Or do you perhaps mean Trucchi's Italian _Dugento Po�sie
+     in�dite?_ I am sincerely delighted at your rare interest in
+     what I have sent you--both the translations, story, etc.--I
+     enclose three printed pieces meant for my volume but
+     omitted:--the ballad, because it deals trivially with a base
+     amour (it was written _very_ early) and is therefore really
+     reprehensible to some extent; the Shakspeare sonnet, because
+     of its incongruity with the rest of the poems, and also
+     because of the insult (however jocose) to the worshipful
+     body of tailors; and the political sonnet for reasons which
+     are plain enough, though the date at which I wrote it (not
+     without feeling) involves now a prophetic value. In a MS.
+     vol. I have a sonnet (1871) _After the German Subjugation of
+     France_, which enforces the prophecy by its fulfilment. In
+     this MS. vol. are a few pieces which were the only ones I
+     copied in doubt as to their admission when I printed the
+     poems, but none of which did I admit. One day I 'll send it
+     for you to look at. It contains a few sonnets bearing on
+     public matters, but only a few. Tell me what you think on
+     reading my things. All you said in your letter of this
+     morning was very grateful to me. I have a fair amount by me
+     in the way of later MS. which I may shew you some day when
+     we meet. Meanwhile I feel that your energies are already in
+     full swing--work coming on the heels of work--and that your
+     time cannot long be deferred as regards your place as a
+     writer.
+
+The ballad of which Rossetti here speaks as dealing trivially with a
+base amour is entitled _Dennis Shand_. Though an early work, it affords
+perhaps the best evidence extant of the poet's grasp of the old ballad
+style: it runs easiest of all his ballads, and is in some respects his
+best. Mr. J. A. Symonds has, in my judgment, made the error of speaking
+of Rossetti as incapable of reproducing the real note of such ballads
+as _Chevy Chase_ and _Sir Patrick Spens_. Mr. Symonds was right in his
+eloquent comments (_Macmillan's Magazine_, February 1882), so far as
+they concern the absence from _Rose Mary, The King's Tragedy, and The
+White Ship_ of the sinewy simplicity of the old singers. But in those
+poems Rossetti attempted quite another thing. There is a development of
+the English ballad that is entirely of modern product, being far more
+complex than the primitive form, and getting rid to some extent of the
+out-worn notion of the ballad being actually sung to set music, but
+retaining enough of the sweep of a free rhythm to carry a sensible
+effect as of being chanted when read. This is a sort of ballad-romance,
+such as _Christabel_ and _The Lay of the Last Minstrel_; and this, and
+this only, was what Rossetti aimed after, and entirely compassed in his
+fine works just mentioned. But (as Rossetti himself remarked to me in
+conversation when I repeated Mr. Symonds's criticism, and urged my own
+grounds of objection to it), that the poet was capable of the directness
+and simplicity which characterise the early ballad-writers, he had
+given proof in _The Staff and Scrip and Stratton Water. Dennis Shand_
+is valuable as evidence going in the same direction, but the author's
+objection to it, on ethical grounds, must here prevail to withhold it
+from publication.
+
+The Shakspeare sonnet, spoken of in the letter as being withheld on
+account of its incongruity with the rest of the poems, was published
+in an early _Academy_, notwithstanding its jocose allusion to the
+worshipful body of tailors. As it is little known, and really very
+powerful in itself, and interesting as showing the author's power over
+words in a new direction, I print it in this place.
+
+             ON THE SITE OF A MULBERRY TREE.
+
+     Planted by Wm. Shakspeare; felled by the Rev. F. Gastrell.
+     This tree, here fall'n, no common birth or death
+        Shared with its kind. The world's enfranchised son,
+        Who found the trees of Life and Knowledge one,
+     Here set it, frailer than his laurel-wreath.
+
+     Shall not the wretch whose hand it fell beneath
+        Rank also singly--the supreme unhung?
+        Lo! Sheppard, Turpin, pleading with black tongue
+     This viler thief's unsuffocated breath!
+
+     We 'U search thy glossary, Shakspeare! whence almost,
+        And whence alone, some name shall be reveal'd
+          For this deaf drudge, to whom no length of ears
+          Sufficed to catch the music of the spheres;
+        Whose soul is carrion now,--too mean to yield
+     Some tailor's ninth allotment of a ghost.
+
+                   Stratford-on-Avon.
+
+The other sonnets referred to, those, namely, on the _French Liberation
+of Italy_, and the _German Subjugation of France_, display all
+Rossetti's mastery of craftsmanship. In strength of vision, in fertility
+of rhythmic resource, in pliant handling, these sonnets are, in my
+judgment, among the best written by the author; and if I do not quote
+them here, or altogether regret that they do not appear in the author's
+works, it is not because I have any sense of their possibly offending
+against the delicate sensibilities of an age in which it seems necessary
+to hide out of sight whatever appears to impinge upon the domain of what
+is called our lower nature.
+
+The circumstance has hardly obtained even so much as a passing mention
+that Rossetti made certain very important additions to the ballad of
+_Sister Helen_, just before passing the old volume through the press
+afresh for publication, contemporaneously with the new book. The
+letters I am now to quote show the origin of those additions, and are
+interesting, as affording a view of the author's estimate of the gain in
+respect of completeness of conception, and sterner tragic spirit which
+resulted upon their adoption.
+
+I was very glad to have the three articles together, including the one
+in which you have written on myself. Looking at this again, it seems to
+me you must possess the _best_ edition (the Tauchnitz, which has my last
+emendations). Otherwise I have been meaning all along to offer you a
+copy of this edition, as I have some. Who was your informant as to dates
+of the poems, etc.? They are not correct, yet show some inkling. _Jenny_
+(in a first form) was written almost as early as _The Blessed Damozel_,
+which I wrote (and have altered little since), when I was eighteen. It
+was first printed when I was twenty-one. Of the first _Jenny_, perhaps
+fifty lines survive here and there, but I felt it was quite beyond me
+then (a world I was then happy enough to be a stranger to), and later
+I re-wrote it completely. I will give you correct particulars at some
+time. _Sister Helen_, I may mention, was written either in 1851 or
+beginning of 1852, and was printed in something called _The D�sseldorf
+Annual_ {*} (published in Germany) in 1853; though since much revised
+in detail--not in the main. You will be horror-struck to hear that
+the first main addition to this poem was made by me only a few days
+ago!--eight stanzas (six together, and two scattered ones) involving
+a new incident!! Your hair is on end, I know, but if you heard the
+stanzas, they would smooth if not curl it. The gain is immense.
+
+     * In The D�sseldorf Annual the poem was signed H. H. H., and
+     in explanation of this signature Rossetti wrote on his own
+     copy the following characteristic note:--"The initials as
+     above were taken from the lead-pencil."
+
+In reply to this I told Rossetti that, as a "jealous honourer" of his,
+I confessed to some uneasiness when I read that he had been making
+important additions to _Sister Helen_. That I could not think of a stage
+of the story that would bear so to be severed from what goes before or
+comes after it as to admit of interpolation might not of itself go for
+much; but the entire ballad was so rounded into unity, one incident so
+naturally begetting the next, and the combined incidents so properly
+building up a fabric of interest of which the meaning was all inwoven,
+that I could not but fear that whatever the gain in certain directions,
+the additions of any stanzas involving a new incident might, in
+some measure, cripple the rest. Even though the new stanzas were as
+beautiful, or yet more beautiful than the old ones, and the incident as
+impressive as any that goes before it, or comes after it, the gain to
+the poem as an individual creation was not, I thought, assured because
+people used to say my style was hard.
+
+Rossetti was mistaken in supposing that I possessed the latest and
+best edition of his _Poems_, but I had seen the latest of all English
+editions, and had noted in it several valuable emendations which, in
+subsequent quotation, I had been careful to employ. One of these seemed
+to me to involve an immeasurable gain. A stanza of _Sister Helen_, in
+its first form, ran:
+
+     Oh, the wind is sad in the iron chill,
+          Sister Helen,
+     And weary sad they look by the hill;
+     But Keith of Ewern 's sadder still,
+          Little brother.--etc. etc.
+
+In the later edition the fourth line of this stanza ran:
+
+     But he and I are sadder still.
+
+The change adds enormously to one's estimate of the characterisation.
+All through the ballad one wants to feel that, despite the bitterness
+of her speech, the heart of the relentless witch is breaking. Like _The
+Broken Heart_ of Ford, the ballad with the amended line was a masterly
+picture of suppressed emotion. I hoped the new incident touched the same
+chord. Rossetti replied:
+
+     Thanks for your present letter, which I will answer with
+     pleasurable care. At present I send you the Tauchnitz
+     edition of my things. The bound copy is hideous, but more
+     convenient--the other pretty. You will find a good many
+     things bettered (I believe) even on the _latest_ English
+     edition. I did not remember that the line you quote from
+     _Sister Helen_ appeared in the new form at all in an English
+     issue. I am greatly pleased at your thinking it, as I do,
+     quite a transfiguring change... The next point I have marked
+     in your letter is that about the additions to _Sister
+     Helen_. Of course I knew that your hair must arise from your
+     scalp in protest. But what should you say if Keith of Ewern
+     were a three days' bridegroom--if the spell had begun on the
+     wedding-morning--and if the bride herself became the last
+     pleader for mercy? I fancy you will see your way now. The
+     culminating, irresistible provocation helps, I think, to
+     humanize Helen, besides lifting the tragedy to a yet sterner
+     height.
+
+If I had felt (as Rossetti predicted I should) an uneasy sensation
+about the roots of the hair upon hearing that he was making important
+additions to the ballad which seemed to me to be the finest of his
+works, the sensation in that quarter was not less, but more, upon
+learning the nature of those additions. But I mistook the character of
+the new incidents. That Sister Helen should be herself the abandoned
+_bride_ of Ewern (for so I understood the poet's explanation), and, as
+such, the last pleader for mercy, pointed, I thought, in the direction
+of the humanizing emendation ("But he and I are sadder still ")
+which had given me so much pleasure. That Keith of Ewern should be a
+three-days' bridegroom, and that the spell should begin on the wedding
+morning, were incidents that seemed to intensify every line of the
+poem. In this view of Rossetti's account of the additions, there were
+certainly difficulties out of which I could see no way, but I seemed
+to realise that Helen's hate, like Macbeth's ambition, had overleaped
+itself, and fallen on the other side, and that she would undo her work,
+if to return were not harder than to go on; her initiate sensibility had
+gained hard use, but even as hate recoils on love, so out of the ashes
+of hate love had arisen. In this view of the characterisation of Helen,
+the parallel with Macbeth struck me more and more as I thought of it.
+When Macbeth kills Duncan, and hears the grooms of the chamber cry in
+their sleep--"God bless us," he cannot say "Amen,"
+
+     I had most need of blessing, and Amen
+     Stuck in my throat.
+
+Helen pleading too late for mercy against the potency of the spell she
+herself had raised, seemed to me an incident that raised her to the
+utmost height of tragic creation. But Rossetti's purpose was at once
+less ambitious and more satisfying.
+
+     Your passage as to the changes in _Sister Helen_ could not
+     well (with all its fine suggestiveness) be likely to meet
+     exactly a reality which had not been submitted to your eye
+     in the verses themselves. It is the _bride of Keith_ who is
+     the last pleader--as vainly as the others, and with a yet
+     more exulting development of vengeance in the forsaken
+     witch. The only acknowledgment by her of a mutual misery is
+     still found in the line you spotted as so great a gain
+     before, and in the last line she speaks. I ought to have
+     sent the stanzas to explain them properly, but have some
+     reluctance to ventilate them at present, much as I should
+     like the opportunity of reading them to you. They will meet
+     your eye in due course, and I am sure of your approval also
+     as regards their value to the ballad.... Don't let the
+     changes in _Helen_ get wind overmuch. I want them to be new
+     when published. Answer this when you can. I like getting
+     your epistles.
+
+The fresh stanzas in question, which had already obtained the suffrages
+of his brother, of Mr. Bell Scott, and other qualified critics, were
+subsequently sent to me. They are as follows. After Keith of Keith,
+the father of Sister Helen's sometime lover, has pleaded for his son in
+vain, the last suppliant to arrive is his son's bride:
+
+     A lady here, by a dark steed brought,
+          Sister Helen,
+     So darkly clad I saw her not.
+     "See her now or never see aught,
+          Little brother!"
+          (_O Mother, Mary Mother_,
+     _Whit more to see, between Hell and Heaven?_)
+
+     "Her hood falls back, and the moon shines fair,
+          Sister Helen,
+     On the Lady of Ewern's golden hair."
+     "Blest hour of my power and her despair,
+          Little brother!"
+          (O Mother, Mary Mother,
+     Hour blest and bann'd, between Hell and Heaven!)
+
+     "Pale, pale her cheeks, that in pride did glow,
+          Sister Helen,
+     'Neath the bridal-wreath three days ago."
+     "One morn for pride and three days for woe,
+          Little brother!"
+          (O Mother, Mary Mother,
+     Three days, three nights, between Hell and Heaven!)
+
+     "Her clasp'd hands stretch from her bending head,
+          Sister Helen;
+     With the loud wind's wail her sobs are wed."
+     "What wedding-strains hath her bridal bed,
+          Little brother?"
+          (O Mother, Mary Mother,
+     What strain but death's, between Hell and Heaven?)
+
+     "She may not speak, she sinks in a swoon,
+          Sister Helen,--
+     She lifts her lips and gasps on the moon."
+     "Oh! might I but hear her soul's blithe tune,
+          Little brother!"
+          (O Mother, Mary Mother,
+     Her woe's dumb cry, between Hell and Heaven!)
+
+     "They've caught her to Westholm's saddle-bow,
+     Sister Helen,
+     And her moonlit hair gleams white in its flow."
+     "Let it turn whiter than winter snow,
+          Little brother!"
+          (O Mother, Mary Mother,
+     Woe-withered gold, between Hell and Heaven!)
+
+Besides these there are two new stanzas, one going before, and the other
+following after, the six stanzas quoted, but as the scattered passages
+involve no farther incident, and are rather of interest as explaining
+and perfecting the idea here expressed, than valuable in themselves, I
+do not reprint them.
+
+I think it must be allowed, by fit judges, that nothing more subtly
+conceived than this incident can be met with in English poetry, though
+something akin to it was projected by Coleridge in an episode of his
+contemplated _Michael Scott_. It is--in the full sense of an abused
+epithet--too weird to be called picturesque. But the crowning merit of
+the poem still lies, as I have said, in the domain of character. Through
+all the outbursts of her ignescent hate Sister Helen can never lose the
+ineradicable relics of her human love:
+
+          But he and I are sadder still.
+
+As Rossetti from time to time made changes in his poems, he transcribed
+the amended verses in a copy of the Tauchnitz edition which he kept
+constantly by him. Upon reference to this little volume some days after
+his death, I discovered that he had prefaced _Sister Helen_ with a
+note written in pencil, of which he had given me the substance in
+conversation about the time of the publication of the altered version,
+but which he abandoned while passing the book through the press. The
+note (evidently designed to precede the ballad) runs:
+
+     It is not unlikely that some may be offended at seeing the
+     additions made thus late to the ballad of _S. H._ My best
+     excuse is that I believe some will wonder with myself that
+     such a climax did not enter into the first conception.
+
+At the foot of the poem this further note is written:
+
+     I wrote this ballad either in 1851 or early in 1852. It was
+     printed in a thing called _The D�sseldorf Annual_ in (I
+     think) 1853--published in Germany. {*}
+
+     * In the same private copy of the Poems the following
+     explanatory passage was written over the much-discussed
+     sonnet, entitled, The Monochord:--"That sublimated mood of
+     the soul in which a separate essence of itself seems as it
+     were to oversoar and survey it." Neither the style nor the
+     substance is characteristic of Rossetti, and though I do not
+     at the moment remember to have met with the passage
+     elsewhere, I doubt not it is a quotation. That quotation
+     marks are employed is not in itself evidence of much moment,
+     for Rossetti had Coleridge's enjoyment of a literary
+     practical joke, and on one occasion prefixed to a story in
+     manuscript a long passage on noses purporting to be from
+     Tristram Shandy, but which is certainly not discoverable in
+     Sterne's story.
+
+The next letter I shall quote appears to explain itself:
+
+     There is a last point in your long letter which I have not
+     noticed, though it interested me much: viz., what you say of
+     your lecture on my poetry; your idea of possibly returning
+     to and enlarging it would, if carried out, be welcome to me.
+     I suppose ere long I must get together such additional work
+     as I have to show--probably a good deal added to the old
+     vol. (which has been for some time out of print) and one
+     longer poem by itself. _The House of Life_, when next
+     issued, will I trust be doubled in number of sonnets; it is
+     nearly so already. Your writing that essay in one day, and
+     the information as to subsequent additions, I noted, and
+     should like to see the passage on _Jenny_ which you have not
+     yet used, if extant. The time taken in composition reminds
+     me of the fact (so long ago!) that I wrote the tale of _Hand
+     and Soul_ (with the exception of an opening page or two) all
+     in one night in December 1849, beginning I suppose about 2
+     A.M. and ending about 7. In such a case a landscape and sky
+     all unsurmised open gradually in the mind--a sort of
+     spiritual _Turner_, among whose hills one ranges and in
+     whose waters one strikes out at unknown liberty; but I have
+     found this only in nightlong work, which I have seldom
+     attempted, for it leaves one entirely broken, and this state
+     was mine when I described the like of it at the close of the
+     story, ah! once again, how long ago! I have thought of
+     including this story in next issue of poems, but am
+     uncertain. What think you?
+
+It seemed certain that _Hand and Soul_ ought not to continue to lie in
+the back numbers, of a magazine. The story, being more poem than aught
+else, might properly lay claim to a place in any fresh collection of
+the author's works. I could see no natural objection on the score of
+its being written in prose. As Coleridge and Wordsworth both aptly said,
+prose is not the antithesis of poetry; science and poetry may stand
+over-against each other, as Keats implied by his famous toast:
+"Confusion to the man who took the poetry out of the moon," but prose
+and poetry surely are or may be practically one. We know that in
+rhythmic flow they sometimes come very close together, and nowhere
+closer than in the heightened prose and the poetry of Rossetti. Poetic
+prose may not be the best prose, just as (to use a false antithesis)
+dull poetry is called prosaic; but there is no natural antagonism
+between prose and verse as literary mediums, provided always that the
+spirit that animates them be akin. Rossetti himself constantly urged
+that in prose the first necessity was that it should be direct, and he
+knew no reproach of poetry more damning than to say it was written in
+proseman's diction. This was the key to his depreciation of Wordsworth,
+and doubtless it was this that ultimately operated with him to exclude
+the story from his published works. I took another view, and did not
+see that an accidental difference of outward form ought to prevent his
+uniting within single book-covers productions that had so much of their
+essential spirit in common. Unlike the Chinese, we do not read by sight
+only, and there is in the story such richness, freshness, and variety
+of cadence, as appeal to the ear also. Prose may be the lowest order
+of rhythmic composition, but we know it is capable of such purity,
+sweetness, strength, and elasticity, as entitle it to a place as a
+sister art with poetry. Milton, however, although he wrote the noblest
+of English prose, seemed more than half ashamed of it, as of a kind of
+left-handed performance. Goethe and Wordsworth, on the other hand, not
+to speak of Coleridge and Shelley (or yet of Keats, whose letters are
+among the very best examples extant of the English epistolary style),
+wrote prose of wonderful beauty and were not ashamed of it. In Milton's
+case the subjects, I imagine, were to blame for his indifference to his
+achievements in prose, for not even the Westminster Convention, or
+the divorce topics of _Tetrachordon_, or yet the liberty of the press,
+albeit raised to a level of philosophic first principles, were quite up
+to those fixed stars of sublimity about which it was Milton's pleasure
+to revolve. _Hand and Soul_ is in faultless harmony with Rossetti's work
+in verse, because distinguished by the same strength of imagination.
+That it was written in a single night seems extraordinary when viewed
+in relation to its sustained beauty; but it is done in a breath, and has
+all the excellencies of fervour and force that result upon that method
+of composition only.
+
+A year or two later than the date of the correspondence with which I am
+now dealing, Rossetti read aloud a fragment of a story written about
+the period of _Hand and Soul_. It was to be entitled _St. Agnes of
+Intercession_, and it dealt in a mystic way with the doctrine of the
+transmigration of souls. He constantly expressed his intention of
+finishing the story, and said that, although in its existing condition
+it was fully as long as the companion story, it would require twice as
+much more to complete it. During the time of our stay at Birchington, at
+the beginning of 1882, he seemed anxious to get to work upon it, and had
+the manuscript sent down from London for that purpose; but the packet
+lay unopened until after his death, when I glanced at it again
+to refresh my memory as to its contents. The fragment is much too
+inconclusive as to design to admit of any satisfying account of its
+plot, of which there is more, than in _Hand and Soul_. As far as it
+goes, it is the story of a young English painter who becomes the victim
+of a conviction that his soul has had a prior existence in this world.
+The hallucination takes entire possession of him, and so unsettles
+his life that he leaves England in search of relic or evidence of his
+spiritual "double." Finally, in a picture-gallery abroad, he comes face
+to face with a portrait which' he instantly recognises as the portrait
+of himself, both as he is now and as he was in the time of his
+antecedent existence. Upon inquiry, the portrait proves to be that of a
+distinguished painter centuries dead, whose work had long been the young
+Englishman's guiding beacon in methods of art. Startled beyond measure
+at the singular discovery of a coincidence which, superstition apart,
+might well astonish the most unsentimental, he sickens to a fever. Here
+the fragment ends. Late one evening, in August 1881, Rossetti gave me
+a full account of the remaining incidents, but I find myself without
+memoranda of what was said (it was never my habit to keep record of his
+or of any man's conversation), and my recollection of what passed is
+too indefinite in some salient particulars to make it safe to attempt
+to complete the outlines of the story. I consider the fragment in all
+respects finer than _Hand and Soul_, and the passage descriptive of the
+artist's identification of his own personality in the portrait on
+the walls of the gallery among the very finest pieces of picturesque,
+impassioned, and dramatic writing that Rossetti ever achieved. On one
+occasion I remarked incidentally upon something he had said of his
+enjoyment of rivers of morning air {*} in the spring of the year, that
+it would be an inquiry fraught with a curious interest to find out how
+many of those who have the greatest love of the Spring were born in it.
+
+     * Within the period of my personal knowledge of Rossetti's
+     habits, he certainly never enjoyed any "rivers of morning
+     air" at all, unless they were such as visited him in a
+     darkened bedchamber.
+
+One felt that one could name a goodly number among the English poets
+living and dead. It would be an inquiry, as Hamlet might say, such as
+would become a woman. To this Rossetti answered that he was born on old
+May-day (May 12), 1828; and thereupon he asked the date of my own birth.
+
+     The comparative dates of our births are curious.... I myself
+     was born on old May-Day (12th), in the year (1828) after
+     that in which Blake died.... You were born, in fact, just as
+     I was giving up poetry at about 25, on finding that it
+     impeded attention to what constituted another aim and a
+     livelihood into the bargain, _i.e._ painting. From that date
+     up to the year when I published my poems, I wrote extremely
+     little,--I might almost say nothing, except the renovated
+     _Jenny_ in 1858 or '59. To this again I added a passage or
+     two when publishing in 1870.
+
+Often since Rossetti's death I have reflected upon the fact that in that
+lengthy correspondence between us which preceded personal intimacy,
+he never made more than a single passing allusion to those adverse
+criticisms which did so much at one period to sadden and alter his life.
+Barely, indeed, in conversation did he touch upon that sore subject, but
+it was obvious enough to the closer observer, as well from his silence
+as from his speech, that though the wounds no longer rankled, they
+did not wholly heal. I take it as evidence of his desire to put by
+unpleasant reflections (at least whilst health was whole with him, for
+he too often nourished melancholy retrospects when health was broken
+or uncertain), that in his correspondence with me, as a young friend
+who knew nothing at first hand of his gloomier side, he constantly dwelt
+with radiant satisfaction and hopefulness on the friendly words that had
+been said of him. And as frequently as he called my attention to such
+favourable comment, he did so without a particle of vanity, and with
+only such joy as he may feel who knows in his secret heart he has
+depreciators, to find that he has ardent upholders too. In one letter he
+says:
+
+I should say that between the appearance of the poems and your lecture,
+there was one article on the subject, of a very masterly kind indeed,
+by some very scholarly hand (unknown to me), in the _New York Catholic
+World_ (I think in 1874). I retain this article, and will some day send
+it you to read.
+
+He sent me the article, and I found it, as he had found it, among the
+best things written on the subject. Naturally, the criticism was best
+where the subject dealt with impinged most upon the spirit of medi�val
+Catholicism. Perhaps Catholicism is itself essentially medi�val, and
+perhaps a man cannot possibly be, what the _Catholic World_ article
+called Rossetti, a "medi�val artist heart and soul," without partaking
+of a strong religious feeling that is primarily Catholic--so much were
+the religion and art of the middle ages knit each to each. Yet, upon
+reading the article, I doubted one of the writer's inferences, namely,
+that Rossetti had inherited a Catholic devotion to the Madonna. Not his
+_Ave_ only seemed to me to live in an atmosphere of tender and sensitive
+devotion, but I missed altogether in it, as in other poems of Rossetti,
+that old, continual, and indispensable Catholic note of mystic Divine
+love lost in love of humanity which, I suppose, Mr. Arnold would call
+anthropomorphism. Years later, when I came to know Rossetti personally,
+I perceived that the writer of the article in question had not made
+a bad shot for the truth. True it was, that he had inherited a strong
+religious spirit--such as could only be called Catholic--inherited
+I say, for, though from his immediate parents, he assuredly did not
+inherit any devotion to the Madonna, his own submission to religious
+influences was too unreasoning and unquestioning to be anything but
+intuitive. Despite some worldly-mindedness, and a certain shrewdness in
+the management of the more important affairs of daily life, Rossetti's
+attitude towards spiritual things was exactly the reverse of what we
+call Protestant. During the last months of his life, when the prospect
+of leaving the world soon, and perhaps suddenly, impressed upon his
+mind a deep sense of his religious position, he yielded himself up
+unhesitatingly to the intuitive influences I speak of; and so far from
+being touched by the interminable controversies which have for ages been
+upsetting and uprearing creeds, he seemed both naturally incapable of
+comprehending differences of belief, and unwilling to dwell upon them
+for an instant. Indeed, he constantly impressed me during the last days
+of his life with the conviction, that he was by religious bias of nature
+a monk of the middle ages.
+
+As to the article in _The Catholic Magazine_ I thought I perceived from
+a curious habit of biblical quotation that it must have been written by
+an Ecclesiastic. A remark in it to the effect that old age is usually
+more indulgent than middle life to the work of first manhood, and that,
+consequently, Rossetti would be a less censorious judge of his early
+efforts at a later period of life, seemed to show that the writer
+himself was no longer a young man. Further, I seemed to see that the
+reviewer was not a professional critic, for his work displayed few of
+the well-recognised trade-marks with which the articles of the literary
+market are invariably branded. As a small matter one noticed the
+somewhat slovenly use of the editorial _we_, which at the fag-end of
+passages sometimes dropped into _I_. [Upon my remarking upon this to
+Rossetti he remembered incidentally that a similar confounding of
+the singular and plural number of the pronoun produces marvellously
+suggestive effects in a very different work, _Macbeth_, where the kingly
+_we_ is tripped up by the guilty _I_ in many places.] Rossetti wrote:
+
+I am glad you liked the _Catholic World_ article, which I certainly view
+as one of rare literary quality. I have not the least idea who is the
+writer, but am sorry now I never wrote to him under cover of the editor
+when I received it. I did send the _Dante and Circle_, but don't know
+if it was ever received or reviewed. As you have the vols, of
+_Fortnightly_, look up a little poem of mine called the _Cloud
+Confines_, a few months later, I suppose, than the tale. It is one of my
+favourites, among my own doings.
+
+I noticed at this early period, as well as later, that in Rossetti's
+eyes a favourable review was always enhanced in value if the writer
+happened to be a stranger to him; and I constantly protested that a
+friend's knowledge of one's work and sympathy with it ought not to be
+less delightful, as such, than a stranger's, however less surprising,
+though at the same time the tribute that is true to one's art without
+auxiliary aids being brought to bear in its formation must be at once
+the most satisfying assurance of the purity, strength, and completeness
+of the art itself, and of the safe and enduring quality of the
+appreciation. It is true that friends who are accustomed to our habit of
+thought and manner of expression sometimes catch our meaning before we
+have expressed it Not rarely, before our thought has reached that stage
+at which it becomes intelligible to a stranger, a word, a look, or a
+gesture will convey it perfectly and fully to a friend. And what goes on
+between minds that exist in more or less intimate communion, goes on
+to a greater degree within the individual mind where the metaphysical
+equivalents to a word or a look answer to, and are answered by, the
+half-realised conception. Hence it often happens that even where our
+touch seems to ourselves delicate and precise, a mind not initiated
+in our self-chosen method of abbreviation finds only impenetrable
+obscurity. It is then in the tentative condition of mind just indicated
+that the spirit of art comes in, and enables a man so to clothe his
+thought in lucid words and fitting imagery that strangers may know, when
+they see it, all that it is, and how he came by it. Although, therefore,
+the praise of friends should not be less delightful, as praise, than
+that tendered by strangers, there is an added element of surprise and
+satisfaction in the latter which the former cannot bring. Rossetti
+certainly never over-valued the applause of his own immediate circle,
+but still no man was more sensible of the value of the good opinion of
+one or two of his immediate friends. Returning to the correspondence, he
+says:
+
+     In what I wrote as to critiques on my poems, I meant to
+     express _special_ gratification from those written by
+     strangers to myself and yet showing full knowledge of the
+     subject and full sympathy with it. Such were Formans at the
+     time, the American one since (and far from alone in America,
+     but this the best) and more lately your own. Other known and
+     unknown critics of course wrote on the book when it
+     appeared, some very favourably and others _quite_
+     sufficiently abusive.
+
+As to _Cloud Confines_, I told Rossetti that I considered it in
+philosophic grasp the most powerful of his productions, and interesting
+as being (unlike the body of his works) more nearly akin to the spirit
+of music than that of painting.
+
+     By the bye, you are right about _Cloud Confines_, which _is_
+     my very best thing--only, having been foolishly sent to a
+     magazine, no notice whatever resulted.
+
+Rossetti was not always open to suggestions as to the need of clarifying
+obscure phrases in his verses, but on one or two occasions, when I was
+so bold as to hint at changes, I found him in highly tractable moods.
+I called his attention to what I imagined might prove to be merely a
+printer's slip in his poem (a great favourite of mine) entitled _The
+Portrait_. The second stanza ran:
+
+     Yet this, of all love's perfect prize,
+     Remains; save what in mournful guise
+     Takes counsel with my soul alone,--
+     Save what is secret and unknown,
+     Below the earth, above the sky.
+
+The words "yet" and "save" seemed to me (and to another friend) somewhat
+puzzling, and I asked if "but" in the sense of _only_ had been meant. He
+wrote:
+
+     That is a very just remark of yours about the passage in
+     _Portrait_ beginning _yet_. I meant to infer _yet only_, but
+     it certainly is truncated. I shall change the line to
+
+          Yet only this, of love's whole prize,
+          Remains, etc.
+
+     But would again be dubious though explicable. Thanks for the
+     hint.... I shall be much obliged to you for any such hints
+     of a verbal nature.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+The letters printed in the foregoing chapter are valuable as settling
+at first-hand all question of the chronology of the poems of Rossetti's
+volume of 1870. The poems of the volume of 1881 (Rose Mary and certain
+of the sonnets excepted) grew under his hand during the period of my
+acquaintance with him, and their origin I shall in due course record.
+The two preceding chapters have been for the most part devoted to such
+letters (and such explanatory matter as must needs accompany them) as
+concern principally, perhaps, the poet and his correspondent; but I
+have thrown into two further chapters a great body of highly interesting
+letters on subjects of general literary interest (embracing the fullest
+statement yet published of Rossetti's critical opinions), and have
+reserved for a more advanced section of the work a body of further
+letters on sonnet literature which arose out of the discussion of an
+anthology that I was at the time engaged in compiling.
+
+It was very natural that Coleridge should prove to be one of the first
+subjects discussed by Rossetti, who admired him greatly, and when it
+transpired that Coleridge was, perhaps, my own chief idol, and that
+whilst even yet a child I had perused and reperused not only his poetry
+but even his mystical philosophy (impalpable or obscure even to his
+maturer and more enlightened, if no more zealous, admirers), the
+disposition to write upon him became great upon both sides. "You can
+never say too much about Coleridge for me," Rossetti would write, "for
+I worship him on the right side of idolatry, and I perceive you know
+him well." Upon this one of my first remarks was that there was much in
+Coleridge's higher descriptive verse equivalent to the landscape art
+of Turner. The critical parallel Rossetti warmly approved of, adding,
+however, that Coleridge, at his best as a pictorial artist, was a
+spiritualised Turner. He instanced his,
+
+     We listened and looked sideways up,
+     The moving moon went up the sky
+     And no where did abide,
+     Softly she was going up,
+     And a star or two beside--
+     The charmed water burnt alway
+     A still and awful red.
+
+I remarked that Shelley possessed the same power of impregnating
+landscape with spiritual feeling, and this Rossetti readily allowed;
+but when I proceeded to say that Wordsworth sometimes, though rarely,
+displayed a power akin to it, I found him less warmly responsive. "I
+grudge Wordsworth every vote he gets," {*} Rossetti frequently said to
+me, both in writing, and afterwards in conversation. "The three
+greatest English imaginations," he would sometimes add, "are Shakspeare,
+Coleridge, and Shelley." I have heard him give a fourth name, Blake.
+
+     * There is a story frequently told of how, seeing two camels
+     walking together in the Zoological Gardens, keeping step in
+     a shambling way, and conversing with one another, Rossetti
+     exclaimed: "There's Wordsworth and Ruskin virtuously taking
+     a walk!"
+
+He thought Wordsworth was too much the High Priest of Nature to be
+her lover: too much concerned to transfigure into poetry his
+pantheo-Christian philosophy regarding Nature, to drop to his knees in
+simple love of her to thank God that she was beautiful. It was hard to
+side with Rossetti in his view of Wordsworth, partly because one feared
+he did not practise the patience necessary to a full appreciation of
+that poet, and was consequently apt to judge of him by fugitive lines
+read at random. In the connection in question, I instanced the lines
+(much admired by Coleridge) beginning
+
+     Suck, little babe, O suck again!
+     It cools my blood, it cools my brain,
+
+and ending--
+
+     The breeze I see is in the tree,
+     It comes to cool my babe and me.
+
+But Rossetti would not see that this last couplet denoted the point of
+artistic vision at which the poet of nature identified himself with her,
+in setting aside or superseding all proprieties of mere speech. To him
+Wordsworth's Idealism (which certainly had the German trick of keeping
+close to the ground) only meant us to understand that the forsaken
+woman through whose mouth the words are spoken (in _The Affliction of
+Margaret_ ------ of ------) saw _the breeze shake the tree_ afar off.
+And this attitude towards Wordsworth Rossetti maintained down to the
+end. I remember that sometime in March of the year in which he died, Mr.
+Theodore Watts, who was paying one of his many visits to see him in his
+last illness at the sea-side, touched, in conversation, upon the power
+of Wordsworth's style in its higher vein, and instanced a noble passage
+in the _Ode to Duty_, which runs:
+
+     Stern Lawgiver! yet thou dost wear
+     The Godhead's most benignant grace;
+     Nor know we anything so fair
+     As is the smile upon thy face;
+     Flowers laugh before thee on their beds;
+     And fragrance in thy footing treads;
+     Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong;
+     And the most ancient heavens, through Thee, are
+               fresh and strong.
+
+Mr. Watts spoke with enthusiasm of the strength and simplicity, the
+sonorousness and stately march of these lines; and numbered them, I
+think, among the noblest verses yet written, for every highest quality
+of style.
+
+But Rossetti was unyielding, and though he admitted the beauty of the
+passage, and was ungrudging in his tribute to another passage which I
+had instanced--
+
+          O joy that in our embers--
+
+he would not allow that Wordsworth ever possessed a grasp of the
+great style, or that (despite the Ode on Immortality and the sonnet on
+_Toussaint L'Ouverture_, which he placed at the head of the poet's work)
+vital lyric impulse was ever fully developed in his muse. He said:
+
+     As to Wordsworth, no one regards the great Ode with more
+     special and unique homage than I do, as a thing absolutely
+     alone of its kind among all greatest things. I cannot say
+     that anything else of his with which I have ever been
+     familiar (and I suffer from long disuse of all familiarity
+     with him) seems at all on a level with this.
+
+In all humility I regard his depreciatory opinion, not at all as a
+valuable example of literary judgment, but as indicative of a clear
+radical difference of poetic bias between the two poets, such as must
+in the same way have made Wordsworth resist Rossetti if he had appeared
+before him. I am the more confirmed in this view from the circumstance
+that Rossetti, throughout the period of my acquaintance with him, seemed
+to me always peculiarly and, if I may be permitted to say so without
+offence, strangely liable to Mr. Watts's influence in his critical
+estimates, and that the case instanced was perhaps the only one in
+which I knew him to resist Mr. Watts's opinion upon a matter of poetical
+criticism, which he considered to be almost final, as his letters to
+me, printed in Chapter VIII. of this volume, will show. I had a striking
+instance of this, and of the real modesty of the man whom I had heard
+and still hear spoken of as the most arrogant man of genius of his
+day, on one of the first occasions of my seeing him. He read out to me
+an additional stanza to the beautiful poem _Cloud Confines_: As he
+read it, I thought it very fine, and he evidently was very fond of it
+himself. But he surprised me by saying that he should not print it. On
+my asking him why, he said:
+
+"Watts, though he admits its beauty, thinks the poem would be better
+without it."
+
+"Well, but you like it yourself," said I.
+
+"Yes," he replied; "but in a question of gain or loss to a poem, I feel
+that Watts must be right."
+
+And the poem appeared in _Ballads and Sonnets_ without the stanza in
+question. The same thing occurred with regard to the omission of the
+sonnet _Nuptial Sleep_ from the new edition of the Poems in 1881. Mr.
+Watts took the view (to Rossetti's great vexation at first) that this
+sonnet, howsoever perfect in structure and beautiful from the artistic
+point of view, was "out of place and altogether incongruous in a group
+of sonnets so entirely spiritual as _The House of Life_," and Rossetti
+gave way: but upon the subject of Wordsworth in his relations to
+Coleridge, Keats, and Shelley, he was quite inflexible to the last.
+
+In a letter treating of other matters, Rossetti asked me if I thought
+"Christabel" really existed as a medi�val name, or existed at all
+earlier than Coleridge. I replied that I had not met with it earlier
+than the date of the poem. I thought Coleridge's granddaughter must
+have been the first person to bear the name. The other names in the poem
+appear to belong to another family of names,--names with a different
+origin and range of expression,--Leoline, G�raldine, Roland, and most
+of all Bracy. It seemed to me very possible that Coleridge invented
+the name, but it was highly probable that he brought it to England from
+Germany, where, with Wordsworth, he visited Klopstock in 1798, about
+the period of the first part of the poem. The Germans have names of a
+kindred etymology and, even if my guess proved wide of the truth,
+it might still be a fact that the name had German relations. Another
+conjecture that seemed to me a reasonable one was that Coleridge evolved
+the name out of the incidents of the opening passages of the poem.
+The beautiful thing, not more from its beauty than its suggestiveness,
+suited his purpose exactly. Rossetti replied:
+
+     Resuming the thread of my letter, I come to the question of
+     the name Christabel, viz.:--as to whether it is to be found
+     earlier than Coleridge. I have now realized afresh what I
+     knew long ago, viz.:--that in the grossly garbled ballad of
+     _Syr Cauline_, in Percy's _Reliques_, there is a Ladye
+     Chrystabelle, but as every stanza in which her name appears
+     would seem certainly to be Percy's own work, I suspect him
+     to be the inventor of the name, which is assuredly a much
+     better invention than any of the stanzas; and from this
+     wretched source Coleridge probably enriched the sphere of
+     symbolic nomenclature. However, a genuine source may turn
+     up, but the name does not sound to me like a real one. As to
+     a German origin, I do not know that language, but would not
+     the second syllable be there the one accented? This seems to
+     render the name shapeless and improbable.
+
+I mentioned an idea that once possessed me despotically. It was that
+where Coleridge says
+
+     Her silken robe and inner vest
+     Dropt to her feet, and full in view
+     Behold! her bosom and half her side--
+     A sight to dream of and not to tell,. . .
+     Shield the Lady Christabel!
+
+he meant ultimately to show _eyes_ in the _bosom_ of the witch. I
+fancied that if the poet had worked out this idea in the second part,
+or in his never-compassed continuation, he must have electrified his
+readers. The first part of the poem is of course immeasurably superior
+in witchery to the second, despite two grand things in the latter--the
+passage on the severance of early friendships, and the conclusion;
+although the dexterity of hand (not to speak of the essential spirit of
+enchantment) which is everywhere present in the first part, and nowhere
+dominant in the second, exhibits itself not a little in the marvellous
+passage in which G�raldine bewitches Christabel. Touching some jocose
+allusion by Rossetti to the necessity which lay upon me to startle
+the world with a continuation of the poem based upon the lines of my
+conjectural scheme, I asked him if he knew that a continuation was
+actually published in Coleridge's own paper, _The Morning Post_. It
+appeared about 1820, and was satirical of course--hitting off many
+peculiarities of versification, if no more. With Coleridge's playful
+love of satirising himself anonymously, the continuation might even be
+his own. Rossetti said:
+
+     I do not understand your early idea of _eyes_ in the bosom
+     of G�raldine. It is described as "that bosom old," "that
+     bosom cold," which seems to show that its withered character
+     as combined with Geraldine's youth, was what shocked and
+     warned Christabel. The first edition says--
+
+          A sight to dream of, not to tell:--
+          And she is to sleep with Christabel!
+
+     I dare say Coleridge altered this, because an idea arose,
+     which I actually heard to have been reported as Coleridge's
+     real intention by a member of contemporary circles (P. G.
+     Patmore, father of Coventry P. who conveyed the report to
+     me)--viz., that G�raldine was to turn out to be a man!! I
+     believe myself that the conclusion as given by Gillman from
+     Coleridge's account to him is correct enough, only not
+     picturesquely worded. It does not seem a bad conclusion by
+     any means, though it would require fine treatment to make it
+     seem a really good one. Of course the first part is so
+     immeasurably beyond the second, that one feels Chas. Lamb's
+     view was right, and it should have been abandoned at that
+     point. The passage on sundered friendship is one of the
+     masterpieces of the language, but no doubt was written quite
+     separately and then fitted into _Christabel_. The two lines
+     about Roland and Sir Leoline are simply an intrusion and an
+     outrage. I cannot say that I like the conclusion nearly so
+     well as this. It hints at infinite beauty, but somehow
+     remains a sort of cobweb. The conception, and partly the
+     execution, of the passage in which Christabel repeats by
+     fascination the serpent-glance of G�raldine, is magnificent;
+     but that is the only good narrative passage in part two. The
+     rest seems to have reached a fatal facility of jingling, at
+     the heels whereof followed Scott.
+
+There are, I believe, many continuations of _Christabel_. Tupper did
+one! I myself saw a continuation in childhood, long before I saw the
+original, and was all agog to see it for years. Our household was all of
+Italian, not English environment, and it was only when I went to school
+later that I began to ransack bookstalls. The continuation in question
+was by one Eliza Stewart, and appeared in a shortlived monthly thing
+called _Smallwood's Magazine_, to which my father contributed
+some Italian poetry, and so it came into the house. I thought the
+continuation spirited then, and perhaps it may have been so. This must
+have been before 1840 I think.
+
+The other day I saw in a bookseller's catalogue--_Christabess_, by S. T.
+Colebritche, translated from the Doggrel by Sir Vinegar Sponge (1816).
+This seems a parody, not a continuation, in the very year of the poem's
+first appearance! I did not think it worth two shillings,--which was the
+price.... Have you seen the continuation of _Christabel_ in _European
+Magazine?_ of course it _might_ have been Coleridge's, so far as the
+date of the composition of the original was concerned; but of course it
+was not his.
+
+I imagine the "Sir Vinegar Sponge" who translated "_Christabess_ from
+the _Doggerel_" must belong to the family of Sponges described by
+Coleridge himself, who give out the liquid they take in much dirtier
+than they imbibe it. I thought it very possible that Coleridge's epigram
+to this effect might have been provoked by the lampoon referred to, and
+Rossetti also thought this probable. Immediately after meeting with the
+continuation of _Christabel_ already referred to, I came across great
+numbers of such continuations, as well as satires, parodies, reviews,
+etc., in old issues of _Blackwood, The Quarterly, and The Examiner_.
+They seemed to me, for the most part, poor in quality--the highest reach
+of comicality to which they attained being concerned with side slaps at
+_Kubla Khan_:
+
+     Better poetry I make
+     When asleep than when awake.
+     Am I sure, or am I guessing?
+     Are my eyes like those of Lessing?
+
+This latter elegant couplet was expected to serve as a scorching satire
+on a letter in the _Biographia Literaria_ in which Coleridge says he
+saw a portrait of Lessing at Klopstock's, in which the eyes seemed
+singularly like his own. The time has gone by when that flight of
+egotism on Coleridge's part seemed an unpardonable offence, and to our
+more modern judgment it scarcely seems necessary that the author of
+_Christabel_ should be charged with a desire to look radiant in the
+glory reflected by an accidental personal resemblance to the author of
+_Laokoon_. Curiously enough I found evidence of the Patmore version
+of Coleridge's intentions as to the ultimate disclosure of the sex of
+G�raldine in a review in the _Examiner_. The author was perhaps Hazlitt,
+but more probably the editor himself, but whether Hazlitt or Hunt,
+he must have been within the circle that found its rallying point at
+Highgate, and consequently acquainted with the earliest forms of the
+poem. The review is an unfavourable one, and Coleridge is told in it
+that he is the dog-in-the-manger of literature, and that his poem is
+proof of the fact that he can write better nonsense poetry than any man
+in England. The writer is particularly wroth with what he considers
+the wilful indefiniteness of the author, and in proof of a charge of
+a desire not to let the public into the secret of the poem, and of
+a conscious endeavour to mystify the reader, he deliberately accuses
+Coleridge of omitting one line of the poem as it was written, which,
+if printed, would have proved conclusively that G�raldine had seduced
+Christabel after getting drunk with her,--for such sequel is implied if
+not openly stated. I told Rossetti of this brutality of criticism, and
+he replied:
+
+     As for the passage in _Christabel_, I am not sure we quite
+     understand each other. What I heard through the Patmores (a
+     complete mistake I am sure), was that Coleridge meant
+     G�raldine to prove to be a man bent on the seduction of
+     Christabel, and presumably effecting it. What I inferred (if
+     so) was that Coleridge had intended the line as in first
+     ed.: "And she is to sleep with Christabel!" as leading up
+     too nearly to what he meant to keep back for the present.
+     But the whole thing was a figment.
+
+What is assuredly not a figment is, that an idea, such as the elder
+Patmore referred to, really did exist in the minds of Coleridge's
+so-called friends, who after praising the poem beyond measure whilst
+it was in manuscript, abused it beyond reason or decency when it was
+printed. My settled conviction is that the _Examiner_ criticism, and
+_not_ the sudden advent of the idea after the first part was written,
+was the cause of Coleridge's adopting the correction which Rossetti
+mentions.
+
+Rossetti called my attention to a letter by Lamb, about which he
+gathered a good deal of interesting conjecture:
+
+     There is (given in _Cottle_) an inconceivably sarcastic,
+     galling, and admirable letter from Lamb to Coleridge,
+     regarding which I never could learn how the deuce their
+     friendship recovered from it. Cottle says the only reason he
+     could ever trace for its being written lay in the three
+     parodied sonnets (one being _The House that Jack Built_)
+     which Coleridge published as a skit on the joint volume
+     brought out by himself, Lamb, and Lloyd. The whole thing was
+     always a mystery to me. But I have thought that the passage
+     on division between friends was not improbably written by
+     Coleridge on this occasion. Curiously enough (if so) Lamb,
+     who is said to have objected greatly to the idea of a second
+     part of _Christabel_, thought (on seeing it) that the
+     mistake was redeemed by this very passage. He _may_ have
+     traced its meaning, though, of course, its beauty alone was
+     enough to make him say so.
+
+The three satirical sonnets which Rossetti refers to appear not only in
+_Cottle_ but in a note to the _Biographia Literaria_ They were published
+first under a fictitious name in _he Monthly Magazine_ They must be
+understood as almost wholly satirical of three distinct facets of
+Coleridge's own manner, for even the sonnet in which occur the words
+
+     Eve saddens into night, {*}
+
+has its counterpart in _The Songs of the Pixies_--
+
+     Hence! thou lingerer, light!
+     Eve saddens into night,
+
+and nearly all the phrases satirised are borrowed from Coleridge's
+own poetry, not from that of Lamb or Lloyd. Nevertheless, Cottle was
+doubtless right as to the fact that Lamb took offence at Coleridge's
+conduct on this account, and Rossetti almost certainly made a good shot
+at the truth when he attributed to the rupture thereupon ensuing the
+passage on severed friendship. The sonnet on _The House that Jack Built_
+is the finest of the three as a satire.
+
+     * So in the Biographia Literaria; in Cottle, "Eve darkens
+     into night."
+
+Indeed, the figure used therein as an equipoise to "the hindward charms"
+satirises perfectly the style of writing characterised by inflated
+thought and imagery. It may be doubted if there exists anything more
+comical; but each of the companion sonnets is good in its way. The
+egotism, which was a constant reproach urged by _The Edinburgh_ critics
+and by the "Cockney Poets" against the poets of the Lake School, is
+splendidly hit off in the first sonnet; the low and creeping meanness,
+or say, simpleness, as contrasted with simplicity, of thought and
+expression, which was stealing into Wordsworth's work at that period,
+is equally cleverly ridiculed in the second sonnet. In reproducing the
+sonnets, Coleridge claims only to have satirised types. As to Lamb's
+letter, it is, indeed, hard to realise the fact that the "gentle-hearted
+Charles," as Coleridge himself named him, could write a galling letter
+to the "inspired charity-boy," for whom at an early period, and again at
+the end, he had so profound a reverence. Every word is an outrage, and
+every syllable must have hit Coleridge terribly. I called Rossetti's
+attention to the surprising circumstance that in a letter written
+immediately after the date of the one in question, Loyd tells Cottle
+that he has never known Lamb (who is at the moment staying with him) so
+happy before as _just then!_ There can hardly be a doubt, however,
+that Rossetti's conjecture is a just one as to the origin of the great
+passage in the second part of _Christabel_. Touching that passage I
+called his attention to an imperfection that I must have perceived, or
+thought I perceived long before,--an imperfection of craftsmanship that
+had taken away something of my absolute enjoyment of its many beauties.
+The passage ends--
+
+     They parted, ne'er to meet again!
+     But never either found another
+     To free the hollow heart from paining--
+     They stood aloof, the scars remaining,
+     Like cliffs which had been rent asunder;
+     A dreary sea now flows between,
+     But neither heat, nor frost, nor thunder,
+     Shall wholly do away, I ween,
+     The marks of that which once hath been.
+
+This is, it is needless to say, in almost every respect, finely felt,
+but the words italicised appeared to display some insufficiency of
+poetic vision. First, nothing but an earthquake would (speaking within
+limits of human experience) unite the two sides of a ravine; and though
+_frost_ might bring them together temporarily, _heat and thunder_ must
+be powerless to make or to unmake the _marks_ that showed the cliffs to
+have once been one, and to have been violently torn apart. Next, _heat_
+(supposing _frost_ to be the root-conception) was obviously used merely
+as a balancing phrase, and _thunder_ simply as the inevitable rhyme to
+_asunder_. I have not seen this matter alluded to, though it may have
+been mentioned, and it is certainly not important enough to make any
+serious deduction from the pleasure afforded by a passage that is in
+other respects so rich in beauty as to be able to endure such modest
+discounting. Rossetti replied:
+
+     Your geological strictures on Coleridge's "friendship"
+     passage are but too just, and I believe quite new. But I
+     would fain think that this is "to consider too nicely." I am
+     certainly willing to bear the obloquy of never having been
+     struck by what is nevertheless obvious enough. {*}... Lamb's
+     letter _is_ a teazer. The three sonnets in _The Monthly
+     Magazine_ were signed "Nehemiah Higginbotham," and were
+     meant to banter good-humouredly the joint vol. issued by
+     Coleridge, Lamb, and Lloyd,--C. himself being, of course,
+     the most obviously ridiculed. I fancy you have really hit
+     the mark as regards Coleridge's epigram and Sir Vinegar
+     Sponge. He might have been worth two shillings after all....
+     _I_ also remember noting Lloyd's assertion of Lamb's
+     exceptional happiness just after that letter. It is a
+     puzzling affair. However C. and Lamb got over it (for I
+     certainly believe they were friends later in life) no one
+     seems to have recorded. The second vol. of Cottle, after the
+     raciness of the first, is very disappointing.
+
+     * In a note on this passage, Canon Dixon writes: What is
+     meant is that in cliffs, actual cliffs, the action of these
+     agents, heat, cold, thunder even, might have an obliterating
+     power; but in the severance of friendship, there is nothing
+     (heat of nature, frost of time, thunder of accident or
+     surprise) that can wholly have the like effect.
+
+On one occasion Rossetti wrote, saying he had written a sonnet on
+Coleridge, and I was curious to learn what note he struck in dealing
+with so complex a subject. The keynote of a man's genius or character
+should be struck in a poetic address to him, just as the expressional
+individuality of a man's features (freed of the modifying or emphasising
+effects of passing fashions of dress), should be reproduced in his
+portrait; but Coleridge's mind had so many sides to it, and his
+character had such varied aspects--from keen and beautiful sensibility
+to every form of suffering, to almost utter disregard of the calls of
+domestic duty--that it seemed difficult to think what kind of idea,
+consistent with the unity of the sonnet and its simplicity of scheme,
+would call up a picture of the entire man. It goes against the grain to
+hint, adoring the man as we must, that Coleridge's personal character
+was anything less than one of untarnished purity, and certainly the
+persons chiefly concerned in the alleged neglect, Southey and his own
+family, have never joined in the strictures commonly levelled against
+him: but whatever Coleridge's personal ego may have been, his creative
+ego was assuredly not single in kind or aim. He did some noble things
+late in life (instance the passage on "Youth and Age," and that on "Work
+without Hope"), but his poetic genius seemed to desert him when Kant
+took possession of him as a gigantic windmill to do battle with, and
+it is now hard to say which was the deeper thing in him: the poetry to
+which he devoted the sunniest years of his young life, or the philosophy
+which he firmly believed it to be the main business of his later life
+to expound. In any discussion of the relative claims of these two to
+the gratitude of the ages that follow, I found Rossetti frankly took one
+side, and constantly said that the few unequal poems Coleridge had left
+us, were a legacy more stimulating, solacing, and enduring, than his
+philosophy could have been, even if he had perfected that attempt of his
+to reconcile all learning and revelation, and if, when perfected, the
+whole effort had not proved to be a work of supererogation. I doubt if
+Rossetti quite knew what was meant by Coleridge's "system," as it was
+so frequently called, and I know that he could not be induced by any
+eulogiums to do so much as look at the _Biographia Literaria_, though
+once he listened whilst I read a chapter from it. He had certainly
+little love of the German elements in Coleridge's later intellectual
+life, and hence it is small matter for surprise that in his sonnet
+he chose for treatment the more poetic side of Coleridge's genius.
+Nevertheless, I think it remains an open question whether the philosophy
+of the author of _The Ancient Mariner_ was more influenced by his
+poetry, or his poetry by his philosophy; for the philosophy is always
+tinged by the mysticism of his poetry, and his poetry is always
+adumbrated by the disposition, which afterwards become paramount, to
+dig beneath the surface for problems of life and character, and for
+"suggestions of the final mystery of existence." I have heard Rossetti
+say that what came most of all uppermost in Coleridge, was his wonderful
+intuitive knowledge and love of the sea, whose billowy roll, and break,
+and sibilation, seemed echoed in the very mechanism of his verse. Sleep,
+too, Rossetti thought, had given up to Coleridge her utmost secrets; and
+perhaps it was partly due to his own sad experience of the dread curse
+of insomnia, as well as to keen susceptibility to poetic beauty, that
+tears so frequently filled his eyes, and sobs rose to his throat when he
+recited the lines beginning
+
+     O sleep! it is a gentle thing--
+
+affirming, meantime, that nothing so simple and touching had ever been
+written on the subject. As to the sonnet, he wrote:
+
+     About Coleridge (whom I only view as a poet, his other
+     aspects being to my apprehension mere bogies) I conceive the
+     leading point about his work is its human love, and the
+     leading point about his career, the sad fact of how little
+     of it was devoted to that work. These are the points made in
+     my sonnet, and the last is such as I (alas!) can sympathise
+     with, though what has excluded more poetry with me
+     (_mountains_ of it I don't want to heap) has chiefly been
+     livelihood necessity. I 'll copy the sonnet on opposite
+     page, only I 'd rather you kept it to yourself. _Five_ years
+     of _good_ poetry is too long a tether to give his Muse, I
+     know.
+
+     His Soul fared forth (as from the deep home-grove
+          The father Songster plies the hour-long quest)
+          To feed his soul-brood hungering in the nest;
+     But his warm Heart, the mother-bird above
+     Their callow fledgling progeny still hove
+          With tented roof of wings and fostering breast
+          Till the Soul fed the soul-brood. Richly blest
+     From Heaven their growth, whose food was Human Love.
+
+     Tet ah! Like desert pools that shew the stars
+          Once in long leagues--even such the scarce-snatched hours
+          Which deepening pain left to his lordliest powers:--
+     Heaven lost through spider-trammelled prison-bars!
+          Five years, from seventy saved! yet kindling skies
+          Own them, a beacon to our centuries.
+
+As a minor point I called Rossetti's attention to the fact that
+Coleridge lived to be scarcely more than sixty, and that his poetic
+career really extended over six good years; and hence the thirteenth
+line was amended to
+
+          Six years from sixty saved.
+
+I doubted if "deepening pain" could be charged with the whole burden
+of Coleridge's constitutional procrastination, and to this objection
+Rossetti replied:
+
+     Line eleven in my first reading was "deepening _sloth_;" but
+     it seemed harsh--and--damn it all! much too like the spirit
+     of Banquo!
+
+Before Coleridge, however, as to warmth of admiration, and before him
+also as to date of influence, Keats was Rossetti's favourite among
+modern English poets. Our friend never tired of writing or talking about
+Keats, and never wearied of the society of any one who could generate
+a fresh thought concerning him. But his was a robust and
+masculine admiration, having nothing in common with the effeminate
+extra-affectionateness that has of late been so much ridiculed. His
+letters now to be quoted shall speak for themselves as to the qualities
+in Keats whereon Rossetti's appreciation of him was founded: but I may
+say in general terms that it was not so much the wealth of expression
+in the author of _Endymion_ which attracted the author of _Rose Mary_
+as the perfect hold of the supernatural which is seen in _La Belle Dame
+Sans Merci_ and in the fragment of the _Eve of St. Mark_. At the time of
+our correspondence, I was engaged upon an essay on Keats, and _� propos_
+of this Rossetti wrote:
+
+     I shall take pleasure in reading your Keats article when
+     ready. He was, among all his contemporaries who established
+     their names, the one true heir of Shakspeare. Another
+     (unestablished then, but partly revived since) was Charles
+     Wells. Did you ever read his splendid dramatic poem _Joseph
+     and his Brethren?_
+
+In this connexion, as a better opportunity may not arise, I take
+occasion to tell briefly the story of the revival of Wells. The facts
+to be related were communicated to me by Rossetti in conversation years
+after the date of the letter in which this first allusion to the
+subject was made. As a boy, Rossetti's chief pleasure was to ransack
+old book-stalls, and the catalogues of the British Museum, for forgotten
+works in the bye-ways of English poetry. In this pursuit he became
+acquainted with nearly every curiosity of modern poetic literature, and
+many were the amusing stories he used to tell at that time, and in after
+life, of the titles and contents of the literary oddities he
+unearthed. If you chanced at any moment to alight upon any obscure book
+particularly curious from its pretentiousness and pomposity, from the
+audacity of its claim, or the obscurity and absurdity of its writing,
+you might be sure that Rossetti would prove familiar with it, and be
+able to recapitulate with infinite zest its salient features; but if you
+happened to drop upon ever so interesting an edition of a book (not of
+verse) which you supposed to be known to many a reader, the chances were
+at least equal that Rossetti would prove to know nothing of it but its
+name. In poring over the forgotten pages of the poetry of the beginning
+of the century, Rossetti, whilst still a boy, met with the scriptural
+drama of _Joseph and his Brethren_. He told me the title did not much
+attract him, but he resolved to glance at the contents, and with
+that swiftness of insight which throughout life distinguished him, he
+instantly perceived its great qualities. I think he said he then wrote a
+letter on the subject to one of the current literary journals, probably
+_The Literary Gazette_, and by this means came into correspondence with
+Charles Wells himself. Rather later a relative of Wells's sought out the
+young enthusiast in London, intending to solicit his aid in an attempt
+to induce a publisher to undertake a reprint, but in any endeavours to
+this end he must have failed. For many years a copy of the poem, left
+by the author's request at Rossetti's lodgings, lay there untouched,
+and meantime the growing reputation of the young painter brought
+about certain removals from Blackfriars Bridge to other chambers, and
+afterwards to the house in Cheyne Walk. In the course of these changes
+the copy got hidden away, and it was not until numerous applications for
+it had been made that it was at length ferreted forth from the chaos of
+some similar volumes huddled together in a corner of the studio. Full of
+remorse for having so long abandoned a laudable project, Rossetti
+then took up afresh the cause of the neglected poem, and enlisted
+Mr. Swinburne's interest so warmly as to prevail with him to use his
+influence to secure its publication. This failed however; but in _The
+Athen�um_ of April 8, 1876, appeared Mr. Watts's elaborate account of
+Wells and the poem and its vicissitudes, whereupon Messrs. Chatto and
+Windus offered to take the risk of publishing it, and the poem
+went forth with the noble commendatory essay of the young author of
+_Atalanta_, whose reputation was already almost at its height, though
+it lacked (doubtless from a touch of his constitutional procrastination)
+the appreciative comment of the discerning critic who first discovered
+it. To return to the Keats correspondence:
+
+     I am truly delighted to hear how young you are. In original
+     work, a man does some of his best things by your time of
+     life, though he only finds it out in a rage much later, at
+     some date when he expected to know no longer that he had
+     ever done them. Keats hardly died so much too early--not at
+     all if there had been any danger of his taking to the modern
+     habit eventually--treating material as product, and shooting
+     it all out as it comes. Of course, however, he wouldn't; he
+     was getting always choicer and simpler, and my favourite
+     piece in his works is _La Belle Dame Sans Merci_--I suppose
+     about his last. As to Shelley, it is really a mercy that he
+     has not been hatching yearly universes till now. He might, I
+     suppose; for his friend Trelawny still walks the earth
+     without great-coat, stockings, or underclothing, this
+     Christmas (1879). In criticism, matters are different, as to
+     seasons of production.... I am writing hurriedly and
+     horribly in every sense. Write on the subject again and I'll
+     try to answer better. All greetings to you.
+
+     P.S.--I think your reference to Keats new, and on a high
+     level It calls back to my mind an adaptation of his self-
+     chosen epitaph which I made in my very earliest days of
+     boyish rhyming, when I was rather proud to be as cockney as
+     Keats _could_ be. Here it is,--
+
+          Through one, years since damned and forgot
+               Who stabbed backs by the Quarter,
+          Here lieth one who, while Time's stream
+               Still runs, as God hath taught her,
+          Bearing man's fame to men, hath writ
+               His name upon that water.
+
+     Well, the rhyme is not so bad as Keats's
+
+                     Ear
+          Of Goddess of Ther�a!--
+
+     nor (tell it not in Gath!) as---
+
+          I wove a crown before her
+          For her I love so dearly,
+          A garland for Lenora!
+
+     Is it possible the laurel crown should now hide a venerated
+     and impeccable ear which was once the ear of a cockney?
+
+This letter was written in 1879, and the opening clauses of it were no
+doubt penned under the impression, then strong on Rossetti's mind, that
+his first volume of poems would prove to be his only one; but when,
+within two years afterwards he completed _Rose Mary_, and wrote _The
+King's Tragedy_ and _The White Ship_, this accession of material
+dissipated the notion that a man does much his best work before
+twenty-five. It can hardly escape the reader that though Rossetti's
+earlier volume displayed a surprising maturity, the subsequent one
+exhibited as a whole infinitely more power and feeling, range of
+sympathy, and knowledge of life. The poet's dramatic instinct developed
+enormously in the interval between the periods of the two books, and,
+being conscious of this, Rossetti used to say in his later years that he
+would never again write poems as from his own person.
+
+     You say an excellent thing [he writes] when you ask, "Where
+     can we look for more poetry per page than Keats furnishes?"
+     It is strange that there is not yet one complete edition of
+     him. {*} No doubt the desideratum (so far as care and
+     exhaustiveness go), will be supplied when
+
+     Forman's edition appears. He is a good appreciator too, as I
+     have reason to say. You will think it strange that I have
+     not seen the Keats love-letters, but I mean to do so.
+     However, I am told they add nothing to one's idea of his
+     epistolary powers.... I hear sometimes from Buxton Forman,
+     and was sending him the other day an extract (from a book
+     called _The Unseen World_) which doubtless bears on the
+     superstition which Keats intended to develope in his lovely
+     _Eve of St. Mark_--a fragment which seems to me to rank with
+     _La Belle Dame Sans Merci_, as a clear advance in direct
+     simplicity.... You ought to have my recent Keats sonnet, so
+     I send it. Your own plan, for one on the same subject, seems
+     to me most beautiful. Do it at once. You will see that mine
+     is again concerned with the epitaph, and perhaps my reviving
+     the latter in writing you was the cause of the sonnet.
+
+     * Rossetti afterwards admitted in conversation that the
+     Aldine Edition seemed complete, though I think he did not
+     approve of the chronological arrangement therein adopted; at
+     least he thought that arrangement had many serious
+     disadvantages.
+
+Rossetti formed a very different opinion of Keats's love-letters, when,
+a year later, he came to read them. At first he shared the general view
+that letters so _intimes_ should never have been made public. Afterwards
+the book had irresistible charms for him, from the first page whereon
+his old friend, Mr. Bell Scott, has vigorously etched Severn's drawing
+of the once redundant locks of rich hair, dank and matted over
+the forehead cold with the death-dew, down to the last line of the
+letterpress. He thought Mr. Forman's work admirably done, and as for the
+letters themselves, he believed they placed Keats indisputably among
+the highest masters of English epistolary style. He considered that all
+Keats's letters proved him to be no weakling, and that whatever walk
+he had chosen he must have been a master. He seemed particularly struck
+with the apparently intuitive perception of Shakspeare's subtlest
+meanings, which certain of the letters display. In a note he said:
+
+     Forman gave me a copy of Keats's letters to Fanny Brawne.
+     The silhouette given of the lady is sadly disenchanting, and
+     may be the strongest proof existing of how much a man may
+     know about abstract Beauty without having an artist's eye
+     for the outside of it.
+
+The Keats sonnet, as first shown to me, ran as follows:
+
+     The weltering London ways where children weep,--
+        Where girls whom none call maidens laugh, where gain,
+        Hurrying men's steps, is yet by loss o'erta'en:--
+     The bright Castalian brink and Latinos' steep:--
+     Such were his paths, till deeper and more deep,
+        He trod the sands of Lethe; and long pain,
+        Weary with labour spurned and love found vain,
+     In dead Rome's sheltering shadow wrapped his sleep.
+
+     O pang-dowered Poet, whose reverberant lips
+     And heart-strung lyre awoke the moon's eclipse,--
+        Thou whom the daisies glory in growing o'er,--
+     Their fragrance clings around thy name, not writ,
+     But rumour'd in water, while the fame of it
+        Along Time's flood goes echoing evermore.
+
+I need hardly say that this sonnet seemed to me extremely noble in
+sentiment, and in music a glorious volume of sound. I felt, however,
+that it would be urged against it that it did not strike the keynote of
+the genius of Keats; that it would be said that in all the particulars
+in which Rossetti had truthfully and pathetically described London,
+Keats was in rather than of it; and that it would be affirmed that Keats
+lived in a fairy world of his own inventing, caring little for the storm
+and stress of London life. On the other hand, I knew it could be replied
+that Keats was not indifferent to the misery of city life; that it bore
+heavily upon him; that it came out powerfully and very sadly in his _Ode
+to the Nightingale_, and that it may have been from sheer torture in
+the contemplation of it that he fled away to a poetic world of his own
+creating. Moreover, Rossetti's sonnet touched the life, rather than
+the genius, of Keats, and of this it struck the keynote in the opening
+lines. I ventured to think that the second and third lines wanted a
+little clarifying in the relation in which they stood. They seemed to
+be a sudden focussing of the laughter and weeping previously mentioned,
+rather than, what they were meant to be, a natural and necessary
+equipoise showing the inner life of Keats as contrasted with his outer
+life. To such an objection as this, Rossetti said:
+
+     I am rather aghast for my own lucidity when I read what you
+     say as to the first quatrain of my Keats sonnet. However, I
+     always take these misconceptions as warnings to the Muse,
+     and may probably alter the opening as below:
+
+          The weltering London ways where children weep
+          And girls whom none call maidens laugh,--strange road,
+          Miring his outward steps who inly trode
+          The bright Castalian brink and Latinos' steep:--
+          Even such his life's cross-paths: till deathly deep
+          He toiled through sands of Lethe, etc.
+          I 'll say more anent Keats anon.
+
+About the period of this portion of the correspondence (1880) I was
+engaged reading up old periodicals dating from 1816 to 1822. My purpose
+was to get at first-hand all available data relative to the life of
+Keats. I thought I met with a good deal of fresh material, and as the
+result of my reading I believed myself able to correct a few errors
+as to facts into which previous writers on the subject had fallen. Two
+things at least I realised--first, that Keats's poetic gift developed
+very rapidly, more rapidly perhaps than that of Shelley; and, next, that
+Keats received vastly more attention and appreciation in his day than is
+commonly supposed. I found it was quite a blunder to say that the first
+volume of miscellaneous poems fell flat. Lord Houghton says in error
+that the book did not so much as seem to signal the advent of a new
+Cockney poet! It is a fact, however, that this very book, in conjunction
+with one of Shelley's and one of Hunt's, all published 1816-17, gave
+rise to the name "The Cockney School of Poets," which was invented by
+the writer signing "Z." in _Blackwood_ in the early part of 1818. Nor
+had Keats to wait for the publication of the volume before attaining
+to some poetic distinction. At the close of 1816, an article, under
+the head of "Young Poets," appeared in _The Examiner_, and in this
+both Shelley and Keats were dealt with. Then _The Quarterly_ contained
+allusions to him, though not by name, in reviews of Leigh Hunt's work,
+and _Blackwood_ mentioned him very frequently in all sorts of places as
+"Johnny Keats"--all this (or much of it) before he published anything
+except occasional sonnets and other fugitive poems in _The Examiner_ and
+elsewhere. And then when _Endymion_ appeared it was abundantly reviewed.
+_The Edinburgh_ reviewers had nothing on it (the book cannot have been
+sent to them, for in 1820 they say they have only just met with it),
+and I could not find anything in the way of _original_ criticism in
+_The Examiner_; but many provincial papers (in Manchester, Exeter, and
+elsewhere) and some metropolitan papers retorted on _The Quarterly_. All
+this, however, does not disturb the impression which (Lord Houghton and
+Mr. W. M. Rossetti notwithstanding) I have been from the first compelled
+to entertain, namely, that "labour spurned" did more than all else to
+kill Keats _in 1821_.
+
+Most men who rightly know the workings of their own minds will agree
+that an adverse criticism rankles longer than a flattering notice
+soothes; and though it be shown that Keats in 1820 was comparatively
+indifferent to the praise of _The Edinburgh_, it cannot follow that in
+1818 he must have been superior to the blame of _The Quarterly_. It is
+difficult to see why a man may not be keenly sensitive to what the world
+says about him, and yet retain all proper manliness as a part of his
+literary character. Surely it was from the mistaken impression that
+this could not be, and that an admission of extreme sensitiveness to
+criticism exposed Keats to a charge of effeminacy that Lord Houghton
+attempted to prove, against the evidence of all immediate friends,
+against the publisher's note to _Hyperion_, against the | poet's
+self-chosen epitaph, and against all but one or two of the most
+self-contained of his letters, that the soul of Keats was so far from
+being "snuffed out by an article," that it was more than ordinarily
+impervious to hostile comment, even when it came in the shape of
+rancorous abuse. In all discussion of the effects produced upon Keats
+by the reviews in _Blackwood and The Quarterly_, let it be remembered,
+first, that having wellnigh exhausted his small patrimony, Keats was
+to be dependent upon literature for his future subsistence; next, that
+Leigh Hunt attempted no defence of Keats when the bread was being taken
+out of his mouth, and that Keats felt this neglect and remarked upon
+it in a letter in which he further cast some doubt upon the purity of
+Hunt's friendship. Hunt, after Keats's death, said in reference to this:
+"Had he but given me the hint!" The _hint_, forsooth! Moreover, I can
+find no sort of allusion in _The Examiner_ for 1821, to the death of
+Keats. I told Rossetti that by the reading of the periodicals of the
+time, I formed a poor opinion of Hunt. Previously I was willing to
+believe in his unswerving loyalty to the much greater men who were his
+friends, but even that poor confidence in him must perforce be shaken
+when one finds him silent at a moment when Keats most needs his voice,
+and abusive when Coleridge is a common subject of ridicule. It was
+all very well for Hunt to glorify himself in the borrowed splendour of
+Keats's established fame when the poet was twenty years dead, and
+to make much of his intimacy with Coleridge after the homage of two
+generations had been offered him, but I know of no instance (unless in
+the case of Shelley) in which Hunt stood by his friends in the winter
+of their lives, and gave them that journalistic support which was, poor
+man, the only thing he ever had to give, whatever he might take. I have,
+however, heard Mr. H. A. Bright (one of Hawthorne's intimate friends in
+England) say that no man here impressed the American romancer so much as
+Hunt for good qualities, both of heart and head. But what I have stated
+above, I believe to be facts; and I have gathered them at first-hand,
+and by the light of them I do not hesitate to say that there is no
+reason to believe that it was Keats's illness alone that caused him to
+regard Hunt's friendship with suspicion. It is true, however, that when
+one reads Hunt's letter to Severn at Borne, one feels that he must be
+forgiven. On this pregnant subject Rossetti wrote:
+
+     Thanks for yours received to-day, and for all you say with
+     so much more kind solicitousness than the matter deserved,
+     about the opening of the Keats sonnet. I have now realized
+     that the new form is a gain in every way; and am therefore
+     glad that, though arising in accident, I was led to make the
+     change.... All you say of Keats shows that you have been
+     reading up the subject with good results. I fancy it would
+     hardly be desirable to add the sonnets you speak of (as
+     being worthless) at this date, though they might be valuable
+     for quotation as to the course of his mental and physical
+     state. I do not myself think that any poems now included
+     should be removed, but the reckless and tasteless plan of
+     the gatherings hitherto (in which the _Nightingale_ and other
+     such masterpieces are jostled indiscriminately, with such
+     wretched juvenile trash as _Lines to some Ladies on
+     receiving a Shelly etc_), should of course be amended, and
+     the rubbish (of which there is a fair quantity), removed to
+     a "Juvenile" or other such section. It is a curious fact
+     that among a poet's early writings, some will really be
+     juvenile in this sense, while others, written at the same
+     time, will perhaps take rank at last with his best efforts.
+     This, however, was not substantially the case with Keats.
+
+     As to Leigh Hunt's friendship for Keats, I think the points
+     you mention look equivocal; but Hunt was a many-laboured and
+     much belaboured man, and as much allowance as may be made on
+     this score is perhaps due to him--no more than that much.
+     His own powers stand high in various ways--poetically higher
+     perhaps than is I at present admitted, despite his
+     detestable flutter and airiness for the most part. But
+     assuredly by no means could he have stood so high in the
+     long-run, as by a loud and earnest defence of Keats. Perhaps
+     the best excuse for him is the remaining possibility of an
+     idea on his part, that any defence coming from one who had
+     himself so many powerful enemies might seem to Keats
+     rather to! damage than improve his position.
+
+     I have this minute (at last) read the first instalment of
+     your Keats paper, and return it.... One of the most marked
+     points in the early recognition of Keats's claims, as
+     compared with the recognition given to other poets, is the
+     fact that he was the only one who secured almost at once a
+     _great_ poet as a close and obvious imitator--viz., Hood,
+     whose first volume is more identical with Keats's work than
+     could be said of any other similar parallel. You quote some
+     of Keats's sayings. One of the most characteristic I think
+     is in a letter to Haydon:--
+
+     "I value more the privilege of seeing great things in
+     loneliness, than the fame of a prophet." I had not in mind
+     the quotations you give from Keats as bearing on the poetic
+     (or prophetic) mission of "doing good." I must say that I
+     should not have thought a longer career thrown away upon him
+     (as you intimate) if he had continued to the age of anything
+     only to give joy. Nor would he ever have done any "good" at
+     all. Shelley did good, and perhaps some harm with it.
+     Keats's joy was after all a flawless gift.
+
+     Keats wrote to Shelley:--"You, I am sure, will forgive me
+     for sincerely remarking that you might curb your magnanimity
+     and be more of an artist, and load every rift of your
+     subject with ore." Cheeky!--but not so much amiss. Poetry,
+     and no prophecy however, must come of that mood,--and no
+     pulpit would have held Keats's wings,--the body and mind
+     together were not heavy enough for a counterweight.... Did
+     you ever meet with
+
+<center>ENDIMION
+
+AN EXCELLENT FANCY FIRST COMPOSED IN FRENCH
+
+By Monsieur GOMBAULD
+
+AND NOW ELEGANTLY INTERPRETED
+
+By RICHARD HURST, Gentleman
+
+1639.
+
+?</center>
+
+     It has very finely engraved plates of the late Flemish type.
+     There is a poem of Vaughan's on Gombauld's _Endimion_, which
+     might make one think it more fascinating than it really is.
+     Though rather prolix, however, it has attractions as a
+     somewhat devious romantic treatment of the subject. The
+     little book is one of the first I remember in this world,
+     and I used to dip into it again and again as a child, but
+     never yet read it through. I still possess it. I dare say it
+     is not easily met with, and should suppose Keats had
+     probably never seen it. If he had, he might really have
+     taken a hint or two for his scheme, which is hardly so clear
+     even as Gombauld's, though its endless digressions teem with
+     beauty.... I do not think you would benefit at all by seeing
+     Gombauld's _Endimion_. Vaughan's poem on it might be worth
+     quoting as showing what attention the subject had received
+     before Keats. I have the poem in Gilfillan's _Less-Known
+     Poets_.
+
+Rossetti took a great interest in the fund started for the relief of
+Mme. de Llanos, Keats's sister, whose circumstances were seriously
+reduced. He wrote:
+
+     By the bye, I don't know whether the subscription for
+     Keats's old and only surviving sister (Madme de Llanos) has
+     been at all ventilated in Liverpool. It flags sorely. Do you
+     think there would be any chance in your neighbourhood? If
+     so, prospectuses, etc., could be sent.
+
+I did not view the prospect of subscriptions as very hopeful, and so
+conceived the idea of a lecture in the interests of the fund. On this
+project, Rossetti wrote:
+
+     I enclose prospectuses as to the Keats subscription. I may
+     say that I did not know the list would accompany them--still
+     less that contributions would be so low generally as to
+     leave me near the head of the list--an unenviable sort of
+     parade.... My own opinion about the lecture question is
+     this. You know best whether such a lecture could be turned
+     to the purposes of your Keats article (now in progress), or
+     rather be so much deduction from the freshness of its
+     resources: and this should be the _absolute_ test of its
+     being done or not done.... I think, if it can be done
+     without impoverishing your materials, the method of getting
+     Lord Houghton to preside and so raising as much from it as
+     possible is doubtless the right one. Of course I view it as
+     far more hopeful than mere distribution of any number of
+     prospectuses.... Even �25 would be a great contribution to
+     the fund.
+
+The lecture project was not found feasible, and hence it was abandoned.
+Meantime the kindness of friends enabled me to add to the list a good
+number of subscriptions, but feeling scarcely satisfied with any such
+success as I might be likely to have in that direction, I opened, by
+the help of a friend, a correspondence with Lord Houghton with a view
+to inducing him to apply for a pension for the lady. It then transpired
+that Lord Houghton had already applied to Lord Beaconsfield for a
+pension for Mme. Llanos, and would doubtless have got it, had not Mr.
+Buxton Forman applied for a grant from the Royal Bounty, which was
+easier to give. I told Rossetti of this fact and he said:
+
+     I am not surprised about Lord H., and feel sure it is a pity
+     he was not left to try Beaconsfield, but I judge the
+     projectors on the other side knew nothing of his intentions.
+     However, _I_ was in no way a projector.
+
+In the end Lord Houghton repeated to Mr. Gladstone the application he
+had made to Lord Beaconsfield, and succeeded.
+
+Rossetti must have been among the earliest admirers of Keats. I remarked
+on one occasion that it was very natural that Lord Houghton should
+consider himself in a sense the first among men now living to champion
+the poet and establish his name, and Rossetti admitted that this was so,
+and was ungrudging in his tribute to Lord Houghton's services towards
+the better appreciation of Keats; but he contended, nevertheless,
+that he had himself been one of the first writers of the generation
+succeeding the poet's own to admire and uphold him, and that this was
+at a time when it made demand of some courage to class him among the
+immortals, when an original edition of any of his books could be bought
+for sixpence on a bookstall, and when only Leigh Hunt, Cowden Clarke,
+Hood, Benjamin Haydon, and perhaps a few others, were still living of
+those who recognised his great gifts.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+Rossetti's primary interest in Chatterton dates back to an early period,
+as I find by the date, 1848, in the copy he possessed of the poet's
+works. But throughout a long interval he neglected Chatterton, and
+it was not until his friend Theodore Watts, who had made Chatterton
+a special study, had undertaken to select from and write upon him in
+Ward's _English Poets_, that he revived his old acquaintance. Whatever
+Rossetti did he did thoroughly, and hence he became as intimate perhaps
+with the Rowley antiques as any other man had ever been. His letters
+written during the course of his Chatterton researches must, I think,
+prove extremely interesting. He says:
+
+     Glancing at your Keats MS., I notice (in a series of
+     parallels) the names of Marlowe and Savage; but not the less
+     "marvellous" than absolutely miraculous Chatterton. Are you
+     up in his work? He is in the very first rank! Theod. Watts
+     is "doing him" for the new selection of poets by Arnold and
+     Ward, and I have contributed a sonnet to Watts's article....
+     I assure you Chatterton's name _must_ come in somewhere in
+     the parallel passage. He was as great as any English poet
+     whatever, and might absolutely, had he lived, have proved
+     the only man in England's theatre of imagination who could
+     have bandied parts with Shakspeare. The best way of getting
+     at him is in Skeat's Aldine edition (G. Bell and Co., 1875).
+     Read him carefully, and you will find his acknowledged work
+     essentially as powerful as his antiques, though less evenly
+     successful--the Rowley work having been produced in Bristol
+     leisure, however indigent, and the modern poetry in the very
+     fangs of London struggle. Strong derivative points are to be
+     found in Keats and Coleridge from the study of Chatterton. I
+     feel much inclined to send the sonnet (on Chatterton) as you
+     wish, but really think it is better not to ventilate these
+     things till in print. I have since written one on Blake. Not
+     to know Chatterton is to be ignorant of the _true_ day-
+     spring of modern romantic poetry.... I believe the 3d vol.
+     of Ward's _Selections of English Poetry_, for which Watts is
+     selecting from Chatterton, will soon be out,--but these
+     excerpts are very brief, as are the notices. The rendering
+     from the Rowley antique will be much better than anything
+     formerly done. Skeat is a thorough philologist, but no hand
+     at all when substitution becomes unavoidable in the text....
+     Read the _Ballad of Charity, the Eclogues, the songs in
+     �lla_, as a first taste. Among the modern poems _Narva and
+     Mared_, and the other _African Eclogues_. These are alone in
+     that section _poetry absolute_, and though they are very
+     unequal, it has been most truly said by Malone that to throw
+     the _African Eclogues_ into the Rowley dialect would be at
+     once a satisfactory key to the question whether Chatterton
+     showed in his own person the same powers as in the person of
+     Rowley. Among the satirical and light modern pieces there
+     are many of a first-. rate order, though generally unequal.
+     Perfect specimens, however, are _The Revenge, a Burletta,
+     Skeat, vol i; Verses to a Lady, p. 84; Journal Sixth, p. 33;
+     The Prophecy, p. 193; and opening of Fragment, p. 132._ I
+     would advise you to consult the original text.
+
+Mr. Watts, it seems, with all his admiration of Chatterton, finding that
+he could not go to Rossetti's length in comparing him with Shakspeare,
+did not in the result consider the sonnet on Chatterton referred to in
+the foregoing letter, and given below, suitable to be embodied in his
+essay:
+
+     With Shakspeare's manhood at a boy's wild heart,--
+        Through Hamlet's doubt to Shakspeare near allied,
+        And kin to Milton through his Satan's pride,--
+     At Death's sole door he stooped, and craved a dart;
+     And to the dear new bower of England's art,--
+        Even to that shrine Time else had deified,
+        The unuttered heart that soared against his side,--
+     Drove the fell point, and smote life's seals apart.
+
+     Thy nested home-loves, noble Chatterton,
+        The angel-trodden stair thy soul could trace
+        Up Redcliffe's spire; and in the world's armed space
+     Thy gallant sword-play:--these to many an one
+     Are sweet for ever; as thy grave unknown,
+        And love-dream of thine unrecorded face.
+
+Some mention was made in this connection of Rossetti's young connection,
+Oliver Madox Brown, who wrote _Gabriel Denver_ (otherwise _The Black
+Swan_) at seventeen years of age. I mentioned the indiscreet remark of
+a friend who said that Oliver had enough genius to stock a good few
+Chattertons, and thereupon Rossetti sent me the following outburst:
+
+     You must take care to be on the right tack about Chatterton.
+     I am very glad to find the gifted Oliver M. B. already an
+     embryo classic, as I always said he would be; but those who
+     compare net results in such cases as his and Chatterton's
+     cannot know what criticism means. The nett results of
+     advancing epochs, however permanent on accumulated
+     foundation-work, are the poorest of all tests as to relative
+     values. Oliver was the product of the most teeming hot-beds
+     of art and literature, and even of compulsory addiction to
+     the art of painting, in which nevertheless he was rapidly
+     becoming as much a proficient as in literature. What he
+     would have been if, like the ardent and heroic Chatterton,
+     he had had to fight a single-handed battle for art and bread
+     together against merciless mediocrity in high places,--what
+     he would _then_ have become, I cannot in the least
+     calculate; but we know what Chatterton became. Moreover, C.
+     at his death, was two years younger than Oliver--a whole
+     lifetime of advancement at that age frequently--indeed
+     always I believe in leading cases. There are few indeed whom
+     the facile enthusiasm for contemporary models does not
+     deaden to the truly balanced claims of successful efforts in
+     art. However, look at Watts's remodelled extracts when the
+     vol comes out, and also at what he says in detail as to
+     Chatterton, Coleridge, and Keats.
+
+Of course Rossetti was right in what he said of comparative criticism
+when brought to bear in such cases as those of Chatterton and Oliver
+Madox Brown. Net results are certainly the poorest tests of relative
+values where the work done belongs to periods of development. We cannot,
+however, see or know any man except through and in his work, and net
+results must usually be accepted as the only concrete foundation for
+judging of the quality of his genius. Such judgment will always be
+influenced, nevertheless, by considerations such as Rossetti mentions.
+Touching Chatterton's development, it were hardly rash to say that it
+appears incredible that the _African Eclogues_ should have been written
+by a boy of seventeen, and, in judging of their place in poetry, one is
+apt to be influenced by one's first feeling of amazement. Is it possible
+that the Rowley poems may owe much of their present distinction to the
+early astonishment that a boy should have written them, albeit they have
+great intrinsic excellencies such as may insure them a high place when
+the romance, intertwined with their history, has been long forgotten?
+But Chatterton is more talked of than read, and this has been so from
+the first. The antiques are all but unknown; certain of the acknowledged
+poems are remembered, and regarded as fervid and vigorous, and many of
+the lesser pieces are thought slight, weak, and valueless. People do not
+measure the poorer things in Chatterton with his time and opportunities,
+or they would see only amazing strength and knowledge of the world in
+all he did. Those lesser pieces were many of them dashed off to answer
+the calls of necessity, to flatter the egotism of a troublesome friend,
+or to wile away a moment of vacancy. Certainly they must not be set
+against his best efforts. As for Chatterton's life, the tragedy of it
+is perhaps the most moving example of what Coleridge might have
+termed the material pathetic. Pathetic, however, as his life was, and
+marvellous as was his genius, I miss in him the note of personal purity
+and majesty of character. I told Rossetti that, in my view, Chatterton
+lacked sincerity, and on this point he wrote:
+
+     I must protest finally about Chatterton, that he lacks
+     nothing because lacking the gradual growth of the emotional
+     in literature which becomes evident in Keats--still less its
+     excess, which would of course have been pruned, in Oliver.
+     The finest of the Rowley poems--_Eclogues, Ballad of
+     Charity, etc_., rank absolutely with the finest poetry in
+     the language, and gain (not lose) by moderation. As to what
+     you say of C.'s want of political sincerity (for I cannot
+     see to what other want you can allude), surely a boy up to
+     eighteen may be pardoned for exercising his faculty if he
+     happens to be the one among millions who can use grown men
+     as his toys. He was an absolute and untarnished hero, but
+     for that reckless defying vaunt. Certainly that most
+     vigorous passage commencing--
+
+          "Interest, thou universal God of men," etc.
+
+     reads startlingly, and comes in a questionable shape. What
+     is the answer to its enigmatical aspect? Why, that he
+     _meant_ it, and that all would mean it at his age, who had
+     his power, his daring, and his hunger. Still it does,
+     perhaps, make one doubt whether his early death were well or
+     ill for him. In the matter of Oliver (whom no one
+     appreciates more than I do), remember that it was impossible
+     to have more opportunities than _he_ had, or on the other
+     side _fewer_ than Chatterton had. Chatterton at seventeen or
+     less said--
+
+          "Flattery's a cloak, and I will put it on."
+
+Blake (probably late in life) said--
+
+          "Innocence is a winter gown."
+
+     ... I _have_ read the Chatterton article in the review
+     mentioned. If Watts had done it, it would have been
+     immeasurably better. There seems to me, who am very well up
+     in Chatterton, no point whatever made in the article. Why
+     does no one ever even allude to the two attributed portraits
+     of Chatterton--one belonging to Sir H. Taylor, and the other
+     in the Salford Museum? Both seem to be the same person
+     clearly, and a good find for Chatterton, but not conceivably
+     done from him. Nevertheless, I _suspect_ there may be a
+     sidelong genuineness in them. Chatterton was acquainted with
+     one Alcock, a miniature painter at Bristol, to whom he
+     addressed a poem. Had A. painted C. it would be among the
+     many recorded facts; but it would be singular even if, in
+     C.'s rapid posthumous fame, A. had never been asked to make
+     a reminiscent likeness of him. Prom such likeness by the
+     miniature painter these _portraits might_ derive--both being
+     life-sized oil heads. There is a savour of Keats in them,
+     though a friend, taking up the younger-looking of the two,
+     said it reminded him of Jack Sheppard! And not such a bad
+     Chatterton-compound either! But I begin to think I have said
+     all this before.... Oliver, or "Nolly," as he was always
+     called, was a sort of spread-eagle likeness of his handsome
+     father, with a conical head like Walter Scott. I must
+     confess to you, that, in this world of books, the only one
+     of his I have read, is _Gabriel Denver_, afterwards
+     reprinted in its original and superior form as _The Black
+     Swan_, but published with the former title in his lifetime.
+
+Rossetti formed no such philosophic estimate of Chatterton's
+contribution to the romantic movement in English poetry as has been
+formulated in the essay in Ward's _Poets_. A critic, in the sense of one
+possessed of a natural gift of analysis, Rossetti assuredly! was not. No
+man's instinct for what is good in poetry was ever swifter or surer than
+that of Rossetti. You might always distrust your judgment if you
+found it at variance with his where abstract power and beauty were in
+question. Sooner or later you would inevitably find yourself gravitating
+to his view. But here Rossetti's function as a critic ended. His was
+at best only the criticism of the creator. Of the gift of ultimate
+classification he had none, and never claimed to have any, although now
+and again (as where he says that Chatterton was the day-spring of
+modern romantic poetry), he seems to give sign of a power of critical
+synthesis.
+
+Rossetti's interest in Blake, both as poet and painter, dates back to
+an early period of his life. I have heard him say that at sixteen or
+seventeen years of age he was already one of Blake's warmest admirers,
+and at the time in question, 1845, the author of the _Songs of
+Innocence_ had not many readers to uphold him. About four years later,
+Rossetti made an exceptionally lucky discovery, for he then found in
+the possession of Mr. Palmer, an attendant at the British Museum, an
+original manuscript scrap-book of Blake's, containing a great body of
+unpublished poetry and many interesting designs, as well as three or
+four remarkably effective profile sketches of the author himself. The
+Mr. Palmer who held the little book was a relative of the landscape
+painter of the same name, who was Blake's friend, and hence the
+authenticity of the manuscript was ascertainable on other grounds than
+the indisputable ones of its internal evidences. The book was offered to
+Rossetti for ten shillings, but the young enthusiast was at the time a
+student of art, and not much in the way of getting or spending even
+so inconsiderable a sum. He told me, however, that at this period his
+brother William, who was, unlike himself, engaged in some reasonably
+profitable occupation, was at all times nothing loath to advance small
+sums for the purchase of such literary or other treasures as he used
+to hunt up out of obscure corners: by his help the Blake manuscript was
+bought, and proved for years a source of infinite pleasure and profit,
+resulting, as it did, in many very important additions to Blake
+literature when Gilchrist's _Life and Works_ of that author came to be
+published. It is an interesting fact, mention of which ought not to
+be omitted, that at the sale of Rossetti's library, which took place
+a little while after his decease, the scrap-book acquired in the way I
+describe was sold for one hundred and five guineas.
+
+The sum was a large one, but the little book was undoubtedly the most
+valuable literary relic of Blake then extant. About the time when a new
+edition of Gilchrist's _Life_ was in the press, Rossetti wrote:
+
+     My evenings have been rather trenched upon lately by helping
+     Mrs. Gilchrist with a new edition of the _Life of Blake_....
+     I don't know if you go in much for him. The new edition of
+     the _Life_ will include a good number of additional letters
+     (from Blake to Hayley), and some addition (though not great)
+     to my own share in the work; as well as much important
+     carrying-on of my brother's catalogue of Blake's works. The
+     illustrations will, I trust, receive valuable additions
+     also, but publishers are apt to be cautious in such
+     expenses. I am writing late at night, to fill up a fag-end
+     of bedtime, and shall write again on this head.
+
+Rossetti's "own share" in this work consisted of the writing of the
+supplementary chapter (left by Gilchrist, with one or two unimportant
+passages merely, at the beginning), and the editing of the poems. When
+there arose, subsequently, some idea of my reviewing the book, Rossetti
+wrote me the following letter, full of disinterested solicitude:
+
+     You will be quite delighted with an essay on Blake by Jas.
+     Smetham, which occurs in vol ii.; it is a noble thing; and
+     at the stupendous design called _Plague_ (vol. i.). I have
+     extracted a passage properly belonging to the same essay,
+     which is as fine as English _can_ be, and which I am sorry
+     to perceive (I think) that Mrs. G. has omitted from the body
+     of the essay because quoted in another place. This essay is
+     no less than a masterpiece. I wrote the supplementary
+     chapter (vol. i.), except a few opening paragraphs by
+     Gilchrist,--and in it have now made some mention of Smetham,
+     an old and dear friend of mine.
+
+     You will admire Shields's paper on the wonderful series of
+     Young's _Night Thoughts_. My brother and I both helped in
+     this new edition, but I added little to what I had done
+     before. I brought forward a portentous series of passages
+     about one "Scofield" in Blake's _Jerusalem_, but did not
+     otherwise write that chapter, except as regards the
+     illustrations. However, don't mention what I have done (in
+     case you write on the subject) except so far as the indices
+     show it, and of course I don't wish to be put forward at
+     all. What I do wish is, that you should say everything that
+     can be gratifying to Mrs. G. as to her husband's work. There
+     is a plate of Blake's Cottage by young Gilchrist which is
+     truly excellent.
+
+As I have already said, Rossetti traversed the bypaths of English
+literature (particularly of English poetry) as few can ever have
+traversed them. A favourite work with him was Gilfillan's _Less-Read
+British Poets_, a copy of which had been presented by Miss Boyd. He
+says:
+
+     Did you ever read Christopher Smart's _Song to David_, the
+     only great _accomplished_ poem of the last century? The
+     accomplished ones are Chatterton's,--of course I mean
+     earlier than Blake or Coleridge, and without reckoning so
+     exceptional a genius as Burns.... You will find Smart's poem
+     a masterpiece of rich imagery, exhaustive resources, and
+     reverberant sound. It is to be met with in Gilfillan's
+     _Specimens of the Less-Read British Poets_ (3 vols. Nichol,
+     Edin., 1860)....
+
+     I remember your mentioning Gilfillan as having encouraged
+     your first efforts. He was powerful, though sometimes rather
+     "tall" as a writer, generally most just as a critic, and
+     lastly, a much better man, intellectually and morally, than
+     Aytoun, who tried to "do for" him. His notice of Swift, in
+     the volume in question, has very great force and eloquence.
+     His whole edition of the _British Poets_ is the best of any
+     to read, being such fine type and convenient bulk and weight
+     (a great thing for an arm-chair reader). Unfortunately, he
+     now and then (in the _Less-Read Poets_) cuts down the
+     extracts almost to nothing, and in some cases excises
+     objectionabilities, which is unpardonable. Much better leave
+     the whole out. Also, the edition includes the usual array of
+     nobodies--Addison, Akenside, and the whole alphabet down to
+     Zany and Zero; whereas a great many of the _less-read_ would
+     have been much-read by every worthy reader if they had only
+     been printed in full. So well printed an edition of Donne
+     (for instance) would have been a great boon; but from him
+     Gilfillan only gives (among the _less-read_) the admirable
+     _Progress of the Soul_ and some of the pregnant _Holy
+     Sonnets_. Do you know Donne? There is hardly an English poet
+     better worth a thorough knowledge, in spite of his provoking
+     conceits and occasional jagged jargon.
+
+     The following paragraph on Whitehead is valuable:
+
+     Charles Whitehead's principal poem is _The Solitary_, which
+     in its day had admirers. It perhaps most recalls Goldsmith.
+     He also wrote a supernatural poem called _Ippolito_. There
+     was a volume of his poems published about 1848, or perhaps a
+     little later, by Bentley. It is disappointing, on the whole,
+     from the decided superiority of its best points to the
+     rest.... But the novel of _Richard Savage_ is very
+     remarkable,--a real character really worked out.
+
+To aid me in certain researches I was at the time engaged in making in
+the back-numbers of almost forgotten periodicals, Rossetti wrote:
+
+     The old _Monthly Mag._ was the precursor of the _New
+     Monthly_, which started about 1830, or thereabouts I think,
+     after which the old one ailed, but went on till fatal old
+     Heraud finished it off by editing it, and fairly massacred
+     that elderly innocent. You speak, in a former letter
+     (touching the continuation of _Christabel_), of "a certain
+     European magazine." Are you aware that it was as old a thing
+     as _The Gentleman's_, and went on _ad infinitum?_ Other such
+     were the _Universal Magazine, the Scots' Magazine_--all
+     endless in extent and beginning time out of mind,--to say
+     nothing of the _Ladies' Magazine and Wits' Magazine_. Then
+     there was the _Annual Register_. All these are quarters in
+     which you might prosecute researches, and might happen to
+     find something about Keats. _The Monthly Magazine_ must have
+     commenced almost as early, I believe. I cannot help thinking
+     there was a similar _Imperial Magazine_.
+
+The following letter possesses an interest independent of its subject,
+which to me, however, is interest enough. Mr. William Watson had sent
+Rossetti a copy of a volume of poems he had just published, and
+had received a letter in acknowledgment, wherein our friend, with
+characteristic appreciativeness, said many cordial words of it:
+
+     Your young friend Watson [he said in a subsequent letter]
+     wrote me in a very modest mood for one who can do as he can
+     at his age. I think I must have hurriedly mis-expressed
+     myself in writing to him, as he seems to think I wished to
+     dissuade him from following narrative poetry. Not in the
+     least--I only wished him to try his hand at clearer dramatic
+     life. The dreamy romantic really hardly needs more than one
+     vast Morris in a literature--at any rate in a century. Not
+     that I think him derivable from Morris--he goes straight
+     back to Keats with a little modification. The narrative,
+     whether condensed or developed, is at any rate a far better
+     impersonal form to work in than declamatory harangue,
+     whether calling on the stars or the Styx. I don't know in
+     the least how Watson is faring with the critics. He must not
+     be discouraged, in any case, with his real and high gifts.
+
+The young poet, in whom Rossetti saw so much to applaud, can scarcely be
+said to have fared at all at the hands of the critics.
+
+Here is a pleasant piece of literary portraiture, as valuable from the
+peep it affords into Rossetti's own character as from the description it
+gives of the rustic poet:
+
+     The other evening I had the pleasant experience of meeting
+     one to whom I have for about two years looked with interest
+     as a poet of the native rustic kind, but often of quite a
+     superior order. I don't know if you noticed, somewhere about
+     the date referred to, in _The Athen�um_, a review of poems
+     by Joseph Skipsey. Skip-sey has exquisite--though, as in all
+     such cases (except of course Burns's) not equal--powers in
+     several directions, but his pictures of humble life are the
+     best. He is a working miner, and describes rustic loves and
+     sports, and the perils and pathos of pit-life with great
+     charm, having a quiet humour too when needed. His more
+     ambitious pieces have solid merit of feeling, but are much
+     less artistic. The other night, as I say, he came here, and
+     I found him a stalwart son of toil, and every inch a
+     gentleman. In cast of face he recalls Tennyson somewhat,
+     though more bronzed and brawned. He is as sweet and gentle
+     as a woman in manner, and recited some beautiful things of
+     his own with a special freshness to which one is quite
+     unaccustomed.
+
+Mr. Skipsey was a miner of North Shields, and in the review referred to
+much was made, in a delicate way, of his stern environments. His volume
+of lyrics is marked by the quiet humour. Rossetti speaks of, as well as
+by a rather exasperating inequality. Perhaps the best piece in it is a
+poem entitled _Thistle and Nettle_, treating with peculiar freshness of
+a country courtship. The coming together of two such entirely opposite
+natures was certainly curious, and only to be accounted for on the
+ground of Rossetti's breadth of poetic sympathy. It would be interesting
+to hear what the impressions were of such a rude son of toil upon
+meeting with one whose life must have seemed the incarnation of artistic
+luxury and indulgence. Later on I received the following:
+
+     Poor Skipsey! He has lost the friend who brought him to
+     London only the other day (T. Dixon), and who was his only
+     hold on intellectual life in his district. Dixon died
+     immediately on his return to the North, of a violent attack
+     of asthma to which he was subject. He was a rarely pure and
+     simple soul, and is doubtless gone to higher uses, though
+     few could have reached, with his small opportunities, to
+     such usefulness as he compassed here. He was Ruskin's
+     correspondent in a little book called (I think) _Work by
+     Tyne and Wear_. I got a very touching note from Skipsey on
+     the subject.
+
+From Mr. Skipsey he received a letter only a little while before his
+death, and to him he addressed one of the last epistles he penned.
+
+The following letter explains itself, and is introduced as much for
+the sake of the real humour which it displays, as because it affords an
+excellent idea of Rossetti's view of the true function of prose:
+
+     I don't like your Shakspeare article quite as well as the
+     first _Supernatural_ one, or rather I should say it does not
+     greatly add to it in my (first) view, though both might gain
+     by embodiment in one. I think there is _some_ truth in the
+     charge of metaphysical involution--the German element as I
+     should call it--and surely you are strong enough to be
+     English pure and simple. I am sure I could write 100 essays,
+     on all possible subjects (I once did project a series under
+     the title, _Essays written in the intervals of
+     Elephantiasis, Hydro-phobia, and Penal Servitude_), without
+     once experiencing the "aching void" which is filled by such
+     words as "mythopoeic," and "anthropomorphism." I do not find
+     life long enough to know in the least what they mean. They
+     are both very long and very ugly indeed--the latter only
+     suggesting to me a Vampire or Somnambulant Cannibal. (To
+     speak rationally, would not "man-evolved Godhead" be an
+     _English_ equivalent?) "Euhemeristic" also found me somewhat
+     on my beam-ends, though explanation is here given; yet I
+     felt I could do without Euhemerus; and _you_ perhaps without
+     the _humerous_. You can pardon me now; for _so_ bad a pun
+     places me at your mercy indeed. But seriously, simple
+     English in prose writing and in all narrative poetry
+     (however monumental language may become in abstract verse)
+     seems to me a treasure not to be foregone in favour of
+     German innovations. I know Coleridge went in latterly for as
+     much Germanism as his time could master; but his best genius
+     had then left him.
+
+It seems necessary to mention that I lectured in 1880, on the relation
+of politics to art, and in printing the lecture I asked Rossetti to
+accept the dedication of it, but this he declined to do in the generous
+terms I have already referred to. The letter that accompanied his
+graceful refusal is, however, so full of interesting personal matter
+that I offer it in this place, with no further explanation than that my
+essay was designed to show that just as great artists in past ages
+had participated in political struggles, so now they should not hold
+themselves aloof from controversies which immediately concern them:
+
+     I must admit, at all hazards, that my friends here consider
+     me exceptionally averse to politics; and I suppose I must
+     be, for I never read a parliamentary debate in my life! At
+     the same time I will add that, among those whose opinions I
+     most value, some think me not altogether wrong when I
+     venture to speak of the momentary momentousness and eternal
+     futility of many noisiest questions. However, you must
+     simply view me as a nonentity in any practical relation to
+     such matters. You have spoken but too generously of a sonnet
+     of mine in your lecture just received. I have written a few
+     others of the sort (which by-the-bye would not prove me a
+     Tory), but felt no vocation--perhaps no right---to print
+     them. I have always reproached myself as sorely amenable to
+     the condemnations of a very fine poem by Barberino, _On
+     Sloth against Sin_, which I translated in the Dante volume.
+     Sloth, alas! has but too much to answer for with me; and is
+     one of the reasons (though I will not say the only one), why
+     I have always fallen back on quality instead of quantity in
+     the little I have ever done. I think often with Coleridge:
+
+          Sloth jaundiced all: and from my graspless hand
+          Drop friendship's precious pearls like hour-glass sand.
+          I weep, yet stoop not: the faint anguish flows,
+          A dreamy pang in morning's feverish doze.
+
+     However, for all I might desire in the direction spoken of,
+     volition is vain without vocation; and I had better really
+     stick to knowing how to mix vermilion and ultramarine for a
+     flesh-grey, and how to manage their equivalents in verse. To
+     speak without sparing myself,--my mind is a childish one, if
+     to be isolated in Art is child's-play; at any rate I feel
+     that I do not attain to the more active and practical of the
+     mental functions of manhood. I can say this to you, because
+     I know you will make the best and not the worst of me; and
+     better than such feasible best I do not wish to appear. Thus
+     you see I don't think my name ought to head your
+     introductory paragraph--and there an end. And now of your
+     new lecture, and of the long letter I lately had from you.
+     At some moment I should like to know which pieces among the
+     translations are specially your favourites. Of the three
+     names you leash together as somewhat those of sensualists,
+     Cecco Angiolieri is really the only one--as for the
+     respectable Cino, he would be shocked indeed, though
+     certainly there are a few oddities bearing that way in the
+     sonnets between him and Dante (who is again similarly
+     reproached by his friend Cavalcanti), but I really _do_
+     suspect that in some cases similar to the one in question
+     about Cino (though not Guido and Dante) politics were really
+     meant where love was used as a metaphor.... I assure you,
+     you cannot say too much to me of this or any other work of
+     yours; in fact, I wish that we should communicate about
+     them. I have been thinking yet more on the relations of
+     politics and art. I do think seriously on consideration that
+     not only my own sluggishness, but vital fact itself, must
+     set to a great extent a _veto_ against the absolute
+     participation of artists in politics. When has it ever been
+     effected? True, Cellini was a bravo and David a good deal
+     like a murderer, and in these capacities they were not
+     without their political use in very turbulent times. But
+     when the attempt was made to turn Michael Angelo into a
+     "utility man" of that kind, he did (it is true) some
+     patriotic duty in the fortification of Florence; but it is
+     no less a fact that, when he had done all that he thought
+     became him, he retired to a certain trackless and forgotten
+     tower, and there stayed in some sort of peace (though much
+     in request) till he could lead his own life again; nor
+     should we forget the occasion on which he did not hesitate
+     even to betake himself to Venice as a refuge. Yet M. Angelo
+     was in every way a patriot, a philosopher, and a hero. I do
+     not say this to undervalue the scope of your theory. I think
+     possibilities are generally so much behind desirabilities
+     that there is no harm in any degree of incitement in the
+     right _direction_; and that is assuredly mental activity of
+     _all_ kinds. I judge you cannot suspect _me_ of thinking the
+     apotheosis of the early Italian poets (though surely
+     spiritual beauty, and not sensuality, was their general aim)
+     of more importance than the "unity of a great nation." But
+     it is in my minute power to deal successfully (I feel) with
+     the one, while no such entity, as I am, can advance or
+     retard the other; and thus mine must needs be the poorer
+     part. Nor (with alas, and again alas!) will Italy or another
+     twice have her day in its fulness.
+
+I happened to have said in speaking of self-indulgence among artists,
+that there probably existed those to whom it seemed more important to
+preserve such a pitiful possession as the poetical remains of Cecco
+Angiolieri than to secure the unity of a great nation. Rossetti half
+suspected I meant this for a playful backhanded blow at himself (for
+Cecco was a great favourite with him), and protested that no such
+individual could exist. I defended my charge by quoting Keats's--
+
+           ... the silver flow
+     Of Hero's tears, the swoon of Imogen,
+     Fair Pastorella in the bandit's den,
+     Are things to brood on with more ardency
+     Than the death-day of empires.
+
+But Rossetti grew weary of the jest:
+
+     I must protest that what you quote from Keats about "Hero's
+     tears," etc., fails to meet the text. Neither Shakspeare nor
+     Spenser assuredly was a Cecco; Marlowe may be most meant as
+     to "Hero," and he perhaps affords the shadow of a parallel
+     in career though not in work.
+
+The extract from Rosetti's letters with which I shall close this chapter
+is perhaps the most interesting yet made:
+
+     One point I must still raise, viz., that I, for one, cannot
+     conceive, even as the Ghost of a Flea, the ideal individual
+     who considers the Poetical Remains of Cecco Angiolieri of
+     more importance than the unity of a great nation! I think
+     this would have been better if much modified. Say for
+     instance--"A thing of some moment even while the contest is
+     waging for the political unity of a great nation." This is
+     the utmost reach surely of human comparative valuation. I
+     think you have brought in Benvenuto and Michael much to the
+     purpose. Shall I give you a parallel in your own style?
+
+     During the months for which poet Coleridge became private
+     Cumberback (a name in which he said his horse would have
+     concurred), it seems strange that, in such stirring times,
+     his regiment should not have been ordered off on foreign
+     service. In such case that pre-eminent member of the awkward
+     squad would assuredly have been the very first man killed.
+     Should we have been more the gainers by his patriotism or
+     the losers by his poetry? The very last man killed in the
+     last _sortie_ from Paris during the Prussian siege (he
+     _would_ go behind a buttress to "pot" a Prussian after
+     orders were given to retire, and so got "potted" himself)
+     was Henri Regnault, a painter, whose brilliant work was a
+     guiding beacon on the road of improvement in French methods
+     of art, if not in intellectual force. Who shall fail to
+     honour the noble ardour which drew him from the security of
+     his studies in Tunis to partake his country's danger? Yet
+     who shall forbear to sigh in thinking that, but for this,
+     his progressing work might still yearly be an element in
+     art-progress for Europe? G�rome and others betook themselves
+     to England instead, and are still benefiting the cause for
+     which they were before all things born. It was David who
+     said, "Si on tirait � mitraille sur les artistes, on n'y
+     tuerait pas un seul patriote!" _He_ was a patriot homicide,
+     and spoke probably what was true in the sense in which he
+     meant it. As I said, I am glad you turned Ben and Mike to
+     account, but the above is in some respects an open question.
+
+I have, as I say, a further batch of letters to introduce, but as these
+were, for the most part, written after an event which forms a land-mark
+in our acquaintance (I mean the occasion of our first meeting), I judge
+it is best to reserve them for a later section of this book. There are
+two forms, and, so far as I know, two only, in which a body of letters
+can be published with justice to the writer. Of these the first and most
+obvious form is to offer them chronologically _in extenso_ or with only
+such eliminations as seem inevitable, and the second is to tabulate them
+according to subject-matter, and print them in the order not of date but
+substance. There are advantages attending each method, and corresponding
+disadvantages also. The temptation to adopt the first of these was, in
+this case of Rossetti's letters, almost insurmountable, for nothing can
+be more charming in epistolary style than the easy grace with which the
+writer passes from point to point, evolving one idea out of another,
+interlinking subject with subject, and building up a fabric of which the
+meaning is everywhere inwoven. In this respect Rossetti's letters are
+almost as perfect as anything that ever left his hand; and, in freedom
+of phrase, in power of throwing off parenthetical reflections always
+faultlessly enunciated, in play of humour, often in eloquence (never
+becoming declamatory, and calling on "Styx or Stars"), sometimes
+in pathos, Rossetti's letters are, in a word, admirable. They
+are comparable in these respects with the best things yet done in
+English,--as pleasing and graceful as Cowper's letters, broader in range
+of subject than the letters of Keats, easier and more colloquial than
+those of Coleridge, and with less appearance of being intended for the
+public eye than is the case with the letters of Byron and of Shelley.
+Rossetti's letters have, moreover, a value quite apart from the merits
+of their epistolary style, in so far as they contain almost the only
+expression extant of his opinions on literary questions. And this is
+the circumstance that has chiefly weighed with me to offer them
+in fragmentary form interspersed with elucidatory comment bearing
+principally upon the occasions that called them forth.
+
+Such then as I have described was the nature of my intercourse with
+Rossetti during the first year and a half of our correspondence, and now
+the time had come when I was to meet my friend for the first time face
+to face. The elasticity of sympathy by which a man of genius, surrounded
+by constant friends, could yet bend to a new-comer who was a stranger
+and twenty-five years his junior, and think and feel with him; the
+generous appreciativeness by which he could bring himself to consider
+the first efforts of one quite unknown; and then the unselfishness that
+seemed always to prefer the claims of others to his own great claims,
+could command only the return of unqualified allegiance. Such were the
+feelings with which I went forth to my first meeting with Rossetti, and
+if at any later date, the ardour of my regard for him in any measure
+suffered modification, be sure when the time comes to touch upon it I
+shall make no more concealment of the causes that led to such a change
+than I have made of those circumstances, however personal in primary
+interest, that generated a friendship so unusual and to me so serious
+and important.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+It was in the autumn of 1880 that I saw Rossetti for the first time.
+Being then rather reduced in health I contemplated a visit to the
+sea-side and wrote saying that in passing through London I should avail
+myself of his oft-repeated invitation to visit him. I gave him this
+warning of my intention, remembering his declared dread of being taken
+unawares, but I came to know at a subsequent period that for one who was
+within the inner circle of his friends the necessity to advise him of
+a visit was by no means binding. His reception of my intimation of an
+intention to call upon him was received with an amount of epistolary
+ceremony which I recognise now by the light of further acquaintance as
+eminently characteristic of the man, although curiously contradictory of
+his unceremonious habits of daily life. The fact is that Rossetti was
+of an excessively nervous temperament, and rarely if ever underwent an
+ordeal more trying than a first meeting with any one to whom for some
+time previously he had looked forward with interest. Hence by return of
+the post that bore him my missive came two letters, the one obviously
+written and posted within an hour or two of the other. In the first of
+these he expressed courteously his pleasure at the prospect of seeing
+me, and appointed 8.30 p.m. the following evening as his dinner hour at
+his house in Cheyne Walk. The second letter begged me to come at 5.30 or
+6 p.m., so that we might have a long evening. "You will, I repeat," he
+says, "recognise the hole-and-cornerest of all existences in this big
+barn of mine; but come early and I shall read you some ballads, and
+we can talk of many things." An hour later than the arrival of these
+letters came a third epistle, which ran: "Of course when I speak of your
+dining with me, I mean t�te-�-t�te and without ceremony of any kind. I
+usually dine in my studio and in my painting coat!" I had before me a
+five hours' journey to London, so that in order to reach Chelsea at 6
+P.M., I must needs set out at mid-day, but oblivious of this necessity,
+Rossetti had actually posted a fourth letter on the morning of the day
+on which we were to meet begging me not on any account to talk, in the
+course of our interview, of a certain personal matter upon which we had
+corresponded. This fourth and final message came to hand the morning
+after the meeting, when I had the satisfaction to reflect that (owing
+more perhaps to the plethora of other subjects of interest than to any
+suspicion of its being tabooed) I had luckily eschewed the proscribed
+topic.
+
+Cheyne Walk was unknown to me at the time in question, except as the
+locality in and near which many men and women eminent in literature
+resided. It seems hard to realise that this was the case as recently as
+two years ago, now that so short an interval has associated it in one's
+mind with memories which seem to cover a large part of one's life. The
+Walk is not now exactly as picturesque as it appears in certain familiar
+old engravings; the new embankment and the gardens that separate it from
+the main thoroughfare have taken something from its beauty, but it still
+possesses many attractions, and among them a look of age which contrasts
+agreeably with the spic-and-span newness of neighbouring places. I found
+Rossetti's house, No. 16, answering in external appearances to the frank
+description he gave of it. It stands about mid-way between the Chelsea
+pier and the new redbrick mansions erected on the Chelsea embankment.
+It seems to be the oldest house in the Walk, and the exceptional
+proportions of its gate-piers, and the weight and mass of its gate and
+railings, suggests that probably at some period it stood alone, and
+commanded as grounds a large part of the space now occupied by the
+adjoining residences. Behind the house, during eighteen years of
+Rossetti's occupancy, there was a garden of almost an acre in extent,
+covering by much the larger part of the space enclosed by a block of
+four streets forming a square. At No. 4 Maclise had lived and died; at
+the same house George Eliot, after her marriage with Mr. Cross, had come
+to live; at No. 5, in the second street to the westward, Thomas Carlyle
+was still living, and a little beyond Cheyne Row stood the modest
+cottage wherein Turner died. Rossetti's house had to me the appearance
+of a plain Queen Anne erection, much mutilated by the introduction of
+unsightly bay-windows; the brickwork seemed to be falling into decay;
+the paint to be in serious need of renewal; the windows to be dull with
+the accumulation of the dust of years; the sills to bear the suspicion
+of cobwebs; the angles of the steps and the untrodden flags of the
+courtyard to be here and there overgrown with moss and weeds; and round
+the walls and up the reveals of doors and windows were creeping the
+tangled branches of the wildest ivy that ever grew untouched by shears.
+Such was the exterior of the home of the poet-painter when I walked up
+to it on the autumn evening of my first visit, and the interior of the
+house was at once like and unlike the exterior. The hall had a puzzling
+look of equal nobility and shabbiness. The floor was paved with
+beautiful white marble, which however, was partly covered with a strip
+of worn cocoa-nut matting; the ceiling was in one of its sections
+gracefully groined, and in each of the walls, which were lofty, there
+was an arched recess containing a piece of sculpture; an old inlaid
+rosewood clock filled a bulkhead on one side facing the door, and on the
+corresponding side stood a massive gas branch. A mezzotint lithograph by
+Legros was the only pictorial decoration of the walls, which were plain,
+and seemed not to have been distempered for many years. Three doors led
+out of the hall, one at each side, and one in front, and two corridors
+opened into it, but there was no sign of staircase, nor had it any light
+except such as was borrowed from the fanlight that looked into the
+porch. These facts I noted in the few minutes I stood waiting in the
+hall, but during the many months in which subsequently that house was my
+own home as well as Rossetti's, I came to see that the changes which the
+building must have undergone since the period of its erection, had so
+filled it with crooks and corners as to bewilder the most ingenious
+observer to account for its peculiarities.
+
+Very soon Rossetti came to me through the doorway in front, which proved
+to be the entrance to his studio. Holding forth both hands and crying
+'Hulloa,' he gave me that cheery, hearty greeting which I came to
+recognise as his alone, perhaps, in warmth and unfailing geniality among
+all the men of our circle. It was Italian in its spontaneity, and yet it
+was English in its manly reserve, and I remember with much tenderness of
+feeling that never to the last (not even when sickness saddened him,
+or after an absence of a few days or even hours) did it fail him when
+meeting with those friends to whom to the last he was really attached.
+Leading the way into the studio, he introduced me to his brother, who
+was there upon one of the evening visits, which at intervals of a week
+he was at that time making, with unfailing regularity. I should have
+described Rossetti, at this time, as a man who looked quite ten years
+older than his actual age, which was fifty-two, of full middle height
+and inclining to corpulence, with a round face that ought, one thought,
+to be ruddy but was pale, large grey eyes with a steady introspecting
+look, surmounted by broad protrusive brows and a clearly-pencilled ridge
+over the nose, which was well cut and had large breathing nostrils. The
+mouth and chin were hidden beneath a heavy moustache and abundant beard,
+which grew up to the ears, and had been of a mixed black-brown and
+auburn, and were now streaked with grey. The forehead was large, round,
+without protuberances, and very gently receding to where thin black
+curls, that had once been redundant, began to tumble down to the ears.
+The entire configuration of the head and face seemed to me singularly
+noble, and from the eyes upwards, full of beauty. He wore a pair of
+spectacles, and, in reading, a second pair over the first: but these
+took little from the sense of power conveyed by those steady eyes,
+and that "bar of Michael Angelo." His dress was not conspicuous, being
+however rather negligent than otherwise, and noticeable, if at all, only
+for a straight sack-coat buttoned at the throat, descending at least to
+the knees, and having large pockets cut into it perpendicularly at the
+sides. This garment was, I afterwards found, one of the articles of
+various kinds made to the author's own design. When he spoke, even in
+exchanging the preliminary courtesies of an opening conversation, I
+thought his voice the richest I had ever known any one to possess.
+It was a full deep barytone, capable of easy modulation, and with
+undertones of infinite softness and sweetness, yet, as I afterwards
+found, with almost illimitable compass, and with every gradation of tone
+at command, for the recitation or reading of poetry. The studio was a
+large room probably measuring thirty feet by twenty, and structurally as
+puzzling as the other parts of the house. A series of columns and arches
+on one side suggested that the room had almost certainly been at some
+period the site of an important staircase with a wide well, and on the
+other side a broad mullioned window reaching to the ceiling, seemed
+certainly to bear record of the occupant's own contribution to the
+peculiarities of the edifice. The fireplace was at an end of the room,
+and over and at each side of it were hung a number of fine drawings
+in chalk, chiefly studies of heads, with here and there a water-colour
+figure piece, all from Rossetti's hand. At the opposite end of the room
+hung some symbolic designs in chalk, _Pandora_ and _Proserpina_ being
+among the number, and easels of various sizes, some very large, bearing
+pictures in differing stages of completion, occupied positions on
+all sides of the floor, leaving room only for a sofa, with a bookcase
+behind, two old cabinets, two large low easy chairs, and a writing desk
+and chair at a window at the side, which was heavily darkened by the
+thick foliage of the trees that grew in the garden beyond.
+
+Dropping down on the sofa with his head laid low and his feet thrown up
+in a favourite attitude on the back, which must, I imagine, have been at
+least as easy as it was elegant, he began the conversation by bantering
+me upon what he called my "robustious" appearance compared with what he
+had been led to expect from gloomy reports of uncertain health. After a
+series of playful touches (all done in the easiest conceivable way,
+and conveying any impression on earth save the right one, that a first
+meeting with any man, however young and harmless, was little less than a
+tragic event to Rossetti) he glanced one by one at certain of the topics
+that had arisen in the course of our correspondence. I perceived that he
+was a ready, fluent, and graceful talker, with a remarkable incisiveness
+of speech, and a trick of dignifying ordinary topics in words which,
+without rising above conversation, were so exactly, though freely
+enunciated, as would have admitted of their being reported exactly as
+they fell from his lips. In some of these respects I found his brother
+William resemble him, though, if I may describe the talk of a dead
+friend by contrasting it with that of a living one bearing a natural
+affinity to it, I will say that Gabriel's conversation was perhaps more
+spontaneous, and had more variety of tone with less range of subject,
+together with the same precision and perspicuity. Very soon the talk
+became general, and then Rossetti spoke without appearance of reserve
+of his two or three intimate friends, telling me, among other things,
+of Theodore Watts, that he "had a head exactly like that of Napoleon I.,
+whom Watts," he said with a chuckle, "detests more than any character
+in history; depend upon it," he added, "such a head was not given to him
+for nothing;" that Frederick Shields was as emotional as Shelley, and
+Ford Madox Brown, whom I had met, as sententious as Dr. Johnson. I kept
+no sort of record of what passed upon the occasion in question, but I
+remember that Rossetti seemed to be playfully battering his friends in
+their absence in the assured consciousness that he was doing so in the
+presence of a well-wisher; and it was amusing to observe that, after any
+particularly lively sally, he would pause to say something in a sobered
+tone that was meant to convey the idea that he was really very jealous
+of his friends' reputation, and was merely for the sake of amusement
+giving rein to a sportive fancy. During dinner (and contrary to his
+declared habit, we did not dine in the studio) he talked a good deal
+about Oliver Madox Brown, for whom I had conceived a warm admiration,
+and to whom I had about that time addressed a sonnet.
+
+"You had a sincere admiration of the boy's gifts?" I asked.
+
+"Assuredly. I have always said that twenty years after his death his
+name will be a familiar one. _The Black Swan_ is a powerful story,
+although I must honestly say that it displays in its central incident a
+certain torpidity that to me is painful. Undoubtedly Oliver had genius,
+and must have done great things had he lived. His death was a grievous
+blow to his father. I'm glad you've written that sonnet; I wanted you to
+toss up your cap for Nolly." He spoke of Oliver's father as indisputably
+one of the greatest of living colourists, inquired earnestly into the
+progress of his frescoes at Manchester, for one of the figures in which
+I had sat, and showed me a little water-colour drawing made by Oliver
+himself when very young. Dinner being now over, I asked Rossetti to
+redeem his promise to read one of his new ballads; and as his brother,
+who had often heard it before, expressed his readiness to hear it again,
+he responded readily, and, taking a small manuscript volume out of a
+section of the bookcase that had been locked, read us _The White Ship_.
+I have spoken of the ballad as a poem at an earlier stage, but it
+remains to me, in this place, to describe the effect produced upon me by
+the author's reading. It seemed to me that I never heard anything at all
+matchable with Rossetti's elocution; his rich deep voice lent an added
+music to the music of the verse: it rose and fell in the passages
+descriptive of the wreck with something of the surge and sibilation of
+the sea itself; in the tenderer passages it was soft as a woman's, and
+in the pathetic stanzas with which the ballad closes it was profoundly
+moving. Effective as the reading sounded in that studio, I remember at
+the moment to have doubted if it would prove quite so effective from a
+public platform. Perhaps there seemed to be so much insistence on the
+rhythm, and so prolonged a tension of the rhyme sounds, as would run
+the risk of a charge of monotony if falling on ears less concerned with
+points of metrical beauty than with fundamental substance. Personally,
+however, I found the reading in the very highest degree enjoyable and
+inspiring.
+
+The evening was gone by the time the ballad was ended; and it was
+arranged that upon my return to London from the house of a friend at
+the sea-side I should again dine with Rossetti, and sleep the night
+at Cheyne Walk. I was invited to come early in order to see certain
+pictures by day-light, and it was then I saw the painter's most
+important work,--the _Dant�s Dream_, which finally (and before Rossetti
+was made aware of any steps being taken to that end) I had prevailed
+with Alderman Samuelson to purchase for the public gallery at Liverpool.
+At my request, though only after some importunity, Rossetti read again
+his _White Ship_, and afterwards _Rose Mary_, the latter of which he
+told me had been written in the country shortly after the appearance of
+the first volume of poems. He remarked that it had occupied three weeks
+in the writing, and that the physical prostration ensuing had been more
+than he would care to go through again. I observed on this head, that
+though highly finished in every stanza, the ballad had an impetuous
+rush of emotion, and swift current of diction, suggesting speed in its
+composition, as contrasted with the laboured deliberation which the
+sonnets, for example, appeared to denote. I asked if his work usually
+took much out of him in physical energy.
+
+"Not my painting, certainly," he replied, "though in early years it
+tormented me more than enough. Now I paint by a set of unwritten but
+clearly-defined rules, which I could teach to any man as systematically
+as you could teach arithmetic; indeed, quite recently I sat all day for
+that very purpose with Shields, who is not so great a colourist as he is
+a draughtsman: he is a great draughtsman--none better now living, unless
+it is Leighton or Sir Noel Paton."
+
+"Still," I said, "there's usually a good deal in a picture of yours
+beside what you can do by rule."
+
+"Fundamental conception, no doubt, but beyond that not much. In
+painting, after all, there is in the less important details something of
+the craft of a superior carpenter, and the part of a picture that is not
+mechanical is often trivial enough. I don't wonder, now," he added, with
+a suspicion of a twinkle in the eye, "if you imagine that one comes down
+here in a fine frenzy every morning to daub canvas?"
+
+"I certainly imagine," I replied, "that a superior carpenter would find
+it hard to paint another _Dante's Dream_, which some people consider the
+best example yet seen of the English school."
+
+"That is friendly nonsense," rejoined my frank host, "there is now no
+English school whatever."
+
+"Well," I said, "if you deny the name to others who lay more claim to
+it, will you not at least allow it to the three or four painters who
+started with you in life?"
+
+"Not at all, unless it is to Brown, and he's more French than English;
+Hunt and Jones have no more claim to the name than I have. As for all
+the prattle about pre-Raphaelitism, I confess to you I am weary of it,
+and long have been. Why should we go on talking about the visionary
+vanities of half-a-dozen boys? We've all grown out of them, I hope, by
+now."
+
+I remarked that the pre-Raphaelite movement was no doubt a serious one
+at the beginning.
+
+"What you call the movement was serious enough, but the banding together
+under that title was all a joke. We had at that time a phenomenal
+antipathy to the Academy, and in sheer love of being outlawed signed our
+pictures with the well-known initials." I have preserved the substance
+of what Rossetti said on this point, and, as far as possible, the actual
+words have been given. On many subsequent occasions he expressed himself
+in the same way: assuredly with as much seeming depreciation of the
+painter's "craft," although certain examples of modern art called forth
+his warmest eulogies. In serious moods he would speak of pictures by
+Millais, Watts, Leighton, Burne Jones, and others, as works of the
+highest genius.
+
+Reverting to my inquiry as to whether his work took much out of him, he
+remarked that his poetry usually did. "In that respect," he said, "I am
+the reverse of Swinburne. For his method of production inspiration is
+indeed the word. With me the case is different. I lie on the couch, the
+racked and tortured medium, never permitted an instant's surcease of
+agony until the thing on hand is finished."
+
+It was obvious that what Rossetti meant by being racked and tortured,
+was that his subject possessed him; that he was enslaved by his own
+"shaping imagination." Assuredly he was the reverse of a costive poet:
+impulse was, to use his own phrase, fully developed in his muse.
+
+I made some playful allusion, assuredly not meant to involve Mr.
+Swinburne, to Sheridan's epigram on easy writing and hard reading; and
+to the Abb� de Marolles, who exultingly told some poet that his verses
+cost no trouble: "They cost you what they are worth," replied the bard.
+
+"One benefit I do derive," Rossetti added, "as a result of my method of
+composition; my work becomes condensed. Probably the man does not live
+who could write what I have written more briefly than I have done."
+
+Emphasis and condensation, I remarked, were indubitably the
+characteristics of his muse. He then read me a great body of the new
+sonnets of _The House of Life_. Sitting in that studio listening to his
+reading and looking up meantime at the chalk-drawings that hung on the
+walls, I realised how truly he had said, in correspondence, that the
+feeling pervading his pictures was such as his poetry ought to suggest.
+The affinity between the two seemed to me at that moment to be complete:
+the same half-sad, half-resigned view of life, the same glimpses of
+hope, the same foreshadowings of gloom.
+
+"You doubtless think it odd," he said at one moment, "to hear an old
+fellow read such love-poetry as much of this is, but I may tell you that
+the larger part of it, though still unpublished, was written when I was
+as young as you are. When I print these sonnets, I shall probably affix
+a note saying, that though many of them are of recent production, not a
+few are obviously the work of earlier years."
+
+I expressed admiration of the pathetic sonnet entitled _Without Her_.
+
+"I cannot tell you," he said, "at what terrible moment it was wrung from
+me."
+
+He had read it with tears of voice, subsiding at length into suppressed
+sobs and intervals of silence. As though to explain away this emotion he
+said:
+
+"All poetry, that is really poetry, affects me deeply and often to
+tears. It does not need to be pathetic or yet tender to produce such a
+result. I have known in my life two men, and two only, who are similarly
+sensitive--Tennyson, and my old friend and neighbour William Bell Scott.
+I once heard Tennyson read _Maud_, and whilst the fiery passages were
+delivered with a voice and vehemence which he alone of living men can
+compass, the softer passages and the songs made the tears course down
+his cheeks. Morris is a fine reader, and so, of his kind, though a
+little prone to sing-song, is Swinburne. Browning both reads and talks
+well--at least he did so when I knew him intimately as a young man."
+
+Rossetti went on to say that he had been among Browning's earliest
+admirers. As a boy he had seen something signed by the then unknown
+name of the author of _Paracelsus_, and wrote to him. The result was
+an intimacy. He spoke with warmest admiration of _Child Roland_; and
+referred to Elizabeth Barrett Browning in terms of regard, and, I think
+I may say, of reverence.
+
+I asked if he had ever heard Ruskin read. He replied:
+
+"I must have done so, but remember nothing clearly. On one occasion,
+however, I heard him deliver a speech, and that was something never
+to forget. When we were young, we helped Frederick Denison Maurice by
+taking classes at the Working Men's College, and there Charles Kingsley
+and others made speeches and delivered lectures. Ruskin was asked to
+do something of the kind and at length consented. He made no sort of
+preparation for the occasion: I know he did not; we were together at his
+father's house the whole of the day in question. At night we drove
+down to the College, and then he made the finest speech I ever heard. I
+doubted at the time if any written words of his were equal to it! such
+flaming diction! such emphasis! such appeal!--yet he had written his
+first and second volumes of _Modern Painters_ by that time." I have
+reproduced the substance of what Rossetti said on the occasion of my
+return visit, and, by help of letters written at the time to a friend,
+I have in many cases recalled his exact words. A certain incisiveness of
+speech which distinguished his conversation, I confess myself scarcely
+able to convey more than a suggestion of; as Mr. Watts has said in _The
+Athen�um_, his talk showed an incisiveness so perfect that it had often
+the pleasurable surprise of wit. Rossetti had both wit and humour, but
+these, during the time that I knew him, were only occasionally present
+in his conversation, while the incisiveness was always conspicuous.
+A certain quiet play of sportive fancy, developing at intervals into
+banter, was sometimes observable in his talk with the younger and more
+familiar of his acquaintances, but for the most part his conversation
+was serious, and, during the time I knew him, often sad. I speedily
+observed that he was not of the number of those who lead or sustain
+conversation. He required to be constantly interrogated, but as a
+negative talker, if I may so describe him, he was by much the best I had
+heard. Catching one's drift before one had revealed it, and anticipating
+one's objections, he would go on from point to point, almost removing
+the necessity for more than occasional words. Nevertheless, as I say, he
+was not, in the conversations I have heard, a leading conversationalist;
+his talk was never more than talk, and in saying that it was uniformly
+sustained yet never declamatory, I think I convey an idea both of its
+merits and limitations.
+
+I understood that Rossetti had never at any period of his life been an
+early riser, and at the time of the interview in question he was more
+than ever before prone to reverse the natural order of waking and
+sleeping hours. I am convinced that during the time I was with him only
+the necessity of securing a certain short interval of daylight, by
+which it was possible to paint, prevailed with him to rise before noon.
+Alluding to this idiosyncrasy, he said: "I lie as long, or say as late,
+as Dr. Johnson used to do. You shall never know, until you discover it
+for yourself, at what hour I rise." He sat up until four A.M. on this
+night of my second visit,--no unaccustomed thing, as I afterwards
+learned. I must not omit the mention of one feature of the conversation,
+revealing to me a new side of his character, or, more properly, a new
+phase of his mind, which gave me subsequently an infinity of anxiety and
+distress. Branching off at a late hour from some entirely foreign topic,
+he begged me to tell him the facts of some unlucky debate in which I
+had long before been engaged on a public platform with some one who had
+attacked him. He had heard a report of what passed at a time when
+my name was unknown to him, as also was that of his assailant. Being
+forewarned by William Rossetti of his brother's peculiar sensitiveness
+to critical attack, and having, moreover, observed something of the kind
+myself, I tried to avoid a circumstantial statement of what passed. But
+Rossetti was, as has been said by one who knew him well, "of imagination
+all compact," and my obvious desire to shelve the subject suggested to
+his mind a thousand inferences infinitely more damaging than the fact.
+To avoid such a result I told him all, and there was little in the
+way of attack to repeat beyond a few unwelcome strictures on his poem
+_Jenny_. He listened but too eagerly to what I was saying, and then in a
+voice slower, softer, and more charged, perhaps, with emotion than I had
+heard before, said it was the old story, which began ten years before,
+and would go on until he had been hunted and hounded to his grave.
+Startled, and indeed, appalled by so grave a view of what to me had
+seemed no more than an error of critical judgment, coupled perhaps, with
+some intemperance of condemnation, I prayed of him to think no more of
+the matter, reproached myself with having yielded to his importunity,
+and begged him to remember that if one man held the opinions I had
+repeated, many men held contrary ones.
+
+"It was right of you to tell me when I asked you," he said, "though my
+friends usually keep such facts from my knowledge. As to _Jenny_, it is
+a sermon, nothing less. As I say, it is a sermon, and on a great world,
+to most men unknown, though few consider themselves ignorant of it. But
+of this conspiracy to persecute me--what remains to say but that it is
+widespread and remorseless--one cannot but feel it."
+
+I assured him there existed no conspiracy to persecute him: that he had
+ardent upholders everywhere, though it was true that few men had found
+crueller critics. He shook his head, and said I knew that what he had
+alleged was true, namely that an organised conspiracy existed, having
+for its object to annoy and injure him. Growing a little impatient of
+this delusion, so tenaciously held, against all show of reason, I told
+him that it was no more than the fever of an oppressed brain brought
+about by his reclusive habits of life, by shunning intercourse with all
+save some half dozen or more friends. "You tell me," I said, "that you
+have rarely been outside these walls for some years, and your brain has
+meanwhile been breeding a host of hallucinations, like cobwebs in a dark
+corner. You have only to go abroad, and the fresh air will blow these
+things away." But continuing for some moments longer in the same strain,
+he came to closer quarters and distressed me by naming as enemies three
+or four men who had throughout life been his friends, who have spoken of
+him since his death in words of admiration and even affection, and who
+had for a time fallen away from him or called on him but rarely, from
+contingencies due to any cause but alienated friendship.
+
+At length the time had arrived when it was considered prudent to retire.
+"You are to sleep in Watts's room to-night," he said: and then in reply
+to a look of inquiry he added, "He comes here at least twice a week,
+talking until four o'clock in the morning upon everything from poetry
+to the Pleiades, and driving away the bogies, and as he lives at Putney
+Hill, it is necessary to have a bed for him." Before going into my room
+he suggested that I should go and look, at his. It was entered from
+another and smaller room which he said that he used as a breakfast
+room. The outer room was made fairly bright and cheerful by a glittering
+chandelier (the property once, he told me, of David Garrick), and
+from the rustle of trees against the window-pane one perceived that it
+overlooked the garden; but the inner room was dark with heavy hangings
+around the walls as well as the bed, and thick velvet curtains before
+the windows, so that the candles in our hands seemed unable to light
+it, and our voices sounded thick and muffled. An enormous black oak
+chimney-piece of curious design, having an ivory crucifix on the largest
+of its ledges, covered a part of one side and reached to the ceiling.
+Cabinets, and the usual furniture of a bedroom, occupied places about
+the floor: and in the middle of it, and before a little couch, stood
+a small table on which was a wire lantern containing a candle which
+Rossetti lit from the open one in his hand--another candle meantime
+lying by its side. I remarked that he probably burned a light all night.
+He said that was so. "My curse," he added, "is insomnia. Two or three
+hours hence I shall get up and lie on the couch, and, to pass away a
+weary hour, read this book"--a volume of Boswell's _Johnson_ which I
+noticed he took out of the bookcase as we left the studio. It did not
+escape me that on the table stood two small bottles sealed and labelled,
+together with a little measuring-glass. Without looking further at it,
+but with a terrible suspicion growing over me, I asked if that were his
+medicine.
+
+"They say there is a skeleton in every cupboard," he said in a low
+voice, "and that's mine; it is chloral."
+
+When I reached the room that I was to occupy during the night, I found
+it, like Rossetti's bedroom, heavy with hangings, and black with antique
+picture panels, with a ceiling (unlike that of the other rooms in the
+house), out of all reach or sight, and so dark from various causes, that
+the candle seemed only to glimmer in it--indeed to add to the darkness
+by making it felt. Mr. Watts, as Rossetti told me, was entirely
+indifferent to these eerie surroundings, even if his fine subjective
+intellect, more prone to meditate than to observe, was ever for an
+instant conscious of them; but on myself I fear they weighed heavily,
+and augmented the feeling of closeness and gloom which had been creeping
+upon me since I entered the house. Scattered about the room in most
+admired disorder were some outlandish and unheard-of books, and all
+kinds of antiquarian and Oriental oddities, which books and oddities I
+afterwards learnt had been picked up at various times by the occupant in
+his ramblings about Chelsea and elsewhere, and never yet taken away by
+him, but left there apparently to scare the chambermaid: such as old
+carved heads and gargoyles of the most grinning and ghastly expression,
+Burmese and Chinese Buddhas in soapstone of every degree of placid
+ugliness, together, I am bound by force of truth to admit, with one
+piece of carved Italian marble in bas-relief, of great interest and
+beauty. Such was my bed-chamber for the night, and little wonder if it
+threatened to murder the innocent sleep. But it was later than 4 A.M.,
+and wearied nature must needs assert herself, and so I lay down amidst
+the odour of bygone ages.
+
+Presently Rossetti came in, for no purpose that I can remember, except
+to say that he had enjoyed my visit I replied that I should never forget
+it. "If you decide to settle in London," he said, "I trust you 'll come
+and live with me, and then many such evenings must remove the memory
+of this one." I laughed, for I thought what he hinted at to be of the
+remotest likelihood. "I have just taken sixty grains of chloral," he
+said, as he was going out; "in four hours I take sixty more, and in four
+hours after that yet another sixty."
+
+"Does not the dose increase with you?"
+
+"It has not done so perceptibly in recent years. I judge I've taken
+more chloral than any man whatever: Marshall says if I were put into a
+Turkish bath I should sweat it at every pore."
+
+There was something in his tone suggesting that he was even proud of the
+accomplishment. To me it was a frightful revelation, accounting entirely
+for what had puzzled and distressed me in his delusions already referred
+to. And now let me say that whilst it would have been on my part the
+most pitiful weakness (because the most foolish tearfulness of injuring
+a great man who was strong enough to suffer a good deal to be discounted
+from his strength), to attempt to conceal this painful side of
+Rossetti's mind, I shall not again allude to those delusions, unless
+it be to show that, coming to him with the drug which blighted half his
+life, they disappeared when it had been removed.
+
+None may rightly say to what the use of that drug was due, or what was
+due to it; the sadder side of his life was ever under its shadow; his
+occasional distrust of friends: his fear of enemies: his broken health
+and shattered spirits, all came of his indulgence in the pernicious
+thing. When I remember this I am more than willing to put by all thought
+of the little annoyances, which to me, as to other immediate friends,
+were constantly occurring through that cause, which seemed at the moment
+so vexatious and often so insupportable, but which are now forgotten.
+
+Next morning--(a clear autumn morning)--I strolled through the large
+garden at the back of the house, and of course I found it of a piece
+with what I had previously seen. A beautiful avenue of lime-trees opened
+into a grass plot of nearly an acre in extent. The trees were just as
+nature made them, and so was the grass, which in places was lying long,
+dry and withered under the sun, weeds creeping up in damp places, and
+the gravel of the pathway scattered upon the verges. This neglected
+condition of the garden was, I afterwards found, humorously charged upon
+Mr. Watts's "reluctance to interfere with nature in her clever scheme of
+the survival of the fittest," but I suspect it was due at least equally
+to the owner's personal indifference to everything of the kind.
+
+Before leaving I glanced over the bookcase. Rossetti's library was by
+no means a large one. It consisted, perhaps, of 1000 volumes, scarcely
+more; and though this was not large as comprising the library of one
+whose reading must have been in two arts pursued as special studies,
+and each involving research and minute original inquiry, it cannot be
+considered noticeably small, and it must have been sufficient. Rossetti
+differed strangely as a reader from the man to whom in bias of genius
+he was most nearly related. Coleridge was an omnivorous general reader:
+Rossetti was eclectic rather than desultory. His library contained a
+number of valuable old works of more interest to him from their plates
+than letterpress. Of this kind were _Gerard's Herbal_ (1626), supposed
+to be the source of many a hint utilised by the Morris firm, of which
+Rossetti was a member; _Poliphili Hypnerotomachia_ (1467); Heywood's
+_History of Women_ (1624); _Songe de Poliphile_ (1561); Bonnard's
+_Costumes of 12th, 13th, and l4th Centuries; Habiti Antichi_ (of
+which the designs are said to be by Titian)--printed Venice, (1664);
+_Cosmographia_, a history of the peoples of the world (1572); _Ciceronis
+Officia_ (1534), a blackletter folio, with woodcuts by Burgkmaier;
+_Jost Amman's Costumes_, with woodcuts coloured by hand; _Cento Novelle_
+(Venice, 1598); Francesco Barberino's _Documenti (d'Amore_ (Rome, 1640);
+_D�coda de Titolivio_, a Spanish blackletter, without date, but probably
+belonging to the 16th century. Besides these were various vellum-bound
+works relating to Greek and Roman allegorical and mythological subjects,
+and a number of scrap-books and portfolios containing photographs from
+nearly all the picture-galleries of Europe, but chiefly of the pictures
+of the early Florentine and Venetian schools, with an admixture of
+Spanish art. Of Michael Angelo's designs for the Sistine Chapel there
+was a fine set of photographs.
+
+These did not make up a very complete ancient artistic library, but
+Rossetti's collection of the poets was more full and valuable. There was
+a pretty little early edition of Petrarch, which appeared to have
+been presented first by John Philip Kemble to Polidori (Rossetti's
+grandfather) in 1812; then in 1853 by Polidori to his daughter,
+Rossetti's mother, Frances Rossetti; and by her in 1870 to her son. A
+splendid edition (1552) of Boccaccio's _Decamerone_ contained a number
+of valuable marginal notes, chiefly by Rossetti, the first being as
+follows:
+
+This volume contains 40 woodcuts besides many initial letters. The
+greater number, if not the whole, must certainly be by Holbein. I am
+in doubt as to the pictures heading the chapters, but think these most
+probably his, only following the usual style of such illustrations
+to Boccaccio, and consequently more Italianised than the others. The
+initial letters present for the most part games of strength or skill.
+
+There were various editions of Dante, including a very large folio
+edition of the _Commedia_, dated Florence, 1481, and the works of a
+number of Dante's contemporaries. Besides two or three editions of
+Shakspeare (the best being Dyce's, in 9 vols.), there were some of the
+Elizabethan dramatists. Coming to later poetry, I found a complete
+set of Gilfillan's _Poets_, in 45 vols. There was the curious little
+manuscript quarto (much like a shilling school-exercise book) labelled
+_Blake_, and this was, perhaps, by far the most valuable volume in the
+library. The contents and history of this book have already been given.
+
+There were two editions of Gilchrist's _Blake_; complete (or almost
+complete) sets of the works of William Morris and A. C. Swinburne,
+inscribed in the authors' autographs--the copy of _Atalanta in Calydon_
+being marked by the poet, "First copy; printed off before the dedication
+was in type." It may be remembered that Robert Brough translated
+B�ranger's songs, and dedicated his volume in affectionate terms
+to Rossetti. The presentation copy of this book bore the following
+inscription:--"To D. G. Rossetti, meaning in my _heart_ what I have
+tried to say in print. Et. B. Brough. 1856." There were also several
+presentation copies from Robert Browning, Coventry Patmore, W. B. Scott,
+Sir Henry Taylor, Aubrey de Vere, Tom Taylor, Westland Marston, F.
+Locker, A. O'Shaughnessy, Sir Theodore Martin; besides volumes bearing
+the names of nearly every well-known younger writer of prose or verse.
+
+Five volumes of _Modern Painters_, together with _The Seven Lamps of
+Architecture_ and the tract on _Pre-Raphaelitism_, bore the author's
+name and Rossetti's in Mr. Ruskin's autograph. There was a fine copy in
+ten volumes of Violet-le-Duc's _Dictionnaire de l'Architecture_, and
+also of the _Biographie G�n�rale_ in forty-six volumes, besides several
+dictionaries, concordances, and the like. There was also a copy of
+Fitzgerald's _Calderon_. Rossetti seemed to be a reader of Swedenborg,
+as White's book on the great mystic testified; also to have been at one
+time interested in the investigation of the phenomena of Spiritualism.
+Of one writer of fiction he must have been an ardent reader, for there
+were at least 100 volumes by Alexandre Dumas. German writers were
+conspicuously absent, Goethe's _Faust_ and Carlyle's translation of
+_Wilhelm, Meister_, being about the only notable German works in the
+library. Rossetti did not appear to be a collector of first editions,
+nor did it seem that he attached much importance to the mere outsides of
+his books, but of the insides he was master indeed. The impression left
+upon the mind after a rapid survey of the poet-painter's library was
+that he was a careful, but slow and thorough reader (as was seen by the
+marginal annotations which nearly every volume contained), and that,
+though very far from affected by bibliomania, he was not without pride
+in the possession of rare and valuable books.
+
+When I left the house at a late hour that morning Rossetti was not yet
+stirring, and so some months passed before I saw him again. If I had
+tried to formulate the idea--or say sensation--that possessed me at the
+moment, I think I should have said, in a word or two, that outside the
+air breathed freely. Within, the gloom, the mediaeval furniture, the
+brass censers, sacramental cups, lamps; and crucifixes conspired, I
+thought, to make the atmosphere heavy and unwholesome. As for the
+man himself who was the central spirit amidst these anachronistic
+environments, he had, if possible, attached me yet closer to himself by
+contact. Before this I had been attracted to him in admiration of his
+gifts: but now I was drawn to him, in something very like pity, for
+his isolation and suffering. Not that at this time he consciously
+made demand of much compassion, and least of all from me. Health was
+apparently whole with him, his spirits were good, and his energies were
+at their best. He had not yet known the full bitterness of the shadowed
+valley: not yet learned what it was to hunger for any cheerful society
+that would relieve him of the burden of the flesh. All that came later.
+Rossetti was one of the most magnetic of men, but it was not more his
+genius than his unhappiness that held certain of his friends by a spell.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+It was characteristic of Rossetti that he addressed me in the following
+terms probably before I had left his house: for the letter was, no
+doubt, written in that interval of sleeplessness which he had spoken of
+as his nightly visitant:
+
+I forgot to say--Don't, please, spread details as to story of _Rose
+Mary_. I don't want it to be stale or to get forestalled in the
+travelling of report from mouth to mouth. I hope it won't be too long
+before you visit town again,--I will not for an instant question that
+you would then visit me also.
+
+Six months or more intervened, however, before I was able to visit
+Rossetti again. In the meantime we corresponded as fully as before: the
+subject upon which we most frequently exchanged opinions being now the
+sonnet.
+
+     By-the-bye [he says], I cannot understand what you say of
+     Milton's, Keats's, and Coleridge's sonnets. The last, it is
+     true, was _always_ poor as a sonnetteer (I don't see much in
+     the _Autumnal Moon_). My own only exception to this verdict
+     (much as I adore Coleridge's genius) would be the ludicrous
+     sonnet on _The House that Jack built_, which is a
+     masterpiece in its way. I should not myself number the one
+     you mention of Keats's among his best half-dozen (many of
+     his are mere drafts, strange to say); and cannot at all
+     enter into your verdict on those of Milton, which seem to me
+     to be every one of exceptional excellence, though a few are
+     even finer than the rest, notably, of course, the one you
+     name. Pardon an egotistic sentence (in answer to what you
+     say so generously of _Lost Days_), if I express an opinion
+     that _Known in Vain_ and _Still-born Love_ may perhaps be
+     said to head the series in value, though _Lost Days_ might
+     be equally a favourite with me if I did not remember in what
+     but too opportune juncture it was wrung out of me. I have a
+     good number of sonnets for _The House of Life_ still in MS.,
+     which I have worked on with my best effort, and, I think,
+     will fully sustain their place. These and other things I
+     should like to show you whenever we meet again. The MS. vol.
+     I proposed to send is merely an old set of (chiefly)
+     trifles, about which I should like an opinion as to whether
+     any should be included in the future.
+
+I had spoken of Keats's sonnet beginning
+
+     To one who has been long in city pent,
+
+with its exquisite last lines--
+
+     E'en like the passage of an angel's tear
+     That falls through the clear ether silently,
+
+reminding one of a less spiritual figure--
+
+     Kings like a golden jewel
+     Down a golden stair.
+
+After his bantering me, as of old he had done, on the use of long and
+crabbed words, I hinted that he was in honour bound to agree at least
+with my disparaging judgment upon _Tetrachordon_, if only because of the
+use of words that would "have made Quintillian stare."
+
+I further instanced--
+
+     "Harry whose tuneful and well-measured song;" and
+     "Lawrence, of virtuous father virtuous son,"
+
+as examples of Milton at his weakest as a sonnet-writer. He replied:
+
+     I am sorry I must still differ somewhat from you about
+     Milton's sonnets. I think the one on _Tetrachordon_ a very
+     vigorous affair indeed. The one to Mr. H. Lawes I am half
+     disposed to give you, but not altogether--its close is
+     sweet. As to _Lawrence_, it is curious that my sister was
+     only the other day expressing to me a special relish for
+     this sonnet, and I do think it very fresh and wholesomely
+     relishing myself. It is an awful fact that sun, moon, or
+     candlelight once looked down on the human portent of Dr.
+     Johnson and Mrs. Hannah More convened in solemn conclave
+     above the outspread sonnets of Milton, with a meritorious
+     and considerate resolve of finding out for him "why they
+     were so bad." This is so stupendous a warning, that perhaps
+     it may even incline one to find some of them better than
+     they are.
+
+     Coming to Coleridge, I must confess at once that I never
+     meet in any collection with the sonnet on Schiller's
+     _Robbers_ without heading it at once with the words
+     "unconscionably bad." The habit has been a life-long one.
+     That you mention beginning--"Sweet mercy," etc., I have
+     looked for in the only Coleridge I have by me (my brother's
+     cheap edition, for all the faults of which _he_ is not at
+     all answerable), and do not find it there, nor have I it in
+     mind.
+
+     To pass to Keats. The ed. of 1868 contains no sonnet on the
+     Elgin Marbles. Is it in a later edition? Of course that on
+     Chapman's _Homer_ is supreme. It ought to be preceded {*} in
+     all editions by the one _To Homer_,
+
+          "Standing aloof in giant ignorance," etc.
+     which contains perhaps the greatest single line in Keats:
+
+          "There is a budding morrow in midnight."
+
+     * I pointed out that it was written later than the one on
+     Chapman's Homer (notwithstanding its first line) and
+     therefore should follow after it, not go before.
+
+     Other special favourites with me are--"Why did I laugh to-
+     night?"--" As Hermes once,"--"Time's sea hath been," and
+     the one _On the Flower and, Leaf_.
+
+     It is odd that several of these best ones seem to have been
+     early work, and rejected by Keats in his lifetime, while
+     some of those he printed are absolutely sorry drafts.
+
+     I had admired Coleridge's sonnet on Schiller's _Robbers_ for
+     the perhaps minor excellence of bringing vividly before the
+     mind the scenes it describes. If the sonnet is
+     unconscionably bad so perhaps is the play, the beautiful
+     scene of the setting sun notwithstanding. Eventually,
+     however, I abandoned my belligerent position as to Milton's
+     sonnets: the army of authorities I found ranged against the
+     modest earth-works within which I had entrenched myself must
+     of itself have made me quail. My utmost contention had been
+     that Milton wrote the most impassioned sonnet (_Avenge, O
+     Lord_), the two most nobly pathetic sonnets (_When I
+     consider_ and _Methought I saw_), and one of the poorest
+     sonnets (_Harry, whose tuneful_, etc.) in English poetry.
+
+     At this time (September 1880) Mr. J. Ashcroft Noble
+     published an essay on _The Sonnet in England_ in _The
+     Contemporary Review_, and relating thereto Rossetti wrote:
+
+     I have just been reading Mr. Noble's article on the sonnet.
+     As regards my own share in it, I can only say that it greets
+     me with a gratifying ray of generous recognition. It is all
+     the more pleasant to me as finding  a place in the very
+     Review which years ago opened its pages to a pseudonymous
+     attack on my poems and on myself. I see a passage in the
+     article which seems meant to indicate the want of such a
+     work on the sonnet as you are wishing to supply. I only
+     trust that you may do so, and that Mr. Noble may find a
+     field for continued poetic criticism. I am very proud to
+     think that, after my small and solitary book has been a good
+     many years published and several years out of print, it yet
+     meets with such ardent upholding by young and sincere men.
+
+     With the verdicts given throughout the article, I generally
+     sympathise, but not with the unqualified homage to
+     Wordsworth. A reticence almost invariably present is fatal
+     in my eyes to the highest pretensions on behalf of his
+     sonnets. Reticence is but a poor sort of muse, nor is
+     tentativeness (so often to be traced in his work) a good
+     accompaniment in music. Take the sonnet on _Toussaint
+     L'Ouverture_ (in my opinion his noblest, and very noble
+     indeed) and study (from Main's note) the lame and fumbling
+     changes made in various editions of the early lines, which
+     remain lame in the end. Far worse than this, study the
+     relation of the closing lines of his famous sonnet _The
+     World is too much with us_, etc., to a passage in Spenser,
+     and say whether plagiarism was ever more impudent or
+     manifest (again I derive from Main's excellent exposition of
+     the point), and then consider whether a bard was likely to
+     do this once and yet not to do it often. Primary vital
+     impulse was surely not fully developed in his muse.
+
+     I will venture to say that I wish my sister's sonnet work
+     had met with what I consider the justice due to it. Besides
+     the unsurpassed quality (in my opinion) of her best sonnets,
+     my sister has proved her poetic importance by solid and
+     noble inventive work of many kinds, which I should be proud
+     indeed to reckon among my life's claims.
+
+     I have a great weakness myself for many of Tennyson-Turner's
+     sonnets, though of course what Mr. Noble says of them is in
+     the main true, and he has certainly quoted the very finest
+     one, which has a more fervent appeal for me than I could
+     easily derive from Wordsworth in almost any case.
+
+     Will you give my thanks to Mr. Noble for his frank and
+     outspoken praise?
+
+     Let me hear of your doings and intentions.
+
+     Ever sincerely yours.
+
+
+Three names notably omitted in the article are those of Dobell, W. B.
+Scott, and Swinburne.
+
+The allusion in the foregoing letter to the work on the Sonnet which
+I was aiming to supply, bears reference to the anthology subsequently
+published under the title of _Sonnets of Three Centuries_. My first
+idea was simply to write a survey of the art and history of the
+sonnet, printing only such examples as might be embraced by my critical
+comments. Rossetti's generous sympathy was warmly engaged in this
+enterprise.
+
+     It would really warm me up much [he writes] to know of
+     _your_ editing a sonnet book You would have my best
+     cooperation as to suggesting examples, but I certainly think
+     that English sonnets (original and exceptionally translated
+     ones, the latter only _perhaps_) should be the sole scheme.
+     Curiously enough, some one wrote me the other day as to a
+     projected series of living sonneteers (other collections
+     being only of those preceding our time). I have half
+     committed myself to contributing, but not altogether as yet.
+     The name of the projector, S. Waddington, is new to me, and
+     I don't know who is to publish.... Really you ought to do
+     the sonnet-book you aspire to do. I know but of one London
+     critic (Theodore Watts) whom I should consider the leading
+     man for such a purpose, and I have tried to incite him to it
+     so often that I know now he won't do it; but I have always
+     meant _a complete_ series in which the dead poets must, of
+     course, predominate. As to a series of the living only, I
+     told you of a Mr. Waddington who seems engaged on such a
+     supplementary scheme. What his gifts for it may be I know
+     not, but I suppose he knows it is in requisition. However,
+     there need not be but one such if you felt your hand in for
+     it. His view happens to be also (as you suggest) about 160
+     sonnets. In reply to your query, I certainly think there
+     must be 20 living writers (male and female--my sister a
+     leader, I consider) who have written good sonnets such as
+     would afford an interesting and representative selection,
+     though assuredly not such as would all take the rank of
+     classics by any means. The number of sonnets now extant,
+     written by poets who did not exist as such a dozen years
+     ago, I believe to be almost infinite, and in sufficiently
+     numerous instances good, however derivative. One younger
+     poet among them, Philip Marston, has written many sonnets
+     which yield to few or none by any poet whatever; but he has
+     printed such a large number in the aggregate, and so unequal
+     one with the other, that the great ones are not to be found
+     by opening at random. "How are they (the poets) to be
+     approached?--" you innocently ask. Ye heavens! how does the
+     cat's-meat-man approach Grimalkin?--and what is that
+     relation in life when compared to the _rapport_ established
+     between the living bard and the fellow-creature who is
+     disposed to cater to his caterwauling appetite for
+     publicity? However, to be serious, I must at least exonerate
+     the bard, I am sure, from any desire to appropriate an
+     "interest in the proceeds." There are some, I feel certain,
+     to whom the collector might say with a wink, "What are you
+     going to stand?"
+
+I do not myself think that a collection of sonnets inserted at intervals
+in an essay is a good form for the purpose. Such a book is from one
+chief point a book of instantaneous reference,--it would only, perhaps,
+be read _through_ once in a lifetime. For this purpose a well-indexed
+current series is best, with any desirable essay prefixed and notes
+affixed.... I once conceived of a series, to be entitled,
+
+<center>
+
+THE ENGLISH CASTALY: A QUINTESSENCE:
+
+BEING A COLLECTION OF ALL THAT IS BEST IN ALL ENGLISH POETS,
+
+EXCEPTING WORKS OF GREAT LENGTH.
+
+</center>
+
+I still think this a good idea, but, of course, it would be an extensive
+undertaking.
+
+Later on, he wrote:
+
+     I have thought of a title for your book. What think you of
+     this?
+
+<center>
+
+A SONNET SEQUENCE
+
+FROM ELDER TO MODERN WORK,
+
+WITH FIFTY HITHERTO UNPRINTED SONNETS BY
+
+LIVING WRITERS.
+
+</center>
+
+     That would not be amiss. Tell me if you think of using the
+     title _A Sonnet Sequence_, as otherwise I might use it in
+     the _House of Life_.... What do you think of this
+     alternative title:
+
+<center>
+
+THE ENGLISH SONNET MUSE
+
+FROM ELIZABETH'S REIGN TO VICTORIA'S.
+
+</center>
+
+     I think _Castalia_ much too euphuistic, and though I
+     shouldn't like the book to be called simply still I have a
+     great prejudice against very florid titles for such
+     gatherings. _Treasury_ has been sadly run upon.
+
+I did not like _Sonnet Sequence_ for such a collection, and relinquished
+the title; moreover, I had had from the first a clearly defined scheme
+in mind, carrying its own inevitable title, which was in due course
+adopted. I may here remark that I never resisted any idea of Rossetti's
+at the moment of its inception, since resistance only led to a temporary
+outburst of self-assertion on his part. He was a man of so much
+impulse,--impulse often as violent as lawless--that to oppose him merely
+provoked anger to no good purpose, for as often as not the position
+at first adopted with so much pertinacity was afterwards silently
+abandoned, and your own aims quietly acquiesced in. On this subject of a
+title he wrote a further letter, which is interesting from more than one
+point of view:
+
+     I don't like _Garland_ at all C. Patmore collected a
+     _Children's Garland._ I think
+
+<center>
+
+ENGLISH SONNET'S
+
+PRESENT AND PAST, WITH--ETC.,
+
+</center>
+
+     would be a good title. I think I prefer _Present and Past_,
+     or _of the P. and P.,_ to _New and Old_ for your purpose;
+     but I own I am partly influenced by the fact that I have
+     settled to call my own vol. _Poems New and Old_, and don't
+     want it to get staled; but I really do think the other at
+     least as good for your purpose--perhaps more dignified.
+
+Again, in reply to a proposal of my own, he wrote:
+
+     I think _Sonnets of the Century_ an excellent idea and
+     title. I must say a mass of Wordsworth over again, like
+     Main's, is a little disheartening,--still the _best_
+     selection from him is what one wants. There is some book
+     called _A Century of Sonnets_, but this, I suppose, would
+     not matter....
+
+     I think sometimes of your sonnet-book, and have formed
+     certain views. I really would not in your place include old
+     work at all: it would be but a scanty gathering, and I feel
+     certain that what is really in requisition is a supplement
+     to Main, containing living writers (printed and un-printed)
+     put together under their authors' names (not separately) and
+     rare gleanings from those more recently dead.
+
+I fear I did not attach importance to this decision, for I now knew my
+correspondent too well to rely upon his being entirely in the same mind
+for long. Hence I was not surprised to receive the following a day or
+two later:
+
+     I lately had a conversation with Watts about your sonnet-
+     book, and find his views to be somewhat different from what
+     I had expressed, and I may add I think now he is right. He
+     says there should be a very careful selection of the elder
+     sonnets and of everything up to present century. I think he
+     is right.
+
+The fact is, that almost from the first I had taken a view similar to
+Mr. Watts's as to the design of my book, and had determined to call the
+anthology by the title it now bears. On one occasion, however, I acted
+rather without judgment in sending Rossetti a synopsis of certain
+critical tests formulated by Mr. Watts in a letter of great power and
+value.
+
+In the letter in question Mr. Watts seemed to be setting himself to
+confute some extremely ill-considered remarks made in a certain quarter
+upon the structure of the sonnet, where (following Macaulay) the critic
+says that there exists no good reason for requiring that even the
+conventional limit as to length should be observed, and that the only
+use in art of the legitimate model is to "supply a poet with something
+to do when his invention fails." I confess to having felt no little
+amazement that one so devoid of a perception of the true function of the
+sonnet should have been considered a proper person to introduce a great
+sonnet-writer; and Mr. Watts (who, however, made no mention of the
+writer) clearly demonstrated that the true sonnet has the foundation
+of its structure in a fixed metrical law, and hence, that as it is
+impossible (as Keats found out for himself) to improve upon the accepted
+form, that model--known as the Petrarchian--should, with little or no
+variation, be worked upon. Rossetti took fire, however, from a mistaken
+notion that Mr. Watts's canons, as given in the letter in question,
+and merely reported by me, were much more inflexible than they really
+proved.
+
+     Sonnets of mine _could not appear_ in any book which
+     contained such rigid rules as to rhyme, as are contained in
+     Watts's letter. I neither follow them, nor agree with them
+     as regards the English language. Every sonnet-writer should
+     show full capability of conforming to them in many
+     instances, but never to deviate from them in English must
+     pinion both thought and diction, and, (mastery once proved)
+     a series gains rather than loses by such varieties as do not
+     lessen the only absolute aim--that of beauty. The English
+     sonnet too much tampered with becomes a sort of bastard
+     madrigal. Too much, invariably restricted, it degenerates
+     into a Shibboleth.
+
+     Dante's sonnets (in reply to your question--not as part of
+     the above point) vary in arrangement. I never for a moment
+     thought of following in my book the rhymes of each
+     individual sonnet.
+
+     If sonnets of mine remain admissible, I should prefer
+     printing the two _On Cassandra to The Monochord_ and _Wine
+     of Circe_.
+
+     I would not be too anxious, were I you, about anything in
+     choice of sonnets except the brains and the music.
+
+Again he wrote:
+
+     I talked to Watts about his letter. He seems to agree with
+     me as to advisable variation of form in preference to
+     transmuting valuable thought. It would not be afc all found
+     that my best sonnets are always in the mere form which I
+     think the best. The question with me is regulated by what I
+     have to say. But in truth, if I have a distinction as a
+     sonnet-writer, it is that I never admit a sonnet which is
+     not fully on the level of every other.... Again, as to this
+     blessed question, though no one ever took more pleasure in
+     continually using the form I prefer when not interfering
+     with thought, to insist on it would after a certain point be
+     ruin to common sense.
+
+     As to what you say of _The One Hope_--it is fully equal to
+     the very best of my sonnets, or I should not have wound up
+     the series with it. But the fact is, what is peculiar
+     chiefly in the series is, that scarcely one is worse than
+     any other. You have much too great a habit of speaking of a
+     special octave, sestette, or line. Conception, my boy,
+     _fundamental brainwork_, that is what makes the difference
+     in all art. Work your metal as much as you like, but first
+     take care that it is gold and worth working. A Shakspearean
+     sonnet is better than the most perfect in form, because
+     Shakspeare wrote it.
+
+     As for Drayton, of course his one incomparable sonnet is the
+     _Love-Parting_. That is almost the best in the language, if
+     not quite. I think I have now answered queries, and it is
+     late. Good-night!
+
+Rossetti had somewhat mistaken the scope of the letter referred to,
+and when he came to know exactly what was intended, I found him in warm
+agreement with the views therein taken. I have said at an earlier stage
+that Rossetti's instinct for what was good in poetry was unfailing,
+whatever the value of his opinions on critical principles, and hence I
+felt naturally anxious to have the benefit of his views on certain of
+the elder writers. He said:
+
+     I am sorry I am no adept in elder sonnet literature. Many of
+     Donne's are remarkable--no doubt you glean some. None of
+     Shakspeare's is more indispensable than the wondrous one on
+     _Last_ (129). Hartley Coleridge's finest is
+
+          "If I have sinned in act, I may repent."
+
+     There is a fine one by Isaac Williams, evidently on the
+     death of a worldly man, and he wrote other good ones. To
+     return to the old, I think Stillingfleet's _To Williamson_
+     very fine....
+
+     I would like to send you a list of my special favourites
+     among Shakspeare's sonnets--viz.:--
+
+     15, 27, 29, 30, 36, 44, 45, 49, 50, 52, 55, 56, 59, 61, 62,
+     64, 65, 66, 68, 71, 73, 76, 77, 90, 93, 94, 97, 98, 99, 102,
+     107, 110, 116, 117, 119, 120, 123, 129, 135, 136, 138, 144,
+     145.
+
+     I made the selection long ago, and of course love them in
+     varying degrees.
+
+     There should be an essential reform in the printing of
+     Shakspeare's sonnets. After sonnet 125 should occur the
+     words _End of Part I_. The couplet-piece, numbered 126,
+     should be called _Epilogue to Part I._. Then, before 127,
+     should be printed Part II. After 152, should be put End of
+     Part II.--and the two last sonnets should be called Epilogue
+     to Part II. About these two last I have a theory of my own.
+
+     Did you ever see the excellent remarks on these sonnets in
+     my brother's _Lives of Famous Poets?_ I think a simple point
+     he mentions (for first time) fixes Pembroke clearly as the
+     male friend. I am glad you like his own two fine sonnets. I
+     wish he would write more such. By the bye, you speak with
+     great scorn of the closing couplet in sonnets. I do not
+     certainly think that form the finest, but I do think this
+     and every variety desirable in a series, and have often used
+     it myself. I like your letters on sonnets; write on all
+     points in question. The two last of Shakspeare's sonnets
+     seem to me to have a very probable (and rather elaborate)
+     meaning never yet attributed to them. Some day, when I see
+     you, we will talk it over. Did you ever see a curious book
+     by one Brown (I don't mean Armitage Brown) on Shakspeare's
+     sonnets? By the bye, he is not the source of my notion as
+     above, but a matter of fact he names helps in it. I never
+     saw Massey's book on the subject, but fancy his views and
+     Brown's are somewhat allied. You should look at what my
+     brother says, which is very concise and valuable. I hope I
+     am not omitting to answer you in any essential point, but my
+     writing-table is a chaos into which your last letters have,
+     for the moment, sunk beyond recovery.
+
+     I consider the foregoing, perhaps, the most valuable of
+     Rossetti's letters to me. I cannot remember that we ever
+     afterwards talked over the two last sonnets of Shakspeare;
+     if we did so, the meaning attached to them by him did not
+     fix itself very definitely upon my memory.
+
+     In explanation of my alleged dislike of the closing couplet,
+     I may say that a rhymed couplet at the close of a sonnet has
+     an effect upon my ear similar to that produced by the
+     couplets at the ends of some of the acts of Shakspeare's
+     plays, which were in many instances interpolated by the
+     actors to enable them to make emphatic exits.
+
+     I must now group together a number of short notes on
+     sonnets:
+
+     I think Blanco White's sonnet difficult to overrate in
+     _thought_--probably in this respect unsurpassable, but easy
+     to overrate as regards its workmanship. Of course there is
+     the one fatally disenchanting line:
+
+          While fly and leaf and insect stood revealed.
+
+     The poverty of vision which could not see at a glance that
+     fly and insect were one and the same, is, as you say, enough
+     to account for its being the writer's only sonnet (there is
+     one more however which I don't know).
+
+     I'll copy you overpage a sonnet which I consider a very fine
+     one, but which may be said to be quite unknown. It is by
+     Charles Whitehead, who wrote the very admirable and
+     exceptional novel of _Richard Savage_, published somewhere
+     about 1840.
+
+          Even as yon lamp within my vacant room
+             With arduous flame disputes the doubtful night,
+             And can with its involuntary light
+          But lifeless things that near it stand illume;
+          Yet all the while it doth itself consume,
+             And ere the sun hath reached his morning height
+             With courier beams that greet the shepherd's sight,
+          There where its life arose must be its tomb:--
+          So wastes my life away, perforce confined
+             To common things, a limit to its sphere,
+          It gleams on worthless trifles undesign'd,
+             With fainter ray each hour imprison'd here.
+          Alas to know that the consuming mind
+             Must leave its lamp cold ere the sun appear!
+
+     I am sure you will agree with me in admiring _that_. I quote
+     from memory, and am not sure that I have given line 6 quite
+     correctly....
+
+     I have just had Blanco White's only other sonnet (_On being
+     called an Old Man at 50_) copied out for you. I do certainly
+     think it ought to go in, though no better than so-so, as you
+     say. But it is just about as good as the former one, but for
+     the leading and splendid thought in the latter. Both are but
+     proseman's diction.
+
+     There is a sonnet of Chas. Wells's _On Chaucer_ which is not
+     worthy of its writer, but still you should have it. It
+     occurs among some prefatory tributes in _Chaucer
+     Modernised_, edited by E. H. Home. I don't know how you are
+     to get a copy, but the book is in the British Museum Reading
+     Room. The sonnet is signed C. W. only.
+
+     The sonnet by Wells seemed to me in every respect poor, and
+     as it was no part of my purpose (as an admirer of Wells) to
+     advertise what the poet could not do, I determined--against
+     Rossetti's judgment--not to print the sonnet.
+
+     You certainly, in my opinion, ought to print Wells's sonnet.
+     Certainly nothing so disjointed ever gave itself the name
+     before, but it ought to be available for reference, and I do
+     not agree with you in considering it weak in any sense
+     except that of structure.
+
+     There is a sonnet by Ebenezer Jones, beginning "I never
+     wholly feel that summer is high," which, though very jagged,
+     has decided merit to warrant its insertion.
+
+     As for Tennyson, he seems to have given leave for a sonnet
+     to appear in Main's book. Why not in yours? But I have long
+     ceased to know him, nor is any friend of mine in
+     communication with him.... My brother has written in his
+     time a few sonnets. Two of them I think very fine--
+     especially the one called _Shelley's Heart_, which he has
+     lately worked upon again with immense advantage.... You do
+     not tell me from whom you have received sonnets. The reason
+     which prevents my coming forward, in such a difficulty, with
+     a new sonnet of my own, is this:--which indeed you have
+     probably surmised: I know nothing would gratify malevolence,
+     after the controversy which ensued on your lecture, more
+     than to be able to assert, however falsely, that we had been
+     working in concert all along, that you were known to me from
+     the first, and that your advocacy had no real
+     spontaneity.... When you first entered on the subject, and
+     wrote your lecture, you were a perfect stranger to me, and
+     that fact greatly enhanced my pleasure in its enthusiastic
+     tone. I hope sincerely that we may have further and close
+     opportunities of intercourse, but should like whatever you
+     may write of me to come from the old source of intellectual
+     affinity only. That you should think the subject worthy of
+     further labour is a pleasure to me, but I only trust it may
+     not be a disadvantage to your book in unfriendly eyes,
+     particularly if that view happened to be the proposed
+     publisher's, in which case I should much prefer that this
+     section of your work were withdrawn for a more propitious
+     occasion.... I am very glad Brown is furthering your sonnet-
+     book--he knows so many bards. Of course if I were you, I
+     should keep an eye on the mouths even of gift-horses; but
+     were a creditable stud to be trotted out, of course I should
+     be willing; as were I one among many, the objection I noted
+     would not exist. I do not mean for a moment to say that many
+     very fine sonnets might not be obtained from poets not yet
+     known or not widely known; but known names would be the
+     things to parry the difficulty.
+
+Later he wrote:
+
+     As you know, I want to contribute to your volume if I can do
+     so without fear of the consequences hinted at in a former
+     letter as likely to ensue, so I now enclose a sonnet of my
+     own. If you are out in March 1881, you may be before my new
+     edition, but I am getting my stock together. Not a word of
+     this however, as it mustn't get into gossip paragraphs at
+     present. _The House of Life_ is now a hundred sonnets--all
+     lyrics being removed. Besides this series, I have forty-five
+     sonnets extra. I think, as you are willing, I shall use the
+     title I sent you--_A Sonnet Sequence_. I fancy the
+     alternative title would be briefer and therefore better as
+
+<center>
+
+OUR SONNET-MUSE
+
+PROM ELIZABETH TO VICTORIA
+
+</center>
+
+I could not be much concerned about the unwillingness to give me a new
+sonnet which Rossetti at first exhibited, for I knew full well that
+sooner or later the sonnet would come. Not that I recognised in him the
+faintest scintillation of the affectation so common among authors as
+to the publication of work. But the fear of any appearance of collusion
+between himself and his critics was, as he said, a bugbear that
+constantly haunted him. Owing to this, a stranger often stood a better
+chance of securing his ready and open co-operation than the most
+intimate of friends. I frequently yielded to his desire that in anything
+that I might write his name should not be mentioned--too frequently
+by far, to my infinite vexation at the time, and now to my deep and
+ineradicable regret. The sonnet-book out of which arose much of the
+correspondence printed in this chapter, contains in its preface and
+notes hardly an allusion to him, and yet he was, in my judgment, out of
+all reach and sight, the greatest sonnet-writer of his time. The sonnet
+first sent was _Pride of Youth_, but as this formed part of _The House
+of Life_ series, it was withdrawn, and _Raleigh's Cell in the Tower_
+was substituted The following hitherto unpublished sonnet was also
+contributed but withdrawn at the last moment, because of its being out
+of harmony with the sonnets selected to accompany it:
+
+               ON CERTAIN ELIZABETHAN REVIVALS.
+
+          O ruff-embastioned vast Elizabeth,
+             Bush to these bushel-bellied casks of wine,
+             Home-growth, 'tis true, but rank as turpentine,--
+          What would we with such skittle-plays at death %
+          Say, must we watch these brawlers' brandished lathe,
+             Or to their reeking wit our ears incline,
+             Because all Castaly flowed crystalline
+          In gentle Shakspeare's modulated breath!
+          What! must our drama with the rat-pit vie,
+             Nor the scene close while one is left to kill!
+                Shall this be poetry % And thou--thou--man
+                Of blood, thou cannibalic Caliban,
+          What shall be said to thee?--a poet?--Fie!
+             "An honourable murderer, if you will"
+
+     I mentioned to you [he says] William Davies, author of
+     _Songs of a Wayfarer_ (by the bye, another man has since
+     adopted his title). He has many excellent sonnets, and is a
+     valued friend of mine. I shall send you, on his behalf, a
+     copy of the book for selection of what you may please.... It
+     is very unequal, but the best truly excellent. The sonnets
+     are numerous, and some good, though the best work in the
+     book is not among them. There are two poems--_The Garden_,
+     and another called, I think, _On a dried-up Spring_, which
+     are worthy of the most fastidious collections. Many of the
+     poems are unnamed, and the whole has too much of a Herrick
+     air. . . .
+
+     It is quite refreshing to find you so pleased with my good
+     friend Davies's book, and I wish he were in London, as I
+     would have shown him what you say, which I know would have
+     given him pleasure. He is a man who suffers much from moods
+     of depression, in spite of his philosophic nature. I have
+     marked fifty pieces of different kinds throughout his book,
+     and of these twenty-nine are sonnets. Had those fifty been
+     alone printed, Davies would now be remembered and not
+     forgotten: but all poets now-a-days are redundant except
+     Tennyson. ...
+
+     I am this evening writing to Davies, who is in Rome, and
+     could not resist enclosing what you say, with so much
+     experimental appreciativeness of his book, and of his
+     intention to fill it with moral sunshine. I am sure he 'll
+     send a new sonnet if he has one, but I fancy his bardic day
+     is over. I should think he was probably not subject to
+     melancholy when he wrote the _Wayfarer_. However, he tells
+     me that his spirits have improved in Italy. One other little
+     book of Herrickian verse he has written, called _The
+     Shepherd!s Garden_, but there are no sonnets in it. Besides
+     this, he published a volume containing a record of travel of
+     a very interesting kind, and called _The Pilgrimage of the
+     Tiber_. This is well known. It is illustrated, many of the
+     drawings being by himself, for he is quite as much painter
+     as poet. He also wrote in _The Quarterly Review_ an article
+     on the sonnet (I should think about 1870 or so), and, a
+     little later, one which raised great wrath, on the English
+     School of Painting. These I have not seen. He "lacks
+     advancement," however; having fertile powers and little
+     opportunity, and being none the luckier (I think) for a
+     small independence which keeps off _compulsion_ to work,
+     though of willingness he has abundance in many directions.
+
+     There is an admirable but totally unknown living poet named
+     Dixon. I will send you two small vols, of his which he gave
+     me long ago, but please take good care of them, and return
+     them as soon as done with. I value them highly. I forgot
+     till to-day that he had written any sonnets, but I see there
+     are three in one vol. and one in another. I have marked my
+     two favourites. He should certainly be represented in your
+     book. If I live, I mean to write something about him in some
+     quarter when I can. His finest passages are as fine as any
+     living man can do. He was a canon of Carlisle Cathedral, and
+     at present has a living somewhere. If you wanted to ask him
+     for an original sonnet, you might mention my name, and
+     address him at Carlisle with _Please forward_. Of course he
+     is a Rev.
+
+     You will be sorry to hear that Davies has abandoned the hope
+     of producing a new sonnet to his own satisfaction. I have
+     again, however, urged him to the onslaught, and told him how
+     deserving you are of his efforts.
+
+     Swinburne, who is a vast admirer of my sister's, thinks the
+     _Advent_ perhaps the noblest of all her poems, and also
+     specially loves the _Passing Away_. I do not know that I
+     quite agree with your decided preference for the two sonnets
+     of hers you signalise,--the _World_ is very fine, but the
+     other, _Dead before Death_, a little sensational for her. I
+     think _After Death_ one of her noblest, and the one _After
+     Communion_. In my own view, the greatest of all her poems is
+     that on France after the siege--_To-Day for Me_. A very
+     splendid piece of feminine ascetic passion is _The Convent
+     Threshold_.
+
+     I have run the sonnet you like, _St. Luke the Painter_, into
+     a sequence with two more not yet printed, and given the
+     three a general title of _Old and New Art_, as well as
+     special titles to each. I shall annex them to _The House of
+     Life_.
+
+     Have you ever read Vaughan? He resembles Donne a good deal
+     as to quaintness, but with a more emotional personality.
+
+     I have altered the last line of octave in _Lost Days_. It
+     now runs--
+
+          "The undying throats of Hell, athirst alway."
+
+     I always had it in my mind to make a change here, as the
+     _in_ standing in the line in its former reading clashed with
+     _in_ occurring in the previous line. I have done what I
+     think is a prime sonnet on the murdered Czar, which I
+     enclose, but don't show it to a soul.
+
+     Theodore Watts is going to print a very fine sonnet of his
+     own in _The Athen�um_. It is the first verse he ever put in
+     print, though he wrote much (when a very young man). Tell me
+     how you like it. I think he is destined to shine in that
+     class of poetry.
+
+     I knew you must like Watts's sonnets. They are splendid
+     affairs. I am not sure that I agree with you in liking the
+     first the better of the two: the second (_Natura Maligna_)
+     is perhaps the deeper and finer. I have asked Watts to give
+     you a new sonnet, and I think perhaps he will do so, or at
+     all events give you permission to use those he has printed.
+     He has just come into the room, and says he would like to
+     hear from you on the subject.
+
+     From one rather jocular sentence in your note I judge you
+     may include some sonnets of your own. I see no possible
+     reason why you should not. You are really now, at your
+     highest, among our best sonnet-writers, and have written two
+     or three sonnets that yield to few or none whatever. I am
+     forced, however, to request that you will not put in the one
+     referring to myself, from my constant bugbear of any
+     appearance of collusion. That sonnet is a very fine one--my
+     brother was showing it me again the other day. It is not my
+     personal gratification alone, though that is deep, because I
+     know you are sincere, which leads me to the conclusion that
+     it is your best, and very fine indeed. I think your
+     Cumberland sonnet admirable. The sonnet on Byron is
+     extremely musical in flow and the symbolic scenery of
+     exceptional excellence. The view taken is the question with
+     me. Byron's vehement directness, at its best, is a lasting
+     lesson: and, dubious monument as _Don Juan_ may be, it
+     towers over the century. Of course there is truth in what
+     you say; but _ought_ it to be the case? and is it the case
+     in any absolute sense? You deal frankly with your sonnets,
+     and do not shrink from radical change. I think that on
+     Oliver much better than when I saw it before. The opening
+     phrases of both octave and sestette are very fine; but the
+     second quatrain and the second terzina, though with a
+     quality of beauty, both seem somewhat to lack distinctness.
+     The word _rivers_ cannot be used with elision--the v is a
+     hard pebble in the flow, and so are the closing consonants.
+     You must put up with _streams_ if you keep the line.
+
+     You should have Bailey's dedicatory sonnet in _Festus_.
+
+     I am enclosing a fine sonnet by William Bell Scott, which I
+     wished him to let me send you for your book. It has not yet
+     been printed. I think I heard of some little chaffy matter
+     between him and you, but, doubtless, you have virtually
+     forgotten all about it. I must say frankly that I think the
+     day when you made the speech he told me of must have been
+     rather a wool-gathering one with you.... I suppose you know
+     that Scott has written a number of fine sonnets contained in
+     his vol of _Poems_ published about 1875, I think.
+
+     I directed the attention of Mr. Waddington (whom, however, I
+     don't know personally) to a most noble sonnet by Fanny
+     Kemble, beginning, "Art thou already weary of the way?" He
+     has put it in, and several others of hers, but she is very
+     unequal, and I don't know if the others should be there, but
+     you should take the one in question. It sadly wants new
+     punctuation, being vilely printed just as I first saw it
+     when a boy in some twopenny edition.
+
+     In a memoir of Gilchrist, appended now by his widow to the
+     _Life of Blake_, there is a sonnet by G., perhaps
+     interesting enough, as being exceptional, for you to ask for
+     it; but I don't advise you, if you don't think it worth.
+
+     I have received from Mrs. Meynell, a sister of Eliz.
+     Thompson, the painter, a most genuine little book of poems
+     containing some sonnets of true spiritual beauty. I must
+     send it you.
+
+     This book had just then been introduced to Rossetti with
+     much warmth of praise by Mr. Watts, and he took to it
+     vastly.
+
+This closes Rossetti's interesting letters on sonnet literature. In
+reprinting his first volume of _Poems_ he had determined to remove
+the sonnets of _The House of Life_ to the new volume of _Ballads and
+Sonnets_, and fill the space with the fragment of a poem written in
+youth, and now called _The Bride's Prelude_. He sent me a proof. The
+reader will remember that as a narrative fragment it is less
+remarkable for striking incident (though never failing of interest
+and picturesqueness) than for a slow and psychical development which
+ultimately gained a great hold of the sympathies. The poem leaves behind
+it a sense as of a sultry day. Judging first of its merits as a song
+(using the word in its broad and simple sense), the poem flows on the
+tongue with unbroken sweetness and with a variety of cadence and light
+and shade of melody which might admit of its pursuing its meanderings
+through five times its less than 50 pages, and still keeping one's
+senses awake to the constantly recurring advent of new and pleasing
+literary forms. The story is a striking one, with a great wealth of
+highly effective incident,--notably the episode of the card-playing,
+and of the father striking down the sword which Raoul turns against the
+breast of the bride. Almost equally memorable are the scenes in which
+the lover appears, and the occasional interludes of incident in which,
+between the pauses of the narrative, the bridegroom's retinue are heard
+sporting in the courtyard without.
+
+The whole atmosphere of the poem is saturated in a medievalism of spirit
+to which no lapse of modernism does violence, and the spell of romance
+which comes with that atmosphere of the middle ages is never broken, but
+preserved in the minutest most matter-of-fact details, such as the bowl
+of water that stood amidst flowers, and in which the sister Amelotte
+"slid a cup" and offered it to Aloyse to drink. But the one great charm
+of the poem lies in its subtle and most powerful psychical analysis,
+seen foreshadowed in the first mention of the bride sitting in the
+shade, but first felt strongly when she begs her sister to pray, and
+again when she tells how, at God's hint, she had whispered something of
+the whole tale to her sister who slept
+
+The dread introspection pictured after the sin is in the highest degree
+tragic, and affects one like remorse in its relentlessness, although
+less remorse than fear of discovery. The sickness of the following
+condition, with its yearnings, longings, dizziness, is very nobly
+done, and delicate as is the theme, and demanding a touch of unerring
+strength, yet lightness, the part of the poem concerned with it contains
+certain of the most beautiful and stirring things. The madness (for it
+is not less than such) in which at the sea-side, believing Urscelyn to
+be lost, the bride tells the whole tale, whilst her curse laughed within
+her to see the amazement and anger of her brothers and of her father,
+is doubtless true enough to the frenzied state of her mind; but my
+sympathies go out less to that part of the poem than to the subsequent
+part, in which the bride-mother is described as leaning along in thought
+after her child, till tears, not like a wedded girl's, fall among her
+curls. Highly dramatic, too, is the passage in which she fears to curse
+the evil men whose evil hands have taken her child, lest from evil lips
+the curse should be a blessing.
+
+The characterisation seemed to be highly powerful, and, so far as it
+went, finely contrasted. I could almost have wished that the love for
+which the bride suffers so much had been more dwelt upon, and Urscelyn
+had been made somehow more worthy of such love and sacrifice. The only
+point in which the poem struck me, after mature reflection, as less
+admirable than certain others of the author's, lay in the circumstance
+that the narrative moves slowly, but, of course, it should be remembered
+that the poem is one of emotion, not incident. There are most magical
+flashes of imagery in the poem, notably in the passage beginning
+
+     Her thought, long stagnant, stirred by speech,
+        Gave her a sick recoil;
+     As, dip thy fingers through the green
+     That masks a pool, where they have been,
+     The naked depth is black between.
+
+Rossetti wrote a valuable letter on his scheme for the completion of
+_The Bride's Prelude_:
+
+     I was much pleased with your verdict on _The Bride's
+     Prelude_. I think the poem is saved by its picturesqueness,
+     but that otherwise the story up to the point reached is too
+     purely repellent. I have the sequel quite clear in my mind,
+     and in it the mere passionate frailty of Aloyse's first love
+     would be followed by a true and noble love, rendered
+     calamitous by Urscelyn, who then (having become a powerful
+     soldier of fortune) solicits the hand of Aloyse. Thus the
+     horror which she expresses against him to her sister on the
+     bridal morning would be fully justified. Of course, Aloyse
+     would confess her fault to her second lover whose love
+     would, nevertheless, endure. The poem would gain so greatly
+     by this sequel that I suppose I must set to and finish it
+     one day, old as it is. I suppose it would be doubled, but
+     hardly more. I hate long poems.
+
+     I quite think the card-playing passage the best thing--as a
+     unit--in the poem: but your opinion encourages my own, that
+     it fails nowhere of good material. It certainly moves slowly
+     as you say, and this is quite against the rule I follow. But
+     here was no life condensed in an episode; but a story which
+     had necessarily to be told step by step, and a situation
+     which had unavoidably to be anatomised. If it is not
+     unworthy to appear with my best things, that is all I hope
+     for it. You have pitched curiously upon some of my favourite
+     touches, and very coincidently with Watts's views.
+
+Early in 1881, he wrote:
+
+     I am writing a ballad on the death of James I. of Scots. It
+     is already twice the length of _The White Ship_, and has a
+     good slice still to come. It is called _The King's Tragedy_,
+     and is a ripper I can tell you!
+
+     The other day I got from Italy a paper containing a really
+     excellent and exceptional notice of my poems, written by the
+     author of a volume also sent me containing, among other
+     translations from the English, _Jenny, Last Confession_,
+     etc.
+
+     I have been re-reading, after many years, Keats's _Otho the
+     Great_, and find it a much better thing than I remembered,
+     though only a draft.
+
+     I am much exercised as to what you mention as to a _Michael
+     Scott_ scheme of Coleridge's. Where does he speak of it, and
+     what is it? It is quite new to me; but curiously enough, I
+     have a complete scheme drawn up for a ballad, to be called
+     _Michael Scott's Wooing_, not the one I proposed beginning
+     now--and also have long designed a picture under the same
+     title, but of quite different motif! Allan Cunningham wrote
+     a romance called _Sir Michael Scott_, but I never saw it.
+
+     I have heard from Walter Severn about a subscription
+     proposed to erect a gravestone to his father beside that of
+     Keats. I should like you to copy for me your sonnet on
+     Severn. I hear it is in _The Athen�um_, but have not seen
+     it. I was asked to prepare an inscription, which I send you.
+     Nothing would be so good as Severn's own words.
+
+     I strongly urge you to go on with your book on the
+     _Supernatural_. The closing chapter should, I think, be on
+     the _weird_ element in its perfection, as shown by recent
+     poets in the mess--i.e. those who take any lead. Tennyson
+     has it certainly here and there in imagery, but there is no
+     great success in the part it plays through his _Idylls_. The
+     Old Romaunt beats him there. The strongest instance of this
+     feeling in Tennyson that I remember is in a few lines of
+     _The Palace of Art_:
+
+          And hollow breasts enclosing hearts of flame;
+             And with dim-fretted foreheads all
+          On corpses three months old at morn she came
+             That stood against the wall.
+
+     I won't answer for the precise age of the corpses--perhaps I
+     have staled them somewhat.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+It is in the nature of these Recollections that they should be personal,
+and it can hardly occur to any reader to complain of them for being that
+which above all else they purport to be. I have hitherto, however, been
+conscious of a desire (made manifest to my own mind by the character of
+my selections from the letters written to me) to impart to this volume
+an interest as broad and general as may be. But my primary purpose is
+now, and has been from the first, to afford the best view at my command
+of Rossetti as a man; and more helpful to such purpose than any number
+of critical opinions, however interesting, have often been those
+passages in his letters where the writer has got closest to his
+correspondent in revealing most of himself. In the chapter I am now
+about to write I must perforce set aside all limitations of reserve if
+I am to convey such an idea of Rossetti's last days as fills my mind; I
+must be content to speak almost exclusively of my personal relations to
+him, to the enforced neglect of the more intimate relations of others.
+
+About six months after my first visit, Rossetti invited me to spend
+a week with him at his house, and this I was glad to be able to do. I
+found him in many important particulars a changed man. His complexion
+was brighter than before, and this circumstance taken alone might have
+been understood to indicate improved bodily health, but in actual fact
+it rather denoted in his case a retrograde physical tendency, as being
+indicative chiefly of some recent excess in the use of his pernicious
+drug. He was distinctly less inclined to corpulence, his eyes were less
+bright, and had more frequently than formerly the appearance of gazing
+upon vacancy, and when he walked to and fro in the studio, as it was
+his habit to do at intervals of about an hour, he did so with a more
+laboured sidelong motion than I had previously noticed, as though the
+body unconsciously lost and then regained some necessary control and
+command at almost every step. Half sensible, no doubt, of a reduced
+condition, or guessing perhaps the nature of my reflections from a
+certain uneasiness which it baffled my efforts to conceal, he paused for
+an instant one evening in the midst of these melancholy perambulations
+and asked me how he struck me as to health. More frankly than
+judiciously I answered promptly, Less well than formerly. It was a
+luckless remark, for Rossetti's prevailing wish at that moment was to
+conceal even from himself his lowered state, and the time was still to
+come when he should crave the questionable sympathy of those who said he
+looked even more ill than he felt. Just before this, my second visit,
+he had completed his _King's Tragedy_, and I had heard from his own lips
+how prostrate the emotional strain involved in the production of the
+poem had first left him. Casting himself now on the couch in an attitude
+indicative of unusual exhaustion, he said the ballad had taken much out
+of him. "It was as though my life ebbed out with it," he said, and in
+saying so much of the nervous tension occasioned by the work in question
+he did not overstate the truth as it presented itself to other eyes.
+Time after time while the ballad was in course of production, he had
+made effort to read it aloud to the friend to whose judgment his poetry
+was always submitted, but had as frequently failed to do so from the
+physical impossibility of restraining the tears that at every stage
+welled up out of an overwrought nature, for the poet never existed
+perhaps who, while at work, lived so vividly in the imagined situation.
+And the weight of that work was still upon him when we met again. His
+voice seemed to have lost much in quality, and in compass too to have
+diminished: or if the volume of sound remained the same, it appeared to
+have retired (so to express it) inwards, and to convey, when he spoke,
+the idea of a man speaking as much to himself as to others. More than
+ever now the scene of his life lacked for me some necessary vitality: it
+breathed an atmosphere of sorrow: it was like the dream of a distempered
+imagination out of which there came no welcome awakening, to say it was
+not true. On the side of his intellectual life Rossetti was obviously
+under less constraint with me than ever before. Previously he had seemed
+to make a conscious effort to speak generously of all contemporaries,
+and cordially of every friend with whom he was brought into active
+relations; and if, by force of some stray impulse, he was ever led to
+say a disparaging word of any one, he forthwith made a palpable, and
+sometimes amusing, effort so to obliterate the injurious impression
+as to convey the idea that he wished it to appear that he had not said
+anything at all. But now this restraint was thrown aside.
+
+I perceived that the drug by which he was enslaved caused what I may
+best characterise as intermittent waves of morbid suspiciousness as
+to the good faith of every individual, including his best, oldest,
+and truest friends, as to whom the most inexplicable delusions would
+suddenly come, and as suddenly go. He would talk in the gravest and most
+earnest way of the wrongs he had suffered at the hands of a dear friend,
+and then the moment his eloquence had drawn from me an exclamation of
+sympathy for him, he would turn round and heap upon the same individual
+an extravagance of praise for his fidelity and good faith. And now,
+he so classed his contemporaries as to leave no doubt that he was
+duly sensible of his own place amongst them, preserving, meantime, a
+dignified reticence as to the extent of his personal claims.
+
+His life was an anachronism. Such a man should have had no dealings with
+the nineteenth century: he belonged to the sixteenth, or perhaps the
+thirteenth, and in Italy not in England. It would, nevertheless, be
+wrong to say that he was wholly indifferent to important political
+issues, of which he took often a very judicial view. In dismissing
+further mention of this second and prolonged meeting with Rossetti,
+it only remains to me to say (as a necessary, if strictly personal,
+explanation of much that will follow), that on the evening preceding my
+departure, he asked me, in the event of my deciding to come to live in
+London, to take up my quarters at his house. To this proposal I made no
+reply: and neither his speech nor my silence needs any comment, and I
+shall offer none.
+
+A month or two later my own health gave way, and then, a change of
+residence being inevitable, Rossetti repeated his invitation; but a
+London campaign, under such conditions as were necessarily entailed
+by pitching one's tent with him, got further and further away, until
+I seemed to see it through the inverse end of a telescope whereof the
+slides were being drawn out, out, every day further and further. I
+determined to spend half a year among' the mountains of Cumberland,
+and went up to the Vale of St. John. Scarcely had I settled there when
+Rossetti wrote that he must himself soon leave London: that he was
+wearied out absolutely, and unable to sleep at night, that if he could
+only reach that secluded vale he would breathe a purer air mentally
+as well as physically. The mood induced by contemplation of the
+tranquillity of my retreat over-against the turmoil and distractions
+of the city _in_ which, though not _of_ which, he was, added to the
+deepening exhaustion which had already begun when I left him, had
+prevailed with him, he said, to ask me to come down to London, and
+travel back with him. "Supposing," he wrote, "I were to ask you to come
+to town in a fortnight's time from now--I returning with you for a while
+into the country--would that be feasible to you?"
+
+Once unsettled in the environments within which for years he had moved
+contentedly, a thousand reasons were found for the contemplated step,
+and simultaneously a thousand obstacles arose to impede the execution of
+it. "They have at length taken my garden," he said, "as they have long
+threatened to do, and now they are really setting about building upon
+it. I do not in the least know what my plans may be." And again: "It
+seems certain that I must leave this house and seek another. Is there
+any house in the neighbourhood of the Vale of St. John with a largish
+room one could paint in (to N. or NE.)?" The idea of his taking up his
+permanent abode so far out of the market circle was, I well knew, just
+one of those impracticable notions which, with Rossetti, were abandoned
+as soon as conceived, so I was not surprised to hear from him as
+follows, by the succeeding post: "In what I wrote yesterday I said
+something as to a possibility of leaving town, but I now perceive this
+is not practicable at present; therefore need not trouble you to take
+note of neighbouring houses." Presently he wrote again: "Bedevilments
+thicken: the garden is ploughed up, and I 've not stirred out of the
+house for a week: I must leave this place at once if I am to leave it
+alive." {*}
+
+     * It is but just to say that, although Rossetti wrote thus
+     peevishly of what was quite inevitable,--the yielding up of
+     his fine garden,--he would at other times speak of the great
+     courtesy and good-nature of Messrs. Pemberton, in allowing
+     him the use of the garden after it had been severed from the
+     property he hired.
+
+"My present purpose is to take another house in London. Could you not
+come down and beat up agents for me? I know you will not deny me your
+help. I hear of a house at Brixton, with a garden of two acres, and only
+�130 a year." In a day or two even this last hope had proved delusive:
+"I find the house at Brixton will not do, and I hear of nothing else....
+I am anxious as to having become perfectly deaf on the right side of
+my head. Partial approaches to this have sometimes occurred to me and
+passed away, so I will not be too much troubled at it." A little later
+he wrote: "Now my housekeeper is leaving me, her mother being very ill.
+Can you not come to my assistance? Come at once and we will set sail
+in one boat." I appear to have replied to this last appeal in a tone
+of some little scepticism as to his remaining long in the same mind
+relative to our mutual housemating, for subsequently he says: "At this
+writing I can see no likelihood of my not remaining in the mind that,
+in case of your coming to London, your quarters should be taken up here.
+The house is big enough for two, even if they meant to be strangers to
+each other. You would have your own rooms and we should meet just when
+we pleased. You have got a sufficient inkling of my exceptional habits
+not to be scared by them. It is true, at times my health and spirits are
+variable, but I am sure we should not be squabbling. However, it seems
+you have no intention of a quite immediate move, and we can speak
+farther of it." I readily consented to do whatever seemed feasible
+to help him out of his difficulties, which existed, however, as I
+perceived, much more in his own mind than in actual fact. I thought
+a brief holiday in the solitude within which I was then located would
+probably be helpful in restoring a tranquil condition of mind, and as
+his brother, Mr. Scott, Mr. Watts, Mr. Shields, and other friends in
+London, were of a similar opinion, efforts were made to induce him
+to undertake the journey which he had been the first to think of.
+His oldest friend, Mr. Madox Brown (whose presence would have been as
+valuable now as it had proved to be on former occasions), was away at
+Manchester, and remained there throughout the time of his last illness.
+His moods at this time were too variable to be relied upon three days
+together, and so I find him writing:
+
+     Many thanks for the information as to your Shady Vale, which
+     seems a vision--a distant one, alas!--of Paradise. Perhaps I
+     may reach it yet.... I am now thinking of writing another
+     ballad-poem to add at the end of my volume. It is romantic,
+     not historical I have a clear scheme for it and believe your
+     scenery might help me much if I could get there. When you
+     hear that scheme, you will, I believe, pronounce it
+     precisely fitted to the scenery you describe as now
+     surrounding you. That scenery I hope to reach a little
+     later, but meantime should much like to see you in London
+     and return with you.
+
+The proposed ballad was to be called _The Orchard Pits_ and was to be
+illustrative of the serpent fascination of beauty, but it was never
+written. Contented now to await the issue of events, he proceeded to
+write on subjects of general interest:
+
+     Keats (page 154, vol. i., of Houghton's Life, etc.) mentions
+     among other landscape features the Vale of St. John. So you
+     may think of him in the neighbourhood as well as (or, if you
+     like, rather than) Wordsworth.
+
+     I have been reading again Hogg's Shelley. S. appears to have
+     been as mad at Keswick as everywhere else, but not madder;--
+     that he could not compass.
+
+At this juncture some unlooked-for hitch in the arrangements then
+pending for the sale of the _Dante's Dream_ to the Corporation of
+Liverpool rendered my presence in London inevitable, and upon my arrival
+I found that Rossetti had fitted out rooms for my reception, although
+I had never down to that moment finally decided to avail myself of an
+offer which upon its first being broached, appeared to be too one-sided
+a bargain (in which of course the sacrifice seemed to be Rossetti's) to
+admit of my entertaining it. In this way I drifted into my position as
+Rossetti's housemate.
+
+The letters and scraps of notes I have embodied in the foregoing will
+probably convey a better idea of Rossetti's native irresolution, as it
+was made manifest to me in the early part of 1881, than any abstract
+definition, however faithful and exact, could be expected to do.
+Irresolution was indubitably his most noticeable quality at the time
+when I came into active relation with him; and if I be allowed to have
+any perception of character and any acquaintance with the fundamental
+traits that distinguish man from man, I shall say unhesitatingly (though
+I well know how different is the opinion of others) that irresolution
+with melancholy lay at the basis of his nature. I have heard Mr.
+Swinburne speak of a cheerfulness of deportment in early life, which
+imparted an idea as of one who could not easily be depressed. I have
+heard Mr. Watts speak of the days at Kelmscott Manor House, where
+he first knew him, and where Rossetti was the most delightful of
+companions. I have heard Canon Dixon speak of a determination of purpose
+which yielded to no sort of obstacle, but carried its point by the sheer
+vehemence with which it asserted it. I can only say that I was witness
+to neither characteristic. Of traits the reverse of these, I was
+constantly receiving evidence; but let it be remembered that before I
+joined Rossetti (which was only in the last year of his life) in that
+intimate relation which revealed to my unwilling judgment every foible
+and infirmity of character, the whole nature of the man had been
+vitiated by an enervating drug. At my meeting with him the brighter
+side of his temperament had been worn away in the night-troubles of his
+unrestful couch; and of that needful volition, which establishes for
+a man the right to rule not others but himself, only the mockery and
+inexplicable vagaries of temper remained. When I knew him, Rossetti was
+devoid of resolution. At that moment at which he had finally summoned
+up every available and imaginable reason for pursuing any particular
+course, his purpose wavered and his heart gave way. When I knew him,
+Rossetti was destitute of cheerfulness or content. At that instant,
+at which the worst of his shadowy fears had been banished by some
+fortuitous occurrence that lit up with an unceasing radiation of hope
+every prospect of life, he conjured out of its very brightness fresh
+cause for fear and sadness. True, indeed, these may have been no more
+than symptoms of those later phenomena which came of disease, and
+foreshadowed death. Other minds may reduce to a statement of cause and
+effect what I am content to offer as fact.
+
+Upon settling with Rossetti in July 1881, I perceived that his health
+was weaker. His tendency to corpulence had entirely disappeared, his
+feebleness of step had become at certain moments painfully apparent,
+and his temper occasionally betrayed signs of bitterness. To myself,
+personally, he was at this stage as genial as of old, or if for an
+instant he gave vent to an unprovoked outburst of wrath, he would far
+more than atone for it by a look of inexpressible remorse and some
+feeling words of regret, whereof the import sometimes was--
+
+I wish you were indeed my son, for though then I should still have no
+right to address you so, I should at least have some right to expect
+your forgiveness.
+
+In such moods of more than needful solicitude for one's acutest
+sensibilities, Rossetti was absolutely irresistible.
+
+As I have said, the occupant of this great gloomy house, in which I had
+now become a resident, had rarely been outside its doors for two years;
+certainly never afoot, and only in carriages with his friends. Upon the
+second night of my stay, I announced my intention of taking a walk on
+the Chelsea embankment, and begged him to accompany me. To my amazement
+he yielded, and every night for a week following, I succeeded in
+inducing him to repeat the now unfamiliar experience. It was obvious
+enough to himself that he walked totteringly, with infinite expenditure
+of physical energy, and returned in a condition of exhaustion that left
+him prostrate for an hour afterwards. The root of all this evil was soon
+apparent. He was exceeding with the chloral, and little as I expected or
+desired to exercise a moral guardianship over the habits of this great
+man, I found myself insensibly dropping into that office.
+
+Negotiations for the sale of the Liverpool picture were now complete;
+the new volume of poems and the altered edition of the old volume had
+been satisfactorily passed through the press; and it might have been
+expected that with the anxiety occasioned by these enterprises,
+would pass away the melancholy which in a nature like Rossetti's they
+naturally induced. The reverse was the fact, He became more and more
+depressed as each palpable cause of depression was removed, and more
+and more liable to give way to excess with the drug. By his brother, Mr.
+Watts, Mr. Shields, and others who had only too frequently in times past
+had experience of similar outbreaks, this failure in spirits, with
+all its attendant physical weakness, was said to be due primarily to
+hypochondriasis. Hence the returning necessity to get him away (as
+Mr. Madox Brown had done at a previous crisis) for a change of air and
+scene. Once out of this atmosphere of gloom, we hoped that amid cheerful
+surroundings his health would speedily revive. Infinite were the efforts
+that had to be made, and countless the precautions that had to be taken
+before he could be induced to set out, but at length we found ourselves
+upon our way to Keswick, at nine p.m., one evening in September, in
+a special carriage packed with as many artist's trappings and as many
+books as would have lasted for a year.
+
+We reached Penrith as the grey of dawn had overspread the sky. It was
+six o'clock as we got into the carriage that was to drive us through the
+vale of St. John to our destination at the Legberthwaite end of it. The
+morning was now calm, the mountains looked loftier, grander, and yet
+more than ever precipitous from the road that circled about their base.
+Nothing could be heard but the calls of the awakening cattle, the rumble
+of cataracts far away, and the rush and surge of those that were near.
+Rossetti was all but indifferent to our surroundings, or displayed only
+such fitful interest in them as must have been affected out of a kindly
+desire to please me. He said the chloral he had taken daring the journey
+was upon him, and he could not see. At length we reached the house that
+was for some months to be our home. It stood at the foot of a ghyll,
+which, when swollen by rain, was majestic in volume and sound. The
+little house we had rented was free from all noise other than the
+occasional voice of a child or bark of a dog. Here at least he might
+bury the memory of the distractions of the city that vexed him. Save
+for the ripple of the river that flowed at his feet, the bleating
+of sheep on Golden Howe, the echo of the axe of the woodman who was
+thinning the neighbouring wood, and the morning and evening mail-coach
+horn, he might delude himself into forgetfulness that he belonged any
+longer to this noisy earth.
+
+Next day Rossetti was exceptionally well, and astounded me by the
+proposal that we should ascend Golden Howe together--a little mountain
+of some 1000 feet that stands at the head of Thirlmere. With never a
+hope on my part of our reaching the summit, we set out for that purpose,
+but through no doubt the exhilarating effect of the mountain air, he
+actually compassed the task he had proposed to himself, and sat for an
+hour on that highest point from whence could be seen the Skiddaw range
+to the north, Haven's Crag to the west, Styx Pass and Helvellyn to the
+east, and the Dunmail Raise to the south, with the lake below. Rossetti
+was struck by the variety of configuration in the hills, and even more
+by the variety of colour. But he was no great lover of landscape beauty,
+and the majestic scene before us produced less effect upon his mind than
+might perhaps have been expected. He seemed to be almost unconscious of
+the unceasing atmospheric changes that perpetually arrest and startle.
+the observer in whom love of external nature in her grander moods has
+not been weakened by disease. The complete extent of the Vale of St.
+John could be traversed by the eye from the eminence upon which we sat.
+The valley throughout its three-mile length is absolutely secluded: one
+has only the hills for company, and to say the truth they are sometimes
+fearful company too. Usually the landscape wears a cheerful aspect, but
+at times long fleecy clouds drive midway across the mountains, leaving
+the tops visible. The scenery is highly awakening to the imagination.
+Even the country people are imaginative, and the country is full
+of ghostly legend. I was never at any moment sensible that these
+environments affected Rossetti: assuredly they never agitated him, and
+no effort did he make to turn them to account for the purposes of
+the romantic ballad he had spoken of as likely to grow amidst such
+surroundings.
+
+Being much more than ordinarily cheerful during the first evenings of
+our stay in the North, he talked sometimes of his past life and of the
+men and women he had known in earlier years. Carlyle's _Reminiscences_
+had not long before been published. Mrs. Carlyle, therein so
+extravagantly though naturally belauded, he described as a bitter
+little woman, with, however, the one redeeming quality of unostentatious
+charity: "The poor of Chelsea," he said, "always spoke well of her."
+"George Eliot," whose genius he much admired, he had ceased to know long
+before her death, but he spoke of the lady as modest and retiring, and
+amiable to a fault when the outer crust of reticence had been broken
+through. Longfellow had called upon him whilst he was painting the
+_Dante's Dream_. The old poet was Courteous and complimentary in
+the last degree; he seemed, however, to know little or nothing about
+painting as an art, and also to have fallen into the error of thinking
+that Rossetti the painter and Sossetti the poet were different men; in
+short, that the Dante of that name was the painter, and the William the
+poet. Upon leaving the house, Longfellow had said: "I have been glad to
+meet you, and should like to have met your brother; pray, tell him how
+much I admire his beautiful poem, _The Blessed Damozel_" Giving no
+hint of the error, Rossetti said he had answered, "I will tell him." He
+painted a little during our stay in the North, for it was whilst
+there that he began the beautiful replica of his _Proserpina_, now the
+property of Mr. Valpy. I found it one of my best pleasures to watch a
+picture growing under his hand, and thought it easy to see through
+the medium of his idealised heads, cold even in their loveliness,
+unsubstantial in their passion, that to the painter life had been a
+dream into which nothing entered that was not as impalpable as itself.
+Tainted by the touch of melancholy that is the blight that clings to the
+purest beauty, his pictured faces were, in my view, akin to his poetry,
+every line of which, as he sometimes recited it, seemed as though it
+echoed the burden of a bygone sorrow--the sorrow of a dream rather than
+that of a life, or of a life that had been itself a dream. I also then
+realised what Mr. Theodore Watts has said in a letter just now
+written to me from Sark, that, "apart from any question of technical
+shortcomings, one of Rossetti's strongest claims to the attention of
+posterity was that of having invented, in the three-quarter-length
+pictures painted from one face, a type of female beauty which was akin
+to none other,--which was entirely new, in short,--and which, for
+wealth of sublime and mysterious suggestion, unaided by complex dramatic
+design, was unique in the art of the world."
+
+On one occasion the talk turned on the eccentricities and affectations
+of men of genius, and I did my best to-ridicule them unsparingly, saying
+they were a purely modern extravagance, the highest intellects of other
+times being ever the sanest, Shakspeare, Cervantes, Goethe, Coleridge,
+Wordsworth; the root of the evil had been Shelley, who was mad, and in
+imitation of whose madness, modern men of genius must many of them
+be mad also, until it had come to such a pass-that if a gifted man
+conducted himself throughout life with probity and propriety we
+instantly began to doubt the value of his gifts. Rossetti evidently
+thought that in all this I was covertly hitting out at himself, and
+cut short the conversation with an unequivocal hint that he had no
+affectations, and could not account himself an authority with respect to
+them.
+
+With such talk a few of our evenings were spent, but too soon the
+insatiable craving for the drug came with renewed force, and then all
+pleasant intercourse was banished. Night after night we sat up until
+eleven, twelve, and one o'clock, watching the long hours go by with
+heavy steps; waiting, waiting, waiting for the time at which he could
+take his first draught, and drop into his pillowed place and snatch a
+dreamless sleep of three or four hours' duration.
+
+In order to break the monotony of nights such as I describe I sometimes
+read from Fielding, Richardson, and Sterne, but more frequently induced
+Rossetti to recite. Thus, with failing voice, he would again and again
+attempt, at my request, his _Cloud Confines_, or passages from _The
+King's Tragedy_, and repeatedly, also, Poe's _Ulalume_ and _Raven_. I
+remember that, touching the last-mentioned of these poems, he remarked
+that out of his love of it while still a boy his own _Blessed Damozel_
+originated. "I saw," he said, "that Poe had done the utmost it was
+possible to do with the grief of the lover on earth, and so I determined
+to reverse the conditions, and give utterance to the yearning of the
+loved one in heaven." At that time of the year the night closed in as
+early as seven or eight o'clock, and then in that little house among
+the solitary hills his disconsolate spirit would sometimes sink beyond
+solace into irreclaimable depths of depression.
+
+It was impossible that such a condition of things should last, and it
+was with unspeakable relief that I heard Rossetti express a desire to
+return home. Mr. Watts, who at that time was at Stratford-upon-Avon, had
+promised to join us, but now wrote to say that this was impossible. Had
+it been otherwise, Rossetti would willingly have remained, but now he
+longed to get back to London. His life had lost its joys. The success of
+his Liverpool picture was almost as nothing to him, and the enthusiastic
+reception given to his book gave him not more than a passing pleasure,
+though he was deeply touched by the sympathetic and exhaustive criticism
+published by Professor Dowden in _The Academy_, as well as by Professor
+Colvin's friendly monograph in _The World_. At length one night, a month
+after our arrival, we set out on our return, and well do I remember the
+pathos of his words as I helped him (now feebler than ever) into his
+house. "Thank God! home at last, and never shall I leave it again!"
+
+Very natural was the deep concern of his friends, especially of his
+brother and Mr. Shields, at finding him return even less well than he
+had set out. With deeper reliance on past knowledge of the man, Mr.
+Watts still took a hopeful view, attributing the physical prostration
+to hypochondriasis, which might, in common with all similar nervous
+ailments, impose as much pain upon the victim as if the sufferings
+complained of had a real foundation in positive disease, but might
+also give way at any moment when the victim could be induced to take
+a hopeful view of life. The cheerfulness of Mr. Watts's society, after
+what I well know must have been the lugubrious nature of my own, had at
+first its usual salutary effect upon Rossetti's spirits, and I will not
+forbear to say that I, too, welcomed it as a draught of healing morning
+air after a month-long imprisonment in an atmosphere of gloom. But I
+was not yet freed of my charge. The sense of responsibility which in the
+solitude of the mountains had weighed me down, was now indeed divided
+with his affectionate family and the friends who were Rossetti's friends
+before they were mine, and who came at this juncture with willing
+help, prompted chiefly, of course, by devotion to the great man in sore
+trouble, but also--I must allow myself to think--in one or two cases by
+desire to relieve me of some of the burden of the task that had fallen
+so unexpectedly upon me. Foremost among such disinterested friends was
+of course the friend I have spoken of so frequently in these pages,
+and for whom I now felt a growing regard arising as much out of my
+perception of the loyalty of his comradeship as the splendour of his
+gifts. But after him in solicitous service to Rossetti, at this
+moment of great need, came Frederick Shields (the fine tissue of whose
+highly-strung nature must have been sorely tried by the strain to which
+it was subjected), Mr. W. B. Scott, whose visits were never more warmly
+welcomed by Rossetti than at this season, the good and gifted Miss Boyd,
+and of course Rossetti's brother, sister, and mother, to each of whom he
+was affectionately attached. Strange enough it seemed that this man who,
+for years had shunned the world and chosen solitude when he might have
+had society, seemed at last to grow weary of his loneliness. But so it
+was. Rossetti became daily more and more dependent upon his friends
+for company that should not fail him, for never for an hour now could he
+endure to be alone. Remembering this, I almost doubt if by nature he was
+at any time a solitary. There are men who feel more deeply the sense of
+isolation amidst the busiest crowds than within the narrowest circle of
+intimates, and I have heard from Rossetti reminiscences of his earlier
+life that led me to believe that he was one of the number. Perhaps,
+after all, he wandered from the world rather from the dread than with
+the hope of solitude. In such pleasant intercourse as the visits of the
+friends I have named afforded, was the sadness of the day in a measure
+dissipated, but when night came I never failed to realise that no
+progress whatever had been made. I tried to check the craving for
+chloral, but I could as easily have checked the rising tide: and where
+the lifelong assiduity of older friends had failed to eradicate a
+morbid, ruinous, and fatal thirst, it was presumptous if not ridiculous
+to imagine that the task could be compassed by a frail creature with
+heart and nerves of wax. But the whole scene was now beginning to have
+an interest for me more personal and more serious than I have yet given
+hint of. The constant fret and fume of this life of baffled effort,
+of struggle with a deadly drug that had grown to have an objective
+existence in my mind as the existence of a fiend, was not without a
+sensible effect upon myself. I became ill for a few days with a low
+fever, but far worse than this was the fact that there was creeping over
+me the wild influence of Rossetti's own distempered imaginings.
+
+Once conscious of such influence I determined to resist it, but how to
+do so I knew not without flying utterly away from an atmosphere in which
+my best senses seemed to stagnate, and burying the memory of it for
+ever.
+
+The crisis was pending, and sooner than we expected it came. A nurse
+was engaged. One evening Dr. Westland Marston and his son Philip Bourke
+Marston came to spend a few hours with Rossetti, For a while he seemed
+much cheered by their bright society, but later on he gave those
+manifestations of uneasiness which I had learned to know too well.
+Removing restlessly from seat to seat, he ultimately threw himself
+upon the sofa in that rather awkward attitude which I have previously
+described as characteristic of him in moments of nervous agitation.
+Presently he called out that his arm had become paralysed, and, upon
+attempting to rise, that his leg also had lost its power. We were
+naturally startled, but knowing the force of his imagination in its
+influence on his bodily capacity, we tried playfully to banish the idea.
+Raising him to his feet, however, we realised that from whatever cause,
+he had lost the use of the limbs in question, and in the utmost alarm
+we carried him to his bedroom, and hurried away for Mr. Marshall It was
+found that he had really undergone a species of paralysis, called, I
+think, loss of co-ordinative power. The juncture was a critical one, and
+it was at length decided by the able medical adviser just named, that
+the time had come when the chloral, which was at the root of all this
+mischief, should be decisively, entirely, and instantly cut off. To
+compass this end a young medical man, Mr. Henry Maudsley, was brought
+into the house as a resident to watch and manage the case in the
+intervals of Mr. Marshall's visits. It is not for me to offer a
+statement of what was done, and done so ably at this period. I only know
+that morphia was at first injected as a substitute for the narcotic the
+system had grown to demand; that Rossetti was for many hours delirious
+whilst his body was passing through the terrible ordeal of having to
+conquer the craving for the former drug, and that three or four mornings
+after the experiment had been begun he awoke calm in body, and clear
+in mind, and grateful in heart. His delusions and those intermittent
+suspicions of his friends which I have before alluded to, were now gone,
+as things in the past of which he hardly knew whether in actual fact
+they had or had not been. Christmas Day was now nigh at hand, and, still
+confined to his room, he begged me to promise to spend that day with
+him; "otherwise," he said, "how sad a day it must be for me, for I
+cannot fairly ask any other." With a tenderness of sympathy I shall not
+forget, Mr. Scott had asked me to dine that day at his more cheerful
+house; but I reflected that this was to be my first Christmas in London
+and it might be Rossetti's last, so I put by pleasanter considerations.
+We dined alone, but, somewhat later, William Rossetti, with true
+brotherly affection, left the guests at his own house, and ran down
+to spend an hour with the invalid. We could hear from time to time the
+ringing of the bells of the neighbouring churches, and I noticed that
+Rossetti was not disturbed by them as he had been formerly. Indeed, the
+drug once removed, he was in every sense a changed man. He talked that
+night brightly, and with more force and incisiveness, I thought, than he
+had displayed for months. There was the ring of affection in his tone as
+he said he had always had loyal friends; and then he spoke with feeling
+of Mr. Watts's friendship, of Mr. Shields's, and afterwards he spoke of
+Mr. Burne Jones who had just previously visited him, as well as of Mr.
+Madox Brown, and his friendship of a lifetime; of Mr. Swinburne, Mr.
+Morris, Mr. Stephens, Mr. Boyce, and other early friends. He said a word
+or two of myself which I shall not repeat, and then spoke with emotion
+of his mother and sister, and of his sister who was dead, and how they
+were supported through their sore trials by religious resignation. He
+asked if I, like Shields, was a believer, and seemed altogether in a
+softer and more spiritual mood than I remember to have noticed before.
+
+With such talk we passed the Christmas night of 1881. Rossetti recovered
+power in some measure, was able to get down to the studio, and see the
+friends who called--Mr. F. E. Leyland frequently, Lord and Lady Mount
+Temple, Mrs. Sumner, Mr. Boyce, Mr. F. G. Stephens, Mr. Gilchrist, Mr.
+and Mrs. Virtue Tebbs, Mrs. Stillman, Mrs. Coronio, and Mr. C. and Mr.
+A. Ionides occasionally, as well as those previously named. A visit
+from Dr. Hueffer of the _Times_ (of whose gifts he had a high opinion),
+enlivened him perceptibly. But he did not recover, and at the end of
+January 1882 it was definitely determined that he should go to the
+sea-side. I was asked to accompany him, and did so. At the right
+juncture Mr. J. P. Seddon very hospitably tendered the use of his
+handsome bungalow at Birchington-on-Sea, a little watering-place four
+miles west of Margate. There we spent nine weeks. At first going out he
+was able to take short walks on the cliffs, or round the road that winds
+about the churchyard, but his strength grew less and less every day
+and hour. We were constantly visited by Mr. Watts, whose devotion never
+failed, and Rossetti would brighten up at the prospect of one of his
+visits, and become sensibly depressed when he had gone. Mr. William
+Sharp, too (a young friend of whose gifts as a poet Rossetti had a
+genuine appreciation, and by whom he had been visited at intervals
+for some time), came out occasionally and cheered up the sufferer in
+a noticeable degree. Then his mother and sister came and stayed in the
+house during many weeks at the last. How shall I speak of the tenderness
+of their solicitude, of their unwearying attentions, in a word of their
+ardent and reciprocated love of the illustrious son and brother for whom
+they did the thousand gentle offices which they alone could have done!
+The end was drawing on, and we all knew the fact. Rossetti had actually
+taken to poetical composition afresh, and had written a facetious ballad
+(conceived years before) of the length of _The White Ship_, called _Jan
+Van Hunks_, embodying an eccentric story of a Dutchman's wager to smoke
+against the devil. This was to appear in a miscellany of stories and
+poems by himself and Mr. Watts, a project which had been a favourite one
+of his for some years, and in which he now, in his last moments, took a
+revived interest strange and strong.
+
+About this time he derived great gratification from reading an article
+on him and his works in _Le Livre_ by Mr. Joseph Knight, an old friend
+to whom he was deeply attached, and for whose gifts he had a genuine
+admiration. Perhaps the very last letter Rossetti penned was written to
+Mr. Knight upon the subject of this article.
+
+His intellect was as powerful as in his best days, and freer than ever
+of hallucinations. But his bodily strength grew less and less. His sight
+became feebler, and then he abandoned the many novels that had recently
+solaced his idler hours, and Miss Rossetti read aloud to him. Among
+other books she read Dickens's _Tale of Two Cities_, and he seemed
+deeply touched by Sidney Carton's sacrifice, and remarked that he would
+like to paint the last scene of the story.
+
+On Wednesday morning, April 5th, I went into the bedroom to which he had
+for some days been confined, and wrote out to his dictation two sonnets
+which he had composed on a design of his called _The Sphinx_, and which
+he wished to give, together with the drawing and the ballad before
+described, to Mr. Watts for publication in the volume just mentioned.
+On the Thursday morning I found his utterance thick, and his speech from
+that cause hardly intelligible. It chanced that I had just been reading
+Mr. Buchanan's new volume of poems, and in the course of conversation
+I told him the story of the ballad called _The Lights of Leith_, and
+he was affected by the pathos of it. He had heard of that author's
+retractation{*} of the charges involved in the article published ten
+years earlier, and was manifestly touched by the dedication of the
+romance _God and the Man_. He talked long and earnestly that morning,
+and it was our last real interview. He spoke of his love of early
+English ballad literature, and of how when he first met with it he had
+said to himself: "There lies your line."
+
+
+     * The retractation, which now has a peculiar literary
+     interest, was made in the following verses, and should, I
+     think, be recorded here:
+
+     To an old Enemy.
+
+          I would have snatch'd a bay-leaf from thy brow,
+             Wronging the chaplet on an honoured head;
+          In peace and charity I bring thee now
+               A lily-flower instead.
+          Pure as thy purpose, blameless as thy song,
+             Sweet as thy spirit, may this offering be;
+          Forget the bitter blame that did thee wrong,
+               And take the gift from me!
+
+     In a later edition of the romance the following verses are
+     added to the dedication:
+
+     To Dante Gabriel Rossetti:
+
+          Calmly, thy royal robe of death around thee,
+             Thou Bleekest, and weeping brethren round thee stand--
+          Gently they placed, ere yet God's angel crown'd thee,
+               My lily in thy hand!
+          I never knew thee living, O my brother!
+             But on thy breast my lily of love now lies;
+          And by that token, we shall know each other,
+               When God's voice saith "Arise!"
+
+"Can you understand me?" he asked abruptly, alluding to the thickness of
+his utterance.
+
+"Perfectly."
+
+"Nurse Abrey cannot: what a good creature she is!"
+
+That night we telegraphed to Mr. Marshall, to Mr. W. M. Rossetti, and
+Mr. Watts, and wrote next morning to Mr. Shields, Mr. Scott, and Mr.
+Madox Brown. It had been found by the resident medical man, Dr. Harris,
+that in Rossetti's case kidney disease had supervened. His dear mother
+and I sat up until early morning with him, and when we left him his
+sister took our place and remained with him the whole of that and
+subsequent nights. He sat up in bed most of the time and said a sort of
+stupefaction had removed all pain. He crooned over odd lines of poetry.
+"My own verses torment me," he said. Then he half-sang, half-recited,
+snatches from one of Iago's songs in _Othello_. "Strange things," he
+murmured, "to come into one's head at such a moment." I told him his
+brother and Mr. Watts would be with him to-morrow. "Then you really
+think that I am dying? At _last_ you think so; but _I_ was right from
+the first."
+
+Next day, Good Friday, the friends named did come, and weak as he was,
+he was much cheered by their presence. The following day Mr. Marshall
+arrived.
+
+That gentleman recognised the alarming position of affairs, but he was
+not without hope. He administered a sort of hot bath, and on Sunday
+morning Rossetti was perceptibly brighter. Mr. Shields had now arrived,
+and one after one of his friends, including Mr. Leyland, who was at the
+time staying at Ramsgate, and made frequent calls, visited him in his
+room and found him able to listen and sometimes to talk. In the evening
+the nurse gave a cheering report of his condition, and encouraged by
+such prospects, Mr. Watts, Mr. Shields, and myself, gave way to good
+spirits, and retired to an adjoining room. About nine o'clock Mr.
+Watts left us, and returning in a short time, said he had been in the
+sickroom, and had had some talk with Rossetti, and found him cheerful.
+An instant afterwards we heard a scream, followed by a loud rapping at
+our door. We hurried into Rossetti's room and found him in convulsions.
+Mr. Watts raised him on one side, whilst I raised him on the other; his
+mother, sister, and brother, were immediately present (Mr. Shields had
+fled away for the doctor); there were a few moments of suspense, and
+then we saw him die in our arms. Mrs. William Rossetti arrived from
+Manchester at this moment.
+
+Thus on Easter Day Rossetti died. It was hard to realise that he was
+actually dead; but so it was, and the dreadful fact had at last come
+upon us with a horrible suddenness. Of the business of the next few
+days I need say nothing. I went up to London in the interval between the
+death and burial, and the old house at Chelsea, which, to my mind, in my
+time had always been desolate, was now more than ever so, that the man
+who had been its vitalising spirit lay dead eighty miles away by the
+side of the sea. It was decided to bury the poet in the churchyard
+of Birchington. The funeral, which was a private one, was attended by
+relatives and personal friends only, with one or two well-wishers from
+London.
+
+Next day we saw most of the friends away by train, and, some days later,
+Mr. Watts was with myself the last to leave. I thought we two were drawn
+the closer each to each from the loss of him by whom we were brought
+together. We walked one morning to the churchyard and found the grave,
+which nestles under the south-west porch, strewn with flowers.
+The church is an ancient and quaint early Gothic edifice, somewhat
+rejuvenated however, but with ivy creeping over its walls. The prospect
+to the north is of sea only: a broad sweep of landscape so flat and so
+featureless that the great sea dominates it. As we stood there, with the
+rumble of the rolling waters borne to us from the shore, we felt that
+though we had little dreamed that we should lay Rossetti in his last
+sleep here, no other place could be quite so fit. It was, indeed, the
+resting-place for a poet. In this bed, of all others, he must at length,
+after weary years of sleeplessness, sleep the only sleep that is deep
+and will endure. Thinking of the incidents which I have in this chapter
+tried to record, my mind reverted to a touching sonnet which the friend
+by my side had just printed; and then, for the first time, I was struck
+by its extraordinary applicability to him whom we had laid below. In its
+printed form it was addressed to Heine, and ran:
+
+     Thou knew'st that island far away and lone
+        Whose shores are as a harp, where billows break
+        In spray of music and the breezes shake
+     O'er spicy seas a woof of colour and tone,
+     While that sweet music echoes like a moan
+        In the island's heart, and sighs around the lake
+        Where, watching fearfully a watchful snake,
+     A damsel weeps upon her emerald throne.
+
+     Life's ocean, breaking round thy senses' shore,
+        Struck golden song as from the strand of day:
+        For us the joy, for thee the fell foe lay--
+     Pain's blinking snake around the fair isle's core,
+        Turning to sighs the enchanted sounds that play
+     Around thy lovely island evermore.
+
+"How strangely appropriate it is," I said, "to Rossetti, and now I
+remember how deeply he was moved on reading it."
+
+"He guessed its secret; I addressed it, for disguise, to Heine, to whom
+it was sadly inapplicable. I meant it for _him_."
+
+
+THE END.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, by 
+T. Hall Caine
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK RECOLLECTIONS OF ROSSETTI ***
+
+***** This file should be named 25574-8.txt or 25574-8.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+        http://www.gutenberg.org/2/5/5/7/25574/
+
+Produced by David Widger
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.
+
+
+
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
+http://gutenberg.org/license).
+
+
+Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B.  "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark.  It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
+paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
+or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
+form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
+     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
+     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+     address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
+     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+     License.  You must require such a user to return or
+     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+     of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH F3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS' WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need, is critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation web page at http://www.pglaf.org.
+
+
+Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541.  Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
+http://pglaf.org/fundraising.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at
+809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
+business@pglaf.org.  Email contact links and up to date contact
+information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
+page at http://pglaf.org
+
+For additional contact information:
+     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+     Chief Executive and Director
+     gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+
+Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit http://pglaf.org
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations.
+To donate, please visit: http://pglaf.org/donate
+
+
+Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart is the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone.  For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+     http://www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
diff --git a/25574-8.zip b/25574-8.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..fc0708e
--- /dev/null
+++ b/25574-8.zip
diff --git a/25574-h.zip b/25574-h.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..2bba4ea
--- /dev/null
+++ b/25574-h.zip
diff --git a/25574-h/25574-h.htm b/25574-h/25574-h.htm
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..1e9a05d
--- /dev/null
+++ b/25574-h/25574-h.htm
@@ -0,0 +1,8978 @@
+<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
+
+<!DOCTYPE html
+   PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
+   "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd" >
+
+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en">
+  <head>
+    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=UTF-8" />
+    <title>
+      Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, by T. Hall Caine
+    </title>
+    <style type="text/css" xml:space="preserve">
+
+    body { margin:5%; background:#faebd0; text-align:justify}
+    P { text-indent: 1em; margin-top: .25em; margin-bottom: .25em; }
+    H1,H2,H3,H4,H5,H6 { text-align: center; margin-left: 15%; margin-right: 15%; }
+    hr  { width: 50%; text-align: center;}
+    .foot { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; text-indent: -3em; font-size: 90%; }
+    blockquote {font-size: 97%; font-style: italic; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%;}
+    .mynote    {background-color: #DDE; color: #000; padding: .5em; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 95%;}
+    .toc       { margin-left: 10%; margin-bottom: .75em;}
+    .toc2      { margin-left: 20%;}
+    div.fig { display:block; margin:0 auto; text-align:center; }
+    .figleft   {float: left; margin-left: 0%; margin-right: 1%;}
+    .figright  {float: right; margin-right: 0%; margin-left: 1%;}
+    .pagenum   {display:inline; font-size: 70%; font-style:normal;
+               margin: 0; padding: 0; position: absolute; right: 1%;
+               text-align: right;}
+    pre     { font-style: italic; font-size: 90%; margin-left: 10%;}
+
+</style>
+  </head>
+  <body>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+
+Project Gutenberg's Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, by T. Hall Caine
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti
+       1883
+
+Author: T. Hall Caine
+
+Release Date: May 23, 2008 [EBook #25574]
+Last Updated: October 6, 2016
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK RECOLLECTIONS OF ROSSETTI ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h1>
+      RECOLLECTIONS OF <br /> <br /> DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI
+    </h1>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      By T. Hall Caine
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <h5>
+      Roberts Brothers - 1883
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_PREF" id="link2H_PREF">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      PREFACE.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      One day towards the close of 1881 Rossetti, who was then very ill, said to
+      me:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How well I remember the beginning of our correspondence, and how little
+      did I think it would lead to such relations between us as have ensued! I
+      was at the time very solitary and depressed from various causes, and the
+      letters of so young and ardent a well-wisher, though unknown to me
+      personally, brought solace.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yours,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;were very valuable to me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mine to you were among the largest bodies of literary letters I ever
+      wrote, others being often letters of personal interest.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And so admirable in themselves,&rdquo; I added, &ldquo;and so free from the
+      discussion of any but literary subjects that many of them would bear to be
+      printed exactly as you penned them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;will be for you some day to decide.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      This was the first hint of any intention upon my part of publishing the
+      letters he had written to me; indeed, this was the first moment at which I
+      had conceived the idea of doing so. Nothing further on the subject was
+      said down to the morning of the Thursday preceding the Sunday on which he
+      died, when we talked together for the last time on subjects of general
+      interest,&mdash;subsequent interviews being concerned wholly with
+      solicitous inquiries upon my part, in common with other anxious friends,
+      as to the nature of his sufferings, and the briefest answers from him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How long have we been friends?&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I replied, between three and four years from my first corresponding with
+      him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And how long did we correspond?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Three years, nearly.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What numbers of my letters you must possess! They may perhaps even yet be
+      useful to you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      From this moment I regarded the publication of his letters as in some sort
+      a trust; and though I must have withheld them for some years if I had
+      consulted my own wishes simply, I yielded to the necessity that they
+      should be published at once, rather than run any risk of their not been
+      published at all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What I have just said will account for the circumstance that I, the
+      youngest and latest of Rossetti&rsquo;s friends, should be the first to seem to
+      stand towards him in the relation of a biographer. I say <i>seem</i> to
+      stand, for this is not a biography. It was always known to be Rossetti&rsquo;s
+      wish that if at any moment after his death it should appear that the story
+      of his life required to be written, the one friend who during many of his
+      later years knew him most intimately, and to whom he unlocked the most
+      sacred secrets of his heart, Mr. Theodore Watts, should write it, unless
+      indeed it were undertaken by his brother William. But though I know that
+      whenever Mr. Watts sets pen to paper in pursuance of such purpose, and in
+      fulfilment of such charge, he will afford us a recognisable portrait of
+      the man, vivified by picturesque illustration, the like of which few other
+      writers could compass, I also know from what Rossetti often told me of his
+      friend&rsquo;s immersion in all kinds and varieties of life, that years (perhaps
+      many years) may elapse before such a biography is given to the world. My
+      own book is, I trust, exactly what it purports to be: a volume of
+      Recollections, interwoven with letters and criticism, and preceded by such
+      a summary of the leading facts in Rossetti&rsquo;s life as seems necessary for
+      the elucidation of subsequent records. I have drawn Rossetti precisely as
+      I found him in each stage of our friendship, exhibiting his many
+      contradictions of character, extenuating nothing, and, I need hardly add,
+      setting down naught in malice. Up to this moment I have never inquired of
+      myself whether to those who have known little or nothing of Rossetti
+      hitherto, mine will seem to be on the whole favourable or unfavourable
+      portraiture; but I have trusted my admiration of the poet and affection
+      for the friend to penetrate with kindly and appreciative feeling every
+      comment I have had to offer. I was attracted to Rossetti in the first case
+      by ardent love of his genius, and retained to him ultimately by love of
+      the man. As I have said in the course of these Recollections, it was
+      largely his unhappiness that held me, with others, as by a spell, and only
+      too sadly in this particular did he in his last year realise his own
+      picture of Dante at Verona:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     Yet of the twofold life he led
+       In chainless thought and fettered will
+       Some glimpses reach us,&mdash;somewhat still
+     Of the steep stairs and bitter bread,&mdash;
+       Of the soul&rsquo;s quest whose stern avow
+       For years had made him haggard now.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      I am sensible of the difficulty and delicacy of the task I have
+      undertaken, involving, as it does, many interests and issues; and in every
+      reference to surviving relatives as well as to other persons now living,
+      with whom Rossetti was in any way allied, I have exercised in all
+      friendliness the best judgment at my command.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Clement&rsquo;s Inn, October 1882.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     *** It has not been thought necessary to attach dates to the
+     letters printed in this volume, for not only would the
+     difficulty of doing so be great, owing to the fact that
+     Rossetti rarely dated his letters, but the utility of dates
+     in such a case would be doubtful, because the substance of
+     what is said is often quite impersonal, and, where
+     otherwise, is almost independent of the time of production.
+     It may be sufficient to say that the letters were written in
+     the years 1879,1880, and 1881.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      Contents
+    </h2>
+    <table summary="">
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2H_PREF"> PREFACE. </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2H_TOC"> DETAILED CONTENTS </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2H_4_0002"> <big><b>RECOLLECTIONS OF DANTE GABRIEL
+            ROSSETTI</b></big> </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2HCH0001"> CHAPTER I. </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2HCH0002"> CHAPTER II. </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2HCH0003"> CHAPTER III. </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2HCH0004"> CHAPTER IV. </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2HCH0005"> CHAPTER V. </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2HCH0006"> CHAPTER VI. </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2HCH0007"> CHAPTER VII. </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2HCH0008"> CHAPTER VIII. </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2HCH0009"> CHAPTER IX. </a>
+          </p>
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+    </table>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <a name="link2H_TOC" id="link2H_TOC">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      CONTENTS
+    </h2>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0001"> CHAPTER I. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CHAPTER I. <br /> Gabriele Rossetti&mdash;Boyhood&mdash;The
+        pre-Raphaelite Movement&mdash;Early <br /> Manhood&mdash;The Blessed
+        Damozel&mdash;Jenny&mdash;Sister Helen&mdash;The Translations&mdash;The
+        <br /> House of Life&mdash;The Germ&mdash;Oxford and Cambridge Magazine&mdash;Blackfriars
+        <br /> Bridge&mdash;Married Life <br />
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0002"> CHAPTER II. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CHAPTER II. <br /> Chelsea&mdash;Chloral&mdash;Dante&rsquo;s Dream&mdash;Recovery
+        of the Poems&mdash;Poems&mdash;The <br /> Contemporary Controversy&mdash;Mr.
+        Theodore Watts&mdash;Rose Mary&mdash;The <br /> White Ship&mdash;The
+        King&rsquo;s Tragedy&mdash;Poetic Continuations&mdash;Cloud <br /> Confines&mdash;Journalistic
+        Slanders <br />
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0003"> CHAPTER III. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CHAPTER III. <br /> Early Intercourse&mdash;Poetic Impulses&mdash;Beginning
+        of Correspondence&mdash;Early <br /> Letters <br />
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0004"> CHAPTER IV. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CHAPTER IV. <br /> Inedited Poems&mdash;Inedited Ballads&mdash;Additions
+        to Sister Helen&mdash;Hand <br /> and Soul&mdash;St. Agnes of
+        Intercession&mdash;Catholic Opinion&mdash;Rossetti&rsquo;s <br /> Catholicism&mdash;Cloud
+        Confines&mdash;The Portrait <br />
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0005"> CHAPTER V. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CHAPTER V. <br /> Coleridge&mdash;Wordsworth&mdash;Lamb and Coleridge&mdash;Charles
+        Wells&mdash;Keats&mdash;Leigh <br /> Hunt and Keats&mdash;Keats&rsquo;s Sister
+        <br />
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0006"> CHAPTER VI. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CHAPTER VI. <br /> Chatterton&mdash;Oliver Madox Brown&mdash;Gilchrist&rsquo;s
+        Blake&mdash;George Gilfillan&mdash;Old <br /> Periodicals&mdash;A Rustic
+        Poet&mdash;Art and Politics&mdash;Letters in Biography <br />
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0007"> CHAPTER VII. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CHAPTER VII. <br /> Cheyne Walk&mdash;The House&mdash;First Meeting&mdash;Rossetti&rsquo;s
+        Personality&mdash;His <br /> Reading&mdash;The Painter&rsquo;s Craft&mdash;Mr.
+        Ruskin&mdash;Rossetti&rsquo;s Sensitiveness&mdash;His <br /> Garden&mdash;His
+        Library <br />
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0008"> CHAPTER VIII. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CHAPTER VIII. <br /> English Sonnets&mdash;Sonnet Structure&mdash;Shakspeare&rsquo;s
+        Sonnets&mdash;Wells&rsquo;s <br /> Sonnet&mdash;Charles Whitehead&mdash;Ebenezer
+        Jones&mdash;Mr. W. M. Rossetti&mdash;A New <br /> Sonnet&mdash;Mr. W.
+        Davies&mdash;Canon Dixon&mdash;Miss Christina Rossetti&mdash;The Bride&rsquo;s
+        <br /> Prelude&mdash;The Supernatural in Poetry <br />
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0009"> CHAPTER IX. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        Last Days&mdash;Vale of St John&mdash;In the Lake Country&mdash;Return
+        to <br /> London&mdash;London&mdash;Birchington <br />
+      </p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0002" id="link2H_4_0002">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h1>
+      RECOLLECTIONS OF <br /> <br /> DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI
+    </h1>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0001" id="link2HCH0001">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER I.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Dante Gabriel Rossetti was the eldest son of Gabriele Rossetti and Frances
+      Polidori, daughter of Alfieri&rsquo;s secretary, and sister of the young
+      physician who travelled with Lord Byron. Gabriele Rossetti was a native of
+      Yasto, in the district of the Abruzzi, kingdom of Naples. He was a
+      patriotic poet of very considerable distinction; and, as a politician,
+      took a part in extorting from Ferdinand I. the Constitution of 1820. After
+      the failure of the Neapolitan insurrection, owing to the treachery of the
+      King (who asked leave of absence on a pretext of ill-health, and returned
+      with an overwhelming Austrian army), the insurrectionists were compelled
+      to fly. Some of them fell victims; others lay long in concealment.
+      Rossetti was one of the latter; and, while he was in hiding, Sir Graham
+      Moore, the English admiral, was lying with an English fleet in the bay.
+      The wife of the admiral had long been a warm admirer of the patriotic
+      hymns of Rossetti, and, when she learned his danger, she prevailed with
+      her husband to make efforts to save him. Sir Graham thereupon set out with
+      another English officer to the place of concealment, habited the poet in
+      an English uniform, placed him between them in a carriage, and put him
+      aboard a ship that sailed next day to Malta, where he obtained the
+      friendship of the governor, John Hookham Frere, by whose agency valuable
+      introductions were procured, and ultimately Rossetti established himself
+      in England. Arrived in London about 1823, he lived a cheerful life as an
+      exile, though deprived of the advantages of his Italian reputation. He
+      married in 1826, and his eldest son was born May 12, 1828, in Charlotte
+      Street, Portland Place, London. He was appointed Professor of Italian at
+      King&rsquo;s College, and died in 1854. His house was for years the constant
+      resort of Italian refugees; and the son used to say that it was from
+      observation of these visitors of his father that he depicted the principal
+      personage of his <i>Last Confession</i>. He did not live to see the
+      returning glories of his country or the consummation we have witnessed of
+      that great movement founded upon the principles for which he fought and
+      suffered. His present position in Italy as a poet and patriot is a high
+      one, a medal having been struck in his honour. An effort is even now afoot
+      to erect a statue to him in his native place, and one of the last
+      occasions upon which the son put pen to paper was when trying to make a
+      reminiscent rough portrait for the use of the sculptor. Gabriele Rossetti
+      spent his last years in the study of Dante, and his works on the subject
+      are unique, exhibiting a peculiar view of Dante&rsquo;s conception of Beatrice,
+      which he believed to be purely ideal, and employed solely for purposes of
+      speculative and political disquisition. Something of this interpretation
+      was fixed undoubtedly upon the personage by Dante himself in his later
+      writings, but whether the change were the result of a maturer and more
+      complicated state of thought, and whether the real and ideal characters of
+      Beatrice may not be compatible, are questions which the poetic mind will
+      not consider it possible to decide. Coleridge, no doubt, took a fair view
+      of Rossetti&rsquo;s theory when he said: &ldquo;Rossetti&rsquo;s view of Dante&rsquo;s meaning is
+      in great part just, but he has pushed it beyond all bounds of common
+      sense. How could a poet&mdash;and such a poet as Dante&mdash;have written
+      the details of the allegory as conjectured by Rossetti? The boundaries
+      between his allegory and his pure picturesque are plain enough, I think,
+      at first reading.&rdquo; It was, doubtless, due to his devotion to studies of
+      the Florentine that Gabriele Rossetti named after him his eldest son.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Dante Gabriel Rossetti, whose full baptismal name was Gabriel Charles
+      Dante, was educated principally at King&rsquo;s College School, London, and
+      there attained to a moderate proficiency in the ordinary classical
+      school-learning, besides a knowledge of French, which throughout life he
+      spoke well. He learned at home some rudimentary German; Italian he had
+      acquired at a very early age. There has always been some playful mention
+      of certain tragedies and translations upon which he exercised himself from
+      the ages of five to fifteen years; but it is hardly necessary to say that
+      he himself never attached value to these efforts of his precocity; he even
+      displayed, occasionally, a little irritation upon hearing them spoken of
+      as remarkable youthful achievements.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One of these productions of his adolescence, Sir Hugh the Heron, has been
+      so frequently alluded to, that it seems necessary to tell the story of it,
+      as the author himself, in conversation, was accustomed to do. At about
+      twelve years of age, the young poet wrote a scrap of a poem under this
+      title, and then cast it aside. His grandfather, Polidori, had seen the
+      fragment, however, and had conceived a much higher opinion of its merits
+      than even the natural vanity of the young author himself permitted him to
+      entertain. It had then become one of the grandfather&rsquo;s amusements to set
+      up an amateur printing-press in his own house, and occupy his leisure in
+      publishing little volumes of original verse for semi-public circulation.
+      He urged his grandson to finish the poem in question, promising it, in a
+      completed state, the dignity and distinction of type. Prompted by hope of
+      this hitherto unexpected reward, Rossetti&mdash;then thirteen to fourteen
+      years of age&mdash;finished the juvenile epic, and some bound copies of it
+      got abroad. No more was thought of the matter, and in due time the little
+      bard had forgotten that he had ever done it. But when a genuine
+      distinction had been earned by poetry that was in no way immature,
+      Rossetti discovered, by the gratuitous revelation of a friend, that a copy
+      of the youthful production&mdash;privately printed and never published&mdash;was
+      actually in the library of the British Museum. Amazed, and indeed appalled
+      as he was by this disclosure, he was powerless to remedy the evil, which
+      he foresaw would some day lead to the poem being unearthed to his injury,
+      and printed as a part of his work. The utmost he could do to avert the
+      threatened mischief he did, and this was to make an entry in a
+      commonplace-book which he kept for such uses, explaining the origin and
+      history of the poem, and expressing a conviction that it seemed to him to
+      be remarkable only from its entire paucity of even ordinary poetic
+      promise. But while this was indubitably a just estimate of these boyish
+      efforts, it is no doubt true, as we shall presently see, that Rossetti&rsquo;s
+      genius matured itself early in life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Whilst still a child, his love of literature exhibited itself, and a story
+      is told of a disaster occurring to him, when rather less than nine years
+      of age, which affords amusing proof of the ardour of his poetic nature.
+      Upon going with his brother and sisters to the house of his grandfather,
+      where as children they occupied themselves with sports appropriate to
+      their years, he proposed to improvise a part of a scene from <i>Othello</i>,
+      and cast himself for the principal <i>rôle</i>. The scene selected was the
+      closing one of the play, and began with the speech delivered to Lodovico,
+      Montano, and Gratiano, when they are about to take Othello prisoner.
+      Rossetti used to say that he delivered the lines in a frenzy of boyish
+      excitement, and coming to the words&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+              Set you down this:
+     And say, besides,&mdash;that in Aleppo once,
+       Where a malignant and a turban&rsquo;d Turk
+       Beat a Venetian, and traduced the state,
+       I took by the throat the circumcised dog,
+       And smote him&mdash;thus!&mdash;
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      he snatched up an iron chisel, that lay somewhere at hand, and, to the
+      consternation of his companions, smote himself with all his might on the
+      chest, inflicting a wound from which he bled and fainted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He is described by those who remember him, at this period, as a boy of a
+      gentle and affectionate nature, albeit prone to outbursts of
+      masterfulness. The earliest existent portraits represent a comely youth,
+      having redundant auburn hair curling all round the head, and eyes and
+      forehead of extraordinary beauty. It is said that he was brave and manly
+      of temperament, courageous as to personal suffering, eminently solicitous
+      of the welfare of others, and kind and considerate to*such as he had
+      claims upon. This is no doubt true portraiture, but it must be stated
+      (however open to explanation, on grounds of laudable self-depreciation),
+      that it is not the picture which he himself used to paint of his character
+      as a boy. He often described himself as being destitute of personal
+      courage when at school, as shrinking from the amusements of schoolfellows,
+      and fearful of their quarrels; not wholly without generous impulses, but,
+      in the main, selfish of nature and reclusive in habit of life. He was
+      certainly free from the meaningless affectation&mdash;for such it too
+      frequently is&mdash;of representing his school-days as the happiest of his
+      life. If, after so much undervaluing of himself, it were possible to trust
+      his estimate of his youthful character, he would have had you believe that
+      school was to him a place of semi-purgatorial probation,&mdash;which
+      nothing but love of his mother, and desire to meet her wishes, prevented
+      him, as an irreclaimable antischoliast, from obstinately renouncing at a
+      time when he had learned little Latin, and less Greek.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Having from childhood shown a propensity towards painting, the strong
+      inclination was fostered by his parents, and art was looked upon as his
+      future profession. Upon leaving school about 1843, he studied first at an
+      art academy near Bedford Square, and afterwards at the Eoyal Academy
+      Antique School, never, however, going to the Eoyal Academy Life School. He
+      appears to have been an assiduous student. In after life when his habit of
+      late rising had become a stock subject of banter among his intimate
+      friends, he would tell with unwonted pride how in earlier years he used to
+      rise at six A.M. once a week in order to attend a life-class held before
+      breakfast. On such occasions he was accustomed, he would say, to purchase
+      a buttered roll and cup of coffee at some stall at a street corner, so as
+      not to dislocate domestic arrangements by requiring the servants to get up
+      in the middle of the night. He left the Academy about 1848 or 1849, and in
+      the latter year exhibited his picture entitled the <i>Girlhood of Mary
+      Virgin</i>. This painting is an admirable example of his early art, before
+      the Gothicism of the early Italian painters became his quest. Better known
+      to the public than the picture is the sonnet written upon it, containing
+      the beautiful lines&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+       An angel-watered lily, that near God
+       Grows and is quiet.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      While Rossetti was still under age he associated with J. E. Millais,
+      Holman Hunt, Thomas Woolner, James Collinson, F. G. Stephens, and his
+      brother, W. M. Rossetti, in the movement called pre-Raphaelite. At the
+      beginning of his career he recognised, in common with his associates, that
+      the contemporary classicism had run to seed, and that, beyond an effort
+      after perfection of <i>technique</i>, the art of the period was all but
+      devoid of purpose, of thought, imagination, or spirituality. At such a
+      moment it was matter for little surprise that ardent young intellects
+      should go back for inspiration to the Gothicism of Giotto and the early
+      painters. There, at least, lay feeling, aim, aspiration, such as did not
+      concern itself primarily with any question of whether a subject were
+      painted well or ill, if only it were first of all a subject at all&mdash;a
+      subject involving manipulative excellence, perhaps, but feeling and
+      invention certainly. This, then, stated briefly, was the meaning of
+      pre-Raphaelitism. The name (as shall hereafter appear) was subsequently
+      given to the movement more than half in jest. It has sometimes been stated
+      that Mr. Ruskin was an initiator, but this is not strictly the case. The
+      company of young painters and writers are said to have been ignorant of
+      Mr. Ruskin&rsquo;s writings when they began their revolt against the current
+      classicism. It is a fact however, that, after perhaps a couple of years,
+      Mr. Ruskin came to the rescue of the little brotherhood (then much
+      maligned) by writing in their defence a letter in the <i>Times</i>. It is
+      easy to make too much of these early endeavours of a company of young men,
+      exceptionally gifted though the reformers undoubtedly were, and inspired
+      by an ennobling enthusiasm. In later years Rossetti was not the most
+      prominent of those who kept these beginnings of a movement constantly in
+      view; indeed, it is hardly rash to say that there were moments when he
+      seemed almost to resent the intrusion of them upon the maturity of aim and
+      handling which, in common with his brother artists, he ultimately
+      compassed. But it would be folly not to recognise the essential germs of a
+      right aspiration which grew out of that interchange of feeling and opinion
+      which, in its concrete shape, came to be termed pre-Raphaelitism. Rossetti
+      is acknowledged to have taken the most prominent part in the movement,
+      supplying, it is alleged, much of the poetic impulse as well as knowledge
+      of mediaeval art. He occupied himself in these and following years mainly
+      in the making of designs for pictures&mdash;the most important of them
+      being <i>Dante&rsquo;s Dream, Hamlet and Ophelia, Cassandra, Lucretia Borgia,
+      Giotto painting Dante&rsquo;s Portrait, The First Anniversary of the Death of
+      Beatrice Mary Magdalene at the Door of Simon the Pharisee, The Death of
+      Lady Macbeth, Desdemona&rsquo;s Death-song</i> and a great subject entitled <i>Found</i>,
+      designed and begun at twenty-five, but left incomplete at death.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All this occurred between the years 1849-1856, but three years before the
+      earlier of these dates Rossetti, as a painter, had come under an influence
+      which he was never slow to acknowledge operated powerfully on his art. In
+      1846, Mr. Ford Madox Brown exhibited designs in the Westminster
+      competition, and his cartoons deeply impressed Rossetti The young painter,
+      then nineteen years of age, wrote to the elder one, his senior by no more
+      than seven years, begging to be permitted to become a pupil. An intimacy
+      sprang up between the two, and for a while Rossetti worked in Brown&rsquo;s
+      studio; but though the friendship lasted throughout life the professional
+      relationship soon terminated. The ardour of the younger man led him into
+      the-brotherhood just referred to, but Brown never joined the
+      pre-Raphaelites, mainly, it is said, from dislike of coterie tendencies.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      About 1856, Rossetti, with two or three other young painters, gratuitously
+      undertook to paint designs on the walls of the Union Debating Hall at
+      Oxford, and about the time he was engaged upon this task he made the
+      acquaintance of Mr. William Morris, Mr. Burne Jones, and Mr. Swinburne,
+      who were undergraduates at the University. Mr. Burne Jones was intended
+      for a clerical career, but due to Rossett&rsquo;s intercession Holy Orders were
+      abandoned, to the great gain of English art. He has more than once
+      generously allowed that he owed much to Rossetti at the beginning of his
+      career, find regarded him to the last as leader of the movement with which
+      his own name is now so eminently and distinctively associated. Together,
+      and with the co-operation of Mr. William Morris and Canon Dixon, they
+      started and carried on for about a year a monthly periodical called <i>The
+      Oxford and Cambridge Magazine</i>, of which Canon Dixon, as one of the
+      projectors, shall presently tell the history. At a subsequent period Mr.
+      Burne Jones and Rossetti, together with Mr. Madox Brown and some three
+      others, associated with Mr. Morris in establishing, from the smallest of
+      all possible beginnings, the trading firm now so well known as Morris and
+      Co., and they remained partners in this enterprise down to the year 1874,
+      when a dissolution took place, leaving the business in the hands of the
+      gentleman whose name it bore, and whose energy had from the first been
+      mainly instrumental in securing its success.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It may be said that almost from the outset Rossetti viewed the public
+      exhibition of pictures as a distracting practice. Except the <i>Girlhood
+      of Mary Virgin</i>, the <i>Annunciation</i> was almost the only picture he
+      exhibited in London, though three or four water-colour drawings were at an
+      early period exhibited in Liverpool, and of these, by a curious
+      coincidence, one was the first study for the <i>Dante&rsquo;s Dream</i>, which
+      was purchased by the corporation of the city within a few months of the
+      painter&rsquo;s death. To sum up all that remains at this stage to say of
+      Rossetti as a pictorial artist down to his thirtieth year, we may describe
+      him (as he liked best to hear himself described) simply as a poetic
+      painter. If he had a special method, it might be called a distinct poetic
+      abstraction, together with a choice of mediaeval subject, and an effort
+      after no less vivid rendering of nature than was found in other painters.
+      With his early designs (the outcome of such a quest as has been indicated)
+      there came, perchance, artistic crudities enough, but assuredly there came
+      a great spirituality also. By and by Rossetti perceived that he must make
+      narrower the stream of his effort if he would have it flow deeper; and
+      then, throughout many years, he perfected his technical methods by
+      abandoning complex subject-designs, and confining himself to simple
+      three-quarter-length pictures. More shall be said on this point in due
+      course. Already, although unknown through the medium of the public
+      picture-gallery, he was recognised as the leader of a school of rising
+      young artists whose eccentricities were frequently a theme of discussion.
+      He never invited publicity, yet he was rapidly attaining to a prominent
+      position among painters.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His personal character in early manhood is described by friends as one of
+      peculiar manliness, geniality, and unselfishness. It is said that, on one
+      occasion, he put aside important work of his own in order to spend several
+      days in the studio of a friend, whose gifts were quite inconsiderable
+      compared with his, and whose prospects were all but hopeless,&mdash;helping
+      forward certain pictures, which were backward, for forthcoming exhibition.
+      Many similar acts of self-sacrifice are still remembered with gratitude by
+      those who were the recipients of them. Rossetti was king of his circle,
+      and it must be said, that in all that properly constituted kingship, he
+      took care to rule. There was then a certain determination of purpose which
+      occasionally had the look of arbitrariness, and sometimes, it is alleged,
+      a disregard of opposing opinion which partook of tyranny: but where heart
+      and not head were in question, he was assuredly the most urbane and
+      amiable of monarchs. In matters of taste in art, or criticism in poetry,
+      he would brook no opposition from any quarter; nor did he ever seem to be
+      conscious of the unreasonableness of compelling his associates to swallow
+      his opinions as being absolute and final. This disposition to govern his
+      circle co-existed, however, with the most lavish appreciation of every
+      good quality displayed by the members of it, and all the little uneasiness
+      to which his absolutism may sometimes have given rise was much more than
+      removed by constantly recurring acts of good-fellowship,&mdash;indeed it
+      was forgotten in the presence of them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A photograph which exists of Rossetti at twenty-seven conveys the idea of
+      a nature rather austere and taciturn than genial and outspoken. The face
+      is long and the cheeks sunken, the whole figure being attenuated and
+      slightly stooping; the eyes have the inward look which belonged to them in
+      later life, but the mouth, which is free from the concealment of moustache
+      or beard, is severe. The impression conveyed is of a powerful intellect
+      and ambitious nature at war with surroundings and not wholly satisfied
+      with the results. It ought to be added that, at the period in question,
+      health was uncertain with Rossetti: and this fact, added to the
+      circumstance of his being at the time in the very throes of those
+      difficulties with his art which he was soon to surmount, must be
+      understood to account for the austerity of his early portrait. Rossetti
+      was not in a distinct sense a humourist, but there came to him at
+      intervals, in earlier manhood, those outbursts of volatility, which, to
+      serious natures, act as safety-valves after prolonged tension of all the
+      powers of the mind. At such moments of levity he is described as almost
+      boyish in recklessness, plunging into any madcap escapade that might be
+      afoot with heedlessness of all consequences. Stories of misadventures,
+      quips and quiddities of every kind, were then his delight, and of these he
+      possessed a fund which no man knew better how to use. He would tell a
+      funny story with wonderful spirit and freshness of resource, always
+      leading up to the point with watchful care of the finest shades of covert
+      suggestion or innuendo, and, when the climax was reached, never denying
+      himself a hearty share in the universal laughter. One of his choicest
+      pleasures at a dinner or other such gathering was to improvise rhymes on
+      his friends, and of these the fun usually lay in the improvisatore&rsquo;s
+      audacious ascription of just those qualities which his subject did not
+      possess. Though far from devoid of worldly wisdom, and indeed possessed of
+      not a little shrewdness in his dealings with his buyers (often exhibiting
+      that rarest quality of the successful trader, the art of linking one
+      transaction with another), he was sometimes amusingly deficient in what is
+      known as common sense. In later life he used to tell with infinite zest a
+      story of a blunder of earlier years which might easily have led to serious
+      if not fatal results. He had been suffering from nervous exhaustion and
+      had been ordered to take a preparation of nux vomica. The dose was to be
+      taken three times daily: in the morning, at noon, and in the evening. One
+      afternoon he was about to start out for the house of a friend with whom he
+      had promised to lunch, when he remembered that he had not taken his first
+      daily dose of medicine. He forthwith took it, and upon setting down the
+      glass, reflected that the second dose was due, and so he took that also.
+      Putting on his hat and preparing to sally forth he further reflected that
+      before he could return the third dose ought in ordinary course to be
+      taken, and so without more deliberation he poured himself a final portion
+      and drank it off. He had thereupon scarcely turned himself about, when to
+      his horror he discovered that his limbs were growing rigid and his jaw
+      stiff. In the utmost agitation he tried to walk across the studio and
+      found himself almost incapable of the effort. His eyes seemed to leap out
+      of their sockets and his sight grew dim. Appalled and in agony, he at
+      length sprang up from the couch upon which he had dropped down a moment
+      before, and fled out of the house. The violent action speedily induced a
+      copious perspiration, and this being by much the best thing that could
+      have happened to him, carried off the poison and so saved his life. He
+      could never afterwards be induced to return to the drug in question, and
+      in the last year of his life was probably more fearfully aghast at seeing
+      the present writer take a harmless dose of it than he would have been at
+      learning that 50 grains of chloral had been taken.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had, in early manhood, the keenest relish of a funny prank, and one
+      such he used to act over again in after life with the greatest vivacity of
+      manner. Every one remembers the story told by Jefferson Hogg how Shelley
+      got rid of the old woman with the onion basket who took a place beside him
+      in a stage coach in Sussex, by seating himself on the floor and fixing a
+      tearful, woful face upon his companion, addressing her in thrilling
+      accents thus&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     For heaven&rsquo;s sake, let us sit upon the ground,
+     And tell sad stories of the death of kings.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Rossetti&rsquo;s frolic was akin to this, though the results were amusingly
+      different. It would appear that when in early years, Mr. William Morris
+      and Mr. Burne Jones occupied a studio together, they had a young servant
+      maid whose manners were perennially vivacious, whose good spirits no
+      disaster could damp, and whose pertness nothing could banish or check.
+      Rossetti conceived the idea of frightening the girl out of her
+      complacency, and calling one day on his friends, he affected the direst
+      madness, strutted ominously up to her and with the wildest glare of his
+      wild eyes, the firmest and fiercest setting of his lower lip, and began in
+      measured and resonant accents to recite the lines&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     Shall the hide of a fierce lion
+     Be stretched on a couch of wood,
+     For a daughter&rsquo;s foot to lie on,
+     Stained with a father&rsquo;s blood?
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      The poet&rsquo;s response is a soft &ldquo;Ah, no!&rdquo; but the girl, ignorant of course
+      of this, and wholly undisturbed by the bloodthirsty tone of the question
+      addressed to her, calmly fixed her eyes on the frenzied eyes before her,
+      and answered with a swift light accent and rippling laugh, &ldquo;It shall if
+      you like, sir!&rdquo; Rossetti&rsquo;s enjoyment of his discomfiture on this occasion
+      seemed never to grow less.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His life was twofold in intellectual effort, and of the directions in
+      which his energy went out the artistic alone has thus far been dealt with.
+      It has been said that he early displayed talent for writing as well as
+      painting, and, in truth, the poems that he wrote in early youth are even
+      more remarkable than the pictures that he painted. His poetic genius
+      developed rapidly after sixteen, and sprang at once to a singular and
+      perfect maturity. It is difficult to say whether it will add to the marvel
+      of mature achievement or deduct from the sense of reality of personal
+      experience, to make public the fact that <i>The Blessed Damozel</i> was
+      written when the poet was no more than nineteen. That poem is a creation
+      so pure and simple in the higher imagination, as to support the contention
+      that the author was electively related to Fra Angelico. Described briefly,
+      it may be said to embody the meditations of a beautiful girl in Paradise,
+      whose lover is in the same hour dreaming of her on earth. How the poet
+      lighted upon the conception shall be told by himself in that portion of
+      this book devoted to the writer&rsquo;s personal recollections.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>The Blessed Damozel</i> is a conception dilated to such spiritual
+      loveliness that it seems not to exist within things substantially
+      beautiful, or yet by aid of images that coalesce out of the evolving
+      memory of them, but outside of everything actual It is not merely that the
+      dream itself is one of ideal purity; the wave of impulse is pure, and
+      flows without taint of media that seem almost to know it not. The lady
+      says:&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     We two will lie i&rsquo; the shadow of
+        That living mystic tree
+     Within whose secret growth the Dove
+        Is sometimes felt to be,
+     While every leaf that His plumes touch
+        Saith His Name audibly.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Here the love involved is so etherealised as scarcely to be called human,
+      save only on the part of the mortal dreamer, in whose yearning ecstasy the
+      ear thinks it recognises a more earthly note. The lover rejoins.&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     (Alas! We two, we two, thou say&rsquo;st!
+        Yea, one wast thou with me
+     That once of old. But shall God lift
+        To endless unity
+     The soul whose likeness with thy soul
+        Was but its love for thee?)
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      It is said of the few existent examples of the art of Giorgione that,
+      around some central realisation of human passion gathers always a
+      landscape which is not merely harmonised to it, but a part of it, sharing
+      the joy or the anguish, lying silent to the breathless adoration, or
+      echoing the rapturous voice of the full pleasure of those who are beyond
+      all height and depth more than it. Something of this passive sympathy of
+      environing objects comes out in the poem:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     Around her, lovers, newly met
+        &lsquo;Mid deathless love&rsquo;s acclaims,
+     Spoke evermore among themselves
+        Their rapturous new names;
+     And the souls mounting up to God
+        Went by her like thin flames.
+
+     And still she bowed herself and stooped
+        Out of the circling charm;
+     Until her bosom must have made
+        The bar she leaned on warm,
+     And the lilies lay as if asleep
+        Along her bended arm.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      The sense induced by such imagery is akin to that which comes of rapt
+      contemplation of the deep em-blazonings of a fine stained window when the
+      sun&rsquo;s warm gules glides off before the dim twilight. And this sense as of
+      a thing existent, yet passing stealthily out of all sight away, the metre
+      of the poem helps to foster. Other metres of Rossetti&rsquo;s have a strenuous
+      reality, and rejoice in their self-assertiveness, and seem, almost, in
+      their resonant strength, to tell themselves they are very good; but this
+      may almost be said to be a disembodied voice, that lives only on the air,
+      and, like the song of a bird, is gone before its accents have been caught.
+      Of the four-and-twenty stanzas of the poem, none is more calmly musical
+      than this:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+      When round his head the aureole clings,
+        And he is clothed in white,
+      I &lsquo;ll take his hand and go with him
+        To the deep wells of light;
+      We will step down as to a stream,
+        And bathe there in God&rsquo;s sight.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Perhaps Rossetti never did anything more beautiful and spiritual than this
+      little work of his twentieth year; and more than once in later life he
+      painted the beautiful lady who is the subject of it, with the lilies lying
+      along her arm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A first draft of <i>Jenny</i> was struck off when the poet was scarcely
+      more than a boy, and taken up again years afterwards, and almost entirely
+      re-written&mdash;the only notable passage of the early poem that now
+      remains being the passage on lust. It is best described in the simplest
+      phrase, as a man&rsquo;s meditations on the life of a courtesan whom he has met
+      at a dancing-garden and accompanied home. While he sits on a couch, she
+      lies at his feet with her head on his knee and sleeps. When the morning
+      dawns he rises, places cushions beneath her head, puts some gold among her
+      hair, and leaves her. It is wisest to hazard at the outset all
+      unfavourable comment by the frankest statement of the story of the poem.
+      But the <i>motif</i> of it is a much higher thing. <i>Jenny</i> embodies
+      an entirely distinct phase of feeling, yet the poet&rsquo;s root impulse is
+      therein the same as in the case of <i>The Blessed Damozel</i>. No two
+      creations could stand more widely apart as to outward features than the
+      dream of the sainted maiden and the reality of the frail and fallen girl;
+      yet the primary prompting and the ultimate outcome are the same. The
+      ardent longing after ideal purity in womanhood, which in the one gave
+      birth to a conception whereof the very sorrow is but excess of joy found
+      expression in the other through a vivid presentment of the nameless misery
+      of unwomanly dishonour:&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     Behold the lilies of the field,
+     They toil not neither do they spin;
+     (So doth the ancient text begin,&mdash;
+     Not of such rest as one of these Can share.)
+     Another rest and ease
+     Along each summer-sated path
+     From its new lord the garden hath,
+     Than that whose spring in blessings ran
+     Which praised the bounteous husbandman,
+     Ere yet, in days of hankering breath,
+     The lilies sickened unto death.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      It was indeed a daring thing the author proposed to himself to do, and
+      assuredly no man could have essayed it who had not consciously united to
+      an unfailing and unshrinking insight, a relativeness of mind such as
+      right-hearted people might approve. To take a fallen woman, a cipher of
+      man&rsquo;s sum of lust, befouled with the shameful knowledge of the streets,
+      yet young, delicate, &ldquo;apparelled beyond parallel,&rdquo; unblessed, with a
+      beauty which, if copied by a Da Vinci&rsquo;s hand, might stand whole ages long
+      &ldquo;for preachings of what God can do,&rdquo; and then to endow such a one with the
+      sensitiveness of a poet&rsquo;s own mind, make her read afresh as though by
+      lightning, and in a dream, that story of the old pure days&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+      Much older than any history
+      That is written in any book,
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      and lastly, to gather about her an overwhelming sense of infinite solace
+      for the wronged and lost, and of the retributive justice with which man&rsquo;s
+      transgressions will be visited&mdash;this is, indeed, to hazard all things
+      in the certainty of an upright purpose and true reward.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+      Shall no man hold his pride forewarn&rsquo;d
+      Till in the end, the Day of Days,
+      At Judgment, one of his own race,
+      As frail and lost as you, shall rise,&mdash;
+      His daughter with his mother&rsquo;s eyes!
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Yet Rossetti made no treaty with puritanism, and in this respect his <i>Jenny</i>
+      has something in common with Hawthorne&rsquo;s <i>Scarlet Letter</i>&mdash;than
+      which nothing, perhaps, that is so pure, without being puritanical, has
+      reached us even from the land that gave <i>Evangeline</i> to the English
+      tongue. The guilty love of Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale is never
+      for an instant condoned, but, on the other hand, the rigorous severity of
+      the old puritan community is not dwelt upon with favour. Relentless
+      remorse must spend itself upon the man before the whole measure of his
+      misery is full, and on the woman the brand of a public shame must be borne
+      meekly to the end. But though no rancour is shown towards the austere and
+      blind morality which puts to open discharge the guilty mother whilst
+      unconsciously nourishing the yet more guilty father, we see the tenderness
+      of a love that palliates the baseness of the amour, and the bitter depths
+      of a penitence that cannot be complete until it can no longer be
+      concealed. And so with Jenny. She may have transient flashes of remorseful
+      consciousness, such as reveal to her the trackless leagues that separate
+      what she was from what she is, but no effort is made to hide the plain
+      truth that she is a courtesan, skilled only in the lures and artifices
+      peculiar to her shameful function. No reformatory promptings fit her for a
+      place at the footstool of the puritan. Nothing tells of winter yet; on the
+      other hand, no virulent diatribes are cast forth against the society that
+      shuts this woman out, as the puritan settlement turned its back on Hester
+      Prynne. But we see her and know her for what she is, a woman like unto other
+      women: desecrated but akin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This dramatic quality of sitting half-passively above their creations and
+      of leaving their ethics to find their own channels (once assured that
+      their impulses are pure), the poet and the romancer possess in common. If
+      there is a point of difference between their attitudes of mind, it is
+      where Rossetti seems to reserve his whole personal feeling for the
+      impeachment of lust;&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     Like a toad within a stone
+     Seated while Time crumbles on;
+     Which sits there since the earth was cursed
+     For Man&rsquo;s transgression at the first;
+     Which, living through all centuries,
+     Not once has seen the sun arise;
+     Whose life, to its cold circle charmed,
+     The earth&rsquo;s whole summers have not warmed;
+     Which always&mdash;whitherso the stone
+     Be flung&mdash;sits there, deaf, blind, alone;&mdash;
+     Ay, and shall not be driven out
+     Till that which shuts him round about
+     Break at the very Master&rsquo;s stroke,
+     And the dust thereof vanish as smoke,
+     And the seed of Man vanish as dust:&mdash;
+     Even so within this world is Lust.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      <i>Sister Helen</i> was written somewhat later than <i>The Blessed Damozel</i>
+      and the first draft of <i>Jenny</i>, and probably belonged to the poet&rsquo;s
+      twenty-fourth or twenty-fifth year. The ballad involves a story of
+      witchcraft A girl has been first betrayed and then deserted by her lover;
+      so, to revenge herself upon him and his newly-married bride, she burns his
+      waxen image three days over a fire, and during that time he dies in
+      torment In <i>Sister Helen</i> we touch the key-note of Rossetti&rsquo;s
+      creative gift. Even the superstition which forms the basis of the ballad
+      owes something of its individual character to the invention and poetic
+      bias of the poet. The popular superstitions of the Middle Ages were
+      usually of two kinds only. First, there were those that arose out of a
+      jealous Catholicism, always glancing towards heresy; and next there were
+      those that laid their account neither with orthodoxy nor unbelief, and
+      were purely pagan. The former were the offspring of fanaticism; the latter
+      of an appeal to appetite or passion, or fancy, or perhaps intuitive reason
+      directed blindly or unconsciously towards natural phenomena. The
+      superstition involved in <i>Sister Helen</i> partakes wholly of neither
+      character, but partly of both, with an added element of demonology. The
+      groundwork is essentially catholic, the burden of the ballad showing that
+      the tragic event lies between Hell and Heaven:&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+                  (O Mother, Mary Mother,
+      Three days to-day, between Hell and Heaven!)
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      But the superstructural overgrowth is totally undisturbed by any animosity
+      against heresy, and is concerned only with a certain ultimate demoniacal
+      justice visiting the wrongdoer. Thus far the elemental tissue of the
+      superstition has something in common with that of the German secret
+      tribunal of the steel and cord; with this difference, however, that
+      whereas the latter punishes in secret, even <i>as the deity</i>, the
+      former makes conscious compact with the powers of evil, that whatever
+      justice shall be administered upon the wicked shall first be purchased by
+      sacrifice of the good. Sister Helen may burn, alive, the body and soul of
+      her betrayer, but the dying knell that tells of the false soul&rsquo;s untimely
+      flight, tolls the loss of her own soul also:&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+      &ldquo;Ah! what white thing at the door has cross&rsquo;d,
+            Sister Helen?
+      Ah! what is this that sighs in the frost!&rdquo;
+       &ldquo;A soul that&rsquo;s lost as mine is lost,
+            Little brother!&rdquo;
+             (O Mother, Mary Mother,
+      Lost, lost, all lost, between Hell and Heaven!)
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Here lies the divergence between the lines of this and other compacts with
+      evil powers; this is the point of Rossetti&rsquo;s departure from the scheme
+      that forms the underplot of Goethe&rsquo;s <i>Faust</i>, and of Marlowe&rsquo;s <i>Faustus</i>,
+      and was intended to constitute the plan of Coleridge&rsquo;s <i>Michael Scott</i>.
+      It has been well said that the theme of the Faust is the consequence of a
+      misology, or hatred of knowledge, resulting upon an original thirst for
+      knowledge baffled. Faust never does from the beginning love knowledge for
+      itself, but he loves it for the means it affords for the acquisition of
+      power. This base purpose defeats itself; and when Faust finds that
+      learning fails to yield him the domination he craves, he hates and
+      contemns it. Away, henceforth, with all pretence to knowledge! Then
+      follows the compact, the articles to which are absolute servility of the
+      Devil on the one part, and complete possession of the soul of Faust on the
+      other. Faust is little better than a wizard from the first, for if
+      knowledge had given him what he: sought, he had never had recourse to
+      witchcraft! Helen, however, partakes in some sort of the triumphant
+      nobility of an avenging deity who has cozened hell itself, and not in
+      vain. In the whole majesty of her great wrong, she loses the originally
+      vulgar character of the witch. It is not as the consequence of a
+      poison-speck in her own heart that she has recourse to sorcery. She does
+      not love witchery for its own sake; she loves it only as the retributive
+      channel for the requital of a terrible offence. It is throughout the last
+      hour of her three-days&rsquo; conflict, merely, that we see her, but we know her
+      then not more for the revengeful woman she is than for the trustful maiden
+      she has been. When she becomes conscious of the treason wrought against
+      her, we feel that she suffers change. In the eyes of others we can see
+      her, and in our vision of her she is beautiful; but hers is the beauty of
+      fair cheeks, from which the canker frets the soft tenderness of colour,
+      the loveliness of golden hair that has lost its radiance, the sweetness of
+      eyes once dripping with the dews of the spirit, now pale, and cold, and
+      lustreless. Very soon the wrongdoer shall reap the harvest of a twofold
+      injury: this day another bride shall stand by his side. Is there, then, no
+      way to wreak the just revenge of a broken heart? <i>That</i> suggests
+      sorcery. Yes, the body and soul of the false lover may melt as before a
+      flame; but the price of vengeance is horrible. Yet why? Has not love
+      become devilish? Is not life a curse? Then wherefore shrink? The resolute
+      wronged woman must go through with it. And when the last hour comes,
+      nature itself is portentous of the virulent ill. In the wind&rsquo;s wake, the
+      moon flies through a rack of night clouds. One after one the suppliants
+      crave pardon for the distant dying lover, and last of these comes the
+      three-days&rsquo; bride.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In addition to the three great poems just traversed, Rossetti had written,
+      before the completion of his twenty-sixth year, <i>The Staff and Scrip,
+      The Burden of Nineveh, Troy Town, Eden Bower</i> and <i>The Last
+      Confession</i>, as well as a fragment of <i>The Bride&rsquo;s Prelude</i>, to
+      which it will be necessary to return. But, with a single exception, the
+      poems just named may be said to exist beside the three that have been
+      analysed, without being radically distinct from them, or touching higher
+      or other levels, and hence it is not considered needful to dwell upon them
+      at length. <i>The Last Confession</i> covers another range of feeling, it
+      is true, whereof it may be said that the nobler part is akin to that which
+      finds expression in the pure and shattered love of Othello; but it is a
+      range of feeling less characteristical, perhaps less indigenous and
+      appreciable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the years 1845-49 inclusive, Rossetti made the larger part of his
+      translations (published in 1861) from the early Italian poets, and though
+      he afterwards spoke of them as having been the work of the leisure moments
+      of many years, of their subsequent revision alone, perhaps, could this be
+      altogether true. The <i>Vita Nuova</i>, together with the many among
+      Dante&rsquo;s <i>Lyrics</i> and those of his contemporaries which elucidate
+      their personal intercourse; were translated, as well as a great body of
+      the sonnets of poets later than Dante. {*} This early and indirect
+      apprenticeship to the sonnet, as a form of composition, led to his
+      becoming, in the end, perhaps the most perfect of English sonnet-writers.
+      In youth, it was one of his pleasures to engage in exercises of
+      sonnet-skill with his brother William and his sister Christina, and, even
+      then, he attained to such proficiency, in the mere mechanism of sonnet
+      structure, that he could sometimes dash off a sonnet in ten minutes&mdash;rivalling,
+      in this particular, the impromptu productions of Hartley Coleridge. It is
+      hardly necessary to say that the poems produced, under such conditions of
+      time and other tests, were rarely, if ever, adjudged worthy of
+      publication, by the side of work to which he gave adequate deliberation.
+      But several of the sonnets on pictures&mdash;as, for example, the fine one
+      on a Venetian pastoral by Giorgione&mdash;and the political sonnet,
+      Miltonic in spirit, <i>On the Refusal of Aid between Nations</i>, were
+      written contemporaneously with the experimental sonnets in question.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     * Rossetti often remarked that he had intended to translate
+     the sonnets of Michael Angelo, until he saw Mr. Symonds&rsquo;s
+     translation, when he was so much impressed by its excellence
+     that he forthwith abandoned the purpose.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      As <i>The House of Life</i> was composed in great part at the period with
+      which we are now dealing (though published in the complete sequence nearly
+      twenty-five years later), it may be best to traverse it at this stage.
+      Though called a full series of sonnets, there is no intimation that it is
+      not fragmentary as to design; the title is an astronomical, not an
+      architectural figure. The work is at once Shakspearean and Dantesque.
+      Whilst electively akin to the <i>Vita Nuova</i>, it is broader in range,
+      the life involved being life idealised in all phases. What Rossetti&rsquo;s idea
+      was of the mission of the sonnet, as associated with life, and exhibiting
+      a similitude of it, may best be learned from his prefatory sonnet:&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    A Sonnet is a moment&rsquo;s monument,&mdash;
+      Memorial from the Soul&rsquo;s eternity
+      To one dead deathless hour. Look that it be,
+    Whether for lustral rite or dire portent,
+    Of its own arduous fulness reverent:
+      Carve it in ivory or in ebony,
+      As Day or Night may rule; and let Time see
+    Its flowering crest impearled and orient.
+    A Sonnet is a coin; its face reveals
+      The soul,&mdash;its converse, to what Power &lsquo;tis due:&mdash;
+    Whether for tribute to the august appeals
+      Of Life, or dower in Love&rsquo;s high retinue,
+    It serve; or &lsquo;mid the dark wharfs cavernous breath,
+    In Charon&rsquo;s palm it pay the toll to Death.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Rossetti&rsquo;s sonnets are of varied metrical structure; but their
+      intellectual structure is uniform, comprising in each case a flow and ebb
+      of thought within the limits of a single conception. In this latter
+      respect they have a character almost peculiar to themselves among English
+      sonnets. Rossetti was not the first English writer who deliberatively
+      separated octave and sestet, but he was the first who obeyed throughout a
+      series of sonnets the canon of the contemporary structure requiring that a
+      sonnet shall present the twofold facet of a single thought or emotion.
+      This form of the sonnet Rossetti was at least the first among English
+      writers entirely to achieve and perfectly to render. <i>The House of Life</i>
+      does not contain a sonnet which is not to some degree informed by such an
+      intellectual and musical wave; but the following is an example more than
+      usually emphatic:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    Even as a child, of sorrow that we give
+        dead, but little in his heart can find,
+        Since without need of thought to his clear mind
+    Their turn it is to die and his to live:&mdash;
+    Even so the winged New Love smiles to receive
+        Along his eddying plumes the auroral wind,
+        Nor, forward glorying, casts one look behind
+    Where night-rack shrouds the Old Love fugitive.
+
+     There is a change in every hour&rsquo;s recall,
+        And the last cowslip in the fields we see
+        On the same day with the first corn-poppy.
+     Alas for hourly change! Alas for all
+     The loves that from his hand proud youth lets fall,
+        Even as the beads of a told rosary!
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      The distinguishing excellence of craftsmanship in Rossetti&rsquo;s sonnets was
+      early recognised; but the fertility of thought, and range of emotion
+      compassed by this part of his work constitute an excellence far higher
+      than any that belongs to perfection of form, rhythm, or metre. Mr.
+      Palgrave has well said that a poet&rsquo;s story differs from a narrative in
+      being in itself a creation; that it brings its own facts; that what we
+      have to ask is not the true life of Laura, but how far Petrarch has truly
+      drawn the life of love. So with Rossetti&rsquo;s sonnets. They may or may not be
+      &ldquo;occasional.&rdquo; Many readers who enter with sympathy into the series of
+      feelings they present will doubtless insist upon regarding them as
+      autobiographical. Others, who think they see the stamp of reality upon
+      them, will perhaps accept them (as Hallam accepted the Sonnets of
+      Shakspeare) as witnesses of excessive affection, redeemed sometimes by
+      touches of nobler sentiments&mdash;if affection, however excessive, needs
+      to be redeemed. Others again will receive them as artistic embodiments of
+      ideal love upon which is placed the imprint of a passion as mythical as
+      they believe to be attached to the autobiography of Dante&rsquo;s early days.
+      But the genesis and history of these sonnets (whether the emotion with
+      which they are pervaded be actual or imagined) must be looked for within.
+      Do they realise vividly Life representative in its many phases of love,
+      joy, sorrow, and death? It must be conceded that <i>he House of Life</i>
+      touches many passions and depicts life in most of its changeful aspects.
+      It would afford an adequate test of its comprehensiveness to note how
+      rarely a mind in general sympathy with the author could come to its
+      perusal without alighting upon something that would be in harmony with its
+      mood. To traverse the work through its aspiration and foreboding, joy,
+      grief, remorse, despair, and final resignation, would involve a task too
+      long and difficult to be attempted here. Two sonnets only need be quoted
+      as at once indicative of the range of thought and feeling covered, and of
+      the sequent relation these poems bear each to each.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    By thine own tears thy song must tears beget,
+       Singer! Magic mirror thou hast none
+       Except thy manifest heart; and save thine own
+    Anguish or ardour, else no amulet.
+
+    Cisterned in Pride, verse is the feathery jet
+       Of soulless air-flung fountains; nay, more dry
+       Than the Dead Sea for throats that thirst and sigh,
+    That song o&rsquo;er which no singer&rsquo;s lids grew wet.
+
+    The Song-god&mdash;He the Sun-god&mdash;is no slave
+       Of thine: thy Hunter he, who for thy soul
+       Fledges his shaft: to the august control
+    Of thy skilled hand his quivered store he gave:
+       But if thy lips&rsquo; loud cry leap to his smart,
+       The inspired record shall pierce thy brother&rsquo;s heart.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      This is not meant to convey the same idea as Shelley&rsquo;s &ldquo;learn in
+      suffering,&rdquo; etc., but merely that a poem must move the writer in its
+      composition if it is to move the reader.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With the following <i>The House of Life</i> is made to close:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    When vain desire at last and vain regret
+       Go hand in hand to death, and all is vain,
+       What shall assuage the unforgotten pain
+    And teach the unforgetful to forget?
+
+    Shall Peace be still a sunk stream long unmet,&mdash;
+       Or may the soul at once in a green plain
+       Stoop through the spray of some sweet life-fountain,
+    And cull the dew-drenched flowering amulet?
+
+    Ah! when the wan soul in that golden air
+       Between the scriptured petals softly blown
+       Peers breathless for the gift of grace unknown,&mdash;
+    Ah! let none other alien spell soe&rsquo;er
+    But only the one Hope&rsquo;s one name be there,&mdash;
+       Not less nor more, but even that word alone.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      A writer must needs be loath to part from this section of Rossett&rsquo;s work
+      without naming some few sonnets that seem to be in all respects on a level
+      with those to which attention has been drawn. Of such, perhaps, the most
+      conspicuous are:&mdash;<i>A Day of Love; Mid-Rapture; Her Gifts; The Dark
+      Glass; True Woman; Without Her; Known in Vain; The Heart of the Night; The
+      Landmark; Stillborn Love; Lost Days</i>. But it would be difficult to
+      formulate a critical opinion in support of the superiority of almost any
+      of these&rsquo; sonnets over the others,&mdash;so balanced is their merit, so
+      equal their appeal to the imagination and heart. Indeed, it were scarcely
+      rash to say that in the language (outside Shakspeare) there exists no
+      single body of sonnets characterised by such sustained excellence of
+      vision and presentment. It must have been strange enough if the all but
+      unexampled ardour and constancy with which Rossetti pursued the art of the
+      sonnet-writer had not resulted in absolute mastery.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In 1850 <i>The Germ</i> was started under the editorship of Mr. William
+      Michael Rossetti, and to the four issues, which were all that were
+      published of this monthly magazine (designed to advocate the views of the
+      pre-Raphaelite brotherhood), Rossetti contributed certain of his early
+      poems&mdash;<i>The Blessed Damozel</i> among the number. In 1856 he
+      contributed many of the same poems, together with others, to <i>The Oxford
+      and Cambridge Magazine</i>, of which Canon Dixon has kindly undertaken to
+      tell the history. He says:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My knowledge of Dante Gabriel Rossetti was begun in connection with <i>The
+      Oxford and Cambridge Magazine</i>, a monthly periodical, which was started
+      in January 1856, and lasted a year. The projectors of this periodical were
+      Mr. William Morris, Mr. Ed. Burne Jones, and myself. The editor was Mr.
+      (now the Rev.) William Fulford. Among the original contributors were the
+      late Mr. Wilfred Heeley of Cambridge, Mr. Faulkner, now Fellow of
+      University College, Oxford, and Mr. Cormel Price. We were all
+      undergraduates. The publishers of the magazine were the late firm of Bell
+      and Daldy. We gradually associated with ourselves several other
+      contributors: above all, D. G. Rossetti.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of this undertaking the central notion was, I think, to advocate moral
+      earnestness and purpose in literature, art, and society. It was founded
+      much on Mr. Ruskin&rsquo;s teaching: it sprang out of youthful impatience, and
+      exhibited many signs of immaturity and ignorance: but perhaps it was not
+      without value as a protest against some things. The pre-Raphaelite
+      movement was then in vigour: and this Magazine came to be considered as
+      the organ of those who accepted the ideas which were brought into art at
+      that time; and, as in a manner, the successor of <i>The Germ</i>, a small
+      periodical which had been published previously by the first beginners of
+      the movement. Rossetti, in many respects the most memorable of the
+      pre-Raphaelites, became connected with our Magazine when it had been in
+      existence about six months: and he contributed to it several of the finest
+      of the poems that were afterwards collected in the former of his two
+      volumes of poems: namely, <i>The Burden of Nineveh, The Blessed Damozel,
+      and The Staff and Scrip</i>. I think that one of them, <i>The Blessed
+      Damozel</i>, had appeared previously in <i>The Germ</i>. All these poems,
+      as they now stand in the author&rsquo;s volume, have been greatly altered from
+      what they were in the Magazine: and, in being altered, not always
+      improved, at least in the verbal changes. The first of them, a sublime
+      meditation of peculiar metrical power, has been much altered, and in
+      general happily, as to the arrangement of stanzas: but not always so
+      happily as to the words. It is, however, pleasing to notice that in the
+      alterations some touches of bitterness have been effaced. The second of
+      these pieces has been brought with great skill into regular form by
+      transposition: but again one repines to find several touches gone that
+      once were there. The last of them, <i>The Staff and Scrip</i>, is, in my
+      judgment, the finest of all Rossetti&rsquo;s poems, and one of the most glorious
+      writings in the language. It exhibits in flawless perfection the gift that
+      he had above all other writers, absolute beauty and pure action. Here
+      again it is not possible to see without regret some of the verbal
+      alterations that have been made in the poem as it now stands, although the
+      chief emendation, the omission of one stanza and the insertion of another,
+      adds clearness, and was all that was wanted to make the poem perfect in
+      structure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I saw Rossetti for the first time in his lodgings over Blackfriars Bridge.
+      It was impossible not to be impressed with the freedom and kindness of his
+      manner, not less than by his personal appearance. His frank greeting,
+      bold, but gentle glance, his whole presence, produced a feeling of
+      confidence and pleasure. His voice had a great charm, both in tone, and
+      from the peculiar cadences that belonged to it I think that the leading
+      features of his character struck me more at first than the characteristics
+      of his genius; or rather, that my notion of the character of the man was
+      formed first, and was then applied to his works, and identified with them.
+      The main features of his character were, in my apprehension, fearlessness,
+      kindliness, a decision that sometimes made him seem somewhat arbitrary,
+      and condensation or concentration. He was wonderfully self-reliant. These
+      moral qualities, guiding an artistic temperament as exquisite as was ever
+      bestowed on man, made him what he was, the greatest inventor of abstract
+      beauty, both in form and colour, that this age, perhaps that the world,
+      has seen. They would also account for some peculiarities that must be
+      admitted in some of his works, want of nature, for instance. I heard him
+      once remark that it was &ldquo;astonishing how much the least bit of nature
+      helped if one put it in;&rdquo; which seemed like an acknowledgment that he
+      might have gone more to nature. Hence, however, his works always seem
+      abstract, always seem to embody some kind of typical aim, and acquire a
+      sort of sacred character.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I saw a good deal of Rossetti in London, and afterwards in Oxford, during
+      the painting of the Union debating-room. In later years our personal
+      intercourse was broken off through distance; though I saw him occasionally
+      almost to the time of his lamented death, and we had some correspondence.
+      My recollection of him is that of greatness, as might be expected of one
+      of the few who have been &ldquo;illustrious in two arts,&rdquo; and who stands by
+      himself and has earned an independent name in both. His work was great:
+      the man was greater. His conversation had a wonderful ease, precision, and
+      felicity of expression. He produced thoughts perfectly enunciated with a
+      deliberate happiness that was indescribable, though it was always simple
+      conversation, never haranguing or declamation. He was a natural leader
+      because he was a natural teacher. When he chose to be interested in
+      anything that was brought before him, no pains were too great for him to
+      take. His advice was always given warmly and freely, and when he spoke of
+      the works of others it was always in the most generous spirit of praise.
+      It was in fact impossible to have been more free from captiousness,
+      jealousy, envy, or any other form of pettiness than this truly noble man.
+      The great painter who first took me to him said, &ldquo;We shall see the
+      greatest man in Europe.&rdquo; I have it on the same authority that Rossetti&rsquo;s
+      aptitude for art was considered amongst painters to be no less
+      extraordinary than his imagination. For example, that he could take hold
+      of the extremity of the brush, and be as certain of his touch as if it had
+      been held in the usual way; that he never painted a picture without doing
+      something in colour that had never been done before; and, in particular,
+      that he had a command of the features of the human face such as no other
+      painter ever possessed. I also remember some observations by the same
+      assuredly competent judge, to the effect that Rossetti might be set
+      against the great painters of the fifteenth century, as equal to them,
+      though unlike them: the difference being that while they represented the
+      characters, whom they painted, in their ordinary and unmoved mood, he
+      represented his characters under emotion, and yet gave them wholly. It may
+      be added, perhaps, that he had a lofty standard of beauty of his own
+      invention, and that he both elevated and subjected all to beauty. Such a
+      man was not likely to be ignorant of the great root of power in art, and I
+      once saw him very indignant on hearing that he had been accused of
+      irreligion, or rather of not being a Christian. He asked with great
+      earnestness, &ldquo;Do not my works testify to my Christianity?&rdquo; I wish that
+      these imperfect recollections may be of any avail to those who cherish the
+      memory of an extraordinary genius.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Besides his contributions to <i>The Germ</i>, and to <i>The Oxford and
+      Cambridge Magazine</i>, Rossetti contributed <i>Sister Helen</i>, in 1853,
+      to a German Annual. Beyond this he made little attempt to publish his
+      poetry. He had written it for the love of writing, or in obedience to the
+      inherent impulse compelling him to do so, but of actual hope of achieving
+      by virtue of it a place among English poets he seems to have had none, or
+      next to none. In later life he used to say that Mr. Browning&rsquo;s greatness
+      and the splendour of Mr. Tennyson&rsquo;s merited renown seemed to him in those
+      early years to render all attempt on his part to secure rank by their side
+      as hopeless as presumptuous. This, he asserted, was the cause that
+      operated to restrain him from publication between 1853 and 1862, and after
+      that (as will presently be seen), another and more serious obstacle than
+      self-depreciation intervened. But in putting aside all hope of the reward
+      of poetic achievement, he did not wholly banish the memory of the work he
+      had done. He made two or more copies of the most noticeable of the poems
+      he had written, and sent them to friends eminent in letters. To Leigh Hunt
+      he sent <i>The Blessed Damozel</i>, and received in acknowledgment a
+      letter full of appreciative comment, and foretelling a brilliant future.
+      His literary friends at this time were Mr. Ruskin, Mr. and Mrs. Browning;
+      he used to see Mr. Tennyson and Carlyle at intervals, and was in constant
+      intercourse with the younger writers, Mr. Swinburne and Mr. Morris, whose
+      reputations had then to be made; Mr. Arnold, Sir Henry Taylor, Mr. Aubrey
+      de Vere, Mr. E. Brough, Mr. J. Hannay, and Mr. Monckton Milnes (Lord
+      Houghton), he met occasionally; Dobell he knew only by correspondence.
+      Though unpublished, his poems were not unknown, for besides the
+      semi-publicity they obtained by circulation &ldquo;among his private friends,&rdquo;
+       he was nothing loath to read or recite them at request, and by such means
+      a few of them secured a celebrity akin in kind and almost equal in extent
+      to that enjoyed by Coleridge&rsquo;s <i>Christabel</i> during the many years
+      preceding 1816 in which it lay in manuscript. Like Coleridge&rsquo;s poem in
+      another important particular, certain of Rossetti&rsquo;s ballads, whilst still
+      unknown to the public, so far influenced contemporary poetry that when
+      they did at length appear they had all the appearance to the uninitiated
+      of work imitated from contemporary models, instead of being, as in fact
+      they were, the primary source of inspiration for writers whose names were
+      earlier established.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Towards the beginning of his artistic career Rossetti occupied a studio,
+      with residential chambers, at Black-friars Bridge. The rooms overlooked
+      the river, and the tide rose almost to the walls of the house, which, with
+      nearly all its old surroundings, has long disappeared.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A story is told of Rossetti amidst these environments which aptly
+      illustrates almost every trait of his character: his impetuosity, and
+      superstition especially. It was his daily habit to ransack old
+      book-stalls, and carry off to his studio whatever treasures he unearthed,
+      but when, upon further investigation, he found he had been deceived as to
+      the value of a book that at first looked promising, he usually revenged
+      himself by throwing the volume through a window into the river running
+      below&mdash;a habit which he discovered (to his amusement, and
+      occasionally to his distress), that his friends, Mr. Swinburne especially,
+      imitated from him and practised at his rooms on his behalf. On one
+      occasion he discovered in some odd nook a volume long sought for, and
+      having inscribed it with his name and address, he bore it off joyfully to
+      his chambers; but finding a few days later that in some respects it
+      disappointed his expectations, he flung it through the window, and
+      banished all further thought of it. The tide had been at the flood when
+      the book disappeared, and when it ebbed, the offending volume was found by
+      a little mud-lark imbedded in the refuse of the river. The boy washed it
+      and took it back to the address it contained, expecting to find it eagerly
+      reclaimed; but, impatient and angry at sight of what he thought he had
+      destroyed, Rossetti snatched the book out of the muddy hand that proffered
+      it and flung it again into the Thames, with rather less than the courtesy
+      which might have been looked for as the reward of an act that was meant so
+      well. But the haunting volume was not even yet done with. Next morning, an
+      old man of the riverside labourer class knocked at the door, bearing in
+      his hands a small parcel rudely made up in a piece of newspaper that was
+      greasy enough to have previously contained his morning&rsquo;s breakfast. He had
+      come from where he was working below London Bridge: he had found something
+      that might have been lost by Mr. Rossetti. It was the tormenting volume:
+      the indestructible, unrelenting phantom that would not be laid! Rossetti
+      now perceived that higher agencies were at work: it was <i>not meant</i>
+      that he should get rid of the book: why should he contend against the
+      inevitable? Reverently and with both hands he took the besoiled parcel
+      from the brown palm of the labourer, placed half-a-crown there instead,
+      and restored the fearful book to its place on his shelf.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And now we come to incidents in Rossetti&rsquo;s career of which it is necessary
+      to treat as briefly as tenderly. Among the models who sat to him was Miss
+      Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal, a young lady of great personal beauty, in whom
+      he discovered a natural genius for painting and a noticeable love of the
+      higher poetic literature. He felt impelled to give her lessons, and she
+      became as much his pupil as model. Her water-colour drawings done under
+      his tuition gave proof of a wonderful eye for colour, and displayed a
+      marked tendency to style. The subjects, too, were admirably composed and
+      often exhibited unusual poetic feeling. It was very natural that such a
+      connection between persons of kindred aspirations should lead to
+      friendship and finally to love.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rossetti and Miss Siddal were married in 1860. They visited France and
+      Belgium; and this journey, together with a similar one undertaken in the
+      company of Mr. Holman Hunt in 1849, and again another in 1863, when his
+      brother was his companion, and a short residence on the Continent when a
+      boy, may be said to constitute almost the whole sum of Rossetti&rsquo;s
+      travelling. Very soon the lady&rsquo;s health began to fail, and she became the
+      victim of neuralgia. To meet this dread enemy she resorted to laudanum,
+      taking it at first in small quantities, but eventually in excess. Her
+      spirits drooped, her art was laid aside, and much of the cheerfulness of
+      home was lost to her. There was a child, but it was stillborn, and not
+      long after this disaster, it was found that Mrs. Rossetti had taken an
+      overdose of her accustomed sleeping potion and was lying dead in her bed.
+      This was in 1862, and after two years only of married life. The blow was a
+      terrible one to Rossetti, who was the first to discover what fate had
+      reserved for him. It was some days before he seemed fully to realise the
+      loss that had befallen him, and then his grief knew no bounds. The poems
+      he had written, so far as they were poems of love, were chiefly inspired
+      by and addressed to her. At her request he had copied them into a little
+      book presented to him for the purpose, and on the day of the funeral he
+      walked into the room where the body lay, and, unmindful of the presence of
+      friends, he spoke to his dead wife as though she heard, saying, as he held
+      the book, that the words it contained were written to her and for her, and
+      she must take them with her for they could not remain when she had gone.
+      Then he put the volume into the coffin between her cheek and beautiful
+      hair, and it was that day buried with her in Highgate Cemetery.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0002" id="link2HCH0002">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER II.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      It was long before Rossetti recovered from the shock of his wife&rsquo;s sudden
+      death. The loss sustained appeared to change the whole course of his life.
+      Previously he had been of a cheerful temperament, and accustomed to go
+      abroad at frequent intervals to visit friends; but after this event he
+      seemed to become for a time morose, and by nature reclusive. Not a great
+      while afterwards he removed from Blackfriars Bridge, and after a temporary
+      residence in Lincoln&rsquo;s Inn Fields, he took up his abode in the house he
+      occupied during the twenty remaining years of his life, at 16 Cheyne Walk,
+      Chelsea. This home of Rossetti&rsquo;s shall be fully described in subsequent
+      personal recollections. It was called Tudor House when he became its
+      tenant, from the tradition that Elizabeth Tudor had lived in it, and it is
+      understood to be the same that Thackeray describes in <i>Esmond</i> as the
+      home of the old Countess of Chelsey. A large garden, which recently has
+      been cut off for building purposes, lay at the back, and, doubtless, it
+      was as much due to the attractions of this piece of pleasant ground,
+      dotted over with lime-trees, and enclosed by a high wall, that Rossetti
+      went so far afield, for at that period Chelsea was not the rallying ground
+      of artists and men of letters. He wished to live a life of retirement, and
+      thought the possession of a garden in which he could take sufficient daily
+      exercise would enable him to do so. In leaving Blackfriars he destroyed
+      many things associated with his residence there, and calculated to remind
+      him of his life&rsquo;s great loss. He burnt a great body of letters, and among
+      them were many valuable ones from almost all the men and women then
+      eminent in literature and art. His great grief notwithstanding, upon
+      settling at Chelsea he began almost insensibly to interest himself in
+      furnishing the house in a beautiful and novel style. Old oak then became
+      for a time his passion, and in hunting it up he rummaged the brokers&rsquo; 
+      shops round London for miles, buying for trifles what would eventually
+      (when the fashion he started grew to be general) have fetched large sums.
+      Cabinets of all conceivable superannuated designs&mdash;so old in material
+      or pattern that no one else would look at them&mdash;were unearthed in
+      obscure corners, bolstered up by a joiner, and consigned to their places
+      in the new residence. Following old oak, Japanese furniture became
+      Rossetti&rsquo;s quest, and following this came blue china ware (of which he had
+      perhaps the first fine collection made), and then ecclesiastical and other
+      brasses, incense-burners, sacramental cups, crucifixes, Indian spice
+      boxes, mediaeval lamps, antique bronzes, and the like. In a few years he
+      had filled his house with so much curious and beautiful furniture that
+      there grew up a widespread desire to imitate his methods; and very soon
+      artists, authors, and men of fortune having no other occupation, were
+      found rummaging, as he had rummaged, for the neglected articles of the
+      centuries gone by. What he did was done, as he used to say, less from love
+      of the things hunted for, than from love of the pursuit, which, from its
+      difficulty, gave rise to a pleasurable excitement. Thus did he grieve down
+      his loss, and little did they think who afterwards followed the fashion he
+      set them, and carried his passion for antique furniture to an excess at
+      which he must have laughed, that his&rsquo; primary impulse was so far from a
+      desire to &ldquo;live up to his blue ware,&rdquo; that it was more like an effort to
+      live down to it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was during the earlier years of his residence at Chelsea that Rossetti
+      formed a habit of life which clung to him almost to the last, and did more
+      than aught else to blight his happiness. What his intimate friend has
+      lately characterised in <i>The Daily News</i> as that great curse of the
+      literary and artistic temperament, insomnia, had been hanging about him
+      since the death of his wife, and was becoming each year more and more
+      alarming. He had tried opiates, but in sparing quantities, for had he not
+      the most serious cause to eschew them? Towards 1868 he heard of the then
+      newly found drug chloral, which was accredited with all the virtues and
+      none of the vices of other known narcotics. Here then was the thing he
+      wanted; this was the blessed discovery that was to save him from days of
+      weariness and nights of misery and tears. Eagerly he procured it, took it
+      nightly in single small doses of ten grains each, and from it he received
+      pleasant and refreshing sleep. He made no concealment of his habit; like
+      Coleridge under similar conditions, he preferred to talk of it. Not yet
+      had he learned the sad truth, too soon to force itself upon him, that the
+      fumes of this dreadful drug would one day wither up his hopes and joys in
+      life: deluding him with a short-lived surcease of pain only to impose a
+      terrible legacy of suffering from which there was to be no respite. Had
+      Rossetti been master of the drug and not mastered by it, perhaps he might
+      have turned it to account at a critical juncture, and laid it aside when
+      the necessity to employ it had gradually been removed. But, alas! he gave
+      way little by little to the encroachments of an evil power with which,
+      when once it had gained the ascendant, he fought down to his dying day a
+      single-handed and losing fight.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was not, however, for some years after he began the use of it that
+      chloral produced any sensible effects of an injurious kind, and meantime
+      he pursued as usual his avocation as a painter. Mention has been made of
+      the fact that Rossetti abandoned at an early age subject designs for
+      three-quarter-length figures. Of the latter, in the period of which we are
+      now treating, he painted great numbers: among them, produced at this time
+      and later, were <i>Sibylla Palmifera and The Beloved</i> (the property of
+      Mr. George Rae), <i>La Pia and The Salutation of Beatrice</i> (Mr. F. E.
+      Leyland), <i>The Dying Beatrice</i> (Lord Mount Temple), <i>Venus Astarte</i>
+      (Mr. Fry), <i>Fiammetta</i> (Mr. Turner), <i>Proserpina</i> (Mr. Graham).
+      Of these works, solidity may be said to be the prominent characteristic.
+      The drapery of Rossetti&rsquo;s pictures is wonderfully powerful and solid; his
+      colour may be said to be at times almost matchable with that of certain of
+      the Venetian painters, though different in kind. He hated beyond most
+      things the &ldquo;varnishy&rdquo; look of some modern work; and his own oil pictures
+      had so much of the manner of frescoes in their lustreless depth, that they
+      were sometimes mistaken for water-colours, while, on the other hand, his
+      water-colours had often so much depth and brilliancy as sometimes to be
+      mistaken for oil. It is alleged in certain quarters that Rossetti was
+      deficient in some qualities of drawing, and this is no doubt a just
+      allegation; but it is beyond question that no English painter has ever
+      been a greater master of the human face, which in his works (especially
+      those painted in later years) acquires a splendid solemnity and spiritual
+      beauty and significance all but peculiar to himself. It seems proper to
+      say in such a connexion, that his success in this direction was always
+      attributed by him to the fact that the most memorable of his faces were
+      painted from a well-known friend.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Only one of his early designs, the <i>Dante&rsquo;s Dream</i>, was ever painted
+      by Rossetti on a scale commensurate with its importance, and the solemnity
+      and massive grandeur of that work leave only a feeling of regret that,
+      whether from personal indisposition on the part of the painter or lack of
+      adequate recognition on that of the public, the three or four other finest
+      designs made in youth were never carried out. As the picture in question
+      stands alone among Rossetti&rsquo;s pictorial works as a completed conception,
+      it may be well to devote a few pages to a description of it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is essential to an appreciation of <i>Dante&rsquo;s Dream</i>, that we should
+      not only fully understand the nature of the particular incident depicted
+      in the picture, but also possess a general knowledge of the lives and
+      relations of the two principal personages concerned in it. What we know,
+      to most purpose, of the early life and love of Dante, we learn from the
+      autobiography which he entitled <i>La Vita Nuova</i>. Boccaccio, however,
+      writing fifty years after the death of the great Florentine, affords a
+      more detailed statement than is furnished by Dante himself of the
+      circumstances of the poets first meeting with the lady he called Beatrice.
+      He says that it was the custom of citizens in Florence, when the time of
+      spring came round, to form social gatherings in their own quarters for
+      purposes of merry-making; that in this way Folco Portinari, a citizen of
+      mark, had collected his neighbours at his house upon the first of May,
+      1274, for pastime and rejoicing: that amongst those who came to him was
+      Alighiero Alighieri, father of Dante Alighieri, who lived within fifty
+      yards; that it was common for children to accompany their parents at such
+      merrymakings, and that Dante, then scarce nine years old, was in the house
+      on the day in question engaged in sports, appropriate to his years, with
+      other children, amongst whom was a little daughter of Folco Portinari,
+      eight years old. The child is described as being, even at this period, in
+      aspect extremely beautiful, and winning and graceful in her ways. Not to
+      dwell upon these passages of childhood, it may be sufficient to say that
+      the boy, young as he was, is said to have then conceived so deep a passion
+      for the child that maturer attachments proved powerless to efface it. Such
+      was the origin of a love that grew from childlike tenderness to manly
+      ardour, and, surviving all the buffetings of an untoward fate, is known to
+      us now and for all time in a record of so much reality and purity, as
+      seems to every right-hearted nature to be equally the story of his
+      personal attachment as the history of a passion that in Florence, six
+      centuries ago, for its mortal put on immortality.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Portinari and Alighieri were immediate neighbours, yet it does not
+      appear that the young Dante encountered the lady in any marked way until
+      nine years later, and then, in the first bloom of a gracious womanhood,
+      she is described as affording him in the street a salutation of such
+      unspeakable courtesy that he left the place where for the instant he had
+      stood sorely abashed, as one intoxicated with a love that now at first
+      knew itself for what it was. The incidents of the attachment are few in
+      facts; numerous only in emotions, and therein too uncertain and liable to
+      change to be counted. In order not to disclose a passion, which other
+      reasons than those given by the poet may have tempted him to conceal,
+      Dante affects an attachment to another lady of the city, and the rumour of
+      this brings about an estrangement with the real object of his desires,
+      which reduces the poet to such an abject condition of mind, as finally
+      results in his laying aside all counterfeiting. Portinari, the father, now
+      dies, and witnessing the tenderness with which the beautiful Beatrice
+      mourns him, Dante becomes affected with a painful infirmity, wherein his
+      mind broods over his enfeebled body, and, perceiving how frail a thing
+      life is, even though health keep with it, his brain begins to travail in
+      many imaginings, and he says within himself, &ldquo;Certainly it must some time
+      come to pass that the very gentle Beatrice will die.&rdquo; Feeling bewildered,
+      he closes his eyes, and, in a trance, he conceives that a friend comes to
+      him, and says, &ldquo;Hast thou not heard? She that was thine excellent lady has
+      been taken out of life.&rdquo; Then as he looks towards Heaven in imagination,
+      he beholds a multitude of angels who are returning upwards, having before
+      them an exceedingly white cloud; and these angels are singing, and the
+      words of their song are, &ldquo;Osanna in excelsis.&rdquo; So strong is his imagining,
+      that it seems to him that he goes to look upon the body where it has its
+      abiding-place.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     The sun ceased, and the stars began to gather,
+     And each wept at the other;
+       And birds dropp&rsquo;d at midflight out of the sky;
+       And earth shook suddenly;
+          And I was &lsquo;ware of one, hoarse and tired out,
+     Who ask&rsquo;d of me: &lsquo;Hast thou not heard it said&mdash;
+     Thy lady, she that was so fair, is dead?
+</pre>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     Then lifting up mine eyes, as the tears came,
+        I saw the angels, like a rain of manna
+        In a long flight flying back Heavenward,
+     Having a little cloud in front of them,
+        After the which they went, and said &lsquo;Hosanna;&rsquo; 
+        And if they had said more, you should have heard.
+</pre>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+        Then Love said, &lsquo;Now shall all things be made clear:
+     Come, and behold our lady where she lies
+     These &lsquo;wildering phantasies
+        Then carried me to see my lady dead.
+        Even as I there was led,
+            Her ladies with a veil were covering her;
+     And with her was such very humbleness
+     That she appeared to say, &lsquo;I am at peace.&rsquo; 
+                        (Dante and his Circle.)
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      The trance proves to be a premonition of the event, for, shortly after
+      writing the poem in which his imaginings find record, Dante says, &ldquo;The
+      Lord God of Justice called my most gracious lady unto Himself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It is with the incidents of the dream that Rossetti has dealt. The
+      principal personage in the picture is, of course, Dante himself. Of the
+      poet&rsquo;s face, two old and accredited witnesses remain to us&mdash;the
+      portrait of Giotto and the mask supposed to be copied from a similar one
+      taken after death. Giotto&rsquo;s portrait represents Dante at the age of
+      twenty-seven. The face has a feminine delicacy of outline, yet is full of
+      manly beauty; strength and tenderness are seen blended in its lineaments.
+      It might be that of a poet, a scholar, a courtier, or yet a soldier; and
+      in Dante it is all combined.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Such, as seen in Giotto, was the great Florentine when Beatrice beheld
+      him. The familiar mask represents that youthful beauty as somewhat
+      saddened by years of exile, by the accidents of an unequal fortune, and by
+      the long brooding memory of his life&rsquo;s one, deep, irreparable loss. We see
+      in it the warrior who served in the great battle of Campaldino: the
+      mourner who sought refuge from grief in the action and danger of the war
+      waged by Florence upon Pisa: the magistrate whose justice proved his ruin:
+      the exile who ate bitter bread when Florence banished the greatest of her
+      sons. The mask is as full as the portrait of intellect and feeling, of
+      strength and character, but it lacks something of the early sweetness and
+      sensibility. Rossetti&rsquo;s portraiture retains the salient qualities of both
+      portrait and mask. It represents Dante in his twenty-seventh year; the
+      face gives hint of both poet and soldier, for behind clear-cut features
+      capable of strengthening into resolve and rigour lie whole depths of
+      tenderest sympathy. The abstracted air, the self-centred look, the eyes
+      that seem to see only what the mind conceives and casts forward from
+      itself; the slow, uncertain, half-reluctant gait,&mdash;these are
+      profoundly true to the man and the dream.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of Beatrice, no such description is given either in the <i>Vita Nuova</i>
+      or the <i>Commedia</i> as could afford an artist a definite suggestion.
+      Dante&rsquo;s love was an idealised passion; it concerned itself with spiritual
+      beauty, whereof the emotions excited absorbed every merely physical
+      consideration. The beauty of Beatrice in the <i>Vita Nuova</i> is like a
+      ray of sunshine flooding a landscape&mdash;we see it only in the effect it
+      produces. All we know with certainty is that her hair was light, that her
+      face was pale, and that her smile was one of thoughtful sweetness. These
+      hints of a beautiful person Rossetti has wrought into a creation of such
+      purity that, lovely as she is in death, as in life, we think less of her
+      loveliness than of her loveableness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The personage of Love, who plays throughout the <i>Vita Nuova</i> a
+      mystical part is not the Pagan Love, but a youth and Christian Master, as
+      Dante terms him, sometimes of severe and terrible aspect. He is
+      represented in the picture as clad in a flame-coloured garment (for it is
+      in a mist of the colour of fire that he appears to the lover), and he
+      wears the pilgrim&rsquo;s scallop-shell on his shoulder as emblem of that
+      pilgrimage on earth which Love is.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The chamber wherein the body of Beatrice has its abiding-place is, to
+      Dante&rsquo;s imaginings, a chamber of dreams. Visionary as the mind of the
+      dreamer, it discloses at once all that goes forward within its own narrow
+      compass, together with the desolate streets of the city of Florence,
+      which, to his fancy, sits silent for his loss, and the long flight of
+      angels above that bear away the little cloud, to which is given a vague
+      semblance of the beatified Beatrice. As if just fallen back in sleep, the
+      beautiful lady lies in death, her hands folded across her breast, and a
+      glory of golden hair flowing over her shoulders. With measured tread Dante
+      approaches the couch led by the winged and scarlet Love, but, as though
+      fearful of so near and unaccustomed an approach, draws slowly backward on
+      his half-raised foot, while the mystical emblem of his earthly passion
+      stands droopingly between him the living, and his lady the dead, and takes
+      the kiss that he himself might never have. In life they must needs be
+      apart, but thus in death they are united, for the hand of the pilgrim, who
+      is the embodiment of his love, holds his hand even as the master&rsquo;s lips
+      touch her lips. Two ladies of the chamber are covering her with a pall,
+      and on the dreamer they fix sympathetic eyes. The floor is strewn with
+      poppies&mdash;emblems equally of the sleep in which the lover walks, and
+      of the sleep that is the sleep of death. The may-bloom in the pall, the
+      apple-blossom in the hand of Love, the violets and roses in the frieze of
+      the alcove, symbolise purity and virginity, the life that is cut off in
+      its spring, the love that is consummated in death before the coming of
+      fruit. Suspended from the roof is a scroll, bearing the first words of the
+      wail from the Lamentations of Jeremiah, quoted by Dante himself:&mdash;&ldquo;How
+      doth the city sit solitary, that was full of people! How is she become as
+      a widow, she that was great among the nations!&rdquo; In the ascending and
+      descending staircase on either iand fly doves of the same glowing colour
+      as Love, and these are emblems of his presence in the house. Over all
+      flickers the last beam of a lamp which has burnt through the long night,
+      and which the dawn of a new day sees die away&mdash;fit symbol of the life
+      that has now taken flight with the heavenly host, leaving behind it only
+      the burnt-out socket where the live flame lived.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Full of symbol as this picture is, it is furthermore permeated by a
+      significance that is not occult. It bears witness to the possible strength
+      of a passion that is so spiritual as to be without taint of sense; and to
+      a confident belief in an immortality wherein the utmost limits of a
+      blessedness not of this world may be compassed. Such are in this picture
+      the simpler, yet deeper, symbols, that all who look may read. Sir Noel
+      Paton has written of this work:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I was so dumbfounded by the beauty of that great picture of Rosetti&rsquo;s,
+      called <i>Dante&rsquo;s Dream</i>, that I was usable to give any expression to
+      the emotions it excited&mdash;emotions such as I do not think any other
+      picture, except the <i>Madonna di San Sisto</i> at Dresden, ever stirred
+      within me. The memory of such a picture is like the memory of sublime and
+      perfect music; it makes any one who <i>fully</i> feels it&mdash;<i>silent</i>.
+      Fifty years hence it will be named among the half-dozen supreme pictures
+      of the world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rossetti had buried the only complete copy of his poems with his wife at
+      Highgate, and for a time he had been able to put by the thought of them;
+      but as one by one his friends, Mr. Morris, Mr. Swinburne, and others,
+      attained to distinction as poets, he began to hanker after poetic
+      reputation, and to reflect with pain and regret upon the hidden fruits of
+      his best effort. Rossetti&mdash;in all love of his memory be it spoken&mdash;was
+      after all a frail mortal; of unstable character: of variable purpose: a
+      creature of impulse and whim, and with a plentiful lack of the backbone of
+      volition. With less affection he would not have buried his book; with more
+      strength of will he had not done so; or, having done so, he had never
+      wished to undo what he had done; or having undone it, he would never have
+      tormented himself with the memory of it as of a deed of sacrilege. But
+      Rossetti had both affection enough to do it and weakness enough to have it
+      undone. After an infinity of self-communions he determined to have the
+      grave opened, and the book extracted. Endless were the preparations
+      necessary before such a work could be begun. Mr. Home Secretary Bruce had
+      to be consulted. At length preliminaries were complete, and one night,
+      seven and a half years after the burial, a fire was built by the side of
+      the grave, and then the coffin was raised and opened. The body is
+      described as perfect upon coming to light.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Whilst this painful work was being done the unhappy author of it was
+      sitting alone and anxious, and full of self-reproaches at the house of the
+      friend who had charge of it. He was relieved and thankful when told that
+      all was over. The volume was not much the worse for the years it had lain
+      in the grave. Deficiencies were filled in from memory, the manuscript was
+      put in the press, and in 1870 the reclaimed work was issued under the
+      simple title of <i>Poems</i>.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The success of the book was almost without precedent; seven editions were
+      called for in rapid succession. It was reviewed with enthusiasm in many
+      quarters. Yet that was a period in which fresh poetry and new poets arose,
+      even as they now arise, with all the abundance and timeliness of poppies
+      in autumn. It is probable enough that of the circumstances attending the
+      unexampled early success of this first volume only the remarkable fact is
+      still remembered that, from a bookseller&rsquo;s standpoint, it ran a
+      neck-and-neck race with Disraeli&rsquo;s <i>Lothair</i> at a time when political
+      romance was found universally appetising, and poetry, as of old, a drug.
+      But it will not be forgotten that certain subsidiary circumstances were
+      thought to have contributed to the former success. Of these the most
+      material was the reputation Rossetti had already achieved as a painter by
+      methods which awakened curiosity as much as they aroused enthusiasm. The
+      public mind became sensibly affected by the idea that the poems of the new
+      poet were not to be regarded as the emanations of a single individual, but
+      as the result of a movement in which Rossetti had played one of the most
+      prominent parts. Mr. F. Hueffer, in prefacing the Tauchnitz edition of the
+      poems with a pleasant memoir, has comprehensively denominated that
+      movement the <i>renaissance of mediæval feeling</i>, but at the outset it
+      acquired popularly, for good or ill, the more rememberable name of
+      pre-Raphaelitism. What the shibboleth was of the originators of the school
+      that grew out of it concerned men but little to ascertain; and this was a
+      condition of indifference as to the logic of the movement which was
+      occasioned partly by the known fact that the most popular of its leaders,
+      Mr. Millais, had long been shifting ground. It was enough that the new
+      sect had comprised dissenters from the creed once established, that the
+      catholic spirit of art which lived with the lives of Elmore, Goodall, and
+      Stone was long dead, and that none of the coteries for love of which the
+      old faith, exemplified in the works of men such as these, had been put
+      aside, possessed such an appeal for the imagination as this, now that
+      twenty years of fairly consistent endeavour had cleared away the cloud of
+      obloquy that gathered about it when it began. And so it came to be thought
+      that the poems of Rossetti were to exhibit a new phase of this movement,
+      involving kindred issues, and opening up afresh in the poetic domain the
+      controversies which had been waged and won in the pictorial. Much to this
+      purpose was said at the time to account for the success of a book whose
+      popular qualities were I manifestly inconsiderable; and much to similar
+      purpose will doubtless long be said by those who affect to believe that a
+      concatenation of circumstances did for Rossetti&rsquo;s earlier work a service
+      which could not attend his subsequent one. But the explanation was
+      inadequate, and had for its immediate outcome a charge of narrowed range
+      of poetic sympathy with which Rossetti&rsquo;s admirers had not laid their
+      account.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A renaissance of mediæval feeling the movement in art assuredly involved,
+      but the essential part of it was another thing, of which mediævalism was
+      palpably independent. How it came to be considered the fundamental element
+      is not difficult to show. In an eminent degree the originators of the new
+      school in painting were colourists, having, perhaps, in their effects, a
+      certain affinity to the early Florentine masters, and this accident of
+      native gift had probably more to do in determining the precise direction
+      of the <i>intellectual</i> sympathy than any external agency. The art
+      feeling which formed the foundation of the movement existed apart from it,
+      or bore no closer relation to it than kinship of powers induced. When
+      Rossetti&rsquo;s poetry came it was seen to be animated by a choice of
+      subject-matter akin to that which gave individual character to his
+      painting, but this was because coeval efforts in two totally distinct arts
+      must needs bear the family resemblance, each to each, which belong to all
+      the offspring of a thoroughly harmonised mind. The poems and the pictures,
+      however, had not more in common than can be found in the early poems and
+      early dramas of Shakspeare. Nay, not so much; for whereas in his poems
+      Shakspeare was constantly evolving certain shades of feeling and begetting
+      certain movements of thought which were soon to find concrete and final
+      collocation in the dramatic creations, in his pictures Rossetti was first
+      of all a dissenter from all prescribed canons of taste, whilst in his
+      poems he was in harmony with the catholic spirit which was as old as
+      Shakspeare himself, and found revival, after temporary eclipse, in
+      Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, and Tennyson. Choice of mediaeval theme would
+      not in itself have been enough to secure a reversal of popular feeling
+      against work that contained no germs of the sensational; and hence we must
+      conclude that Mr. Swinburne accounted more satisfactorily for the instant
+      popularity of Rossetti&rsquo;s poetry when he claimed for it those innate utmost
+      qualities of beauty and strength which are always the first and last
+      constituents of poetry that abides. Indeed those qualities and none other,
+      wholly independent of auxiliary aids, must now as then go farthest to
+      determine Rossetti&rsquo;s final place among poets.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Such as is here described was the first reception given to Rossetti&rsquo;s
+      volume of poetry; but at the close of 1871, there arose out of it a long
+      and acrimonious controversy. It seems necessary to allude to this painful
+      matter, because it involved serious issues; but an effort alike after
+      brevity and impartiality of comment shall be observed in what is said of
+      it. In October of the year mentioned, an article entitled <i>The Fleshly
+      School of Poetry</i>, and signed &ldquo;Thomas Maitland,&rdquo; appeared in <i>The
+      Contemporary Review</i>. {*} It consisted in the main of an impeachment of
+      Rossetti&rsquo;s poetry on the ground of sensuality, though it embraced a broad
+      denunciation of the sensual tendencies of the age in art, music, poetry,
+      the drama, and social life generally. Sensuality was regarded as the
+      phenomenon of the age. &ldquo;It lies,&rdquo; said the writer, &ldquo;on the drawing-room
+      table, shamelessly naked and dangerously fair. It is part of the pretty
+      poem which the belle of the season reads, and it breathes away the
+      pureness of her soul like the poisoned breath of the girl in Hawthorne&rsquo;s
+      tale. It covers the shelves of the great Oxford-Street librarian, lurking
+      in the covers of three-volume novels. It is on the French booksellers&rsquo; 
+      counters, authenticated by the signature of the author of the <i>Visite de
+      Noces</i>. It is here, there, and everywhere, in art, literature, life,
+      just as surely as it is in the <i>Fleurs de Mal</i>, the Marquis de Sade&rsquo;s
+      <i>Justine</i>, or the <i>Monk</i> of Lewis. It appeals to all tastes, to
+      all dispositions, to all ages. If the querulous man of letters has his
+      Baudelaire, the pimpled clerk has his <i>Day&rsquo;s Doings</i>, and the
+      dissipated artisan his <i>Day and Night.</i>&rdquo; When the writer set himself
+      to inquire into the source of this social cancer, he refused to believe
+      that English society was honeycombed and rotten. He accounted for the
+      portentous symptoms that appalled him by attributing the evil to a fringe
+      of real English society, chiefly, if not altogether, resident in London:
+      &ldquo;a sort of demi-monde, not composed, like that other in France, of simple
+      courtesans, but of men and women of indolent habits and aesthetic tastes,
+      artists, literary persons, novel writers, actors, men of genius and men of
+      talent, butterflies and gadflies of the human kind, leading a lazy
+      existence from hand to mouth.&rdquo; It was to this Bohemian fringe of society
+      that the writer attributed the &ldquo;gross and vulgar conceptions of life which
+      are formulated into certain products of art, literature, and criticism.&rdquo;
+       Dealing with only one form of the social phenomenon, with sensualism so
+      far as it appeared to affect contemporary poetry, the writer proceeded
+      with a literary retrospect intended to show that the fair dawn of our
+      English poetry in Chaucer and the Elizabethan dramatists had been
+      overclouded by a portentous darkness, a darkness &ldquo;vaporous,&rdquo; &ldquo;miasmic,&rdquo;
+       coming from a &ldquo;fever-cloud generated first in Italy and then blown
+      westward,&rdquo; sucking up on its way &ldquo;all that was most unwholesome from the
+      soil of France.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     * In this summary, the pamphlet reprint has been followed in
+     preference to the original article as it appeared in the
+     Review.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Just previously to and contemporaneously with the rise of Dante, there had
+      flourished a legion of poets of greater or less ability, but all more or
+      less characterised by affectation, foolishness, and moral blindness:
+      singers of the falsetto school, with ballads to their mistress&rsquo;s eyebrow,
+      sonnets to their lady&rsquo;s lute, and general songs of a fiddlestick; peevish
+      men for the most part, as is the way of all fleshly and affected beings;
+      men so ignorant of human subjects and materials as to be driven in their
+      sheer bankruptcy of mind to raise Hope, Love, Fear, Rage (everything but
+      Charity) into human entities, and to treat the body and upholstery of a
+      dollish woman as if, in itself, it constituted a whole universe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After tracing the effect of the &ldquo;moral poison&rdquo; here seen in its inception
+      through English poetry from Surrey and Wyat to Cowley, the writer
+      recognised a &ldquo;tranquil gleam of honest English light&rdquo; in Cowper, who
+      &ldquo;spread the seeds of new life&rdquo; soon to re-appear in Wordsworth, Coleridge,
+      Southey, Lamb, and Scott. In his opinion the &ldquo;Italian disease would now
+      have died out altogether,&rdquo; but for a &ldquo;fresh importation of the obnoxious
+      matter from France.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      At this stage came a denunciation of the representation of &ldquo;abnormal types
+      of diseased lust and lustful disease&rdquo; as seen in Charles Baudelaire&rsquo;s <i>Fleurs
+      de Mal</i>, with the conclusion that out of &ldquo;the hideousness of <i>Femmes
+      Damnées</i>&rdquo; came certain English poems. &ldquo;This,&rdquo; said the writer, &ldquo;is our
+      double misfortune&mdash;to have a nuisance, and to have it at second-hand.
+      We might have been more tolerant to an unclean thing if it had been in
+      some sense a product of the soil&rdquo; All that is here summarised, however,
+      was but preparatory to the real object of the article, which was to assail
+      Rossetti&rsquo;s new volume.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The poems were traversed in detail, with but little (and that the most
+      grudging) admission of their power and beauty, and the very sharpest
+      accentuation of their less spiritual qualities. Since the publication of
+      the article in question, events have taken such a turn that it is no
+      longer either necessary or wise to quote the strictures contained in it,
+      however they might be fenced by juster views. The gravamen of the charge
+      against Rossetti, Mr. Swinburne, and Mr. Morris alike&mdash;setting aside
+      all particular accusations, however serious&mdash;was that they had &ldquo;bound
+      themselves into a solemn league and covenant to extol fleshliness as the
+      distinct and supreme end of poetic and pictorial art; to aver that poetic
+      expression is greater than poetic thought, and by inference that the body
+      is greater than the soul, and sound superior to sense.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Such, then, is a synopsis of the hostile article of which the nucleus
+      appeared in <i>The Contemporary Review</i>, and it were little less than
+      childish to say that events so important as the publication of the article
+      and subsequent pamphlet, and the controversy that arose out of them,
+      should, from their unpleasantness and futility, from the bad passions
+      provoked by them, or yet from the regret that followed after them, be
+      passed over in sorrow and silence. For good or ill, what was written on
+      both sides will remain. It has stood and will stand. Sooner or later the
+      story of this literary quarrel will be told in detail and in cold blood,
+      and perhaps with less than sufficient knowledge of either of the parties
+      concerned in it, or sympathy with their aims. No better fate, one might
+      think, could befall it than to be dealt with, however briefly, by a writer
+      whose affections were warmly engaged on one side, while his convictions
+      and bias of nature forced him to recognise the justice of the other&mdash;stripped,
+      of course, of the cruelties with which literary error but too obviously
+      enshrouded it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Whatever the effect produced upon the public mind by the article in
+      question (and there seems little reason to think it was at all material),
+      the effect upon two of the writers attacked was certainly more than
+      commensurate with the assault. Mr. Morris wisely attempted no reply to the
+      few words of adverse criticism in which his name was specifically
+      involved; but Mr. Swinburne retorted upon his adversary with the torrents
+      of invective of which he has a measureless command. Rossetti&rsquo;s course was
+      different. Greatly concerned at the bitterness, as well as startled by the
+      unexpectedness of the attack, he wrote in the first moments of indignation
+      a full and point-for-point rejoinder, and this he printed in the form of a
+      pamphlet, and had a great number struck off; but with constitutional
+      irresolution (wisely restraining him in this case), he destroyed every
+      copy, and contented himself with writing a temperate letter on the subject
+      to <i>The Athenæum</i>, December 16, 1871. He said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A sonnet, entitled <i>Nuptial Sleep</i>, is quoted and abused at page 338
+      of the Review, and is there dwelt upon as a &ldquo;whole poem,&rdquo; describing
+      &ldquo;merely animal sensations.&rdquo; It is no more a whole poem in reality than is
+      any single stanza of any poem throughout the book. The poem, written
+      chiefly in sonnets, and of which this is one sonnet-stanza, is entitled <i>The
+      House of Life</i>; and even in my first published instalment of the whole
+      work (as contained in the volume under notice), ample evidence is included
+      that no such passing phase of description as the one headed <i>Nuptial
+      Sleep</i> could possibly be put forward by the author of <i>The House of
+      Life</i> as his own representative view of the subject of love. In proof
+      of this I will direct attention (among the love-sonnets of this poem), to
+      Nos. 2, 8, 11, 17, 28, and more especially 13. [Here <i>Love Sweetness</i>
+      is printed.] Any reader may bring any artistic charge he pleases against
+      the above sonnet; but one charge it would be impossible to maintain
+      against the writer of the series in which it occurs, and that is, the wish
+      on his part to assert that the body is greater than the soul. For here all
+      the passionate and just delights of the body are declared&mdash;somewhat
+      figuratively, it is true, but unmistakeably&mdash;to be as naught if not
+      ennobled by the concurrence of the soul at all times. Moreover, nearly one
+      half of this series of sonnets has nothing to do with love, but treats of
+      quite other life-influences. I would defy any one to couple with fair
+      quotation of sonnets 29, 30, 31, 39, 40, 43, or others, the slander that
+      their author was not impressed, like all other thinking men, with the
+      responsibilities and higher mysteries of life; while sonnets 35, 36, and
+      37, entitled <i>The Choice</i>, sum up the general view taken in a manner
+      only to be evaded by conscious insincerity. Thus much for <i>The House of
+      Life</i>, of which the sonnet <i>Nuptial Sleep</i> is one stanza,
+      embodying, for its small constituent share, a beauty of natural universal
+      function, only to be reprobated in art if dwelt on (as I have shown that
+      it is not here), to the exclusion of those other highest things of which
+      it is the harmonious concomitant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It had become known that the article in the <i>Review</i> was not the work
+      of the unknown Thomas Maitland, whose name it bore, and on this head
+      Rossetti wrote:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Here a critical organ, professedly adopting the principle of open
+      signature, would seem, in reality, to assert (by silent practice, however,
+      not by annunciation) that if the anonymous in criticism was&mdash;as
+      itself originally indicated&mdash;but an early caterpillar stage, the
+      nominate too is found to be no better than a homely transitional
+      chrysalis, and that the ultimate butterfly form for a critic who likes to
+      sport in sunlight, and yet elude the grasp, is after all the pseudonymous.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It transpired, in subsequent correspondence (of which there was more than
+      enough), that the actual writer was Mr. Robert Buchanan, then a young
+      author who had risen into distinction as a poet, and who was consequently
+      suspected, by the writers and disciples of the Rossetti school, of being
+      actuated much more by feelings of rivalry than by desire for the public
+      good. Mr. Buchanan&rsquo;s reply to the serious accusation of having assailed a
+      brother-poet pseudonymously was that the false signature was affixed to
+      the article without his knowledge, &ldquo;in order that the criticism might rest
+      upon its own merits, and gain nothing from the name of the real writer.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was an unpleasant controversy, and what remains as an impartial
+      synopsis of it appears to be this: that there was actually manifest in the
+      poetry of certain writers a tendency to deviate from wholesome reticence,
+      and that this dangerous tendency came to us from France, where deep-seated
+      unhealthy passion so gave shape to the glorification of gross forms of
+      animalism as to excite alarm that what had begun with the hideousness of
+      <i>Femmes Damnées</i> would not even end there; finally, that the
+      unpleasant truth demanded to be spoken&mdash;by whomsoever had courage
+      enough to utter it&mdash;that to deify mere lust was an offence and an
+      outrage. So much for the justice on Mr. Buchanan&rsquo;s side; with the mistaken
+      criticism linking the writers of Dante&rsquo;s time with French writers of the
+      time of Baudelaire it is hardly necessary to deal. On the other hand, it
+      must be said that the sum-total of all the English poetry written in
+      imitation of the worst forms of this French excess was probably less than
+      one hundred lines; that what was really reprehensible in the English
+      imitation of the poetry of the French School was, therefore, too
+      inconsiderable to justify a wholesale charge against it of an endeavour to
+      raise the banner of a black ambition whose only aim was to ruin society;
+      that Rossetti, who was made to bear the brunt of attack, was a man who
+      never by direct avowal, or yet by inference, displayed the faintest
+      conceivable sympathy with the French excesses in question, and who never
+      wrote a line inspired by unwholesome passion. As the pith of Mr.
+      Buchanan&rsquo;s accusation of 1871 lay here, and as Mr. Buchanan has, since
+      then, very manfully withdrawn it, {*} we need hardly go further; but, as
+      more recent articles in prominent places, <i>The Edinburgh Review, The
+      British Quarterly Review, and again The Contemporary Review</i>, have
+      repeated what was first said by him on the alleged unwholesomeness of
+      Rossetti&rsquo;s poetic impulses, it may be as well to admit frankly, and at
+      once (for the subject will arise in the future as frequently as this
+      poetry is under discussion) that love of bodily beauty did underlie much
+      of the poet&rsquo;s work. But has not the same passion made the back-bone of
+      nine-tenths of the noblest English poetry since Chaucer? If it is objected
+      that Rossetti&rsquo;s love of physical beauty took new forms, the rejoinder is
+      that it would have been equally childish and futile to attempt to
+      prescribe limits for it. All this we grant to those unfriendly critics who
+      refuse to see that spiritual beauty and not sensuality was Rossetti&rsquo;s
+      actual goal.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     * Writing to me on this subject since Rossetti&rsquo;s death, Mr.
+     Buchanan says:&mdash;&ldquo;In perfect frankness, let me say a few
+     words concerning our old quarrel. While admitting freely
+     that my article in the C. R. was unjust to Rossetti&rsquo;s claims
+     as a poet, I have ever held, and still hold, that it
+     contained nothing to warrant the manner in which it was
+     received by the poet and his circle. At the time it was
+     written, the newspapers were full of panegyric; mine was a
+     mere drop of gall in an ocean of <i>eau sucrée</i>. That it could
+     have had on any man the effect you describe, I can scarcely
+     believe; indeed, I think that no living man had so little to
+     complain of as Rossetti, on the score of criticism. Well, my
+     protest was received in a way which turned irritation into
+     wrath, wrath into violence; and then ensued the paper war
+     which lasted for years. If you compare what I have written
+     of Rossetti with what his admirers have written of myself, I
+     think you will admit that there has been some cause for me
+     to complain, to shun society, to feel bitter against the
+     world; but happily, I have a thick epidermis, and the
+     courage of an approving conscience. I was unjust, as I have
+     said; most unjust when I impugned the purity and
+     misconceived the passion of writings too hurriedly read and
+     reviewed currente calamo; but I was at least honest and
+     fearless, and wrote with no personal malignity. Save for the
+     action of the literary defence, if I may so term it, my
+     article would have been as ephemeral as the mood which
+     induced its composition. I make full admission of Rossetti&rsquo;s
+     claims to the purest kind of literary renown, and if I were
+     to criticise his poems now, I should write very differently.
+     But nothing will shake my conviction that the cruelty, the
+     unfairness, the pusillanimity has been on the other side,
+     not on mine. The amende of my Dedication in God and the Man
+     was a sacred thing; between his spirit and mine; not between
+     my character and the cowards who have attacked it. I thought
+     he would understand,&mdash;which would have been, and indeed is,
+     sufficient. I cried, and cry, no truce with the horde of
+     slanderers who hid themselves within his shadow. That is
+     all. But when all is said, there still remains the pity that
+     our quarrel should ever have been. Our little lives are too
+     short for such animosities. Your friend is at peace with
+     God,&mdash;that God who will justify and cherish him, who has
+     dried his tears, and who will turn the shadow of his sad
+     life-dream into full sunshine. My only regret now is that we
+     did not meet,&mdash;that I did not take him by the hand; but I am
+     old-fashioned enough to believe that this world is only a
+     prelude, and that our meeting may take place&mdash;even yet.&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      To Rossetti, the poet, the accusation of extolling fleshliness as the
+      distinct and supreme end of art was, after all, only an error of critical
+      judgment; but to Rossetti, the man, the charge was something far more
+      serious. It was a cruel and irremediable wound inflicted upon a fine
+      spirit, sensitive to attack beyond all sensitiveness hitherto known among
+      poets. He who had withheld his pictures from exhibition from dread of the
+      distracting influences of popular opinion, he who for fifteen years had
+      withheld his poems from print in obedience first to an extreme modesty of
+      personal estimate and afterwards to the commands of a mastering affection
+      was likely enough at forty-two years of age (after being loaded by the
+      disciples that idolised him with only too much of the &ldquo;frankincense of
+      praise and myrrh of flattery&rdquo;) to feel deeply the slander that he had
+      unpacked his bosom of unhealthy passions. But to say that Rossetti felt
+      the slander does not express his sense of it. He had replied to his
+      reviewer and had acted unwisely in so doing; but when one after one&mdash;in
+      the <i>Quarterly Review, the North American Review</i>, and elsewhere, in
+      articles more or less ignorant, uncritical, and stupid&mdash;the
+      accusations he had rebutted were repeated with increased bitterness, he
+      lost all hope of stemming the torrent of hostile criticism. He had, as we
+      have seen, for years lived in partial retirement, enjoying at intervals a
+      garden party behind the house, or going about occasionally to visit
+      relatives and acquaintances, but now he became entirely reclusive,
+      refusing to see any friends except the three or four intimate ones who
+      were constantly with him. Nor did the mischief end there. We have spoken
+      of his habitual use of chloral, which was taken at first in small doses as
+      a remedy for insomnia and afterwards indulged in to excess at moments of
+      physical prostration or nervous excitement. To that false friend he came
+      at this time with only too great assiduity, and the chloral, added to the
+      seclusive habit of life, induced a series of terrible though intermittent
+      illnesses and a morbid condition of mind in which for a little while he
+      was the victim of many painful delusions. It was at this time that the
+      soothing friendship of Dr. Gordon Hake, and his son Mr. George Hake, was
+      of such inestimable service to Rossetti. Having appeared myself on the
+      scene much later I never had the privilege of knowing either of these two
+      gentlemen, for Mr. George Hake was already gone away to Cyprus and Dr.
+      Hake had retired very much into the bosom of his own family where, as is
+      rumoured, he has been engaged upon a literary work which will establish
+      his fame. But I have often heard Mr. Theodore Watts speak with deep
+      emotion and eloquent enthusiasm of the tender kindness and loyal zeal
+      shown to Rossetti during this crisis by Mr. Bell Scott, and by Dr. Hake
+      and his son. As to Mr. Theodore Watts, whose brotherly devotion to him,
+      and beneficial influence over him from that time forward are so well
+      known, this must be considered by those who witnessed it to be almost
+      without precedent or parallel even in the beautiful story of literary
+      friendships, and it does as much honour to the one as to the other. No
+      light matter it must have been to lay aside one&rsquo;s own long-cherished
+      life-work and literary ambitions to be Rossetti&rsquo;s closest friend and
+      brother, at a moment like the present, when he imagined the world to be
+      conspiring against him; but through these evil days, and long after them
+      down to his death, the friend that clung closer than a brother was with
+      him, as he himself said, to protect, to soothe, to comfort, to divert, to
+      interest, and inspire him&mdash;asking, meantime, no better reward than
+      the knowledge that a noble mind and nature was by such sacrifice lifted
+      out of sorrow. Among the world&rsquo;s great men the greatest are sometimes
+      those whose names are least on our lips, and this is because selfish aims
+      have been so subordinate in their lives to the welfare of others as to
+      leave no time for the personal achievements that win personal distinction;
+      but when the world comes to the knowledge of the price that has been paid
+      for the devotion that enables others to enjoy their renown, shall it not
+      reward with a double meed of gratitude the fine spirits to whom ambition
+      has been as nothing against fidelity of friendship? Among the latest words
+      I heard from Rossetti was this: &ldquo;Watts is a hero of friendship;&rdquo; and
+      indeed he has displayed his capacity for participation in the noblest part
+      of comradeship, that part, namely, which is far above the mere traffic
+      that too often goes by the name, and wherein self-love always counts upon
+      being the gainer. If in the end it should appear that he has in his own
+      person done less than might have been hoped for from one possessed of his
+      splendid gifts, let it not be overlooked that he has influenced in a quite
+      incalculable degree, and influenced for good, several of the foremost
+      among those who in their turn have influenced the age. As Rossetti&rsquo;s
+      faithful friend, and gifted medical adviser, Mr. John Marshall has often
+      declared, there were periods when Rossetti&rsquo;s very life may be said to have
+      hung upon Mr. Watts&rsquo;s power to cheer and soothe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Efforts were afoot about the year 1872 to induce Rossetti to visit Italy&mdash;a
+      journey which, strangely enough, he had never made&mdash;but this he could
+      not be prevailed upon to do. In the hope of diverting his mind from the
+      unwholesome matters that too largely engaged it, his brother and friends,
+      prominent among whom at this time were Mr. Bell Scott, Mr. Ford Madox
+      Brown, Mr. W. Graham, and Dr. Gordon Hake, as well as his assistant and
+      friend, Mr. H. T. Dunn, and Mr. George Hake, induced him to seek a change
+      in Scotland, and there he speedily recovered tone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Immediately upon the publication of his first volume, and incited thereto
+      by the early success of it, he had written the poem <i>Rose Mary</i>, as
+      well as two lyrics published at the time in <i>The Fortnightly Review</i>;
+      but he suffered so seriously from the subsequent assaults of criticism,
+      that he seemed definitely to lay aside all hope of producing further
+      poetry, and, indeed, to become possessed of the delusion that he had for
+      ever lost all power of doing so. It is an interesting fact, well known in
+      his own literary circle, that his taking up poetry afresh was the result
+      of a fortuitous occurrence. After one of his most serious illnesses, and
+      in the hope of drawing off his attention from himself, and from the gloomy
+      forebodings which in an invalid&rsquo;s mind usually gather about his own too
+      absorbing personality, a friend prevailed upon him, with infinite
+      solicitation, to try his hand afresh at a sonnet. The outcome was an
+      effort so feeble as to be all but unrecognisable as the work of the author
+      of the sonnets of <i>The House of Life</i>, but with more shrewdness and
+      friendliness (on this occasion) than frankness, the critic lavished
+      measureless praise upon it, and urged the poet to renewed exertion. One by
+      one, at longer or shorter intervals, sonnets were written, and this
+      exercise did more towards his recovery than any other medicine, with the
+      result besides that Rossetti eventually regained all his old dexterity and
+      mastery of hand. The artifice had succeeded beyond every expectation
+      formed of it, serving, indeed, the twofold end of improving the invalid&rsquo;s
+      health by preventing his brooding over unhealthy matters, and increasing
+      the number of his accomplished works. Encouraged by such results, the
+      friend went on to induce Rossetti to write a ballad, and this purpose he
+      finally achieved by challenging the poet&rsquo;s ability to compose in the
+      simple, direct, and emphatic style, which is the style of the ballad
+      proper, as distinguished from the elaborate, ornate, and condensed diction
+      which he had hitherto worked in. Put upon his mettle, the outcome of this
+      second artifice practised upon him, was that he wrote <i>The White Ship</i>,
+      and afterwards <i>The King&rsquo;s Tragedy</i>.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thus was Rossetti already immersed in this revived occupation of poetic
+      composition, and had recovered a healthy* tone of body, before he became
+      conscious of what was being done with him. It is a further amusing fact
+      that one day he requested to be shown the first sonnet which, in view of
+      the praise lavished upon it by the friend on whose judgment he reposed,
+      had encouraged him to renewed effort. The sonnet was bad: the critic knew
+      it was bad, and had from the first hour of its production kept it
+      carefully out of sight, and was now more than ever unwilling to show it.
+      Eventually, however, by reason of ceaseless importunity, he returned it to
+      its author, who, upon reading it, cried: &ldquo;You fraud! you said this sonnet
+      was good, and it&rsquo;s the worst I <i>ever</i> wrote.&rdquo; &ldquo;The worst ever written
+      would perhaps be a truer criticism,&rdquo; was the reply, as the studio
+      resounded with a hearty laugh, and the poem was committed to the flames.
+      It would appear that to this occurrence we probably owe a large portion of
+      the contents of the volume of 1881.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As we say, <i>Rose Mary</i> was the first to be written of the leading
+      poems that found places in his final volume. This ballad (or ballad
+      romance, for ballad it can hardly be called) is akin to <i>Sister Helen</i>
+      in <i>motif</i>. The superstition involved owes something in this case as
+      in the other to the invention and poetic bias of the poet. It has,
+      however, less of what has been called the Catholic element, and is more
+      purely Pagan. It is, therefore, as entirely undisturbed by animosity
+      against heresy, and is concerned only with an ultimate demoniacal justice
+      visiting the wrongdoer. The main point of divergency lies in the
+      circumstance that Rose Mary, unlike Helen, is the undesigning instrument
+      of evil powers, and that her blind deed is the means by which her own and
+      her lover&rsquo;s sin and his treachery become revealed. A further material
+      point of divergency lies in the fact that unlike Helen, who loses her soul
+      (as the price of revenge, directed against her betrayer), Rose Mary loses
+      her life (as the price of vengeance directed against the evil race),
+      whilst her soul gains rest. The superstition is that associated with the
+      beryl stone, wherein the pure only may read the future, and from which
+      sinful eyes must chase the spirits of grace and leave their realm to be
+      usurped by the spirits of fire, who seal up the truth or reveal it by
+      contraries. Rose Mary, who has sinned with her lover, is bidden to look in
+      the beryl and learn where lurks the ambush that waits to take his life as
+      he rides at break of day. Hiding, but remembering her transgression, she
+      at first shrinks, but at length submits, and the blessed spirits by whom
+      the stone has been tenanted give place to the fiery train. The stone is
+      not sealed to her; and the long spell being ministered, she is satisfied.
+      But she has read the stone by contraries, and her lover falls into the
+      hand of his enemy. By his death is their secret sin made known. And then a
+      newer shame is revealed, not to her eyes, but to her mother&rsquo;s: even the
+      treachery of the murdered man. Ignorant of this to the end, Eose Mary
+      seeks to work a twofold ransoming by banishing from the beryl the evil
+      powers. With the sword of her father (by whom the accursed gift had been
+      brought from Palestine), she cleaves the heart of the stone, and with the
+      broken spell her own life breaks.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It will readily be seen that the scheme of the ballad does not afford
+      opportunity for a memorable incursion in the domain of character. Rose
+      Mary herself as a creation is not comparable with Helen. But the ballad
+      throughout is nevertheless a triumph of the higher imagination. Nowhere
+      else (to take the lowest ground) has Rossetti displayed so great a gift of
+      flashing images upon the mind at once by a single expression.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     Closely locked, they clung without speech,
+     And the mirrored souls shook each to each,
+     As the cloud-moon and the water-moon
+     Shake face to face when the dim stars swoon
+     In stormy bowers of the night&rsquo;s mid-noon.
+
+     Deep the flood and heavy the shock
+     When sea meets sea in the riven rock:
+     But calm is the pulse that shakes the sea
+     To the prisoned tide of doom set free
+     In the breaking heart of Rose Mary.
+
+     She knew she had waded bosom-deep
+     Along death&rsquo;s bank in the sedge of sleep.
+     And now in Eose Mary&rsquo;s lifted eye
+     &lsquo;Twas shadow alone that made reply
+     To the set face of the soul&rsquo;s dark shy.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Nor has Rossetti anywhere displayed a more sustained picturesqueness. One
+      episode stands forth vividly even among so many that are conspicuous. The
+      mother has left her daughter in a swoon to seek help of the priest who has
+      knelt unweariedly by the dead body of her daughter&rsquo;s lover, now lying on
+      the ingle-bench in the hall. When the priest has gone and the castle folk
+      have left her alone, the lady sinks to her knees beside the corpse. Great
+      wrong the dead man has done to her and hers, and perhaps God has wrought
+      this doom of his for a sign; but well she knows, or thinks she knows, that
+      if life had remained with him his love would have been security for their
+      honour. She stoops with a sob to kiss the dead, but before her lips touch
+      the cold brow she sees a packet half-hidden in the dead man&rsquo;s breast. It
+      is a folded paper about which the blood from a spear-thrust has grown
+      clotted, and inside is a tress of golden hair. Some pledge of her child&rsquo;s
+      she thinks it, and proceeds to undo the paper&rsquo;s folds, and then learns the
+      treachery of the fallen knight and suffers a bitterer pang than came of
+      the knowledge of her daughter&rsquo;s dishonour. It is a love-missive from the
+      sister of his foe and murderer.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     She rose upright with a long low moan,
+     And stared in the dead man&rsquo;s face new-known.
+     Had it lived indeed? she scarce could tell:
+     &lsquo;Twas a cloud where fiends had come to dwell,&mdash;
+     A mask that hung on the gate of Hell.
+
+     She lifted the lock of gleaming hair,
+     And smote the lips and left it there.
+     &ldquo;Here&rsquo;s gold that Hell shall take for thy toll!
+     Full well hath thy treason found its goal,
+     O thou dead body and damned soul!&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      Anything finer than this it would be hard to discover in English narrative
+      poetry. Every word goes to build up the story: every line is
+      quintessential: every flash of thought helps to heighten the emotion.
+      Indeed the closing lines rise entirely above the limits of ballad poetry
+      into the realm of dramatic diction. But perhaps the crowning glory and
+      epic grandeur of the poem comes at the close. Awakened from her swoon,
+      Rose Mary makes her way to the altar-cell and there she sees the
+      beryl-stone lying between the wings of some sculptured beast. Within the
+      fated glass she beholds Death, Sorrow, Sin and Shame marshalled past in
+      the glare of a writhing flame, and thereupon follows a scene scarcely less
+      terrible than Juliet&rsquo;s vision of the tomb of the Capulets. But she has
+      been told within this hour that her weak hand shall send hence the evil
+      race by whom the stone is possessed, and with a stern purpose she reaches
+      her father&rsquo;s dinted sword. Then when the beryl is cleft to the core, and
+      Rose Mary lies in her last gracious sleep&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     With a cold brow like the snows ere May,
+     With a cold breast like the earth till spring,
+     With such a smile as the June days bring&mdash;
+     A clear voice pronounces her beatitude:
+
+     Already thy heart remembereth
+     No more his name thou sought&rsquo;st in death:
+     For under all deeps, all heights above,&mdash;
+     So wide the gulf in the midst thereof,&mdash;
+     Are Hell of Treason and Heaven of Love.
+
+     Thee, true soul, shall thy truth prefer
+     To blessed Mary&rsquo;s rose-bower:
+     Warmed and lit is thy place afar
+     With guerdon-fires of the sweet love-star,
+     Where hearts of steadfast lovers are.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      The White Ship was written in 1880; <i>The King&rsquo;s Tragedy</i> in the
+      spring of 1881. These historical ballads we must briefly consider
+      together. The memorable events of which Rossetti has made poetic record
+      are, in <i>The White Ship</i>, those associated with the wreck of the ship
+      in which the son and daughter of Henry I. of England set sail from France,
+      and in <i>The King&rsquo;s Tragedy</i>, with the death of James the First of
+      Scots. The story of the one is told by the sole survivor, Herold, the
+      butcher of Rouen; and of the other by Catherine Douglas, the maid of
+      honour who received popularly the name of Kate Barlass, in recognition of
+      her heroic act when she barred the door with her arm against the murderers
+      of the King. It is scarcely possible to conceive in either case a diction
+      more perfectly adapted to the person by whom it is employed. If we compare
+      the language of these ballads with that of the sonnets or other poems
+      spoken in the author&rsquo;s own person, we find it is not first of all
+      gorgeous, condensed, emphatic. It is direct, simple, pure and musical;
+      heightened, it is true, by imagery acquired in its passage through the
+      medium of the poet&rsquo;s mind, but in other respects essentially the language
+      of the historical personages who are made to speak. The diction belongs in
+      each case to the period of the ballad in which it is employed, and yet
+      there is no wanton use of archaisms, or any disposition manifested to
+      resort to meretricious artifices by which to impart an appearance of
+      probability to the story other than that which comes legitimately of sheer
+      narrative excellence. The characterisation is that of history with the
+      features softened that constituted the prose of real life, and with the
+      salient, moral, and intellectual lineaments brought into relief. Herein
+      the ballad may do that final justice which history itself withholds. Thus
+      the King Henry of <i>The White Ship</i> is governed by lust of dominion
+      more than by parental affection; and the Prince, his son, is a lawless,
+      shameless youth; intolerant, tyrannical, luxurious, voluptuous, yet
+      capable of self-sacrifice even amidst peril of death.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     When he should be King, he oft would vow,
+     He &lsquo;d yoke the peasant to his own plough.
+     O&rsquo;er him the ships score their furrows now.
+     God only knows where his soul did wake,
+     But I saw him die for his sister&rsquo;s sake.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      The King James of <i>The King&rsquo;s Tragedy</i> is of a righteous and fearless
+      nature, strong yet sensitive, unbending before the pride and hate of
+      powerful men, resolute, and ready even where fate itself declares that
+      death lurks where his road must lie; his beautiful Queen Jane is sweet,
+      tender, loving, devoted&mdash;meet spouse for a poet and king. The
+      incidents too are those of history: the choice and final collocation of
+      them, and the closing scene in which the queen mourns her husband, being
+      the sum of the author&rsquo;s contribution. And those incidents are in the
+      highest degree varied and picturesque. The author has not achieved a more
+      vivid pictorial presentment than is displayed in these latest ballads from
+      his pen. It would be hard to find in his earlier work anything bearing
+      more clearly the stamp of reality than the descriptions of the wreck in <i>The
+      White Ship</i>, of the two drowning men together on the mainyard, of the
+      morning dawning over the dim sea-sky&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     At last the morning rose on the sea
+     Like an angel&rsquo;s wing that beat towards me&mdash;
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      and of the little golden-haired boy in black whose foot patters down the
+      court of the king. Certainly Rossetti has never attained a higher
+      pictorial level than he reaches in the descriptions of the summoned
+      Parliament in <i>The King&rsquo;s Tragedy</i>, of the journey to the
+      Charterhouse of Perth, of the woman on the rock of the black beach of the
+      Scottish sea, of the king singing to the queen the song he made while
+      immured by Bolingbroke at Windsor, of the knock of the woman at the outer
+      gate, of her voice at night beneath the window, of the death in <i>The Pit
+      of Fortune&rsquo;s Wheel</i>. But all lesser excellencies must make way in our
+      regard before a distinguishing spiritualising element which exists in
+      these ballads only, or mainly amongst the author&rsquo;s works. Natural portents
+      are here first employed as factors of poetic creation. Presentiment,
+      foreboding, omen become the essential tissue of works that are lifted by
+      them into the higher realm of imagination. These supernatural constituents
+      penetrate and pervade <i>The White Ship</i>; and <i>The King&rsquo;s Tragedy</i>
+      is saturated in the spirit of them. We do not speak of the incidents
+      associated with the wraith that haunts the isles, but of the less palpable
+      touches which convey the scarce explicable sense of a change of voice when
+      the king sings of the pit that is under fortune&rsquo;s wheel:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     And under the wheel, beheld I there
+        An ugly Pit as deep as hell,
+     That to behold I quaked for fear:
+        And this I heard, that who therein fell
+     Came no more up, tidings to tell:
+     Whereat, astound of the fearful sight,
+     I wot not what to do for fright.
+               (The King&rsquo;s Quair.)
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      It is the shadow of the supernatural that hangs over the king, and very
+      soon it must enshroud him. One of the most subtle and impressive of the
+      natural portents is that which presents itself to the eyes of Catherine
+      when the leaguers have first left the chamber, and the moon goes out and
+      leaves black the royal armorial shield on the painted window-pane:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     And the rain had ceased, and the moonbeams lit
+        The window high in the wall,&mdash;
+     Bright beams that on the plank that I knew
+        Through the painted pane did fall
+     And gleamed with the splendour of Scotland&rsquo;s crown
+        And shield armorial.
+
+     But then a great wind swept up the skies,
+        And the climbing moon fell back;
+     And the royal blazon fled from the floor,
+        And nought remained on its track;
+     And high in the darkened window-pane
+        The shield and the crown were black.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      It has been said that <i>Sister Helen</i> strikes the keynote of
+      Rossetti&rsquo;s creative gift; it ought to be added that <i>The King&rsquo;s Tragedy</i>
+      touches his highest reach of imagination.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Having in the early part of 1881 brought together a sufficient quantity of
+      fresh poetry to fill a volume, Rossetti began negotiations for publishing
+      it. Anticipatory announcements were at that time constantly appearing in
+      many quarters, not rarely accompanied by an outspoken disbelief in the
+      poet&rsquo;s ability to achieve a second success equal to his first. In this way
+      it often happens to an author, that, having achieved a single conspicuous
+      triumph, the public mind, which has spontaneously offered him the tribute
+      of a generous recognition, forthwith gravitates towards a disposition to
+      become silently but unmistakeably sceptical of his power to repeat it.
+      Subsequent effort in such a case is rarely regarded with that confidence
+      which might be looked for as the reward of achievement, and which goes far
+      to prepare the mind for the ready acceptance of any genuine triumph.
+      Indeed, a jealous attitude is often unconsciously adopted, involving a
+      demand for special qualities, for which, perchance, the peculiar character
+      of the past success has created an appetite, or obedience to certain
+      arbitrary tests, which, though passively present in the recognised work,
+      have grown mainly out of critical analysis of it, and are neither radical
+      nor essential. Where, moreover, such conspicuous success has been followed
+      by an interval of years distinguished by no signal effort, the sceptical
+      bias of the public mind sometimes complacently settles into a conviction
+      (grateful alike to its pride and envy, whilst consciously hurtful to its
+      more generous impulses), that the man who made it lived once indeed upon
+      the mountains, but has at length come down to dwell finally upon the
+      plain. Literary biography furnishes abundant examples of this imperfection
+      of character, a foible, indeed, which in its multiform manifestations,
+      probably goes as far as anything else to interfere with the formation of a
+      just and final judgment of an author&rsquo;s merit within his own lifetime. When
+      it goes the length of affirming that even a great writer&rsquo;s creative
+      activity usually finds not merely central realisation, but absolute
+      exhaustion within the limits of some single work, to reason against it is
+      futile, and length of time affords it the only satisfying refutation. One
+      would think that it could scarcely require to be urged that creative
+      impulse, once existent within a mind, can never wholly depart from it, but
+      must remain to the end, dependent, perhaps, for its expression in some
+      measure on external promptings, variable with the variations of physical
+      environments, but always gathering innate strength for the hour (silent
+      perchance, or audible only within other spheres), when the inventive
+      faculty shall be harmonised, animated, and lubricated to its utmost
+      height. Nevertheless, Coleridge encountered the implied doubtfulness of
+      his contemporaries, that the gift remained with him to carry to its
+      completion the execution of that most subtle mid-day witchery, which, as
+      begun in <i>Christabel</i>, is probably the most difficult and elusive
+      thing ever attempted in the field of romance. Goethe, too, found himself
+      face to face with outspoken distrust of his continuation of <i>Faust</i>;
+      and even Cervantes had perforce to challenge the popular judgment which
+      long refused to allow that the second part of <i>Don Quixote</i>, with all
+      its added significance, was adequate to his original simple conception.
+      Indeed that author must be considered fortunate who effects a reversal of
+      the public judgment against the completion of a fragment, and the
+      repetition of a complete and conspicuous success.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When Rossetti published his first volume of poems in 1870, he left only
+      his <i>House of Life</i> incomplete; but amongst the readers who then
+      offered spontaneous tribute to that series of sonnets, and still treasured
+      it as a work of all but faultless symmetry, built up by aid of a blended
+      inspiration caught equally from Shakspeare and from Dante, with a
+      superadded psychical quality peculiar to its author, there were many, even
+      amongst the friendliest in sympathy, who heard of the completed sequence
+      with a sense of doubt. Such is the silent and unreasoning and all but
+      irrevocable edict of all popular criticism against continuations of works
+      which have in fragmentary form once made conquest of the popular
+      imagination. Moreover, Rossetti&rsquo;s first volume achieved a success so
+      signal and unexpected as to subject this second and maturer book to the
+      preliminary ordeal of such a questioning attitude of mind as we speak of,
+      as the unfailing and ungracious reward of a conspicuous triumph. In the
+      interval of eleven years, Rossetti had essayed no notable achievement, and
+      his name had been found attached only to such fugitive efforts as may have
+      lived from time to time a brief life in the pages of the <i>Athenæum</i>
+      and <i>Fortnightly</i>. Of the works in question two only come now within
+      our province to mention. The first and most memorable was the poem <i>Cloud
+      Confines</i>. Inadequate as the critical attention necessarily was which
+      this remarkable lyric obtained, indications were not wanting that it had
+      laid unconquerable siege to the sympathies of that section of the public
+      in whose enthusiasm the life of every creative work is seen chiefly to
+      abide. There was in it a lyrical sweetness scarcely ever previously
+      compassed by its author, a cadent undertoned symphony that first gave
+      testimony that the poet held the power of conveying by words a sensible
+      eflfect of great music, even as former works of his had given testimony to
+      his power of conveying a sensible eflfect by great painting. But to these
+      metrical excellencies was added an element new to Rossetti&rsquo;s poetry, or
+      seen here for the first time conspicuously. Insight and imagination of a
+      high order, together with a poetic instinct whose promptings were sure,
+      had already found expression in more than one creation moulded into an
+      innate chasteness of perfected parts and wedded to nature with an unerring
+      fidelity. But the range of nature was circumscribed, save only in the one
+      exception of a work throbbing with the sufferings and sorrows of a
+      shadowed side of modern life. To this lyric, however, there came as basis
+      a fundamental conception that made aim to grapple with the pro-foundest
+      problems compassed by the mysteries of life and death, and a temper to
+      yield only where human perception fails. Abstract indeed in theme the
+      lyric is, but few are the products of thought out of which imagination has
+      delved a more concrete and varied picturesqueness:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     What of the heart of hate
+        That beats in thy breast, O Time?&mdash;
+        Bed strife from the furthest prime,
+     And anguish of fierce debate; that shatters her slain,
+        And peace that grinds them as grain,
+        And eyes fixed ever in vain
+     On the pitiless eyes of Fate.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      The second of the fugitive efforts alluded to was a prose work entitled <i>Hand
+      and Soul</i>. More poem than story, this beautiful idyl may be briefly
+      described as mainly illustrative of the struggles of the transition period
+      through which, as through a slough, all true artists must pass who have
+      been led to reflect deeply upon the aims and ends of their calling before
+      they attain that goal of settled purpose in which they see it to be best
+      to work from their own heart simply, without regard for the spectres that
+      would draw them apart into quagmires of moral aspiration. These two works
+      and an occasional sonnet, such as that on the greatly gifted and untimely
+      lost Oliver Madox Brown, made the sum of all {*} that was done, in the
+      interval of eleven years between the dates of the first volume and of that
+      which was now to be published, to keep before the public a name which rose
+      at once into distinction, and had since, without feverish periodical
+      bolstering, grown not less but more in the ardent upholding of sincere men
+      who, in number and influence, comprised a following as considerable
+      perhaps as owned allegiance to any contemporary.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     * A ballad appeared in The Dark Blue.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Having brought these biographical and critical notes to the point at which
+      they overlap the personal recollections that form the body of this volume,
+      it only remains to say that during the years in which the poems just
+      reviewed were being written Rossetti was living at his house in Chelsea a
+      life of unbroken retirement. At this time, however (1877-81), his
+      seclusion was not so complete as it had been when he used to see scarcely
+      any one but Mr. Watts and his own family, with an occasional visit from
+      Lord and Lady Mount Temple, Mrs. Sumner, etc. Once weekly he was now
+      visited by his brother William, twice weekly by his attached and gifted
+      friend Frederick J. Shields, occasionally by his old friends William Bell
+      Scott and Ford Madox Brown. For the rest, he rarely if ever left the
+      precincts of his home. It was a placid and undisturbed existence such as
+      he loved. Health too (except for one serious attack in 1877), was good
+      with him, and his energies were, as we have seen, at their best.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His personal amiability was, perhaps, never more conspicuous than in these
+      tranquil years; yet this was the very time when paragraphs injurious to
+      his character found their way into certain journals. Among the numerous
+      stories illustrative of his alleged barbarity of manners was the one which
+      has often been repeated both in conversation and in print to the effect
+      that H.E.H. the Princess Louise was rudely repulsed from his door.
+      Rossetti was certainly not easy to approach, but the geniality of his
+      personal bearing towards those who had commands upon his esteem was always
+      unfailing, and knowledge of this fact must have been enough to give the
+      lie to the injurious calumny just named. Nevertheless, Rossetti, who was
+      deeply moved by the imputation, thought it necessary to contradict it
+      emphatically, and as the letter in which he did this is a thoroughly
+      outspoken and manly one, and touches an important point in his character,
+      I reprint it in this place:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     16 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, S.W., December 28, 1878.
+
+     My attention has been directed to the following paragraph
+     which has appeared in the newspapers:&mdash;&ldquo;A very disagreeable
+     story is told about a neighbour of Mr. Whistler&rsquo;s, whose
+     works are not exhibited to the vulgar herd; the Princess
+     Louise in her zeal, therefore, graciously sought them at the
+     artist&rsquo;s studio, but was rebuffed by a &lsquo;Not at home&rsquo; and an
+     intimation that he was not at the beck and call of
+     princesses. I trust it is not true,&rdquo; continues the writer of
+     the paragraph, &ldquo;that so medievally minded a gentleman is
+     really a stranger to that generous loyalty to rank and sex,
+     that dignified obedience,&rdquo; etc.
+
+     The story is certainly &ldquo;disagreeable&rdquo; enough; but if I am
+     pointed at as the &ldquo;near neighbour of Mr. Whistler&rsquo;s&rdquo; who
+     rebuffed, in this rude fashion, the Princess Louise, I can
+     only say that it is a <i>canard</i> devoid of the smallest
+     nucleus of truth. Her Royal Highness has never called upon
+     me; and I know of only two occasions when she has expressed
+     a wish to do so. Some years ago Mr. Theodore Martin spoke to
+     me upon the subject; but I was at that time engaged upon an
+     important work, and the delays thence arising caused the
+     matter to slip through. And I heard no more upon the subject
+     till last summer, when Mr. Theodore Watts told me that the
+     Princess, in conversation, had mentioned my name to him, and
+     that he had then assured her that I should &ldquo;feel honoured
+     and charmed to see her,&rdquo; and suggested her making an
+     appointment. Her Royal Highness knew that Mr. Watts, as one
+     of my most intimate friends, would not have thus expressed
+     himself without feeling fully warranted in so doing; and had
+     she called she would not, I trust, have found me wanting in
+     that &ldquo;generous loyalty&rdquo; which is due not more to her exalted
+     position than to her well-known charm of character and
+     artistic gifts. It is true enough that I do not run after
+     great people on account of their mere social position, but I
+     am, I hope, never rude to them; and the man who could rebuff
+     the Princess Louise must be a curmudgeon indeed.
+
+     D. G. Rossetti.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      At the very juncture in question Lord Lome was suddenly and unexpectedly
+      appointed Governor-General of Canada, and, leaving England, Her Royal
+      Highness did not return until Rossetti&rsquo;s health had somewhat suddenly
+      broken down, and it was impossible for him to see any but his most intimate
+      friends.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0003" id="link2HCH0003">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER III.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      My intercourse with Rossetti, epistolary and personal, extended over a
+      period of between three and four years. During the first two of these
+      years I was, as this volume must show, his constant correspondent, during
+      the third year his attached friend, and during the portion of the fourth
+      year of our acquaintance terminating with his life, his daily companion
+      and housemate. It is a part of my purpose to help towards the elucidation
+      of Rossetti&rsquo;s personal character by a simple, and I trust, unaffected
+      statement of my relations to him, and so I begin by explaining that my
+      knowledge of the man was the sequel to my admiration of the poet. Not
+      accident (the agency that usually operates in such cases), but his genius
+      and my love of it, began the friendship between us. Of Rossetti&rsquo;s
+      pictorial art I knew little, until very recent years, beyond what could be
+      gathered from a few illustrations to books. My acquaintance with his
+      poetry must have been made at the time of the publication of the first
+      volume in 1870, but as I did not then possess a copy of the book, and do
+      not remember to have seen one, my knowledge of the work must have been
+      merely such as could be gleaned from the reading of reviews. The unlucky
+      controversy, that subsequently arose out of it, directed afresh my
+      attention, in common with that of others, to Rossetti and his school of
+      poetry, with the result of impressing my mind with qualities of the work
+      that were certainly quite outside the issues involved in the discussion.
+      Some two or three years after that acrimonious controversy had subsided,
+      an accident, sufficiently curious to warrant my describing it, produced
+      the effect of converting me from a temperate believer in the charm of
+      music and colour in Rossetti&rsquo;s lyric verse, to an ardent admirer of his
+      imaginative genius as displayed in the higher walks of his art.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I had set out with a knapsack to make one of my many periodical walking
+      tours of the beautiful lake country of Westmoreland and Cumberland.
+      Beginning the journey at Bowness&mdash;as tourists, if they will accept
+      the advice of one who knows perhaps the whole of the country, ought always
+      to do&mdash;I walked through Dungeon Ghyll, climbed the Stake Pass,
+      descended into Borrowdale, and traced the course of the winding Derwent to
+      that point at which it meets the estuary of the lake, and where stands the
+      Derwentwater Hotel. A rain and thunder storm was gathering over the Black
+      Sail and Great Gable as I reached the summit of the Pass, and travelling
+      slowly northwards it had overtaken me. Before I reached the hotel, my
+      resting-place for the night, I was certainly as thoroughly saturated as
+      any one in reasonable moments could wish to be. I remember that as I
+      passed into the shelter of the porch an elderly gentleman, who was
+      standing there, remarked upon the severity of the storm, inquired what
+      distance I had travelled, and expressed amazement that on such a day, when
+      mists were floating, any one could have ventured to cover so much
+      dangerous mountain-country,&mdash;which he estimated as nearly thirty
+      miles in extent. Beyond observing that my interlocutor was friendly in
+      manner and knew the country intimately, I do not remember to have
+      reflected either then or afterwards upon his personality except perhaps
+      that he might have answered to Wordsworth&rsquo;s scarcely definite description
+      of his illustrious friend as &ldquo;a noticeable man,&rdquo; with the further
+      parallel, I think, of possessing &ldquo;large grey eyes.&rdquo; After attending to the
+      obvious necessity of dry garments in exchange for wet ones, and otherwise
+      comforting myself after a fatiguing day&rsquo;s march, I descended to the
+      drawing-room of the hotel, where a company of persons were trying, with
+      that too formal cordiality peculiar to English people, who are
+      accidentally thrown together in the course of a holiday, to get rid of the
+      depression which results upon dishearteningly unpropitious weather. Music,
+      as usual, was the gracious angel employed to banish the fiend of ennui,
+      but among those who took no part either in the singing or playing, other
+      than that of an enforced auditor, was the elderly gentleman, my quondam
+      acquaintance of the porch, who stood apart in an alcove looking through a
+      window. I stepped up to him and renewed our talk. The storm had rather
+      increased than abated since my arrival; the thunder which before had
+      rumbled over the distant Langdale Pikes was breaking in sharp peals over
+      our heads, and flashes of sheeted lightning lit up the gathering darkness
+      that lay between us and Castle Crag. A playful allusion to &ldquo;poor Tom&rdquo; and
+      to King Lear&rsquo;s undisputed sole enjoyment of such a scene (except as viewed
+      from the ambush of a comfortable hotel) led to the discovery, very welcome
+      to both at a moment when we were at bay for an evening&rsquo;s occupation, that
+      besides knowledge and love of the country round about us, we had in common
+      some knowledge and much love of the far wider realm of books. Thereupon
+      ensued a talk chiefly on authors and their works which lasted until long
+      after the music had ceased, until the elemental as well as instrumental
+      storm had passed, and the guests had slipped away one after one, and the
+      last remaining servant of the house had, by the introduction of a couple
+      of candles, given us a palpable hint that in the opinion of that guardian
+      of a country inn the hour was come and gone when well-regulated persons
+      should betake themselves to bed. To my delight my friend knew nearly every
+      prominent living author, could give me personal descriptions of them, as
+      well as scholarly and well-digested criticisms of their works. He was
+      certainly no ordinary man, but who he was I have never learned with
+      certainty, though I cherish the agreeable impression that I could give a
+      shrewd guess. At one moment the talk turned on <i>Festus</i>, and then I
+      heard the most lucid and philosophical account of that work I have ever
+      listened to or read. I was told that the author of <i>Festus</i> had never
+      (in all the years that had elapsed since its publication, when he was in
+      his earliest manhood, though now he is grown elderly) ceased to emend it,
+      notwithstanding the protestations of critics; and that an improved and
+      enlarged edition of the poem might probably appear after his death. Struck
+      with the especial knowledge displayed of the author in question, I asked
+      if he happened to be a friend. Then, with a scarcely perceptible smile
+      playing about the corners of the mouth (a circumstance without
+      significance for me at the time and only remembered afterwards), my new
+      acquaintance answered: &ldquo;He is my oldest and dearest friend.&rdquo; Next morning
+      I saw my night-long conversationalist in company with a clergyman get on
+      to the Buttermere coach and wave his hand to me as they vanished under the
+      trees that overhung the Buttermere road, but in answer to many inquiries
+      the utmost I could learn of my interesting acquaintance was that he was
+      somehow understood to be a great author, and a friend of Charles Kingsley,
+      who, I think they said, was or had been with him there or elsewhere that
+      year. Whether besides being the &ldquo;oldest and dearest friend&rdquo; of the author
+      of <i>Festus</i>, my delightful companion was Philip James Bailey himself
+      I have never learned to this day, and can only cherish a pleasant trust;
+      but what remains as really important in this connexion is that whosoever
+      he was he originated my first real love of Rossetti&rsquo;s poetry, and gave me
+      my first realisable idea of the man. Taking up from the table some popular
+      <i>Garland, Casket, Treasury</i>, or other anthology of English poetry, he
+      pointed out a sonnet entitled <i>Lost Days</i> (to which, indeed, a friend
+      at home had directed my attention), and dwelt upon its marvellous strength
+      of spiritual insight, and power of symbolic phrase. Of course the sonnet
+      was Rossetti&rsquo;s. It is impossible for me to describe the effect produced
+      upon me by sonnet and exposition. I resolved not to live many days longer
+      without acquiring a knowledge of the body of Rossetti&rsquo;s work. Perceiving
+      that the gentleman knew something of the poet, I put questions to him
+      which elicited the fact that he had met him many years earlier at, I think
+      he said, Mrs. Gaskell&rsquo;s, when Rossetti was a rather young man, known only
+      as a painter and the leader of an eccentric school in art. He described
+      him as a little dark man, with fine eyes under a broad brow, with a deep
+      voice, and Bohemian habits&mdash;&ldquo;a little Italian, in short.&rdquo; [Little, by
+      the way, Rossetti could not properly be said to be, but opinions as to
+      physical proportions being so liable to vary, I may at once mention that
+      he was exactly five feet eight inches in height, and except in early
+      manhood, when he was somewhat attenuated, well built in proportion.] He
+      further described Rossetti&rsquo;s manners as those of a man in deliberate
+      revolt against society; delighting in an opportunity to startle
+      well-ordered persons out of their propriety, and to silence by sheer
+      vehemence of denunciation the seemly protests of very good and very gentle
+      folk. The portraiture seems to me now to bear the impress of truth, unlike
+      as it is in some particulars to the man as I knew him. When once, however,
+      years after the event recorded, I bantered Rossetti on the amiable picture
+      of him I had received from a stranger, he admitted that it was in the main
+      true to his character early in life, and recounted an instance in which,
+      from sheer perversity, or at best for amusement, he had made the late Dean
+      Stanley aghast with horror at the spectacle of a young man, born in a
+      Christian country, and in the nineteenth century, defending (in sport) the
+      vices of Neronian Home.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The outcome of this first serious and sufficient introduction to
+      Rossetti&rsquo;s poetry was that I forthwith devoted time to reading and
+      meditating upon it. Ultimately I lectured twice or thrice on the subject
+      in Liverpool, first at the Royal Institution, and afterwards at the Free
+      Library. The text of that lecture I still preserve, and as in all
+      probability it did more than anything else to originate the friendship I
+      afterwards enjoyed with the poet, I shall try to convey very briefly an
+      idea of its purpose.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Against both friendly and unfriendly critics of Rossetti I held that to
+      place him among the &ldquo;aesthetic&rdquo; poets was an error of classification. It
+      seemed to me that, unlike the poets properly so described, he had nothing
+      in common with the Caliban of Mr. Browning, who worked &ldquo;for work&rsquo;s sole
+      sake;&rdquo; and, unlike them yet further, the topmost thing in him was indeed
+      love of beauty, but the deepest thing was love of uncomely right. The
+      fusion of these elements in Rossetti softened the mythological Italian
+      Catholicism that I recognised as a leading thing in him, and subjugated
+      his sensuous passion. I thought it wrong to say that Rossetti had part or
+      lot with those false artists, or no artists, who assert, without fear or
+      shame, that the manner of doing a thing should be abrogated or superseded
+      by the moral purpose of its being done. On the other hand, Rossetti
+      appeared to make no conscious compromise with the Puritan principle of
+      doing good; and to demand first of his work the lesson or message it had
+      for us were wilfully to miss of pleasure while we vainly strove for
+      profit. He was too true an artist to follow art into its byeways of moral
+      significance, and thereby cripple its broader arms; but at the same time
+      all this absorption of the artist in his art seemed to me to live and work
+      together with the personal instincts of the man. An artist&rsquo;s nature cannot
+      escape the colouring it gets from the human side of his nature, because it
+      is of the essence of art to appeal to its own highest faculties largely
+      through the channel of moral instincts: that music is exquisite and colour
+      splendid, first, because they have an indescribable significance, and next
+      because they respond to mere sense. But it appeared to me to be one thing
+      to work for &ldquo;work&rsquo;s sole sake,&rdquo; with an overruling moral instinct that
+      gravitates, as Mr. Arnold would say, towards conduct, and quite another
+      thing to absorb art in moral purposes. I thought that Rossetti&rsquo;s poetry
+      showed how possible it is, without making conscious compromise with that
+      puritan principle of doing good of which Keats at one period became
+      enamoured, to be unconsciously making for moral ends. There was for me a
+      passive puritanism in <i>Jenny</i> which lived and worked together with
+      the poet&rsquo;s purely artistic passion for doing his work supremely well.
+      Every thought in <i>Dante at Verona</i> and <i>The Last Confession</i>
+      seemed mixed with and coloured by a personal moral instinct that was safe
+      and right.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This was perhaps the only noticeable feature of my lecture, and knowing
+      Rossetti&rsquo;s nature, as since the lecture I have learned to know it, I feel
+      no great surprise that such pleading for the moral impulses animating his
+      work should have been of all things the most likely to engage his
+      affections. Just as Coleridge always resented the imputation that he had
+      ever been concerned with Wordsworth and Southey in the establishment of a
+      school of poetry, and contended that, in common with his colleagues, he
+      had been inspired by no desire save that of imitating the best examples of
+      Greece and Home, so Rossetti (at least throughout the period of my
+      acquaintance with him) invariably shrank from classification with the
+      poetry of æstheticism, and aspired to the fame of a poet who had been
+      prompted primarily by the highest of spiritual emotions, and to whom the
+      sensations of the body were as naught, unless they were sanctified by the
+      concurrence of the soul. My lecture was printed, but quite a year elapsed
+      after its preparation before it occurred to me that Rossetti himself might
+      derive a moment&rsquo;s gratification from knowledge of the fact that he had one
+      ardent upholder and sincere well-wisher hitherto unknown to him. At length
+      I sent him a copy of the magazine containing my lecture on his poetry. A
+      post or two later brought me the following reply:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     Dear Mr. Caine,&mdash;
+
+     I am much struck by the generous enthusiasm displayed in
+     your Lecture, and by the ability with which it is written.
+     Your estimate of the impulses influencing my poetry is such
+     as I should wish it to suggest, and this suggestion, I
+     believe, it will have always for a true-hearted nature. You
+     say that you are grateful to me: my response is, that I am
+     grateful to you: for you have spoken up heartily and
+     unfalteringly for the work you love.
+
+     I daresay you sometimes come to London. I should be very
+     glad to know you, and would ask you, if you thought of
+     calling, to give me a day&rsquo;s notice when to expect you, as I
+     am not always able to see visitors without appointment. The
+     afternoon, about 5, might suit me, or else the evening about
+     9.30. With all best wishes, yours sincerely,
+
+     D. G. Rossetti.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      This was the first of nearly two hundred letters in all received from
+      Rossetti in the course of our acquaintance. A day or two later the
+      following supplementary note reached me:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     I return your article. In reading it, I feel it a
+     distinction that my minute plot in the poetic field should
+     have attracted the gaze of one who is able to traverse its
+     widest ranges with so much command. I shall be much pleased
+     if the plan of calling on me is carried out soon&mdash;at any
+     rate I trust it will be so eventually.... Have you got, or
+     do you know, my book of translations called <i>Dante and his
+     Circle?</i> If not, I &lsquo;ll send you one....
+
+     I have been reading again your article on <i>The Supernatural
+     in Poetry</i>. It is truly admirable&mdash;such work must soon make
+     you a place. The dramatic paper I thought suffered from some
+     immaturity.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      It is hardly necessary to say that I was equally delighted with the warmth
+      of the reception accorded to my essay, and with the revelation the letters
+      appeared to contain of a sincere and unselfish nature. My purpose,
+      however, which was a modest one, had been served, and I made no further
+      attempt to continue the correspondence, least of all did I expect or
+      desire to originate anything of the nature of a friendship. In my reply to
+      his note, however, I had asked him to accept the dedication of a little
+      work of mine, and when, with abundant courtesy, he had declined to do so
+      on very sufficient grounds, I felt satisfied that matters between us
+      should rest where they were. It is a pleasing recollection, nevertheless,
+      that Rossetti himself had taken a different view of the relation that had
+      grown up between us, and by many generous appeals induced me to put by all
+      further thoughts of abandoning the correspondence out of regard for him.
+      There had ensued an interval in which I did not write to him, whereupon he
+      addressed to me a hurried note, saying:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     Let me have a line from you. I am haunted by the idea, that
+     in declining the dedication, I may have hurt you. I assure
+     you I should be proud to be associated in any way with your
+     work, but gave you my very reasons.
+
+     I shall be pleased if you do not think them sufficient, and
+     still carry out your original intention.... At least write
+     to me.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      I replied to this letter (containing, as it did, the expression of so much
+      more than the necessary solicitude), by saying that I too had been
+      haunted, but it had been by the fear that I had been asking too much of
+      his attention. As to the dedication, so far from feeling hurt, by
+      Rossetti&rsquo;s declining it, I had grown to see that such was the only course
+      that remained to him to take. The terms in which he had replied to my
+      offer of it (so far from being of a kind to annoy or hurt me), had, to my
+      thinking, been only generous, sympathetic, and beautiful. Again he wrote:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     My dear Caine,&mdash;
+
+     Let me assure you at once that correspondence with yourself
+     is one of my best pleasures, and that you cannot write too
+     much or too often for <i>me</i>; though after what you have told
+     me as to the apportioning of your time, I should be
+     unwilling to encroach unduly upon it. Neither should I on my
+     side prove very tardy in reply, as you are one to whom I
+     find there <i>is</i> something to say when I sit down with a pen
+     and paper. I have a good deal of enforced evening leisure,
+     as it is seldom I can paint or draw by gaslight. It would
+     not be right in me to refrain from saying that to meet with
+     one so &ldquo;leal and true&rdquo; to myself as you are has been a
+     consolation amid much discouragement.... I perceive you have
+     had a complete poetic career which you have left behind to
+     strike out into wider waters.... The passage on Night, which
+     you say was written under the planet Shelley, seems to me
+     (and to my brother, to whom I read it) to savour more of the
+     &ldquo;mortal moon&rdquo;&mdash;that is, of a weird and sombre
+     Elizabethanism, of which Beddoes may be considered the
+     modern representative. But we both think it has an
+     unmistakeable force and value; and if you can write better
+     poetry than this, let your angel say unto you, <i>Write</i>.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      I take it that it would be wholly unwise of me in selecting excerpts from
+      Rossetti&rsquo;s letters entirely to withhold the passages that concern
+      exclusively (so far as their substance goes) my own early doings or
+      try-ings-to-do; for it ought to be a part of my purpose to lay bare the
+      beginnings of that friendship by virtue of which such letters exist. I can
+      only ask the readers of these pages to accept my assurance, that whatever
+      the number and extent of the passages which I publish that are necessarily
+      in themselves of more interest to myself personally than to the public
+      generally, they are altogether disproportionate to the number and extent
+      of those I withhold. I cannot, however, resist the conclusion that such
+      picture as they afford of a man beyond the period of middle life capable
+      of bending to a new and young friend, and of thinking with and for him, is
+      not without an exceptional literary interest as being so contrary to
+      every-day experience. Hence, I am not without hope that the occasional
+      references to myself which in the course of these extracts I shall feel it
+      necessary to introduce, may be understood to be employed by me as much for
+      their illustrative value (being indicative of Rossetti&rsquo;s character), as
+      for any purpose less purely impersonal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The passage of verse referred to was copied out for Rossetti in reply to
+      an inquiry as to whether I had written poetry. Prompted no doubt by the
+      encouragement derived in this instance, I submitted from time to time
+      other verses to Rossetti, as subsequent letters show, but it says
+      something for the value of his praise that whatever the measure of it when
+      his sympathies were fairly aroused, and whatever his natural tendency to
+      look for the characteristic merits rather than defects of compositions
+      referred to his judgment, his candour was always prominent among his good
+      qualities when censure alone required to be forthcoming. Among many frank
+      utterances of an opinion early formed, that whatever my potentialities as
+      a writer of prose, I had but small vocation as a writer of poetry, I
+      preserve one such utterance, which will, I trust, be found not less
+      interesting to other readers from affording a glimpse of the writer&rsquo;s
+      attitude towards the old controversy touching the several and
+      distinguishing elements that contribute to make good prose on the one hand
+      and good verse on the other.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On one occasion he had sent me his fine sonnet on Keats, then just
+      written, and, in acknowledging the receipt of it with many expressions of
+      admiration, I remarked that for some days I had been struggling
+      desperately, in all senses, to incubate a sonnet on the same somewhat
+      hackneyed subject. I had not written a line or put pen to paper for the
+      purpose, but I could tell him, in general terms, what my unaccomplished
+      marvel of sonnet-craft was to be about.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rossetti replied saying that the scheme for a sonnet was &ldquo;extremely
+      beautiful,&rdquo; and urging me to &ldquo;do it at once.&rdquo; Alas for my intrepidity, &ldquo;do
+      it&rdquo; I did, with the result of awakening my correspondent to the certainty
+      that, whatever embowerings I had in my mind, that shy bird the sonnet
+      would seek in vain for a nest to hide in there. It asked so much special
+      courage to send a first attempt at sonneteering to the greatest living
+      master of the sonnet that moral daring alone ought to have got me off
+      lightly, but here is Rossetti&rsquo;s reply, valuable now, as well for the view
+      it affords of the poet&rsquo;s attitude towards the sonnet as a medium of
+      expression, as for other reasons already assigned. The opening passage
+      alludes to a lyric of humble life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      You may be sure I do not mean essential discouragement when I say that,
+      full as <i>Nell</i> is of reality and pathos, your swing of arm seems to
+      me firmer and freer in prose than in verse. I do think I see your field to
+      lie chiefly in the achievements of fervid and impassioned prose.... I am
+      sure that, when sending me your first sonnet, you wished me to say quite
+      frankly what I think of it. Well, I do not think it shows a special
+      vocation for this condensed and emphatic form. The prose version you sent
+      me seems to say much more distinctly what this says with some want of
+      force. The octave does not seem to me very clearly put, and the sestet
+      does not emphasize in a sufficiently striking way the idea which the prose
+      sketch conveyed to me,&mdash;that of Keats&rsquo;s special privilege in early
+      death: viz., the lovely monumentalized image he bequeathed to us of the
+      young poet. Also I must say that more special originality and even <i>newness</i>
+      (though this might be called a vulgarizing word), of thought and picture
+      in individual lines&mdash;more of this than I find here&mdash;seems to me
+      the very first qualification of a sonnet&mdash;otherwise it puts forward
+      no right to be so short, but might seem a severed passage from a longer
+      poem depending on development. I would almost counsel you to try the same
+      theme again&mdash;or else some other theme in sonnet-form. I thought the
+      passage on Night you sent showed an aptitude for choice imagery. I should
+      much like to see something which you view as your best poetic effort
+      hitherto. After all, there is no need that every gifted writer should take
+      the path of poetry&mdash;still less of sonneteering. I am confident in
+      your preference for frankness on my part.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I tried the theme again before I abandoned it, and was so fortunate as to
+      get him to admit a degree of improvement such as led to his desiring to
+      recall his conjectural judgment on my possibilities as a sonnet-writer,
+      but as the letters in which he characterises the advance are neither so
+      terse in criticism, nor so interesting from the exposition of principles,
+      as the one quoted, I pass them by. With more confidence in my ultimate
+      comparative success than I had ever entertained, Rossetti was only anxious
+      that I should engage in that work to which I. could address myself with a
+      sense of command; and I think it will be agreed that, where temperate
+      confidence in what the future may legitimately hold for one is united to
+      earnest and rightly directed endeavour in the present, it is often a good
+      thing for the man who stands on the threshold of life (to whom,
+      nevertheless, the path passed seems ever to stretch out of sight
+      backwards) to be told the extent to which, little enough at the most, his
+      clasp (to use a phrase of Mr. Browning) may be equal to his grasp.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My residing, as I did, at a distance from London, was at once the
+      difficulty which for a time prevented our coming together and the
+      necessity for correspondence by virtue of which these letters exist. As I
+      failed, however, from hampering circumstance, to meet at once with
+      himself, Rossetti invariably displayed a good deal of friendly anxiety to
+      bring me into contact with his friends as frequently as occasion rendered
+      it feasible to do so. In this way I met with Mr. Madox Brown, who was at
+      the moment engaged on his admirable frescoes in the Manchester Town Hall,
+      and in this way also I met with other friends of his resident in my
+      neighbourhood. When I came to know him more intimately I perceived that
+      besides the kindliness of intention which had prompted him to bring me
+      into what he believed to be agreeable associations, he had adopted this
+      course from the other motive of desiring to be reassured as to the
+      comparative harmlessness of my personality, for he usually followed the
+      introduction to a friend by a private letter of thanks for the reception
+      accorded me, and a number of dexterously manipulated allusions, which
+      always, I found, produced the desired result of eliciting the required
+      information (to be gleaned only from personal intercourse) as to my manner
+      and habits. Later in our acquaintance, I found that he, like all
+      meditative men, had the greatest conceivable dread of being taken
+      unawares, and that there was no safer way for any fresh acquaintance to
+      insure his taking violently against him, than to take the step of coming
+      down upon him suddenly, and without appointment, or before a sufficient
+      time had elapsed between the beginning of the friendship and the actual
+      personal encounter, to admit of his forming preconceived ideas of the
+      manner of man to expect. The agony he suffered upon the unexpected visit
+      of even the most ardent of well-wishers could scarcely be realised at the
+      moment, from the apparent ease, and assumed indifference of his outward
+      bearing, and could only be known to those who were with him after the
+      trying ordeal had been passed, or immediately before the threatened
+      intrusion had been consummated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Early in our correspondence a friend of his, an art critic of distinction,
+      visited Liverpool with the purpose of lecturing on the valuable examples
+      of Byzantine art in the Eoyal Institution of that city. The lecture was, I
+      fear, almost too good and quite too technical for some of the hearers,
+      many of whom claim (and with reason) to be lovers of art, and cover the
+      walls of their houses with beautiful representations of lovely landscape,
+      but at the same time erect huge furnaces which emit vast volumes of black
+      smoke such as prevent the sky of any Liverpool landscape being for an
+      instant lovely. I doubt if the lecture could have been treated more
+      popularly, but there was manifestly a lack of merited appreciation. The
+      archaisms of some of the pictures chosen for illustration (early Byzantine
+      examples exclusively) appeared to cause certain of the audience to smile
+      at much of the lecturer&rsquo;s enthusiasm. Fortunately the man chiefly
+      concerned seemed unconscious of all this. And indeed, however he fared in
+      public, in private he was only too &ldquo;dreadfully attended.&rdquo; After the
+      lecture a good many folks gave him the benefit of their invaluable
+      opinions on various art questions, and some, as was natural, made pitiful
+      slips. I observed with secret and scarcely concealed satisfaction his
+      courageous loyalty in defence of his friends, and his hitting out in their
+      defence when he believed them to be assailed. One superlative
+      intelligence, eager to do honour to the guest, yet ignorant of his claim
+      to such honour, gave him a wonderfully facile and racy comment on the
+      pre-Raphaelite painters, and, in particular, made the ridiculous blunder
+      of a deliberate attack upon Rossetti, and then paused for breath and for
+      the lecturer&rsquo;s appreciative response; of course, Rossetti&rsquo;s friend was not
+      to be drawn into such disloyalty for an instant, even to avoid the risk of
+      ruffling the plumage of the mightiest of the corporate cacklers. Rossetti
+      had permitted me in his name to meet his friend, and in writing
+      subsequently I alluded to the affection with which he had been mentioned,
+      also to something that had been said of his immediate surroundings, and to
+      that frank championing of his claims which I have just described.
+      Rossetti&rsquo;s reply to this is interesting as affording a pathetic view of
+      his isolation of life and of the natural affectionateness of his nature:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     I am very glad you were welcomed by dear staunch S&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;, as
+     I felt sure you would be. He holds the honourable position
+     of being almost the only living art-critic who has really
+     himself worked through the art-schools practically, and
+     learnt to draw and paint. He is one of my oldest and best
+     friends, of whom few can be numbered at my age, from causes
+     only too varying.
+
+          Go from me, summer friends, and tarry not,&mdash;
+          I am no summer friend, but wintry cold, etc.
+
+     So be it, as needs must be,&mdash;not for all, let us hope, and
+     not with all, as good S&mdash;&mdash;&mdash; shews. I have not seen him
+     since his return. I wrote him a line to thank him for his
+     friendly reception of you, and he wrote in return to thank
+     me for your acquaintance, and spoke very pleasantly of you.
+     Your youth seems to have surprised him. I sent a letter of
+     his to your address. I hope you may see more of him. . . .
+     You mention something he said to you of me and my
+     surroundings. They are certainly <i>quiet</i> enough as fax as
+     retirement goes, and I have often thought I should enjoy the
+     presence of a congenial and intellectual housefellow and
+     boardfellow in this big barn of mine, which is actually
+     going to rack and ruin for want of use. But where to find
+     the welcome, the willing, and the able combined in one? . . .
+     I was truly concerned to hear of the attack of ill-health
+     you have suffered from, though you do not tell me its exact
+     nature. I hope it was not accompanied by any such symptoms
+     as you mentioned before. . . . I myself have had similar
+     symptoms (though not so fully as you describe), and have
+     spat blood at intervals for years, but now think nothing of
+     it&mdash;nor indeed ever did,&mdash;waiting for further alarm signals
+     which never came.
+
+     . . . By-the-bye, I have since remembered that Burne Jones,
+     many years ago, had such an experience as you spoke of
+     before&mdash;quite as bad certainly. He was weak for some time
+     after, and has frequently been reminded in minor ways of it,
+     but seems now (at about forty-six or forty-seven) to be more
+     settled in health and stronger, perhaps, than ever
+     before.... Your letter holds out the welcome probability of
+     meeting you here ere long.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      This friendly solicitude regarding my health was excited by the revelation
+      of what seemed to me at the time a startling occurrence, but has doubtless
+      frequently happened to others, and has certainly since happened to myself
+      without provoking quite so much outcry. The blood-spitting to which
+      Rossetti here alleges he was liable was of a comparatively innocent
+      nature. In later years he was assuredly not altogether a hero as to
+      personal suffering, and I afterwards found that, upon the periodical
+      recurrence of the symptom, he never failed to become convinced that he
+      spat arterial blood, and that on each occasion he had received his
+      death-warrant. Proof enough was adduced that the blood came from the minor
+      vessels of the throat, and this was undoubtedly the case in the majority
+      of instances, but whether the same explanation applied to one alarming
+      occurrence which I shall now recount, seems to me uncertain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      During the two or three weeks preceding our departure for Cumberland, in
+      the autumn of 1881, during the time of our residence there and during the
+      first few weeks after our return to London, Rossetti was afflicted by a
+      violent cough. I noticed that it troubled him almost exclusively in the
+      night-time, and after the taking of chloral; that it was sometimes
+      attended by vomiting; and that it invariably shook his whole system so
+      terribly as to leave him for a while entirely prostrate from sheer
+      physical exhaustion. The spectacle was a painful one, and I watched
+      closely its phenomena, with the result of convincing myself that whatever
+      radical mischief lay at the root of it, the damage done was seriously
+      augmented by a conscious giving way to it, induced, I thought, by hope of
+      the relief it sometimes afforded the stomach to get rid of the nauseous
+      drug at a moment of reduced digestive vitality. Then it became my fear
+      that in these violent and prolonged retchings internal injury might be
+      sustained, and so I begged him to try to restrain the tendency to cough so
+      much and often. He took the remonstrance with great goodnature (observing
+      that he perceived I thought he was putting it on), but I was not conscious
+      that at any moment he acted upon my suggestion. At the time in question I
+      was under the necessity of leaving him for a day or two every week in
+      order to fulfil, a course of lecturing engagements at a distance; and upon
+      my return in each instance I was told much of all that had happened to him
+      in the interval. On one occasion, however, I was conscious that something
+      had occurred of which he desired to make a disclosure, for amongst the
+      gifts that Rossetti had not got was that of concealing from his intimate
+      friends any event, however trifling, or however important, which weighed
+      upon his mind. At length I begged him to say what had happened, whereupon,
+      with great reluctance and many protestations of his intention to observe
+      silence, and constant injunctions as to secrecy, he told me that during
+      the night of my absence, in the midst of one of his bouts of coughing, he
+      had discharged an enormous quantity of blood. &ldquo;I know this is the final
+      signal,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;and I shall die.&rdquo; I did my utmost to compose him by
+      recounting afresh the personal incident hinted at, with many added
+      features of (I trust) justifiable exaggeration, but it is hardly necessary
+      to say that I did not hold the promise I gave him as to secrecy
+      sufficiently sacred, or so exclusive, as to forbid my revealing the whole
+      circumstance to his medical attendant. I may add that from that moment the
+      cough entirely disappeared.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To return from this reminiscence of a later period to the beginnings,
+      three years earlier, of our correspondence, I will bring the present
+      chapter to a close by quoting short passages from three letters written on
+      the eve of my first visit to Rossetti, in 1880:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     I will be truly glad to meet you when you come to town. You
+     will recognise the hole-and-cornerest of all existences; but
+     I&rsquo;ll read you a ballad or two, and have Brown&rsquo;s report to
+     back my certainty of liking you.... I would propose that you
+     should dine with me at 8.30 on the Monday of your visit, and
+     spend the evening.... Better come at 5.30 to 6 (if feasible
+     to you), that I may try to show you a picture by daylight...
+     Of course, when I speak of your dining with me, I mean tête-
+     à-tête, and without ceremony of any kind. I usually dine in
+     my studio, and in my painting coat. I judge this will reach
+     you in time for a note to reach <i>me</i>. Telegrams I hate. In
+     hope of the pleasure of a meeting, yours ever.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      How that &ldquo;hole-and-cornerest of all existences&rdquo; struck an ardent admirer
+      of the poet-painter&rsquo;s genius, and a devoted lover of his personal
+      character, as then revealed to me, I hope to describe in a later section
+      of this book. Meantime I must proceed to cull from the epistolary
+      treasures I possess a number of interesting passages on literary subjects,
+      called forth in the course of an intercourse which, at that stage, had few
+      topics of a private nature to divert it from a channel of impersonal
+      discussion. It is a fact that the letters written to me by Rossetti in the
+      year 1880 deal so largely with literary affairs (chiefly of the past) as
+      to be almost capable of <i>verbatim</i> reproduction, even at the present
+      short interval after his death. If they were to be reproduced, they would
+      be found to cover two hundred pages of the present volume, and to be so
+      easy, fluent, varied, and wholly felicitous as to style, and full of
+      research and reflection as to substance, as probably to earn for the
+      writer a foremost place for epistolary power. Indeed, I am not without
+      hope that this accession of a fresh reputation may result even upon the
+      excerpts I have decided to introduce.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0004" id="link2HCH0004">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER IV.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      It was very natural that our earliest correspondence should deal chiefly
+      with Rossetti&rsquo;s own works, for those works gave rise to it. He sent me a
+      copy of his translations from early Italian poets (<i>Dante and his Circle</i>),
+      and a copy of his story, entitled <i>Hand and Soul</i>. In posting the
+      latter, he said:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     I don&rsquo;t know if you ever saw a sort of story of mine called
+     <i>Hand and Soul</i>. I send you one with this, as printed to go
+     in my poems (though afterwards omitted, being, nevertheless,
+     more poem than story). I printed it since in the
+     <i>Fortnightly</i>&mdash;and, I believe, abolished one or two extra
+     sentimentalities. You may have seen it there. In case it&rsquo;s
+     stale, I enclose with this a sonnet which <i>must</i> be new, for
+     I only wrote it the other day.
+
+     I have already, in the proper place in this volume, said how
+     the story first struck me. Perhaps I had never before
+     reading it seen quite so clearly the complete mission as
+     well as enforced limitations of true art. All the many
+     subtle gradations in the development of purpose were there
+     beautifully pictured in a little creation that was charming
+     in the full sense of a word that has wellnigh lost its
+     charm. For all such as cried out against pursuits
+     originating in what Keats had christened &ldquo;the infant chamber
+     of sensation,&rdquo; and for all such as demanded that everything
+     we do should be done to &ldquo;strengthen God among men,&rdquo; the
+     story provided this answer: &ldquo;When at any time hath He cried
+     unto thee, saying, &lsquo;My son, lend me thy shoulder, for I
+     fall&rsquo;?&rdquo;
+ 
+     The sonnet sent, and spoken of as having just been written
+     (the letter bears post-mark February 1880), was the sonnet
+     on the sonnet. It is throughout beautiful and in two of its
+     lines (those depicting the dark wharf and the black Styx)
+     truly magnificent. It appears most to be valued, however, as
+     affording a clue to the attitude of mind adopted towards
+     this form of verse by the greatest master of it in modern
+     poetry. I think it is Mr. Pater who says that a fine poem in
+     manuscript carries an aroma with it, and a sensation of
+     music. I must have enjoyed the pleasure of such a presence
+     somewhat frequently about this period, for many of the poems
+     that afterwards found places in the second volume of ballads
+     and sonnets were sent to me from time to time.
+
+     I should like to know what were the three or four vols. on
+     Italian poetry which you mentioned in a former letter, and
+     which my book somewhat recalled to your mind. I was not
+     aware of any such extensive <i>English</i> work on the subject.
+     Or do you perhaps mean Trucchi&rsquo;s Italian <i>Dugento Poésie
+     inédite?</i> I am sincerely delighted at your rare interest in
+     what I have sent you&mdash;both the translations, story, etc.&mdash;I
+     enclose three printed pieces meant for my volume but
+     omitted:&mdash;the ballad, because it deals trivially with a base
+     amour (it was written <i>very</i> early) and is therefore really
+     reprehensible to some extent; the Shakspeare sonnet, because
+     of its incongruity with the rest of the poems, and also
+     because of the insult (however jocose) to the worshipful
+     body of tailors; and the political sonnet for reasons which
+     are plain enough, though the date at which I wrote it (not
+     without feeling) involves now a prophetic value. In a MS.
+     vol. I have a sonnet (1871) <i>After the German Subjugation of
+     France</i>, which enforces the prophecy by its fulfilment. In
+     this MS. vol. are a few pieces which were the only ones I
+     copied in doubt as to their admission when I printed the
+     poems, but none of which did I admit. One day I &lsquo;ll send it
+     for you to look at. It contains a few sonnets bearing on
+     public matters, but only a few. Tell me what you think on
+     reading my things. All you said in your letter of this
+     morning was very grateful to me. I have a fair amount by me
+     in the way of later MS. which I may shew you some day when
+     we meet. Meanwhile I feel that your energies are already in
+     full swing&mdash;work coming on the heels of work&mdash;and that your
+     time cannot long be deferred as regards your place as a
+     writer.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      The ballad of which Rossetti here speaks as dealing trivially with a base
+      amour is entitled <i>Dennis Shand</i>. Though an early work, it affords
+      perhaps the best evidence extant of the poet&rsquo;s grasp of the old ballad
+      style: it runs easiest of all his ballads, and is in some respects his
+      best. Mr. J. A. Symonds has, in my judgment, made the error of speaking of
+      Rossetti as incapable of reproducing the real note of such ballads as <i>Chevy
+      Chase</i> and <i>Sir Patrick Spens</i>. Mr. Symonds was right in his
+      eloquent comments (<i>Macmillan&rsquo;s Magazine</i>, February 1882), so far as
+      they concern the absence from <i>Rose Mary, The King&rsquo;s Tragedy, and The
+      White Ship</i> of the sinewy simplicity of the old singers. But in those
+      poems Rossetti attempted quite another thing. There is a development of
+      the English ballad that is entirely of modern product, being far more
+      complex than the primitive form, and getting rid to some extent of the
+      out-worn notion of the ballad being actually sung to set music, but
+      retaining enough of the sweep of a free rhythm to carry a sensible effect
+      as of being chanted when read. This is a sort of ballad-romance, such as
+      <i>Christabel</i> and <i>The Lay of the Last Minstrel</i>; and this, and
+      this only, was what Rossetti aimed after, and entirely compassed in his
+      fine works just mentioned. But (as Rossetti himself remarked to me in
+      conversation when I repeated Mr. Symonds&rsquo;s criticism, and urged my own
+      grounds of objection to it), that the poet was capable of the directness
+      and simplicity which characterise the early ballad-writers, he had given
+      proof in <i>The Staff and Scrip and Stratton Water. Dennis Shand</i> is
+      valuable as evidence going in the same direction, but the author&rsquo;s
+      objection to it, on ethical grounds, must here prevail to withhold it from
+      publication.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Shakspeare sonnet, spoken of in the letter as being withheld on
+      account of its incongruity with the rest of the poems, was published in an
+      early <i>Academy</i>, notwithstanding its jocose allusion to the
+      worshipful body of tailors. As it is little known, and really very
+      powerful in itself, and interesting as showing the author&rsquo;s power over
+      words in a new direction, I print it in this place.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+             ON THE SITE OF A MULBERRY TREE.
+
+     Planted by Wm. Shakspeare; felled by the Rev. F. Gastrell.
+     This tree, here fall&rsquo;n, no common birth or death
+        Shared with its kind. The world&rsquo;s enfranchised son,
+        Who found the trees of Life and Knowledge one,
+     Here set it, frailer than his laurel-wreath.
+
+     Shall not the wretch whose hand it fell beneath
+        Rank also singly&mdash;the supreme unhung?
+        Lo! Sheppard, Turpin, pleading with black tongue
+     This viler thief&rsquo;s unsuffocated breath!
+
+     We &lsquo;U search thy glossary, Shakspeare! whence almost,
+        And whence alone, some name shall be reveal&rsquo;d
+          For this deaf drudge, to whom no length of ears
+          Sufficed to catch the music of the spheres;
+        Whose soul is carrion now,&mdash;too mean to yield
+     Some tailor&rsquo;s ninth allotment of a ghost.
+
+                   Stratford-on-Avon.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      The other sonnets referred to, those, namely, on the <i>French Liberation
+      of Italy</i>, and the <i>German Subjugation of France</i>, display all
+      Rossetti&rsquo;s mastery of craftsmanship. In strength of vision, in fertility
+      of rhythmic resource, in pliant handling, these sonnets are, in my
+      judgment, among the best written by the author; and if I do not quote them
+      here, or altogether regret that they do not appear in the author&rsquo;s works,
+      it is not because I have any sense of their possibly offending against the
+      delicate sensibilities of an age in which it seems necessary to hide out
+      of sight whatever appears to impinge upon the domain of what is called our
+      lower nature.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The circumstance has hardly obtained even so much as a passing mention
+      that Rossetti made certain very important additions to the ballad of <i>Sister
+      Helen</i>, just before passing the old volume through the press afresh for
+      publication, contemporaneously with the new book. The letters I am now to
+      quote show the origin of those additions, and are interesting, as
+      affording a view of the author&rsquo;s estimate of the gain in respect of
+      completeness of conception, and sterner tragic spirit which resulted upon
+      their adoption.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I was very glad to have the three articles together, including the one in
+      which you have written on myself. Looking at this again, it seems to me
+      you must possess the <i>best</i> edition (the Tauchnitz, which has my last
+      emendations). Otherwise I have been meaning all along to offer you a copy
+      of this edition, as I have some. Who was your informant as to dates of the
+      poems, etc.? They are not correct, yet show some inkling. <i>Jenny</i> (in
+      a first form) was written almost as early as <i>The Blessed Damozel</i>,
+      which I wrote (and have altered little since), when I was eighteen. It was
+      first printed when I was twenty-one. Of the first <i>Jenny</i>, perhaps
+      fifty lines survive here and there, but I felt it was quite beyond me then
+      (a world I was then happy enough to be a stranger to), and later I
+      re-wrote it completely. I will give you correct particulars at some time.
+      <i>Sister Helen</i>, I may mention, was written either in 1851 or
+      beginning of 1852, and was printed in something called <i>The Düsseldorf
+      Annual</i> {*} (published in Germany) in 1853; though since much revised
+      in detail&mdash;not in the main. You will be horror-struck to hear that
+      the first main addition to this poem was made by me only a few days ago!&mdash;eight
+      stanzas (six together, and two scattered ones) involving a new incident!!
+      Your hair is on end, I know, but if you heard the stanzas, they would
+      smooth if not curl it. The gain is immense.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     * In The Düsseldorf Annual the poem was signed H. H. H., and
+     in explanation of this signature Rossetti wrote on his own
+     copy the following characteristic note:&mdash;&ldquo;The initials as
+     above were taken from the lead-pencil.&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      In reply to this I told Rossetti that, as a &ldquo;jealous honourer&rdquo; of his, I
+      confessed to some uneasiness when I read that he had been making important
+      additions to <i>Sister Helen</i>. That I could not think of a stage of the
+      story that would bear so to be severed from what goes before or comes
+      after it as to admit of interpolation might not of itself go for much; but
+      the entire ballad was so rounded into unity, one incident so naturally
+      begetting the next, and the combined incidents so properly building up a
+      fabric of interest of which the meaning was all inwoven, that I could not
+      but fear that whatever the gain in certain directions, the additions of
+      any stanzas involving a new incident might, in some measure, cripple the
+      rest. Even though the new stanzas were as beautiful, or yet more beautiful
+      than the old ones, and the incident as impressive as any that goes before
+      it, or comes after it, the gain to the poem as an individual creation was
+      not, I thought, assured because people used to say my style was hard.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rossetti was mistaken in supposing that I possessed the latest and best
+      edition of his <i>Poems</i>, but I had seen the latest of all English
+      editions, and had noted in it several valuable emendations which, in
+      subsequent quotation, I had been careful to employ. One of these seemed to
+      me to involve an immeasurable gain. A stanza of <i>Sister Helen</i>, in
+      its first form, ran:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     Oh, the wind is sad in the iron chill,
+          Sister Helen,
+     And weary sad they look by the hill;
+     But Keith of Ewern &lsquo;s sadder still,
+          Little brother.&mdash;etc. etc.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      In the later edition the fourth line of this stanza ran:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     But he and I are sadder still.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      The change adds enormously to one&rsquo;s estimate of the characterisation. All
+      through the ballad one wants to feel that, despite the bitterness of her
+      speech, the heart of the relentless witch is breaking. Like <i>The Broken
+      Heart</i> of Ford, the ballad with the amended line was a masterly picture
+      of suppressed emotion. I hoped the new incident touched the same chord.
+      Rossetti replied:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     Thanks for your present letter, which I will answer with
+     pleasurable care. At present I send you the Tauchnitz
+     edition of my things. The bound copy is hideous, but more
+     convenient&mdash;the other pretty. You will find a good many
+     things bettered (I believe) even on the <i>latest</i> English
+     edition. I did not remember that the line you quote from
+     <i>Sister Helen</i> appeared in the new form at all in an English
+     issue. I am greatly pleased at your thinking it, as I do,
+     quite a transfiguring change... The next point I have marked
+     in your letter is that about the additions to <i>Sister
+     Helen</i>. Of course I knew that your hair must arise from your
+     scalp in protest. But what should you say if Keith of Ewern
+     were a three days&rsquo; bridegroom&mdash;if the spell had begun on the
+     wedding-morning&mdash;and if the bride herself became the last
+     pleader for mercy? I fancy you will see your way now. The
+     culminating, irresistible provocation helps, I think, to
+     humanize Helen, besides lifting the tragedy to a yet sterner
+     height.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      If I had felt (as Rossetti predicted I should) an uneasy sensation about
+      the roots of the hair upon hearing that he was making important additions
+      to the ballad which seemed to me to be the finest of his works, the
+      sensation in that quarter was not less, but more, upon learning the nature
+      of those additions. But I mistook the character of the new incidents. That
+      Sister Helen should be herself the abandoned <i>bride</i> of Ewern (for so
+      I understood the poet&rsquo;s explanation), and, as such, the last pleader for
+      mercy, pointed, I thought, in the direction of the humanizing emendation
+      (&ldquo;But he and I are sadder still &ldquo;) which had given me so much pleasure.
+      That Keith of Ewern should be a three-days&rsquo; bridegroom, and that the spell
+      should begin on the wedding morning, were incidents that seemed to
+      intensify every line of the poem. In this view of Rossetti&rsquo;s account of
+      the additions, there were certainly difficulties out of which I could see
+      no way, but I seemed to realise that Helen&rsquo;s hate, like Macbeth&rsquo;s
+      ambition, had overleaped itself, and fallen on the other side, and that
+      she would undo her work, if to return were not harder than to go on; her
+      initiate sensibility had gained hard use, but even as hate recoils on
+      love, so out of the ashes of hate love had arisen. In this view of the
+      characterisation of Helen, the parallel with Macbeth struck me more and
+      more as I thought of it. When Macbeth kills Duncan, and hears the grooms
+      of the chamber cry in their sleep&mdash;&ldquo;God bless us,&rdquo; he cannot say
+      &ldquo;Amen,&rdquo;
+     </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     I had most need of blessing, and Amen
+     Stuck in my throat.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Helen pleading too late for mercy against the potency of the spell she
+      herself had raised, seemed to me an incident that raised her to the utmost
+      height of tragic creation. But Rossetti&rsquo;s purpose was at once less
+      ambitious and more satisfying.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     Your passage as to the changes in <i>Sister Helen</i> could not
+     well (with all its fine suggestiveness) be likely to meet
+     exactly a reality which had not been submitted to your eye
+     in the verses themselves. It is the <i>bride of Keith</i> who is
+     the last pleader&mdash;as vainly as the others, and with a yet
+     more exulting development of vengeance in the forsaken
+     witch. The only acknowledgment by her of a mutual misery is
+     still found in the line you spotted as so great a gain
+     before, and in the last line she speaks. I ought to have
+     sent the stanzas to explain them properly, but have some
+     reluctance to ventilate them at present, much as I should
+     like the opportunity of reading them to you. They will meet
+     your eye in due course, and I am sure of your approval also
+     as regards their value to the ballad.... Don&rsquo;t let the
+     changes in <i>Helen</i> get wind overmuch. I want them to be new
+     when published. Answer this when you can. I like getting
+     your epistles.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      The fresh stanzas in question, which had already obtained the suffrages of
+      his brother, of Mr. Bell Scott, and other qualified critics, were
+      subsequently sent to me. They are as follows. After Keith of Keith, the
+      father of Sister Helen&rsquo;s sometime lover, has pleaded for his son in vain,
+      the last suppliant to arrive is his son&rsquo;s bride:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     A lady here, by a dark steed brought,
+          Sister Helen,
+     So darkly clad I saw her not.
+     &ldquo;See her now or never see aught,
+          Little brother!&rdquo;
+           (<i>O Mother, Mary Mother</i>,
+     <i>Whit more to see, between Hell and Heaven?</i>)
+
+     &ldquo;Her hood falls back, and the moon shines fair,
+          Sister Helen,
+     On the Lady of Ewern&rsquo;s golden hair.&rdquo;
+      &ldquo;Blest hour of my power and her despair,
+          Little brother!&rdquo;
+           (O Mother, Mary Mother,
+     Hour blest and bann&rsquo;d, between Hell and Heaven!)
+
+     &ldquo;Pale, pale her cheeks, that in pride did glow,
+          Sister Helen,
+     &lsquo;Neath the bridal-wreath three days ago.&rdquo;
+      &ldquo;One morn for pride and three days for woe,
+          Little brother!&rdquo;
+           (O Mother, Mary Mother,
+     Three days, three nights, between Hell and Heaven!)
+
+     &ldquo;Her clasp&rsquo;d hands stretch from her bending head,
+          Sister Helen;
+     With the loud wind&rsquo;s wail her sobs are wed.&rdquo;
+      &ldquo;What wedding-strains hath her bridal bed,
+          Little brother?&rdquo;
+           (O Mother, Mary Mother,
+     What strain but death&rsquo;s, between Hell and Heaven?)
+
+     &ldquo;She may not speak, she sinks in a swoon,
+          Sister Helen,&mdash;
+     She lifts her lips and gasps on the moon.&rdquo;
+      &ldquo;Oh! might I but hear her soul&rsquo;s blithe tune,
+          Little brother!&rdquo;
+           (O Mother, Mary Mother,
+     Her woe&rsquo;s dumb cry, between Hell and Heaven!)
+
+     &ldquo;They&rsquo;ve caught her to Westholm&rsquo;s saddle-bow,
+     Sister Helen,
+     And her moonlit hair gleams white in its flow.&rdquo;
+      &ldquo;Let it turn whiter than winter snow,
+          Little brother!&rdquo;
+           (O Mother, Mary Mother,
+     Woe-withered gold, between Hell and Heaven!)
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Besides these there are two new stanzas, one going before, and the other
+      following after, the six stanzas quoted, but as the scattered passages
+      involve no farther incident, and are rather of interest as explaining and
+      perfecting the idea here expressed, than valuable in themselves, I do not
+      reprint them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I think it must be allowed, by fit judges, that nothing more subtly
+      conceived than this incident can be met with in English poetry, though
+      something akin to it was projected by Coleridge in an episode of his
+      contemplated <i>Michael Scott</i>. It is&mdash;in the full sense of an
+      abused epithet&mdash;too weird to be called picturesque. But the crowning
+      merit of the poem still lies, as I have said, in the domain of character.
+      Through all the outbursts of her ignescent hate Sister Helen can never
+      lose the ineradicable relics of her human love:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+          But he and I are sadder still.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      As Rossetti from time to time made changes in his poems, he transcribed
+      the amended verses in a copy of the Tauchnitz edition which he kept
+      constantly by him. Upon reference to this little volume some days after
+      his death, I discovered that he had prefaced <i>Sister Helen</i> with a
+      note written in pencil, of which he had given me the substance in
+      conversation about the time of the publication of the altered version, but
+      which he abandoned while passing the book through the press. The note
+      (evidently designed to precede the ballad) runs:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     It is not unlikely that some may be offended at seeing the
+     additions made thus late to the ballad of <i>S. H.</i> My best
+     excuse is that I believe some will wonder with myself that
+     such a climax did not enter into the first conception.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      At the foot of the poem this further note is written:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     I wrote this ballad either in 1851 or early in 1852. It was
+     printed in a thing called <i>The Düsseldorf Annual</i> in (I
+     think) 1853&mdash;published in Germany. {*}
+
+     * In the same private copy of the Poems the following
+     explanatory passage was written over the much-discussed
+     sonnet, entitled, The Monochord:&mdash;&ldquo;That sublimated mood of
+     the soul in which a separate essence of itself seems as it
+     were to oversoar and survey it.&rdquo; Neither the style nor the
+     substance is characteristic of Rossetti, and though I do not
+     at the moment remember to have met with the passage
+     elsewhere, I doubt not it is a quotation. That quotation
+     marks are employed is not in itself evidence of much moment,
+     for Rossetti had Coleridge&rsquo;s enjoyment of a literary
+     practical joke, and on one occasion prefixed to a story in
+     manuscript a long passage on noses purporting to be from
+     Tristram Shandy, but which is certainly not discoverable in
+     Sterne&rsquo;s story.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      The next letter I shall quote appears to explain itself:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     There is a last point in your long letter which I have not
+     noticed, though it interested me much: viz., what you say of
+     your lecture on my poetry; your idea of possibly returning
+     to and enlarging it would, if carried out, be welcome to me.
+     I suppose ere long I must get together such additional work
+     as I have to show&mdash;probably a good deal added to the old
+     vol. (which has been for some time out of print) and one
+     longer poem by itself. <i>The House of Life</i>, when next
+     issued, will I trust be doubled in number of sonnets; it is
+     nearly so already. Your writing that essay in one day, and
+     the information as to subsequent additions, I noted, and
+     should like to see the passage on <i>Jenny</i> which you have not
+     yet used, if extant. The time taken in composition reminds
+     me of the fact (so long ago!) that I wrote the tale of <i>Hand
+     and Soul</i> (with the exception of an opening page or two) all
+     in one night in December 1849, beginning I suppose about 2
+     A.M. and ending about 7. In such a case a landscape and sky
+     all unsurmised open gradually in the mind&mdash;a sort of
+     spiritual <i>Turner</i>, among whose hills one ranges and in
+     whose waters one strikes out at unknown liberty; but I have
+     found this only in nightlong work, which I have seldom
+     attempted, for it leaves one entirely broken, and this state
+     was mine when I described the like of it at the close of the
+     story, ah! once again, how long ago! I have thought of
+     including this story in next issue of poems, but am
+     uncertain. What think you?
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      It seemed certain that <i>Hand and Soul</i> ought not to continue to lie
+      in the back numbers, of a magazine. The story, being more poem than aught
+      else, might properly lay claim to a place in any fresh collection of the
+      author&rsquo;s works. I could see no natural objection on the score of its being
+      written in prose. As Coleridge and Wordsworth both aptly said, prose is
+      not the antithesis of poetry; science and poetry may stand over-against
+      each other, as Keats implied by his famous toast: &ldquo;Confusion to the man
+      who took the poetry out of the moon,&rdquo; but prose and poetry surely are or
+      may be practically one. We know that in rhythmic flow they sometimes come
+      very close together, and nowhere closer than in the heightened prose and
+      the poetry of Rossetti. Poetic prose may not be the best prose, just as
+      (to use a false antithesis) dull poetry is called prosaic; but there is no
+      natural antagonism between prose and verse as literary mediums, provided
+      always that the spirit that animates them be akin. Rossetti himself
+      constantly urged that in prose the first necessity was that it should be
+      direct, and he knew no reproach of poetry more damning than to say it was
+      written in proseman&rsquo;s diction. This was the key to his depreciation of
+      Wordsworth, and doubtless it was this that ultimately operated with him to
+      exclude the story from his published works. I took another view, and did
+      not see that an accidental difference of outward form ought to prevent his
+      uniting within single book-covers productions that had so much of their
+      essential spirit in common. Unlike the Chinese, we do not read by sight
+      only, and there is in the story such richness, freshness, and variety of
+      cadence, as appeal to the ear also. Prose may be the lowest order of
+      rhythmic composition, but we know it is capable of such purity, sweetness,
+      strength, and elasticity, as entitle it to a place as a sister art with
+      poetry. Milton, however, although he wrote the noblest of English prose,
+      seemed more than half ashamed of it, as of a kind of left-handed
+      performance. Goethe and Wordsworth, on the other hand, not to speak of
+      Coleridge and Shelley (or yet of Keats, whose letters are among the very
+      best examples extant of the English epistolary style), wrote prose of
+      wonderful beauty and were not ashamed of it. In Milton&rsquo;s case the
+      subjects, I imagine, were to blame for his indifference to his
+      achievements in prose, for not even the Westminster Convention, or the
+      divorce topics of <i>Tetrachordon</i>, or yet the liberty of the press,
+      albeit raised to a level of philosophic first principles, were quite up to
+      those fixed stars of sublimity about which it was Milton&rsquo;s pleasure to
+      revolve. <i>Hand and Soul</i> is in faultless harmony with Rossetti&rsquo;s work
+      in verse, because distinguished by the same strength of imagination. That
+      it was written in a single night seems extraordinary when viewed in
+      relation to its sustained beauty; but it is done in a breath, and has all
+      the excellencies of fervour and force that result upon that method of
+      composition only.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A year or two later than the date of the correspondence with which I am
+      now dealing, Rossetti read aloud a fragment of a story written about the
+      period of <i>Hand and Soul</i>. It was to be entitled <i>St. Agnes of
+      Intercession</i>, and it dealt in a mystic way with the doctrine of the
+      transmigration of souls. He constantly expressed his intention of
+      finishing the story, and said that, although in its existing condition it
+      was fully as long as the companion story, it would require twice as much
+      more to complete it. During the time of our stay at Birchington, at the
+      beginning of 1882, he seemed anxious to get to work upon it, and had the
+      manuscript sent down from London for that purpose; but the packet lay
+      unopened until after his death, when I glanced at it again to refresh my
+      memory as to its contents. The fragment is much too inconclusive as to
+      design to admit of any satisfying account of its plot, of which there is
+      more, than in <i>Hand and Soul</i>. As far as it goes, it is the story of
+      a young English painter who becomes the victim of a conviction that his
+      soul has had a prior existence in this world. The hallucination takes
+      entire possession of him, and so unsettles his life that he leaves England
+      in search of relic or evidence of his spiritual &ldquo;double.&rdquo; Finally, in a
+      picture-gallery abroad, he comes face to face with a portrait which&rsquo; he
+      instantly recognises as the portrait of himself, both as he is now and as
+      he was in the time of his antecedent existence. Upon inquiry, the portrait
+      proves to be that of a distinguished painter centuries dead, whose work
+      had long been the young Englishman&rsquo;s guiding beacon in methods of art.
+      Startled beyond measure at the singular discovery of a coincidence which,
+      superstition apart, might well astonish the most unsentimental, he sickens
+      to a fever. Here the fragment ends. Late one evening, in August 1881,
+      Rossetti gave me a full account of the remaining incidents, but I find
+      myself without memoranda of what was said (it was never my habit to keep
+      record of his or of any man&rsquo;s conversation), and my recollection of what
+      passed is too indefinite in some salient particulars to make it safe to
+      attempt to complete the outlines of the story. I consider the fragment in
+      all respects finer than <i>Hand and Soul</i>, and the passage descriptive
+      of the artist&rsquo;s identification of his own personality in the portrait on
+      the walls of the gallery among the very finest pieces of picturesque,
+      impassioned, and dramatic writing that Rossetti ever achieved. On one
+      occasion I remarked incidentally upon something he had said of his
+      enjoyment of rivers of morning air {*} in the spring of the year, that it
+      would be an inquiry fraught with a curious interest to find out how many
+      of those who have the greatest love of the Spring were born in it.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     * Within the period of my personal knowledge of Rossetti&rsquo;s
+     habits, he certainly never enjoyed any &ldquo;rivers of morning
+     air&rdquo; at all, unless they were such as visited him in a
+     darkened bedchamber.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      One felt that one could name a goodly number among the English poets
+      living and dead. It would be an inquiry, as Hamlet might say, such as
+      would become a woman. To this Rossetti answered that he was born on old
+      May-day (May 12), 1828; and thereupon he asked the date of my own birth.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     The comparative dates of our births are curious.... I myself
+     was born on old May-Day (12th), in the year (1828) after
+     that in which Blake died.... You were born, in fact, just as
+     I was giving up poetry at about 25, on finding that it
+     impeded attention to what constituted another aim and a
+     livelihood into the bargain, <i>i.e.</i> painting. From that date
+     up to the year when I published my poems, I wrote extremely
+     little,&mdash;I might almost say nothing, except the renovated
+     <i>Jenny</i> in 1858 or &lsquo;59. To this again I added a passage or
+     two when publishing in 1870.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Often since Rossetti&rsquo;s death I have reflected upon the fact that in that
+      lengthy correspondence between us which preceded personal intimacy, he
+      never made more than a single passing allusion to those adverse criticisms
+      which did so much at one period to sadden and alter his life. Barely,
+      indeed, in conversation did he touch upon that sore subject, but it was
+      obvious enough to the closer observer, as well from his silence as from
+      his speech, that though the wounds no longer rankled, they did not wholly
+      heal. I take it as evidence of his desire to put by unpleasant reflections
+      (at least whilst health was whole with him, for he too often nourished
+      melancholy retrospects when health was broken or uncertain), that in his
+      correspondence with me, as a young friend who knew nothing at first hand
+      of his gloomier side, he constantly dwelt with radiant satisfaction and
+      hopefulness on the friendly words that had been said of him. And as
+      frequently as he called my attention to such favourable comment, he did so
+      without a particle of vanity, and with only such joy as he may feel who
+      knows in his secret heart he has depreciators, to find that he has ardent
+      upholders too. In one letter he says:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I should say that between the appearance of the poems and your lecture,
+      there was one article on the subject, of a very masterly kind indeed, by
+      some very scholarly hand (unknown to me), in the <i>New York Catholic
+      World</i> (I think in 1874). I retain this article, and will some day send
+      it you to read.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He sent me the article, and I found it, as he had found it, among the best
+      things written on the subject. Naturally, the criticism was best where the
+      subject dealt with impinged most upon the spirit of mediæval Catholicism.
+      Perhaps Catholicism is itself essentially mediæval, and perhaps a man
+      cannot possibly be, what the <i>Catholic World</i> article called
+      Rossetti, a &ldquo;mediæval artist heart and soul,&rdquo; without partaking of a
+      strong religious feeling that is primarily Catholic&mdash;so much were the
+      religion and art of the middle ages knit each to each. Yet, upon reading
+      the article, I doubted one of the writer&rsquo;s inferences, namely, that
+      Rossetti had inherited a Catholic devotion to the Madonna. Not his <i>Ave</i>
+      only seemed to me to live in an atmosphere of tender and sensitive
+      devotion, but I missed altogether in it, as in other poems of Rossetti,
+      that old, continual, and indispensable Catholic note of mystic Divine love
+      lost in love of humanity which, I suppose, Mr. Arnold would call
+      anthropomorphism. Years later, when I came to know Rossetti personally, I
+      perceived that the writer of the article in question had not made a bad
+      shot for the truth. True it was, that he had inherited a strong religious
+      spirit&mdash;such as could only be called Catholic&mdash;inherited I say,
+      for, though from his immediate parents, he assuredly did not inherit any
+      devotion to the Madonna, his own submission to religious influences was
+      too unreasoning and unquestioning to be anything but intuitive. Despite
+      some worldly-mindedness, and a certain shrewdness in the management of the
+      more important affairs of daily life, Rossetti&rsquo;s attitude towards
+      spiritual things was exactly the reverse of what we call Protestant.
+      During the last months of his life, when the prospect of leaving the world
+      soon, and perhaps suddenly, impressed upon his mind a deep sense of his
+      religious position, he yielded himself up unhesitatingly to the intuitive
+      influences I speak of; and so far from being touched by the interminable
+      controversies which have for ages been upsetting and uprearing creeds, he
+      seemed both naturally incapable of comprehending differences of belief,
+      and unwilling to dwell upon them for an instant. Indeed, he constantly
+      impressed me during the last days of his life with the conviction, that he
+      was by religious bias of nature a monk of the middle ages.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As to the article in <i>The Catholic Magazine</i> I thought I perceived
+      from a curious habit of biblical quotation that it must have been written
+      by an Ecclesiastic. A remark in it to the effect that old age is usually
+      more indulgent than middle life to the work of first manhood, and that,
+      consequently, Rossetti would be a less censorious judge of his early
+      efforts at a later period of life, seemed to show that the writer himself
+      was no longer a young man. Further, I seemed to see that the reviewer was
+      not a professional critic, for his work displayed few of the
+      well-recognised trade-marks with which the articles of the literary market
+      are invariably branded. As a small matter one noticed the somewhat
+      slovenly use of the editorial <i>we</i>, which at the fag-end of passages
+      sometimes dropped into <i>I</i>. [Upon my remarking upon this to Rossetti
+      he remembered incidentally that a similar confounding of the singular and
+      plural number of the pronoun produces marvellously suggestive effects in a
+      very different work, <i>Macbeth</i>, where the kingly <i>we</i> is tripped
+      up by the guilty <i>I</i> in many places.] Rossetti wrote:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I am glad you liked the <i>Catholic World</i> article, which I certainly
+      view as one of rare literary quality. I have not the least idea who is the
+      writer, but am sorry now I never wrote to him under cover of the editor
+      when I received it. I did send the <i>Dante and Circle</i>, but don&rsquo;t know
+      if it was ever received or reviewed. As you have the vols, of <i>Fortnightly</i>,
+      look up a little poem of mine called the <i>Cloud Confines</i>, a few
+      months later, I suppose, than the tale. It is one of my favourites, among
+      my own doings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I noticed at this early period, as well as later, that in Rossetti&rsquo;s eyes
+      a favourable review was always enhanced in value if the writer happened to
+      be a stranger to him; and I constantly protested that a friend&rsquo;s knowledge
+      of one&rsquo;s work and sympathy with it ought not to be less delightful, as
+      such, than a stranger&rsquo;s, however less surprising, though at the same time
+      the tribute that is true to one&rsquo;s art without auxiliary aids being brought
+      to bear in its formation must be at once the most satisfying assurance of
+      the purity, strength, and completeness of the art itself, and of the safe
+      and enduring quality of the appreciation. It is true that friends who are
+      accustomed to our habit of thought and manner of expression sometimes
+      catch our meaning before we have expressed it Not rarely, before our
+      thought has reached that stage at which it becomes intelligible to a
+      stranger, a word, a look, or a gesture will convey it perfectly and fully
+      to a friend. And what goes on between minds that exist in more or less
+      intimate communion, goes on to a greater degree within the individual mind
+      where the metaphysical equivalents to a word or a look answer to, and are
+      answered by, the half-realised conception. Hence it often happens that
+      even where our touch seems to ourselves delicate and precise, a mind not
+      initiated in our self-chosen method of abbreviation finds only
+      impenetrable obscurity. It is then in the tentative condition of mind just
+      indicated that the spirit of art comes in, and enables a man so to clothe
+      his thought in lucid words and fitting imagery that strangers may know,
+      when they see it, all that it is, and how he came by it. Although,
+      therefore, the praise of friends should not be less delightful, as praise,
+      than that tendered by strangers, there is an added element of surprise and
+      satisfaction in the latter which the former cannot bring. Rossetti
+      certainly never over-valued the applause of his own immediate circle, but
+      still no man was more sensible of the value of the good opinion of one or
+      two of his immediate friends. Returning to the correspondence, he says:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     In what I wrote as to critiques on my poems, I meant to
+     express <i>special</i> gratification from those written by
+     strangers to myself and yet showing full knowledge of the
+     subject and full sympathy with it. Such were Formans at the
+     time, the American one since (and far from alone in America,
+     but this the best) and more lately your own. Other known and
+     unknown critics of course wrote on the book when it
+     appeared, some very favourably and others <i>quite</i>
+     sufficiently abusive.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      As to <i>Cloud Confines</i>, I told Rossetti that I considered it in
+      philosophic grasp the most powerful of his productions, and interesting as
+      being (unlike the body of his works) more nearly akin to the spirit of
+      music than that of painting.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     By the bye, you are right about <i>Cloud Confines</i>, which <i>is</i>
+     my very best thing&mdash;only, having been foolishly sent to a
+     magazine, no notice whatever resulted.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Rossetti was not always open to suggestions as to the need of clarifying
+      obscure phrases in his verses, but on one or two occasions, when I was so
+      bold as to hint at changes, I found him in highly tractable moods. I
+      called his attention to what I imagined might prove to be merely a
+      printer&rsquo;s slip in his poem (a great favourite of mine) entitled <i>The
+      Portrait</i>. The second stanza ran:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     Yet this, of all love&rsquo;s perfect prize,
+     Remains; save what in mournful guise
+     Takes counsel with my soul alone,&mdash;
+     Save what is secret and unknown,
+     Below the earth, above the sky.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      The words &ldquo;yet&rdquo; and &ldquo;save&rdquo; seemed to me (and to another friend) somewhat
+      puzzling, and I asked if &ldquo;but&rdquo; in the sense of <i>only</i> had been meant.
+      He wrote:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     That is a very just remark of yours about the passage in
+     <i>Portrait</i> beginning <i>yet</i>. I meant to infer <i>yet only</i>, but
+     it certainly is truncated. I shall change the line to
+
+          Yet only this, of love&rsquo;s whole prize,
+          Remains, etc.
+
+     But would again be dubious though explicable. Thanks for the
+     hint.... I shall be much obliged to you for any such hints
+     of a verbal nature.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0005" id="link2HCH0005">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER V.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The letters printed in the foregoing chapter are valuable as settling at
+      first-hand all question of the chronology of the poems of Rossetti&rsquo;s
+      volume of 1870. The poems of the volume of 1881 (Rose Mary and certain of
+      the sonnets excepted) grew under his hand during the period of my
+      acquaintance with him, and their origin I shall in due course record. The
+      two preceding chapters have been for the most part devoted to such letters
+      (and such explanatory matter as must needs accompany them) as concern
+      principally, perhaps, the poet and his correspondent; but I have thrown
+      into two further chapters a great body of highly interesting letters on
+      subjects of general literary interest (embracing the fullest statement yet
+      published of Rossetti&rsquo;s critical opinions), and have reserved for a more
+      advanced section of the work a body of further letters on sonnet
+      literature which arose out of the discussion of an anthology that I was at
+      the time engaged in compiling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was very natural that Coleridge should prove to be one of the first
+      subjects discussed by Rossetti, who admired him greatly, and when it
+      transpired that Coleridge was, perhaps, my own chief idol, and that whilst
+      even yet a child I had perused and reperused not only his poetry but even
+      his mystical philosophy (impalpable or obscure even to his maturer and
+      more enlightened, if no more zealous, admirers), the disposition to write
+      upon him became great upon both sides. &ldquo;You can never say too much about
+      Coleridge for me,&rdquo; Rossetti would write, &ldquo;for I worship him on the right
+      side of idolatry, and I perceive you know him well.&rdquo; Upon this one of my
+      first remarks was that there was much in Coleridge&rsquo;s higher descriptive
+      verse equivalent to the landscape art of Turner. The critical parallel
+      Rossetti warmly approved of, adding, however, that Coleridge, at his best
+      as a pictorial artist, was a spiritualised Turner. He instanced his,
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     We listened and looked sideways up,
+     The moving moon went up the sky
+     And no where did abide,
+     Softly she was going up,
+     And a star or two beside&mdash;
+     The charmed water burnt alway
+     A still and awful red.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      I remarked that Shelley possessed the same power of impregnating landscape
+      with spiritual feeling, and this Rossetti readily allowed; but when I
+      proceeded to say that Wordsworth sometimes, though rarely, displayed a
+      power akin to it, I found him less warmly responsive. &ldquo;I grudge Wordsworth
+      every vote he gets,&rdquo; {*} Rossetti frequently said to me, both in writing,
+      and afterwards in conversation. &ldquo;The three greatest English imaginations,&rdquo;
+       he would sometimes add, &ldquo;are Shakspeare, Coleridge, and Shelley.&rdquo; I have
+      heard him give a fourth name, Blake.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     * There is a story frequently told of how, seeing two camels
+     walking together in the Zoological Gardens, keeping step in
+     a shambling way, and conversing with one another, Rossetti
+     exclaimed: &ldquo;There&rsquo;s Wordsworth and Ruskin virtuously taking
+     a walk!&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      He thought Wordsworth was too much the High Priest of Nature to be her
+      lover: too much concerned to transfigure into poetry his pantheo-Christian
+      philosophy regarding Nature, to drop to his knees in simple love of her to
+      thank God that she was beautiful. It was hard to side with Rossetti in his
+      view of Wordsworth, partly because one feared he did not practise the
+      patience necessary to a full appreciation of that poet, and was
+      consequently apt to judge of him by fugitive lines read at random. In the
+      connection in question, I instanced the lines (much admired by Coleridge)
+      beginning
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     Suck, little babe, O suck again!
+     It cools my blood, it cools my brain,
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      and ending&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     The breeze I see is in the tree,
+     It comes to cool my babe and me.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      But Rossetti would not see that this last couplet denoted the point of
+      artistic vision at which the poet of nature identified himself with her,
+      in setting aside or superseding all proprieties of mere speech. To him
+      Wordsworth&rsquo;s Idealism (which certainly had the German trick of keeping
+      close to the ground) only meant us to understand that the forsaken woman
+      through whose mouth the words are spoken (in <i>The Affliction of Margaret</i>
+      &mdash;&mdash;&mdash; of &mdash;&mdash;&mdash;) saw <i>the breeze shake
+      the tree</i> afar off. And this attitude towards Wordsworth Rossetti
+      maintained down to the end. I remember that sometime in March of the year
+      in which he died, Mr. Theodore Watts, who was paying one of his many
+      visits to see him in his last illness at the sea-side, touched, in
+      conversation, upon the power of Wordsworth&rsquo;s style in its higher vein, and
+      instanced a noble passage in the <i>Ode to Duty</i>, which runs:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     Stern Lawgiver! yet thou dost wear
+     The Godhead&rsquo;s most benignant grace;
+     Nor know we anything so fair
+     As is the smile upon thy face;
+     Flowers laugh before thee on their beds;
+     And fragrance in thy footing treads;
+     Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong;
+     And the most ancient heavens, through Thee, are
+               fresh and strong.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Watts spoke with enthusiasm of the strength and simplicity, the
+      sonorousness and stately march of these lines; and numbered them, I think,
+      among the noblest verses yet written, for every highest quality of style.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But Rossetti was unyielding, and though he admitted the beauty of the
+      passage, and was ungrudging in his tribute to another passage which I had
+      instanced&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+          O joy that in our embers&mdash;
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      he would not allow that Wordsworth ever possessed a grasp of the great
+      style, or that (despite the Ode on Immortality and the sonnet on <i>Toussaint
+      L&rsquo;Ouverture</i>, which he placed at the head of the poet&rsquo;s work) vital
+      lyric impulse was ever fully developed in his muse. He said:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     As to Wordsworth, no one regards the great Ode with more
+     special and unique homage than I do, as a thing absolutely
+     alone of its kind among all greatest things. I cannot say
+     that anything else of his with which I have ever been
+     familiar (and I suffer from long disuse of all familiarity
+     with him) seems at all on a level with this.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      In all humility I regard his depreciatory opinion, not at all as a
+      valuable example of literary judgment, but as indicative of a clear
+      radical difference of poetic bias between the two poets, such as must in
+      the same way have made Wordsworth resist Rossetti if he had appeared
+      before him. I am the more confirmed in this view from the circumstance
+      that Rossetti, throughout the period of my acquaintance with him, seemed
+      to me always peculiarly and, if I may be permitted to say so without
+      offence, strangely liable to Mr. Watts&rsquo;s influence in his critical
+      estimates, and that the case instanced was perhaps the only one in which I
+      knew him to resist Mr. Watts&rsquo;s opinion upon a matter of poetical
+      criticism, which he considered to be almost final, as his letters to me,
+      printed in Chapter VIII. of this volume, will show. I had a striking
+      instance of this, and of the real modesty of the man whom I had heard and
+      still hear spoken of as the most arrogant man of genius of his day, on one
+      of the first occasions of my seeing him. He read out to me an additional
+      stanza to the beautiful poem <i>Cloud Confines</i>: As he read it, I
+      thought it very fine, and he evidently was very fond of it himself. But he
+      surprised me by saying that he should not print it. On my asking him why,
+      he said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Watts, though he admits its beauty, thinks the poem would be better
+      without it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, but you like it yourself,&rdquo; said I.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; he replied; &ldquo;but in a question of gain or loss to a poem, I feel
+      that Watts must be right.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And the poem appeared in <i>Ballads and Sonnets</i> without the stanza in
+      question. The same thing occurred with regard to the omission of the
+      sonnet <i>Nuptial Sleep</i> from the new edition of the Poems in 1881. Mr.
+      Watts took the view (to Rossetti&rsquo;s great vexation at first) that this
+      sonnet, howsoever perfect in structure and beautiful from the artistic
+      point of view, was &ldquo;out of place and altogether incongruous in a group of
+      sonnets so entirely spiritual as <i>The House of Life</i>,&rdquo; and Rossetti
+      gave way: but upon the subject of Wordsworth in his relations to
+      Coleridge, Keats, and Shelley, he was quite inflexible to the last.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In a letter treating of other matters, Rossetti asked me if I thought
+      &ldquo;Christabel&rdquo; really existed as a mediæval name, or existed at all earlier
+      than Coleridge. I replied that I had not met with it earlier than the date
+      of the poem. I thought Coleridge&rsquo;s granddaughter must have been the first
+      person to bear the name. The other names in the poem appear to belong to
+      another family of names,&mdash;names with a different origin and range of
+      expression,&mdash;Leoline, Géraldine, Roland, and most of all Bracy. It
+      seemed to me very possible that Coleridge invented the name, but it was
+      highly probable that he brought it to England from Germany, where, with
+      Wordsworth, he visited Klopstock in 1798, about the period of the first
+      part of the poem. The Germans have names of a kindred etymology and, even
+      if my guess proved wide of the truth, it might still be a fact that the
+      name had German relations. Another conjecture that seemed to me a
+      reasonable one was that Coleridge evolved the name out of the incidents of
+      the opening passages of the poem. The beautiful thing, not more from its
+      beauty than its suggestiveness, suited his purpose exactly. Rossetti
+      replied:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     Resuming the thread of my letter, I come to the question of
+     the name Christabel, viz.:&mdash;as to whether it is to be found
+     earlier than Coleridge. I have now realized afresh what I
+     knew long ago, viz.:&mdash;that in the grossly garbled ballad of
+     <i>Syr Cauline</i>, in Percy&rsquo;s <i>Reliques</i>, there is a Ladye
+     Chrystabelle, but as every stanza in which her name appears
+     would seem certainly to be Percy&rsquo;s own work, I suspect him
+     to be the inventor of the name, which is assuredly a much
+     better invention than any of the stanzas; and from this
+     wretched source Coleridge probably enriched the sphere of
+     symbolic nomenclature. However, a genuine source may turn
+     up, but the name does not sound to me like a real one. As to
+     a German origin, I do not know that language, but would not
+     the second syllable be there the one accented? This seems to
+     render the name shapeless and improbable.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      I mentioned an idea that once possessed me despotically. It was that where
+      Coleridge says
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     Her silken robe and inner vest
+     Dropt to her feet, and full in view
+     Behold! her bosom and half her side&mdash;
+     A sight to dream of and not to tell,. . .
+     Shield the Lady Christabel!
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      he meant ultimately to show <i>eyes</i> in the <i>bosom</i> of the witch.
+      I fancied that if the poet had worked out this idea in the second part, or
+      in his never-compassed continuation, he must have electrified his readers.
+      The first part of the poem is of course immeasurably superior in witchery
+      to the second, despite two grand things in the latter&mdash;the passage on
+      the severance of early friendships, and the conclusion; although the
+      dexterity of hand (not to speak of the essential spirit of enchantment)
+      which is everywhere present in the first part, and nowhere dominant in the
+      second, exhibits itself not a little in the marvellous passage in which
+      Géraldine bewitches Christabel. Touching some jocose allusion by Rossetti
+      to the necessity which lay upon me to startle the world with a
+      continuation of the poem based upon the lines of my conjectural scheme, I
+      asked him if he knew that a continuation was actually published in
+      Coleridge&rsquo;s own paper, <i>The Morning Post</i>. It appeared about 1820,
+      and was satirical of course&mdash;hitting off many peculiarities of
+      versification, if no more. With Coleridge&rsquo;s playful love of satirising
+      himself anonymously, the continuation might even be his own. Rossetti
+      said:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     I do not understand your early idea of <i>eyes</i> in the bosom
+     of Géraldine. It is described as &ldquo;that bosom old,&rdquo; &ldquo;that
+     bosom cold,&rdquo; which seems to show that its withered character
+     as combined with Geraldine&rsquo;s youth, was what shocked and
+     warned Christabel. The first edition says&mdash;
+
+          A sight to dream of, not to tell:&mdash;
+          And she is to sleep with Christabel!
+
+     I dare say Coleridge altered this, because an idea arose,
+     which I actually heard to have been reported as Coleridge&rsquo;s
+     real intention by a member of contemporary circles (P. G.
+     Patmore, father of Coventry P. who conveyed the report to
+     me)&mdash;viz., that Géraldine was to turn out to be a man!! I
+     believe myself that the conclusion as given by Gillman from
+     Coleridge&rsquo;s account to him is correct enough, only not
+     picturesquely worded. It does not seem a bad conclusion by
+     any means, though it would require fine treatment to make it
+     seem a really good one. Of course the first part is so
+     immeasurably beyond the second, that one feels Chas. Lamb&rsquo;s
+     view was right, and it should have been abandoned at that
+     point. The passage on sundered friendship is one of the
+     masterpieces of the language, but no doubt was written quite
+     separately and then fitted into <i>Christabel</i>. The two lines
+     about Roland and Sir Leoline are simply an intrusion and an
+     outrage. I cannot say that I like the conclusion nearly so
+     well as this. It hints at infinite beauty, but somehow
+     remains a sort of cobweb. The conception, and partly the
+     execution, of the passage in which Christabel repeats by
+     fascination the serpent-glance of Géraldine, is magnificent;
+     but that is the only good narrative passage in part two. The
+     rest seems to have reached a fatal facility of jingling, at
+     the heels whereof followed Scott.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      There are, I believe, many continuations of <i>Christabel</i>. Tupper did
+      one! I myself saw a continuation in childhood, long before I saw the
+      original, and was all agog to see it for years. Our household was all of
+      Italian, not English environment, and it was only when I went to school
+      later that I began to ransack bookstalls. The continuation in question was
+      by one Eliza Stewart, and appeared in a shortlived monthly thing called <i>Smallwood&rsquo;s
+      Magazine</i>, to which my father contributed some Italian poetry, and so
+      it came into the house. I thought the continuation spirited then, and
+      perhaps it may have been so. This must have been before 1840 I think.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The other day I saw in a bookseller&rsquo;s catalogue&mdash;<i>Christabess</i>,
+      by S. T. Colebritche, translated from the Doggrel by Sir Vinegar Sponge
+      (1816). This seems a parody, not a continuation, in the very year of the
+      poem&rsquo;s first appearance! I did not think it worth two shillings,&mdash;which
+      was the price.... Have you seen the continuation of <i>Christabel</i> in
+      <i>European Magazine?</i> of course it <i>might</i> have been Coleridge&rsquo;s,
+      so far as the date of the composition of the original was concerned; but
+      of course it was not his.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I imagine the &ldquo;Sir Vinegar Sponge&rdquo; who translated &ldquo;<i>Christabess</i> from
+      the <i>Doggerel</i>&rdquo; must belong to the family of Sponges described by
+      Coleridge himself, who give out the liquid they take in much dirtier than
+      they imbibe it. I thought it very possible that Coleridge&rsquo;s epigram to
+      this effect might have been provoked by the lampoon referred to, and
+      Rossetti also thought this probable. Immediately after meeting with the
+      continuation of <i>Christabel</i> already referred to, I came across great
+      numbers of such continuations, as well as satires, parodies, reviews,
+      etc., in old issues of <i>Blackwood, The Quarterly, and The Examiner</i>.
+      They seemed to me, for the most part, poor in quality&mdash;the highest
+      reach of comicality to which they attained being concerned with side slaps
+      at <i>Kubla Khan</i>:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     Better poetry I make
+     When asleep than when awake.
+     Am I sure, or am I guessing?
+     Are my eyes like those of Lessing?
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      This latter elegant couplet was expected to serve as a scorching satire on
+      a letter in the <i>Biographia Literaria</i> in which Coleridge says he saw
+      a portrait of Lessing at Klopstock&rsquo;s, in which the eyes seemed singularly
+      like his own. The time has gone by when that flight of egotism on
+      Coleridge&rsquo;s part seemed an unpardonable offence, and to our more modern
+      judgment it scarcely seems necessary that the author of <i>Christabel</i>
+      should be charged with a desire to look radiant in the glory reflected by
+      an accidental personal resemblance to the author of <i>Laokoon</i>.
+      Curiously enough I found evidence of the Patmore version of Coleridge&rsquo;s
+      intentions as to the ultimate disclosure of the sex of Géraldine in a
+      review in the <i>Examiner</i>. The author was perhaps Hazlitt, but more
+      probably the editor himself, but whether Hazlitt or Hunt, he must have
+      been within the circle that found its rallying point at Highgate, and
+      consequently acquainted with the earliest forms of the poem. The review is
+      an unfavourable one, and Coleridge is told in it that he is the
+      dog-in-the-manger of literature, and that his poem is proof of the fact
+      that he can write better nonsense poetry than any man in England. The
+      writer is particularly wroth with what he considers the wilful
+      indefiniteness of the author, and in proof of a charge of a desire not to
+      let the public into the secret of the poem, and of a conscious endeavour
+      to mystify the reader, he deliberately accuses Coleridge of omitting one
+      line of the poem as it was written, which, if printed, would have proved
+      conclusively that Géraldine had seduced Christabel after getting drunk
+      with her,&mdash;for such sequel is implied if not openly stated. I told
+      Rossetti of this brutality of criticism, and he replied:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     As for the passage in <i>Christabel</i>, I am not sure we quite
+     understand each other. What I heard through the Patmores (a
+     complete mistake I am sure), was that Coleridge meant
+     Géraldine to prove to be a man bent on the seduction of
+     Christabel, and presumably effecting it. What I inferred (if
+     so) was that Coleridge had intended the line as in first
+     ed.: &ldquo;And she is to sleep with Christabel!&rdquo; as leading up
+     too nearly to what he meant to keep back for the present.
+     But the whole thing was a figment.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      What is assuredly not a figment is, that an idea, such as the elder
+      Patmore referred to, really did exist in the minds of Coleridge&rsquo;s
+      so-called friends, who after praising the poem beyond measure whilst it
+      was in manuscript, abused it beyond reason or decency when it was printed.
+      My settled conviction is that the <i>Examiner</i> criticism, and <i>not</i>
+      the sudden advent of the idea after the first part was written, was the
+      cause of Coleridge&rsquo;s adopting the correction which Rossetti mentions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rossetti called my attention to a letter by Lamb, about which he gathered
+      a good deal of interesting conjecture:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     There is (given in <i>Cottle</i>) an inconceivably sarcastic,
+     galling, and admirable letter from Lamb to Coleridge,
+     regarding which I never could learn how the deuce their
+     friendship recovered from it. Cottle says the only reason he
+     could ever trace for its being written lay in the three
+     parodied sonnets (one being <i>The House that Jack Built</i>)
+     which Coleridge published as a skit on the joint volume
+     brought out by himself, Lamb, and Lloyd. The whole thing was
+     always a mystery to me. But I have thought that the passage
+     on division between friends was not improbably written by
+     Coleridge on this occasion. Curiously enough (if so) Lamb,
+     who is said to have objected greatly to the idea of a second
+     part of <i>Christabel</i>, thought (on seeing it) that the
+     mistake was redeemed by this very passage. He <i>may</i> have
+     traced its meaning, though, of course, its beauty alone was
+     enough to make him say so.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      The three satirical sonnets which Rossetti refers to appear not only in <i>Cottle</i>
+      but in a note to the <i>Biographia Literaria</i> They were published first
+      under a fictitious name in <i>he Monthly Magazine</i> They must be
+      understood as almost wholly satirical of three distinct facets of
+      Coleridge&rsquo;s own manner, for even the sonnet in which occur the words
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     Eve saddens into night, {*}
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      has its counterpart in <i>The Songs of the Pixies</i>&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     Hence! thou lingerer, light!
+     Eve saddens into night,
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      and nearly all the phrases satirised are borrowed from Coleridge&rsquo;s own
+      poetry, not from that of Lamb or Lloyd. Nevertheless, Cottle was doubtless
+      right as to the fact that Lamb took offence at Coleridge&rsquo;s conduct on this
+      account, and Rossetti almost certainly made a good shot at the truth when
+      he attributed to the rupture thereupon ensuing the passage on severed
+      friendship. The sonnet on <i>The House that Jack Built</i> is the finest
+      of the three as a satire.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     * So in the Biographia Literaria; in Cottle, &ldquo;Eve darkens
+     into night.&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      Indeed, the figure used therein as an equipoise to &ldquo;the hindward charms&rdquo;
+       satirises perfectly the style of writing characterised by inflated thought
+      and imagery. It may be doubted if there exists anything more comical; but
+      each of the companion sonnets is good in its way. The egotism, which was a
+      constant reproach urged by <i>The Edinburgh</i> critics and by the
+      &ldquo;Cockney Poets&rdquo; against the poets of the Lake School, is splendidly hit
+      off in the first sonnet; the low and creeping meanness, or say,
+      simpleness, as contrasted with simplicity, of thought and expression,
+      which was stealing into Wordsworth&rsquo;s work at that period, is equally
+      cleverly ridiculed in the second sonnet. In reproducing the sonnets,
+      Coleridge claims only to have satirised types. As to Lamb&rsquo;s letter, it is,
+      indeed, hard to realise the fact that the &ldquo;gentle-hearted Charles,&rdquo; as
+      Coleridge himself named him, could write a galling letter to the &ldquo;inspired
+      charity-boy,&rdquo; for whom at an early period, and again at the end, he had so
+      profound a reverence. Every word is an outrage, and every syllable must
+      have hit Coleridge terribly. I called Rossetti&rsquo;s attention to the
+      surprising circumstance that in a letter written immediately after the
+      date of the one in question, Loyd tells Cottle that he has never known
+      Lamb (who is at the moment staying with him) so happy before as <i>just
+      then!</i> There can hardly be a doubt, however, that Rossetti&rsquo;s conjecture
+      is a just one as to the origin of the great passage in the second part of
+      <i>Christabel</i>. Touching that passage I called his attention to an
+      imperfection that I must have perceived, or thought I perceived long
+      before,&mdash;an imperfection of craftsmanship that had taken away
+      something of my absolute enjoyment of its many beauties. The passage ends&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     They parted, ne&rsquo;er to meet again!
+     But never either found another
+     To free the hollow heart from paining&mdash;
+     They stood aloof, the scars remaining,
+     Like cliffs which had been rent asunder;
+     A dreary sea now flows between,
+     But neither heat, nor frost, nor thunder,
+     Shall wholly do away, I ween,
+     The marks of that which once hath been.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      This is, it is needless to say, in almost every respect, finely felt, but
+      the words italicised appeared to display some insufficiency of poetic
+      vision. First, nothing but an earthquake would (speaking within limits of
+      human experience) unite the two sides of a ravine; and though <i>frost</i>
+      might bring them together temporarily, <i>heat and thunder</i> must be
+      powerless to make or to unmake the <i>marks</i> that showed the cliffs to
+      have once been one, and to have been violently torn apart. Next, <i>heat</i>
+      (supposing <i>frost</i> to be the root-conception) was obviously used
+      merely as a balancing phrase, and <i>thunder</i> simply as the inevitable
+      rhyme to <i>asunder</i>. I have not seen this matter alluded to, though it
+      may have been mentioned, and it is certainly not important enough to make
+      any serious deduction from the pleasure afforded by a passage that is in
+      other respects so rich in beauty as to be able to endure such modest
+      discounting. Rossetti replied:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     Your geological strictures on Coleridge&rsquo;s &ldquo;friendship&rdquo;
+      passage are but too just, and I believe quite new. But I
+     would fain think that this is &ldquo;to consider too nicely.&rdquo; I am
+     certainly willing to bear the obloquy of never having been
+     struck by what is nevertheless obvious enough. {*}... Lamb&rsquo;s
+     letter <i>is</i> a teazer. The three sonnets in <i>The Monthly
+     Magazine</i> were signed &ldquo;Nehemiah Higginbotham,&rdquo; and were
+     meant to banter good-humouredly the joint vol. issued by
+     Coleridge, Lamb, and Lloyd,&mdash;C. himself being, of course,
+     the most obviously ridiculed. I fancy you have really hit
+     the mark as regards Coleridge&rsquo;s epigram and Sir Vinegar
+     Sponge. He might have been worth two shillings after all....
+     <i>I</i> also remember noting Lloyd&rsquo;s assertion of Lamb&rsquo;s
+     exceptional happiness just after that letter. It is a
+     puzzling affair. However C. and Lamb got over it (for I
+     certainly believe they were friends later in life) no one
+     seems to have recorded. The second vol. of Cottle, after the
+     raciness of the first, is very disappointing.
+
+     * In a note on this passage, Canon Dixon writes: What is
+     meant is that in cliffs, actual cliffs, the action of these
+     agents, heat, cold, thunder even, might have an obliterating
+     power; but in the severance of friendship, there is nothing
+     (heat of nature, frost of time, thunder of accident or
+     surprise) that can wholly have the like effect.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      On one occasion Rossetti wrote, saying he had written a sonnet on
+      Coleridge, and I was curious to learn what note he struck in dealing with
+      so complex a subject. The keynote of a man&rsquo;s genius or character should be
+      struck in a poetic address to him, just as the expressional individuality
+      of a man&rsquo;s features (freed of the modifying or emphasising effects of
+      passing fashions of dress), should be reproduced in his portrait; but
+      Coleridge&rsquo;s mind had so many sides to it, and his character had such
+      varied aspects&mdash;from keen and beautiful sensibility to every form of
+      suffering, to almost utter disregard of the calls of domestic duty&mdash;that
+      it seemed difficult to think what kind of idea, consistent with the unity
+      of the sonnet and its simplicity of scheme, would call up a picture of the
+      entire man. It goes against the grain to hint, adoring the man as we must,
+      that Coleridge&rsquo;s personal character was anything less than one of
+      untarnished purity, and certainly the persons chiefly concerned in the
+      alleged neglect, Southey and his own family, have never joined in the
+      strictures commonly levelled against him: but whatever Coleridge&rsquo;s
+      personal ego may have been, his creative ego was assuredly not single in
+      kind or aim. He did some noble things late in life (instance the passage
+      on &ldquo;Youth and Age,&rdquo; and that on &ldquo;Work without Hope&rdquo;), but his poetic
+      genius seemed to desert him when Kant took possession of him as a gigantic
+      windmill to do battle with, and it is now hard to say which was the deeper
+      thing in him: the poetry to which he devoted the sunniest years of his
+      young life, or the philosophy which he firmly believed it to be the main
+      business of his later life to expound. In any discussion of the relative
+      claims of these two to the gratitude of the ages that follow, I found
+      Rossetti frankly took one side, and constantly said that the few unequal
+      poems Coleridge had left us, were a legacy more stimulating, solacing, and
+      enduring, than his philosophy could have been, even if he had perfected
+      that attempt of his to reconcile all learning and revelation, and if, when
+      perfected, the whole effort had not proved to be a work of supererogation.
+      I doubt if Rossetti quite knew what was meant by Coleridge&rsquo;s &ldquo;system,&rdquo; as
+      it was so frequently called, and I know that he could not be induced by
+      any eulogiums to do so much as look at the <i>Biographia Literaria</i>,
+      though once he listened whilst I read a chapter from it. He had certainly
+      little love of the German elements in Coleridge&rsquo;s later intellectual life,
+      and hence it is small matter for surprise that in his sonnet he chose for
+      treatment the more poetic side of Coleridge&rsquo;s genius. Nevertheless, I
+      think it remains an open question whether the philosophy of the author of
+      <i>The Ancient Mariner</i> was more influenced by his poetry, or his
+      poetry by his philosophy; for the philosophy is always tinged by the
+      mysticism of his poetry, and his poetry is always adumbrated by the
+      disposition, which afterwards become paramount, to dig beneath the surface
+      for problems of life and character, and for &ldquo;suggestions of the final
+      mystery of existence.&rdquo; I have heard Rossetti say that what came most of
+      all uppermost in Coleridge, was his wonderful intuitive knowledge and love
+      of the sea, whose billowy roll, and break, and sibilation, seemed echoed
+      in the very mechanism of his verse. Sleep, too, Rossetti thought, had
+      given up to Coleridge her utmost secrets; and perhaps it was partly due to
+      his own sad experience of the dread curse of insomnia, as well as to keen
+      susceptibility to poetic beauty, that tears so frequently filled his eyes,
+      and sobs rose to his throat when he recited the lines beginning
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     O sleep! it is a gentle thing&mdash;
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      affirming, meantime, that nothing so simple and touching had ever been
+      written on the subject. As to the sonnet, he wrote:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     About Coleridge (whom I only view as a poet, his other
+     aspects being to my apprehension mere bogies) I conceive the
+     leading point about his work is its human love, and the
+     leading point about his career, the sad fact of how little
+     of it was devoted to that work. These are the points made in
+     my sonnet, and the last is such as I (alas!) can sympathise
+     with, though what has excluded more poetry with me
+     (<i>mountains</i> of it I don&rsquo;t want to heap) has chiefly been
+     livelihood necessity. I &lsquo;ll copy the sonnet on opposite
+     page, only I &lsquo;d rather you kept it to yourself. <i>Five</i> years
+     of <i>good</i> poetry is too long a tether to give his Muse, I
+     know.
+
+     His Soul fared forth (as from the deep home-grove
+          The father Songster plies the hour-long quest)
+          To feed his soul-brood hungering in the nest;
+     But his warm Heart, the mother-bird above
+     Their callow fledgling progeny still hove
+          With tented roof of wings and fostering breast
+          Till the Soul fed the soul-brood. Richly blest
+     From Heaven their growth, whose food was Human Love.
+
+     Tet ah! Like desert pools that shew the stars
+          Once in long leagues&mdash;even such the scarce-snatched hours
+          Which deepening pain left to his lordliest powers:&mdash;
+     Heaven lost through spider-trammelled prison-bars!
+          Five years, from seventy saved! yet kindling skies
+          Own them, a beacon to our centuries.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      As a minor point I called Rossetti&rsquo;s attention to the fact that Coleridge
+      lived to be scarcely more than sixty, and that his poetic career really
+      extended over six good years; and hence the thirteenth line was amended to
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+          Six years from sixty saved.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      I doubted if &ldquo;deepening pain&rdquo; could be charged with the whole burden of
+      Coleridge&rsquo;s constitutional procrastination, and to this objection Rossetti
+      replied:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     Line eleven in my first reading was &ldquo;deepening <i>sloth</i>;&rdquo; but
+     it seemed harsh&mdash;and&mdash;damn it all! much too like the spirit
+     of Banquo!
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Before Coleridge, however, as to warmth of admiration, and before him also
+      as to date of influence, Keats was Rossetti&rsquo;s favourite among modern
+      English poets. Our friend never tired of writing or talking about Keats,
+      and never wearied of the society of any one who could generate a fresh
+      thought concerning him. But his was a robust and masculine admiration,
+      having nothing in common with the effeminate extra-affectionateness that
+      has of late been so much ridiculed. His letters now to be quoted shall
+      speak for themselves as to the qualities in Keats whereon Rossetti&rsquo;s
+      appreciation of him was founded: but I may say in general terms that it
+      was not so much the wealth of expression in the author of <i>Endymion</i>
+      which attracted the author of <i>Rose Mary</i> as the perfect hold of the
+      supernatural which is seen in <i>La Belle Dame Sans Merci</i> and in the
+      fragment of the <i>Eve of St. Mark</i>. At the time of our correspondence,
+      I was engaged upon an essay on Keats, and <i>à propos</i> of this Rossetti
+      wrote:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     I shall take pleasure in reading your Keats article when
+     ready. He was, among all his contemporaries who established
+     their names, the one true heir of Shakspeare. Another
+     (unestablished then, but partly revived since) was Charles
+     Wells. Did you ever read his splendid dramatic poem <i>Joseph
+     and his Brethren?</i>
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      In this connexion, as a better opportunity may not arise, I take occasion
+      to tell briefly the story of the revival of Wells. The facts to be related
+      were communicated to me by Rossetti in conversation years after the date
+      of the letter in which this first allusion to the subject was made. As a
+      boy, Rossetti&rsquo;s chief pleasure was to ransack old book-stalls, and the
+      catalogues of the British Museum, for forgotten works in the bye-ways of
+      English poetry. In this pursuit he became acquainted with nearly every
+      curiosity of modern poetic literature, and many were the amusing stories
+      he used to tell at that time, and in after life, of the titles and
+      contents of the literary oddities he unearthed. If you chanced at any
+      moment to alight upon any obscure book particularly curious from its
+      pretentiousness and pomposity, from the audacity of its claim, or the
+      obscurity and absurdity of its writing, you might be sure that Rossetti
+      would prove familiar with it, and be able to recapitulate with infinite
+      zest its salient features; but if you happened to drop upon ever so
+      interesting an edition of a book (not of verse) which you supposed to be
+      known to many a reader, the chances were at least equal that Rossetti
+      would prove to know nothing of it but its name. In poring over the
+      forgotten pages of the poetry of the beginning of the century, Rossetti,
+      whilst still a boy, met with the scriptural drama of <i>Joseph and his
+      Brethren</i>. He told me the title did not much attract him, but he
+      resolved to glance at the contents, and with that swiftness of insight
+      which throughout life distinguished him, he instantly perceived its great
+      qualities. I think he said he then wrote a letter on the subject to one of
+      the current literary journals, probably <i>The Literary Gazette</i>, and
+      by this means came into correspondence with Charles Wells himself. Rather
+      later a relative of Wells&rsquo;s sought out the young enthusiast in London,
+      intending to solicit his aid in an attempt to induce a publisher to
+      undertake a reprint, but in any endeavours to this end he must have
+      failed. For many years a copy of the poem, left by the author&rsquo;s request at
+      Rossetti&rsquo;s lodgings, lay there untouched, and meantime the growing
+      reputation of the young painter brought about certain removals from
+      Blackfriars Bridge to other chambers, and afterwards to the house in
+      Cheyne Walk. In the course of these changes the copy got hidden away, and
+      it was not until numerous applications for it had been made that it was at
+      length ferreted forth from the chaos of some similar volumes huddled
+      together in a corner of the studio. Full of remorse for having so long
+      abandoned a laudable project, Rossetti then took up afresh the cause of
+      the neglected poem, and enlisted Mr. Swinburne&rsquo;s interest so warmly as to
+      prevail with him to use his influence to secure its publication. This
+      failed however; but in <i>The Athenæum</i> of April 8, 1876, appeared Mr.
+      Watts&rsquo;s elaborate account of Wells and the poem and its vicissitudes,
+      whereupon Messrs. Chatto and Windus offered to take the risk of publishing
+      it, and the poem went forth with the noble commendatory essay of the young
+      author of <i>Atalanta</i>, whose reputation was already almost at its
+      height, though it lacked (doubtless from a touch of his constitutional
+      procrastination) the appreciative comment of the discerning critic who
+      first discovered it. To return to the Keats correspondence:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     I am truly delighted to hear how young you are. In original
+     work, a man does some of his best things by your time of
+     life, though he only finds it out in a rage much later, at
+     some date when he expected to know no longer that he had
+     ever done them. Keats hardly died so much too early&mdash;not at
+     all if there had been any danger of his taking to the modern
+     habit eventually&mdash;treating material as product, and shooting
+     it all out as it comes. Of course, however, he wouldn&rsquo;t; he
+     was getting always choicer and simpler, and my favourite
+     piece in his works is <i>La Belle Dame Sans Merci</i>&mdash;I suppose
+     about his last. As to Shelley, it is really a mercy that he
+     has not been hatching yearly universes till now. He might, I
+     suppose; for his friend Trelawny still walks the earth
+     without great-coat, stockings, or underclothing, this
+     Christmas (1879). In criticism, matters are different, as to
+     seasons of production.... I am writing hurriedly and
+     horribly in every sense. Write on the subject again and I&rsquo;ll
+     try to answer better. All greetings to you.
+
+     P.S.&mdash;I think your reference to Keats new, and on a high
+     level It calls back to my mind an adaptation of his self-
+     chosen epitaph which I made in my very earliest days of
+     boyish rhyming, when I was rather proud to be as cockney as
+     Keats <i>could</i> be. Here it is,&mdash;
+
+          Through one, years since damned and forgot
+               Who stabbed backs by the Quarter,
+          Here lieth one who, while Time&rsquo;s stream
+               Still runs, as God hath taught her,
+          Bearing man&rsquo;s fame to men, hath writ
+               His name upon that water.
+
+     Well, the rhyme is not so bad as Keats&rsquo;s
+
+                     Ear
+          Of Goddess of Theræa!&mdash;
+
+     nor (tell it not in Gath!) as&mdash;-
+
+          I wove a crown before her
+          For her I love so dearly,
+          A garland for Lenora!
+
+     Is it possible the laurel crown should now hide a venerated
+     and impeccable ear which was once the ear of a cockney?
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      This letter was written in 1879, and the opening clauses of it were no
+      doubt penned under the impression, then strong on Rossetti&rsquo;s mind, that
+      his first volume of poems would prove to be his only one; but when, within
+      two years afterwards he completed <i>Rose Mary</i>, and wrote <i>The
+      King&rsquo;s Tragedy</i> and <i>The White Ship</i>, this accession of material
+      dissipated the notion that a man does much his best work before
+      twenty-five. It can hardly escape the reader that though Rossetti&rsquo;s
+      earlier volume displayed a surprising maturity, the subsequent one
+      exhibited as a whole infinitely more power and feeling, range of sympathy,
+      and knowledge of life. The poet&rsquo;s dramatic instinct developed enormously
+      in the interval between the periods of the two books, and, being conscious
+      of this, Rossetti used to say in his later years that he would never again
+      write poems as from his own person.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     You say an excellent thing [he writes] when you ask, &ldquo;Where
+     can we look for more poetry per page than Keats furnishes?&rdquo;
+      It is strange that there is not yet one complete edition of
+     him. {*} No doubt the desideratum (so far as care and
+     exhaustiveness go), will be supplied when
+
+     Forman&rsquo;s edition appears. He is a good appreciator too, as I
+     have reason to say. You will think it strange that I have
+     not seen the Keats love-letters, but I mean to do so.
+     However, I am told they add nothing to one&rsquo;s idea of his
+     epistolary powers.... I hear sometimes from Buxton Forman,
+     and was sending him the other day an extract (from a book
+     called <i>The Unseen World</i>) which doubtless bears on the
+     superstition which Keats intended to develope in his lovely
+     <i>Eve of St. Mark</i>&mdash;a fragment which seems to me to rank with
+     <i>La Belle Dame Sans Merci</i>, as a clear advance in direct
+     simplicity.... You ought to have my recent Keats sonnet, so
+     I send it. Your own plan, for one on the same subject, seems
+     to me most beautiful. Do it at once. You will see that mine
+     is again concerned with the epitaph, and perhaps my reviving
+     the latter in writing you was the cause of the sonnet.
+
+     * Rossetti afterwards admitted in conversation that the
+     Aldine Edition seemed complete, though I think he did not
+     approve of the chronological arrangement therein adopted; at
+     least he thought that arrangement had many serious
+     disadvantages.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Rossetti formed a very different opinion of Keats&rsquo;s love-letters, when, a
+      year later, he came to read them. At first he shared the general view that
+      letters so <i>intimes</i> should never have been made public. Afterwards
+      the book had irresistible charms for him, from the first page whereon his
+      old friend, Mr. Bell Scott, has vigorously etched Severn&rsquo;s drawing of the
+      once redundant locks of rich hair, dank and matted over the forehead cold
+      with the death-dew, down to the last line of the letterpress. He thought
+      Mr. Forman&rsquo;s work admirably done, and as for the letters themselves, he
+      believed they placed Keats indisputably among the highest masters of
+      English epistolary style. He considered that all Keats&rsquo;s letters proved
+      him to be no weakling, and that whatever walk he had chosen he must have
+      been a master. He seemed particularly struck with the apparently intuitive
+      perception of Shakspeare&rsquo;s subtlest meanings, which certain of the letters
+      display. In a note he said:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     Forman gave me a copy of Keats&rsquo;s letters to Fanny Brawne.
+     The silhouette given of the lady is sadly disenchanting, and
+     may be the strongest proof existing of how much a man may
+     know about abstract Beauty without having an artist&rsquo;s eye
+     for the outside of it.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      The Keats sonnet, as first shown to me, ran as follows:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     The weltering London ways where children weep,&mdash;
+        Where girls whom none call maidens laugh, where gain,
+        Hurrying men&rsquo;s steps, is yet by loss o&rsquo;erta&rsquo;en:&mdash;
+     The bright Castalian brink and Latinos&rsquo; steep:&mdash;
+     Such were his paths, till deeper and more deep,
+        He trod the sands of Lethe; and long pain,
+        Weary with labour spurned and love found vain,
+     In dead Rome&rsquo;s sheltering shadow wrapped his sleep.
+
+     O pang-dowered Poet, whose reverberant lips
+     And heart-strung lyre awoke the moon&rsquo;s eclipse,&mdash;
+        Thou whom the daisies glory in growing o&rsquo;er,&mdash;
+     Their fragrance clings around thy name, not writ,
+     But rumour&rsquo;d in water, while the fame of it
+        Along Time&rsquo;s flood goes echoing evermore.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      I need hardly say that this sonnet seemed to me extremely noble in
+      sentiment, and in music a glorious volume of sound. I felt, however, that
+      it would be urged against it that it did not strike the keynote of the
+      genius of Keats; that it would be said that in all the particulars in
+      which Rossetti had truthfully and pathetically described London, Keats was
+      in rather than of it; and that it would be affirmed that Keats lived in a
+      fairy world of his own inventing, caring little for the storm and stress
+      of London life. On the other hand, I knew it could be replied that Keats
+      was not indifferent to the misery of city life; that it bore heavily upon
+      him; that it came out powerfully and very sadly in his <i>Ode to the
+      Nightingale</i>, and that it may have been from sheer torture in the
+      contemplation of it that he fled away to a poetic world of his own
+      creating. Moreover, Rossetti&rsquo;s sonnet touched the life, rather than the
+      genius, of Keats, and of this it struck the keynote in the opening lines.
+      I ventured to think that the second and third lines wanted a little
+      clarifying in the relation in which they stood. They seemed to be a sudden
+      focussing of the laughter and weeping previously mentioned, rather than,
+      what they were meant to be, a natural and necessary equipoise showing the
+      inner life of Keats as contrasted with his outer life. To such an
+      objection as this, Rossetti said:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     I am rather aghast for my own lucidity when I read what you
+     say as to the first quatrain of my Keats sonnet. However, I
+     always take these misconceptions as warnings to the Muse,
+     and may probably alter the opening as below:
+
+          The weltering London ways where children weep
+          And girls whom none call maidens laugh,&mdash;strange road,
+          Miring his outward steps who inly trode
+          The bright Castalian brink and Latinos&rsquo; steep:&mdash;
+          Even such his life&rsquo;s cross-paths: till deathly deep
+          He toiled through sands of Lethe, etc.
+          I &lsquo;ll say more anent Keats anon.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      About the period of this portion of the correspondence (1880) I was
+      engaged reading up old periodicals dating from 1816 to 1822. My purpose
+      was to get at first-hand all available data relative to the life of Keats.
+      I thought I met with a good deal of fresh material, and as the result of
+      my reading I believed myself able to correct a few errors as to facts into
+      which previous writers on the subject had fallen. Two things at least I
+      realised&mdash;first, that Keats&rsquo;s poetic gift developed very rapidly,
+      more rapidly perhaps than that of Shelley; and, next, that Keats received
+      vastly more attention and appreciation in his day than is commonly
+      supposed. I found it was quite a blunder to say that the first volume of
+      miscellaneous poems fell flat. Lord Houghton says in error that the book
+      did not so much as seem to signal the advent of a new Cockney poet! It is
+      a fact, however, that this very book, in conjunction with one of Shelley&rsquo;s
+      and one of Hunt&rsquo;s, all published 1816-17, gave rise to the name &ldquo;The
+      Cockney School of Poets,&rdquo; which was invented by the writer signing &ldquo;Z.&rdquo; in
+      <i>Blackwood</i> in the early part of 1818. Nor had Keats to wait for the
+      publication of the volume before attaining to some poetic distinction. At
+      the close of 1816, an article, under the head of &ldquo;Young Poets,&rdquo; appeared
+      in <i>The Examiner</i>, and in this both Shelley and Keats were dealt
+      with. Then <i>The Quarterly</i> contained allusions to him, though not by
+      name, in reviews of Leigh Hunt&rsquo;s work, and <i>Blackwood</i> mentioned him
+      very frequently in all sorts of places as &ldquo;Johnny Keats&rdquo;&mdash;all this
+      (or much of it) before he published anything except occasional sonnets and
+      other fugitive poems in <i>The Examiner</i> and elsewhere. And then when
+      <i>Endymion</i> appeared it was abundantly reviewed. <i>The Edinburgh</i>
+      reviewers had nothing on it (the book cannot have been sent to them, for
+      in 1820 they say they have only just met with it), and I could not find
+      anything in the way of <i>original</i> criticism in <i>The Examiner</i>;
+      but many provincial papers (in Manchester, Exeter, and elsewhere) and some
+      metropolitan papers retorted on <i>The Quarterly</i>. All this, however,
+      does not disturb the impression which (Lord Houghton and Mr. W. M.
+      Rossetti notwithstanding) I have been from the first compelled to
+      entertain, namely, that &ldquo;labour spurned&rdquo; did more than all else to kill
+      Keats <i>in 1821</i>.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Most men who rightly know the workings of their own minds will agree that
+      an adverse criticism rankles longer than a flattering notice soothes; and
+      though it be shown that Keats in 1820 was comparatively indifferent to the
+      praise of <i>The Edinburgh</i>, it cannot follow that in 1818 he must have
+      been superior to the blame of <i>The Quarterly</i>. It is difficult to see
+      why a man may not be keenly sensitive to what the world says about him,
+      and yet retain all proper manliness as a part of his literary character.
+      Surely it was from the mistaken impression that this could not be, and
+      that an admission of extreme sensitiveness to criticism exposed Keats to a
+      charge of effeminacy that Lord Houghton attempted to prove, against the
+      evidence of all immediate friends, against the publisher&rsquo;s note to <i>Hyperion</i>,
+      against the | poet&rsquo;s self-chosen epitaph, and against all but one or two
+      of the most self-contained of his letters, that the soul of Keats was so
+      far from being &ldquo;snuffed out by an article,&rdquo; that it was more than
+      ordinarily impervious to hostile comment, even when it came in the shape
+      of rancorous abuse. In all discussion of the effects produced upon Keats
+      by the reviews in <i>Blackwood and The Quarterly</i>, let it be
+      remembered, first, that having wellnigh exhausted his small patrimony,
+      Keats was to be dependent upon literature for his future subsistence;
+      next, that Leigh Hunt attempted no defence of Keats when the bread was
+      being taken out of his mouth, and that Keats felt this neglect and
+      remarked upon it in a letter in which he further cast some doubt upon the
+      purity of Hunt&rsquo;s friendship. Hunt, after Keats&rsquo;s death, said in reference
+      to this: &ldquo;Had he but given me the hint!&rdquo; The <i>hint</i>, forsooth!
+      Moreover, I can find no sort of allusion in <i>The Examiner</i> for 1821,
+      to the death of Keats. I told Rossetti that by the reading of the
+      periodicals of the time, I formed a poor opinion of Hunt. Previously I was
+      willing to believe in his unswerving loyalty to the much greater men who
+      were his friends, but even that poor confidence in him must perforce be
+      shaken when one finds him silent at a moment when Keats most needs his
+      voice, and abusive when Coleridge is a common subject of ridicule. It was
+      all very well for Hunt to glorify himself in the borrowed splendour of
+      Keats&rsquo;s established fame when the poet was twenty years dead, and to make
+      much of his intimacy with Coleridge after the homage of two generations
+      had been offered him, but I know of no instance (unless in the case of
+      Shelley) in which Hunt stood by his friends in the winter of their lives,
+      and gave them that journalistic support which was, poor man, the only
+      thing he ever had to give, whatever he might take. I have, however, heard
+      Mr. H. A. Bright (one of Hawthorne&rsquo;s intimate friends in England) say that
+      no man here impressed the American romancer so much as Hunt for good
+      qualities, both of heart and head. But what I have stated above, I believe
+      to be facts; and I have gathered them at first-hand, and by the light of
+      them I do not hesitate to say that there is no reason to believe that it
+      was Keats&rsquo;s illness alone that caused him to regard Hunt&rsquo;s friendship with
+      suspicion. It is true, however, that when one reads Hunt&rsquo;s letter to
+      Severn at Borne, one feels that he must be forgiven. On this pregnant
+      subject Rossetti wrote:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     Thanks for yours received to-day, and for all you say with
+     so much more kind solicitousness than the matter deserved,
+     about the opening of the Keats sonnet. I have now realized
+     that the new form is a gain in every way; and am therefore
+     glad that, though arising in accident, I was led to make the
+     change.... All you say of Keats shows that you have been
+     reading up the subject with good results. I fancy it would
+     hardly be desirable to add the sonnets you speak of (as
+     being worthless) at this date, though they might be valuable
+     for quotation as to the course of his mental and physical
+     state. I do not myself think that any poems now included
+     should be removed, but the reckless and tasteless plan of
+     the gatherings hitherto (in which the <i>Nightingale</i> and other
+     such masterpieces are jostled indiscriminately, with such
+     wretched juvenile trash as <i>Lines to some Ladies on
+     receiving a Shelly etc</i>), should of course be amended, and
+     the rubbish (of which there is a fair quantity), removed to
+     a &ldquo;Juvenile&rdquo; or other such section. It is a curious fact
+     that among a poet&rsquo;s early writings, some will really be
+     juvenile in this sense, while others, written at the same
+     time, will perhaps take rank at last with his best efforts.
+     This, however, was not substantially the case with Keats.
+
+     As to Leigh Hunt&rsquo;s friendship for Keats, I think the points
+     you mention look equivocal; but Hunt was a many-laboured and
+     much belaboured man, and as much allowance as may be made on
+     this score is perhaps due to him&mdash;no more than that much.
+     His own powers stand high in various ways&mdash;poetically higher
+     perhaps than is I at present admitted, despite his
+     detestable flutter and airiness for the most part. But
+     assuredly by no means could he have stood so high in the
+     long-run, as by a loud and earnest defence of Keats. Perhaps
+     the best excuse for him is the remaining possibility of an
+     idea on his part, that any defence coming from one who had
+     himself so many powerful enemies might seem to Keats
+     rather to! damage than improve his position.
+
+     I have this minute (at last) read the first instalment of
+     your Keats paper, and return it.... One of the most marked
+     points in the early recognition of Keats&rsquo;s claims, as
+     compared with the recognition given to other poets, is the
+     fact that he was the only one who secured almost at once a
+     <i>great</i> poet as a close and obvious imitator&mdash;viz., Hood,
+     whose first volume is more identical with Keats&rsquo;s work than
+     could be said of any other similar parallel. You quote some
+     of Keats&rsquo;s sayings. One of the most characteristic I think
+     is in a letter to Haydon:&mdash;
+
+     &ldquo;I value more the privilege of seeing great things in
+     loneliness, than the fame of a prophet.&rdquo; I had not in mind
+     the quotations you give from Keats as bearing on the poetic
+     (or prophetic) mission of &ldquo;doing good.&rdquo; I must say that I
+     should not have thought a longer career thrown away upon him
+     (as you intimate) if he had continued to the age of anything
+     only to give joy. Nor would he ever have done any &ldquo;good&rdquo; at
+     all. Shelley did good, and perhaps some harm with it.
+     Keats&rsquo;s joy was after all a flawless gift.
+
+     Keats wrote to Shelley:&mdash;&ldquo;You, I am sure, will forgive me
+     for sincerely remarking that you might curb your magnanimity
+     and be more of an artist, and load every rift of your
+     subject with ore.&rdquo; Cheeky!&mdash;but not so much amiss. Poetry,
+     and no prophecy however, must come of that mood,&mdash;and no
+     pulpit would have held Keats&rsquo;s wings,&mdash;the body and mind
+     together were not heavy enough for a counterweight.... Did
+     you ever meet with
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      ENDIMION<br /><br /> AN EXCELLENT FANCY FIRST COMPOSED IN FRENCH<br /><br />
+      By Monsieur GOMBAULD<br /><br /> AND NOW ELEGANTLY INTERPRETED<br /><br /> By
+      RICHARD HURST, Gentleman<br /><br /> 1639.<br /><br /> ?
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     It has very finely engraved plates of the late Flemish type.
+     There is a poem of Vaughan&rsquo;s on Gombauld&rsquo;s <i>Endimion</i>, which
+     might make one think it more fascinating than it really is.
+     Though rather prolix, however, it has attractions as a
+     somewhat devious romantic treatment of the subject. The
+     little book is one of the first I remember in this world,
+     and I used to dip into it again and again as a child, but
+     never yet read it through. I still possess it. I dare say it
+     is not easily met with, and should suppose Keats had
+     probably never seen it. If he had, he might really have
+     taken a hint or two for his scheme, which is hardly so clear
+     even as Gombauld&rsquo;s, though its endless digressions teem with
+     beauty.... I do not think you would benefit at all by seeing
+     Gombauld&rsquo;s <i>Endimion</i>. Vaughan&rsquo;s poem on it might be worth
+     quoting as showing what attention the subject had received
+     before Keats. I have the poem in Gilfillan&rsquo;s <i>Less-Known
+     Poets</i>.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Rossetti took a great interest in the fund started for the relief of Mme.
+      de Llanos, Keats&rsquo;s sister, whose circumstances were seriously reduced. He
+      wrote:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     By the bye, I don&rsquo;t know whether the subscription for
+     Keats&rsquo;s old and only surviving sister (Madme de Llanos) has
+     been at all ventilated in Liverpool. It flags sorely. Do you
+     think there would be any chance in your neighbourhood? If
+     so, prospectuses, etc., could be sent.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      I did not view the prospect of subscriptions as very hopeful, and so
+      conceived the idea of a lecture in the interests of the fund. On this
+      project, Rossetti wrote:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     I enclose prospectuses as to the Keats subscription. I may
+     say that I did not know the list would accompany them&mdash;still
+     less that contributions would be so low generally as to
+     leave me near the head of the list&mdash;an unenviable sort of
+     parade.... My own opinion about the lecture question is
+     this. You know best whether such a lecture could be turned
+     to the purposes of your Keats article (now in progress), or
+     rather be so much deduction from the freshness of its
+     resources: and this should be the <i>absolute</i> test of its
+     being done or not done.... I think, if it can be done
+     without impoverishing your materials, the method of getting
+     Lord Houghton to preside and so raising as much from it as
+     possible is doubtless the right one. Of course I view it as
+     far more hopeful than mere distribution of any number of
+     prospectuses.... Even £25 would be a great contribution to
+     the fund.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      The lecture project was not found feasible, and hence it was abandoned.
+      Meantime the kindness of friends enabled me to add to the list a good
+      number of subscriptions, but feeling scarcely satisfied with any such
+      success as I might be likely to have in that direction, I opened, by the
+      help of a friend, a correspondence with Lord Houghton with a view to
+      inducing him to apply for a pension for the lady. It then transpired that
+      Lord Houghton had already applied to Lord Beaconsfield for a pension for
+      Mme. Llanos, and would doubtless have got it, had not Mr. Buxton Forman
+      applied for a grant from the Royal Bounty, which was easier to give. I
+      told Rossetti of this fact and he said:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     I am not surprised about Lord H., and feel sure it is a pity
+     he was not left to try Beaconsfield, but I judge the
+     projectors on the other side knew nothing of his intentions.
+     However, <i>I</i> was in no way a projector.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      In the end Lord Houghton repeated to Mr. Gladstone the application he had
+      made to Lord Beaconsfield, and succeeded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rossetti must have been among the earliest admirers of Keats. I remarked
+      on one occasion that it was very natural that Lord Houghton should
+      consider himself in a sense the first among men now living to champion the
+      poet and establish his name, and Rossetti admitted that this was so, and
+      was ungrudging in his tribute to Lord Houghton&rsquo;s services towards the
+      better appreciation of Keats; but he contended, nevertheless, that he had
+      himself been one of the first writers of the generation succeeding the
+      poet&rsquo;s own to admire and uphold him, and that this was at a time when it
+      made demand of some courage to class him among the immortals, when an
+      original edition of any of his books could be bought for sixpence on a
+      bookstall, and when only Leigh Hunt, Cowden Clarke, Hood, Benjamin Haydon,
+      and perhaps a few others, were still living of those who recognised his
+      great gifts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0006" id="link2HCH0006">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER VI.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Rossetti&rsquo;s primary interest in Chatterton dates back to an early period,
+      as I find by the date, 1848, in the copy he possessed of the poet&rsquo;s works.
+      But throughout a long interval he neglected Chatterton, and it was not
+      until his friend Theodore Watts, who had made Chatterton a special study,
+      had undertaken to select from and write upon him in Ward&rsquo;s <i>English
+      Poets</i>, that he revived his old acquaintance. Whatever Rossetti did he
+      did thoroughly, and hence he became as intimate perhaps with the Rowley
+      antiques as any other man had ever been. His letters written during the
+      course of his Chatterton researches must, I think, prove extremely
+      interesting. He says:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     Glancing at your Keats MS., I notice (in a series of
+     parallels) the names of Marlowe and Savage; but not the less
+     &ldquo;marvellous&rdquo; than absolutely miraculous Chatterton. Are you
+     up in his work? He is in the very first rank! Theod. Watts
+     is &ldquo;doing him&rdquo; for the new selection of poets by Arnold and
+     Ward, and I have contributed a sonnet to Watts&rsquo;s article....
+     I assure you Chatterton&rsquo;s name <i>must</i> come in somewhere in
+     the parallel passage. He was as great as any English poet
+     whatever, and might absolutely, had he lived, have proved
+     the only man in England&rsquo;s theatre of imagination who could
+     have bandied parts with Shakspeare. The best way of getting
+     at him is in Skeat&rsquo;s Aldine edition (G. Bell and Co., 1875).
+     Read him carefully, and you will find his acknowledged work
+     essentially as powerful as his antiques, though less evenly
+     successful&mdash;the Rowley work having been produced in Bristol
+     leisure, however indigent, and the modern poetry in the very
+     fangs of London struggle. Strong derivative points are to be
+     found in Keats and Coleridge from the study of Chatterton. I
+     feel much inclined to send the sonnet (on Chatterton) as you
+     wish, but really think it is better not to ventilate these
+     things till in print. I have since written one on Blake. Not
+     to know Chatterton is to be ignorant of the <i>true</i> day-
+     spring of modern romantic poetry.... I believe the 3d vol.
+     of Ward&rsquo;s <i>Selections of English Poetry</i>, for which Watts is
+     selecting from Chatterton, will soon be out,&mdash;but these
+     excerpts are very brief, as are the notices. The rendering
+     from the Rowley antique will be much better than anything
+     formerly done. Skeat is a thorough philologist, but no hand
+     at all when substitution becomes unavoidable in the text....
+     Read the <i>Ballad of Charity, the Eclogues, the songs in
+     Ælla</i>, as a first taste. Among the modern poems <i>Narva and
+     Mared</i>, and the other <i>African Eclogues</i>. These are alone in
+     that section <i>poetry absolute</i>, and though they are very
+     unequal, it has been most truly said by Malone that to throw
+     the <i>African Eclogues</i> into the Rowley dialect would be at
+     once a satisfactory key to the question whether Chatterton
+     showed in his own person the same powers as in the person of
+     Rowley. Among the satirical and light modern pieces there
+     are many of a first-. rate order, though generally unequal.
+     Perfect specimens, however, are <i>The Revenge, a Burletta,
+     Skeat, vol i; Verses to a Lady, p. 84; Journal Sixth, p. 33;
+     The Prophecy, p. 193; and opening of Fragment, p. 132.</i> I
+     would advise you to consult the original text.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Watts, it seems, with all his admiration of Chatterton, finding that
+      he could not go to Rossetti&rsquo;s length in comparing him with Shakspeare, did
+      not in the result consider the sonnet on Chatterton referred to in the
+      foregoing letter, and given below, suitable to be embodied in his essay:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     With Shakspeare&rsquo;s manhood at a boy&rsquo;s wild heart,&mdash;
+        Through Hamlet&rsquo;s doubt to Shakspeare near allied,
+        And kin to Milton through his Satan&rsquo;s pride,&mdash;
+     At Death&rsquo;s sole door he stooped, and craved a dart;
+     And to the dear new bower of England&rsquo;s art,&mdash;
+        Even to that shrine Time else had deified,
+        The unuttered heart that soared against his side,&mdash;
+     Drove the fell point, and smote life&rsquo;s seals apart.
+
+     Thy nested home-loves, noble Chatterton,
+        The angel-trodden stair thy soul could trace
+        Up Redcliffe&rsquo;s spire; and in the world&rsquo;s armed space
+     Thy gallant sword-play:&mdash;these to many an one
+     Are sweet for ever; as thy grave unknown,
+        And love-dream of thine unrecorded face.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Some mention was made in this connection of Rossetti&rsquo;s young connection,
+      Oliver Madox Brown, who wrote <i>Gabriel Denver</i> (otherwise <i>The
+      Black Swan</i>) at seventeen years of age. I mentioned the indiscreet
+      remark of a friend who said that Oliver had enough genius to stock a good
+      few Chattertons, and thereupon Rossetti sent me the following outburst:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     You must take care to be on the right tack about Chatterton.
+     I am very glad to find the gifted Oliver M. B. already an
+     embryo classic, as I always said he would be; but those who
+     compare net results in such cases as his and Chatterton&rsquo;s
+     cannot know what criticism means. The nett results of
+     advancing epochs, however permanent on accumulated
+     foundation-work, are the poorest of all tests as to relative
+     values. Oliver was the product of the most teeming hot-beds
+     of art and literature, and even of compulsory addiction to
+     the art of painting, in which nevertheless he was rapidly
+     becoming as much a proficient as in literature. What he
+     would have been if, like the ardent and heroic Chatterton,
+     he had had to fight a single-handed battle for art and bread
+     together against merciless mediocrity in high places,&mdash;what
+     he would <i>then</i> have become, I cannot in the least
+     calculate; but we know what Chatterton became. Moreover, C.
+     at his death, was two years younger than Oliver&mdash;a whole
+     lifetime of advancement at that age frequently&mdash;indeed
+     always I believe in leading cases. There are few indeed whom
+     the facile enthusiasm for contemporary models does not
+     deaden to the truly balanced claims of successful efforts in
+     art. However, look at Watts&rsquo;s remodelled extracts when the
+     vol comes out, and also at what he says in detail as to
+     Chatterton, Coleridge, and Keats.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Of course Rossetti was right in what he said of comparative criticism when
+      brought to bear in such cases as those of Chatterton and Oliver Madox
+      Brown. Net results are certainly the poorest tests of relative values
+      where the work done belongs to periods of development. We cannot, however,
+      see or know any man except through and in his work, and net results must
+      usually be accepted as the only concrete foundation for judging of the
+      quality of his genius. Such judgment will always be influenced,
+      nevertheless, by considerations such as Rossetti mentions. Touching
+      Chatterton&rsquo;s development, it were hardly rash to say that it appears
+      incredible that the <i>African Eclogues</i> should have been written by a
+      boy of seventeen, and, in judging of their place in poetry, one is apt to
+      be influenced by one&rsquo;s first feeling of amazement. Is it possible that the
+      Rowley poems may owe much of their present distinction to the early
+      astonishment that a boy should have written them, albeit they have great
+      intrinsic excellencies such as may insure them a high place when the
+      romance, intertwined with their history, has been long forgotten? But
+      Chatterton is more talked of than read, and this has been so from the
+      first. The antiques are all but unknown; certain of the acknowledged poems
+      are remembered, and regarded as fervid and vigorous, and many of the
+      lesser pieces are thought slight, weak, and valueless. People do not
+      measure the poorer things in Chatterton with his time and opportunities,
+      or they would see only amazing strength and knowledge of the world in all
+      he did. Those lesser pieces were many of them dashed off to answer the
+      calls of necessity, to flatter the egotism of a troublesome friend, or to
+      wile away a moment of vacancy. Certainly they must not be set against his
+      best efforts. As for Chatterton&rsquo;s life, the tragedy of it is perhaps the
+      most moving example of what Coleridge might have termed the material
+      pathetic. Pathetic, however, as his life was, and marvellous as was his
+      genius, I miss in him the note of personal purity and majesty of
+      character. I told Rossetti that, in my view, Chatterton lacked sincerity,
+      and on this point he wrote:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     I must protest finally about Chatterton, that he lacks
+     nothing because lacking the gradual growth of the emotional
+     in literature which becomes evident in Keats&mdash;still less its
+     excess, which would of course have been pruned, in Oliver.
+     The finest of the Rowley poems&mdash;<i>Eclogues, Ballad of
+     Charity, etc</i>., rank absolutely with the finest poetry in
+     the language, and gain (not lose) by moderation. As to what
+     you say of C.&lsquo;s want of political sincerity (for I cannot
+     see to what other want you can allude), surely a boy up to
+     eighteen may be pardoned for exercising his faculty if he
+     happens to be the one among millions who can use grown men
+     as his toys. He was an absolute and untarnished hero, but
+     for that reckless defying vaunt. Certainly that most
+     vigorous passage commencing&mdash;
+
+          &ldquo;Interest, thou universal God of men,&rdquo; etc.
+
+     reads startlingly, and comes in a questionable shape. What
+     is the answer to its enigmatical aspect? Why, that he
+     <i>meant</i> it, and that all would mean it at his age, who had
+     his power, his daring, and his hunger. Still it does,
+     perhaps, make one doubt whether his early death were well or
+     ill for him. In the matter of Oliver (whom no one
+     appreciates more than I do), remember that it was impossible
+     to have more opportunities than <i>he</i> had, or on the other
+     side <i>fewer</i> than Chatterton had. Chatterton at seventeen or
+     less said&mdash;
+
+          &ldquo;Flattery&rsquo;s a cloak, and I will put it on.&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      Blake (probably late in life) said&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+          &ldquo;Innocence is a winter gown.&rdquo;
+ 
+     ... I <i>have</i> read the Chatterton article in the review
+     mentioned. If Watts had done it, it would have been
+     immeasurably better. There seems to me, who am very well up
+     in Chatterton, no point whatever made in the article. Why
+     does no one ever even allude to the two attributed portraits
+     of Chatterton&mdash;one belonging to Sir H. Taylor, and the other
+     in the Salford Museum? Both seem to be the same person
+     clearly, and a good find for Chatterton, but not conceivably
+     done from him. Nevertheless, I <i>suspect</i> there may be a
+     sidelong genuineness in them. Chatterton was acquainted with
+     one Alcock, a miniature painter at Bristol, to whom he
+     addressed a poem. Had A. painted C. it would be among the
+     many recorded facts; but it would be singular even if, in
+     C.&lsquo;s rapid posthumous fame, A. had never been asked to make
+     a reminiscent likeness of him. Prom such likeness by the
+     miniature painter these <i>portraits might</i> derive&mdash;both being
+     life-sized oil heads. There is a savour of Keats in them,
+     though a friend, taking up the younger-looking of the two,
+     said it reminded him of Jack Sheppard! And not such a bad
+     Chatterton-compound either! But I begin to think I have said
+     all this before.... Oliver, or &ldquo;Nolly,&rdquo; as he was always
+     called, was a sort of spread-eagle likeness of his handsome
+     father, with a conical head like Walter Scott. I must
+     confess to you, that, in this world of books, the only one
+     of his I have read, is <i>Gabriel Denver</i>, afterwards
+     reprinted in its original and superior form as <i>The Black
+     Swan</i>, but published with the former title in his lifetime.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Rossetti formed no such philosophic estimate of Chatterton&rsquo;s contribution
+      to the romantic movement in English poetry as has been formulated in the
+      essay in Ward&rsquo;s <i>Poets</i>. A critic, in the sense of one possessed of a
+      natural gift of analysis, Rossetti assuredly! was not. No man&rsquo;s instinct
+      for what is good in poetry was ever swifter or surer than that of
+      Rossetti. You might always distrust your judgment if you found it at
+      variance with his where abstract power and beauty were in question. Sooner
+      or later you would inevitably find yourself gravitating to his view. But
+      here Rossetti&rsquo;s function as a critic ended. His was at best only the
+      criticism of the creator. Of the gift of ultimate classification he had
+      none, and never claimed to have any, although now and again (as where he
+      says that Chatterton was the day-spring of modern romantic poetry), he
+      seems to give sign of a power of critical synthesis.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rossetti&rsquo;s interest in Blake, both as poet and painter, dates back to an
+      early period of his life. I have heard him say that at sixteen or
+      seventeen years of age he was already one of Blake&rsquo;s warmest admirers, and
+      at the time in question, 1845, the author of the <i>Songs of Innocence</i>
+      had not many readers to uphold him. About four years later, Rossetti made
+      an exceptionally lucky discovery, for he then found in the possession of
+      Mr. Palmer, an attendant at the British Museum, an original manuscript
+      scrap-book of Blake&rsquo;s, containing a great body of unpublished poetry and
+      many interesting designs, as well as three or four remarkably effective
+      profile sketches of the author himself. The Mr. Palmer who held the little
+      book was a relative of the landscape painter of the same name, who was
+      Blake&rsquo;s friend, and hence the authenticity of the manuscript was
+      ascertainable on other grounds than the indisputable ones of its internal
+      evidences. The book was offered to Rossetti for ten shillings, but the
+      young enthusiast was at the time a student of art, and not much in the way
+      of getting or spending even so inconsiderable a sum. He told me, however,
+      that at this period his brother William, who was, unlike himself, engaged
+      in some reasonably profitable occupation, was at all times nothing loath
+      to advance small sums for the purchase of such literary or other treasures
+      as he used to hunt up out of obscure corners: by his help the Blake
+      manuscript was bought, and proved for years a source of infinite pleasure
+      and profit, resulting, as it did, in many very important additions to
+      Blake literature when Gilchrist&rsquo;s <i>Life and Works</i> of that author
+      came to be published. It is an interesting fact, mention of which ought
+      not to be omitted, that at the sale of Rossetti&rsquo;s library, which took
+      place a little while after his decease, the scrap-book acquired in the way
+      I describe was sold for one hundred and five guineas.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The sum was a large one, but the little book was undoubtedly the most
+      valuable literary relic of Blake then extant. About the time when a new
+      edition of Gilchrist&rsquo;s <i>Life</i> was in the press, Rossetti wrote:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     My evenings have been rather trenched upon lately by helping
+     Mrs. Gilchrist with a new edition of the <i>Life of Blake</i>....
+     I don&rsquo;t know if you go in much for him. The new edition of
+     the <i>Life</i> will include a good number of additional letters
+     (from Blake to Hayley), and some addition (though not great)
+     to my own share in the work; as well as much important
+     carrying-on of my brother&rsquo;s catalogue of Blake&rsquo;s works. The
+     illustrations will, I trust, receive valuable additions
+     also, but publishers are apt to be cautious in such
+     expenses. I am writing late at night, to fill up a fag-end
+     of bedtime, and shall write again on this head.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Rossetti&rsquo;s &ldquo;own share&rdquo; in this work consisted of the writing of the
+      supplementary chapter (left by Gilchrist, with one or two unimportant
+      passages merely, at the beginning), and the editing of the poems. When
+      there arose, subsequently, some idea of my reviewing the book, Rossetti
+      wrote me the following letter, full of disinterested solicitude:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     You will be quite delighted with an essay on Blake by Jas.
+     Smetham, which occurs in vol ii.; it is a noble thing; and
+     at the stupendous design called <i>Plague</i> (vol. i.). I have
+     extracted a passage properly belonging to the same essay,
+     which is as fine as English <i>can</i> be, and which I am sorry
+     to perceive (I think) that Mrs. G. has omitted from the body
+     of the essay because quoted in another place. This essay is
+     no less than a masterpiece. I wrote the supplementary
+     chapter (vol. i.), except a few opening paragraphs by
+     Gilchrist,&mdash;and in it have now made some mention of Smetham,
+     an old and dear friend of mine.
+
+     You will admire Shields&rsquo;s paper on the wonderful series of
+     Young&rsquo;s <i>Night Thoughts</i>. My brother and I both helped in
+     this new edition, but I added little to what I had done
+     before. I brought forward a portentous series of passages
+     about one &ldquo;Scofield&rdquo; in Blake&rsquo;s <i>Jerusalem</i>, but did not
+     otherwise write that chapter, except as regards the
+     illustrations. However, don&rsquo;t mention what I have done (in
+     case you write on the subject) except so far as the indices
+     show it, and of course I don&rsquo;t wish to be put forward at
+     all. What I do wish is, that you should say everything that
+     can be gratifying to Mrs. G. as to her husband&rsquo;s work. There
+     is a plate of Blake&rsquo;s Cottage by young Gilchrist which is
+     truly excellent.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      As I have already said, Rossetti traversed the bypaths of English
+      literature (particularly of English poetry) as few can ever have traversed
+      them. A favourite work with him was Gilfillan&rsquo;s <i>Less-Read British Poets</i>,
+      a copy of which had been presented by Miss Boyd. He says:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     Did you ever read Christopher Smart&rsquo;s <i>Song to David</i>, the
+     only great <i>accomplished</i> poem of the last century? The
+     accomplished ones are Chatterton&rsquo;s,&mdash;of course I mean
+     earlier than Blake or Coleridge, and without reckoning so
+     exceptional a genius as Burns.... You will find Smart&rsquo;s poem
+     a masterpiece of rich imagery, exhaustive resources, and
+     reverberant sound. It is to be met with in Gilfillan&rsquo;s
+     <i>Specimens of the Less-Read British Poets</i> (3 vols. Nichol,
+     Edin., 1860)....
+
+     I remember your mentioning Gilfillan as having encouraged
+     your first efforts. He was powerful, though sometimes rather
+     &ldquo;tall&rdquo; as a writer, generally most just as a critic, and
+     lastly, a much better man, intellectually and morally, than
+     Aytoun, who tried to &ldquo;do for&rdquo; him. His notice of Swift, in
+     the volume in question, has very great force and eloquence.
+     His whole edition of the <i>British Poets</i> is the best of any
+     to read, being such fine type and convenient bulk and weight
+     (a great thing for an arm-chair reader). Unfortunately, he
+     now and then (in the <i>Less-Read Poets</i>) cuts down the
+     extracts almost to nothing, and in some cases excises
+     objectionabilities, which is unpardonable. Much better leave
+     the whole out. Also, the edition includes the usual array of
+     nobodies&mdash;Addison, Akenside, and the whole alphabet down to
+     Zany and Zero; whereas a great many of the <i>less-read</i> would
+     have been much-read by every worthy reader if they had only
+     been printed in full. So well printed an edition of Donne
+     (for instance) would have been a great boon; but from him
+     Gilfillan only gives (among the <i>less-read</i>) the admirable
+     <i>Progress of the Soul</i> and some of the pregnant <i>Holy
+     Sonnets</i>. Do you know Donne? There is hardly an English poet
+     better worth a thorough knowledge, in spite of his provoking
+     conceits and occasional jagged jargon.
+
+     The following paragraph on Whitehead is valuable:
+
+     Charles Whitehead&rsquo;s principal poem is <i>The Solitary</i>, which
+     in its day had admirers. It perhaps most recalls Goldsmith.
+     He also wrote a supernatural poem called <i>Ippolito</i>. There
+     was a volume of his poems published about 1848, or perhaps a
+     little later, by Bentley. It is disappointing, on the whole,
+     from the decided superiority of its best points to the
+     rest.... But the novel of <i>Richard Savage</i> is very
+     remarkable,&mdash;a real character really worked out.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      To aid me in certain researches I was at the time engaged in making in the
+      back-numbers of almost forgotten periodicals, Rossetti wrote:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     The old <i>Monthly Mag.</i> was the precursor of the <i>New
+     Monthly</i>, which started about 1830, or thereabouts I think,
+     after which the old one ailed, but went on till fatal old
+     Heraud finished it off by editing it, and fairly massacred
+     that elderly innocent. You speak, in a former letter
+     (touching the continuation of <i>Christabel</i>), of &ldquo;a certain
+     European magazine.&rdquo; Are you aware that it was as old a thing
+     as <i>The Gentleman&rsquo;s</i>, and went on <i>ad infinitum?</i> Other such
+     were the <i>Universal Magazine, the Scots&rsquo; Magazine</i>&mdash;all
+     endless in extent and beginning time out of mind,&mdash;to say
+     nothing of the <i>Ladies&rsquo; Magazine and Wits&rsquo; Magazine</i>. Then
+     there was the <i>Annual Register</i>. All these are quarters in
+     which you might prosecute researches, and might happen to
+     find something about Keats. <i>The Monthly Magazine</i> must have
+     commenced almost as early, I believe. I cannot help thinking
+     there was a similar <i>Imperial Magazine</i>.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      The following letter possesses an interest independent of its subject,
+      which to me, however, is interest enough. Mr. William Watson had sent
+      Rossetti a copy of a volume of poems he had just published, and had
+      received a letter in acknowledgment, wherein our friend, with
+      characteristic appreciativeness, said many cordial words of it:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     Your young friend Watson [he said in a subsequent letter]
+     wrote me in a very modest mood for one who can do as he can
+     at his age. I think I must have hurriedly mis-expressed
+     myself in writing to him, as he seems to think I wished to
+     dissuade him from following narrative poetry. Not in the
+     least&mdash;I only wished him to try his hand at clearer dramatic
+     life. The dreamy romantic really hardly needs more than one
+     vast Morris in a literature&mdash;at any rate in a century. Not
+     that I think him derivable from Morris&mdash;he goes straight
+     back to Keats with a little modification. The narrative,
+     whether condensed or developed, is at any rate a far better
+     impersonal form to work in than declamatory harangue,
+     whether calling on the stars or the Styx. I don&rsquo;t know in
+     the least how Watson is faring with the critics. He must not
+     be discouraged, in any case, with his real and high gifts.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      The young poet, in whom Rossetti saw so much to applaud, can scarcely be
+      said to have fared at all at the hands of the critics.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Here is a pleasant piece of literary portraiture, as valuable from the
+      peep it affords into Rossetti&rsquo;s own character as from the description it
+      gives of the rustic poet:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     The other evening I had the pleasant experience of meeting
+     one to whom I have for about two years looked with interest
+     as a poet of the native rustic kind, but often of quite a
+     superior order. I don&rsquo;t know if you noticed, somewhere about
+     the date referred to, in <i>The Athenæum</i>, a review of poems
+     by Joseph Skipsey. Skip-sey has exquisite&mdash;though, as in all
+     such cases (except of course Burns&rsquo;s) not equal&mdash;powers in
+     several directions, but his pictures of humble life are the
+     best. He is a working miner, and describes rustic loves and
+     sports, and the perils and pathos of pit-life with great
+     charm, having a quiet humour too when needed. His more
+     ambitious pieces have solid merit of feeling, but are much
+     less artistic. The other night, as I say, he came here, and
+     I found him a stalwart son of toil, and every inch a
+     gentleman. In cast of face he recalls Tennyson somewhat,
+     though more bronzed and brawned. He is as sweet and gentle
+     as a woman in manner, and recited some beautiful things of
+     his own with a special freshness to which one is quite
+     unaccustomed.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Skipsey was a miner of North Shields, and in the review referred to
+      much was made, in a delicate way, of his stern environments. His volume of
+      lyrics is marked by the quiet humour. Rossetti speaks of, as well as by a
+      rather exasperating inequality. Perhaps the best piece in it is a poem
+      entitled <i>Thistle and Nettle</i>, treating with peculiar freshness of a
+      country courtship. The coming together of two such entirely opposite
+      natures was certainly curious, and only to be accounted for on the ground
+      of Rossetti&rsquo;s breadth of poetic sympathy. It would be interesting to hear
+      what the impressions were of such a rude son of toil upon meeting with one
+      whose life must have seemed the incarnation of artistic luxury and
+      indulgence. Later on I received the following:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     Poor Skipsey! He has lost the friend who brought him to
+     London only the other day (T. Dixon), and who was his only
+     hold on intellectual life in his district. Dixon died
+     immediately on his return to the North, of a violent attack
+     of asthma to which he was subject. He was a rarely pure and
+     simple soul, and is doubtless gone to higher uses, though
+     few could have reached, with his small opportunities, to
+     such usefulness as he compassed here. He was Ruskin&rsquo;s
+     correspondent in a little book called (I think) <i>Work by
+     Tyne and Wear</i>. I got a very touching note from Skipsey on
+     the subject.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      From Mr. Skipsey he received a letter only a little while before his
+      death, and to him he addressed one of the last epistles he penned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The following letter explains itself, and is introduced as much for the
+      sake of the real humour which it displays, as because it affords an
+      excellent idea of Rossetti&rsquo;s view of the true function of prose:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     I don&rsquo;t like your Shakspeare article quite as well as the
+     first <i>Supernatural</i> one, or rather I should say it does not
+     greatly add to it in my (first) view, though both might gain
+     by embodiment in one. I think there is <i>some</i> truth in the
+     charge of metaphysical involution&mdash;the German element as I
+     should call it&mdash;and surely you are strong enough to be
+     English pure and simple. I am sure I could write 100 essays,
+     on all possible subjects (I once did project a series under
+     the title, <i>Essays written in the intervals of
+     Elephantiasis, Hydro-phobia, and Penal Servitude</i>), without
+     once experiencing the &ldquo;aching void&rdquo; which is filled by such
+     words as &ldquo;mythopoeic,&rdquo; and &ldquo;anthropomorphism.&rdquo; I do not find
+     life long enough to know in the least what they mean. They
+     are both very long and very ugly indeed&mdash;the latter only
+     suggesting to me a Vampire or Somnambulant Cannibal. (To
+     speak rationally, would not &ldquo;man-evolved Godhead&rdquo; be an
+     <i>English</i> equivalent?) &ldquo;Euhemeristic&rdquo; also found me somewhat
+     on my beam-ends, though explanation is here given; yet I
+     felt I could do without Euhemerus; and <i>you</i> perhaps without
+     the <i>humerous</i>. You can pardon me now; for <i>so</i> bad a pun
+     places me at your mercy indeed. But seriously, simple
+     English in prose writing and in all narrative poetry
+     (however monumental language may become in abstract verse)
+     seems to me a treasure not to be foregone in favour of
+     German innovations. I know Coleridge went in latterly for as
+     much Germanism as his time could master; but his best genius
+     had then left him.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      It seems necessary to mention that I lectured in 1880, on the relation of
+      politics to art, and in printing the lecture I asked Rossetti to accept
+      the dedication of it, but this he declined to do in the generous terms I
+      have already referred to. The letter that accompanied his graceful refusal
+      is, however, so full of interesting personal matter that I offer it in
+      this place, with no further explanation than that my essay was designed to
+      show that just as great artists in past ages had participated in political
+      struggles, so now they should not hold themselves aloof from controversies
+      which immediately concern them:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     I must admit, at all hazards, that my friends here consider
+     me exceptionally averse to politics; and I suppose I must
+     be, for I never read a parliamentary debate in my life! At
+     the same time I will add that, among those whose opinions I
+     most value, some think me not altogether wrong when I
+     venture to speak of the momentary momentousness and eternal
+     futility of many noisiest questions. However, you must
+     simply view me as a nonentity in any practical relation to
+     such matters. You have spoken but too generously of a sonnet
+     of mine in your lecture just received. I have written a few
+     others of the sort (which by-the-bye would not prove me a
+     Tory), but felt no vocation&mdash;perhaps no right&mdash;-to print
+     them. I have always reproached myself as sorely amenable to
+     the condemnations of a very fine poem by Barberino, <i>On
+     Sloth against Sin</i>, which I translated in the Dante volume.
+     Sloth, alas! has but too much to answer for with me; and is
+     one of the reasons (though I will not say the only one), why
+     I have always fallen back on quality instead of quantity in
+     the little I have ever done. I think often with Coleridge:
+
+          Sloth jaundiced all: and from my graspless hand
+          Drop friendship&rsquo;s precious pearls like hour-glass sand.
+          I weep, yet stoop not: the faint anguish flows,
+          A dreamy pang in morning&rsquo;s feverish doze.
+
+     However, for all I might desire in the direction spoken of,
+     volition is vain without vocation; and I had better really
+     stick to knowing how to mix vermilion and ultramarine for a
+     flesh-grey, and how to manage their equivalents in verse. To
+     speak without sparing myself,&mdash;my mind is a childish one, if
+     to be isolated in Art is child&rsquo;s-play; at any rate I feel
+     that I do not attain to the more active and practical of the
+     mental functions of manhood. I can say this to you, because
+     I know you will make the best and not the worst of me; and
+     better than such feasible best I do not wish to appear. Thus
+     you see I don&rsquo;t think my name ought to head your
+     introductory paragraph&mdash;and there an end. And now of your
+     new lecture, and of the long letter I lately had from you.
+     At some moment I should like to know which pieces among the
+     translations are specially your favourites. Of the three
+     names you leash together as somewhat those of sensualists,
+     Cecco Angiolieri is really the only one&mdash;as for the
+     respectable Cino, he would be shocked indeed, though
+     certainly there are a few oddities bearing that way in the
+     sonnets between him and Dante (who is again similarly
+     reproached by his friend Cavalcanti), but I really <i>do</i>
+     suspect that in some cases similar to the one in question
+     about Cino (though not Guido and Dante) politics were really
+     meant where love was used as a metaphor.... I assure you,
+     you cannot say too much to me of this or any other work of
+     yours; in fact, I wish that we should communicate about
+     them. I have been thinking yet more on the relations of
+     politics and art. I do think seriously on consideration that
+     not only my own sluggishness, but vital fact itself, must
+     set to a great extent a <i>veto</i> against the absolute
+     participation of artists in politics. When has it ever been
+     effected? True, Cellini was a bravo and David a good deal
+     like a murderer, and in these capacities they were not
+     without their political use in very turbulent times. But
+     when the attempt was made to turn Michael Angelo into a
+     &ldquo;utility man&rdquo; of that kind, he did (it is true) some
+     patriotic duty in the fortification of Florence; but it is
+     no less a fact that, when he had done all that he thought
+     became him, he retired to a certain trackless and forgotten
+     tower, and there stayed in some sort of peace (though much
+     in request) till he could lead his own life again; nor
+     should we forget the occasion on which he did not hesitate
+     even to betake himself to Venice as a refuge. Yet M. Angelo
+     was in every way a patriot, a philosopher, and a hero. I do
+     not say this to undervalue the scope of your theory. I think
+     possibilities are generally so much behind desirabilities
+     that there is no harm in any degree of incitement in the
+     right <i>direction</i>; and that is assuredly mental activity of
+     <i>all</i> kinds. I judge you cannot suspect <i>me</i> of thinking the
+     apotheosis of the early Italian poets (though surely
+     spiritual beauty, and not sensuality, was their general aim)
+     of more importance than the &ldquo;unity of a great nation.&rdquo; But
+     it is in my minute power to deal successfully (I feel) with
+     the one, while no such entity, as I am, can advance or
+     retard the other; and thus mine must needs be the poorer
+     part. Nor (with alas, and again alas!) will Italy or another
+     twice have her day in its fulness.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      I happened to have said in speaking of self-indulgence among artists, that
+      there probably existed those to whom it seemed more important to preserve
+      such a pitiful possession as the poetical remains of Cecco Angiolieri than
+      to secure the unity of a great nation. Rossetti half suspected I meant
+      this for a playful backhanded blow at himself (for Cecco was a great
+      favourite with him), and protested that no such individual could exist. I
+      defended my charge by quoting Keats&rsquo;s&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+           ... the silver flow
+     Of Hero&rsquo;s tears, the swoon of Imogen,
+     Fair Pastorella in the bandit&rsquo;s den,
+     Are things to brood on with more ardency
+     Than the death-day of empires.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      But Rossetti grew weary of the jest:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     I must protest that what you quote from Keats about &ldquo;Hero&rsquo;s
+     tears,&rdquo; etc., fails to meet the text. Neither Shakspeare nor
+     Spenser assuredly was a Cecco; Marlowe may be most meant as
+     to &ldquo;Hero,&rdquo; and he perhaps affords the shadow of a parallel
+     in career though not in work.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      The extract from Rosetti&rsquo;s letters with which I shall close this chapter
+      is perhaps the most interesting yet made:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     One point I must still raise, viz., that I, for one, cannot
+     conceive, even as the Ghost of a Flea, the ideal individual
+     who considers the Poetical Remains of Cecco Angiolieri of
+     more importance than the unity of a great nation! I think
+     this would have been better if much modified. Say for
+     instance&mdash;&ldquo;A thing of some moment even while the contest is
+     waging for the political unity of a great nation.&rdquo; This is
+     the utmost reach surely of human comparative valuation. I
+     think you have brought in Benvenuto and Michael much to the
+     purpose. Shall I give you a parallel in your own style?
+
+     During the months for which poet Coleridge became private
+     Cumberback (a name in which he said his horse would have
+     concurred), it seems strange that, in such stirring times,
+     his regiment should not have been ordered off on foreign
+     service. In such case that pre-eminent member of the awkward
+     squad would assuredly have been the very first man killed.
+     Should we have been more the gainers by his patriotism or
+     the losers by his poetry? The very last man killed in the
+     last <i>sortie</i> from Paris during the Prussian siege (he
+     <i>would</i> go behind a buttress to &ldquo;pot&rdquo; a Prussian after
+     orders were given to retire, and so got &ldquo;potted&rdquo; himself)
+     was Henri Regnault, a painter, whose brilliant work was a
+     guiding beacon on the road of improvement in French methods
+     of art, if not in intellectual force. Who shall fail to
+     honour the noble ardour which drew him from the security of
+     his studies in Tunis to partake his country&rsquo;s danger? Yet
+     who shall forbear to sigh in thinking that, but for this,
+     his progressing work might still yearly be an element in
+     art-progress for Europe? Gérome and others betook themselves
+     to England instead, and are still benefiting the cause for
+     which they were before all things born. It was David who
+     said, &ldquo;Si on tirait à mitraille sur les artistes, on n&rsquo;y
+     tuerait pas un seul patriote!&rdquo; <i>He</i> was a patriot homicide,
+     and spoke probably what was true in the sense in which he
+     meant it. As I said, I am glad you turned Ben and Mike to
+     account, but the above is in some respects an open question.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      I have, as I say, a further batch of letters to introduce, but as these
+      were, for the most part, written after an event which forms a land-mark in
+      our acquaintance (I mean the occasion of our first meeting), I judge it is
+      best to reserve them for a later section of this book. There are two
+      forms, and, so far as I know, two only, in which a body of letters can be
+      published with justice to the writer. Of these the first and most obvious
+      form is to offer them chronologically <i>in extenso</i> or with only such
+      eliminations as seem inevitable, and the second is to tabulate them
+      according to subject-matter, and print them in the order not of date but
+      substance. There are advantages attending each method, and corresponding
+      disadvantages also. The temptation to adopt the first of these was, in
+      this case of Rossetti&rsquo;s letters, almost insurmountable, for nothing can be
+      more charming in epistolary style than the easy grace with which the
+      writer passes from point to point, evolving one idea out of another,
+      interlinking subject with subject, and building up a fabric of which the
+      meaning is everywhere inwoven. In this respect Rossetti&rsquo;s letters are
+      almost as perfect as anything that ever left his hand; and, in freedom of
+      phrase, in power of throwing off parenthetical reflections always
+      faultlessly enunciated, in play of humour, often in eloquence (never
+      becoming declamatory, and calling on &ldquo;Styx or Stars&rdquo;), sometimes in
+      pathos, Rossetti&rsquo;s letters are, in a word, admirable. They are comparable
+      in these respects with the best things yet done in English,&mdash;as
+      pleasing and graceful as Cowper&rsquo;s letters, broader in range of subject
+      than the letters of Keats, easier and more colloquial than those of
+      Coleridge, and with less appearance of being intended for the public eye
+      than is the case with the letters of Byron and of Shelley. Rossetti&rsquo;s
+      letters have, moreover, a value quite apart from the merits of their
+      epistolary style, in so far as they contain almost the only expression
+      extant of his opinions on literary questions. And this is the circumstance
+      that has chiefly weighed with me to offer them in fragmentary form
+      interspersed with elucidatory comment bearing principally upon the
+      occasions that called them forth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Such then as I have described was the nature of my intercourse with
+      Rossetti during the first year and a half of our correspondence, and now
+      the time had come when I was to meet my friend for the first time face to
+      face. The elasticity of sympathy by which a man of genius, surrounded by
+      constant friends, could yet bend to a new-comer who was a stranger and
+      twenty-five years his junior, and think and feel with him; the generous
+      appreciativeness by which he could bring himself to consider the first
+      efforts of one quite unknown; and then the unselfishness that seemed
+      always to prefer the claims of others to his own great claims, could
+      command only the return of unqualified allegiance. Such were the feelings
+      with which I went forth to my first meeting with Rossetti, and if at any
+      later date, the ardour of my regard for him in any measure suffered
+      modification, be sure when the time comes to touch upon it I shall make no
+      more concealment of the causes that led to such a change than I have made
+      of those circumstances, however personal in primary interest, that
+      generated a friendship so unusual and to me so serious and important.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0007" id="link2HCH0007">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER VII.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      It was in the autumn of 1880 that I saw Rossetti for the first time. Being
+      then rather reduced in health I contemplated a visit to the sea-side and
+      wrote saying that in passing through London I should avail myself of his
+      oft-repeated invitation to visit him. I gave him this warning of my
+      intention, remembering his declared dread of being taken unawares, but I
+      came to know at a subsequent period that for one who was within the inner
+      circle of his friends the necessity to advise him of a visit was by no
+      means binding. His reception of my intimation of an intention to call upon
+      him was received with an amount of epistolary ceremony which I recognise
+      now by the light of further acquaintance as eminently characteristic of
+      the man, although curiously contradictory of his unceremonious habits of
+      daily life. The fact is that Rossetti was of an excessively nervous
+      temperament, and rarely if ever underwent an ordeal more trying than a
+      first meeting with any one to whom for some time previously he had looked
+      forward with interest. Hence by return of the post that bore him my
+      missive came two letters, the one obviously written and posted within an
+      hour or two of the other. In the first of these he expressed courteously
+      his pleasure at the prospect of seeing me, and appointed 8.30 p.m. the
+      following evening as his dinner hour at his house in Cheyne Walk. The
+      second letter begged me to come at 5.30 or 6 p.m., so that we might have a
+      long evening. &ldquo;You will, I repeat,&rdquo; he says, &ldquo;recognise the
+      hole-and-cornerest of all existences in this big barn of mine; but come
+      early and I shall read you some ballads, and we can talk of many things.&rdquo;
+       An hour later than the arrival of these letters came a third epistle,
+      which ran: &ldquo;Of course when I speak of your dining with me, I mean
+      tête-à-tête and without ceremony of any kind. I usually dine in my studio
+      and in my painting coat!&rdquo; I had before me a five hours&rsquo; journey to London,
+      so that in order to reach Chelsea at 6 P.M., I must needs set out at
+      mid-day, but oblivious of this necessity, Rossetti had actually posted a
+      fourth letter on the morning of the day on which we were to meet begging
+      me not on any account to talk, in the course of our interview, of a
+      certain personal matter upon which we had corresponded. This fourth and
+      final message came to hand the morning after the meeting, when I had the
+      satisfaction to reflect that (owing more perhaps to the plethora of other
+      subjects of interest than to any suspicion of its being tabooed) I had
+      luckily eschewed the proscribed topic.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Cheyne Walk was unknown to me at the time in question, except as the
+      locality in and near which many men and women eminent in literature
+      resided. It seems hard to realise that this was the case as recently as
+      two years ago, now that so short an interval has associated it in one&rsquo;s
+      mind with memories which seem to cover a large part of one&rsquo;s life. The
+      Walk is not now exactly as picturesque as it appears in certain familiar
+      old engravings; the new embankment and the gardens that separate it from
+      the main thoroughfare have taken something from its beauty, but it still
+      possesses many attractions, and among them a look of age which contrasts
+      agreeably with the spic-and-span newness of neighbouring places. I found
+      Rossetti&rsquo;s house, No. 16, answering in external appearances to the frank
+      description he gave of it. It stands about mid-way between the Chelsea
+      pier and the new redbrick mansions erected on the Chelsea embankment. It
+      seems to be the oldest house in the Walk, and the exceptional proportions
+      of its gate-piers, and the weight and mass of its gate and railings,
+      suggests that probably at some period it stood alone, and commanded as
+      grounds a large part of the space now occupied by the adjoining
+      residences. Behind the house, during eighteen years of Rossetti&rsquo;s
+      occupancy, there was a garden of almost an acre in extent, covering by
+      much the larger part of the space enclosed by a block of four streets
+      forming a square. At No. 4 Maclise had lived and died; at the same house
+      George Eliot, after her marriage with Mr. Cross, had come to live; at No.
+      5, in the second street to the westward, Thomas Carlyle was still living,
+      and a little beyond Cheyne Row stood the modest cottage wherein Turner
+      died. Rossetti&rsquo;s house had to me the appearance of a plain Queen Anne
+      erection, much mutilated by the introduction of unsightly bay-windows; the
+      brickwork seemed to be falling into decay; the paint to be in serious need
+      of renewal; the windows to be dull with the accumulation of the dust of
+      years; the sills to bear the suspicion of cobwebs; the angles of the steps
+      and the untrodden flags of the courtyard to be here and there overgrown
+      with moss and weeds; and round the walls and up the reveals of doors and
+      windows were creeping the tangled branches of the wildest ivy that ever
+      grew untouched by shears. Such was the exterior of the home of the
+      poet-painter when I walked up to it on the autumn evening of my first
+      visit, and the interior of the house was at once like and unlike the
+      exterior. The hall had a puzzling look of equal nobility and shabbiness.
+      The floor was paved with beautiful white marble, which however, was partly
+      covered with a strip of worn cocoa-nut matting; the ceiling was in one of
+      its sections gracefully groined, and in each of the walls, which were
+      lofty, there was an arched recess containing a piece of sculpture; an old
+      inlaid rosewood clock filled a bulkhead on one side facing the door, and
+      on the corresponding side stood a massive gas branch. A mezzotint
+      lithograph by Legros was the only pictorial decoration of the walls, which
+      were plain, and seemed not to have been distempered for many years. Three
+      doors led out of the hall, one at each side, and one in front, and two
+      corridors opened into it, but there was no sign of staircase, nor had it
+      any light except such as was borrowed from the fanlight that looked into
+      the porch. These facts I noted in the few minutes I stood waiting in the
+      hall, but during the many months in which subsequently that house was my
+      own home as well as Rossetti&rsquo;s, I came to see that the changes which the
+      building must have undergone since the period of its erection, had so
+      filled it with crooks and corners as to bewilder the most ingenious
+      observer to account for its peculiarities.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Very soon Rossetti came to me through the doorway in front, which proved
+      to be the entrance to his studio. Holding forth both hands and crying
+      &lsquo;Hulloa,&rsquo; he gave me that cheery, hearty greeting which I came to
+      recognise as his alone, perhaps, in warmth and unfailing geniality among
+      all the men of our circle. It was Italian in its spontaneity, and yet it
+      was English in its manly reserve, and I remember with much tenderness of
+      feeling that never to the last (not even when sickness saddened him, or
+      after an absence of a few days or even hours) did it fail him when meeting
+      with those friends to whom to the last he was really attached. Leading the
+      way into the studio, he introduced me to his brother, who was there upon
+      one of the evening visits, which at intervals of a week he was at that
+      time making, with unfailing regularity. I should have described Rossetti,
+      at this time, as a man who looked quite ten years older than his actual
+      age, which was fifty-two, of full middle height and inclining to
+      corpulence, with a round face that ought, one thought, to be ruddy but was
+      pale, large grey eyes with a steady introspecting look, surmounted by
+      broad protrusive brows and a clearly-pencilled ridge over the nose, which
+      was well cut and had large breathing nostrils. The mouth and chin were
+      hidden beneath a heavy moustache and abundant beard, which grew up to the
+      ears, and had been of a mixed black-brown and auburn, and were now
+      streaked with grey. The forehead was large, round, without protuberances,
+      and very gently receding to where thin black curls, that had once been
+      redundant, began to tumble down to the ears. The entire configuration of
+      the head and face seemed to me singularly noble, and from the eyes
+      upwards, full of beauty. He wore a pair of spectacles, and, in reading, a
+      second pair over the first: but these took little from the sense of power
+      conveyed by those steady eyes, and that &ldquo;bar of Michael Angelo.&rdquo; His dress
+      was not conspicuous, being however rather negligent than otherwise, and
+      noticeable, if at all, only for a straight sack-coat buttoned at the
+      throat, descending at least to the knees, and having large pockets cut
+      into it perpendicularly at the sides. This garment was, I afterwards
+      found, one of the articles of various kinds made to the author&rsquo;s own
+      design. When he spoke, even in exchanging the preliminary courtesies of an
+      opening conversation, I thought his voice the richest I had ever known any
+      one to possess. It was a full deep barytone, capable of easy modulation,
+      and with undertones of infinite softness and sweetness, yet, as I
+      afterwards found, with almost illimitable compass, and with every
+      gradation of tone at command, for the recitation or reading of poetry. The
+      studio was a large room probably measuring thirty feet by twenty, and
+      structurally as puzzling as the other parts of the house. A series of
+      columns and arches on one side suggested that the room had almost
+      certainly been at some period the site of an important staircase with a
+      wide well, and on the other side a broad mullioned window reaching to the
+      ceiling, seemed certainly to bear record of the occupant&rsquo;s own
+      contribution to the peculiarities of the edifice. The fireplace was at an
+      end of the room, and over and at each side of it were hung a number of
+      fine drawings in chalk, chiefly studies of heads, with here and there a
+      water-colour figure piece, all from Rossetti&rsquo;s hand. At the opposite end
+      of the room hung some symbolic designs in chalk, <i>Pandora</i> and <i>Proserpina</i>
+      being among the number, and easels of various sizes, some very large,
+      bearing pictures in differing stages of completion, occupied positions on
+      all sides of the floor, leaving room only for a sofa, with a bookcase
+      behind, two old cabinets, two large low easy chairs, and a writing desk
+      and chair at a window at the side, which was heavily darkened by the thick
+      foliage of the trees that grew in the garden beyond.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Dropping down on the sofa with his head laid low and his feet thrown up in
+      a favourite attitude on the back, which must, I imagine, have been at
+      least as easy as it was elegant, he began the conversation by bantering me
+      upon what he called my &ldquo;robustious&rdquo; appearance compared with what he had
+      been led to expect from gloomy reports of uncertain health. After a series
+      of playful touches (all done in the easiest conceivable way, and conveying
+      any impression on earth save the right one, that a first meeting with any
+      man, however young and harmless, was little less than a tragic event to
+      Rossetti) he glanced one by one at certain of the topics that had arisen
+      in the course of our correspondence. I perceived that he was a ready,
+      fluent, and graceful talker, with a remarkable incisiveness of speech, and
+      a trick of dignifying ordinary topics in words which, without rising above
+      conversation, were so exactly, though freely enunciated, as would have
+      admitted of their being reported exactly as they fell from his lips. In
+      some of these respects I found his brother William resemble him, though,
+      if I may describe the talk of a dead friend by contrasting it with that of
+      a living one bearing a natural affinity to it, I will say that Gabriel&rsquo;s
+      conversation was perhaps more spontaneous, and had more variety of tone
+      with less range of subject, together with the same precision and
+      perspicuity. Very soon the talk became general, and then Rossetti spoke
+      without appearance of reserve of his two or three intimate friends,
+      telling me, among other things, of Theodore Watts, that he &ldquo;had a head
+      exactly like that of Napoleon I., whom Watts,&rdquo; he said with a chuckle,
+      &ldquo;detests more than any character in history; depend upon it,&rdquo; he added,
+      &ldquo;such a head was not given to him for nothing;&rdquo; that Frederick Shields was
+      as emotional as Shelley, and Ford Madox Brown, whom I had met, as
+      sententious as Dr. Johnson. I kept no sort of record of what passed upon
+      the occasion in question, but I remember that Rossetti seemed to be
+      playfully battering his friends in their absence in the assured
+      consciousness that he was doing so in the presence of a well-wisher; and
+      it was amusing to observe that, after any particularly lively sally, he
+      would pause to say something in a sobered tone that was meant to convey
+      the idea that he was really very jealous of his friends&rsquo; reputation, and
+      was merely for the sake of amusement giving rein to a sportive fancy.
+      During dinner (and contrary to his declared habit, we did not dine in the
+      studio) he talked a good deal about Oliver Madox Brown, for whom I had
+      conceived a warm admiration, and to whom I had about that time addressed a
+      sonnet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You had a sincere admiration of the boy&rsquo;s gifts?&rdquo; I asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Assuredly. I have always said that twenty years after his death his name
+      will be a familiar one. <i>The Black Swan</i> is a powerful story,
+      although I must honestly say that it displays in its central incident a
+      certain torpidity that to me is painful. Undoubtedly Oliver had genius,
+      and must have done great things had he lived. His death was a grievous
+      blow to his father. I&rsquo;m glad you&rsquo;ve written that sonnet; I wanted you to
+      toss up your cap for Nolly.&rdquo; He spoke of Oliver&rsquo;s father as indisputably
+      one of the greatest of living colourists, inquired earnestly into the
+      progress of his frescoes at Manchester, for one of the figures in which I
+      had sat, and showed me a little water-colour drawing made by Oliver
+      himself when very young. Dinner being now over, I asked Rossetti to redeem
+      his promise to read one of his new ballads; and as his brother, who had
+      often heard it before, expressed his readiness to hear it again, he
+      responded readily, and, taking a small manuscript volume out of a section
+      of the bookcase that had been locked, read us <i>The White Ship</i>. I
+      have spoken of the ballad as a poem at an earlier stage, but it remains to
+      me, in this place, to describe the effect produced upon me by the author&rsquo;s
+      reading. It seemed to me that I never heard anything at all matchable with
+      Rossetti&rsquo;s elocution; his rich deep voice lent an added music to the music
+      of the verse: it rose and fell in the passages descriptive of the wreck
+      with something of the surge and sibilation of the sea itself; in the
+      tenderer passages it was soft as a woman&rsquo;s, and in the pathetic stanzas
+      with which the ballad closes it was profoundly moving. Effective as the
+      reading sounded in that studio, I remember at the moment to have doubted
+      if it would prove quite so effective from a public platform. Perhaps there
+      seemed to be so much insistence on the rhythm, and so prolonged a tension
+      of the rhyme sounds, as would run the risk of a charge of monotony if
+      falling on ears less concerned with points of metrical beauty than with
+      fundamental substance. Personally, however, I found the reading in the
+      very highest degree enjoyable and inspiring.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The evening was gone by the time the ballad was ended; and it was arranged
+      that upon my return to London from the house of a friend at the sea-side I
+      should again dine with Rossetti, and sleep the night at Cheyne Walk. I was
+      invited to come early in order to see certain pictures by day-light, and
+      it was then I saw the painter&rsquo;s most important work,&mdash;the <i>Dantés
+      Dream</i>, which finally (and before Rossetti was made aware of any steps
+      being taken to that end) I had prevailed with Alderman Samuelson to
+      purchase for the public gallery at Liverpool. At my request, though only
+      after some importunity, Rossetti read again his <i>White Ship</i>, and
+      afterwards <i>Rose Mary</i>, the latter of which he told me had been
+      written in the country shortly after the appearance of the first volume of
+      poems. He remarked that it had occupied three weeks in the writing, and
+      that the physical prostration ensuing had been more than he would care to
+      go through again. I observed on this head, that though highly finished in
+      every stanza, the ballad had an impetuous rush of emotion, and swift
+      current of diction, suggesting speed in its composition, as contrasted
+      with the laboured deliberation which the sonnets, for example, appeared to
+      denote. I asked if his work usually took much out of him in physical
+      energy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not my painting, certainly,&rdquo; he replied, &ldquo;though in early years it
+      tormented me more than enough. Now I paint by a set of unwritten but
+      clearly-defined rules, which I could teach to any man as systematically as
+      you could teach arithmetic; indeed, quite recently I sat all day for that
+      very purpose with Shields, who is not so great a colourist as he is a
+      draughtsman: he is a great draughtsman&mdash;none better now living,
+      unless it is Leighton or Sir Noel Paton.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Still,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;there&rsquo;s usually a good deal in a picture of yours beside
+      what you can do by rule.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Fundamental conception, no doubt, but beyond that not much. In painting,
+      after all, there is in the less important details something of the craft
+      of a superior carpenter, and the part of a picture that is not mechanical
+      is often trivial enough. I don&rsquo;t wonder, now,&rdquo; he added, with a suspicion
+      of a twinkle in the eye, &ldquo;if you imagine that one comes down here in a
+      fine frenzy every morning to daub canvas?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I certainly imagine,&rdquo; I replied, &ldquo;that a superior carpenter would find it
+      hard to paint another <i>Dante&rsquo;s Dream</i>, which some people consider the
+      best example yet seen of the English school.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is friendly nonsense,&rdquo; rejoined my frank host, &ldquo;there is now no
+      English school whatever.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;if you deny the name to others who lay more claim to it,
+      will you not at least allow it to the three or four painters who started
+      with you in life?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not at all, unless it is to Brown, and he&rsquo;s more French than English;
+      Hunt and Jones have no more claim to the name than I have. As for all the
+      prattle about pre-Raphaelitism, I confess to you I am weary of it, and
+      long have been. Why should we go on talking about the visionary vanities
+      of half-a-dozen boys? We&rsquo;ve all grown out of them, I hope, by now.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I remarked that the pre-Raphaelite movement was no doubt a serious one at
+      the beginning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What you call the movement was serious enough, but the banding together
+      under that title was all a joke. We had at that time a phenomenal
+      antipathy to the Academy, and in sheer love of being outlawed signed our
+      pictures with the well-known initials.&rdquo; I have preserved the substance of
+      what Rossetti said on this point, and, as far as possible, the actual
+      words have been given. On many subsequent occasions he expressed himself
+      in the same way: assuredly with as much seeming depreciation of the
+      painter&rsquo;s &ldquo;craft,&rdquo; although certain examples of modern art called forth
+      his warmest eulogies. In serious moods he would speak of pictures by
+      Millais, Watts, Leighton, Burne Jones, and others, as works of the highest
+      genius.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Reverting to my inquiry as to whether his work took much out of him, he
+      remarked that his poetry usually did. &ldquo;In that respect,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;I am
+      the reverse of Swinburne. For his method of production inspiration is
+      indeed the word. With me the case is different. I lie on the couch, the
+      racked and tortured medium, never permitted an instant&rsquo;s surcease of agony
+      until the thing on hand is finished.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was obvious that what Rossetti meant by being racked and tortured, was
+      that his subject possessed him; that he was enslaved by his own &ldquo;shaping
+      imagination.&rdquo; Assuredly he was the reverse of a costive poet: impulse was,
+      to use his own phrase, fully developed in his muse.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I made some playful allusion, assuredly not meant to involve Mr.
+      Swinburne, to Sheridan&rsquo;s epigram on easy writing and hard reading; and to
+      the Abbé de Marolles, who exultingly told some poet that his verses cost
+      no trouble: &ldquo;They cost you what they are worth,&rdquo; replied the bard.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;One benefit I do derive,&rdquo; Rossetti added, &ldquo;as a result of my method of
+      composition; my work becomes condensed. Probably the man does not live who
+      could write what I have written more briefly than I have done.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Emphasis and condensation, I remarked, were indubitably the
+      characteristics of his muse. He then read me a great body of the new
+      sonnets of <i>The House of Life</i>. Sitting in that studio listening to
+      his reading and looking up meantime at the chalk-drawings that hung on the
+      walls, I realised how truly he had said, in correspondence, that the
+      feeling pervading his pictures was such as his poetry ought to suggest.
+      The affinity between the two seemed to me at that moment to be complete:
+      the same half-sad, half-resigned view of life, the same glimpses of hope,
+      the same foreshadowings of gloom.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You doubtless think it odd,&rdquo; he said at one moment, &ldquo;to hear an old
+      fellow read such love-poetry as much of this is, but I may tell you that
+      the larger part of it, though still unpublished, was written when I was as
+      young as you are. When I print these sonnets, I shall probably affix a
+      note saying, that though many of them are of recent production, not a few
+      are obviously the work of earlier years.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I expressed admiration of the pathetic sonnet entitled <i>Without Her</i>.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I cannot tell you,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;at what terrible moment it was wrung from
+      me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He had read it with tears of voice, subsiding at length into suppressed
+      sobs and intervals of silence. As though to explain away this emotion he
+      said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All poetry, that is really poetry, affects me deeply and often to tears.
+      It does not need to be pathetic or yet tender to produce such a result. I
+      have known in my life two men, and two only, who are similarly sensitive&mdash;Tennyson,
+      and my old friend and neighbour William Bell Scott. I once heard Tennyson
+      read <i>Maud</i>, and whilst the fiery passages were delivered with a
+      voice and vehemence which he alone of living men can compass, the softer
+      passages and the songs made the tears course down his cheeks. Morris is a
+      fine reader, and so, of his kind, though a little prone to sing-song, is
+      Swinburne. Browning both reads and talks well&mdash;at least he did so
+      when I knew him intimately as a young man.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Rossetti went on to say that he had been among Browning&rsquo;s earliest
+      admirers. As a boy he had seen something signed by the then unknown name
+      of the author of <i>Paracelsus</i>, and wrote to him. The result was an
+      intimacy. He spoke with warmest admiration of <i>Child Roland</i>; and
+      referred to Elizabeth Barrett Browning in terms of regard, and, I think I
+      may say, of reverence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I asked if he had ever heard Ruskin read. He replied:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I must have done so, but remember nothing clearly. On one occasion,
+      however, I heard him deliver a speech, and that was something never to
+      forget. When we were young, we helped Frederick Denison Maurice by taking
+      classes at the Working Men&rsquo;s College, and there Charles Kingsley and
+      others made speeches and delivered lectures. Ruskin was asked to do
+      something of the kind and at length consented. He made no sort of
+      preparation for the occasion: I know he did not; we were together at his
+      father&rsquo;s house the whole of the day in question. At night we drove down to
+      the College, and then he made the finest speech I ever heard. I doubted at
+      the time if any written words of his were equal to it! such flaming
+      diction! such emphasis! such appeal!&mdash;yet he had written his first
+      and second volumes of <i>Modern Painters</i> by that time.&rdquo; I have
+      reproduced the substance of what Rossetti said on the occasion of my
+      return visit, and, by help of letters written at the time to a friend, I
+      have in many cases recalled his exact words. A certain incisiveness of
+      speech which distinguished his conversation, I confess myself scarcely
+      able to convey more than a suggestion of; as Mr. Watts has said in <i>The
+      Athenæum</i>, his talk showed an incisiveness so perfect that it had often
+      the pleasurable surprise of wit. Rossetti had both wit and humour, but
+      these, during the time that I knew him, were only occasionally present in
+      his conversation, while the incisiveness was always conspicuous. A certain
+      quiet play of sportive fancy, developing at intervals into banter, was
+      sometimes observable in his talk with the younger and more familiar of his
+      acquaintances, but for the most part his conversation was serious, and,
+      during the time I knew him, often sad. I speedily observed that he was not
+      of the number of those who lead or sustain conversation. He required to be
+      constantly interrogated, but as a negative talker, if I may so describe
+      him, he was by much the best I had heard. Catching one&rsquo;s drift before one
+      had revealed it, and anticipating one&rsquo;s objections, he would go on from
+      point to point, almost removing the necessity for more than occasional
+      words. Nevertheless, as I say, he was not, in the conversations I have
+      heard, a leading conversationalist; his talk was never more than talk, and
+      in saying that it was uniformly sustained yet never declamatory, I think I
+      convey an idea both of its merits and limitations.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I understood that Rossetti had never at any period of his life been an
+      early riser, and at the time of the interview in question he was more than
+      ever before prone to reverse the natural order of waking and sleeping
+      hours. I am convinced that during the time I was with him only the
+      necessity of securing a certain short interval of daylight, by which it
+      was possible to paint, prevailed with him to rise before noon. Alluding to
+      this idiosyncrasy, he said: &ldquo;I lie as long, or say as late, as Dr. Johnson
+      used to do. You shall never know, until you discover it for yourself, at
+      what hour I rise.&rdquo; He sat up until four A.M. on this night of my second
+      visit,&mdash;no unaccustomed thing, as I afterwards learned. I must not
+      omit the mention of one feature of the conversation, revealing to me a new
+      side of his character, or, more properly, a new phase of his mind, which
+      gave me subsequently an infinity of anxiety and distress. Branching off at
+      a late hour from some entirely foreign topic, he begged me to tell him the
+      facts of some unlucky debate in which I had long before been engaged on a
+      public platform with some one who had attacked him. He had heard a report
+      of what passed at a time when my name was unknown to him, as also was that
+      of his assailant. Being forewarned by William Rossetti of his brother&rsquo;s
+      peculiar sensitiveness to critical attack, and having, moreover, observed
+      something of the kind myself, I tried to avoid a circumstantial statement
+      of what passed. But Rossetti was, as has been said by one who knew him
+      well, &ldquo;of imagination all compact,&rdquo; and my obvious desire to shelve the
+      subject suggested to his mind a thousand inferences infinitely more
+      damaging than the fact. To avoid such a result I told him all, and there
+      was little in the way of attack to repeat beyond a few unwelcome
+      strictures on his poem <i>Jenny</i>. He listened but too eagerly to what I
+      was saying, and then in a voice slower, softer, and more charged, perhaps,
+      with emotion than I had heard before, said it was the old story, which
+      began ten years before, and would go on until he had been hunted and
+      hounded to his grave. Startled, and indeed, appalled by so grave a view of
+      what to me had seemed no more than an error of critical judgment, coupled
+      perhaps, with some intemperance of condemnation, I prayed of him to think
+      no more of the matter, reproached myself with having yielded to his
+      importunity, and begged him to remember that if one man held the opinions
+      I had repeated, many men held contrary ones.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was right of you to tell me when I asked you,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;though my
+      friends usually keep such facts from my knowledge. As to <i>Jenny</i>, it
+      is a sermon, nothing less. As I say, it is a sermon, and on a great world,
+      to most men unknown, though few consider themselves ignorant of it. But of
+      this conspiracy to persecute me&mdash;what remains to say but that it is
+      widespread and remorseless&mdash;one cannot but feel it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I assured him there existed no conspiracy to persecute him: that he had
+      ardent upholders everywhere, though it was true that few men had found
+      crueller critics. He shook his head, and said I knew that what he had
+      alleged was true, namely that an organised conspiracy existed, having for
+      its object to annoy and injure him. Growing a little impatient of this
+      delusion, so tenaciously held, against all show of reason, I told him that
+      it was no more than the fever of an oppressed brain brought about by his
+      reclusive habits of life, by shunning intercourse with all save some half
+      dozen or more friends. &ldquo;You tell me,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;that you have rarely been
+      outside these walls for some years, and your brain has meanwhile been
+      breeding a host of hallucinations, like cobwebs in a dark corner. You have
+      only to go abroad, and the fresh air will blow these things away.&rdquo; But
+      continuing for some moments longer in the same strain, he came to closer
+      quarters and distressed me by naming as enemies three or four men who had
+      throughout life been his friends, who have spoken of him since his death
+      in words of admiration and even affection, and who had for a time fallen
+      away from him or called on him but rarely, from contingencies due to any
+      cause but alienated friendship.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At length the time had arrived when it was considered prudent to retire.
+      &ldquo;You are to sleep in Watts&rsquo;s room to-night,&rdquo; he said: and then in reply to
+      a look of inquiry he added, &ldquo;He comes here at least twice a week, talking
+      until four o&rsquo;clock in the morning upon everything from poetry to the
+      Pleiades, and driving away the bogies, and as he lives at Putney Hill, it
+      is necessary to have a bed for him.&rdquo; Before going into my room he
+      suggested that I should go and look, at his. It was entered from another
+      and smaller room which he said that he used as a breakfast room. The outer
+      room was made fairly bright and cheerful by a glittering chandelier (the
+      property once, he told me, of David Garrick), and from the rustle of trees
+      against the window-pane one perceived that it overlooked the garden; but
+      the inner room was dark with heavy hangings around the walls as well as
+      the bed, and thick velvet curtains before the windows, so that the candles
+      in our hands seemed unable to light it, and our voices sounded thick and
+      muffled. An enormous black oak chimney-piece of curious design, having an
+      ivory crucifix on the largest of its ledges, covered a part of one side
+      and reached to the ceiling. Cabinets, and the usual furniture of a
+      bedroom, occupied places about the floor: and in the middle of it, and
+      before a little couch, stood a small table on which was a wire lantern
+      containing a candle which Rossetti lit from the open one in his hand&mdash;another
+      candle meantime lying by its side. I remarked that he probably burned a
+      light all night. He said that was so. &ldquo;My curse,&rdquo; he added, &ldquo;is insomnia.
+      Two or three hours hence I shall get up and lie on the couch, and, to pass
+      away a weary hour, read this book&rdquo;&mdash;a volume of Boswell&rsquo;s <i>Johnson</i>
+      which I noticed he took out of the bookcase as we left the studio. It did
+      not escape me that on the table stood two small bottles sealed and
+      labelled, together with a little measuring-glass. Without looking further
+      at it, but with a terrible suspicion growing over me, I asked if that were
+      his medicine.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They say there is a skeleton in every cupboard,&rdquo; he said in a low voice,
+      &ldquo;and that&rsquo;s mine; it is chloral.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      When I reached the room that I was to occupy during the night, I found it,
+      like Rossetti&rsquo;s bedroom, heavy with hangings, and black with antique
+      picture panels, with a ceiling (unlike that of the other rooms in the
+      house), out of all reach or sight, and so dark from various causes, that
+      the candle seemed only to glimmer in it&mdash;indeed to add to the
+      darkness by making it felt. Mr. Watts, as Rossetti told me, was entirely
+      indifferent to these eerie surroundings, even if his fine subjective
+      intellect, more prone to meditate than to observe, was ever for an instant
+      conscious of them; but on myself I fear they weighed heavily, and
+      augmented the feeling of closeness and gloom which had been creeping upon
+      me since I entered the house. Scattered about the room in most admired
+      disorder were some outlandish and unheard-of books, and all kinds of
+      antiquarian and Oriental oddities, which books and oddities I afterwards
+      learnt had been picked up at various times by the occupant in his
+      ramblings about Chelsea and elsewhere, and never yet taken away by him,
+      but left there apparently to scare the chambermaid: such as old carved
+      heads and gargoyles of the most grinning and ghastly expression, Burmese
+      and Chinese Buddhas in soapstone of every degree of placid ugliness,
+      together, I am bound by force of truth to admit, with one piece of carved
+      Italian marble in bas-relief, of great interest and beauty. Such was my
+      bed-chamber for the night, and little wonder if it threatened to murder
+      the innocent sleep. But it was later than 4 A.M., and wearied nature must
+      needs assert herself, and so I lay down amidst the odour of bygone ages.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Presently Rossetti came in, for no purpose that I can remember, except to
+      say that he had enjoyed my visit I replied that I should never forget it.
+      &ldquo;If you decide to settle in London,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;I trust you &lsquo;ll come and
+      live with me, and then many such evenings must remove the memory of this
+      one.&rdquo; I laughed, for I thought what he hinted at to be of the remotest
+      likelihood. &ldquo;I have just taken sixty grains of chloral,&rdquo; he said, as he
+      was going out; &ldquo;in four hours I take sixty more, and in four hours after
+      that yet another sixty.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Does not the dose increase with you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It has not done so perceptibly in recent years. I judge I&rsquo;ve taken more
+      chloral than any man whatever: Marshall says if I were put into a Turkish
+      bath I should sweat it at every pore.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was something in his tone suggesting that he was even proud of the
+      accomplishment. To me it was a frightful revelation, accounting entirely
+      for what had puzzled and distressed me in his delusions already referred
+      to. And now let me say that whilst it would have been on my part the most
+      pitiful weakness (because the most foolish tearfulness of injuring a great
+      man who was strong enough to suffer a good deal to be discounted from his
+      strength), to attempt to conceal this painful side of Rossetti&rsquo;s mind, I
+      shall not again allude to those delusions, unless it be to show that,
+      coming to him with the drug which blighted half his life, they disappeared
+      when it had been removed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      None may rightly say to what the use of that drug was due, or what was due
+      to it; the sadder side of his life was ever under its shadow; his
+      occasional distrust of friends: his fear of enemies: his broken health and
+      shattered spirits, all came of his indulgence in the pernicious thing.
+      When I remember this I am more than willing to put by all thought of the
+      little annoyances, which to me, as to other immediate friends, were
+      constantly occurring through that cause, which seemed at the moment so
+      vexatious and often so insupportable, but which are now forgotten.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Next morning&mdash;(a clear autumn morning)&mdash;I strolled through the
+      large garden at the back of the house, and of course I found it of a piece
+      with what I had previously seen. A beautiful avenue of lime-trees opened
+      into a grass plot of nearly an acre in extent. The trees were just as
+      nature made them, and so was the grass, which in places was lying long,
+      dry and withered under the sun, weeds creeping up in damp places, and the
+      gravel of the pathway scattered upon the verges. This neglected condition
+      of the garden was, I afterwards found, humorously charged upon Mr. Watts&rsquo;s
+      &ldquo;reluctance to interfere with nature in her clever scheme of the survival
+      of the fittest,&rdquo; but I suspect it was due at least equally to the owner&rsquo;s
+      personal indifference to everything of the kind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Before leaving I glanced over the bookcase. Rossetti&rsquo;s library was by no
+      means a large one. It consisted, perhaps, of 1000 volumes, scarcely more;
+      and though this was not large as comprising the library of one whose
+      reading must have been in two arts pursued as special studies, and each
+      involving research and minute original inquiry, it cannot be considered
+      noticeably small, and it must have been sufficient. Rossetti differed
+      strangely as a reader from the man to whom in bias of genius he was most
+      nearly related. Coleridge was an omnivorous general reader: Rossetti was
+      eclectic rather than desultory. His library contained a number of valuable
+      old works of more interest to him from their plates than letterpress. Of
+      this kind were <i>Gerard&rsquo;s Herbal</i> (1626), supposed to be the source of
+      many a hint utilised by the Morris firm, of which Rossetti was a member;
+      <i>Poliphili Hypnerotomachia</i> (1467); Heywood&rsquo;s <i>History of Women</i>
+      (1624); <i>Songe de Poliphile</i> (1561); Bonnard&rsquo;s <i>Costumes of 12th,
+      13th, and l4th Centuries; Habiti Antichi</i> (of which the designs are
+      said to be by Titian)&mdash;printed Venice, (1664); <i>Cosmographia</i>, a
+      history of the peoples of the world (1572); <i>Ciceronis Officia</i>
+      (1534), a blackletter folio, with woodcuts by Burgkmaier; <i>Jost Amman&rsquo;s
+      Costumes</i>, with woodcuts coloured by hand; <i>Cento Novelle</i>
+      (Venice, 1598); Francesco Barberino&rsquo;s <i>Documenti (d&rsquo;Amore</i> (Rome,
+      1640); <i>Décoda de Titolivio</i>, a Spanish blackletter, without date,
+      but probably belonging to the 16th century. Besides these were various
+      vellum-bound works relating to Greek and Roman allegorical and
+      mythological subjects, and a number of scrap-books and portfolios
+      containing photographs from nearly all the picture-galleries of Europe,
+      but chiefly of the pictures of the early Florentine and Venetian schools,
+      with an admixture of Spanish art. Of Michael Angelo&rsquo;s designs for the
+      Sistine Chapel there was a fine set of photographs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These did not make up a very complete ancient artistic library, but
+      Rossetti&rsquo;s collection of the poets was more full and valuable. There was a
+      pretty little early edition of Petrarch, which appeared to have been
+      presented first by John Philip Kemble to Polidori (Rossetti&rsquo;s grandfather)
+      in 1812; then in 1853 by Polidori to his daughter, Rossetti&rsquo;s mother,
+      Frances Rossetti; and by her in 1870 to her son. A splendid edition (1552)
+      of Boccaccio&rsquo;s <i>Decamerone</i> contained a number of valuable marginal
+      notes, chiefly by Rossetti, the first being as follows:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This volume contains 40 woodcuts besides many initial letters. The greater
+      number, if not the whole, must certainly be by Holbein. I am in doubt as
+      to the pictures heading the chapters, but think these most probably his,
+      only following the usual style of such illustrations to Boccaccio, and
+      consequently more Italianised than the others. The initial letters present
+      for the most part games of strength or skill.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There were various editions of Dante, including a very large folio edition
+      of the <i>Commedia</i>, dated Florence, 1481, and the works of a number of
+      Dante&rsquo;s contemporaries. Besides two or three editions of Shakspeare (the
+      best being Dyce&rsquo;s, in 9 vols.), there were some of the Elizabethan
+      dramatists. Coming to later poetry, I found a complete set of Gilfillan&rsquo;s
+      <i>Poets</i>, in 45 vols. There was the curious little manuscript quarto
+      (much like a shilling school-exercise book) labelled <i>Blake</i>, and
+      this was, perhaps, by far the most valuable volume in the library. The
+      contents and history of this book have already been given.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There were two editions of Gilchrist&rsquo;s <i>Blake</i>; complete (or almost
+      complete) sets of the works of William Morris and A. C. Swinburne,
+      inscribed in the authors&rsquo; autographs&mdash;the copy of <i>Atalanta in
+      Calydon</i> being marked by the poet, &ldquo;First copy; printed off before the
+      dedication was in type.&rdquo; It may be remembered that Robert Brough
+      translated Béranger&rsquo;s songs, and dedicated his volume in affectionate
+      terms to Rossetti. The presentation copy of this book bore the following
+      inscription:&mdash;&ldquo;To D. G. Rossetti, meaning in my <i>heart</i> what I
+      have tried to say in print. Et. B. Brough. 1856.&rdquo; There were also several
+      presentation copies from Robert Browning, Coventry Patmore, W. B. Scott,
+      Sir Henry Taylor, Aubrey de Vere, Tom Taylor, Westland Marston, F. Locker,
+      A. O&rsquo;Shaughnessy, Sir Theodore Martin; besides volumes bearing the names
+      of nearly every well-known younger writer of prose or verse.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Five volumes of <i>Modern Painters</i>, together with <i>The Seven Lamps
+      of Architecture</i> and the tract on <i>Pre-Raphaelitism</i>, bore the
+      author&rsquo;s name and Rossetti&rsquo;s in Mr. Ruskin&rsquo;s autograph. There was a fine
+      copy in ten volumes of Violet-le-Duc&rsquo;s <i>Dictionnaire de l&rsquo;Architecture</i>,
+      and also of the <i>Biographie Générale</i> in forty-six volumes, besides
+      several dictionaries, concordances, and the like. There was also a copy of
+      Fitzgerald&rsquo;s <i>Calderon</i>. Rossetti seemed to be a reader of
+      Swedenborg, as White&rsquo;s book on the great mystic testified; also to have
+      been at one time interested in the investigation of the phenomena of
+      Spiritualism. Of one writer of fiction he must have been an ardent reader,
+      for there were at least 100 volumes by Alexandre Dumas. German writers
+      were conspicuously absent, Goethe&rsquo;s <i>Faust</i> and Carlyle&rsquo;s translation
+      of <i>Wilhelm, Meister</i>, being about the only notable German works in
+      the library. Rossetti did not appear to be a collector of first editions,
+      nor did it seem that he attached much importance to the mere outsides of
+      his books, but of the insides he was master indeed. The impression left
+      upon the mind after a rapid survey of the poet-painter&rsquo;s library was that
+      he was a careful, but slow and thorough reader (as was seen by the
+      marginal annotations which nearly every volume contained), and that,
+      though very far from affected by bibliomania, he was not without pride in
+      the possession of rare and valuable books.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When I left the house at a late hour that morning Rossetti was not yet
+      stirring, and so some months passed before I saw him again. If I had tried
+      to formulate the idea&mdash;or say sensation&mdash;that possessed me at
+      the moment, I think I should have said, in a word or two, that outside the
+      air breathed freely. Within, the gloom, the mediaeval furniture, the brass
+      censers, sacramental cups, lamps; and crucifixes conspired, I thought, to
+      make the atmosphere heavy and unwholesome. As for the man himself who was
+      the central spirit amidst these anachronistic environments, he had, if
+      possible, attached me yet closer to himself by contact. Before this I had
+      been attracted to him in admiration of his gifts: but now I was drawn to
+      him, in something very like pity, for his isolation and suffering. Not
+      that at this time he consciously made demand of much compassion, and least
+      of all from me. Health was apparently whole with him, his spirits were
+      good, and his energies were at their best. He had not yet known the full
+      bitterness of the shadowed valley: not yet learned what it was to hunger
+      for any cheerful society that would relieve him of the burden of the
+      flesh. All that came later. Rossetti was one of the most magnetic of men,
+      but it was not more his genius than his unhappiness that held certain of
+      his friends by a spell.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0008" id="link2HCH0008">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER VIII.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      It was characteristic of Rossetti that he addressed me in the following
+      terms probably before I had left his house: for the letter was, no doubt,
+      written in that interval of sleeplessness which he had spoken of as his
+      nightly visitant:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I forgot to say&mdash;Don&rsquo;t, please, spread details as to story of <i>Rose
+      Mary</i>. I don&rsquo;t want it to be stale or to get forestalled in the
+      travelling of report from mouth to mouth. I hope it won&rsquo;t be too long
+      before you visit town again,&mdash;I will not for an instant question that
+      you would then visit me also.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Six months or more intervened, however, before I was able to visit
+      Rossetti again. In the meantime we corresponded as fully as before: the
+      subject upon which we most frequently exchanged opinions being now the
+      sonnet.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     By-the-bye [he says], I cannot understand what you say of
+     Milton&rsquo;s, Keats&rsquo;s, and Coleridge&rsquo;s sonnets. The last, it is
+     true, was <i>always</i> poor as a sonnetteer (I don&rsquo;t see much in
+     the <i>Autumnal Moon</i>). My own only exception to this verdict
+     (much as I adore Coleridge&rsquo;s genius) would be the ludicrous
+     sonnet on <i>The House that Jack built</i>, which is a
+     masterpiece in its way. I should not myself number the one
+     you mention of Keats&rsquo;s among his best half-dozen (many of
+     his are mere drafts, strange to say); and cannot at all
+     enter into your verdict on those of Milton, which seem to me
+     to be every one of exceptional excellence, though a few are
+     even finer than the rest, notably, of course, the one you
+     name. Pardon an egotistic sentence (in answer to what you
+     say so generously of <i>Lost Days</i>), if I express an opinion
+     that <i>Known in Vain</i> and <i>Still-born Love</i> may perhaps be
+     said to head the series in value, though <i>Lost Days</i> might
+     be equally a favourite with me if I did not remember in what
+     but too opportune juncture it was wrung out of me. I have a
+     good number of sonnets for <i>The House of Life</i> still in MS.,
+     which I have worked on with my best effort, and, I think,
+     will fully sustain their place. These and other things I
+     should like to show you whenever we meet again. The MS. vol.
+     I proposed to send is merely an old set of (chiefly)
+     trifles, about which I should like an opinion as to whether
+     any should be included in the future.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      I had spoken of Keats&rsquo;s sonnet beginning
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     To one who has been long in city pent,
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      with its exquisite last lines&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     E&rsquo;en like the passage of an angel&rsquo;s tear
+     That falls through the clear ether silently,
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      reminding one of a less spiritual figure&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     Kings like a golden jewel
+     Down a golden stair.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      After his bantering me, as of old he had done, on the use of long and
+      crabbed words, I hinted that he was in honour bound to agree at least with
+      my disparaging judgment upon <i>Tetrachordon</i>, if only because of the
+      use of words that would &ldquo;have made Quintillian stare.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I further instanced&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     &ldquo;Harry whose tuneful and well-measured song;&rdquo; and
+     &ldquo;Lawrence, of virtuous father virtuous son,&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      as examples of Milton at his weakest as a sonnet-writer. He replied:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     I am sorry I must still differ somewhat from you about
+     Milton&rsquo;s sonnets. I think the one on <i>Tetrachordon</i> a very
+     vigorous affair indeed. The one to Mr. H. Lawes I am half
+     disposed to give you, but not altogether&mdash;its close is
+     sweet. As to <i>Lawrence</i>, it is curious that my sister was
+     only the other day expressing to me a special relish for
+     this sonnet, and I do think it very fresh and wholesomely
+     relishing myself. It is an awful fact that sun, moon, or
+     candlelight once looked down on the human portent of Dr.
+     Johnson and Mrs. Hannah More convened in solemn conclave
+     above the outspread sonnets of Milton, with a meritorious
+     and considerate resolve of finding out for him &ldquo;why they
+     were so bad.&rdquo; This is so stupendous a warning, that perhaps
+     it may even incline one to find some of them better than
+     they are.
+
+     Coming to Coleridge, I must confess at once that I never
+     meet in any collection with the sonnet on Schiller&rsquo;s
+     <i>Robbers</i> without heading it at once with the words
+     &ldquo;unconscionably bad.&rdquo; The habit has been a life-long one.
+     That you mention beginning&mdash;&ldquo;Sweet mercy,&rdquo; etc., I have
+     looked for in the only Coleridge I have by me (my brother&rsquo;s
+     cheap edition, for all the faults of which <i>he</i> is not at
+     all answerable), and do not find it there, nor have I it in
+     mind.
+
+     To pass to Keats. The ed. of 1868 contains no sonnet on the
+     Elgin Marbles. Is it in a later edition? Of course that on
+     Chapman&rsquo;s <i>Homer</i> is supreme. It ought to be preceded {*} in
+     all editions by the one <i>To Homer</i>,
+
+          &ldquo;Standing aloof in giant ignorance,&rdquo; etc.
+     which contains perhaps the greatest single line in Keats:
+
+          &ldquo;There is a budding morrow in midnight.&rdquo;
+ 
+     * I pointed out that it was written later than the one on
+     Chapman&rsquo;s Homer (notwithstanding its first line) and
+     therefore should follow after it, not go before.
+
+     Other special favourites with me are&mdash;&ldquo;Why did I laugh to-
+     night?&rdquo;&mdash;&rdquo; As Hermes once,&rdquo;&mdash;&ldquo;Time&rsquo;s sea hath been,&rdquo; and
+     the one <i>On the Flower and, Leaf</i>.
+
+     It is odd that several of these best ones seem to have been
+     early work, and rejected by Keats in his lifetime, while
+     some of those he printed are absolutely sorry drafts.
+
+     I had admired Coleridge&rsquo;s sonnet on Schiller&rsquo;s <i>Robbers</i> for
+     the perhaps minor excellence of bringing vividly before the
+     mind the scenes it describes. If the sonnet is
+     unconscionably bad so perhaps is the play, the beautiful
+     scene of the setting sun notwithstanding. Eventually,
+     however, I abandoned my belligerent position as to Milton&rsquo;s
+     sonnets: the army of authorities I found ranged against the
+     modest earth-works within which I had entrenched myself must
+     of itself have made me quail. My utmost contention had been
+     that Milton wrote the most impassioned sonnet (<i>Avenge, O
+     Lord</i>), the two most nobly pathetic sonnets (<i>When I
+     consider</i> and <i>Methought I saw</i>), and one of the poorest
+     sonnets (<i>Harry, whose tuneful</i>, etc.) in English poetry.
+
+     At this time (September 1880) Mr. J. Ashcroft Noble
+     published an essay on <i>The Sonnet in England</i> in <i>The
+     Contemporary Review</i>, and relating thereto Rossetti wrote:
+
+     I have just been reading Mr. Noble&rsquo;s article on the sonnet.
+     As regards my own share in it, I can only say that it greets
+     me with a gratifying ray of generous recognition. It is all
+     the more pleasant to me as finding  a place in the very
+     Review which years ago opened its pages to a pseudonymous
+     attack on my poems and on myself. I see a passage in the
+     article which seems meant to indicate the want of such a
+     work on the sonnet as you are wishing to supply. I only
+     trust that you may do so, and that Mr. Noble may find a
+     field for continued poetic criticism. I am very proud to
+     think that, after my small and solitary book has been a good
+     many years published and several years out of print, it yet
+     meets with such ardent upholding by young and sincere men.
+
+     With the verdicts given throughout the article, I generally
+     sympathise, but not with the unqualified homage to
+     Wordsworth. A reticence almost invariably present is fatal
+     in my eyes to the highest pretensions on behalf of his
+     sonnets. Reticence is but a poor sort of muse, nor is
+     tentativeness (so often to be traced in his work) a good
+     accompaniment in music. Take the sonnet on <i>Toussaint
+     L&rsquo;Ouverture</i> (in my opinion his noblest, and very noble
+     indeed) and study (from Main&rsquo;s note) the lame and fumbling
+     changes made in various editions of the early lines, which
+     remain lame in the end. Far worse than this, study the
+     relation of the closing lines of his famous sonnet <i>The
+     World is too much with us</i>, etc., to a passage in Spenser,
+     and say whether plagiarism was ever more impudent or
+     manifest (again I derive from Main&rsquo;s excellent exposition of
+     the point), and then consider whether a bard was likely to
+     do this once and yet not to do it often. Primary vital
+     impulse was surely not fully developed in his muse.
+
+     I will venture to say that I wish my sister&rsquo;s sonnet work
+     had met with what I consider the justice due to it. Besides
+     the unsurpassed quality (in my opinion) of her best sonnets,
+     my sister has proved her poetic importance by solid and
+     noble inventive work of many kinds, which I should be proud
+     indeed to reckon among my life&rsquo;s claims.
+
+     I have a great weakness myself for many of Tennyson-Turner&rsquo;s
+     sonnets, though of course what Mr. Noble says of them is in
+     the main true, and he has certainly quoted the very finest
+     one, which has a more fervent appeal for me than I could
+     easily derive from Wordsworth in almost any case.
+
+     Will you give my thanks to Mr. Noble for his frank and
+     outspoken praise?
+
+     Let me hear of your doings and intentions.
+
+     Ever sincerely yours.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Three names notably omitted in the article are those of Dobell, W. B.
+      Scott, and Swinburne.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The allusion in the foregoing letter to the work on the Sonnet which I was
+      aiming to supply, bears reference to the anthology subsequently published
+      under the title of <i>Sonnets of Three Centuries</i>. My first idea was
+      simply to write a survey of the art and history of the sonnet, printing
+      only such examples as might be embraced by my critical comments.
+      Rossetti&rsquo;s generous sympathy was warmly engaged in this enterprise.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     It would really warm me up much [he writes] to know of
+     <i>your</i> editing a sonnet book You would have my best
+     cooperation as to suggesting examples, but I certainly think
+     that English sonnets (original and exceptionally translated
+     ones, the latter only <i>perhaps</i>) should be the sole scheme.
+     Curiously enough, some one wrote me the other day as to a
+     projected series of living sonneteers (other collections
+     being only of those preceding our time). I have half
+     committed myself to contributing, but not altogether as yet.
+     The name of the projector, S. Waddington, is new to me, and
+     I don&rsquo;t know who is to publish.... Really you ought to do
+     the sonnet-book you aspire to do. I know but of one London
+     critic (Theodore Watts) whom I should consider the leading
+     man for such a purpose, and I have tried to incite him to it
+     so often that I know now he won&rsquo;t do it; but I have always
+     meant <i>a complete</i> series in which the dead poets must, of
+     course, predominate. As to a series of the living only, I
+     told you of a Mr. Waddington who seems engaged on such a
+     supplementary scheme. What his gifts for it may be I know
+     not, but I suppose he knows it is in requisition. However,
+     there need not be but one such if you felt your hand in for
+     it. His view happens to be also (as you suggest) about 160
+     sonnets. In reply to your query, I certainly think there
+     must be 20 living writers (male and female&mdash;my sister a
+     leader, I consider) who have written good sonnets such as
+     would afford an interesting and representative selection,
+     though assuredly not such as would all take the rank of
+     classics by any means. The number of sonnets now extant,
+     written by poets who did not exist as such a dozen years
+     ago, I believe to be almost infinite, and in sufficiently
+     numerous instances good, however derivative. One younger
+     poet among them, Philip Marston, has written many sonnets
+     which yield to few or none by any poet whatever; but he has
+     printed such a large number in the aggregate, and so unequal
+     one with the other, that the great ones are not to be found
+     by opening at random. &ldquo;How are they (the poets) to be
+     approached?&mdash;&rdquo; you innocently ask. Ye heavens! how does the
+     cat&rsquo;s-meat-man approach Grimalkin?&mdash;and what is that
+     relation in life when compared to the <i>rapport</i> established
+     between the living bard and the fellow-creature who is
+     disposed to cater to his caterwauling appetite for
+     publicity? However, to be serious, I must at least exonerate
+     the bard, I am sure, from any desire to appropriate an
+     &ldquo;interest in the proceeds.&rdquo; There are some, I feel certain,
+     to whom the collector might say with a wink, &ldquo;What are you
+     going to stand?&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      I do not myself think that a collection of sonnets inserted at intervals
+      in an essay is a good form for the purpose. Such a book is from one chief
+      point a book of instantaneous reference,&mdash;it would only, perhaps, be
+      read <i>through</i> once in a lifetime. For this purpose a well-indexed
+      current series is best, with any desirable essay prefixed and notes
+      affixed.... I once conceived of a series, to be entitled,
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      THE ENGLISH CASTALY: A QUINTESSENCE: BEING A COLLECTION OF ALL THAT IS
+      BEST IN ALL ENGLISH POETS, EXCEPTING WORKS OF GREAT LENGTH.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I still think this a good idea, but, of course, it would be an extensive
+      undertaking.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Later on, he wrote:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     I have thought of a title for your book. What think you of
+     this?
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      A SONNET SEQUENCE FROM ELDER TO MODERN WORK, WITH FIFTY HITHERTO UNPRINTED
+      SONNETS BY LIVING WRITERS.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     That would not be amiss. Tell me if you think of using the
+     title <i>A Sonnet Sequence</i>, as otherwise I might use it in
+     the <i>House of Life</i>.... What do you think of this
+     alternative title:
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      THE ENGLISH SONNET MUSE FROM ELIZABETH&rsquo;S REIGN TO VICTORIA&rsquo;S.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     I think <i>Castalia</i> much too euphuistic, and though I
+     shouldn&rsquo;t like the book to be called simply still I have a
+     great prejudice against very florid titles for such
+     gatherings. <i>Treasury</i> has been sadly run upon.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      I did not like <i>Sonnet Sequence</i> for such a collection, and
+      relinquished the title; moreover, I had had from the first a clearly
+      defined scheme in mind, carrying its own inevitable title, which was in
+      due course adopted. I may here remark that I never resisted any idea of
+      Rossetti&rsquo;s at the moment of its inception, since resistance only led to a
+      temporary outburst of self-assertion on his part. He was a man of so much
+      impulse,&mdash;impulse often as violent as lawless&mdash;that to oppose
+      him merely provoked anger to no good purpose, for as often as not the
+      position at first adopted with so much pertinacity was afterwards silently
+      abandoned, and your own aims quietly acquiesced in. On this subject of a
+      title he wrote a further letter, which is interesting from more than one
+      point of view:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     I don&rsquo;t like <i>Garland</i> at all C. Patmore collected a
+     <i>Children&rsquo;s Garland.</i> I think
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      ENGLISH SONNET&rsquo;S PRESENT AND PAST, WITH&mdash;ETC.,
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     would be a good title. I think I prefer <i>Present and Past</i>,
+     or <i>of the P. and P.,</i> to <i>New and Old</i> for your purpose;
+     but I own I am partly influenced by the fact that I have
+     settled to call my own vol. <i>Poems New and Old</i>, and don&rsquo;t
+     want it to get staled; but I really do think the other at
+     least as good for your purpose&mdash;perhaps more dignified.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Again, in reply to a proposal of my own, he wrote:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     I think <i>Sonnets of the Century</i> an excellent idea and
+     title. I must say a mass of Wordsworth over again, like
+     Main&rsquo;s, is a little disheartening,&mdash;still the <i>best</i>
+     selection from him is what one wants. There is some book
+     called <i>A Century of Sonnets</i>, but this, I suppose, would
+     not matter....
+
+     I think sometimes of your sonnet-book, and have formed
+     certain views. I really would not in your place include old
+     work at all: it would be but a scanty gathering, and I feel
+     certain that what is really in requisition is a supplement
+     to Main, containing living writers (printed and un-printed)
+     put together under their authors&rsquo; names (not separately) and
+     rare gleanings from those more recently dead.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      I fear I did not attach importance to this decision, for I now knew my
+      correspondent too well to rely upon his being entirely in the same mind
+      for long. Hence I was not surprised to receive the following a day or two
+      later:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     I lately had a conversation with Watts about your sonnet-
+     book, and find his views to be somewhat different from what
+     I had expressed, and I may add I think now he is right. He
+     says there should be a very careful selection of the elder
+     sonnets and of everything up to present century. I think he
+     is right.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      The fact is, that almost from the first I had taken a view similar to Mr.
+      Watts&rsquo;s as to the design of my book, and had determined to call the
+      anthology by the title it now bears. On one occasion, however, I acted
+      rather without judgment in sending Rossetti a synopsis of certain critical
+      tests formulated by Mr. Watts in a letter of great power and value.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the letter in question Mr. Watts seemed to be setting himself to
+      confute some extremely ill-considered remarks made in a certain quarter
+      upon the structure of the sonnet, where (following Macaulay) the critic
+      says that there exists no good reason for requiring that even the
+      conventional limit as to length should be observed, and that the only use
+      in art of the legitimate model is to &ldquo;supply a poet with something to do
+      when his invention fails.&rdquo; I confess to having felt no little amazement
+      that one so devoid of a perception of the true function of the sonnet
+      should have been considered a proper person to introduce a great
+      sonnet-writer; and Mr. Watts (who, however, made no mention of the writer)
+      clearly demonstrated that the true sonnet has the foundation of its
+      structure in a fixed metrical law, and hence, that as it is impossible (as
+      Keats found out for himself) to improve upon the accepted form, that model&mdash;known
+      as the Petrarchian&mdash;should, with little or no variation, be worked
+      upon. Rossetti took fire, however, from a mistaken notion that Mr. Watts&rsquo;s
+      canons, as given in the letter in question, and merely reported by me,
+      were much more inflexible than they really proved.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     Sonnets of mine <i>could not appear</i> in any book which
+     contained such rigid rules as to rhyme, as are contained in
+     Watts&rsquo;s letter. I neither follow them, nor agree with them
+     as regards the English language. Every sonnet-writer should
+     show full capability of conforming to them in many
+     instances, but never to deviate from them in English must
+     pinion both thought and diction, and, (mastery once proved)
+     a series gains rather than loses by such varieties as do not
+     lessen the only absolute aim&mdash;that of beauty. The English
+     sonnet too much tampered with becomes a sort of bastard
+     madrigal. Too much, invariably restricted, it degenerates
+     into a Shibboleth.
+
+     Dante&rsquo;s sonnets (in reply to your question&mdash;not as part of
+     the above point) vary in arrangement. I never for a moment
+     thought of following in my book the rhymes of each
+     individual sonnet.
+
+     If sonnets of mine remain admissible, I should prefer
+     printing the two <i>On Cassandra to The Monochord</i> and <i>Wine
+     of Circe</i>.
+
+     I would not be too anxious, were I you, about anything in
+     choice of sonnets except the brains and the music.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Again he wrote:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     I talked to Watts about his letter. He seems to agree with
+     me as to advisable variation of form in preference to
+     transmuting valuable thought. It would not be afc all found
+     that my best sonnets are always in the mere form which I
+     think the best. The question with me is regulated by what I
+     have to say. But in truth, if I have a distinction as a
+     sonnet-writer, it is that I never admit a sonnet which is
+     not fully on the level of every other.... Again, as to this
+     blessed question, though no one ever took more pleasure in
+     continually using the form I prefer when not interfering
+     with thought, to insist on it would after a certain point be
+     ruin to common sense.
+
+     As to what you say of <i>The One Hope</i>&mdash;it is fully equal to
+     the very best of my sonnets, or I should not have wound up
+     the series with it. But the fact is, what is peculiar
+     chiefly in the series is, that scarcely one is worse than
+     any other. You have much too great a habit of speaking of a
+     special octave, sestette, or line. Conception, my boy,
+     <i>fundamental brainwork</i>, that is what makes the difference
+     in all art. Work your metal as much as you like, but first
+     take care that it is gold and worth working. A Shakspearean
+     sonnet is better than the most perfect in form, because
+     Shakspeare wrote it.
+
+     As for Drayton, of course his one incomparable sonnet is the
+     <i>Love-Parting</i>. That is almost the best in the language, if
+     not quite. I think I have now answered queries, and it is
+     late. Good-night!
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Rossetti had somewhat mistaken the scope of the letter referred to, and
+      when he came to know exactly what was intended, I found him in warm
+      agreement with the views therein taken. I have said at an earlier stage
+      that Rossetti&rsquo;s instinct for what was good in poetry was unfailing,
+      whatever the value of his opinions on critical principles, and hence I
+      felt naturally anxious to have the benefit of his views on certain of the
+      elder writers. He said:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     I am sorry I am no adept in elder sonnet literature. Many of
+     Donne&rsquo;s are remarkable&mdash;no doubt you glean some. None of
+     Shakspeare&rsquo;s is more indispensable than the wondrous one on
+     <i>Last</i> (129). Hartley Coleridge&rsquo;s finest is
+
+          &ldquo;If I have sinned in act, I may repent.&rdquo;
+ 
+     There is a fine one by Isaac Williams, evidently on the
+     death of a worldly man, and he wrote other good ones. To
+     return to the old, I think Stillingfleet&rsquo;s <i>To Williamson</i>
+     very fine....
+
+     I would like to send you a list of my special favourites
+     among Shakspeare&rsquo;s sonnets&mdash;viz.:&mdash;
+
+     15, 27, 29, 30, 36, 44, 45, 49, 50, 52, 55, 56, 59, 61, 62,
+     64, 65, 66, 68, 71, 73, 76, 77, 90, 93, 94, 97, 98, 99, 102,
+     107, 110, 116, 117, 119, 120, 123, 129, 135, 136, 138, 144,
+     145.
+
+     I made the selection long ago, and of course love them in
+     varying degrees.
+
+     There should be an essential reform in the printing of
+     Shakspeare&rsquo;s sonnets. After sonnet 125 should occur the
+     words <i>End of Part I</i>. The couplet-piece, numbered 126,
+     should be called <i>Epilogue to Part I.</i>. Then, before 127,
+     should be printed Part II. After 152, should be put End of
+     Part II.&mdash;and the two last sonnets should be called Epilogue
+     to Part II. About these two last I have a theory of my own.
+
+     Did you ever see the excellent remarks on these sonnets in
+     my brother&rsquo;s <i>Lives of Famous Poets?</i> I think a simple point
+     he mentions (for first time) fixes Pembroke clearly as the
+     male friend. I am glad you like his own two fine sonnets. I
+     wish he would write more such. By the bye, you speak with
+     great scorn of the closing couplet in sonnets. I do not
+     certainly think that form the finest, but I do think this
+     and every variety desirable in a series, and have often used
+     it myself. I like your letters on sonnets; write on all
+     points in question. The two last of Shakspeare&rsquo;s sonnets
+     seem to me to have a very probable (and rather elaborate)
+     meaning never yet attributed to them. Some day, when I see
+     you, we will talk it over. Did you ever see a curious book
+     by one Brown (I don&rsquo;t mean Armitage Brown) on Shakspeare&rsquo;s
+     sonnets? By the bye, he is not the source of my notion as
+     above, but a matter of fact he names helps in it. I never
+     saw Massey&rsquo;s book on the subject, but fancy his views and
+     Brown&rsquo;s are somewhat allied. You should look at what my
+     brother says, which is very concise and valuable. I hope I
+     am not omitting to answer you in any essential point, but my
+     writing-table is a chaos into which your last letters have,
+     for the moment, sunk beyond recovery.
+
+     I consider the foregoing, perhaps, the most valuable of
+     Rossetti&rsquo;s letters to me. I cannot remember that we ever
+     afterwards talked over the two last sonnets of Shakspeare;
+     if we did so, the meaning attached to them by him did not
+     fix itself very definitely upon my memory.
+
+     In explanation of my alleged dislike of the closing couplet,
+     I may say that a rhymed couplet at the close of a sonnet has
+     an effect upon my ear similar to that produced by the
+     couplets at the ends of some of the acts of Shakspeare&rsquo;s
+     plays, which were in many instances interpolated by the
+     actors to enable them to make emphatic exits.
+
+     I must now group together a number of short notes on
+     sonnets:
+
+     I think Blanco White&rsquo;s sonnet difficult to overrate in
+     <i>thought</i>&mdash;probably in this respect unsurpassable, but easy
+     to overrate as regards its workmanship. Of course there is
+     the one fatally disenchanting line:
+
+          While fly and leaf and insect stood revealed.
+
+     The poverty of vision which could not see at a glance that
+     fly and insect were one and the same, is, as you say, enough
+     to account for its being the writer&rsquo;s only sonnet (there is
+     one more however which I don&rsquo;t know).
+
+     I&rsquo;ll copy you overpage a sonnet which I consider a very fine
+     one, but which may be said to be quite unknown. It is by
+     Charles Whitehead, who wrote the very admirable and
+     exceptional novel of <i>Richard Savage</i>, published somewhere
+     about 1840.
+
+          Even as yon lamp within my vacant room
+             With arduous flame disputes the doubtful night,
+             And can with its involuntary light
+          But lifeless things that near it stand illume;
+          Yet all the while it doth itself consume,
+             And ere the sun hath reached his morning height
+             With courier beams that greet the shepherd&rsquo;s sight,
+          There where its life arose must be its tomb:&mdash;
+          So wastes my life away, perforce confined
+             To common things, a limit to its sphere,
+          It gleams on worthless trifles undesign&rsquo;d,
+             With fainter ray each hour imprison&rsquo;d here.
+          Alas to know that the consuming mind
+             Must leave its lamp cold ere the sun appear!
+
+     I am sure you will agree with me in admiring <i>that</i>. I quote
+     from memory, and am not sure that I have given line 6 quite
+     correctly....
+
+     I have just had Blanco White&rsquo;s only other sonnet (<i>On being
+     called an Old Man at 50</i>) copied out for you. I do certainly
+     think it ought to go in, though no better than so-so, as you
+     say. But it is just about as good as the former one, but for
+     the leading and splendid thought in the latter. Both are but
+     proseman&rsquo;s diction.
+
+     There is a sonnet of Chas. Wells&rsquo;s <i>On Chaucer</i> which is not
+     worthy of its writer, but still you should have it. It
+     occurs among some prefatory tributes in <i>Chaucer
+     Modernised</i>, edited by E. H. Home. I don&rsquo;t know how you are
+     to get a copy, but the book is in the British Museum Reading
+     Room. The sonnet is signed C. W. only.
+
+     The sonnet by Wells seemed to me in every respect poor, and
+     as it was no part of my purpose (as an admirer of Wells) to
+     advertise what the poet could not do, I determined&mdash;against
+     Rossetti&rsquo;s judgment&mdash;not to print the sonnet.
+
+     You certainly, in my opinion, ought to print Wells&rsquo;s sonnet.
+     Certainly nothing so disjointed ever gave itself the name
+     before, but it ought to be available for reference, and I do
+     not agree with you in considering it weak in any sense
+     except that of structure.
+
+     There is a sonnet by Ebenezer Jones, beginning &ldquo;I never
+     wholly feel that summer is high,&rdquo; which, though very jagged,
+     has decided merit to warrant its insertion.
+
+     As for Tennyson, he seems to have given leave for a sonnet
+     to appear in Main&rsquo;s book. Why not in yours? But I have long
+     ceased to know him, nor is any friend of mine in
+     communication with him.... My brother has written in his
+     time a few sonnets. Two of them I think very fine&mdash;
+     especially the one called <i>Shelley&rsquo;s Heart</i>, which he has
+     lately worked upon again with immense advantage.... You do
+     not tell me from whom you have received sonnets. The reason
+     which prevents my coming forward, in such a difficulty, with
+     a new sonnet of my own, is this:&mdash;which indeed you have
+     probably surmised: I know nothing would gratify malevolence,
+     after the controversy which ensued on your lecture, more
+     than to be able to assert, however falsely, that we had been
+     working in concert all along, that you were known to me from
+     the first, and that your advocacy had no real
+     spontaneity.... When you first entered on the subject, and
+     wrote your lecture, you were a perfect stranger to me, and
+     that fact greatly enhanced my pleasure in its enthusiastic
+     tone. I hope sincerely that we may have further and close
+     opportunities of intercourse, but should like whatever you
+     may write of me to come from the old source of intellectual
+     affinity only. That you should think the subject worthy of
+     further labour is a pleasure to me, but I only trust it may
+     not be a disadvantage to your book in unfriendly eyes,
+     particularly if that view happened to be the proposed
+     publisher&rsquo;s, in which case I should much prefer that this
+     section of your work were withdrawn for a more propitious
+     occasion.... I am very glad Brown is furthering your sonnet-
+     book&mdash;he knows so many bards. Of course if I were you, I
+     should keep an eye on the mouths even of gift-horses; but
+     were a creditable stud to be trotted out, of course I should
+     be willing; as were I one among many, the objection I noted
+     would not exist. I do not mean for a moment to say that many
+     very fine sonnets might not be obtained from poets not yet
+     known or not widely known; but known names would be the
+     things to parry the difficulty.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Later he wrote:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     As you know, I want to contribute to your volume if I can do
+     so without fear of the consequences hinted at in a former
+     letter as likely to ensue, so I now enclose a sonnet of my
+     own. If you are out in March 1881, you may be before my new
+     edition, but I am getting my stock together. Not a word of
+     this however, as it mustn&rsquo;t get into gossip paragraphs at
+     present. <i>The House of Life</i> is now a hundred sonnets&mdash;all
+     lyrics being removed. Besides this series, I have forty-five
+     sonnets extra. I think, as you are willing, I shall use the
+     title I sent you&mdash;<i>A Sonnet Sequence</i>. I fancy the
+     alternative title would be briefer and therefore better as
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      OUR SONNET-MUSE PROM ELIZABETH TO VICTORIA
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I could not be much concerned about the unwillingness to give me a new
+      sonnet which Rossetti at first exhibited, for I knew full well that sooner
+      or later the sonnet would come. Not that I recognised in him the faintest
+      scintillation of the affectation so common among authors as to the
+      publication of work. But the fear of any appearance of collusion between
+      himself and his critics was, as he said, a bugbear that constantly haunted
+      him. Owing to this, a stranger often stood a better chance of securing his
+      ready and open co-operation than the most intimate of friends. I
+      frequently yielded to his desire that in anything that I might write his
+      name should not be mentioned&mdash;too frequently by far, to my infinite
+      vexation at the time, and now to my deep and ineradicable regret. The
+      sonnet-book out of which arose much of the correspondence printed in this
+      chapter, contains in its preface and notes hardly an allusion to him, and
+      yet he was, in my judgment, out of all reach and sight, the greatest
+      sonnet-writer of his time. The sonnet first sent was <i>Pride of Youth</i>,
+      but as this formed part of <i>The House of Life</i> series, it was
+      withdrawn, and <i>Raleigh&rsquo;s Cell in the Tower</i> was substituted The
+      following hitherto unpublished sonnet was also contributed but withdrawn
+      at the last moment, because of its being out of harmony with the sonnets
+      selected to accompany it:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+               ON CERTAIN ELIZABETHAN REVIVALS.
+
+          O ruff-embastioned vast Elizabeth,
+             Bush to these bushel-bellied casks of wine,
+             Home-growth, &lsquo;tis true, but rank as turpentine,&mdash;
+          What would we with such skittle-plays at death %
+          Say, must we watch these brawlers&rsquo; brandished lathe,
+             Or to their reeking wit our ears incline,
+             Because all Castaly flowed crystalline
+          In gentle Shakspeare&rsquo;s modulated breath!
+          What! must our drama with the rat-pit vie,
+             Nor the scene close while one is left to kill!
+                Shall this be poetry % And thou&mdash;thou&mdash;man
+                Of blood, thou cannibalic Caliban,
+          What shall be said to thee?&mdash;a poet?&mdash;Fie!
+             &ldquo;An honourable murderer, if you will&rdquo;
+ 
+     I mentioned to you [he says] William Davies, author of
+     <i>Songs of a Wayfarer</i> (by the bye, another man has since
+     adopted his title). He has many excellent sonnets, and is a
+     valued friend of mine. I shall send you, on his behalf, a
+     copy of the book for selection of what you may please.... It
+     is very unequal, but the best truly excellent. The sonnets
+     are numerous, and some good, though the best work in the
+     book is not among them. There are two poems&mdash;<i>The Garden</i>,
+     and another called, I think, <i>On a dried-up Spring</i>, which
+     are worthy of the most fastidious collections. Many of the
+     poems are unnamed, and the whole has too much of a Herrick
+     air. . . .
+
+     It is quite refreshing to find you so pleased with my good
+     friend Davies&rsquo;s book, and I wish he were in London, as I
+     would have shown him what you say, which I know would have
+     given him pleasure. He is a man who suffers much from moods
+     of depression, in spite of his philosophic nature. I have
+     marked fifty pieces of different kinds throughout his book,
+     and of these twenty-nine are sonnets. Had those fifty been
+     alone printed, Davies would now be remembered and not
+     forgotten: but all poets now-a-days are redundant except
+     Tennyson. ...
+
+     I am this evening writing to Davies, who is in Rome, and
+     could not resist enclosing what you say, with so much
+     experimental appreciativeness of his book, and of his
+     intention to fill it with moral sunshine. I am sure he &lsquo;ll
+     send a new sonnet if he has one, but I fancy his bardic day
+     is over. I should think he was probably not subject to
+     melancholy when he wrote the <i>Wayfarer</i>. However, he tells
+     me that his spirits have improved in Italy. One other little
+     book of Herrickian verse he has written, called <i>The
+     Shepherd!s Garden</i>, but there are no sonnets in it. Besides
+     this, he published a volume containing a record of travel of
+     a very interesting kind, and called <i>The Pilgrimage of the
+     Tiber</i>. This is well known. It is illustrated, many of the
+     drawings being by himself, for he is quite as much painter
+     as poet. He also wrote in <i>The Quarterly Review</i> an article
+     on the sonnet (I should think about 1870 or so), and, a
+     little later, one which raised great wrath, on the English
+     School of Painting. These I have not seen. He &ldquo;lacks
+     advancement,&rdquo; however; having fertile powers and little
+     opportunity, and being none the luckier (I think) for a
+     small independence which keeps off <i>compulsion</i> to work,
+     though of willingness he has abundance in many directions.
+
+     There is an admirable but totally unknown living poet named
+     Dixon. I will send you two small vols, of his which he gave
+     me long ago, but please take good care of them, and return
+     them as soon as done with. I value them highly. I forgot
+     till to-day that he had written any sonnets, but I see there
+     are three in one vol. and one in another. I have marked my
+     two favourites. He should certainly be represented in your
+     book. If I live, I mean to write something about him in some
+     quarter when I can. His finest passages are as fine as any
+     living man can do. He was a canon of Carlisle Cathedral, and
+     at present has a living somewhere. If you wanted to ask him
+     for an original sonnet, you might mention my name, and
+     address him at Carlisle with <i>Please forward</i>. Of course he
+     is a Rev.
+
+     You will be sorry to hear that Davies has abandoned the hope
+     of producing a new sonnet to his own satisfaction. I have
+     again, however, urged him to the onslaught, and told him how
+     deserving you are of his efforts.
+
+     Swinburne, who is a vast admirer of my sister&rsquo;s, thinks the
+     <i>Advent</i> perhaps the noblest of all her poems, and also
+     specially loves the <i>Passing Away</i>. I do not know that I
+     quite agree with your decided preference for the two sonnets
+     of hers you signalise,&mdash;the <i>World</i> is very fine, but the
+     other, <i>Dead before Death</i>, a little sensational for her. I
+     think <i>After Death</i> one of her noblest, and the one <i>After
+     Communion</i>. In my own view, the greatest of all her poems is
+     that on France after the siege&mdash;<i>To-Day for Me</i>. A very
+     splendid piece of feminine ascetic passion is <i>The Convent
+     Threshold</i>.
+
+     I have run the sonnet you like, <i>St. Luke the Painter</i>, into
+     a sequence with two more not yet printed, and given the
+     three a general title of <i>Old and New Art</i>, as well as
+     special titles to each. I shall annex them to <i>The House of
+     Life</i>.
+
+     Have you ever read Vaughan? He resembles Donne a good deal
+     as to quaintness, but with a more emotional personality.
+
+     I have altered the last line of octave in <i>Lost Days</i>. It
+     now runs&mdash;
+
+          &ldquo;The undying throats of Hell, athirst alway.&rdquo;
+ 
+     I always had it in my mind to make a change here, as the
+     <i>in</i> standing in the line in its former reading clashed with
+     <i>in</i> occurring in the previous line. I have done what I
+     think is a prime sonnet on the murdered Czar, which I
+     enclose, but don&rsquo;t show it to a soul.
+
+     Theodore Watts is going to print a very fine sonnet of his
+     own in <i>The Athenæum</i>. It is the first verse he ever put in
+     print, though he wrote much (when a very young man). Tell me
+     how you like it. I think he is destined to shine in that
+     class of poetry.
+
+     I knew you must like Watts&rsquo;s sonnets. They are splendid
+     affairs. I am not sure that I agree with you in liking the
+     first the better of the two: the second (<i>Natura Maligna</i>)
+     is perhaps the deeper and finer. I have asked Watts to give
+     you a new sonnet, and I think perhaps he will do so, or at
+     all events give you permission to use those he has printed.
+     He has just come into the room, and says he would like to
+     hear from you on the subject.
+
+     From one rather jocular sentence in your note I judge you
+     may include some sonnets of your own. I see no possible
+     reason why you should not. You are really now, at your
+     highest, among our best sonnet-writers, and have written two
+     or three sonnets that yield to few or none whatever. I am
+     forced, however, to request that you will not put in the one
+     referring to myself, from my constant bugbear of any
+     appearance of collusion. That sonnet is a very fine one&mdash;my
+     brother was showing it me again the other day. It is not my
+     personal gratification alone, though that is deep, because I
+     know you are sincere, which leads me to the conclusion that
+     it is your best, and very fine indeed. I think your
+     Cumberland sonnet admirable. The sonnet on Byron is
+     extremely musical in flow and the symbolic scenery of
+     exceptional excellence. The view taken is the question with
+     me. Byron&rsquo;s vehement directness, at its best, is a lasting
+     lesson: and, dubious monument as <i>Don Juan</i> may be, it
+     towers over the century. Of course there is truth in what
+     you say; but <i>ought</i> it to be the case? and is it the case
+     in any absolute sense? You deal frankly with your sonnets,
+     and do not shrink from radical change. I think that on
+     Oliver much better than when I saw it before. The opening
+     phrases of both octave and sestette are very fine; but the
+     second quatrain and the second terzina, though with a
+     quality of beauty, both seem somewhat to lack distinctness.
+     The word <i>rivers</i> cannot be used with elision&mdash;the v is a
+     hard pebble in the flow, and so are the closing consonants.
+     You must put up with <i>streams</i> if you keep the line.
+
+     You should have Bailey&rsquo;s dedicatory sonnet in <i>Festus</i>.
+
+     I am enclosing a fine sonnet by William Bell Scott, which I
+     wished him to let me send you for your book. It has not yet
+     been printed. I think I heard of some little chaffy matter
+     between him and you, but, doubtless, you have virtually
+     forgotten all about it. I must say frankly that I think the
+     day when you made the speech he told me of must have been
+     rather a wool-gathering one with you.... I suppose you know
+     that Scott has written a number of fine sonnets contained in
+     his vol of <i>Poems</i> published about 1875, I think.
+
+     I directed the attention of Mr. Waddington (whom, however, I
+     don&rsquo;t know personally) to a most noble sonnet by Fanny
+     Kemble, beginning, &ldquo;Art thou already weary of the way?&rdquo; He
+     has put it in, and several others of hers, but she is very
+     unequal, and I don&rsquo;t know if the others should be there, but
+     you should take the one in question. It sadly wants new
+     punctuation, being vilely printed just as I first saw it
+     when a boy in some twopenny edition.
+
+     In a memoir of Gilchrist, appended now by his widow to the
+     <i>Life of Blake</i>, there is a sonnet by G., perhaps
+     interesting enough, as being exceptional, for you to ask for
+     it; but I don&rsquo;t advise you, if you don&rsquo;t think it worth.
+
+     I have received from Mrs. Meynell, a sister of Eliz.
+     Thompson, the painter, a most genuine little book of poems
+     containing some sonnets of true spiritual beauty. I must
+     send it you.
+
+     This book had just then been introduced to Rossetti with
+     much warmth of praise by Mr. Watts, and he took to it
+     vastly.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      This closes Rossetti&rsquo;s interesting letters on sonnet literature. In
+      reprinting his first volume of <i>Poems</i> he had determined to remove
+      the sonnets of <i>The House of Life</i> to the new volume of <i>Ballads
+      and Sonnets</i>, and fill the space with the fragment of a poem written in
+      youth, and now called <i>The Bride&rsquo;s Prelude</i>. He sent me a proof. The
+      reader will remember that as a narrative fragment it is less remarkable
+      for striking incident (though never failing of interest and
+      picturesqueness) than for a slow and psychical development which
+      ultimately gained a great hold of the sympathies. The poem leaves behind
+      it a sense as of a sultry day. Judging first of its merits as a song
+      (using the word in its broad and simple sense), the poem flows on the
+      tongue with unbroken sweetness and with a variety of cadence and light and
+      shade of melody which might admit of its pursuing its meanderings through
+      five times its less than 50 pages, and still keeping one&rsquo;s senses awake to
+      the constantly recurring advent of new and pleasing literary forms. The
+      story is a striking one, with a great wealth of highly effective incident,&mdash;notably
+      the episode of the card-playing, and of the father striking down the sword
+      which Raoul turns against the breast of the bride. Almost equally
+      memorable are the scenes in which the lover appears, and the occasional
+      interludes of incident in which, between the pauses of the narrative, the
+      bridegroom&rsquo;s retinue are heard sporting in the courtyard without.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The whole atmosphere of the poem is saturated in a medievalism of spirit
+      to which no lapse of modernism does violence, and the spell of romance
+      which comes with that atmosphere of the middle ages is never broken, but
+      preserved in the minutest most matter-of-fact details, such as the bowl of
+      water that stood amidst flowers, and in which the sister Amelotte &ldquo;slid a
+      cup&rdquo; and offered it to Aloyse to drink. But the one great charm of the
+      poem lies in its subtle and most powerful psychical analysis, seen
+      foreshadowed in the first mention of the bride sitting in the shade, but
+      first felt strongly when she begs her sister to pray, and again when she
+      tells how, at God&rsquo;s hint, she had whispered something of the whole tale to
+      her sister who slept
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The dread introspection pictured after the sin is in the highest degree
+      tragic, and affects one like remorse in its relentlessness, although less
+      remorse than fear of discovery. The sickness of the following condition,
+      with its yearnings, longings, dizziness, is very nobly done, and delicate
+      as is the theme, and demanding a touch of unerring strength, yet
+      lightness, the part of the poem concerned with it contains certain of the
+      most beautiful and stirring things. The madness (for it is not less than
+      such) in which at the sea-side, believing Urscelyn to be lost, the bride
+      tells the whole tale, whilst her curse laughed within her to see the
+      amazement and anger of her brothers and of her father, is doubtless true
+      enough to the frenzied state of her mind; but my sympathies go out less to
+      that part of the poem than to the subsequent part, in which the
+      bride-mother is described as leaning along in thought after her child,
+      till tears, not like a wedded girl&rsquo;s, fall among her curls. Highly
+      dramatic, too, is the passage in which she fears to curse the evil men
+      whose evil hands have taken her child, lest from evil lips the curse
+      should be a blessing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The characterisation seemed to be highly powerful, and, so far as it went,
+      finely contrasted. I could almost have wished that the love for which the
+      bride suffers so much had been more dwelt upon, and Urscelyn had been made
+      somehow more worthy of such love and sacrifice. The only point in which
+      the poem struck me, after mature reflection, as less admirable than
+      certain others of the author&rsquo;s, lay in the circumstance that the narrative
+      moves slowly, but, of course, it should be remembered that the poem is one
+      of emotion, not incident. There are most magical flashes of imagery in the
+      poem, notably in the passage beginning
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     Her thought, long stagnant, stirred by speech,
+        Gave her a sick recoil;
+     As, dip thy fingers through the green
+     That masks a pool, where they have been,
+     The naked depth is black between.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Rossetti wrote a valuable letter on his scheme for the completion of <i>The
+      Bride&rsquo;s Prelude</i>:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     I was much pleased with your verdict on <i>The Bride&rsquo;s
+     Prelude</i>. I think the poem is saved by its picturesqueness,
+     but that otherwise the story up to the point reached is too
+     purely repellent. I have the sequel quite clear in my mind,
+     and in it the mere passionate frailty of Aloyse&rsquo;s first love
+     would be followed by a true and noble love, rendered
+     calamitous by Urscelyn, who then (having become a powerful
+     soldier of fortune) solicits the hand of Aloyse. Thus the
+     horror which she expresses against him to her sister on the
+     bridal morning would be fully justified. Of course, Aloyse
+     would confess her fault to her second lover whose love
+     would, nevertheless, endure. The poem would gain so greatly
+     by this sequel that I suppose I must set to and finish it
+     one day, old as it is. I suppose it would be doubled, but
+     hardly more. I hate long poems.
+
+     I quite think the card-playing passage the best thing&mdash;as a
+     unit&mdash;in the poem: but your opinion encourages my own, that
+     it fails nowhere of good material. It certainly moves slowly
+     as you say, and this is quite against the rule I follow. But
+     here was no life condensed in an episode; but a story which
+     had necessarily to be told step by step, and a situation
+     which had unavoidably to be anatomised. If it is not
+     unworthy to appear with my best things, that is all I hope
+     for it. You have pitched curiously upon some of my favourite
+     touches, and very coincidently with Watts&rsquo;s views.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Early in 1881, he wrote:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     I am writing a ballad on the death of James I. of Scots. It
+     is already twice the length of <i>The White Ship</i>, and has a
+     good slice still to come. It is called <i>The King&rsquo;s Tragedy</i>,
+     and is a ripper I can tell you!
+
+     The other day I got from Italy a paper containing a really
+     excellent and exceptional notice of my poems, written by the
+     author of a volume also sent me containing, among other
+     translations from the English, <i>Jenny, Last Confession</i>,
+     etc.
+
+     I have been re-reading, after many years, Keats&rsquo;s <i>Otho the
+     Great</i>, and find it a much better thing than I remembered,
+     though only a draft.
+
+     I am much exercised as to what you mention as to a <i>Michael
+     Scott</i> scheme of Coleridge&rsquo;s. Where does he speak of it, and
+     what is it? It is quite new to me; but curiously enough, I
+     have a complete scheme drawn up for a ballad, to be called
+     <i>Michael Scott&rsquo;s Wooing</i>, not the one I proposed beginning
+     now&mdash;and also have long designed a picture under the same
+     title, but of quite different motif! Allan Cunningham wrote
+     a romance called <i>Sir Michael Scott</i>, but I never saw it.
+
+     I have heard from Walter Severn about a subscription
+     proposed to erect a gravestone to his father beside that of
+     Keats. I should like you to copy for me your sonnet on
+     Severn. I hear it is in <i>The Athenæum</i>, but have not seen
+     it. I was asked to prepare an inscription, which I send you.
+     Nothing would be so good as Severn&rsquo;s own words.
+
+     I strongly urge you to go on with your book on the
+     <i>Supernatural</i>. The closing chapter should, I think, be on
+     the <i>weird</i> element in its perfection, as shown by recent
+     poets in the mess&mdash;i.e. those who take any lead. Tennyson
+     has it certainly here and there in imagery, but there is no
+     great success in the part it plays through his <i>Idylls</i>. The
+     Old Romaunt beats him there. The strongest instance of this
+     feeling in Tennyson that I remember is in a few lines of
+     <i>The Palace of Art</i>:
+
+          And hollow breasts enclosing hearts of flame;
+             And with dim-fretted foreheads all
+          On corpses three months old at morn she came
+             That stood against the wall.
+
+     I won&rsquo;t answer for the precise age of the corpses&mdash;perhaps I
+     have staled them somewhat.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0009" id="link2HCH0009">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER IX.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      It is in the nature of these Recollections that they should be personal,
+      and it can hardly occur to any reader to complain of them for being that
+      which above all else they purport to be. I have hitherto, however, been
+      conscious of a desire (made manifest to my own mind by the character of my
+      selections from the letters written to me) to impart to this volume an
+      interest as broad and general as may be. But my primary purpose is now,
+      and has been from the first, to afford the best view at my command of
+      Rossetti as a man; and more helpful to such purpose than any number of
+      critical opinions, however interesting, have often been those passages in
+      his letters where the writer has got closest to his correspondent in
+      revealing most of himself. In the chapter I am now about to write I must
+      perforce set aside all limitations of reserve if I am to convey such an
+      idea of Rossetti&rsquo;s last days as fills my mind; I must be content to speak
+      almost exclusively of my personal relations to him, to the enforced
+      neglect of the more intimate relations of others.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      About six months after my first visit, Rossetti invited me to spend a week
+      with him at his house, and this I was glad to be able to do. I found him
+      in many important particulars a changed man. His complexion was brighter
+      than before, and this circumstance taken alone might have been understood
+      to indicate improved bodily health, but in actual fact it rather denoted
+      in his case a retrograde physical tendency, as being indicative chiefly of
+      some recent excess in the use of his pernicious drug. He was distinctly
+      less inclined to corpulence, his eyes were less bright, and had more
+      frequently than formerly the appearance of gazing upon vacancy, and when
+      he walked to and fro in the studio, as it was his habit to do at intervals
+      of about an hour, he did so with a more laboured sidelong motion than I
+      had previously noticed, as though the body unconsciously lost and then
+      regained some necessary control and command at almost every step. Half
+      sensible, no doubt, of a reduced condition, or guessing perhaps the nature
+      of my reflections from a certain uneasiness which it baffled my efforts to
+      conceal, he paused for an instant one evening in the midst of these
+      melancholy perambulations and asked me how he struck me as to health. More
+      frankly than judiciously I answered promptly, Less well than formerly. It
+      was a luckless remark, for Rossetti&rsquo;s prevailing wish at that moment was
+      to conceal even from himself his lowered state, and the time was still to
+      come when he should crave the questionable sympathy of those who said he
+      looked even more ill than he felt. Just before this, my second visit, he
+      had completed his <i>King&rsquo;s Tragedy</i>, and I had heard from his own lips
+      how prostrate the emotional strain involved in the production of the poem
+      had first left him. Casting himself now on the couch in an attitude
+      indicative of unusual exhaustion, he said the ballad had taken much out of
+      him. &ldquo;It was as though my life ebbed out with it,&rdquo; he said, and in saying
+      so much of the nervous tension occasioned by the work in question he did
+      not overstate the truth as it presented itself to other eyes. Time after
+      time while the ballad was in course of production, he had made effort to
+      read it aloud to the friend to whose judgment his poetry was always
+      submitted, but had as frequently failed to do so from the physical
+      impossibility of restraining the tears that at every stage welled up out
+      of an overwrought nature, for the poet never existed perhaps who, while at
+      work, lived so vividly in the imagined situation. And the weight of that
+      work was still upon him when we met again. His voice seemed to have lost
+      much in quality, and in compass too to have diminished: or if the volume
+      of sound remained the same, it appeared to have retired (so to express it)
+      inwards, and to convey, when he spoke, the idea of a man speaking as much
+      to himself as to others. More than ever now the scene of his life lacked
+      for me some necessary vitality: it breathed an atmosphere of sorrow: it
+      was like the dream of a distempered imagination out of which there came no
+      welcome awakening, to say it was not true. On the side of his intellectual
+      life Rossetti was obviously under less constraint with me than ever
+      before. Previously he had seemed to make a conscious effort to speak
+      generously of all contemporaries, and cordially of every friend with whom
+      he was brought into active relations; and if, by force of some stray
+      impulse, he was ever led to say a disparaging word of any one, he
+      forthwith made a palpable, and sometimes amusing, effort so to obliterate
+      the injurious impression as to convey the idea that he wished it to appear
+      that he had not said anything at all. But now this restraint was thrown
+      aside.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I perceived that the drug by which he was enslaved caused what I may best
+      characterise as intermittent waves of morbid suspiciousness as to the good
+      faith of every individual, including his best, oldest, and truest friends,
+      as to whom the most inexplicable delusions would suddenly come, and as
+      suddenly go. He would talk in the gravest and most earnest way of the
+      wrongs he had suffered at the hands of a dear friend, and then the moment
+      his eloquence had drawn from me an exclamation of sympathy for him, he
+      would turn round and heap upon the same individual an extravagance of
+      praise for his fidelity and good faith. And now, he so classed his
+      contemporaries as to leave no doubt that he was duly sensible of his own
+      place amongst them, preserving, meantime, a dignified reticence as to the
+      extent of his personal claims.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His life was an anachronism. Such a man should have had no dealings with
+      the nineteenth century: he belonged to the sixteenth, or perhaps the
+      thirteenth, and in Italy not in England. It would, nevertheless, be wrong
+      to say that he was wholly indifferent to important political issues, of
+      which he took often a very judicial view. In dismissing further mention of
+      this second and prolonged meeting with Rossetti, it only remains to me to
+      say (as a necessary, if strictly personal, explanation of much that will
+      follow), that on the evening preceding my departure, he asked me, in the
+      event of my deciding to come to live in London, to take up my quarters at
+      his house. To this proposal I made no reply: and neither his speech nor my
+      silence needs any comment, and I shall offer none.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A month or two later my own health gave way, and then, a change of
+      residence being inevitable, Rossetti repeated his invitation; but a London
+      campaign, under such conditions as were necessarily entailed by pitching
+      one&rsquo;s tent with him, got further and further away, until I seemed to see
+      it through the inverse end of a telescope whereof the slides were being
+      drawn out, out, every day further and further. I determined to spend half
+      a year among&rsquo; the mountains of Cumberland, and went up to the Vale of St.
+      John. Scarcely had I settled there when Rossetti wrote that he must
+      himself soon leave London: that he was wearied out absolutely, and unable
+      to sleep at night, that if he could only reach that secluded vale he would
+      breathe a purer air mentally as well as physically. The mood induced by
+      contemplation of the tranquillity of my retreat over-against the turmoil
+      and distractions of the city <i>in</i> which, though not <i>of</i> which,
+      he was, added to the deepening exhaustion which had already begun when I
+      left him, had prevailed with him, he said, to ask me to come down to
+      London, and travel back with him. &ldquo;Supposing,&rdquo; he wrote, &ldquo;I were to ask
+      you to come to town in a fortnight&rsquo;s time from now&mdash;I returning with
+      you for a while into the country&mdash;would that be feasible to you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Once unsettled in the environments within which for years he had moved
+      contentedly, a thousand reasons were found for the contemplated step, and
+      simultaneously a thousand obstacles arose to impede the execution of it.
+      &ldquo;They have at length taken my garden,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;as they have long
+      threatened to do, and now they are really setting about building upon it.
+      I do not in the least know what my plans may be.&rdquo; And again: &ldquo;It seems
+      certain that I must leave this house and seek another. Is there any house
+      in the neighbourhood of the Vale of St. John with a largish room one could
+      paint in (to N. or NE.)?&rdquo; The idea of his taking up his permanent abode so
+      far out of the market circle was, I well knew, just one of those
+      impracticable notions which, with Rossetti, were abandoned as soon as
+      conceived, so I was not surprised to hear from him as follows, by the
+      succeeding post: &ldquo;In what I wrote yesterday I said something as to a
+      possibility of leaving town, but I now perceive this is not practicable at
+      present; therefore need not trouble you to take note of neighbouring
+      houses.&rdquo; Presently he wrote again: &ldquo;Bedevilments thicken: the garden is
+      ploughed up, and I &lsquo;ve not stirred out of the house for a week: I must
+      leave this place at once if I am to leave it alive.&rdquo; {*}
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     * It is but just to say that, although Rossetti wrote thus
+     peevishly of what was quite inevitable,&mdash;the yielding up of
+     his fine garden,&mdash;he would at other times speak of the great
+     courtesy and good-nature of Messrs. Pemberton, in allowing
+     him the use of the garden after it had been severed from the
+     property he hired.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My present purpose is to take another house in London. Could you not come
+      down and beat up agents for me? I know you will not deny me your help. I
+      hear of a house at Brixton, with a garden of two acres, and only £130 a
+      year.&rdquo; In a day or two even this last hope had proved delusive: &ldquo;I find
+      the house at Brixton will not do, and I hear of nothing else.... I am
+      anxious as to having become perfectly deaf on the right side of my head.
+      Partial approaches to this have sometimes occurred to me and passed away,
+      so I will not be too much troubled at it.&rdquo; A little later he wrote: &ldquo;Now
+      my housekeeper is leaving me, her mother being very ill. Can you not come
+      to my assistance? Come at once and we will set sail in one boat.&rdquo; I appear
+      to have replied to this last appeal in a tone of some little scepticism as
+      to his remaining long in the same mind relative to our mutual housemating,
+      for subsequently he says: &ldquo;At this writing I can see no likelihood of my
+      not remaining in the mind that, in case of your coming to London, your
+      quarters should be taken up here. The house is big enough for two, even if
+      they meant to be strangers to each other. You would have your own rooms
+      and we should meet just when we pleased. You have got a sufficient inkling
+      of my exceptional habits not to be scared by them. It is true, at times my
+      health and spirits are variable, but I am sure we should not be
+      squabbling. However, it seems you have no intention of a quite immediate
+      move, and we can speak farther of it.&rdquo; I readily consented to do whatever
+      seemed feasible to help him out of his difficulties, which existed,
+      however, as I perceived, much more in his own mind than in actual fact. I
+      thought a brief holiday in the solitude within which I was then located
+      would probably be helpful in restoring a tranquil condition of mind, and
+      as his brother, Mr. Scott, Mr. Watts, Mr. Shields, and other friends in
+      London, were of a similar opinion, efforts were made to induce him to
+      undertake the journey which he had been the first to think of. His oldest
+      friend, Mr. Madox Brown (whose presence would have been as valuable now as
+      it had proved to be on former occasions), was away at Manchester, and
+      remained there throughout the time of his last illness. His moods at this
+      time were too variable to be relied upon three days together, and so I
+      find him writing:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     Many thanks for the information as to your Shady Vale, which
+     seems a vision&mdash;a distant one, alas!&mdash;of Paradise. Perhaps I
+     may reach it yet.... I am now thinking of writing another
+     ballad-poem to add at the end of my volume. It is romantic,
+     not historical I have a clear scheme for it and believe your
+     scenery might help me much if I could get there. When you
+     hear that scheme, you will, I believe, pronounce it
+     precisely fitted to the scenery you describe as now
+     surrounding you. That scenery I hope to reach a little
+     later, but meantime should much like to see you in London
+     and return with you.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      The proposed ballad was to be called <i>The Orchard Pits</i> and was to be
+      illustrative of the serpent fascination of beauty, but it was never
+      written. Contented now to await the issue of events, he proceeded to write
+      on subjects of general interest:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     Keats (page 154, vol. i., of Houghton&rsquo;s Life, etc.) mentions
+     among other landscape features the Vale of St. John. So you
+     may think of him in the neighbourhood as well as (or, if you
+     like, rather than) Wordsworth.
+
+     I have been reading again Hogg&rsquo;s Shelley. S. appears to have
+     been as mad at Keswick as everywhere else, but not madder;&mdash;
+     that he could not compass.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      At this juncture some unlooked-for hitch in the arrangements then pending
+      for the sale of the <i>Dante&rsquo;s Dream</i> to the Corporation of Liverpool
+      rendered my presence in London inevitable, and upon my arrival I found
+      that Rossetti had fitted out rooms for my reception, although I had never
+      down to that moment finally decided to avail myself of an offer which upon
+      its first being broached, appeared to be too one-sided a bargain (in which
+      of course the sacrifice seemed to be Rossetti&rsquo;s) to admit of my
+      entertaining it. In this way I drifted into my position as Rossetti&rsquo;s
+      housemate.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The letters and scraps of notes I have embodied in the foregoing will
+      probably convey a better idea of Rossetti&rsquo;s native irresolution, as it was
+      made manifest to me in the early part of 1881, than any abstract
+      definition, however faithful and exact, could be expected to do.
+      Irresolution was indubitably his most noticeable quality at the time when
+      I came into active relation with him; and if I be allowed to have any
+      perception of character and any acquaintance with the fundamental traits
+      that distinguish man from man, I shall say unhesitatingly (though I well
+      know how different is the opinion of others) that irresolution with
+      melancholy lay at the basis of his nature. I have heard Mr. Swinburne
+      speak of a cheerfulness of deportment in early life, which imparted an
+      idea as of one who could not easily be depressed. I have heard Mr. Watts
+      speak of the days at Kelmscott Manor House, where he first knew him, and
+      where Rossetti was the most delightful of companions. I have heard Canon
+      Dixon speak of a determination of purpose which yielded to no sort of
+      obstacle, but carried its point by the sheer vehemence with which it
+      asserted it. I can only say that I was witness to neither characteristic.
+      Of traits the reverse of these, I was constantly receiving evidence; but
+      let it be remembered that before I joined Rossetti (which was only in the
+      last year of his life) in that intimate relation which revealed to my
+      unwilling judgment every foible and infirmity of character, the whole
+      nature of the man had been vitiated by an enervating drug. At my meeting
+      with him the brighter side of his temperament had been worn away in the
+      night-troubles of his unrestful couch; and of that needful volition, which
+      establishes for a man the right to rule not others but himself, only the
+      mockery and inexplicable vagaries of temper remained. When I knew him,
+      Rossetti was devoid of resolution. At that moment at which he had finally
+      summoned up every available and imaginable reason for pursuing any
+      particular course, his purpose wavered and his heart gave way. When I knew
+      him, Rossetti was destitute of cheerfulness or content. At that instant,
+      at which the worst of his shadowy fears had been banished by some
+      fortuitous occurrence that lit up with an unceasing radiation of hope
+      every prospect of life, he conjured out of its very brightness fresh cause
+      for fear and sadness. True, indeed, these may have been no more than
+      symptoms of those later phenomena which came of disease, and foreshadowed
+      death. Other minds may reduce to a statement of cause and effect what I am
+      content to offer as fact.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Upon settling with Rossetti in July 1881, I perceived that his health was
+      weaker. His tendency to corpulence had entirely disappeared, his
+      feebleness of step had become at certain moments painfully apparent, and
+      his temper occasionally betrayed signs of bitterness. To myself,
+      personally, he was at this stage as genial as of old, or if for an instant
+      he gave vent to an unprovoked outburst of wrath, he would far more than
+      atone for it by a look of inexpressible remorse and some feeling words of
+      regret, whereof the import sometimes was&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I wish you were indeed my son, for though then I should still have no
+      right to address you so, I should at least have some right to expect your
+      forgiveness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In such moods of more than needful solicitude for one&rsquo;s acutest
+      sensibilities, Rossetti was absolutely irresistible.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As I have said, the occupant of this great gloomy house, in which I had
+      now become a resident, had rarely been outside its doors for two years;
+      certainly never afoot, and only in carriages with his friends. Upon the
+      second night of my stay, I announced my intention of taking a walk on the
+      Chelsea embankment, and begged him to accompany me. To my amazement he
+      yielded, and every night for a week following, I succeeded in inducing him
+      to repeat the now unfamiliar experience. It was obvious enough to himself
+      that he walked totteringly, with infinite expenditure of physical energy,
+      and returned in a condition of exhaustion that left him prostrate for an
+      hour afterwards. The root of all this evil was soon apparent. He was
+      exceeding with the chloral, and little as I expected or desired to
+      exercise a moral guardianship over the habits of this great man, I found
+      myself insensibly dropping into that office.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Negotiations for the sale of the Liverpool picture were now complete; the
+      new volume of poems and the altered edition of the old volume had been
+      satisfactorily passed through the press; and it might have been expected
+      that with the anxiety occasioned by these enterprises, would pass away the
+      melancholy which in a nature like Rossetti&rsquo;s they naturally induced. The
+      reverse was the fact, He became more and more depressed as each palpable
+      cause of depression was removed, and more and more liable to give way to
+      excess with the drug. By his brother, Mr. Watts, Mr. Shields, and others
+      who had only too frequently in times past had experience of similar
+      outbreaks, this failure in spirits, with all its attendant physical
+      weakness, was said to be due primarily to hypochondriasis. Hence the
+      returning necessity to get him away (as Mr. Madox Brown had done at a
+      previous crisis) for a change of air and scene. Once out of this
+      atmosphere of gloom, we hoped that amid cheerful surroundings his health
+      would speedily revive. Infinite were the efforts that had to be made, and
+      countless the precautions that had to be taken before he could be induced
+      to set out, but at length we found ourselves upon our way to Keswick, at
+      nine p.m., one evening in September, in a special carriage packed with as
+      many artist&rsquo;s trappings and as many books as would have lasted for a year.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We reached Penrith as the grey of dawn had overspread the sky. It was six
+      o&rsquo;clock as we got into the carriage that was to drive us through the vale
+      of St. John to our destination at the Legberthwaite end of it. The morning
+      was now calm, the mountains looked loftier, grander, and yet more than
+      ever precipitous from the road that circled about their base. Nothing
+      could be heard but the calls of the awakening cattle, the rumble of
+      cataracts far away, and the rush and surge of those that were near.
+      Rossetti was all but indifferent to our surroundings, or displayed only
+      such fitful interest in them as must have been affected out of a kindly
+      desire to please me. He said the chloral he had taken daring the journey
+      was upon him, and he could not see. At length we reached the house that
+      was for some months to be our home. It stood at the foot of a ghyll,
+      which, when swollen by rain, was majestic in volume and sound. The little
+      house we had rented was free from all noise other than the occasional
+      voice of a child or bark of a dog. Here at least he might bury the memory
+      of the distractions of the city that vexed him. Save for the ripple of the
+      river that flowed at his feet, the bleating of sheep on Golden Howe, the
+      echo of the axe of the woodman who was thinning the neighbouring wood, and
+      the morning and evening mail-coach horn, he might delude himself into
+      forgetfulness that he belonged any longer to this noisy earth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Next day Rossetti was exceptionally well, and astounded me by the proposal
+      that we should ascend Golden Howe together&mdash;a little mountain of some
+      1000 feet that stands at the head of Thirlmere. With never a hope on my
+      part of our reaching the summit, we set out for that purpose, but through
+      no doubt the exhilarating effect of the mountain air, he actually
+      compassed the task he had proposed to himself, and sat for an hour on that
+      highest point from whence could be seen the Skiddaw range to the north,
+      Haven&rsquo;s Crag to the west, Styx Pass and Helvellyn to the east, and the
+      Dunmail Raise to the south, with the lake below. Rossetti was struck by
+      the variety of configuration in the hills, and even more by the variety of
+      colour. But he was no great lover of landscape beauty, and the majestic
+      scene before us produced less effect upon his mind than might perhaps have
+      been expected. He seemed to be almost unconscious of the unceasing
+      atmospheric changes that perpetually arrest and startle. the observer in
+      whom love of external nature in her grander moods has not been weakened by
+      disease. The complete extent of the Vale of St. John could be traversed by
+      the eye from the eminence upon which we sat. The valley throughout its
+      three-mile length is absolutely secluded: one has only the hills for
+      company, and to say the truth they are sometimes fearful company too.
+      Usually the landscape wears a cheerful aspect, but at times long fleecy
+      clouds drive midway across the mountains, leaving the tops visible. The
+      scenery is highly awakening to the imagination. Even the country people
+      are imaginative, and the country is full of ghostly legend. I was never at
+      any moment sensible that these environments affected Rossetti: assuredly
+      they never agitated him, and no effort did he make to turn them to account
+      for the purposes of the romantic ballad he had spoken of as likely to grow
+      amidst such surroundings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Being much more than ordinarily cheerful during the first evenings of our
+      stay in the North, he talked sometimes of his past life and of the men and
+      women he had known in earlier years. Carlyle&rsquo;s <i>Reminiscences</i> had
+      not long before been published. Mrs. Carlyle, therein so extravagantly
+      though naturally belauded, he described as a bitter little woman, with,
+      however, the one redeeming quality of unostentatious charity: &ldquo;The poor of
+      Chelsea,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;always spoke well of her.&rdquo; &ldquo;George Eliot,&rdquo; whose
+      genius he much admired, he had ceased to know long before her death, but
+      he spoke of the lady as modest and retiring, and amiable to a fault when
+      the outer crust of reticence had been broken through. Longfellow had
+      called upon him whilst he was painting the <i>Dante&rsquo;s Dream</i>. The old
+      poet was Courteous and complimentary in the last degree; he seemed,
+      however, to know little or nothing about painting as an art, and also to
+      have fallen into the error of thinking that Rossetti the painter and
+      Sossetti the poet were different men; in short, that the Dante of that
+      name was the painter, and the William the poet. Upon leaving the house,
+      Longfellow had said: &ldquo;I have been glad to meet you, and should like to
+      have met your brother; pray, tell him how much I admire his beautiful
+      poem, <i>The Blessed Damozel</i>&rdquo; Giving no hint of the error, Rossetti
+      said he had answered, &ldquo;I will tell him.&rdquo; He painted a little during our
+      stay in the North, for it was whilst there that he began the beautiful
+      replica of his <i>Proserpina</i>, now the property of Mr. Valpy. I found
+      it one of my best pleasures to watch a picture growing under his hand, and
+      thought it easy to see through the medium of his idealised heads, cold
+      even in their loveliness, unsubstantial in their passion, that to the
+      painter life had been a dream into which nothing entered that was not as
+      impalpable as itself. Tainted by the touch of melancholy that is the
+      blight that clings to the purest beauty, his pictured faces were, in my
+      view, akin to his poetry, every line of which, as he sometimes recited it,
+      seemed as though it echoed the burden of a bygone sorrow&mdash;the sorrow
+      of a dream rather than that of a life, or of a life that had been itself a
+      dream. I also then realised what Mr. Theodore Watts has said in a letter
+      just now written to me from Sark, that, &ldquo;apart from any question of
+      technical shortcomings, one of Rossetti&rsquo;s strongest claims to the
+      attention of posterity was that of having invented, in the
+      three-quarter-length pictures painted from one face, a type of female
+      beauty which was akin to none other,&mdash;which was entirely new, in
+      short,&mdash;and which, for wealth of sublime and mysterious suggestion,
+      unaided by complex dramatic design, was unique in the art of the world.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      On one occasion the talk turned on the eccentricities and affectations of
+      men of genius, and I did my best to-ridicule them unsparingly, saying they
+      were a purely modern extravagance, the highest intellects of other times
+      being ever the sanest, Shakspeare, Cervantes, Goethe, Coleridge,
+      Wordsworth; the root of the evil had been Shelley, who was mad, and in
+      imitation of whose madness, modern men of genius must many of them be mad
+      also, until it had come to such a pass-that if a gifted man conducted
+      himself throughout life with probity and propriety we instantly began to
+      doubt the value of his gifts. Rossetti evidently thought that in all this
+      I was covertly hitting out at himself, and cut short the conversation with
+      an unequivocal hint that he had no affectations, and could not account
+      himself an authority with respect to them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With such talk a few of our evenings were spent, but too soon the
+      insatiable craving for the drug came with renewed force, and then all
+      pleasant intercourse was banished. Night after night we sat up until
+      eleven, twelve, and one o&rsquo;clock, watching the long hours go by with heavy
+      steps; waiting, waiting, waiting for the time at which he could take his
+      first draught, and drop into his pillowed place and snatch a dreamless
+      sleep of three or four hours&rsquo; duration.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In order to break the monotony of nights such as I describe I sometimes
+      read from Fielding, Richardson, and Sterne, but more frequently induced
+      Rossetti to recite. Thus, with failing voice, he would again and again
+      attempt, at my request, his <i>Cloud Confines</i>, or passages from <i>The
+      King&rsquo;s Tragedy</i>, and repeatedly, also, Poe&rsquo;s <i>Ulalume</i> and <i>Raven</i>.
+      I remember that, touching the last-mentioned of these poems, he remarked
+      that out of his love of it while still a boy his own <i>Blessed Damozel</i>
+      originated. &ldquo;I saw,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;that Poe had done the utmost it was
+      possible to do with the grief of the lover on earth, and so I determined
+      to reverse the conditions, and give utterance to the yearning of the loved
+      one in heaven.&rdquo; At that time of the year the night closed in as early as
+      seven or eight o&rsquo;clock, and then in that little house among the solitary
+      hills his disconsolate spirit would sometimes sink beyond solace into
+      irreclaimable depths of depression.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was impossible that such a condition of things should last, and it was
+      with unspeakable relief that I heard Rossetti express a desire to return
+      home. Mr. Watts, who at that time was at Stratford-upon-Avon, had promised
+      to join us, but now wrote to say that this was impossible. Had it been
+      otherwise, Rossetti would willingly have remained, but now he longed to
+      get back to London. His life had lost its joys. The success of his
+      Liverpool picture was almost as nothing to him, and the enthusiastic
+      reception given to his book gave him not more than a passing pleasure,
+      though he was deeply touched by the sympathetic and exhaustive criticism
+      published by Professor Dowden in <i>The Academy</i>, as well as by
+      Professor Colvin&rsquo;s friendly monograph in <i>The World</i>. At length one
+      night, a month after our arrival, we set out on our return, and well do I
+      remember the pathos of his words as I helped him (now feebler than ever)
+      into his house. &ldquo;Thank God! home at last, and never shall I leave it
+      again!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Very natural was the deep concern of his friends, especially of his
+      brother and Mr. Shields, at finding him return even less well than he had
+      set out. With deeper reliance on past knowledge of the man, Mr. Watts
+      still took a hopeful view, attributing the physical prostration to
+      hypochondriasis, which might, in common with all similar nervous ailments,
+      impose as much pain upon the victim as if the sufferings complained of had
+      a real foundation in positive disease, but might also give way at any
+      moment when the victim could be induced to take a hopeful view of life.
+      The cheerfulness of Mr. Watts&rsquo;s society, after what I well know must have
+      been the lugubrious nature of my own, had at first its usual salutary
+      effect upon Rossetti&rsquo;s spirits, and I will not forbear to say that I, too,
+      welcomed it as a draught of healing morning air after a month-long
+      imprisonment in an atmosphere of gloom. But I was not yet freed of my
+      charge. The sense of responsibility which in the solitude of the mountains
+      had weighed me down, was now indeed divided with his affectionate family
+      and the friends who were Rossetti&rsquo;s friends before they were mine, and who
+      came at this juncture with willing help, prompted chiefly, of course, by
+      devotion to the great man in sore trouble, but also&mdash;I must allow
+      myself to think&mdash;in one or two cases by desire to relieve me of some
+      of the burden of the task that had fallen so unexpectedly upon me.
+      Foremost among such disinterested friends was of course the friend I have
+      spoken of so frequently in these pages, and for whom I now felt a growing
+      regard arising as much out of my perception of the loyalty of his
+      comradeship as the splendour of his gifts. But after him in solicitous
+      service to Rossetti, at this moment of great need, came Frederick Shields
+      (the fine tissue of whose highly-strung nature must have been sorely tried
+      by the strain to which it was subjected), Mr. W. B. Scott, whose visits
+      were never more warmly welcomed by Rossetti than at this season, the good
+      and gifted Miss Boyd, and of course Rossetti&rsquo;s brother, sister, and
+      mother, to each of whom he was affectionately attached. Strange enough it
+      seemed that this man who, for years had shunned the world and chosen
+      solitude when he might have had society, seemed at last to grow weary of
+      his loneliness. But so it was. Rossetti became daily more and more
+      dependent upon his friends for company that should not fail him, for never
+      for an hour now could he endure to be alone. Remembering this, I almost
+      doubt if by nature he was at any time a solitary. There are men who feel
+      more deeply the sense of isolation amidst the busiest crowds than within
+      the narrowest circle of intimates, and I have heard from Rossetti
+      reminiscences of his earlier life that led me to believe that he was one
+      of the number. Perhaps, after all, he wandered from the world rather from
+      the dread than with the hope of solitude. In such pleasant intercourse as
+      the visits of the friends I have named afforded, was the sadness of the
+      day in a measure dissipated, but when night came I never failed to realise
+      that no progress whatever had been made. I tried to check the craving for
+      chloral, but I could as easily have checked the rising tide: and where the
+      lifelong assiduity of older friends had failed to eradicate a morbid,
+      ruinous, and fatal thirst, it was presumptous if not ridiculous to imagine
+      that the task could be compassed by a frail creature with heart and nerves
+      of wax. But the whole scene was now beginning to have an interest for me
+      more personal and more serious than I have yet given hint of. The constant
+      fret and fume of this life of baffled effort, of struggle with a deadly
+      drug that had grown to have an objective existence in my mind as the
+      existence of a fiend, was not without a sensible effect upon myself. I
+      became ill for a few days with a low fever, but far worse than this was
+      the fact that there was creeping over me the wild influence of Rossetti&rsquo;s
+      own distempered imaginings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Once conscious of such influence I determined to resist it, but how to do
+      so I knew not without flying utterly away from an atmosphere in which my
+      best senses seemed to stagnate, and burying the memory of it for ever.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The crisis was pending, and sooner than we expected it came. A nurse was
+      engaged. One evening Dr. Westland Marston and his son Philip Bourke
+      Marston came to spend a few hours with Rossetti, For a while he seemed
+      much cheered by their bright society, but later on he gave those
+      manifestations of uneasiness which I had learned to know too well.
+      Removing restlessly from seat to seat, he ultimately threw himself upon
+      the sofa in that rather awkward attitude which I have previously described
+      as characteristic of him in moments of nervous agitation. Presently he
+      called out that his arm had become paralysed, and, upon attempting to
+      rise, that his leg also had lost its power. We were naturally startled,
+      but knowing the force of his imagination in its influence on his bodily
+      capacity, we tried playfully to banish the idea. Raising him to his feet,
+      however, we realised that from whatever cause, he had lost the use of the
+      limbs in question, and in the utmost alarm we carried him to his bedroom,
+      and hurried away for Mr. Marshall It was found that he had really
+      undergone a species of paralysis, called, I think, loss of co-ordinative
+      power. The juncture was a critical one, and it was at length decided by
+      the able medical adviser just named, that the time had come when the
+      chloral, which was at the root of all this mischief, should be decisively,
+      entirely, and instantly cut off. To compass this end a young medical man,
+      Mr. Henry Maudsley, was brought into the house as a resident to watch and
+      manage the case in the intervals of Mr. Marshall&rsquo;s visits. It is not for
+      me to offer a statement of what was done, and done so ably at this period.
+      I only know that morphia was at first injected as a substitute for the
+      narcotic the system had grown to demand; that Rossetti was for many hours
+      delirious whilst his body was passing through the terrible ordeal of
+      having to conquer the craving for the former drug, and that three or four
+      mornings after the experiment had been begun he awoke calm in body, and
+      clear in mind, and grateful in heart. His delusions and those intermittent
+      suspicions of his friends which I have before alluded to, were now gone,
+      as things in the past of which he hardly knew whether in actual fact they
+      had or had not been. Christmas Day was now nigh at hand, and, still
+      confined to his room, he begged me to promise to spend that day with him;
+      &ldquo;otherwise,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;how sad a day it must be for me, for I cannot
+      fairly ask any other.&rdquo; With a tenderness of sympathy I shall not forget,
+      Mr. Scott had asked me to dine that day at his more cheerful house; but I
+      reflected that this was to be my first Christmas in London and it might be
+      Rossetti&rsquo;s last, so I put by pleasanter considerations. We dined alone,
+      but, somewhat later, William Rossetti, with true brotherly affection, left
+      the guests at his own house, and ran down to spend an hour with the
+      invalid. We could hear from time to time the ringing of the bells of the
+      neighbouring churches, and I noticed that Rossetti was not disturbed by
+      them as he had been formerly. Indeed, the drug once removed, he was in
+      every sense a changed man. He talked that night brightly, and with more
+      force and incisiveness, I thought, than he had displayed for months. There
+      was the ring of affection in his tone as he said he had always had loyal
+      friends; and then he spoke with feeling of Mr. Watts&rsquo;s friendship, of Mr.
+      Shields&rsquo;s, and afterwards he spoke of Mr. Burne Jones who had just
+      previously visited him, as well as of Mr. Madox Brown, and his friendship
+      of a lifetime; of Mr. Swinburne, Mr. Morris, Mr. Stephens, Mr. Boyce, and
+      other early friends. He said a word or two of myself which I shall not
+      repeat, and then spoke with emotion of his mother and sister, and of his
+      sister who was dead, and how they were supported through their sore trials
+      by religious resignation. He asked if I, like Shields, was a believer, and
+      seemed altogether in a softer and more spiritual mood than I remember to
+      have noticed before.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With such talk we passed the Christmas night of 1881. Rossetti recovered
+      power in some measure, was able to get down to the studio, and see the
+      friends who called&mdash;Mr. F. E. Leyland frequently, Lord and Lady Mount
+      Temple, Mrs. Sumner, Mr. Boyce, Mr. F. G. Stephens, Mr. Gilchrist, Mr. and
+      Mrs. Virtue Tebbs, Mrs. Stillman, Mrs. Coronio, and Mr. C. and Mr. A.
+      Ionides occasionally, as well as those previously named. A visit from Dr.
+      Hueffer of the <i>Times</i> (of whose gifts he had a high opinion),
+      enlivened him perceptibly. But he did not recover, and at the end of
+      January 1882 it was definitely determined that he should go to the
+      sea-side. I was asked to accompany him, and did so. At the right juncture
+      Mr. J. P. Seddon very hospitably tendered the use of his handsome bungalow
+      at Birchington-on-Sea, a little watering-place four miles west of Margate.
+      There we spent nine weeks. At first going out he was able to take short
+      walks on the cliffs, or round the road that winds about the churchyard,
+      but his strength grew less and less every day and hour. We were constantly
+      visited by Mr. Watts, whose devotion never failed, and Rossetti would
+      brighten up at the prospect of one of his visits, and become sensibly
+      depressed when he had gone. Mr. William Sharp, too (a young friend of
+      whose gifts as a poet Rossetti had a genuine appreciation, and by whom he
+      had been visited at intervals for some time), came out occasionally and
+      cheered up the sufferer in a noticeable degree. Then his mother and sister
+      came and stayed in the house during many weeks at the last. How shall I
+      speak of the tenderness of their solicitude, of their unwearying
+      attentions, in a word of their ardent and reciprocated love of the
+      illustrious son and brother for whom they did the thousand gentle offices
+      which they alone could have done! The end was drawing on, and we all knew
+      the fact. Rossetti had actually taken to poetical composition afresh, and
+      had written a facetious ballad (conceived years before) of the length of
+      <i>The White Ship</i>, called <i>Jan Van Hunks</i>, embodying an eccentric
+      story of a Dutchman&rsquo;s wager to smoke against the devil. This was to appear
+      in a miscellany of stories and poems by himself and Mr. Watts, a project
+      which had been a favourite one of his for some years, and in which he now,
+      in his last moments, took a revived interest strange and strong.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      About this time he derived great gratification from reading an article on
+      him and his works in <i>Le Livre</i> by Mr. Joseph Knight, an old friend
+      to whom he was deeply attached, and for whose gifts he had a genuine
+      admiration. Perhaps the very last letter Rossetti penned was written to
+      Mr. Knight upon the subject of this article.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His intellect was as powerful as in his best days, and freer than ever of
+      hallucinations. But his bodily strength grew less and less. His sight
+      became feebler, and then he abandoned the many novels that had recently
+      solaced his idler hours, and Miss Rossetti read aloud to him. Among other
+      books she read Dickens&rsquo;s <i>Tale of Two Cities</i>, and he seemed deeply
+      touched by Sidney Carton&rsquo;s sacrifice, and remarked that he would like to
+      paint the last scene of the story.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On Wednesday morning, April 5th, I went into the bedroom to which he had
+      for some days been confined, and wrote out to his dictation two sonnets
+      which he had composed on a design of his called <i>The Sphinx</i>, and
+      which he wished to give, together with the drawing and the ballad before
+      described, to Mr. Watts for publication in the volume just mentioned. On
+      the Thursday morning I found his utterance thick, and his speech from that
+      cause hardly intelligible. It chanced that I had just been reading Mr.
+      Buchanan&rsquo;s new volume of poems, and in the course of conversation I told
+      him the story of the ballad called <i>The Lights of Leith</i>, and he was
+      affected by the pathos of it. He had heard of that author&rsquo;s
+      retractation{*} of the charges involved in the article published ten years
+      earlier, and was manifestly touched by the dedication of the romance <i>God
+      and the Man</i>. He talked long and earnestly that morning, and it was our
+      last real interview. He spoke of his love of early English ballad
+      literature, and of how when he first met with it he had said to himself:
+      &ldquo;There lies your line.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     * The retractation, which now has a peculiar literary
+     interest, was made in the following verses, and should, I
+     think, be recorded here:
+
+     To an old Enemy.
+
+          I would have snatch&rsquo;d a bay-leaf from thy brow,
+             Wronging the chaplet on an honoured head;
+          In peace and charity I bring thee now
+               A lily-flower instead.
+          Pure as thy purpose, blameless as thy song,
+             Sweet as thy spirit, may this offering be;
+          Forget the bitter blame that did thee wrong,
+               And take the gift from me!
+
+     In a later edition of the romance the following verses are
+     added to the dedication:
+
+     To Dante Gabriel Rossetti:
+
+          Calmly, thy royal robe of death around thee,
+             Thou Bleekest, and weeping brethren round thee stand&mdash;
+          Gently they placed, ere yet God&rsquo;s angel crown&rsquo;d thee,
+               My lily in thy hand!
+          I never knew thee living, O my brother!
+             But on thy breast my lily of love now lies;
+          And by that token, we shall know each other,
+               When God&rsquo;s voice saith &ldquo;Arise!&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Can you understand me?&rdquo; he asked abruptly, alluding to the thickness of
+      his utterance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Perfectly.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nurse Abrey cannot: what a good creature she is!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      That night we telegraphed to Mr. Marshall, to Mr. W. M. Rossetti, and Mr.
+      Watts, and wrote next morning to Mr. Shields, Mr. Scott, and Mr. Madox
+      Brown. It had been found by the resident medical man, Dr. Harris, that in
+      Rossetti&rsquo;s case kidney disease had supervened. His dear mother and I sat
+      up until early morning with him, and when we left him his sister took our
+      place and remained with him the whole of that and subsequent nights. He
+      sat up in bed most of the time and said a sort of stupefaction had removed
+      all pain. He crooned over odd lines of poetry. &ldquo;My own verses torment me,&rdquo;
+       he said. Then he half-sang, half-recited, snatches from one of Iago&rsquo;s
+      songs in <i>Othello</i>. &ldquo;Strange things,&rdquo; he murmured, &ldquo;to come into
+      one&rsquo;s head at such a moment.&rdquo; I told him his brother and Mr. Watts would
+      be with him to-morrow. &ldquo;Then you really think that I am dying? At <i>last</i>
+      you think so; but <i>I</i> was right from the first.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Next day, Good Friday, the friends named did come, and weak as he was, he
+      was much cheered by their presence. The following day Mr. Marshall
+      arrived.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That gentleman recognised the alarming position of affairs, but he was not
+      without hope. He administered a sort of hot bath, and on Sunday morning
+      Rossetti was perceptibly brighter. Mr. Shields had now arrived, and one
+      after one of his friends, including Mr. Leyland, who was at the time
+      staying at Ramsgate, and made frequent calls, visited him in his room and
+      found him able to listen and sometimes to talk. In the evening the nurse
+      gave a cheering report of his condition, and encouraged by such prospects,
+      Mr. Watts, Mr. Shields, and myself, gave way to good spirits, and retired
+      to an adjoining room. About nine o&rsquo;clock Mr. Watts left us, and returning
+      in a short time, said he had been in the sickroom, and had had some talk
+      with Rossetti, and found him cheerful. An instant afterwards we heard a
+      scream, followed by a loud rapping at our door. We hurried into Rossetti&rsquo;s
+      room and found him in convulsions. Mr. Watts raised him on one side,
+      whilst I raised him on the other; his mother, sister, and brother, were
+      immediately present (Mr. Shields had fled away for the doctor); there were
+      a few moments of suspense, and then we saw him die in our arms. Mrs.
+      William Rossetti arrived from Manchester at this moment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thus on Easter Day Rossetti died. It was hard to realise that he was
+      actually dead; but so it was, and the dreadful fact had at last come upon
+      us with a horrible suddenness. Of the business of the next few days I need
+      say nothing. I went up to London in the interval between the death and
+      burial, and the old house at Chelsea, which, to my mind, in my time had
+      always been desolate, was now more than ever so, that the man who had been
+      its vitalising spirit lay dead eighty miles away by the side of the sea.
+      It was decided to bury the poet in the churchyard of Birchington. The
+      funeral, which was a private one, was attended by relatives and personal
+      friends only, with one or two well-wishers from London.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Next day we saw most of the friends away by train, and, some days later,
+      Mr. Watts was with myself the last to leave. I thought we two were drawn
+      the closer each to each from the loss of him by whom we were brought
+      together. We walked one morning to the churchyard and found the grave,
+      which nestles under the south-west porch, strewn with flowers. The church
+      is an ancient and quaint early Gothic edifice, somewhat rejuvenated
+      however, but with ivy creeping over its walls. The prospect to the north
+      is of sea only: a broad sweep of landscape so flat and so featureless that
+      the great sea dominates it. As we stood there, with the rumble of the
+      rolling waters borne to us from the shore, we felt that though we had
+      little dreamed that we should lay Rossetti in his last sleep here, no
+      other place could be quite so fit. It was, indeed, the resting-place for a
+      poet. In this bed, of all others, he must at length, after weary years of
+      sleeplessness, sleep the only sleep that is deep and will endure. Thinking
+      of the incidents which I have in this chapter tried to record, my mind
+      reverted to a touching sonnet which the friend by my side had just
+      printed; and then, for the first time, I was struck by its extraordinary
+      applicability to him whom we had laid below. In its printed form it was
+      addressed to Heine, and ran:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     Thou knew&rsquo;st that island far away and lone
+        Whose shores are as a harp, where billows break
+        In spray of music and the breezes shake
+     O&rsquo;er spicy seas a woof of colour and tone,
+     While that sweet music echoes like a moan
+        In the island&rsquo;s heart, and sighs around the lake
+        Where, watching fearfully a watchful snake,
+     A damsel weeps upon her emerald throne.
+
+     Life&rsquo;s ocean, breaking round thy senses&rsquo; shore,
+        Struck golden song as from the strand of day:
+        For us the joy, for thee the fell foe lay&mdash;
+     Pain&rsquo;s blinking snake around the fair isle&rsquo;s core,
+        Turning to sighs the enchanted sounds that play
+     Around thy lovely island evermore.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How strangely appropriate it is,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;to Rossetti, and now I
+      remember how deeply he was moved on reading it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He guessed its secret; I addressed it, for disguise, to Heine, to whom it
+      was sadly inapplicable. I meant it for <i>him</i>.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      THE END. <br /><br />
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, by
+T. Hall Caine
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK RECOLLECTIONS OF ROSSETTI ***
+
+***** This file should be named 25574-h.htm or 25574-h.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+        http://www.gutenberg.org/2/5/5/7/25574/
+
+Produced by David Widger
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.
+
+
+
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase &ldquo;Project
+Gutenberg&rdquo;), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
+http://gutenberg.org/license).
+
+
+Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B.  &ldquo;Project Gutenberg&rdquo; is a registered trademark.  It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
+paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation (&ldquo;the Foundation&rdquo;
+ or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase &ldquo;Project Gutenberg&rdquo; appears, or with which the phrase &ldquo;Project
+Gutenberg&rdquo; is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase &ldquo;Project Gutenberg&rdquo; associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+&ldquo;Plain Vanilla ASCII&rdquo; or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original &ldquo;Plain Vanilla ASCII&rdquo; or other
+form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
+     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
+     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+     address specified in Section 4, &ldquo;Information about donations to
+     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.&rdquo;
+ 
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+     License.  You must require such a user to return or
+     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+     of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+&ldquo;Defects,&rdquo; such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the &ldquo;Right
+of Replacement or Refund&rdquo; described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH F3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you &lsquo;AS-IS&rsquo; WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need, is critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm&rsquo;s
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation web page at http://www.pglaf.org.
+
+
+Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service.  The Foundation&rsquo;s EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541.  Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
+http://pglaf.org/fundraising.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state&rsquo;s laws.
+
+The Foundation&rsquo;s principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at
+809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
+business@pglaf.org.  Email contact links and up to date contact
+information can be found at the Foundation&rsquo;s web site and official
+page at http://pglaf.org
+
+For additional contact information:
+     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+     Chief Executive and Director
+     gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+
+Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit http://pglaf.org
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations.
+To donate, please visit: http://pglaf.org/donate
+
+
+Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart is the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone.  For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+     http://www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
+
+
+</pre>
+  </body>
+</html>
diff --git a/25574.txt b/25574.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..1e3f80b
--- /dev/null
+++ b/25574.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,8464 @@
+Project Gutenberg's Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, by T. Hall Caine
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti
+       1883
+
+Author: T. Hall Caine
+
+Release Date: May 23, 2008 [EBook #25574]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK RECOLLECTIONS OF ROSSETTI ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+RECOLLECTIONS OF DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI
+
+By T. Hall Caine
+
+
+Roberts Brothers - 1883
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE.
+
+One day towards the close of 1881 Rossetti, who was then very ill, said
+to me:
+
+"How well I remember the beginning of our correspondence, and how little
+did I think it would lead to such relations between us as have ensued! I
+was at the time very solitary and depressed from various causes, and
+the letters of so young and ardent a well-wisher, though unknown to me
+personally, brought solace."
+
+"Yours," I said, "were very valuable to me."
+
+"Mine to you were among the largest bodies of literary letters I ever
+wrote, others being often letters of personal interest."
+
+"And so admirable in themselves," I added, "and so free from the
+discussion of any but literary subjects that many of them would bear to
+be printed exactly as you penned them."
+
+"That," he said, "will be for you some day to decide."
+
+This was the first hint of any intention upon my part of publishing the
+letters he had written to me; indeed, this was the first moment at which
+I had conceived the idea of doing so. Nothing further on the subject was
+said down to the morning of the Thursday preceding the Sunday on which
+he died, when we talked together for the last time on subjects of
+general interest,--subsequent interviews being concerned wholly with
+solicitous inquiries upon my part, in common with other anxious friends,
+as to the nature of his sufferings, and the briefest answers from him.
+
+"How long have we been friends?" he said.
+
+I replied, between three and four years from my first corresponding with
+him.
+
+"And how long did we correspond?"
+
+"Three years, nearly."
+
+"What numbers of my letters you must possess! They may perhaps even yet
+be useful to you."
+
+From this moment I regarded the publication of his letters as in some
+sort a trust; and though I must have withheld them for some years if I
+had consulted my own wishes simply, I yielded to the necessity that they
+should be published at once, rather than run any risk of their not been
+published at all.
+
+What I have just said will account for the circumstance that I, the
+youngest and latest of Rossetti's friends, should be the first to seem
+to stand towards him in the relation of a biographer. I say _seem_ to
+stand, for this is not a biography. It was always known to be Rossetti's
+wish that if at any moment after his death it should appear that the
+story of his life required to be written, the one friend who during many
+of his later years knew him most intimately, and to whom he unlocked the
+most sacred secrets of his heart, Mr. Theodore Watts, should write it,
+unless indeed it were undertaken by his brother William. But though
+I know that whenever Mr. Watts sets pen to paper in pursuance of
+such purpose, and in fulfilment of such charge, he will afford us a
+recognisable portrait of the man, vivified by picturesque illustration,
+the like of which few other writers could compass, I also know from
+what Rossetti often told me of his friend's immersion in all kinds and
+varieties of life, that years (perhaps many years) may elapse before
+such a biography is given to the world. My own book is, I trust, exactly
+what it purports to be: a volume of Recollections, interwoven with
+letters and criticism, and preceded by such a summary of the leading
+facts in Rossetti's life as seems necessary for the elucidation of
+subsequent records. I have drawn Rossetti precisely as I found him in
+each stage of our friendship, exhibiting his many contradictions of
+character, extenuating nothing, and, I need hardly add, setting down
+naught in malice. Up to this moment I have never inquired of myself
+whether to those who have known little or nothing of Rossetti
+hitherto, mine will seem to be on the whole favourable or unfavourable
+portraiture; but I have trusted my admiration of the poet and affection
+for the friend to penetrate with kindly and appreciative feeling every
+comment I have had to offer. I was attracted to Rossetti in the first
+case by ardent love of his genius, and retained to him ultimately by
+love of the man. As I have said in the course of these Recollections,
+it was largely his unhappiness that held me, with others, as by a spell,
+and only too sadly in this particular did he in his last year realise
+his own picture of Dante at Verona:
+
+     Yet of the twofold life he led
+       In chainless thought and fettered will
+       Some glimpses reach us,--somewhat still
+     Of the steep stairs and bitter bread,--
+       Of the soul's quest whose stern avow
+       For years had made him haggard now.
+
+I am sensible of the difficulty and delicacy of the task I have
+undertaken, involving, as it does, many interests and issues; and in
+every reference to surviving relatives as well as to other persons now
+living, with whom Rossetti was in any way allied, I have exercised in
+all friendliness the best judgment at my command.
+
+Clement's Inn, October 1882.
+
+     *** It has not been thought necessary to attach dates to the
+     letters printed in this volume, for not only would the
+     difficulty of doing so be great, owing to the fact that
+     Rossetti rarely dated his letters, but the utility of dates
+     in such a case would be doubtful, because the substance of
+     what is said is often quite impersonal, and, where
+     otherwise, is almost independent of the time of production.
+     It may be sufficient to say that the letters were written in
+     the years 1879,1880, and 1881.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+Gabriele Rossetti--Boyhood--The pre-Raphaelite Movement--Early
+Manhood--The Blessed Damozel--Jenny--Sister Helen--The Translations--The
+House of Life--The Germ--Oxford and Cambridge Magazine--Blackfriars
+Bridge--Married Life
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+Chelsea--Chloral--Dante's Dream--Recovery of the Poems--Poems--The
+Contemporary Controversy--Mr. Theodore Watts--Rose Mary--The
+White Ship--The King's Tragedy--Poetic Continuations--Cloud
+Confines--Journalistic Slanders
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+Early Intercourse--Poetic Impulses--Beginning of Correspondence--Early
+Letters
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+Inedited Poems--Inedited Ballads--Additions to Sister Helen--Hand
+and Soul--St. Agnes of Intercession--Catholic Opinion--Rossetti's
+Catholicism--Cloud Confines--The Portrait
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+Coleridge--Wordsworth--Lamb and Coleridge--Charles Wells--Keats--Leigh
+Hunt and Keats--Keats's Sister
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+Chatterton--Oliver Madox Brown--Gilchrist's Blake--George Gilfillan--Old
+Periodicals--A Rustic Poet--Art and Politics--Letters in Biography
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+Cheyne Walk--The House--First Meeting--Rossetti's Personality--His
+Reading--The Painter's Craft--Mr. Ruskin--Rossetti's Sensitiveness--His
+Garden--His Library
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+English Sonnets--Sonnet Structure--Shakspeare's Sonnets--Wells's
+Sonnet--Charles Whitehead--Ebenezer Jones--Mr. W. M. Rossetti--A New
+Sonnet--Mr. W. Davies--Canon Dixon--Miss Christina Rossetti--The Bride's
+Prelude--The Supernatural in Poetry
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+Last Days--Vale of St John--In the Lake Country--Return to
+London--London--Birchington
+
+
+
+
+RECOLLECTIONS OF DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+Dante Gabriel Rossetti was the eldest son of Gabriele Rossetti and
+Frances Polidori, daughter of Alfieri's secretary, and sister of the
+young physician who travelled with Lord Byron. Gabriele Rossetti was a
+native of Yasto, in the district of the Abruzzi, kingdom of Naples.
+He was a patriotic poet of very considerable distinction; and, as a
+politician, took a part in extorting from Ferdinand I. the Constitution
+of 1820. After the failure of the Neapolitan insurrection, owing to
+the treachery of the King (who asked leave of absence on a pretext
+of ill-health, and returned with an overwhelming Austrian army), the
+insurrectionists were compelled to fly. Some of them fell victims;
+others lay long in concealment. Rossetti was one of the latter; and,
+while he was in hiding, Sir Graham Moore, the English admiral, was lying
+with an English fleet in the bay. The wife of the admiral had long been
+a warm admirer of the patriotic hymns of Rossetti, and, when she learned
+his danger, she prevailed with her husband to make efforts to save him.
+Sir Graham thereupon set out with another English officer to the place
+of concealment, habited the poet in an English uniform, placed him
+between them in a carriage, and put him aboard a ship that sailed next
+day to Malta, where he obtained the friendship of the governor, John
+Hookham Frere, by whose agency valuable introductions were procured, and
+ultimately Rossetti established himself in England. Arrived in London
+about 1823, he lived a cheerful life as an exile, though deprived of the
+advantages of his Italian reputation. He married in 1826, and his eldest
+son was born May 12, 1828, in Charlotte Street, Portland Place, London.
+He was appointed Professor of Italian at King's College, and died in
+1854. His house was for years the constant resort of Italian refugees;
+and the son used to say that it was from observation of these visitors
+of his father that he depicted the principal personage of his _Last
+Confession_. He did not live to see the returning glories of his country
+or the consummation we have witnessed of that great movement founded
+upon the principles for which he fought and suffered. His present
+position in Italy as a poet and patriot is a high one, a medal having
+been struck in his honour. An effort is even now afoot to erect a statue
+to him in his native place, and one of the last occasions upon which
+the son put pen to paper was when trying to make a reminiscent rough
+portrait for the use of the sculptor. Gabriele Rossetti spent his last
+years in the study of Dante, and his works on the subject are unique,
+exhibiting a peculiar view of Dante's conception of Beatrice, which
+he believed to be purely ideal, and employed solely for purposes of
+speculative and political disquisition. Something of this interpretation
+was fixed undoubtedly upon the personage by Dante himself in his later
+writings, but whether the change were the result of a maturer and more
+complicated state of thought, and whether the real and ideal characters
+of Beatrice may not be compatible, are questions which the poetic mind
+will not consider it possible to decide. Coleridge, no doubt, took a
+fair view of Rossetti's theory when he said: "Rossetti's view of Dante's
+meaning is in great part just, but he has pushed it beyond all bounds of
+common sense. How could a poet--and such a poet as Dante--have written
+the details of the allegory as conjectured by Rossetti? The boundaries
+between his allegory and his pure picturesque are plain enough, I think,
+at first reading." It was, doubtless, due to his devotion to studies of
+the Florentine that Gabriele Rossetti named after him his eldest son.
+
+Dante Gabriel Rossetti, whose full baptismal name was Gabriel Charles
+Dante, was educated principally at King's College School, London, and
+there attained to a moderate proficiency in the ordinary classical
+school-learning, besides a knowledge of French, which throughout life he
+spoke well. He learned at home some rudimentary German; Italian he had
+acquired at a very early age. There has always been some playful mention
+of certain tragedies and translations upon which he exercised himself
+from the ages of five to fifteen years; but it is hardly necessary
+to say that he himself never attached value to these efforts of his
+precocity; he even displayed, occasionally, a little irritation upon
+hearing them spoken of as remarkable youthful achievements.
+
+One of these productions of his adolescence, Sir Hugh the Heron, has
+been so frequently alluded to, that it seems necessary to tell the story
+of it, as the author himself, in conversation, was accustomed to do. At
+about twelve years of age, the young poet wrote a scrap of a poem under
+this title, and then cast it aside. His grandfather, Polidori, had seen
+the fragment, however, and had conceived a much higher opinion of
+its merits than even the natural vanity of the young author himself
+permitted him to entertain. It had then become one of the grandfather's
+amusements to set up an amateur printing-press in his own house, and
+occupy his leisure in publishing little volumes of original verse for
+semi-public circulation. He urged his grandson to finish the poem
+in question, promising it, in a completed state, the dignity and
+distinction of type. Prompted by hope of this hitherto unexpected
+reward, Rossetti--then thirteen to fourteen years of age--finished
+the juvenile epic, and some bound copies of it got abroad. No more was
+thought of the matter, and in due time the little bard had forgotten
+that he had ever done it. But when a genuine distinction had been earned
+by poetry that was in no way immature, Rossetti discovered, by
+the gratuitous revelation of a friend, that a copy of the youthful
+production--privately printed and never published--was actually in the
+library of the British Museum. Amazed, and indeed appalled as he was by
+this disclosure, he was powerless to remedy the evil, which he foresaw
+would some day lead to the poem being unearthed to his injury, and
+printed as a part of his work. The utmost he could do to avert
+the threatened mischief he did, and this was to make an entry in a
+commonplace-book which he kept for such uses, explaining the origin and
+history of the poem, and expressing a conviction that it seemed to him
+to be remarkable only from its entire paucity of even ordinary poetic
+promise. But while this was indubitably a just estimate of these boyish
+efforts, it is no doubt true, as we shall presently see, that Rossetti's
+genius matured itself early in life.
+
+Whilst still a child, his love of literature exhibited itself, and a
+story is told of a disaster occurring to him, when rather less than nine
+years of age, which affords amusing proof of the ardour of his poetic
+nature. Upon going with his brother and sisters to the house of his
+grandfather, where as children they occupied themselves with sports
+appropriate to their years, he proposed to improvise a part of a scene
+from _Othello_, and cast himself for the principal _role_. The scene
+selected was the closing one of the play, and began with the speech
+delivered to Lodovico, Montano, and Gratiano, when they are about to
+take Othello prisoner. Rossetti used to say that he delivered the lines
+in a frenzy of boyish excitement, and coming to the words--
+
+              Set you down this:
+     And say, besides,--that in Aleppo once,
+       Where a malignant and a turban'd Turk
+       Beat a Venetian, and traduced the state,
+       I took by the throat the circumcised dog,
+       And smote him--thus!--
+
+he snatched up an iron chisel, that lay somewhere at hand, and, to the
+consternation of his companions, smote himself with all his might on the
+chest, inflicting a wound from which he bled and fainted.
+
+He is described by those who remember him, at this period, as a boy of
+a gentle and affectionate nature, albeit prone to outbursts of
+masterfulness. The earliest existent portraits represent a comely youth,
+having redundant auburn hair curling all round the head, and eyes and
+forehead of extraordinary beauty. It is said that he was brave and
+manly of temperament, courageous as to personal suffering, eminently
+solicitous of the welfare of others, and kind and considerate to*such
+as he had claims upon. This is no doubt true portraiture, but it must
+be stated (however open to explanation, on grounds of laudable
+self-depreciation), that it is not the picture which he himself used
+to paint of his character as a boy. He often described himself as being
+destitute of personal courage when at school, as shrinking from the
+amusements of schoolfellows, and fearful of their quarrels; not wholly
+without generous impulses, but, in the main, selfish of nature and
+reclusive in habit of life. He was certainly free from the meaningless
+affectation--for such it too frequently is--of representing his
+school-days as the happiest of his life. If, after so much undervaluing
+of himself, it were possible to trust his estimate of his youthful
+character, he would have had you believe that school was to him a place
+of semi-purgatorial probation,--which nothing but love of his mother,
+and desire to meet her wishes, prevented him, as an irreclaimable
+antischoliast, from obstinately renouncing at a time when he had learned
+little Latin, and less Greek.
+
+Having from childhood shown a propensity towards painting, the strong
+inclination was fostered by his parents, and art was looked upon as his
+future profession. Upon leaving school about 1843, he studied first at
+an art academy near Bedford Square, and afterwards at the Eoyal Academy
+Antique School, never, however, going to the Eoyal Academy Life School.
+He appears to have been an assiduous student. In after life when his
+habit of late rising had become a stock subject of banter among his
+intimate friends, he would tell with unwonted pride how in earlier years
+he used to rise at six A.M. once a week in order to attend a life-class
+held before breakfast. On such occasions he was accustomed, he would
+say, to purchase a buttered roll and cup of coffee at some stall at a
+street corner, so as not to dislocate domestic arrangements by requiring
+the servants to get up in the middle of the night. He left the Academy
+about 1848 or 1849, and in the latter year exhibited his picture
+entitled the _Girlhood of Mary Virgin_. This painting is an admirable
+example of his early art, before the Gothicism of the early Italian
+painters became his quest. Better known to the public than the picture
+is the sonnet written upon it, containing the beautiful lines--
+
+       An angel-watered lily, that near God
+       Grows and is quiet.
+
+While Rossetti was still under age he associated with J. E. Millais,
+Holman Hunt, Thomas Woolner, James Collinson, F. G. Stephens, and his
+brother, W. M. Rossetti, in the movement called pre-Raphaelite. At the
+beginning of his career he recognised, in common with his associates,
+that the contemporary classicism had run to seed, and that, beyond an
+effort after perfection of _technique_, the art of the period was all
+but devoid of purpose, of thought, imagination, or spirituality. At such
+a moment it was matter for little surprise that ardent young intellects
+should go back for inspiration to the Gothicism of Giotto and the early
+painters. There, at least, lay feeling, aim, aspiration, such as did
+not concern itself primarily with any question of whether a subject were
+painted well or ill, if only it were first of all a subject at all--a
+subject involving manipulative excellence, perhaps, but feeling and
+invention certainly. This, then, stated briefly, was the meaning of
+pre-Raphaelitism. The name (as shall hereafter appear) was subsequently
+given to the movement more than half in jest. It has sometimes been
+stated that Mr. Ruskin was an initiator, but this is not strictly the
+case. The company of young painters and writers are said to have been
+ignorant of Mr. Ruskin's writings when they began their revolt against
+the current classicism. It is a fact however, that, after perhaps a
+couple of years, Mr. Ruskin came to the rescue of the little brotherhood
+(then much maligned) by writing in their defence a letter in the
+_Times_. It is easy to make too much of these early endeavours of
+a company of young men, exceptionally gifted though the reformers
+undoubtedly were, and inspired by an ennobling enthusiasm. In later
+years Rossetti was not the most prominent of those who kept these
+beginnings of a movement constantly in view; indeed, it is hardly rash
+to say that there were moments when he seemed almost to resent the
+intrusion of them upon the maturity of aim and handling which, in common
+with his brother artists, he ultimately compassed. But it would be folly
+not to recognise the essential germs of a right aspiration which grew
+out of that interchange of feeling and opinion which, in its concrete
+shape, came to be termed pre-Raphaelitism. Rossetti is acknowledged to
+have taken the most prominent part in the movement, supplying, it is
+alleged, much of the poetic impulse as well as knowledge of mediaeval
+art. He occupied himself in these and following years mainly in the
+making of designs for pictures--the most important of them being
+_Dante's Dream, Hamlet and Ophelia, Cassandra, Lucretia Borgia, Giotto
+painting Dante's Portrait, The First Anniversary of the Death of
+Beatrice Mary Magdalene at the Door of Simon the Pharisee, The Death
+of Lady Macbeth, Desdemona's Death-song_ and a great subject entitled
+_Found_, designed and begun at twenty-five, but left incomplete at
+death.
+
+All this occurred between the years 1849-1856, but three years before
+the earlier of these dates Rossetti, as a painter, had come under an
+influence which he was never slow to acknowledge operated powerfully
+on his art. In 1846, Mr. Ford Madox Brown exhibited designs in the
+Westminster competition, and his cartoons deeply impressed Rossetti The
+young painter, then nineteen years of age, wrote to the elder one, his
+senior by no more than seven years, begging to be permitted to become a
+pupil. An intimacy sprang up between the two, and for a while Rossetti
+worked in Brown's studio; but though the friendship lasted throughout
+life the professional relationship soon terminated. The ardour of the
+younger man led him into the-brotherhood just referred to, but Brown
+never joined the pre-Raphaelites, mainly, it is said, from dislike of
+coterie tendencies.
+
+About 1856, Rossetti, with two or three other young painters,
+gratuitously undertook to paint designs on the walls of the Union
+Debating Hall at Oxford, and about the time he was engaged upon this
+task he made the acquaintance of Mr. William Morris, Mr. Burne Jones,
+and Mr. Swinburne, who were undergraduates at the University. Mr.
+Burne Jones was intended for a clerical career, but due to Rossett's
+intercession Holy Orders were abandoned, to the great gain of English
+art. He has more than once generously allowed that he owed much to
+Rossetti at the beginning of his career, find regarded him to the last
+as leader of the movement with which his own name is now so eminently
+and distinctively associated. Together, and with the co-operation of Mr.
+William Morris and Canon Dixon, they started and carried on for about a
+year a monthly periodical called _The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine_,
+of which Canon Dixon, as one of the projectors, shall presently tell the
+history. At a subsequent period Mr. Burne Jones and Rossetti, together
+with Mr. Madox Brown and some three others, associated with Mr. Morris
+in establishing, from the smallest of all possible beginnings, the
+trading firm now so well known as Morris and Co., and they remained
+partners in this enterprise down to the year 1874, when a dissolution
+took place, leaving the business in the hands of the gentleman
+whose name it bore, and whose energy had from the first been mainly
+instrumental in securing its success.
+
+It may be said that almost from the outset Rossetti viewed the public
+exhibition of pictures as a distracting practice. Except the _Girlhood
+of Mary Virgin_, the _Annunciation_ was almost the only picture he
+exhibited in London, though three or four water-colour drawings were
+at an early period exhibited in Liverpool, and of these, by a curious
+coincidence, one was the first study for the _Dante's Dream_, which
+was purchased by the corporation of the city within a few months of
+the painter's death. To sum up all that remains at this stage to say
+of Rossetti as a pictorial artist down to his thirtieth year, we may
+describe him (as he liked best to hear himself described) simply as
+a poetic painter. If he had a special method, it might be called
+a distinct poetic abstraction, together with a choice of mediaeval
+subject, and an effort after no less vivid rendering of nature than was
+found in other painters. With his early designs (the outcome of such a
+quest as has been indicated) there came, perchance, artistic crudities
+enough, but assuredly there came a great spirituality also. By and by
+Rossetti perceived that he must make narrower the stream of his effort
+if he would have it flow deeper; and then, throughout many years, he
+perfected his technical methods by abandoning complex subject-designs,
+and confining himself to simple three-quarter-length pictures. More
+shall be said on this point in due course. Already, although unknown
+through the medium of the public picture-gallery, he was recognised as
+the leader of a school of rising young artists whose eccentricities were
+frequently a theme of discussion. He never invited publicity, yet he was
+rapidly attaining to a prominent position among painters.
+
+His personal character in early manhood is described by friends as one
+of peculiar manliness, geniality, and unselfishness. It is said that, on
+one occasion, he put aside important work of his own in order to
+spend several days in the studio of a friend, whose gifts were quite
+inconsiderable compared with his, and whose prospects were all but
+hopeless,--helping forward certain pictures, which were backward, for
+forthcoming exhibition. Many similar acts of self-sacrifice are still
+remembered with gratitude by those who were the recipients of them.
+Rossetti was king of his circle, and it must be said, that in all that
+properly constituted kingship, he took care to rule. There was then
+a certain determination of purpose which occasionally had the look of
+arbitrariness, and sometimes, it is alleged, a disregard of opposing
+opinion which partook of tyranny: but where heart and not head were in
+question, he was assuredly the most urbane and amiable of monarchs.
+In matters of taste in art, or criticism in poetry, he would brook no
+opposition from any quarter; nor did he ever seem to be conscious of the
+unreasonableness of compelling his associates to swallow his opinions
+as being absolute and final. This disposition to govern his circle
+co-existed, however, with the most lavish appreciation of every good
+quality displayed by the members of it, and all the little uneasiness
+to which his absolutism may sometimes have given rise was much more than
+removed by constantly recurring acts of good-fellowship,--indeed it was
+forgotten in the presence of them.
+
+A photograph which exists of Rossetti at twenty-seven conveys the idea
+of a nature rather austere and taciturn than genial and outspoken. The
+face is long and the cheeks sunken, the whole figure being attenuated
+and slightly stooping; the eyes have the inward look which belonged to
+them in later life, but the mouth, which is free from the concealment of
+moustache or beard, is severe. The impression conveyed is of a powerful
+intellect and ambitious nature at war with surroundings and not wholly
+satisfied with the results. It ought to be added that, at the period in
+question, health was uncertain with Rossetti: and this fact, added to
+the circumstance of his being at the time in the very throes of those
+difficulties with his art which he was soon to surmount, must be
+understood to account for the austerity of his early portrait. Rossetti
+was not in a distinct sense a humourist, but there came to him at
+intervals, in earlier manhood, those outbursts of volatility, which, to
+serious natures, act as safety-valves after prolonged tension of all the
+powers of the mind. At such moments of levity he is described as almost
+boyish in recklessness, plunging into any madcap escapade that might be
+afoot with heedlessness of all consequences. Stories of misadventures,
+quips and quiddities of every kind, were then his delight, and of these
+he possessed a fund which no man knew better how to use. He would tell
+a funny story with wonderful spirit and freshness of resource, always
+leading up to the point with watchful care of the finest shades of
+covert suggestion or innuendo, and, when the climax was reached, never
+denying himself a hearty share in the universal laughter. One of his
+choicest pleasures at a dinner or other such gathering was to improvise
+rhymes on his friends, and of these the fun usually lay in the
+improvisatore's audacious ascription of just those qualities which his
+subject did not possess. Though far from devoid of worldly wisdom, and
+indeed possessed of not a little shrewdness in his dealings with his
+buyers (often exhibiting that rarest quality of the successful trader,
+the art of linking one transaction with another), he was sometimes
+amusingly deficient in what is known as common sense. In later life he
+used to tell with infinite zest a story of a blunder of earlier years
+which might easily have led to serious if not fatal results. He had
+been suffering from nervous exhaustion and had been ordered to take a
+preparation of nux vomica. The dose was to be taken three times daily:
+in the morning, at noon, and in the evening. One afternoon he was about
+to start out for the house of a friend with whom he had promised to
+lunch, when he remembered that he had not taken his first daily dose
+of medicine. He forthwith took it, and upon setting down the glass,
+reflected that the second dose was due, and so he took that also.
+Putting on his hat and preparing to sally forth he further reflected
+that before he could return the third dose ought in ordinary course to
+be taken, and so without more deliberation he poured himself a final
+portion and drank it off. He had thereupon scarcely turned himself
+about, when to his horror he discovered that his limbs were growing
+rigid and his jaw stiff. In the utmost agitation he tried to walk across
+the studio and found himself almost incapable of the effort. His eyes
+seemed to leap out of their sockets and his sight grew dim. Appalled
+and in agony, he at length sprang up from the couch upon which he had
+dropped down a moment before, and fled out of the house. The violent
+action speedily induced a copious perspiration, and this being by much
+the best thing that could have happened to him, carried off the poison
+and so saved his life. He could never afterwards be induced to return to
+the drug in question, and in the last year of his life was probably more
+fearfully aghast at seeing the present writer take a harmless dose of it
+than he would have been at learning that 50 grains of chloral had been
+taken.
+
+He had, in early manhood, the keenest relish of a funny prank, and one
+such he used to act over again in after life with the greatest vivacity
+of manner. Every one remembers the story told by Jefferson Hogg how
+Shelley got rid of the old woman with the onion basket who took a place
+beside him in a stage coach in Sussex, by seating himself on the floor
+and fixing a tearful, woful face upon his companion, addressing her in
+thrilling accents thus--
+
+     For heaven's sake, let us sit upon the ground,
+     And tell sad stories of the death of kings.
+
+Rossetti's frolic was akin to this, though the results were amusingly
+different. It would appear that when in early years, Mr. William Morris
+and Mr. Burne Jones occupied a studio together, they had a young servant
+maid whose manners were perennially vivacious, whose good spirits no
+disaster could damp, and whose pertness nothing could banish or
+check. Rossetti conceived the idea of frightening the girl out of her
+complacency, and calling one day on his friends, he affected the direst
+madness, strutted ominously up to her and with the wildest glare of his
+wild eyes, the firmest and fiercest setting of his lower lip, and began
+in measured and resonant accents to recite the lines--
+
+     Shall the hide of a fierce lion
+     Be stretched on a couch of wood,
+     For a daughter's foot to lie on,
+     Stained with a father's blood?
+
+The poet's response is a soft "Ah, no!" but the girl, ignorant of course
+of this, and wholly undisturbed by the bloodthirsty tone of the question
+addressed to her, calmly fixed her eyes on the frenzied eyes before her,
+and answered with a swift light accent and rippling laugh, "It shall
+if you like, sir!" Rossetti's enjoyment of his discomfiture on this
+occasion seemed never to grow less.
+
+His life was twofold in intellectual effort, and of the directions in
+which his energy went out the artistic alone has thus far been dealt
+with. It has been said that he early displayed talent for writing as
+well as painting, and, in truth, the poems that he wrote in early youth
+are even more remarkable than the pictures that he painted. His poetic
+genius developed rapidly after sixteen, and sprang at once to a singular
+and perfect maturity. It is difficult to say whether it will add to the
+marvel of mature achievement or deduct from the sense of reality of
+personal experience, to make public the fact that _The Blessed Damozel_
+was written when the poet was no more than nineteen. That poem is a
+creation so pure and simple in the higher imagination, as to support the
+contention that the author was electively related to Fra Angelico.
+Described briefly, it may be said to embody the meditations of a
+beautiful girl in Paradise, whose lover is in the same hour dreaming of
+her on earth. How the poet lighted upon the conception shall be told by
+himself in that portion of this book devoted to the writer's personal
+recollections.
+
+_The Blessed Damozel_ is a conception dilated to such spiritual
+loveliness that it seems not to exist within things substantially
+beautiful, or yet by aid of images that coalesce out of the evolving
+memory of them, but outside of everything actual It is not merely that
+the dream itself is one of ideal purity; the wave of impulse is pure,
+and flows without taint of media that seem almost to know it not. The
+lady says:--
+
+     We two will lie i' the shadow of
+        That living mystic tree
+     Within whose secret growth the Dove
+        Is sometimes felt to be,
+     While every leaf that His plumes touch
+        Saith His Name audibly.
+
+Here the love involved is so etherealised as scarcely to be called
+human, save only on the part of the mortal dreamer, in whose yearning
+ecstasy the ear thinks it recognises a more earthly note. The lover
+rejoins.--
+
+     (Alas! We two, we two, thou say'st!
+        Yea, one wast thou with me
+     That once of old. But shall God lift
+        To endless unity
+     The soul whose likeness with thy soul
+        Was but its love for thee?)
+
+It is said of the few existent examples of the art of Giorgione that,
+around some central realisation of human passion gathers always a
+landscape which is not merely harmonised to it, but a part of it,
+sharing the joy or the anguish, lying silent to the breathless
+adoration, or echoing the rapturous voice of the full pleasure of those
+who are beyond all height and depth more than it. Something of this
+passive sympathy of environing objects comes out in the poem:
+
+     Around her, lovers, newly met
+        'Mid deathless love's acclaims,
+     Spoke evermore among themselves
+        Their rapturous new names;
+     And the souls mounting up to God
+        Went by her like thin flames.
+
+     And still she bowed herself and stooped
+        Out of the circling charm;
+     Until her bosom must have made
+        The bar she leaned on warm,
+     And the lilies lay as if asleep
+        Along her bended arm.
+
+The sense induced by such imagery is akin to that which comes of rapt
+contemplation of the deep em-blazonings of a fine stained window when
+the sun's warm gules glides off before the dim twilight. And this sense
+as of a thing existent, yet passing stealthily out of all sight away,
+the metre of the poem helps to foster. Other metres of Rossetti's have
+a strenuous reality, and rejoice in their self-assertiveness, and seem,
+almost, in their resonant strength, to tell themselves they are very
+good; but this may almost be said to be a disembodied voice, that
+lives only on the air, and, like the song of a bird, is gone before its
+accents have been caught. Of the four-and-twenty stanzas of the poem,
+none is more calmly musical than this:
+
+      When round his head the aureole clings,
+        And he is clothed in white,
+      I 'll take his hand and go with him
+        To the deep wells of light;
+      We will step down as to a stream,
+        And bathe there in God's sight.
+
+Perhaps Rossetti never did anything more beautiful and spiritual than
+this little work of his twentieth year; and more than once in later life
+he painted the beautiful lady who is the subject of it, with the lilies
+lying along her arm.
+
+A first draft of _Jenny_ was struck off when the poet was scarcely more
+than a boy, and taken up again years afterwards, and almost entirely
+re-written--the only notable passage of the early poem that now remains
+being the passage on lust. It is best described in the simplest phrase,
+as a man's meditations on the life of a courtesan whom he has met at a
+dancing-garden and accompanied home. While he sits on a couch, she lies
+at his feet with her head on his knee and sleeps. When the morning dawns
+he rises, places cushions beneath her head, puts some gold among
+her hair, and leaves her. It is wisest to hazard at the outset all
+unfavourable comment by the frankest statement of the story of the
+poem. But the _motif_ of it is a much higher thing. _Jenny_ embodies
+an entirely distinct phase of feeling, yet the poet's root impulse
+is therein the same as in the case of _The Blessed Damozel_. No two
+creations could stand more widely apart as to outward features than
+the dream of the sainted maiden and the reality of the frail and fallen
+girl; yet the primary prompting and the ultimate outcome are the same.
+The ardent longing after ideal purity in womanhood, which in the one
+gave birth to a conception whereof the very sorrow is but excess of
+joy found expression in the other through a vivid presentment of the
+nameless misery of unwomanly dishonour:--
+
+     Behold the lilies of the field,
+     They toil not neither do they spin;
+     (So doth the ancient text begin,--
+     Not of such rest as one of these Can share.)
+     Another rest and ease
+     Along each summer-sated path
+     From its new lord the garden hath,
+     Than that whose spring in blessings ran
+     Which praised the bounteous husbandman,
+     Ere yet, in days of hankering breath,
+     The lilies sickened unto death.
+
+It was indeed a daring thing the author proposed to himself to do, and
+assuredly no man could have essayed it who had not consciously united
+to an unfailing and unshrinking insight, a relativeness of mind such as
+right-hearted people might approve. To take a fallen woman, a cipher of
+man's sum of lust, befouled with the shameful knowledge of the streets,
+yet young, delicate, "apparelled beyond parallel," unblessed, with a
+beauty which, if copied by a Da Vinci's hand, might stand whole ages
+long "for preachings of what God can do," and then to endow such a one
+with the sensitiveness of a poet's own mind, make her read afresh as
+though by lightning, and in a dream, that story of the old pure days--
+
+      Much older than any history
+      That is written in any book,
+
+and lastly, to gather about her an overwhelming sense of infinite solace
+for the wronged and lost, and of the retributive justice with which
+man's transgressions will be visited--this is, indeed, to hazard all
+things in the certainty of an upright purpose and true reward.
+
+      Shall no man hold his pride forewarn'd
+      Till in the end, the Day of Days,
+      At Judgment, one of his own race,
+      As frail and lost as you, shall rise,--
+      His daughter with his mother's eyes!
+
+Yet Rossetti made no treaty with puritanism, and in this respect his
+_Jenny_ has something in common with Hawthorne's _Scarlet Letter_--than
+which nothing, perhaps, that is so pure, without being puritanical,
+has reached us even from the land that gave _Evangeline_ to the English
+tongue. The guilty love of Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale is never
+for an instant condoned, but, on the other hand, the rigorous severity
+of the old puritan community is not dwelt upon with favour. Relentless
+remorse must spend itself upon the man before the whole measure of his
+misery is full, and on the woman the brand of a public shame must be
+borne meekly to the end. But though no rancour is shown towards the
+austere and blind morality which puts to open discharge the guilty
+mother whilst unconsciously nourishing the yet more guilty father, we
+see the tenderness of a love that palliates the baseness of the amour,
+and the bitter depths of a penitence that cannot be complete until it
+can no longer be concealed. And so with Jenny. She may have transient
+flashes of remorseful consciousness, such as reveal to her the trackless
+leagues that separate what she was from what she is, but no effort is
+made to hide the plain truth that she is a courtesan, skilled only
+in the lures and artifices peculiar to her shameful function. No
+reformatory promptings fit her for a place at the footstool of the
+puritan. Nothing tells of winter yet; on the other hand, no virulent
+diatribes are cast forth against the society that shuts this woman out,
+as the puritan settlement turned its back on Hester Prynne. But we
+see her and know her for what she is, a woman like unto other women:
+desecrated but akin.
+
+This dramatic quality of sitting half-passively above their creations
+and of leaving their ethics to find their own channels (once assured
+that their impulses are pure), the poet and the romancer possess in
+common. If there is a point of difference between their attitudes of
+mind, it is where Rossetti seems to reserve his whole personal feeling
+for the impeachment of lust;--
+
+     Like a toad within a stone
+     Seated while Time crumbles on;
+     Which sits there since the earth was cursed
+     For Man's transgression at the first;
+     Which, living through all centuries,
+     Not once has seen the sun arise;
+     Whose life, to its cold circle charmed,
+     The earth's whole summers have not warmed;
+     Which always--whitherso the stone
+     Be flung--sits there, deaf, blind, alone;--
+     Ay, and shall not be driven out
+     Till that which shuts him round about
+     Break at the very Master's stroke,
+     And the dust thereof vanish as smoke,
+     And the seed of Man vanish as dust:--
+     Even so within this world is Lust.
+
+_Sister Helen_ was written somewhat later than _The Blessed Damozel_
+and the first draft of _Jenny_, and probably belonged to the poet's
+twenty-fourth or twenty-fifth year. The ballad involves a story of
+witchcraft A girl has been first betrayed and then deserted by her
+lover; so, to revenge herself upon him and his newly-married bride, she
+burns his waxen image three days over a fire, and during that time he
+dies in torment In _Sister Helen_ we touch the key-note of Rossetti's
+creative gift. Even the superstition which forms the basis of the ballad
+owes something of its individual character to the invention and poetic
+bias of the poet. The popular superstitions of the Middle Ages were
+usually of two kinds only. First, there were those that arose out of a
+jealous Catholicism, always glancing towards heresy; and next there were
+those that laid their account neither with orthodoxy nor unbelief, and
+were purely pagan. The former were the offspring of fanaticism; the
+latter of an appeal to appetite or passion, or fancy, or perhaps
+intuitive reason directed blindly or unconsciously towards natural
+phenomena. The superstition involved in _Sister Helen_ partakes wholly
+of neither character, but partly of both, with an added element of
+demonology. The groundwork is essentially catholic, the burden of the
+ballad showing that the tragic event lies between Hell and Heaven:--
+
+                  (O Mother, Mary Mother,
+      Three days to-day, between Hell and Heaven!)
+
+But the superstructural overgrowth is totally undisturbed by any
+animosity against heresy, and is concerned only with a certain ultimate
+demoniacal justice visiting the wrongdoer. Thus far the elemental tissue
+of the superstition has something in common with that of the German
+secret tribunal of the steel and cord; with this difference, however,
+that whereas the latter punishes in secret, even _as the deity_, the
+former makes conscious compact with the powers of evil, that whatever
+justice shall be administered upon the wicked shall first be purchased
+by sacrifice of the good. Sister Helen may burn, alive, the body and
+soul of her betrayer, but the dying knell that tells of the false soul's
+untimely flight, tolls the loss of her own soul also:--
+
+      "Ah! what white thing at the door has cross'd,
+            Sister Helen?
+      Ah! what is this that sighs in the frost!"
+      "A soul that's lost as mine is lost,
+            Little brother!"
+            (O Mother, Mary Mother,
+      Lost, lost, all lost, between Hell and Heaven!)
+
+Here lies the divergence between the lines of this and other compacts
+with evil powers; this is the point of Rossetti's departure from the
+scheme that forms the underplot of Goethe's _Faust_, and of Marlowe's
+_Faustus_, and was intended to constitute the plan of Coleridge's
+_Michael Scott_. It has been well said that the theme of the Faust is
+the consequence of a misology, or hatred of knowledge, resulting upon
+an original thirst for knowledge baffled. Faust never does from the
+beginning love knowledge for itself, but he loves it for the means it
+affords for the acquisition of power. This base purpose defeats itself;
+and when Faust finds that learning fails to yield him the domination he
+craves, he hates and contemns it. Away, henceforth, with all pretence to
+knowledge! Then follows the compact, the articles to which are absolute
+servility of the Devil on the one part, and complete possession of the
+soul of Faust on the other. Faust is little better than a wizard from
+the first, for if knowledge had given him what he: sought, he had never
+had recourse to witchcraft! Helen, however, partakes in some sort
+of the triumphant nobility of an avenging deity who has cozened hell
+itself, and not in vain. In the whole majesty of her great wrong, she
+loses the originally vulgar character of the witch. It is not as the
+consequence of a poison-speck in her own heart that she has recourse to
+sorcery. She does not love witchery for its own sake; she loves it only
+as the retributive channel for the requital of a terrible offence. It
+is throughout the last hour of her three-days' conflict, merely, that we
+see her, but we know her then not more for the revengeful woman she is
+than for the trustful maiden she has been. When she becomes conscious of
+the treason wrought against her, we feel that she suffers change. In
+the eyes of others we can see her, and in our vision of her she is
+beautiful; but hers is the beauty of fair cheeks, from which the canker
+frets the soft tenderness of colour, the loveliness of golden hair that
+has lost its radiance, the sweetness of eyes once dripping with the
+dews of the spirit, now pale, and cold, and lustreless. Very soon the
+wrongdoer shall reap the harvest of a twofold injury: this day another
+bride shall stand by his side. Is there, then, no way to wreak the just
+revenge of a broken heart? _That_ suggests sorcery. Yes, the body and
+soul of the false lover may melt as before a flame; but the price of
+vengeance is horrible. Yet why? Has not love become devilish? Is not
+life a curse? Then wherefore shrink? The resolute wronged woman must
+go through with it. And when the last hour comes, nature itself is
+portentous of the virulent ill. In the wind's wake, the moon flies
+through a rack of night clouds. One after one the suppliants crave
+pardon for the distant dying lover, and last of these comes the
+three-days' bride.
+
+In addition to the three great poems just traversed, Rossetti had
+written, before the completion of his twenty-sixth year, _The Staff
+and Scrip, The Burden of Nineveh, Troy Town, Eden Bower_ and _The Last
+Confession_, as well as a fragment of _The Bride's Prelude_, to which
+it will be necessary to return. But, with a single exception, the
+poems just named may be said to exist beside the three that have been
+analysed, without being radically distinct from them, or touching
+higher or other levels, and hence it is not considered needful to dwell
+upon them at length. _The Last Confession_ covers another range of
+feeling, it is true, whereof it may be said that the nobler part is
+akin to that which finds expression in the pure and shattered love of
+Othello; but it is a range of feeling less characteristical, perhaps
+less indigenous and appreciable.
+
+In the years 1845-49 inclusive, Rossetti made the larger part of his
+translations (published in 1861) from the early Italian poets, and
+though he afterwards spoke of them as having been the work of the
+leisure moments of many years, of their subsequent revision alone,
+perhaps, could this be altogether true. The _Vita Nuova_, together with
+the many among Dante's _Lyrics_ and those of his contemporaries which
+elucidate their personal intercourse; were translated, as well as a
+great body of the sonnets of poets later than Dante. {*} This early and
+indirect apprenticeship to the sonnet, as a form of composition, led
+to his becoming, in the end, perhaps the most perfect of English
+sonnet-writers. In youth, it was one of his pleasures to engage in
+exercises of sonnet-skill with his brother William and his sister
+Christina, and, even then, he attained to such proficiency, in the mere
+mechanism of sonnet structure, that he could sometimes dash off a sonnet
+in ten minutes--rivalling, in this particular, the impromptu productions
+of Hartley Coleridge. It is hardly necessary to say that the poems
+produced, under such conditions of time and other tests, were rarely,
+if ever, adjudged worthy of publication, by the side of work to which he
+gave adequate deliberation. But several of the sonnets on pictures--as,
+for example, the fine one on a Venetian pastoral by Giorgione--and the
+political sonnet, Miltonic in spirit, _On the Refusal of Aid between
+Nations_, were written contemporaneously with the experimental sonnets
+in question.
+
+     * Rossetti often remarked that he had intended to translate
+     the sonnets of Michael Angelo, until he saw Mr. Symonds's
+     translation, when he was so much impressed by its excellence
+     that he forthwith abandoned the purpose.
+
+As _The House of Life_ was composed in great part at the period with
+which we are now dealing (though published in the complete sequence
+nearly twenty-five years later), it may be best to traverse it at this
+stage. Though called a full series of sonnets, there is no intimation
+that it is not fragmentary as to design; the title is an astronomical,
+not an architectural figure. The work is at once Shakspearean and
+Dantesque. Whilst electively akin to the _Vita Nuova_, it is broader
+in range, the life involved being life idealised in all phases. What
+Rossetti's idea was of the mission of the sonnet, as associated with
+life, and exhibiting a similitude of it, may best be learned from his
+prefatory sonnet:--
+
+    A Sonnet is a moment's monument,--
+      Memorial from the Soul's eternity
+      To one dead deathless hour. Look that it be,
+    Whether for lustral rite or dire portent,
+    Of its own arduous fulness reverent:
+      Carve it in ivory or in ebony,
+      As Day or Night may rule; and let Time see
+    Its flowering crest impearled and orient.
+    A Sonnet is a coin; its face reveals
+      The soul,--its converse, to what Power 'tis due:--
+    Whether for tribute to the august appeals
+      Of Life, or dower in Love's high retinue,
+    It serve; or 'mid the dark wharfs cavernous breath,
+    In Charon's palm it pay the toll to Death.
+
+Rossetti's sonnets are of varied metrical structure; but their
+intellectual structure is uniform, comprising in each case a flow and
+ebb of thought within the limits of a single conception. In this latter
+respect they have a character almost peculiar to themselves among
+English sonnets. Rossetti was not the first English writer who
+deliberatively separated octave and sestet, but he was the first who
+obeyed throughout a series of sonnets the canon of the contemporary
+structure requiring that a sonnet shall present the twofold facet of a
+single thought or emotion. This form of the sonnet Rossetti was at least
+the first among English writers entirely to achieve and perfectly to
+render. _The House of Life_ does not contain a sonnet which is not to
+some degree informed by such an intellectual and musical wave; but the
+following is an example more than usually emphatic:
+
+    Even as a child, of sorrow that we give
+        dead, but little in his heart can find,
+        Since without need of thought to his clear mind
+    Their turn it is to die and his to live:--
+    Even so the winged New Love smiles to receive
+        Along his eddying plumes the auroral wind,
+        Nor, forward glorying, casts one look behind
+    Where night-rack shrouds the Old Love fugitive.
+
+     There is a change in every hour's recall,
+        And the last cowslip in the fields we see
+        On the same day with the first corn-poppy.
+     Alas for hourly change! Alas for all
+     The loves that from his hand proud youth lets fall,
+        Even as the beads of a told rosary!
+
+The distinguishing excellence of craftsmanship in Rossetti's sonnets
+was early recognised; but the fertility of thought, and range of emotion
+compassed by this part of his work constitute an excellence far higher
+than any that belongs to perfection of form, rhythm, or metre. Mr.
+Palgrave has well said that a poet's story differs from a narrative in
+being in itself a creation; that it brings its own facts; that what
+we have to ask is not the true life of Laura, but how far Petrarch has
+truly drawn the life of love. So with Rossetti's sonnets. They may or
+may not be "occasional." Many readers who enter with sympathy into the
+series of feelings they present will doubtless insist upon regarding
+them as autobiographical. Others, who think they see the stamp of
+reality upon them, will perhaps accept them (as Hallam accepted the
+Sonnets of Shakspeare) as witnesses of excessive affection, redeemed
+sometimes by touches of nobler sentiments--if affection, however
+excessive, needs to be redeemed. Others again will receive them as
+artistic embodiments of ideal love upon which is placed the imprint of a
+passion as mythical as they believe to be attached to the autobiography
+of Dante's early days. But the genesis and history of these sonnets
+(whether the emotion with which they are pervaded be actual or imagined)
+must be looked for within. Do they realise vividly Life representative
+in its many phases of love, joy, sorrow, and death? It must be conceded
+that _he House of Life_ touches many passions and depicts life in
+most of its changeful aspects. It would afford an adequate test of its
+comprehensiveness to note how rarely a mind in general sympathy with the
+author could come to its perusal without alighting upon something that
+would be in harmony with its mood. To traverse the work through its
+aspiration and foreboding, joy, grief, remorse, despair, and final
+resignation, would involve a task too long and difficult to be attempted
+here. Two sonnets only need be quoted as at once indicative of the range
+of thought and feeling covered, and of the sequent relation these poems
+bear each to each.
+
+    By thine own tears thy song must tears beget,
+       Singer! Magic mirror thou hast none
+       Except thy manifest heart; and save thine own
+    Anguish or ardour, else no amulet.
+
+    Cisterned in Pride, verse is the feathery jet
+       Of soulless air-flung fountains; nay, more dry
+       Than the Dead Sea for throats that thirst and sigh,
+    That song o'er which no singer's lids grew wet.
+
+    The Song-god--He the Sun-god--is no slave
+       Of thine: thy Hunter he, who for thy soul
+       Fledges his shaft: to the august control
+    Of thy skilled hand his quivered store he gave:
+       But if thy lips' loud cry leap to his smart,
+       The inspired record shall pierce thy brother's heart.
+
+This is not meant to convey the same idea as Shelley's "learn in
+suffering," etc., but merely that a poem must move the writer in its
+composition if it is to move the reader.
+
+With the following _The House of Life_ is made to close:
+
+    When vain desire at last and vain regret
+       Go hand in hand to death, and all is vain,
+       What shall assuage the unforgotten pain
+    And teach the unforgetful to forget?
+
+    Shall Peace be still a sunk stream long unmet,--
+       Or may the soul at once in a green plain
+       Stoop through the spray of some sweet life-fountain,
+    And cull the dew-drenched flowering amulet?
+
+    Ah! when the wan soul in that golden air
+       Between the scriptured petals softly blown
+       Peers breathless for the gift of grace unknown,--
+    Ah! let none other alien spell soe'er
+    But only the one Hope's one name be there,--
+       Not less nor more, but even that word alone.
+
+A writer must needs be loath to part from this section of Rossett's work
+without naming some few sonnets that seem to be in all respects on a
+level with those to which attention has been drawn. Of such, perhaps,
+the most conspicuous are:--_A Day of Love; Mid-Rapture; Her Gifts; The
+Dark Glass; True Woman; Without Her; Known in Vain; The Heart of
+the Night; The Landmark; Stillborn Love; Lost Days_. But it would be
+difficult to formulate a critical opinion in support of the superiority
+of almost any of these' sonnets over the others,--so balanced is their
+merit, so equal their appeal to the imagination and heart. Indeed, it
+were scarcely rash to say that in the language (outside Shakspeare)
+there exists no single body of sonnets characterised by such sustained
+excellence of vision and presentment. It must have been strange enough
+if the all but unexampled ardour and constancy with which Rossetti
+pursued the art of the sonnet-writer had not resulted in absolute
+mastery.
+
+In 1850 _The Germ_ was started under the editorship of Mr. William
+Michael Rossetti, and to the four issues, which were all that were
+published of this monthly magazine (designed to advocate the views of
+the pre-Raphaelite brotherhood), Rossetti contributed certain of
+his early poems--_The Blessed Damozel_ among the number. In 1856 he
+contributed many of the same poems, together with others, to _The Oxford
+and Cambridge Magazine_, of which Canon Dixon has kindly undertaken to
+tell the history. He says:
+
+My knowledge of Dante Gabriel Rossetti was begun in connection with _The
+Oxford and Cambridge Magazine_, a monthly periodical, which was started
+in January 1856, and lasted a year. The projectors of this periodical
+were Mr. William Morris, Mr. Ed. Burne Jones, and myself. The editor was
+Mr. (now the Rev.) William Fulford. Among the original contributors were
+the late Mr. Wilfred Heeley of Cambridge, Mr. Faulkner, now Fellow
+of University College, Oxford, and Mr. Cormel Price. We were all
+undergraduates. The publishers of the magazine were the late firm of
+Bell and Daldy. We gradually associated with ourselves several other
+contributors: above all, D. G. Rossetti.
+
+Of this undertaking the central notion was, I think, to advocate moral
+earnestness and purpose in literature, art, and society. It was founded
+much on Mr. Ruskin's teaching: it sprang out of youthful impatience, and
+exhibited many signs of immaturity and ignorance: but perhaps it was
+not without value as a protest against some things. The pre-Raphaelite
+movement was then in vigour: and this Magazine came to be considered as
+the organ of those who accepted the ideas which were brought into art
+at that time; and, as in a manner, the successor of _The Germ_, a small
+periodical which had been published previously by the first beginners
+of the movement. Rossetti, in many respects the most memorable of the
+pre-Raphaelites, became connected with our Magazine when it had been
+in existence about six months: and he contributed to it several of the
+finest of the poems that were afterwards collected in the former of
+his two volumes of poems: namely, _The Burden of Nineveh, The Blessed
+Damozel, and The Staff and Scrip_. I think that one of them, _The
+Blessed Damozel_, had appeared previously in _The Germ_. All these
+poems, as they now stand in the author's volume, have been greatly
+altered from what they were in the Magazine: and, in being altered, not
+always improved, at least in the verbal changes. The first of them, a
+sublime meditation of peculiar metrical power, has been much altered,
+and in general happily, as to the arrangement of stanzas: but not always
+so happily as to the words. It is, however, pleasing to notice that in
+the alterations some touches of bitterness have been effaced. The second
+of these pieces has been brought with great skill into regular form by
+transposition: but again one repines to find several touches gone that
+once were there. The last of them, _The Staff and Scrip_, is, in my
+judgment, the finest of all Rossetti's poems, and one of the most
+glorious writings in the language. It exhibits in flawless perfection
+the gift that he had above all other writers, absolute beauty and pure
+action. Here again it is not possible to see without regret some of the
+verbal alterations that have been made in the poem as it now stands,
+although the chief emendation, the omission of one stanza and the
+insertion of another, adds clearness, and was all that was wanted to
+make the poem perfect in structure.
+
+I saw Rossetti for the first time in his lodgings over Blackfriars
+Bridge. It was impossible not to be impressed with the freedom and
+kindness of his manner, not less than by his personal appearance. His
+frank greeting, bold, but gentle glance, his whole presence, produced a
+feeling of confidence and pleasure. His voice had a great charm, both
+in tone, and from the peculiar cadences that belonged to it I think that
+the leading features of his character struck me more at first than
+the characteristics of his genius; or rather, that my notion of the
+character of the man was formed first, and was then applied to his
+works, and identified with them. The main features of his character
+were, in my apprehension, fearlessness, kindliness, a decision that
+sometimes made him seem somewhat arbitrary, and condensation or
+concentration. He was wonderfully self-reliant. These moral qualities,
+guiding an artistic temperament as exquisite as was ever bestowed on
+man, made him what he was, the greatest inventor of abstract beauty,
+both in form and colour, that this age, perhaps that the world, has
+seen. They would also account for some peculiarities that must be
+admitted in some of his works, want of nature, for instance. I heard him
+once remark that it was "astonishing how much the least bit of nature
+helped if one put it in;" which seemed like an acknowledgment that he
+might have gone more to nature. Hence, however, his works always seem
+abstract, always seem to embody some kind of typical aim, and acquire a
+sort of sacred character.
+
+I saw a good deal of Rossetti in London, and afterwards in Oxford,
+during the painting of the Union debating-room. In later years our
+personal intercourse was broken off through distance; though I saw him
+occasionally almost to the time of his lamented death, and we had some
+correspondence. My recollection of him is that of greatness, as might be
+expected of one of the few who have been "illustrious in two arts," and
+who stands by himself and has earned an independent name in both. His
+work was great: the man was greater. His conversation had a wonderful
+ease, precision, and felicity of expression. He produced thoughts
+perfectly enunciated with a deliberate happiness that was indescribable,
+though it was always simple conversation, never haranguing or
+declamation. He was a natural leader because he was a natural teacher.
+When he chose to be interested in anything that was brought before him,
+no pains were too great for him to take. His advice was always given
+warmly and freely, and when he spoke of the works of others it was
+always in the most generous spirit of praise. It was in fact impossible
+to have been more free from captiousness, jealousy, envy, or any other
+form of pettiness than this truly noble man. The great painter who first
+took me to him said, "We shall see the greatest man in Europe." I have
+it on the same authority that Rossetti's aptitude for art was considered
+amongst painters to be no less extraordinary than his imagination. For
+example, that he could take hold of the extremity of the brush, and be
+as certain of his touch as if it had been held in the usual way; that he
+never painted a picture without doing something in colour that had
+never been done before; and, in particular, that he had a command of the
+features of the human face such as no other painter ever possessed. I
+also remember some observations by the same assuredly competent judge,
+to the effect that Rossetti might be set against the great painters
+of the fifteenth century, as equal to them, though unlike them: the
+difference being that while they represented the characters, whom
+they painted, in their ordinary and unmoved mood, he represented his
+characters under emotion, and yet gave them wholly. It may be added,
+perhaps, that he had a lofty standard of beauty of his own invention,
+and that he both elevated and subjected all to beauty. Such a man was
+not likely to be ignorant of the great root of power in art, and I
+once saw him very indignant on hearing that he had been accused of
+irreligion, or rather of not being a Christian. He asked with great
+earnestness, "Do not my works testify to my Christianity?" I wish that
+these imperfect recollections may be of any avail to those who cherish
+the memory of an extraordinary genius.
+
+Besides his contributions to _The Germ_, and to _The Oxford and
+Cambridge Magazine_, Rossetti contributed _Sister Helen_, in 1853, to a
+German Annual. Beyond this he made little attempt to publish his poetry.
+He had written it for the love of writing, or in obedience to the
+inherent impulse compelling him to do so, but of actual hope of
+achieving by virtue of it a place among English poets he seems to
+have had none, or next to none. In later life he used to say that Mr.
+Browning's greatness and the splendour of Mr. Tennyson's merited renown
+seemed to him in those early years to render all attempt on his part
+to secure rank by their side as hopeless as presumptuous. This, he
+asserted, was the cause that operated to restrain him from publication
+between 1853 and 1862, and after that (as will presently be seen),
+another and more serious obstacle than self-depreciation intervened. But
+in putting aside all hope of the reward of poetic achievement, he did
+not wholly banish the memory of the work he had done. He made two or
+more copies of the most noticeable of the poems he had written, and sent
+them to friends eminent in letters. To Leigh Hunt he sent _The Blessed
+Damozel_, and received in acknowledgment a letter full of appreciative
+comment, and foretelling a brilliant future. His literary friends at
+this time were Mr. Ruskin, Mr. and Mrs. Browning; he used to see Mr.
+Tennyson and Carlyle at intervals, and was in constant intercourse with
+the younger writers, Mr. Swinburne and Mr. Morris, whose reputations had
+then to be made; Mr. Arnold, Sir Henry Taylor, Mr. Aubrey de Vere, Mr.
+E. Brough, Mr. J. Hannay, and Mr. Monckton Milnes (Lord Houghton),
+he met occasionally; Dobell he knew only by correspondence. Though
+unpublished, his poems were not unknown, for besides the semi-publicity
+they obtained by circulation "among his private friends," he was nothing
+loath to read or recite them at request, and by such means a few of
+them secured a celebrity akin in kind and almost equal in extent to that
+enjoyed by Coleridge's _Christabel_ during the many years preceding
+1816 in which it lay in manuscript. Like Coleridge's poem in another
+important particular, certain of Rossetti's ballads, whilst still
+unknown to the public, so far influenced contemporary poetry that when
+they did at length appear they had all the appearance to the uninitiated
+of work imitated from contemporary models, instead of being, as in fact
+they were, the primary source of inspiration for writers whose names
+were earlier established.
+
+Towards the beginning of his artistic career Rossetti occupied a studio,
+with residential chambers, at Black-friars Bridge. The rooms overlooked
+the river, and the tide rose almost to the walls of the house, which,
+with nearly all its old surroundings, has long disappeared.
+
+A story is told of Rossetti amidst these environments which aptly
+illustrates almost every trait of his character: his impetuosity,
+and superstition especially. It was his daily habit to ransack
+old book-stalls, and carry off to his studio whatever treasures he
+unearthed, but when, upon further investigation, he found he had been
+deceived as to the value of a book that at first looked promising, he
+usually revenged himself by throwing the volume through a window into
+the river running below--a habit which he discovered (to his amusement,
+and occasionally to his distress), that his friends, Mr. Swinburne
+especially, imitated from him and practised at his rooms on his behalf.
+On one occasion he discovered in some odd nook a volume long sought
+for, and having inscribed it with his name and address, he bore it off
+joyfully to his chambers; but finding a few days later that in some
+respects it disappointed his expectations, he flung it through the
+window, and banished all further thought of it. The tide had been at the
+flood when the book disappeared, and when it ebbed, the offending volume
+was found by a little mud-lark imbedded in the refuse of the river. The
+boy washed it and took it back to the address it contained, expecting to
+find it eagerly reclaimed; but, impatient and angry at sight of what he
+thought he had destroyed, Rossetti snatched the book out of the muddy
+hand that proffered it and flung it again into the Thames, with rather
+less than the courtesy which might have been looked for as the reward of
+an act that was meant so well. But the haunting volume was not even
+yet done with. Next morning, an old man of the riverside labourer class
+knocked at the door, bearing in his hands a small parcel rudely made
+up in a piece of newspaper that was greasy enough to have previously
+contained his morning's breakfast. He had come from where he was working
+below London Bridge: he had found something that might have been lost
+by Mr. Rossetti. It was the tormenting volume: the indestructible,
+unrelenting phantom that would not be laid! Rossetti now perceived that
+higher agencies were at work: it was _not meant_ that he should get rid
+of the book: why should he contend against the inevitable? Reverently
+and with both hands he took the besoiled parcel from the brown palm
+of the labourer, placed half-a-crown there instead, and restored the
+fearful book to its place on his shelf.
+
+And now we come to incidents in Rossetti's career of which it is
+necessary to treat as briefly as tenderly. Among the models who sat to
+him was Miss Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal, a young lady of great personal
+beauty, in whom he discovered a natural genius for painting and a
+noticeable love of the higher poetic literature. He felt impelled
+to give her lessons, and she became as much his pupil as model. Her
+water-colour drawings done under his tuition gave proof of a wonderful
+eye for colour, and displayed a marked tendency to style. The subjects,
+too, were admirably composed and often exhibited unusual poetic feeling.
+It was very natural that such a connection between persons of kindred
+aspirations should lead to friendship and finally to love.
+
+Rossetti and Miss Siddal were married in 1860. They visited France and
+Belgium; and this journey, together with a similar one undertaken in the
+company of Mr. Holman Hunt in 1849, and again another in 1863, when his
+brother was his companion, and a short residence on the Continent when
+a boy, may be said to constitute almost the whole sum of Rossetti's
+travelling. Very soon the lady's health began to fail, and she became
+the victim of neuralgia. To meet this dread enemy she resorted to
+laudanum, taking it at first in small quantities, but eventually in
+excess. Her spirits drooped, her art was laid aside, and much of the
+cheerfulness of home was lost to her. There was a child, but it was
+stillborn, and not long after this disaster, it was found that Mrs.
+Rossetti had taken an overdose of her accustomed sleeping potion and
+was lying dead in her bed. This was in 1862, and after two years only of
+married life. The blow was a terrible one to Rossetti, who was the first
+to discover what fate had reserved for him. It was some days before he
+seemed fully to realise the loss that had befallen him, and then his
+grief knew no bounds. The poems he had written, so far as they were
+poems of love, were chiefly inspired by and addressed to her. At her
+request he had copied them into a little book presented to him for the
+purpose, and on the day of the funeral he walked into the room where
+the body lay, and, unmindful of the presence of friends, he spoke to
+his dead wife as though she heard, saying, as he held the book, that the
+words it contained were written to her and for her, and she must take
+them with her for they could not remain when she had gone. Then he put
+the volume into the coffin between her cheek and beautiful hair, and it
+was that day buried with her in Highgate Cemetery.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+It was long before Rossetti recovered from the shock of his wife's
+sudden death. The loss sustained appeared to change the whole course
+of his life. Previously he had been of a cheerful temperament, and
+accustomed to go abroad at frequent intervals to visit friends; but
+after this event he seemed to become for a time morose, and by nature
+reclusive. Not a great while afterwards he removed from Blackfriars
+Bridge, and after a temporary residence in Lincoln's Inn Fields, he took
+up his abode in the house he occupied during the twenty remaining years
+of his life, at 16 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea. This home of Rossetti's shall
+be fully described in subsequent personal recollections. It was called
+Tudor House when he became its tenant, from the tradition that Elizabeth
+Tudor had lived in it, and it is understood to be the same that
+Thackeray describes in _Esmond_ as the home of the old Countess of
+Chelsey. A large garden, which recently has been cut off for building
+purposes, lay at the back, and, doubtless, it was as much due to
+the attractions of this piece of pleasant ground, dotted over with
+lime-trees, and enclosed by a high wall, that Rossetti went so far
+afield, for at that period Chelsea was not the rallying ground of
+artists and men of letters. He wished to live a life of retirement, and
+thought the possession of a garden in which he could take sufficient
+daily exercise would enable him to do so. In leaving Blackfriars
+he destroyed many things associated with his residence there, and
+calculated to remind him of his life's great loss. He burnt a great body
+of letters, and among them were many valuable ones from almost all
+the men and women then eminent in literature and art. His great grief
+notwithstanding, upon settling at Chelsea he began almost insensibly to
+interest himself in furnishing the house in a beautiful and novel style.
+Old oak then became for a time his passion, and in hunting it up he
+rummaged the brokers' shops round London for miles, buying for trifles
+what would eventually (when the fashion he started grew to be general)
+have fetched large sums. Cabinets of all conceivable superannuated
+designs--so old in material or pattern that no one else would look at
+them--were unearthed in obscure corners, bolstered up by a joiner,
+and consigned to their places in the new residence. Following old oak,
+Japanese furniture became Rossetti's quest, and following this came blue
+china ware (of which he had perhaps the first fine collection made),
+and then ecclesiastical and other brasses, incense-burners, sacramental
+cups, crucifixes, Indian spice boxes, mediaeval lamps, antique bronzes,
+and the like. In a few years he had filled his house with so much
+curious and beautiful furniture that there grew up a widespread desire
+to imitate his methods; and very soon artists, authors, and men of
+fortune having no other occupation, were found rummaging, as he had
+rummaged, for the neglected articles of the centuries gone by. What he
+did was done, as he used to say, less from love of the things hunted
+for, than from love of the pursuit, which, from its difficulty, gave
+rise to a pleasurable excitement. Thus did he grieve down his loss, and
+little did they think who afterwards followed the fashion he set them,
+and carried his passion for antique furniture to an excess at which he
+must have laughed, that his' primary impulse was so far from a desire to
+"live up to his blue ware," that it was more like an effort to live down
+to it.
+
+It was during the earlier years of his residence at Chelsea that
+Rossetti formed a habit of life which clung to him almost to the last,
+and did more than aught else to blight his happiness. What his intimate
+friend has lately characterised in _The Daily News_ as that great curse
+of the literary and artistic temperament, insomnia, had been hanging
+about him since the death of his wife, and was becoming each year more
+and more alarming. He had tried opiates, but in sparing quantities, for
+had he not the most serious cause to eschew them? Towards 1868 he heard
+of the then newly found drug chloral, which was accredited with all the
+virtues and none of the vices of other known narcotics. Here then was
+the thing he wanted; this was the blessed discovery that was to save
+him from days of weariness and nights of misery and tears. Eagerly he
+procured it, took it nightly in single small doses of ten grains each,
+and from it he received pleasant and refreshing sleep. He made no
+concealment of his habit; like Coleridge under similar conditions, he
+preferred to talk of it. Not yet had he learned the sad truth, too soon
+to force itself upon him, that the fumes of this dreadful drug would
+one day wither up his hopes and joys in life: deluding him with a
+short-lived surcease of pain only to impose a terrible legacy of
+suffering from which there was to be no respite. Had Rossetti been
+master of the drug and not mastered by it, perhaps he might have
+turned it to account at a critical juncture, and laid it aside when the
+necessity to employ it had gradually been removed. But, alas! he gave
+way little by little to the encroachments of an evil power with which,
+when once it had gained the ascendant, he fought down to his dying day a
+single-handed and losing fight.
+
+It was not, however, for some years after he began the use of it that
+chloral produced any sensible effects of an injurious kind, and meantime
+he pursued as usual his avocation as a painter. Mention has been made
+of the fact that Rossetti abandoned at an early age subject designs for
+three-quarter-length figures. Of the latter, in the period of which we
+are now treating, he painted great numbers: among them, produced at this
+time and later, were _Sibylla Palmifera and The Beloved_ (the property
+of Mr. George Rae), _La Pia and The Salutation of Beatrice_ (Mr. F. E.
+Leyland), _The Dying Beatrice_ (Lord Mount Temple), _Venus Astarte_
+(Mr. Fry), _Fiammetta_ (Mr. Turner), _Proserpina_ (Mr. Graham). Of these
+works, solidity may be said to be the prominent characteristic. The
+drapery of Rossetti's pictures is wonderfully powerful and solid; his
+colour may be said to be at times almost matchable with that of certain
+of the Venetian painters, though different in kind. He hated beyond most
+things the "varnishy" look of some modern work; and his own oil pictures
+had so much of the manner of frescoes in their lustreless depth, that
+they were sometimes mistaken for water-colours, while, on the other
+hand, his water-colours had often so much depth and brilliancy as
+sometimes to be mistaken for oil. It is alleged in certain quarters
+that Rossetti was deficient in some qualities of drawing, and this is
+no doubt a just allegation; but it is beyond question that no English
+painter has ever been a greater master of the human face, which in his
+works (especially those painted in later years) acquires a splendid
+solemnity and spiritual beauty and significance all but peculiar to
+himself. It seems proper to say in such a connexion, that his success
+in this direction was always attributed by him to the fact that the most
+memorable of his faces were painted from a well-known friend.
+
+Only one of his early designs, the _Dante's Dream_, was ever painted by
+Rossetti on a scale commensurate with its importance, and the solemnity
+and massive grandeur of that work leave only a feeling of regret that,
+whether from personal indisposition on the part of the painter or lack
+of adequate recognition on that of the public, the three or four other
+finest designs made in youth were never carried out. As the picture in
+question stands alone among Rossetti's pictorial works as a completed
+conception, it may be well to devote a few pages to a description of it.
+
+It is essential to an appreciation of _Dante's Dream_, that we should
+not only fully understand the nature of the particular incident depicted
+in the picture, but also possess a general knowledge of the lives and
+relations of the two principal personages concerned in it. What we know,
+to most purpose, of the early life and love of Dante, we learn from the
+autobiography which he entitled _La Vita Nuova_. Boccaccio, however,
+writing fifty years after the death of the great Florentine, affords
+a more detailed statement than is furnished by Dante himself of the
+circumstances of the poets first meeting with the lady he called
+Beatrice. He says that it was the custom of citizens in Florence, when
+the time of spring came round, to form social gatherings in their own
+quarters for purposes of merry-making; that in this way Folco Portinari,
+a citizen of mark, had collected his neighbours at his house upon the
+first of May, 1274, for pastime and rejoicing: that amongst those who
+came to him was Alighiero Alighieri, father of Dante Alighieri, who
+lived within fifty yards; that it was common for children to accompany
+their parents at such merrymakings, and that Dante, then scarce nine
+years old, was in the house on the day in question engaged in sports,
+appropriate to his years, with other children, amongst whom was a little
+daughter of Folco Portinari, eight years old. The child is described as
+being, even at this period, in aspect extremely beautiful, and winning
+and graceful in her ways. Not to dwell upon these passages of childhood,
+it may be sufficient to say that the boy, young as he was, is said
+to have then conceived so deep a passion for the child that maturer
+attachments proved powerless to efface it. Such was the origin of a love
+that grew from childlike tenderness to manly ardour, and, surviving all
+the buffetings of an untoward fate, is known to us now and for all
+time in a record of so much reality and purity, as seems to every
+right-hearted nature to be equally the story of his personal attachment
+as the history of a passion that in Florence, six centuries ago, for its
+mortal put on immortality.
+
+The Portinari and Alighieri were immediate neighbours, yet it does not
+appear that the young Dante encountered the lady in any marked way until
+nine years later, and then, in the first bloom of a gracious womanhood,
+she is described as affording him in the street a salutation of such
+unspeakable courtesy that he left the place where for the instant he had
+stood sorely abashed, as one intoxicated with a love that now at first
+knew itself for what it was. The incidents of the attachment are few in
+facts; numerous only in emotions, and therein too uncertain and liable
+to change to be counted. In order not to disclose a passion, which other
+reasons than those given by the poet may have tempted him to conceal,
+Dante affects an attachment to another lady of the city, and the
+rumour of this brings about an estrangement with the real object of his
+desires, which reduces the poet to such an abject condition of mind, as
+finally results in his laying aside all counterfeiting. Portinari, the
+father, now dies, and witnessing the tenderness with which the beautiful
+Beatrice mourns him, Dante becomes affected with a painful infirmity,
+wherein his mind broods over his enfeebled body, and, perceiving how
+frail a thing life is, even though health keep with it, his brain begins
+to travail in many imaginings, and he says within himself, "Certainly
+it must some time come to pass that the very gentle Beatrice will die."
+Feeling bewildered, he closes his eyes, and, in a trance, he conceives
+that a friend comes to him, and says, "Hast thou not heard? She that
+was thine excellent lady has been taken out of life." Then as he looks
+towards Heaven in imagination, he beholds a multitude of angels who are
+returning upwards, having before them an exceedingly white cloud; and
+these angels are singing, and the words of their song are, "Osanna in
+excelsis." So strong is his imagining, that it seems to him that he goes
+to look upon the body where it has its abiding-place.
+
+     The sun ceased, and the stars began to gather,
+     And each wept at the other;
+       And birds dropp'd at midflight out of the sky;
+       And earth shook suddenly;
+          And I was 'ware of one, hoarse and tired out,
+     Who ask'd of me: 'Hast thou not heard it said--
+     Thy lady, she that was so fair, is dead?
+
+
+     Then lifting up mine eyes, as the tears came,
+        I saw the angels, like a rain of manna
+        In a long flight flying back Heavenward,
+     Having a little cloud in front of them,
+        After the which they went, and said 'Hosanna;'
+        And if they had said more, you should have heard.
+
+
+        Then Love said, 'Now shall all things be made clear:
+     Come, and behold our lady where she lies
+     These 'wildering phantasies
+        Then carried me to see my lady dead.
+        Even as I there was led,
+            Her ladies with a veil were covering her;
+     And with her was such very humbleness
+     That she appeared to say, 'I am at peace.'
+                        (Dante and his Circle.)
+
+The trance proves to be a premonition of the event, for, shortly after
+writing the poem in which his imaginings find record, Dante says, "The
+Lord God of Justice called my most gracious lady unto Himself."
+
+It is with the incidents of the dream that Rossetti has dealt. The
+principal personage in the picture is, of course, Dante himself. Of the
+poet's face, two old and accredited witnesses remain to us--the portrait
+of Giotto and the mask supposed to be copied from a similar one
+taken after death. Giotto's portrait represents Dante at the age of
+twenty-seven. The face has a feminine delicacy of outline, yet is
+full of manly beauty; strength and tenderness are seen blended in its
+lineaments. It might be that of a poet, a scholar, a courtier, or yet a
+soldier; and in Dante it is all combined.
+
+Such, as seen in Giotto, was the great Florentine when Beatrice beheld
+him. The familiar mask represents that youthful beauty as somewhat
+saddened by years of exile, by the accidents of an unequal fortune, and
+by the long brooding memory of his life's one, deep, irreparable loss.
+We see in it the warrior who served in the great battle of Campaldino:
+the mourner who sought refuge from grief in the action and danger of the
+war waged by Florence upon Pisa: the magistrate whose justice proved his
+ruin: the exile who ate bitter bread when Florence banished the greatest
+of her sons. The mask is as full as the portrait of intellect and
+feeling, of strength and character, but it lacks something of the early
+sweetness and sensibility. Rossetti's portraiture retains the salient
+qualities of both portrait and mask. It represents Dante in his
+twenty-seventh year; the face gives hint of both poet and soldier, for
+behind clear-cut features capable of strengthening into resolve and
+rigour lie whole depths of tenderest sympathy. The abstracted air,
+the self-centred look, the eyes that seem to see only what the
+mind conceives and casts forward from itself; the slow, uncertain,
+half-reluctant gait,--these are profoundly true to the man and the
+dream.
+
+Of Beatrice, no such description is given either in the _Vita Nuova_ or
+the _Commedia_ as could afford an artist a definite suggestion. Dante's
+love was an idealised passion; it concerned itself with spiritual
+beauty, whereof the emotions excited absorbed every merely physical
+consideration. The beauty of Beatrice in the _Vita Nuova_ is like a
+ray of sunshine flooding a landscape--we see it only in the effect it
+produces. All we know with certainty is that her hair was light, that
+her face was pale, and that her smile was one of thoughtful sweetness.
+These hints of a beautiful person Rossetti has wrought into a creation
+of such purity that, lovely as she is in death, as in life, we think
+less of her loveliness than of her loveableness.
+
+The personage of Love, who plays throughout the _Vita Nuova_ a mystical
+part is not the Pagan Love, but a youth and Christian Master, as Dante
+terms him, sometimes of severe and terrible aspect. He is represented in
+the picture as clad in a flame-coloured garment (for it is in a mist
+of the colour of fire that he appears to the lover), and he wears the
+pilgrim's scallop-shell on his shoulder as emblem of that pilgrimage on
+earth which Love is.
+
+The chamber wherein the body of Beatrice has its abiding-place is, to
+Dante's imaginings, a chamber of dreams. Visionary as the mind of the
+dreamer, it discloses at once all that goes forward within its own
+narrow compass, together with the desolate streets of the city of
+Florence, which, to his fancy, sits silent for his loss, and the long
+flight of angels above that bear away the little cloud, to which is
+given a vague semblance of the beatified Beatrice. As if just fallen
+back in sleep, the beautiful lady lies in death, her hands folded across
+her breast, and a glory of golden hair flowing over her shoulders. With
+measured tread Dante approaches the couch led by the winged and scarlet
+Love, but, as though fearful of so near and unaccustomed an approach,
+draws slowly backward on his half-raised foot, while the mystical emblem
+of his earthly passion stands droopingly between him the living, and his
+lady the dead, and takes the kiss that he himself might never have. In
+life they must needs be apart, but thus in death they are united, for
+the hand of the pilgrim, who is the embodiment of his love, holds his
+hand even as the master's lips touch her lips. Two ladies of the chamber
+are covering her with a pall, and on the dreamer they fix sympathetic
+eyes. The floor is strewn with poppies--emblems equally of the sleep in
+which the lover walks, and of the sleep that is the sleep of death.
+The may-bloom in the pall, the apple-blossom in the hand of Love, the
+violets and roses in the frieze of the alcove, symbolise purity and
+virginity, the life that is cut off in its spring, the love that is
+consummated in death before the coming of fruit. Suspended from the roof
+is a scroll, bearing the first words of the wail from the Lamentations
+of Jeremiah, quoted by Dante himself:--"How doth the city sit solitary,
+that was full of people! How is she become as a widow, she that was
+great among the nations!" In the ascending and descending staircase on
+either iand fly doves of the same glowing colour as Love, and these are
+emblems of his presence in the house. Over all flickers the last beam of
+a lamp which has burnt through the long night, and which the dawn of a
+new day sees die away--fit symbol of the life that has now taken flight
+with the heavenly host, leaving behind it only the burnt-out socket
+where the live flame lived.
+
+Full of symbol as this picture is, it is furthermore permeated by
+a significance that is not occult. It bears witness to the possible
+strength of a passion that is so spiritual as to be without taint of
+sense; and to a confident belief in an immortality wherein the utmost
+limits of a blessedness not of this world may be compassed. Such are
+in this picture the simpler, yet deeper, symbols, that all who look may
+read. Sir Noel Paton has written of this work:
+
+I was so dumbfounded by the beauty of that great picture of Rosetti's,
+called _Dante's Dream_, that I was usable to give any expression to the
+emotions it excited--emotions such as I do not think any other picture,
+except the _Madonna di San Sisto_ at Dresden, ever stirred within me.
+The memory of such a picture is like the memory of sublime and perfect
+music; it makes any one who _fully_ feels it--_silent_. Fifty years
+hence it will be named among the half-dozen supreme pictures of the
+world.
+
+Rossetti had buried the only complete copy of his poems with his wife at
+Highgate, and for a time he had been able to put by the thought of them;
+but as one by one his friends, Mr. Morris, Mr. Swinburne, and others,
+attained to distinction as poets, he began to hanker after poetic
+reputation, and to reflect with pain and regret upon the hidden
+fruits of his best effort. Rossetti--in all love of his memory be
+it spoken--was after all a frail mortal; of unstable character: of
+variable purpose: a creature of impulse and whim, and with a plentiful
+lack of the backbone of volition. With less affection he would not have
+buried his book; with more strength of will he had not done so; or,
+having done so, he had never wished to undo what he had done; or having
+undone it, he would never have tormented himself with the memory of it
+as of a deed of sacrilege. But Rossetti had both affection enough to
+do it and weakness enough to have it undone. After an infinity of
+self-communions he determined to have the grave opened, and the book
+extracted. Endless were the preparations necessary before such a work
+could be begun. Mr. Home Secretary Bruce had to be consulted. At length
+preliminaries were complete, and one night, seven and a half years after
+the burial, a fire was built by the side of the grave, and then the
+coffin was raised and opened. The body is described as perfect upon
+coming to light.
+
+Whilst this painful work was being done the unhappy author of it was
+sitting alone and anxious, and full of self-reproaches at the house of
+the friend who had charge of it. He was relieved and thankful when told
+that all was over. The volume was not much the worse for the years it
+had lain in the grave. Deficiencies were filled in from memory, the
+manuscript was put in the press, and in 1870 the reclaimed work was
+issued under the simple title of _Poems_.
+
+The success of the book was almost without precedent; seven editions
+were called for in rapid succession. It was reviewed with enthusiasm in
+many quarters. Yet that was a period in which fresh poetry and new poets
+arose, even as they now arise, with all the abundance and timeliness
+of poppies in autumn. It is probable enough that of the circumstances
+attending the unexampled early success of this first volume only
+the remarkable fact is still remembered that, from a bookseller's
+standpoint, it ran a neck-and-neck race with Disraeli's _Lothair_ at
+a time when political romance was found universally appetising, and
+poetry, as of old, a drug. But it will not be forgotten that certain
+subsidiary circumstances were thought to have contributed to the former
+success. Of these the most material was the reputation Rossetti had
+already achieved as a painter by methods which awakened curiosity
+as much as they aroused enthusiasm. The public mind became sensibly
+affected by the idea that the poems of the new poet were not to be
+regarded as the emanations of a single individual, but as the result of
+a movement in which Rossetti had played one of the most prominent parts.
+Mr. F. Hueffer, in prefacing the Tauchnitz edition of the poems with
+a pleasant memoir, has comprehensively denominated that movement
+the _renaissance of mediaeval feeling_, but at the outset it
+acquired popularly, for good or ill, the more rememberable name of
+pre-Raphaelitism. What the shibboleth was of the originators of the
+school that grew out of it concerned men but little to ascertain; and
+this was a condition of indifference as to the logic of the movement
+which was occasioned partly by the known fact that the most popular of
+its leaders, Mr. Millais, had long been shifting ground. It was
+enough that the new sect had comprised dissenters from the creed once
+established, that the catholic spirit of art which lived with the
+lives of Elmore, Goodall, and Stone was long dead, and that none of the
+coteries for love of which the old faith, exemplified in the works of
+men such as these, had been put aside, possessed such an appeal for
+the imagination as this, now that twenty years of fairly consistent
+endeavour had cleared away the cloud of obloquy that gathered about it
+when it began. And so it came to be thought that the poems of Rossetti
+were to exhibit a new phase of this movement, involving kindred issues,
+and opening up afresh in the poetic domain the controversies which had
+been waged and won in the pictorial. Much to this purpose was said at
+the time to account for the success of a book whose popular qualities
+were I manifestly inconsiderable; and much to similar purpose
+will doubtless long be said by those who affect to believe that a
+concatenation of circumstances did for Rossetti's earlier work a service
+which could not attend his subsequent one. But the explanation was
+inadequate, and had for its immediate outcome a charge of narrowed range
+of poetic sympathy with which Rossetti's admirers had not laid their
+account.
+
+A renaissance of mediaeval feeling the movement in art assuredly
+involved, but the essential part of it was another thing, of which
+mediaevalism was palpably independent. How it came to be considered the
+fundamental element is not difficult to show. In an eminent degree
+the originators of the new school in painting were colourists, having,
+perhaps, in their effects, a certain affinity to the early Florentine
+masters, and this accident of native gift had probably more to do in
+determining the precise direction of the _intellectual_ sympathy than
+any external agency. The art feeling which formed the foundation of the
+movement existed apart from it, or bore no closer relation to it than
+kinship of powers induced. When Rossetti's poetry came it was seen to
+be animated by a choice of subject-matter akin to that which gave
+individual character to his painting, but this was because coeval
+efforts in two totally distinct arts must needs bear the family
+resemblance, each to each, which belong to all the offspring of a
+thoroughly harmonised mind. The poems and the pictures, however, had not
+more in common than can be found in the early poems and early dramas of
+Shakspeare. Nay, not so much; for whereas in his poems Shakspeare was
+constantly evolving certain shades of feeling and begetting certain
+movements of thought which were soon to find concrete and final
+collocation in the dramatic creations, in his pictures Rossetti was
+first of all a dissenter from all prescribed canons of taste, whilst in
+his poems he was in harmony with the catholic spirit which was as old
+as Shakspeare himself, and found revival, after temporary eclipse, in
+Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, and Tennyson. Choice of mediaeval theme would
+not in itself have been enough to secure a reversal of popular feeling
+against work that contained no germs of the sensational; and hence we
+must conclude that Mr. Swinburne accounted more satisfactorily for the
+instant popularity of Rossetti's poetry when he claimed for it those
+innate utmost qualities of beauty and strength which are always
+the first and last constituents of poetry that abides. Indeed those
+qualities and none other, wholly independent of auxiliary aids, must now
+as then go farthest to determine Rossetti's final place among poets.
+
+Such as is here described was the first reception given to Rossetti's
+volume of poetry; but at the close of 1871, there arose out of it a
+long and acrimonious controversy. It seems necessary to allude to this
+painful matter, because it involved serious issues; but an effort alike
+after brevity and impartiality of comment shall be observed in what is
+said of it. In October of the year mentioned, an article entitled _The
+Fleshly School of Poetry_, and signed "Thomas Maitland," appeared
+in _The Contemporary Review_. {*} It consisted in the main of an
+impeachment of Rossetti's poetry on the ground of sensuality, though it
+embraced a broad denunciation of the sensual tendencies of the age in
+art, music, poetry, the drama, and social life generally. Sensuality was
+regarded as the phenomenon of the age. "It lies," said the writer, "on
+the drawing-room table, shamelessly naked and dangerously fair. It is
+part of the pretty poem which the belle of the season reads, and it
+breathes away the pureness of her soul like the poisoned breath of
+the girl in Hawthorne's tale. It covers the shelves of the great
+Oxford-Street librarian, lurking in the covers of three-volume novels.
+It is on the French booksellers' counters, authenticated by the
+signature of the author of the _Visite de Noces_. It is here, there,
+and everywhere, in art, literature, life, just as surely as it is in
+the _Fleurs de Mal_, the Marquis de Sade's _Justine_, or the _Monk_ of
+Lewis. It appeals to all tastes, to all dispositions, to all ages. If
+the querulous man of letters has his Baudelaire, the pimpled clerk has
+his _Day's Doings_, and the dissipated artisan his _Day and Night._"
+When the writer set himself to inquire into the source of this social
+cancer, he refused to believe that English society was honeycombed and
+rotten. He accounted for the portentous symptoms that appalled him by
+attributing the evil to a fringe of real English society, chiefly, if
+not altogether, resident in London: "a sort of demi-monde, not composed,
+like that other in France, of simple courtesans, but of men and women of
+indolent habits and aesthetic tastes, artists, literary persons, novel
+writers, actors, men of genius and men of talent, butterflies and
+gadflies of the human kind, leading a lazy existence from hand to
+mouth." It was to this Bohemian fringe of society that the writer
+attributed the "gross and vulgar conceptions of life which are
+formulated into certain products of art, literature, and criticism."
+Dealing with only one form of the social phenomenon, with sensualism so
+far as it appeared to affect contemporary poetry, the writer proceeded
+with a literary retrospect intended to show that the fair dawn of
+our English poetry in Chaucer and the Elizabethan dramatists had been
+overclouded by a portentous darkness, a darkness "vaporous," "miasmic,"
+coming from a "fever-cloud generated first in Italy and then blown
+westward," sucking up on its way "all that was most unwholesome from the
+soil of France."
+
+     * In this summary, the pamphlet reprint has been followed in
+     preference to the original article as it appeared in the
+     Review.
+
+Just previously to and contemporaneously with the rise of Dante, there
+had flourished a legion of poets of greater or less ability, but all
+more or less characterised by affectation, foolishness, and moral
+blindness: singers of the falsetto school, with ballads to their
+mistress's eyebrow, sonnets to their lady's lute, and general songs of a
+fiddlestick; peevish men for the most part, as is the way of all fleshly
+and affected beings; men so ignorant of human subjects and materials
+as to be driven in their sheer bankruptcy of mind to raise Hope, Love,
+Fear, Rage (everything but Charity) into human entities, and to
+treat the body and upholstery of a dollish woman as if, in itself, it
+constituted a whole universe.
+
+After tracing the effect of the "moral poison" here seen in its
+inception through English poetry from Surrey and Wyat to Cowley, the
+writer recognised a "tranquil gleam of honest English light" in Cowper,
+who "spread the seeds of new life" soon to re-appear in Wordsworth,
+Coleridge, Southey, Lamb, and Scott. In his opinion the "Italian disease
+would now have died out altogether," but for a "fresh importation of the
+obnoxious matter from France."
+
+At this stage came a denunciation of the representation of "abnormal
+types of diseased lust and lustful disease" as seen in Charles
+Baudelaire's _Fleurs de Mal_, with the conclusion that out of "the
+hideousness of _Femmes Damnees_" came certain English poems. "This,"
+said the writer, "is our double misfortune--to have a nuisance, and to
+have it at second-hand. We might have been more tolerant to an unclean
+thing if it had been in some sense a product of the soil" All that is
+here summarised, however, was but preparatory to the real object of the
+article, which was to assail Rossetti's new volume.
+
+The poems were traversed in detail, with but little (and that the most
+grudging) admission of their power and beauty, and the very sharpest
+accentuation of their less spiritual qualities. Since the publication
+of the article in question, events have taken such a turn that it is no
+longer either necessary or wise to quote the strictures contained in it,
+however they might be fenced by juster views. The gravamen of the charge
+against Rossetti, Mr. Swinburne, and Mr. Morris alike--setting aside
+all particular accusations, however serious--was that they had "bound
+themselves into a solemn league and covenant to extol fleshliness as
+the distinct and supreme end of poetic and pictorial art; to aver that
+poetic expression is greater than poetic thought, and by inference that
+the body is greater than the soul, and sound superior to sense."
+
+Such, then, is a synopsis of the hostile article of which the nucleus
+appeared in _The Contemporary Review_, and it were little less than
+childish to say that events so important as the publication of the
+article and subsequent pamphlet, and the controversy that arose out
+of them, should, from their unpleasantness and futility, from the bad
+passions provoked by them, or yet from the regret that followed after
+them, be passed over in sorrow and silence. For good or ill, what was
+written on both sides will remain. It has stood and will stand. Sooner
+or later the story of this literary quarrel will be told in detail and
+in cold blood, and perhaps with less than sufficient knowledge of either
+of the parties concerned in it, or sympathy with their aims. No better
+fate, one might think, could befall it than to be dealt with, however
+briefly, by a writer whose affections were warmly engaged on one side,
+while his convictions and bias of nature forced him to recognise the
+justice of the other--stripped, of course, of the cruelties with which
+literary error but too obviously enshrouded it.
+
+Whatever the effect produced upon the public mind by the article
+in question (and there seems little reason to think it was at all
+material), the effect upon two of the writers attacked was certainly
+more than commensurate with the assault. Mr. Morris wisely attempted
+no reply to the few words of adverse criticism in which his name was
+specifically involved; but Mr. Swinburne retorted upon his adversary
+with the torrents of invective of which he has a measureless command.
+Rossetti's course was different. Greatly concerned at the bitterness,
+as well as startled by the unexpectedness of the attack, he wrote in the
+first moments of indignation a full and point-for-point rejoinder, and
+this he printed in the form of a pamphlet, and had a great number struck
+off; but with constitutional irresolution (wisely restraining him in
+this case), he destroyed every copy, and contented himself with writing
+a temperate letter on the subject to _The Athenaeum_, December 16, 1871.
+He said:
+
+A sonnet, entitled _Nuptial Sleep_, is quoted and abused at page 338
+of the Review, and is there dwelt upon as a "whole poem," describing
+"merely animal sensations." It is no more a whole poem in reality than
+is any single stanza of any poem throughout the book. The poem, written
+chiefly in sonnets, and of which this is one sonnet-stanza, is entitled
+_The House of Life_; and even in my first published instalment of the
+whole work (as contained in the volume under notice), ample evidence
+is included that no such passing phase of description as the one headed
+_Nuptial Sleep_ could possibly be put forward by the author of _The
+House of Life_ as his own representative view of the subject of love.
+In proof of this I will direct attention (among the love-sonnets of this
+poem), to Nos. 2, 8, 11, 17, 28, and more especially 13. [Here _Love
+Sweetness_ is printed.] Any reader may bring any artistic charge he
+pleases against the above sonnet; but one charge it would be impossible
+to maintain against the writer of the series in which it occurs, and
+that is, the wish on his part to assert that the body is greater than
+the soul. For here all the passionate and just delights of the body are
+declared--somewhat figuratively, it is true, but unmistakeably--to be
+as naught if not ennobled by the concurrence of the soul at all times.
+Moreover, nearly one half of this series of sonnets has nothing to do
+with love, but treats of quite other life-influences. I would defy any
+one to couple with fair quotation of sonnets 29, 30, 31, 39, 40, 43, or
+others, the slander that their author was not impressed, like all other
+thinking men, with the responsibilities and higher mysteries of life;
+while sonnets 35, 36, and 37, entitled _The Choice_, sum up the general
+view taken in a manner only to be evaded by conscious insincerity. Thus
+much for _The House of Life_, of which the sonnet _Nuptial Sleep_ is one
+stanza, embodying, for its small constituent share, a beauty of natural
+universal function, only to be reprobated in art if dwelt on (as I have
+shown that it is not here), to the exclusion of those other highest
+things of which it is the harmonious concomitant.
+
+It had become known that the article in the _Review_ was not the work
+of the unknown Thomas Maitland, whose name it bore, and on this head
+Rossetti wrote:
+
+Here a critical organ, professedly adopting the principle of open
+signature, would seem, in reality, to assert (by silent practice,
+however, not by annunciation) that if the anonymous in criticism
+was--as itself originally indicated--but an early caterpillar stage,
+the nominate too is found to be no better than a homely transitional
+chrysalis, and that the ultimate butterfly form for a critic who
+likes to sport in sunlight, and yet elude the grasp, is after all the
+pseudonymous.
+
+It transpired, in subsequent correspondence (of which there was more
+than enough), that the actual writer was Mr. Robert Buchanan, then
+a young author who had risen into distinction as a poet, and who was
+consequently suspected, by the writers and disciples of the Rossetti
+school, of being actuated much more by feelings of rivalry than
+by desire for the public good. Mr. Buchanan's reply to the serious
+accusation of having assailed a brother-poet pseudonymously was that the
+false signature was affixed to the article without his knowledge,
+"in order that the criticism might rest upon its own merits, and gain
+nothing from the name of the real writer."
+
+It was an unpleasant controversy, and what remains as an impartial
+synopsis of it appears to be this: that there was actually manifest
+in the poetry of certain writers a tendency to deviate from wholesome
+reticence, and that this dangerous tendency came to us from France,
+where deep-seated unhealthy passion so gave shape to the glorification
+of gross forms of animalism as to excite alarm that what had begun with
+the hideousness of _Femmes Damnees_ would not even end there; finally,
+that the unpleasant truth demanded to be spoken--by whomsoever had
+courage enough to utter it--that to deify mere lust was an offence and
+an outrage. So much for the justice on Mr. Buchanan's side; with the
+mistaken criticism linking the writers of Dante's time with French
+writers of the time of Baudelaire it is hardly necessary to deal. On the
+other hand, it must be said that the sum-total of all the English
+poetry written in imitation of the worst forms of this French excess was
+probably less than one hundred lines; that what was really reprehensible
+in the English imitation of the poetry of the French School was,
+therefore, too inconsiderable to justify a wholesale charge against it
+of an endeavour to raise the banner of a black ambition whose only aim
+was to ruin society; that Rossetti, who was made to bear the brunt
+of attack, was a man who never by direct avowal, or yet by inference,
+displayed the faintest conceivable sympathy with the French excesses in
+question, and who never wrote a line inspired by unwholesome passion.
+As the pith of Mr. Buchanan's accusation of 1871 lay here, and as Mr.
+Buchanan has, since then, very manfully withdrawn it, {*} we need hardly
+go further; but, as more recent articles in prominent places,
+_The Edinburgh Review, The British Quarterly Review, and again The
+Contemporary Review_, have repeated what was first said by him on the
+alleged unwholesomeness of Rossetti's poetic impulses, it may be as well
+to admit frankly, and at once (for the subject will arise in the future
+as frequently as this poetry is under discussion) that love of bodily
+beauty did underlie much of the poet's work. But has not the same
+passion made the back-bone of nine-tenths of the noblest English poetry
+since Chaucer? If it is objected that Rossetti's love of physical
+beauty took new forms, the rejoinder is that it would have been equally
+childish and futile to attempt to prescribe limits for it. All this
+we grant to those unfriendly critics who refuse to see that spiritual
+beauty and not sensuality was Rossetti's actual goal.
+
+     * Writing to me on this subject since Rossetti's death, Mr.
+     Buchanan says:--"In perfect frankness, let me say a few
+     words concerning our old quarrel. While admitting freely
+     that my article in the C. R. was unjust to Rossetti's claims
+     as a poet, I have ever held, and still hold, that it
+     contained nothing to warrant the manner in which it was
+     received by the poet and his circle. At the time it was
+     written, the newspapers were full of panegyric; mine was a
+     mere drop of gall in an ocean of _eau sucree_. That it could
+     have had on any man the effect you describe, I can scarcely
+     believe; indeed, I think that no living man had so little to
+     complain of as Rossetti, on the score of criticism. Well, my
+     protest was received in a way which turned irritation into
+     wrath, wrath into violence; and then ensued the paper war
+     which lasted for years. If you compare what I have written
+     of Rossetti with what his admirers have written of myself, I
+     think you will admit that there has been some cause for me
+     to complain, to shun society, to feel bitter against the
+     world; but happily, I have a thick epidermis, and the
+     courage of an approving conscience. I was unjust, as I have
+     said; most unjust when I impugned the purity and
+     misconceived the passion of writings too hurriedly read and
+     reviewed currente calamo; but I was at least honest and
+     fearless, and wrote with no personal malignity. Save for the
+     action of the literary defence, if I may so term it, my
+     article would have been as ephemeral as the mood which
+     induced its composition. I make full admission of Rossetti's
+     claims to the purest kind of literary renown, and if I were
+     to criticise his poems now, I should write very differently.
+     But nothing will shake my conviction that the cruelty, the
+     unfairness, the pusillanimity has been on the other side,
+     not on mine. The amende of my Dedication in God and the Man
+     was a sacred thing; between his spirit and mine; not between
+     my character and the cowards who have attacked it. I thought
+     he would understand,--which would have been, and indeed is,
+     sufficient. I cried, and cry, no truce with the horde of
+     slanderers who hid themselves within his shadow. That is
+     all. But when all is said, there still remains the pity that
+     our quarrel should ever have been. Our little lives are too
+     short for such animosities. Your friend is at peace with
+     God,--that God who will justify and cherish him, who has
+     dried his tears, and who will turn the shadow of his sad
+     life-dream into full sunshine. My only regret now is that we
+     did not meet,--that I did not take him by the hand; but I am
+     old-fashioned enough to believe that this world is only a
+     prelude, and that our meeting may take place--even yet."
+
+To Rossetti, the poet, the accusation of extolling fleshliness as
+the distinct and supreme end of art was, after all, only an error of
+critical judgment; but to Rossetti, the man, the charge was something
+far more serious. It was a cruel and irremediable wound inflicted upon a
+fine spirit, sensitive to attack beyond all sensitiveness hitherto known
+among poets. He who had withheld his pictures from exhibition from dread
+of the distracting influences of popular opinion, he who for fifteen
+years had withheld his poems from print in obedience first to an
+extreme modesty of personal estimate and afterwards to the commands of
+a mastering affection was likely enough at forty-two years of age (after
+being loaded by the disciples that idolised him with only too much of
+the "frankincense of praise and myrrh of flattery") to feel deeply the
+slander that he had unpacked his bosom of unhealthy passions. But to say
+that Rossetti felt the slander does not express his sense of it. He had
+replied to his reviewer and had acted unwisely in so doing; but when
+one after one--in the _Quarterly Review, the North American Review_,
+and elsewhere, in articles more or less ignorant, uncritical, and
+stupid--the accusations he had rebutted were repeated with increased
+bitterness, he lost all hope of stemming the torrent of hostile
+criticism. He had, as we have seen, for years lived in partial
+retirement, enjoying at intervals a garden party behind the house, or
+going about occasionally to visit relatives and acquaintances, but now
+he became entirely reclusive, refusing to see any friends except the
+three or four intimate ones who were constantly with him. Nor did the
+mischief end there. We have spoken of his habitual use of chloral,
+which was taken at first in small doses as a remedy for insomnia and
+afterwards indulged in to excess at moments of physical prostration or
+nervous excitement. To that false friend he came at this time with only
+too great assiduity, and the chloral, added to the seclusive habit of
+life, induced a series of terrible though intermittent illnesses and a
+morbid condition of mind in which for a little while he was the victim
+of many painful delusions. It was at this time that the soothing
+friendship of Dr. Gordon Hake, and his son Mr. George Hake, was of such
+inestimable service to Rossetti. Having appeared myself on the scene
+much later I never had the privilege of knowing either of these two
+gentlemen, for Mr. George Hake was already gone away to Cyprus and Dr.
+Hake had retired very much into the bosom of his own family where, as is
+rumoured, he has been engaged upon a literary work which will establish
+his fame. But I have often heard Mr. Theodore Watts speak with deep
+emotion and eloquent enthusiasm of the tender kindness and loyal zeal
+shown to Rossetti during this crisis by Mr. Bell Scott, and by Dr. Hake
+and his son. As to Mr. Theodore Watts, whose brotherly devotion to him,
+and beneficial influence over him from that time forward are so well
+known, this must be considered by those who witnessed it to be almost
+without precedent or parallel even in the beautiful story of literary
+friendships, and it does as much honour to the one as to the other. No
+light matter it must have been to lay aside one's own long-cherished
+life-work and literary ambitions to be Rossetti's closest friend and
+brother, at a moment like the present, when he imagined the world to be
+conspiring against him; but through these evil days, and long after them
+down to his death, the friend that clung closer than a brother was with
+him, as he himself said, to protect, to soothe, to comfort, to divert,
+to interest, and inspire him--asking, meantime, no better reward than
+the knowledge that a noble mind and nature was by such sacrifice lifted
+out of sorrow. Among the world's great men the greatest are sometimes
+those whose names are least on our lips, and this is because selfish
+aims have been so subordinate in their lives to the welfare of others
+as to leave no time for the personal achievements that win personal
+distinction; but when the world comes to the knowledge of the price
+that has been paid for the devotion that enables others to enjoy their
+renown, shall it not reward with a double meed of gratitude the fine
+spirits to whom ambition has been as nothing against fidelity of
+friendship? Among the latest words I heard from Rossetti was this:
+"Watts is a hero of friendship;" and indeed he has displayed his
+capacity for participation in the noblest part of comradeship, that
+part, namely, which is far above the mere traffic that too often goes by
+the name, and wherein self-love always counts upon being the gainer. If
+in the end it should appear that he has in his own person done less than
+might have been hoped for from one possessed of his splendid gifts,
+let it not be overlooked that he has influenced in a quite incalculable
+degree, and influenced for good, several of the foremost among those who
+in their turn have influenced the age. As Rossetti's faithful friend,
+and gifted medical adviser, Mr. John Marshall has often declared, there
+were periods when Rossetti's very life may be said to have hung upon Mr.
+Watts's power to cheer and soothe.
+
+Efforts were afoot about the year 1872 to induce Rossetti to visit
+Italy--a journey which, strangely enough, he had never made--but this
+he could not be prevailed upon to do. In the hope of diverting his mind
+from the unwholesome matters that too largely engaged it, his brother
+and friends, prominent among whom at this time were Mr. Bell Scott, Mr.
+Ford Madox Brown, Mr. W. Graham, and Dr. Gordon Hake, as well as his
+assistant and friend, Mr. H. T. Dunn, and Mr. George Hake, induced him
+to seek a change in Scotland, and there he speedily recovered tone.
+
+Immediately upon the publication of his first volume, and incited
+thereto by the early success of it, he had written the poem _Rose Mary_,
+as well as two lyrics published at the time in _The Fortnightly Review_;
+but he suffered so seriously from the subsequent assaults of criticism,
+that he seemed definitely to lay aside all hope of producing further
+poetry, and, indeed, to become possessed of the delusion that he had for
+ever lost all power of doing so. It is an interesting fact, well known
+in his own literary circle, that his taking up poetry afresh was
+the result of a fortuitous occurrence. After one of his most serious
+illnesses, and in the hope of drawing off his attention from himself,
+and from the gloomy forebodings which in an invalid's mind usually
+gather about his own too absorbing personality, a friend prevailed upon
+him, with infinite solicitation, to try his hand afresh at a sonnet. The
+outcome was an effort so feeble as to be all but unrecognisable as the
+work of the author of the sonnets of _The House of Life_, but with
+more shrewdness and friendliness (on this occasion) than frankness,
+the critic lavished measureless praise upon it, and urged the poet to
+renewed exertion. One by one, at longer or shorter intervals, sonnets
+were written, and this exercise did more towards his recovery than
+any other medicine, with the result besides that Rossetti eventually
+regained all his old dexterity and mastery of hand. The artifice had
+succeeded beyond every expectation formed of it, serving, indeed, the
+twofold end of improving the invalid's health by preventing his brooding
+over unhealthy matters, and increasing the number of his accomplished
+works. Encouraged by such results, the friend went on to induce Rossetti
+to write a ballad, and this purpose he finally achieved by challenging
+the poet's ability to compose in the simple, direct, and emphatic style,
+which is the style of the ballad proper, as distinguished from the
+elaborate, ornate, and condensed diction which he had hitherto worked
+in. Put upon his mettle, the outcome of this second artifice practised
+upon him, was that he wrote _The White Ship_, and afterwards _The King's
+Tragedy_.
+
+Thus was Rossetti already immersed in this revived occupation of poetic
+composition, and had recovered a healthy* tone of body, before he became
+conscious of what was being done with him. It is a further amusing fact
+that one day he requested to be shown the first sonnet which, in view of
+the praise lavished upon it by the friend on whose judgment he reposed,
+had encouraged him to renewed effort. The sonnet was bad: the critic
+knew it was bad, and had from the first hour of its production kept it
+carefully out of sight, and was now more than ever unwilling to show it.
+Eventually, however, by reason of ceaseless importunity, he returned it
+to its author, who, upon reading it, cried: "You fraud! you said this
+sonnet was good, and it's the worst I _ever_ wrote." "The worst ever
+written would perhaps be a truer criticism," was the reply, as the
+studio resounded with a hearty laugh, and the poem was committed to the
+flames. It would appear that to this occurrence we probably owe a large
+portion of the contents of the volume of 1881.
+
+As we say, _Rose Mary_ was the first to be written of the leading poems
+that found places in his final volume. This ballad (or ballad romance,
+for ballad it can hardly be called) is akin to _Sister Helen_ in
+_motif_. The superstition involved owes something in this case as in
+the other to the invention and poetic bias of the poet. It has, however,
+less of what has been called the Catholic element, and is more purely
+Pagan. It is, therefore, as entirely undisturbed by animosity against
+heresy, and is concerned only with an ultimate demoniacal justice
+visiting the wrongdoer. The main point of divergency lies in the
+circumstance that Rose Mary, unlike Helen, is the undesigning instrument
+of evil powers, and that her blind deed is the means by which her
+own and her lover's sin and his treachery become revealed. A further
+material point of divergency lies in the fact that unlike Helen, who
+loses her soul (as the price of revenge, directed against her betrayer),
+Rose Mary loses her life (as the price of vengeance directed against
+the evil race), whilst her soul gains rest. The superstition is that
+associated with the beryl stone, wherein the pure only may read the
+future, and from which sinful eyes must chase the spirits of grace and
+leave their realm to be usurped by the spirits of fire, who seal up the
+truth or reveal it by contraries. Rose Mary, who has sinned with her
+lover, is bidden to look in the beryl and learn where lurks the ambush
+that waits to take his life as he rides at break of day. Hiding, but
+remembering her transgression, she at first shrinks, but at length
+submits, and the blessed spirits by whom the stone has been tenanted
+give place to the fiery train. The stone is not sealed to her; and the
+long spell being ministered, she is satisfied. But she has read the
+stone by contraries, and her lover falls into the hand of his enemy.
+By his death is their secret sin made known. And then a newer shame is
+revealed, not to her eyes, but to her mother's: even the treachery of
+the murdered man. Ignorant of this to the end, Eose Mary seeks to work a
+twofold ransoming by banishing from the beryl the evil powers. With the
+sword of her father (by whom the accursed gift had been brought from
+Palestine), she cleaves the heart of the stone, and with the broken
+spell her own life breaks.
+
+It will readily be seen that the scheme of the ballad does not afford
+opportunity for a memorable incursion in the domain of character. Rose
+Mary herself as a creation is not comparable with Helen. But the ballad
+throughout is nevertheless a triumph of the higher imagination. Nowhere
+else (to take the lowest ground) has Rossetti displayed so great a gift
+of flashing images upon the mind at once by a single expression.
+
+     Closely locked, they clung without speech,
+     And the mirrored souls shook each to each,
+     As the cloud-moon and the water-moon
+     Shake face to face when the dim stars swoon
+     In stormy bowers of the night's mid-noon.
+
+     Deep the flood and heavy the shock
+     When sea meets sea in the riven rock:
+     But calm is the pulse that shakes the sea
+     To the prisoned tide of doom set free
+     In the breaking heart of Rose Mary.
+
+     She knew she had waded bosom-deep
+     Along death's bank in the sedge of sleep.
+     And now in Eose Mary's lifted eye
+     'Twas shadow alone that made reply
+     To the set face of the soul's dark shy.
+
+Nor has Rossetti anywhere displayed a more sustained picturesqueness.
+One episode stands forth vividly even among so many that are
+conspicuous. The mother has left her daughter in a swoon to seek help of
+the priest who has knelt unweariedly by the dead body of her daughter's
+lover, now lying on the ingle-bench in the hall. When the priest has
+gone and the castle folk have left her alone, the lady sinks to her
+knees beside the corpse. Great wrong the dead man has done to her and
+hers, and perhaps God has wrought this doom of his for a sign; but well
+she knows, or thinks she knows, that if life had remained with him his
+love would have been security for their honour. She stoops with a sob to
+kiss the dead, but before her lips touch the cold brow she sees a packet
+half-hidden in the dead man's breast. It is a folded paper about which
+the blood from a spear-thrust has grown clotted, and inside is a tress
+of golden hair. Some pledge of her child's she thinks it, and proceeds
+to undo the paper's folds, and then learns the treachery of the fallen
+knight and suffers a bitterer pang than came of the knowledge of her
+daughter's dishonour. It is a love-missive from the sister of his foe
+and murderer.
+
+     She rose upright with a long low moan,
+     And stared in the dead man's face new-known.
+     Had it lived indeed? she scarce could tell:
+     'Twas a cloud where fiends had come to dwell,--
+     A mask that hung on the gate of Hell.
+
+     She lifted the lock of gleaming hair,
+     And smote the lips and left it there.
+     "Here's gold that Hell shall take for thy toll!
+     Full well hath thy treason found its goal,
+     O thou dead body and damned soul!"
+
+Anything finer than this it would be hard to discover in English
+narrative poetry. Every word goes to build up the story: every line is
+quintessential: every flash of thought helps to heighten the emotion.
+Indeed the closing lines rise entirely above the limits of ballad poetry
+into the realm of dramatic diction. But perhaps the crowning glory and
+epic grandeur of the poem comes at the close. Awakened from her swoon,
+Rose Mary makes her way to the altar-cell and there she sees the
+beryl-stone lying between the wings of some sculptured beast. Within the
+fated glass she beholds Death, Sorrow, Sin and Shame marshalled past in
+the glare of a writhing flame, and thereupon follows a scene scarcely
+less terrible than Juliet's vision of the tomb of the Capulets. But she
+has been told within this hour that her weak hand shall send hence the
+evil race by whom the stone is possessed, and with a stern purpose she
+reaches her father's dinted sword. Then when the beryl is cleft to the
+core, and Rose Mary lies in her last gracious sleep--
+
+     With a cold brow like the snows ere May,
+     With a cold breast like the earth till spring,
+     With such a smile as the June days bring--
+     A clear voice pronounces her beatitude:
+
+     Already thy heart remembereth
+     No more his name thou sought'st in death:
+     For under all deeps, all heights above,--
+     So wide the gulf in the midst thereof,--
+     Are Hell of Treason and Heaven of Love.
+
+     Thee, true soul, shall thy truth prefer
+     To blessed Mary's rose-bower:
+     Warmed and lit is thy place afar
+     With guerdon-fires of the sweet love-star,
+     Where hearts of steadfast lovers are.
+
+The White Ship was written in 1880; _The King's Tragedy_ in the spring
+of 1881. These historical ballads we must briefly consider together. The
+memorable events of which Rossetti has made poetic record are, in _The
+White Ship_, those associated with the wreck of the ship in which the
+son and daughter of Henry I. of England set sail from France, and in
+_The King's Tragedy_, with the death of James the First of Scots. The
+story of the one is told by the sole survivor, Herold, the butcher of
+Rouen; and of the other by Catherine Douglas, the maid of honour who
+received popularly the name of Kate Barlass, in recognition of her
+heroic act when she barred the door with her arm against the murderers
+of the King. It is scarcely possible to conceive in either case a
+diction more perfectly adapted to the person by whom it is employed.
+If we compare the language of these ballads with that of the sonnets or
+other poems spoken in the author's own person, we find it is not first
+of all gorgeous, condensed, emphatic. It is direct, simple, pure and
+musical; heightened, it is true, by imagery acquired in its passage
+through the medium of the poet's mind, but in other respects essentially
+the language of the historical personages who are made to speak. The
+diction belongs in each case to the period of the ballad in which it
+is employed, and yet there is no wanton use of archaisms, or any
+disposition manifested to resort to meretricious artifices by which to
+impart an appearance of probability to the story other than that which
+comes legitimately of sheer narrative excellence. The characterisation
+is that of history with the features softened that constituted the prose
+of real life, and with the salient, moral, and intellectual lineaments
+brought into relief. Herein the ballad may do that final justice which
+history itself withholds. Thus the King Henry of _The White Ship_ is
+governed by lust of dominion more than by parental affection; and the
+Prince, his son, is a lawless, shameless youth; intolerant, tyrannical,
+luxurious, voluptuous, yet capable of self-sacrifice even amidst peril
+of death.
+
+     When he should be King, he oft would vow,
+     He 'd yoke the peasant to his own plough.
+     O'er him the ships score their furrows now.
+     God only knows where his soul did wake,
+     But I saw him die for his sister's sake.
+
+The King James of _The King's Tragedy_ is of a righteous and fearless
+nature, strong yet sensitive, unbending before the pride and hate of
+powerful men, resolute, and ready even where fate itself declares that
+death lurks where his road must lie; his beautiful Queen Jane is sweet,
+tender, loving, devoted--meet spouse for a poet and king. The incidents
+too are those of history: the choice and final collocation of them, and
+the closing scene in which the queen mourns her husband, being the sum
+of the author's contribution. And those incidents are in the highest
+degree varied and picturesque. The author has not achieved a more vivid
+pictorial presentment than is displayed in these latest ballads from his
+pen. It would be hard to find in his earlier work anything bearing more
+clearly the stamp of reality than the descriptions of the wreck in _The
+White Ship_, of the two drowning men together on the mainyard, of the
+morning dawning over the dim sea-sky--
+
+     At last the morning rose on the sea
+     Like an angel's wing that beat towards me--
+
+and of the little golden-haired boy in black whose foot patters down
+the court of the king. Certainly Rossetti has never attained a higher
+pictorial level than he reaches in the descriptions of the summoned
+Parliament in _The King's Tragedy_, of the journey to the Charterhouse
+of Perth, of the woman on the rock of the black beach of the Scottish
+sea, of the king singing to the queen the song he made while immured by
+Bolingbroke at Windsor, of the knock of the woman at the outer gate,
+of her voice at night beneath the window, of the death in _The Pit
+of Fortune's Wheel_. But all lesser excellencies must make way in our
+regard before a distinguishing spiritualising element which exists
+in these ballads only, or mainly amongst the author's works. Natural
+portents are here first employed as factors of poetic creation.
+Presentiment, foreboding, omen become the essential tissue of works
+that are lifted by them into the higher realm of imagination. These
+supernatural constituents penetrate and pervade _The White Ship_; and
+_The King's Tragedy_ is saturated in the spirit of them. We do not speak
+of the incidents associated with the wraith that haunts the isles, but
+of the less palpable touches which convey the scarce explicable
+sense of a change of voice when the king sings of the pit that is under
+fortune's wheel:
+
+     And under the wheel, beheld I there
+        An ugly Pit as deep as hell,
+     That to behold I quaked for fear:
+        And this I heard, that who therein fell
+     Came no more up, tidings to tell:
+     Whereat, astound of the fearful sight,
+     I wot not what to do for fright.
+               (The King's Quair.)
+
+It is the shadow of the supernatural that hangs over the king, and very
+soon it must enshroud him. One of the most subtle and impressive of the
+natural portents is that which presents itself to the eyes of Catherine
+when the leaguers have first left the chamber, and the moon goes out and
+leaves black the royal armorial shield on the painted window-pane:
+
+     And the rain had ceased, and the moonbeams lit
+        The window high in the wall,--
+     Bright beams that on the plank that I knew
+        Through the painted pane did fall
+     And gleamed with the splendour of Scotland's crown
+        And shield armorial.
+
+     But then a great wind swept up the skies,
+        And the climbing moon fell back;
+     And the royal blazon fled from the floor,
+        And nought remained on its track;
+     And high in the darkened window-pane
+        The shield and the crown were black.
+
+It has been said that _Sister Helen_ strikes the keynote of Rossetti's
+creative gift; it ought to be added that _The King's Tragedy_ touches
+his highest reach of imagination.
+
+Having in the early part of 1881 brought together a sufficient quantity
+of fresh poetry to fill a volume, Rossetti began negotiations for
+publishing it. Anticipatory announcements were at that time constantly
+appearing in many quarters, not rarely accompanied by an outspoken
+disbelief in the poet's ability to achieve a second success equal to his
+first. In this way it often happens to an author, that, having achieved
+a single conspicuous triumph, the public mind, which has spontaneously
+offered him the tribute of a generous recognition, forthwith gravitates
+towards a disposition to become silently but unmistakeably sceptical
+of his power to repeat it. Subsequent effort in such a case is rarely
+regarded with that confidence which might be looked for as the reward
+of achievement, and which goes far to prepare the mind for the ready
+acceptance of any genuine triumph. Indeed, a jealous attitude is often
+unconsciously adopted, involving a demand for special qualities, for
+which, perchance, the peculiar character of the past success has created
+an appetite, or obedience to certain arbitrary tests, which, though
+passively present in the recognised work, have grown mainly out of
+critical analysis of it, and are neither radical nor essential. Where,
+moreover, such conspicuous success has been followed by an interval
+of years distinguished by no signal effort, the sceptical bias of the
+public mind sometimes complacently settles into a conviction (grateful
+alike to its pride and envy, whilst consciously hurtful to its more
+generous impulses), that the man who made it lived once indeed upon the
+mountains, but has at length come down to dwell finally upon the plain.
+Literary biography furnishes abundant examples of this imperfection
+of character, a foible, indeed, which in its multiform manifestations,
+probably goes as far as anything else to interfere with the formation of
+a just and final judgment of an author's merit within his own lifetime.
+When it goes the length of affirming that even a great writer's creative
+activity usually finds not merely central realisation, but absolute
+exhaustion within the limits of some single work, to reason against it
+is futile, and length of time affords it the only satisfying refutation.
+One would think that it could scarcely require to be urged that creative
+impulse, once existent within a mind, can never wholly depart from it,
+but must remain to the end, dependent, perhaps, for its expression in
+some measure on external promptings, variable with the variations of
+physical environments, but always gathering innate strength for the
+hour (silent perchance, or audible only within other spheres), when the
+inventive faculty shall be harmonised, animated, and lubricated to
+its utmost height. Nevertheless, Coleridge encountered the implied
+doubtfulness of his contemporaries, that the gift remained with him
+to carry to its completion the execution of that most subtle mid-day
+witchery, which, as begun in _Christabel_, is probably the most
+difficult and elusive thing ever attempted in the field of romance.
+Goethe, too, found himself face to face with outspoken distrust of his
+continuation of _Faust_; and even Cervantes had perforce to challenge
+the popular judgment which long refused to allow that the second part
+of _Don Quixote_, with all its added significance, was adequate to
+his original simple conception. Indeed that author must be considered
+fortunate who effects a reversal of the public judgment against
+the completion of a fragment, and the repetition of a complete and
+conspicuous success.
+
+When Rossetti published his first volume of poems in 1870, he left only
+his _House of Life_ incomplete; but amongst the readers who then offered
+spontaneous tribute to that series of sonnets, and still treasured it
+as a work of all but faultless symmetry, built up by aid of a blended
+inspiration caught equally from Shakspeare and from Dante, with a
+superadded psychical quality peculiar to its author, there were many,
+even amongst the friendliest in sympathy, who heard of the completed
+sequence with a sense of doubt. Such is the silent and unreasoning and
+all but irrevocable edict of all popular criticism against continuations
+of works which have in fragmentary form once made conquest of the
+popular imagination. Moreover, Rossetti's first volume achieved a
+success so signal and unexpected as to subject this second and maturer
+book to the preliminary ordeal of such a questioning attitude of mind
+as we speak of, as the unfailing and ungracious reward of a conspicuous
+triumph. In the interval of eleven years, Rossetti had essayed no
+notable achievement, and his name had been found attached only to such
+fugitive efforts as may have lived from time to time a brief life in the
+pages of the _Athenaeum_ and _Fortnightly_. Of the works in question
+two only come now within our province to mention. The first and most
+memorable was the poem _Cloud Confines_. Inadequate as the critical
+attention necessarily was which this remarkable lyric obtained,
+indications were not wanting that it had laid unconquerable siege to the
+sympathies of that section of the public in whose enthusiasm the life of
+every creative work is seen chiefly to abide. There was in it a lyrical
+sweetness scarcely ever previously compassed by its author, a cadent
+undertoned symphony that first gave testimony that the poet held the
+power of conveying by words a sensible eflfect of great music, even
+as former works of his had given testimony to his power of conveying a
+sensible eflfect by great painting. But to these metrical excellencies
+was added an element new to Rossetti's poetry, or seen here for the
+first time conspicuously. Insight and imagination of a high order,
+together with a poetic instinct whose promptings were sure, had already
+found expression in more than one creation moulded into an innate
+chasteness of perfected parts and wedded to nature with an unerring
+fidelity. But the range of nature was circumscribed, save only in the
+one exception of a work throbbing with the sufferings and sorrows of
+a shadowed side of modern life. To this lyric, however, there came
+as basis a fundamental conception that made aim to grapple with the
+pro-foundest problems compassed by the mysteries of life and death, and
+a temper to yield only where human perception fails. Abstract indeed
+in theme the lyric is, but few are the products of thought out of which
+imagination has delved a more concrete and varied picturesqueness:
+
+     What of the heart of hate
+        That beats in thy breast, O Time?--
+        Bed strife from the furthest prime,
+     And anguish of fierce debate; that shatters her slain,
+        And peace that grinds them as grain,
+        And eyes fixed ever in vain
+     On the pitiless eyes of Fate.
+
+The second of the fugitive efforts alluded to was a prose work entitled
+_Hand and Soul_. More poem than story, this beautiful idyl may be
+briefly described as mainly illustrative of the struggles of the
+transition period through which, as through a slough, all true artists
+must pass who have been led to reflect deeply upon the aims and ends of
+their calling before they attain that goal of settled purpose in which
+they see it to be best to work from their own heart simply, without
+regard for the spectres that would draw them apart into quagmires of
+moral aspiration. These two works and an occasional sonnet, such as that
+on the greatly gifted and untimely lost Oliver Madox Brown, made the sum
+of all {*} that was done, in the interval of eleven years between the
+dates of the first volume and of that which was now to be published, to
+keep before the public a name which rose at once into distinction, and
+had since, without feverish periodical bolstering, grown not less
+but more in the ardent upholding of sincere men who, in number and
+influence, comprised a following as considerable perhaps as owned
+allegiance to any contemporary.
+
+     * A ballad appeared in The Dark Blue.
+
+Having brought these biographical and critical notes to the point at
+which they overlap the personal recollections that form the body of this
+volume, it only remains to say that during the years in which the poems
+just reviewed were being written Rossetti was living at his house in
+Chelsea a life of unbroken retirement. At this time, however (1877-81),
+his seclusion was not so complete as it had been when he used to see
+scarcely any one but Mr. Watts and his own family, with an occasional
+visit from Lord and Lady Mount Temple, Mrs. Sumner, etc. Once weekly he
+was now visited by his brother William, twice weekly by his attached
+and gifted friend Frederick J. Shields, occasionally by his old friends
+William Bell Scott and Ford Madox Brown. For the rest, he rarely if
+ever left the precincts of his home. It was a placid and undisturbed
+existence such as he loved. Health too (except for one serious attack
+in 1877), was good with him, and his energies were, as we have seen, at
+their best.
+
+His personal amiability was, perhaps, never more conspicuous than
+in these tranquil years; yet this was the very time when paragraphs
+injurious to his character found their way into certain journals. Among
+the numerous stories illustrative of his alleged barbarity of manners
+was the one which has often been repeated both in conversation and in
+print to the effect that H.E.H. the Princess Louise was rudely repulsed
+from his door. Rossetti was certainly not easy to approach, but the
+geniality of his personal bearing towards those who had commands upon
+his esteem was always unfailing, and knowledge of this fact must
+have been enough to give the lie to the injurious calumny just named.
+Nevertheless, Rossetti, who was deeply moved by the imputation, thought
+it necessary to contradict it emphatically, and as the letter in which
+he did this is a thoroughly outspoken and manly one, and touches an
+important point in his character, I reprint it in this place:
+
+     16 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, S.W., December 28, 1878.
+
+     My attention has been directed to the following paragraph
+     which has appeared in the newspapers:--"A very disagreeable
+     story is told about a neighbour of Mr. Whistler's, whose
+     works are not exhibited to the vulgar herd; the Princess
+     Louise in her zeal, therefore, graciously sought them at the
+     artist's studio, but was rebuffed by a 'Not at home' and an
+     intimation that he was not at the beck and call of
+     princesses. I trust it is not true," continues the writer of
+     the paragraph, "that so medievally minded a gentleman is
+     really a stranger to that generous loyalty to rank and sex,
+     that dignified obedience," etc.
+
+     The story is certainly "disagreeable" enough; but if I am
+     pointed at as the "near neighbour of Mr. Whistler's" who
+     rebuffed, in this rude fashion, the Princess Louise, I can
+     only say that it is a _canard_ devoid of the smallest
+     nucleus of truth. Her Royal Highness has never called upon
+     me; and I know of only two occasions when she has expressed
+     a wish to do so. Some years ago Mr. Theodore Martin spoke to
+     me upon the subject; but I was at that time engaged upon an
+     important work, and the delays thence arising caused the
+     matter to slip through. And I heard no more upon the subject
+     till last summer, when Mr. Theodore Watts told me that the
+     Princess, in conversation, had mentioned my name to him, and
+     that he had then assured her that I should "feel honoured
+     and charmed to see her," and suggested her making an
+     appointment. Her Royal Highness knew that Mr. Watts, as one
+     of my most intimate friends, would not have thus expressed
+     himself without feeling fully warranted in so doing; and had
+     she called she would not, I trust, have found me wanting in
+     that "generous loyalty" which is due not more to her exalted
+     position than to her well-known charm of character and
+     artistic gifts. It is true enough that I do not run after
+     great people on account of their mere social position, but I
+     am, I hope, never rude to them; and the man who could rebuff
+     the Princess Louise must be a curmudgeon indeed.
+
+     D. G. Rossetti.
+
+At the very juncture in question Lord Lome was suddenly and unexpectedly
+appointed Governor-General of Canada, and, leaving England, Her Royal
+Highness did not return until Rossetti's health had somewhat suddenly
+broken down, and it was impossible for him to see any but his most
+intimate friends.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+My intercourse with Rossetti, epistolary and personal, extended over a
+period of between three and four years. During the first two of these
+years I was, as this volume must show, his constant correspondent,
+during the third year his attached friend, and during the portion of
+the fourth year of our acquaintance terminating with his life, his daily
+companion and housemate. It is a part of my purpose to help towards the
+elucidation of Rossetti's personal character by a simple, and I
+trust, unaffected statement of my relations to him, and so I begin by
+explaining that my knowledge of the man was the sequel to my admiration
+of the poet. Not accident (the agency that usually operates in such
+cases), but his genius and my love of it, began the friendship between
+us. Of Rossetti's pictorial art I knew little, until very recent years,
+beyond what could be gathered from a few illustrations to books. My
+acquaintance with his poetry must have been made at the time of the
+publication of the first volume in 1870, but as I did not then possess a
+copy of the book, and do not remember to have seen one, my knowledge of
+the work must have been merely such as could be gleaned from the reading
+of reviews. The unlucky controversy, that subsequently arose out of it,
+directed afresh my attention, in common with that of others, to Rossetti
+and his school of poetry, with the result of impressing my mind with
+qualities of the work that were certainly quite outside the issues
+involved in the discussion. Some two or three years after that
+acrimonious controversy had subsided, an accident, sufficiently curious
+to warrant my describing it, produced the effect of converting me from a
+temperate believer in the charm of music and colour in Rossetti's lyric
+verse, to an ardent admirer of his imaginative genius as displayed in
+the higher walks of his art.
+
+I had set out with a knapsack to make one of my many periodical walking
+tours of the beautiful lake country of Westmoreland and Cumberland.
+Beginning the journey at Bowness--as tourists, if they will accept the
+advice of one who knows perhaps the whole of the country, ought always
+to do--I walked through Dungeon Ghyll, climbed the Stake Pass, descended
+into Borrowdale, and traced the course of the winding Derwent to that
+point at which it meets the estuary of the lake, and where stands the
+Derwentwater Hotel. A rain and thunder storm was gathering over the
+Black Sail and Great Gable as I reached the summit of the Pass, and
+travelling slowly northwards it had overtaken me. Before I reached the
+hotel, my resting-place for the night, I was certainly as thoroughly
+saturated as any one in reasonable moments could wish to be. I remember
+that as I passed into the shelter of the porch an elderly gentleman, who
+was standing there, remarked upon the severity of the storm, inquired
+what distance I had travelled, and expressed amazement that on such a
+day, when mists were floating, any one could have ventured to cover so
+much dangerous mountain-country,--which he estimated as nearly thirty
+miles in extent. Beyond observing that my interlocutor was friendly
+in manner and knew the country intimately, I do not remember to have
+reflected either then or afterwards upon his personality except
+perhaps that he might have answered to Wordsworth's scarcely definite
+description of his illustrious friend as "a noticeable man," with
+the further parallel, I think, of possessing "large grey eyes." After
+attending to the obvious necessity of dry garments in exchange for wet
+ones, and otherwise comforting myself after a fatiguing day's march, I
+descended to the drawing-room of the hotel, where a company of persons
+were trying, with that too formal cordiality peculiar to English people,
+who are accidentally thrown together in the course of a holiday, to get
+rid of the depression which results upon dishearteningly unpropitious
+weather. Music, as usual, was the gracious angel employed to banish the
+fiend of ennui, but among those who took no part either in the singing
+or playing, other than that of an enforced auditor, was the elderly
+gentleman, my quondam acquaintance of the porch, who stood apart in an
+alcove looking through a window. I stepped up to him and renewed our
+talk. The storm had rather increased than abated since my arrival; the
+thunder which before had rumbled over the distant Langdale Pikes was
+breaking in sharp peals over our heads, and flashes of sheeted lightning
+lit up the gathering darkness that lay between us and Castle Crag.
+A playful allusion to "poor Tom" and to King Lear's undisputed sole
+enjoyment of such a scene (except as viewed from the ambush of a
+comfortable hotel) led to the discovery, very welcome to both at a
+moment when we were at bay for an evening's occupation, that besides
+knowledge and love of the country round about us, we had in common
+some knowledge and much love of the far wider realm of books. Thereupon
+ensued a talk chiefly on authors and their works which lasted until long
+after the music had ceased, until the elemental as well as instrumental
+storm had passed, and the guests had slipped away one after one, and the
+last remaining servant of the house had, by the introduction of a
+couple of candles, given us a palpable hint that in the opinion of that
+guardian of a country inn the hour was come and gone when well-regulated
+persons should betake themselves to bed. To my delight my friend
+knew nearly every prominent living author, could give me personal
+descriptions of them, as well as scholarly and well-digested criticisms
+of their works. He was certainly no ordinary man, but who he was I have
+never learned with certainty, though I cherish the agreeable impression
+that I could give a shrewd guess. At one moment the talk turned on
+_Festus_, and then I heard the most lucid and philosophical account of
+that work I have ever listened to or read. I was told that the author
+of _Festus_ had never (in all the years that had elapsed since its
+publication, when he was in his earliest manhood, though now he is
+grown elderly) ceased to emend it, notwithstanding the protestations
+of critics; and that an improved and enlarged edition of the poem might
+probably appear after his death. Struck with the especial knowledge
+displayed of the author in question, I asked if he happened to be
+a friend. Then, with a scarcely perceptible smile playing about the
+corners of the mouth (a circumstance without significance for me at the
+time and only remembered afterwards), my new acquaintance answered:
+"He is my oldest and dearest friend." Next morning I saw my night-long
+conversationalist in company with a clergyman get on to the Buttermere
+coach and wave his hand to me as they vanished under the trees that
+overhung the Buttermere road, but in answer to many inquiries the utmost
+I could learn of my interesting acquaintance was that he was somehow
+understood to be a great author, and a friend of Charles Kingsley, who,
+I think they said, was or had been with him there or elsewhere that
+year. Whether besides being the "oldest and dearest friend" of the
+author of _Festus_, my delightful companion was Philip James Bailey
+himself I have never learned to this day, and can only cherish a
+pleasant trust; but what remains as really important in this connexion
+is that whosoever he was he originated my first real love of Rossetti's
+poetry, and gave me my first realisable idea of the man. Taking up from
+the table some popular _Garland, Casket, Treasury_, or other anthology
+of English poetry, he pointed out a sonnet entitled _Lost Days_ (to
+which, indeed, a friend at home had directed my attention), and dwelt
+upon its marvellous strength of spiritual insight, and power of symbolic
+phrase. Of course the sonnet was Rossetti's. It is impossible for me
+to describe the effect produced upon me by sonnet and exposition. I
+resolved not to live many days longer without acquiring a knowledge
+of the body of Rossetti's work. Perceiving that the gentleman knew
+something of the poet, I put questions to him which elicited the
+fact that he had met him many years earlier at, I think he said, Mrs.
+Gaskell's, when Rossetti was a rather young man, known only as a painter
+and the leader of an eccentric school in art. He described him as a
+little dark man, with fine eyes under a broad brow, with a deep voice,
+and Bohemian habits--"a little Italian, in short." [Little, by the way,
+Rossetti could not properly be said to be, but opinions as to physical
+proportions being so liable to vary, I may at once mention that he was
+exactly five feet eight inches in height, and except in early manhood,
+when he was somewhat attenuated, well built in proportion.] He further
+described Rossetti's manners as those of a man in deliberate revolt
+against society; delighting in an opportunity to startle well-ordered
+persons out of their propriety, and to silence by sheer vehemence of
+denunciation the seemly protests of very good and very gentle folk. The
+portraiture seems to me now to bear the impress of truth, unlike as it
+is in some particulars to the man as I knew him. When once, however,
+years after the event recorded, I bantered Rossetti on the amiable
+picture of him I had received from a stranger, he admitted that it
+was in the main true to his character early in life, and recounted an
+instance in which, from sheer perversity, or at best for amusement, he
+had made the late Dean Stanley aghast with horror at the spectacle of a
+young man, born in a Christian country, and in the nineteenth century,
+defending (in sport) the vices of Neronian Home.
+
+The outcome of this first serious and sufficient introduction to
+Rossetti's poetry was that I forthwith devoted time to reading and
+meditating upon it. Ultimately I lectured twice or thrice on the subject
+in Liverpool, first at the Royal Institution, and afterwards at the
+Free Library. The text of that lecture I still preserve, and as in all
+probability it did more than anything else to originate the friendship I
+afterwards enjoyed with the poet, I shall try to convey very briefly an
+idea of its purpose.
+
+Against both friendly and unfriendly critics of Rossetti I held that to
+place him among the "aesthetic" poets was an error of classification.
+It seemed to me that, unlike the poets properly so described, he had
+nothing in common with the Caliban of Mr. Browning, who worked "for
+work's sole sake;" and, unlike them yet further, the topmost thing
+in him was indeed love of beauty, but the deepest thing was love of
+uncomely right. The fusion of these elements in Rossetti softened the
+mythological Italian Catholicism that I recognised as a leading thing in
+him, and subjugated his sensuous passion. I thought it wrong to say that
+Rossetti had part or lot with those false artists, or no artists, who
+assert, without fear or shame, that the manner of doing a thing should
+be abrogated or superseded by the moral purpose of its being done. On
+the other hand, Rossetti appeared to make no conscious compromise with
+the Puritan principle of doing good; and to demand first of his work the
+lesson or message it had for us were wilfully to miss of pleasure while
+we vainly strove for profit. He was too true an artist to follow art
+into its byeways of moral significance, and thereby cripple its broader
+arms; but at the same time all this absorption of the artist in his art
+seemed to me to live and work together with the personal instincts of
+the man. An artist's nature cannot escape the colouring it gets from the
+human side of his nature, because it is of the essence of art to appeal
+to its own highest faculties largely through the channel of moral
+instincts: that music is exquisite and colour splendid, first, because
+they have an indescribable significance, and next because they respond
+to mere sense. But it appeared to me to be one thing to work for "work's
+sole sake," with an overruling moral instinct that gravitates, as Mr.
+Arnold would say, towards conduct, and quite another thing to absorb art
+in moral purposes. I thought that Rossetti's poetry showed how possible
+it is, without making conscious compromise with that puritan principle
+of doing good of which Keats at one period became enamoured, to
+be unconsciously making for moral ends. There was for me a passive
+puritanism in _Jenny_ which lived and worked together with the poet's
+purely artistic passion for doing his work supremely well. Every thought
+in _Dante at Verona_ and _The Last Confession_ seemed mixed with and
+coloured by a personal moral instinct that was safe and right.
+
+This was perhaps the only noticeable feature of my lecture, and knowing
+Rossetti's nature, as since the lecture I have learned to know it,
+I feel no great surprise that such pleading for the moral impulses
+animating his work should have been of all things the most likely to
+engage his affections. Just as Coleridge always resented the imputation
+that he had ever been concerned with Wordsworth and Southey in the
+establishment of a school of poetry, and contended that, in common with
+his colleagues, he had been inspired by no desire save that of imitating
+the best examples of Greece and Home, so Rossetti (at least throughout
+the period of my acquaintance with him) invariably shrank from
+classification with the poetry of aestheticism, and aspired to the fame
+of a poet who had been prompted primarily by the highest of spiritual
+emotions, and to whom the sensations of the body were as naught, unless
+they were sanctified by the concurrence of the soul. My lecture was
+printed, but quite a year elapsed after its preparation before
+it occurred to me that Rossetti himself might derive a moment's
+gratification from knowledge of the fact that he had one ardent upholder
+and sincere well-wisher hitherto unknown to him. At length I sent him a
+copy of the magazine containing my lecture on his poetry. A post or two
+later brought me the following reply:
+
+     Dear Mr. Caine,--
+
+     I am much struck by the generous enthusiasm displayed in
+     your Lecture, and by the ability with which it is written.
+     Your estimate of the impulses influencing my poetry is such
+     as I should wish it to suggest, and this suggestion, I
+     believe, it will have always for a true-hearted nature. You
+     say that you are grateful to me: my response is, that I am
+     grateful to you: for you have spoken up heartily and
+     unfalteringly for the work you love.
+
+     I daresay you sometimes come to London. I should be very
+     glad to know you, and would ask you, if you thought of
+     calling, to give me a day's notice when to expect you, as I
+     am not always able to see visitors without appointment. The
+     afternoon, about 5, might suit me, or else the evening about
+     9.30. With all best wishes, yours sincerely,
+
+     D. G. Rossetti.
+
+This was the first of nearly two hundred letters in all received from
+Rossetti in the course of our acquaintance. A day or two later the
+following supplementary note reached me:
+
+     I return your article. In reading it, I feel it a
+     distinction that my minute plot in the poetic field should
+     have attracted the gaze of one who is able to traverse its
+     widest ranges with so much command. I shall be much pleased
+     if the plan of calling on me is carried out soon--at any
+     rate I trust it will be so eventually.... Have you got, or
+     do you know, my book of translations called _Dante and his
+     Circle?_ If not, I 'll send you one....
+
+     I have been reading again your article on _The Supernatural
+     in Poetry_. It is truly admirable--such work must soon make
+     you a place. The dramatic paper I thought suffered from some
+     immaturity.
+
+It is hardly necessary to say that I was equally delighted with the
+warmth of the reception accorded to my essay, and with the revelation
+the letters appeared to contain of a sincere and unselfish nature. My
+purpose, however, which was a modest one, had been served, and I made
+no further attempt to continue the correspondence, least of all did I
+expect or desire to originate anything of the nature of a friendship. In
+my reply to his note, however, I had asked him to accept the dedication
+of a little work of mine, and when, with abundant courtesy, he had
+declined to do so on very sufficient grounds, I felt satisfied that
+matters between us should rest where they were. It is a pleasing
+recollection, nevertheless, that Rossetti himself had taken a different
+view of the relation that had grown up between us, and by many generous
+appeals induced me to put by all further thoughts of abandoning the
+correspondence out of regard for him. There had ensued an interval in
+which I did not write to him, whereupon he addressed to me a hurried
+note, saying:
+
+     Let me have a line from you. I am haunted by the idea, that
+     in declining the dedication, I may have hurt you. I assure
+     you I should be proud to be associated in any way with your
+     work, but gave you my very reasons.
+
+     I shall be pleased if you do not think them sufficient, and
+     still carry out your original intention.... At least write
+     to me.
+
+I replied to this letter (containing, as it did, the expression of so
+much more than the necessary solicitude), by saying that I too had been
+haunted, but it had been by the fear that I had been asking too much
+of his attention. As to the dedication, so far from feeling hurt, by
+Rossetti's declining it, I had grown to see that such was the only
+course that remained to him to take. The terms in which he had replied
+to my offer of it (so far from being of a kind to annoy or hurt me),
+had, to my thinking, been only generous, sympathetic, and beautiful.
+Again he wrote:
+
+     My dear Caine,--
+
+     Let me assure you at once that correspondence with yourself
+     is one of my best pleasures, and that you cannot write too
+     much or too often for _me_; though after what you have told
+     me as to the apportioning of your time, I should be
+     unwilling to encroach unduly upon it. Neither should I on my
+     side prove very tardy in reply, as you are one to whom I
+     find there _is_ something to say when I sit down with a pen
+     and paper. I have a good deal of enforced evening leisure,
+     as it is seldom I can paint or draw by gaslight. It would
+     not be right in me to refrain from saying that to meet with
+     one so "leal and true" to myself as you are has been a
+     consolation amid much discouragement.... I perceive you have
+     had a complete poetic career which you have left behind to
+     strike out into wider waters.... The passage on Night, which
+     you say was written under the planet Shelley, seems to me
+     (and to my brother, to whom I read it) to savour more of the
+     "mortal moon"--that is, of a weird and sombre
+     Elizabethanism, of which Beddoes may be considered the
+     modern representative. But we both think it has an
+     unmistakeable force and value; and if you can write better
+     poetry than this, let your angel say unto you, _Write_.
+
+I take it that it would be wholly unwise of me in selecting excerpts
+from Rossetti's letters entirely to withhold the passages that concern
+exclusively (so far as their substance goes) my own early doings or
+try-ings-to-do; for it ought to be a part of my purpose to lay bare the
+beginnings of that friendship by virtue of which such letters exist.
+I can only ask the readers of these pages to accept my assurance, that
+whatever the number and extent of the passages which I publish that are
+necessarily in themselves of more interest to myself personally than to
+the public generally, they are altogether disproportionate to the number
+and extent of those I withhold. I cannot, however, resist the conclusion
+that such picture as they afford of a man beyond the period of middle
+life capable of bending to a new and young friend, and of thinking with
+and for him, is not without an exceptional literary interest as being so
+contrary to every-day experience. Hence, I am not without hope that the
+occasional references to myself which in the course of these extracts I
+shall feel it necessary to introduce, may be understood to be employed
+by me as much for their illustrative value (being indicative of
+Rossetti's character), as for any purpose less purely impersonal.
+
+The passage of verse referred to was copied out for Rossetti in reply to
+an inquiry as to whether I had written poetry. Prompted no doubt by the
+encouragement derived in this instance, I submitted from time to time
+other verses to Rossetti, as subsequent letters show, but it says
+something for the value of his praise that whatever the measure of
+it when his sympathies were fairly aroused, and whatever his natural
+tendency to look for the characteristic merits rather than defects of
+compositions referred to his judgment, his candour was always prominent
+among his good qualities when censure alone required to be forthcoming.
+Among many frank utterances of an opinion early formed, that whatever
+my potentialities as a writer of prose, I had but small vocation as a
+writer of poetry, I preserve one such utterance, which will, I trust, be
+found not less interesting to other readers from affording a glimpse of
+the writer's attitude towards the old controversy touching the several
+and distinguishing elements that contribute to make good prose on the
+one hand and good verse on the other.
+
+On one occasion he had sent me his fine sonnet on Keats, then just
+written, and, in acknowledging the receipt of it with many expressions
+of admiration, I remarked that for some days I had been struggling
+desperately, in all senses, to incubate a sonnet on the same somewhat
+hackneyed subject. I had not written a line or put pen to paper for the
+purpose, but I could tell him, in general terms, what my unaccomplished
+marvel of sonnet-craft was to be about.
+
+Rossetti replied saying that the scheme for a sonnet was "extremely
+beautiful," and urging me to "do it at once." Alas for my intrepidity,
+"do it" I did, with the result of awakening my correspondent to the
+certainty that, whatever embowerings I had in my mind, that shy bird the
+sonnet would seek in vain for a nest to hide in there. It asked so much
+special courage to send a first attempt at sonneteering to the greatest
+living master of the sonnet that moral daring alone ought to have got me
+off lightly, but here is Rossetti's reply, valuable now, as well for the
+view it affords of the poet's attitude towards the sonnet as a medium of
+expression, as for other reasons already assigned. The opening passage
+alludes to a lyric of humble life.
+
+You may be sure I do not mean essential discouragement when I say that,
+full as _Nell_ is of reality and pathos, your swing of arm seems to me
+firmer and freer in prose than in verse. I do think I see your field to
+lie chiefly in the achievements of fervid and impassioned prose.... I am
+sure that, when sending me your first sonnet, you wished me to say quite
+frankly what I think of it. Well, I do not think it shows a special
+vocation for this condensed and emphatic form. The prose version you
+sent me seems to say much more distinctly what this says with some
+want of force. The octave does not seem to me very clearly put, and the
+sestet does not emphasize in a sufficiently striking way the idea which
+the prose sketch conveyed to me,--that of Keats's special privilege in
+early death: viz., the lovely monumentalized image he bequeathed to us
+of the young poet. Also I must say that more special originality and
+even _newness_ (though this might be called a vulgarizing word), of
+thought and picture in individual lines--more of this than I find
+here--seems to me the very first qualification of a sonnet--otherwise it
+puts forward no right to be so short, but might seem a severed passage
+from a longer poem depending on development. I would almost counsel you
+to try the same theme again--or else some other theme in sonnet-form.
+I thought the passage on Night you sent showed an aptitude for choice
+imagery. I should much like to see something which you view as your best
+poetic effort hitherto. After all, there is no need that every gifted
+writer should take the path of poetry--still less of sonneteering. I am
+confident in your preference for frankness on my part.
+
+I tried the theme again before I abandoned it, and was so fortunate as
+to get him to admit a degree of improvement such as led to his
+desiring to recall his conjectural judgment on my possibilities as a
+sonnet-writer, but as the letters in which he characterises the
+advance are neither so terse in criticism, nor so interesting from the
+exposition of principles, as the one quoted, I pass them by. With
+more confidence in my ultimate comparative success than I had ever
+entertained, Rossetti was only anxious that I should engage in that work
+to which I. could address myself with a sense of command; and I think it
+will be agreed that, where temperate confidence in what the future may
+legitimately hold for one is united to earnest and rightly directed
+endeavour in the present, it is often a good thing for the man who
+stands on the threshold of life (to whom, nevertheless, the path passed
+seems ever to stretch out of sight backwards) to be told the extent
+to which, little enough at the most, his clasp (to use a phrase of Mr.
+Browning) may be equal to his grasp.
+
+My residing, as I did, at a distance from London, was at once the
+difficulty which for a time prevented our coming together and the
+necessity for correspondence by virtue of which these letters exist.
+As I failed, however, from hampering circumstance, to meet at once with
+himself, Rossetti invariably displayed a good deal of friendly anxiety
+to bring me into contact with his friends as frequently as occasion
+rendered it feasible to do so. In this way I met with Mr. Madox
+Brown, who was at the moment engaged on his admirable frescoes in the
+Manchester Town Hall, and in this way also I met with other friends
+of his resident in my neighbourhood. When I came to know him more
+intimately I perceived that besides the kindliness of intention which
+had prompted him to bring me into what he believed to be agreeable
+associations, he had adopted this course from the other motive of
+desiring to be reassured as to the comparative harmlessness of my
+personality, for he usually followed the introduction to a friend by a
+private letter of thanks for the reception accorded me, and a number of
+dexterously manipulated allusions, which always, I found, produced the
+desired result of eliciting the required information (to be gleaned
+only from personal intercourse) as to my manner and habits. Later in our
+acquaintance, I found that he, like all meditative men, had the greatest
+conceivable dread of being taken unawares, and that there was no safer
+way for any fresh acquaintance to insure his taking violently against
+him, than to take the step of coming down upon him suddenly, and
+without appointment, or before a sufficient time had elapsed between the
+beginning of the friendship and the actual personal encounter, to admit
+of his forming preconceived ideas of the manner of man to expect. The
+agony he suffered upon the unexpected visit of even the most ardent of
+well-wishers could scarcely be realised at the moment, from the apparent
+ease, and assumed indifference of his outward bearing, and could only
+be known to those who were with him after the trying ordeal had
+been passed, or immediately before the threatened intrusion had been
+consummated.
+
+Early in our correspondence a friend of his, an art critic of
+distinction, visited Liverpool with the purpose of lecturing on the
+valuable examples of Byzantine art in the Eoyal Institution of that
+city. The lecture was, I fear, almost too good and quite too technical
+for some of the hearers, many of whom claim (and with reason) to be
+lovers of art, and cover the walls of their houses with beautiful
+representations of lovely landscape, but at the same time erect huge
+furnaces which emit vast volumes of black smoke such as prevent the sky
+of any Liverpool landscape being for an instant lovely. I doubt if the
+lecture could have been treated more popularly, but there was manifestly
+a lack of merited appreciation. The archaisms of some of the pictures
+chosen for illustration (early Byzantine examples exclusively) appeared
+to cause certain of the audience to smile at much of the lecturer's
+enthusiasm. Fortunately the man chiefly concerned seemed unconscious of
+all this. And indeed, however he fared in public, in private he was only
+too "dreadfully attended." After the lecture a good many folks gave him
+the benefit of their invaluable opinions on various art questions, and
+some, as was natural, made pitiful slips. I observed with secret and
+scarcely concealed satisfaction his courageous loyalty in defence of his
+friends, and his hitting out in their defence when he believed them to
+be assailed. One superlative intelligence, eager to do honour to the
+guest, yet ignorant of his claim to such honour, gave him a wonderfully
+facile and racy comment on the pre-Raphaelite painters, and, in
+particular, made the ridiculous blunder of a deliberate attack upon
+Rossetti, and then paused for breath and for the lecturer's appreciative
+response; of course, Rossetti's friend was not to be drawn into such
+disloyalty for an instant, even to avoid the risk of ruffling the
+plumage of the mightiest of the corporate cacklers. Rossetti had
+permitted me in his name to meet his friend, and in writing subsequently
+I alluded to the affection with which he had been mentioned, also to
+something that had been said of his immediate surroundings, and to that
+frank championing of his claims which I have just described. Rossetti's
+reply to this is interesting as affording a pathetic view of his
+isolation of life and of the natural affectionateness of his nature:
+
+     I am very glad you were welcomed by dear staunch S------, as
+     I felt sure you would be. He holds the honourable position
+     of being almost the only living art-critic who has really
+     himself worked through the art-schools practically, and
+     learnt to draw and paint. He is one of my oldest and best
+     friends, of whom few can be numbered at my age, from causes
+     only too varying.
+
+          Go from me, summer friends, and tarry not,--
+          I am no summer friend, but wintry cold, etc.
+
+     So be it, as needs must be,--not for all, let us hope, and
+     not with all, as good S------ shews. I have not seen him
+     since his return. I wrote him a line to thank him for his
+     friendly reception of you, and he wrote in return to thank
+     me for your acquaintance, and spoke very pleasantly of you.
+     Your youth seems to have surprised him. I sent a letter of
+     his to your address. I hope you may see more of him. . . .
+     You mention something he said to you of me and my
+     surroundings. They are certainly _quiet_ enough as fax as
+     retirement goes, and I have often thought I should enjoy the
+     presence of a congenial and intellectual housefellow and
+     boardfellow in this big barn of mine, which is actually
+     going to rack and ruin for want of use. But where to find
+     the welcome, the willing, and the able combined in one? . . .
+     I was truly concerned to hear of the attack of ill-health
+     you have suffered from, though you do not tell me its exact
+     nature. I hope it was not accompanied by any such symptoms
+     as you mentioned before. . . . I myself have had similar
+     symptoms (though not so fully as you describe), and have
+     spat blood at intervals for years, but now think nothing of
+     it--nor indeed ever did,--waiting for further alarm signals
+     which never came.
+
+     . . . By-the-bye, I have since remembered that Burne Jones,
+     many years ago, had such an experience as you spoke of
+     before--quite as bad certainly. He was weak for some time
+     after, and has frequently been reminded in minor ways of it,
+     but seems now (at about forty-six or forty-seven) to be more
+     settled in health and stronger, perhaps, than ever
+     before.... Your letter holds out the welcome probability of
+     meeting you here ere long.
+
+This friendly solicitude regarding my health was excited by the
+revelation of what seemed to me at the time a startling occurrence, but
+has doubtless frequently happened to others, and has certainly
+since happened to myself without provoking quite so much outcry. The
+blood-spitting to which Rossetti here alleges he was liable was of
+a comparatively innocent nature. In later years he was assuredly not
+altogether a hero as to personal suffering, and I afterwards found that,
+upon the periodical recurrence of the symptom, he never failed to become
+convinced that he spat arterial blood, and that on each occasion he had
+received his death-warrant. Proof enough was adduced that the blood came
+from the minor vessels of the throat, and this was undoubtedly the case
+in the majority of instances, but whether the same explanation applied
+to one alarming occurrence which I shall now recount, seems to me
+uncertain.
+
+During the two or three weeks preceding our departure for Cumberland,
+in the autumn of 1881, during the time of our residence there and during
+the first few weeks after our return to London, Rossetti was afflicted
+by a violent cough. I noticed that it troubled him almost exclusively in
+the night-time, and after the taking of chloral; that it was sometimes
+attended by vomiting; and that it invariably shook his whole system
+so terribly as to leave him for a while entirely prostrate from sheer
+physical exhaustion. The spectacle was a painful one, and I watched
+closely its phenomena, with the result of convincing myself that
+whatever radical mischief lay at the root of it, the damage done was
+seriously augmented by a conscious giving way to it, induced, I thought,
+by hope of the relief it sometimes afforded the stomach to get rid of
+the nauseous drug at a moment of reduced digestive vitality. Then it
+became my fear that in these violent and prolonged retchings internal
+injury might be sustained, and so I begged him to try to restrain the
+tendency to cough so much and often. He took the remonstrance with great
+goodnature (observing that he perceived I thought he was putting it on),
+but I was not conscious that at any moment he acted upon my suggestion.
+At the time in question I was under the necessity of leaving him for
+a day or two every week in order to fulfil, a course of lecturing
+engagements at a distance; and upon my return in each instance I was
+told much of all that had happened to him in the interval. On one
+occasion, however, I was conscious that something had occurred of which
+he desired to make a disclosure, for amongst the gifts that Rossetti
+had not got was that of concealing from his intimate friends any event,
+however trifling, or however important, which weighed upon his mind.
+At length I begged him to say what had happened, whereupon, with great
+reluctance and many protestations of his intention to observe silence,
+and constant injunctions as to secrecy, he told me that during the night
+of my absence, in the midst of one of his bouts of coughing, he had
+discharged an enormous quantity of blood. "I know this is the final
+signal," he said, "and I shall die." I did my utmost to compose him
+by recounting afresh the personal incident hinted at, with many added
+features of (I trust) justifiable exaggeration, but it is hardly
+necessary to say that I did not hold the promise I gave him as to
+secrecy sufficiently sacred, or so exclusive, as to forbid my revealing
+the whole circumstance to his medical attendant. I may add that from
+that moment the cough entirely disappeared.
+
+To return from this reminiscence of a later period to the beginnings,
+three years earlier, of our correspondence, I will bring the present
+chapter to a close by quoting short passages from three letters written
+on the eve of my first visit to Rossetti, in 1880:
+
+     I will be truly glad to meet you when you come to town. You
+     will recognise the hole-and-cornerest of all existences; but
+     I'll read you a ballad or two, and have Brown's report to
+     back my certainty of liking you.... I would propose that you
+     should dine with me at 8.30 on the Monday of your visit, and
+     spend the evening.... Better come at 5.30 to 6 (if feasible
+     to you), that I may try to show you a picture by daylight...
+     Of course, when I speak of your dining with me, I mean tete-
+     a-tete, and without ceremony of any kind. I usually dine in
+     my studio, and in my painting coat. I judge this will reach
+     you in time for a note to reach _me_. Telegrams I hate. In
+     hope of the pleasure of a meeting, yours ever.
+
+How that "hole-and-cornerest of all existences" struck an ardent admirer
+of the poet-painter's genius, and a devoted lover of his personal
+character, as then revealed to me, I hope to describe in a later section
+of this book. Meantime I must proceed to cull from the epistolary
+treasures I possess a number of interesting passages on literary
+subjects, called forth in the course of an intercourse which, at that
+stage, had few topics of a private nature to divert it from a channel
+of impersonal discussion. It is a fact that the letters written to me by
+Rossetti in the year 1880 deal so largely with literary affairs (chiefly
+of the past) as to be almost capable of _verbatim_ reproduction, even
+at the present short interval after his death. If they were to be
+reproduced, they would be found to cover two hundred pages of the
+present volume, and to be so easy, fluent, varied, and wholly felicitous
+as to style, and full of research and reflection as to substance, as
+probably to earn for the writer a foremost place for epistolary power.
+Indeed, I am not without hope that this accession of a fresh reputation
+may result even upon the excerpts I have decided to introduce.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+It was very natural that our earliest correspondence should deal chiefly
+with Rossetti's own works, for those works gave rise to it. He sent me
+a copy of his translations from early Italian poets (_Dante and his
+Circle_), and a copy of his story, entitled _Hand and Soul_. In posting
+the latter, he said:
+
+     I don't know if you ever saw a sort of story of mine called
+     _Hand and Soul_. I send you one with this, as printed to go
+     in my poems (though afterwards omitted, being, nevertheless,
+     more poem than story). I printed it since in the
+     _Fortnightly_--and, I believe, abolished one or two extra
+     sentimentalities. You may have seen it there. In case it's
+     stale, I enclose with this a sonnet which _must_ be new, for
+     I only wrote it the other day.
+
+     I have already, in the proper place in this volume, said how
+     the story first struck me. Perhaps I had never before
+     reading it seen quite so clearly the complete mission as
+     well as enforced limitations of true art. All the many
+     subtle gradations in the development of purpose were there
+     beautifully pictured in a little creation that was charming
+     in the full sense of a word that has wellnigh lost its
+     charm. For all such as cried out against pursuits
+     originating in what Keats had christened "the infant chamber
+     of sensation," and for all such as demanded that everything
+     we do should be done to "strengthen God among men," the
+     story provided this answer: "When at any time hath He cried
+     unto thee, saying, 'My son, lend me thy shoulder, for I
+     fall'?"
+
+     The sonnet sent, and spoken of as having just been written
+     (the letter bears post-mark February 1880), was the sonnet
+     on the sonnet. It is throughout beautiful and in two of its
+     lines (those depicting the dark wharf and the black Styx)
+     truly magnificent. It appears most to be valued, however, as
+     affording a clue to the attitude of mind adopted towards
+     this form of verse by the greatest master of it in modern
+     poetry. I think it is Mr. Pater who says that a fine poem in
+     manuscript carries an aroma with it, and a sensation of
+     music. I must have enjoyed the pleasure of such a presence
+     somewhat frequently about this period, for many of the poems
+     that afterwards found places in the second volume of ballads
+     and sonnets were sent to me from time to time.
+
+     I should like to know what were the three or four vols. on
+     Italian poetry which you mentioned in a former letter, and
+     which my book somewhat recalled to your mind. I was not
+     aware of any such extensive _English_ work on the subject.
+     Or do you perhaps mean Trucchi's Italian _Dugento Poesie
+     inedite?_ I am sincerely delighted at your rare interest in
+     what I have sent you--both the translations, story, etc.--I
+     enclose three printed pieces meant for my volume but
+     omitted:--the ballad, because it deals trivially with a base
+     amour (it was written _very_ early) and is therefore really
+     reprehensible to some extent; the Shakspeare sonnet, because
+     of its incongruity with the rest of the poems, and also
+     because of the insult (however jocose) to the worshipful
+     body of tailors; and the political sonnet for reasons which
+     are plain enough, though the date at which I wrote it (not
+     without feeling) involves now a prophetic value. In a MS.
+     vol. I have a sonnet (1871) _After the German Subjugation of
+     France_, which enforces the prophecy by its fulfilment. In
+     this MS. vol. are a few pieces which were the only ones I
+     copied in doubt as to their admission when I printed the
+     poems, but none of which did I admit. One day I 'll send it
+     for you to look at. It contains a few sonnets bearing on
+     public matters, but only a few. Tell me what you think on
+     reading my things. All you said in your letter of this
+     morning was very grateful to me. I have a fair amount by me
+     in the way of later MS. which I may shew you some day when
+     we meet. Meanwhile I feel that your energies are already in
+     full swing--work coming on the heels of work--and that your
+     time cannot long be deferred as regards your place as a
+     writer.
+
+The ballad of which Rossetti here speaks as dealing trivially with a
+base amour is entitled _Dennis Shand_. Though an early work, it affords
+perhaps the best evidence extant of the poet's grasp of the old ballad
+style: it runs easiest of all his ballads, and is in some respects his
+best. Mr. J. A. Symonds has, in my judgment, made the error of speaking
+of Rossetti as incapable of reproducing the real note of such ballads
+as _Chevy Chase_ and _Sir Patrick Spens_. Mr. Symonds was right in his
+eloquent comments (_Macmillan's Magazine_, February 1882), so far as
+they concern the absence from _Rose Mary, The King's Tragedy, and The
+White Ship_ of the sinewy simplicity of the old singers. But in those
+poems Rossetti attempted quite another thing. There is a development of
+the English ballad that is entirely of modern product, being far more
+complex than the primitive form, and getting rid to some extent of the
+out-worn notion of the ballad being actually sung to set music, but
+retaining enough of the sweep of a free rhythm to carry a sensible
+effect as of being chanted when read. This is a sort of ballad-romance,
+such as _Christabel_ and _The Lay of the Last Minstrel_; and this, and
+this only, was what Rossetti aimed after, and entirely compassed in his
+fine works just mentioned. But (as Rossetti himself remarked to me in
+conversation when I repeated Mr. Symonds's criticism, and urged my own
+grounds of objection to it), that the poet was capable of the directness
+and simplicity which characterise the early ballad-writers, he had
+given proof in _The Staff and Scrip and Stratton Water. Dennis Shand_
+is valuable as evidence going in the same direction, but the author's
+objection to it, on ethical grounds, must here prevail to withhold it
+from publication.
+
+The Shakspeare sonnet, spoken of in the letter as being withheld on
+account of its incongruity with the rest of the poems, was published
+in an early _Academy_, notwithstanding its jocose allusion to the
+worshipful body of tailors. As it is little known, and really very
+powerful in itself, and interesting as showing the author's power over
+words in a new direction, I print it in this place.
+
+             ON THE SITE OF A MULBERRY TREE.
+
+     Planted by Wm. Shakspeare; felled by the Rev. F. Gastrell.
+     This tree, here fall'n, no common birth or death
+        Shared with its kind. The world's enfranchised son,
+        Who found the trees of Life and Knowledge one,
+     Here set it, frailer than his laurel-wreath.
+
+     Shall not the wretch whose hand it fell beneath
+        Rank also singly--the supreme unhung?
+        Lo! Sheppard, Turpin, pleading with black tongue
+     This viler thief's unsuffocated breath!
+
+     We 'U search thy glossary, Shakspeare! whence almost,
+        And whence alone, some name shall be reveal'd
+          For this deaf drudge, to whom no length of ears
+          Sufficed to catch the music of the spheres;
+        Whose soul is carrion now,--too mean to yield
+     Some tailor's ninth allotment of a ghost.
+
+                   Stratford-on-Avon.
+
+The other sonnets referred to, those, namely, on the _French Liberation
+of Italy_, and the _German Subjugation of France_, display all
+Rossetti's mastery of craftsmanship. In strength of vision, in fertility
+of rhythmic resource, in pliant handling, these sonnets are, in my
+judgment, among the best written by the author; and if I do not quote
+them here, or altogether regret that they do not appear in the author's
+works, it is not because I have any sense of their possibly offending
+against the delicate sensibilities of an age in which it seems necessary
+to hide out of sight whatever appears to impinge upon the domain of what
+is called our lower nature.
+
+The circumstance has hardly obtained even so much as a passing mention
+that Rossetti made certain very important additions to the ballad of
+_Sister Helen_, just before passing the old volume through the press
+afresh for publication, contemporaneously with the new book. The
+letters I am now to quote show the origin of those additions, and are
+interesting, as affording a view of the author's estimate of the gain in
+respect of completeness of conception, and sterner tragic spirit which
+resulted upon their adoption.
+
+I was very glad to have the three articles together, including the one
+in which you have written on myself. Looking at this again, it seems to
+me you must possess the _best_ edition (the Tauchnitz, which has my last
+emendations). Otherwise I have been meaning all along to offer you a
+copy of this edition, as I have some. Who was your informant as to dates
+of the poems, etc.? They are not correct, yet show some inkling. _Jenny_
+(in a first form) was written almost as early as _The Blessed Damozel_,
+which I wrote (and have altered little since), when I was eighteen. It
+was first printed when I was twenty-one. Of the first _Jenny_, perhaps
+fifty lines survive here and there, but I felt it was quite beyond me
+then (a world I was then happy enough to be a stranger to), and later
+I re-wrote it completely. I will give you correct particulars at some
+time. _Sister Helen_, I may mention, was written either in 1851 or
+beginning of 1852, and was printed in something called _The Duesseldorf
+Annual_ {*} (published in Germany) in 1853; though since much revised
+in detail--not in the main. You will be horror-struck to hear that
+the first main addition to this poem was made by me only a few days
+ago!--eight stanzas (six together, and two scattered ones) involving
+a new incident!! Your hair is on end, I know, but if you heard the
+stanzas, they would smooth if not curl it. The gain is immense.
+
+     * In The Duesseldorf Annual the poem was signed H. H. H., and
+     in explanation of this signature Rossetti wrote on his own
+     copy the following characteristic note:--"The initials as
+     above were taken from the lead-pencil."
+
+In reply to this I told Rossetti that, as a "jealous honourer" of his,
+I confessed to some uneasiness when I read that he had been making
+important additions to _Sister Helen_. That I could not think of a stage
+of the story that would bear so to be severed from what goes before or
+comes after it as to admit of interpolation might not of itself go for
+much; but the entire ballad was so rounded into unity, one incident so
+naturally begetting the next, and the combined incidents so properly
+building up a fabric of interest of which the meaning was all inwoven,
+that I could not but fear that whatever the gain in certain directions,
+the additions of any stanzas involving a new incident might, in
+some measure, cripple the rest. Even though the new stanzas were as
+beautiful, or yet more beautiful than the old ones, and the incident as
+impressive as any that goes before it, or comes after it, the gain to
+the poem as an individual creation was not, I thought, assured because
+people used to say my style was hard.
+
+Rossetti was mistaken in supposing that I possessed the latest and
+best edition of his _Poems_, but I had seen the latest of all English
+editions, and had noted in it several valuable emendations which, in
+subsequent quotation, I had been careful to employ. One of these seemed
+to me to involve an immeasurable gain. A stanza of _Sister Helen_, in
+its first form, ran:
+
+     Oh, the wind is sad in the iron chill,
+          Sister Helen,
+     And weary sad they look by the hill;
+     But Keith of Ewern 's sadder still,
+          Little brother.--etc. etc.
+
+In the later edition the fourth line of this stanza ran:
+
+     But he and I are sadder still.
+
+The change adds enormously to one's estimate of the characterisation.
+All through the ballad one wants to feel that, despite the bitterness
+of her speech, the heart of the relentless witch is breaking. Like _The
+Broken Heart_ of Ford, the ballad with the amended line was a masterly
+picture of suppressed emotion. I hoped the new incident touched the same
+chord. Rossetti replied:
+
+     Thanks for your present letter, which I will answer with
+     pleasurable care. At present I send you the Tauchnitz
+     edition of my things. The bound copy is hideous, but more
+     convenient--the other pretty. You will find a good many
+     things bettered (I believe) even on the _latest_ English
+     edition. I did not remember that the line you quote from
+     _Sister Helen_ appeared in the new form at all in an English
+     issue. I am greatly pleased at your thinking it, as I do,
+     quite a transfiguring change... The next point I have marked
+     in your letter is that about the additions to _Sister
+     Helen_. Of course I knew that your hair must arise from your
+     scalp in protest. But what should you say if Keith of Ewern
+     were a three days' bridegroom--if the spell had begun on the
+     wedding-morning--and if the bride herself became the last
+     pleader for mercy? I fancy you will see your way now. The
+     culminating, irresistible provocation helps, I think, to
+     humanize Helen, besides lifting the tragedy to a yet sterner
+     height.
+
+If I had felt (as Rossetti predicted I should) an uneasy sensation
+about the roots of the hair upon hearing that he was making important
+additions to the ballad which seemed to me to be the finest of his
+works, the sensation in that quarter was not less, but more, upon
+learning the nature of those additions. But I mistook the character of
+the new incidents. That Sister Helen should be herself the abandoned
+_bride_ of Ewern (for so I understood the poet's explanation), and, as
+such, the last pleader for mercy, pointed, I thought, in the direction
+of the humanizing emendation ("But he and I are sadder still ")
+which had given me so much pleasure. That Keith of Ewern should be a
+three-days' bridegroom, and that the spell should begin on the wedding
+morning, were incidents that seemed to intensify every line of the
+poem. In this view of Rossetti's account of the additions, there were
+certainly difficulties out of which I could see no way, but I seemed
+to realise that Helen's hate, like Macbeth's ambition, had overleaped
+itself, and fallen on the other side, and that she would undo her work,
+if to return were not harder than to go on; her initiate sensibility had
+gained hard use, but even as hate recoils on love, so out of the ashes
+of hate love had arisen. In this view of the characterisation of Helen,
+the parallel with Macbeth struck me more and more as I thought of it.
+When Macbeth kills Duncan, and hears the grooms of the chamber cry in
+their sleep--"God bless us," he cannot say "Amen,"
+
+     I had most need of blessing, and Amen
+     Stuck in my throat.
+
+Helen pleading too late for mercy against the potency of the spell she
+herself had raised, seemed to me an incident that raised her to the
+utmost height of tragic creation. But Rossetti's purpose was at once
+less ambitious and more satisfying.
+
+     Your passage as to the changes in _Sister Helen_ could not
+     well (with all its fine suggestiveness) be likely to meet
+     exactly a reality which had not been submitted to your eye
+     in the verses themselves. It is the _bride of Keith_ who is
+     the last pleader--as vainly as the others, and with a yet
+     more exulting development of vengeance in the forsaken
+     witch. The only acknowledgment by her of a mutual misery is
+     still found in the line you spotted as so great a gain
+     before, and in the last line she speaks. I ought to have
+     sent the stanzas to explain them properly, but have some
+     reluctance to ventilate them at present, much as I should
+     like the opportunity of reading them to you. They will meet
+     your eye in due course, and I am sure of your approval also
+     as regards their value to the ballad.... Don't let the
+     changes in _Helen_ get wind overmuch. I want them to be new
+     when published. Answer this when you can. I like getting
+     your epistles.
+
+The fresh stanzas in question, which had already obtained the suffrages
+of his brother, of Mr. Bell Scott, and other qualified critics, were
+subsequently sent to me. They are as follows. After Keith of Keith,
+the father of Sister Helen's sometime lover, has pleaded for his son in
+vain, the last suppliant to arrive is his son's bride:
+
+     A lady here, by a dark steed brought,
+          Sister Helen,
+     So darkly clad I saw her not.
+     "See her now or never see aught,
+          Little brother!"
+          (_O Mother, Mary Mother_,
+     _Whit more to see, between Hell and Heaven?_)
+
+     "Her hood falls back, and the moon shines fair,
+          Sister Helen,
+     On the Lady of Ewern's golden hair."
+     "Blest hour of my power and her despair,
+          Little brother!"
+          (O Mother, Mary Mother,
+     Hour blest and bann'd, between Hell and Heaven!)
+
+     "Pale, pale her cheeks, that in pride did glow,
+          Sister Helen,
+     'Neath the bridal-wreath three days ago."
+     "One morn for pride and three days for woe,
+          Little brother!"
+          (O Mother, Mary Mother,
+     Three days, three nights, between Hell and Heaven!)
+
+     "Her clasp'd hands stretch from her bending head,
+          Sister Helen;
+     With the loud wind's wail her sobs are wed."
+     "What wedding-strains hath her bridal bed,
+          Little brother?"
+          (O Mother, Mary Mother,
+     What strain but death's, between Hell and Heaven?)
+
+     "She may not speak, she sinks in a swoon,
+          Sister Helen,--
+     She lifts her lips and gasps on the moon."
+     "Oh! might I but hear her soul's blithe tune,
+          Little brother!"
+          (O Mother, Mary Mother,
+     Her woe's dumb cry, between Hell and Heaven!)
+
+     "They've caught her to Westholm's saddle-bow,
+     Sister Helen,
+     And her moonlit hair gleams white in its flow."
+     "Let it turn whiter than winter snow,
+          Little brother!"
+          (O Mother, Mary Mother,
+     Woe-withered gold, between Hell and Heaven!)
+
+Besides these there are two new stanzas, one going before, and the other
+following after, the six stanzas quoted, but as the scattered passages
+involve no farther incident, and are rather of interest as explaining
+and perfecting the idea here expressed, than valuable in themselves, I
+do not reprint them.
+
+I think it must be allowed, by fit judges, that nothing more subtly
+conceived than this incident can be met with in English poetry, though
+something akin to it was projected by Coleridge in an episode of his
+contemplated _Michael Scott_. It is--in the full sense of an abused
+epithet--too weird to be called picturesque. But the crowning merit of
+the poem still lies, as I have said, in the domain of character. Through
+all the outbursts of her ignescent hate Sister Helen can never lose the
+ineradicable relics of her human love:
+
+          But he and I are sadder still.
+
+As Rossetti from time to time made changes in his poems, he transcribed
+the amended verses in a copy of the Tauchnitz edition which he kept
+constantly by him. Upon reference to this little volume some days after
+his death, I discovered that he had prefaced _Sister Helen_ with a
+note written in pencil, of which he had given me the substance in
+conversation about the time of the publication of the altered version,
+but which he abandoned while passing the book through the press. The
+note (evidently designed to precede the ballad) runs:
+
+     It is not unlikely that some may be offended at seeing the
+     additions made thus late to the ballad of _S. H._ My best
+     excuse is that I believe some will wonder with myself that
+     such a climax did not enter into the first conception.
+
+At the foot of the poem this further note is written:
+
+     I wrote this ballad either in 1851 or early in 1852. It was
+     printed in a thing called _The Duesseldorf Annual_ in (I
+     think) 1853--published in Germany. {*}
+
+     * In the same private copy of the Poems the following
+     explanatory passage was written over the much-discussed
+     sonnet, entitled, The Monochord:--"That sublimated mood of
+     the soul in which a separate essence of itself seems as it
+     were to oversoar and survey it." Neither the style nor the
+     substance is characteristic of Rossetti, and though I do not
+     at the moment remember to have met with the passage
+     elsewhere, I doubt not it is a quotation. That quotation
+     marks are employed is not in itself evidence of much moment,
+     for Rossetti had Coleridge's enjoyment of a literary
+     practical joke, and on one occasion prefixed to a story in
+     manuscript a long passage on noses purporting to be from
+     Tristram Shandy, but which is certainly not discoverable in
+     Sterne's story.
+
+The next letter I shall quote appears to explain itself:
+
+     There is a last point in your long letter which I have not
+     noticed, though it interested me much: viz., what you say of
+     your lecture on my poetry; your idea of possibly returning
+     to and enlarging it would, if carried out, be welcome to me.
+     I suppose ere long I must get together such additional work
+     as I have to show--probably a good deal added to the old
+     vol. (which has been for some time out of print) and one
+     longer poem by itself. _The House of Life_, when next
+     issued, will I trust be doubled in number of sonnets; it is
+     nearly so already. Your writing that essay in one day, and
+     the information as to subsequent additions, I noted, and
+     should like to see the passage on _Jenny_ which you have not
+     yet used, if extant. The time taken in composition reminds
+     me of the fact (so long ago!) that I wrote the tale of _Hand
+     and Soul_ (with the exception of an opening page or two) all
+     in one night in December 1849, beginning I suppose about 2
+     A.M. and ending about 7. In such a case a landscape and sky
+     all unsurmised open gradually in the mind--a sort of
+     spiritual _Turner_, among whose hills one ranges and in
+     whose waters one strikes out at unknown liberty; but I have
+     found this only in nightlong work, which I have seldom
+     attempted, for it leaves one entirely broken, and this state
+     was mine when I described the like of it at the close of the
+     story, ah! once again, how long ago! I have thought of
+     including this story in next issue of poems, but am
+     uncertain. What think you?
+
+It seemed certain that _Hand and Soul_ ought not to continue to lie in
+the back numbers, of a magazine. The story, being more poem than aught
+else, might properly lay claim to a place in any fresh collection of
+the author's works. I could see no natural objection on the score of
+its being written in prose. As Coleridge and Wordsworth both aptly said,
+prose is not the antithesis of poetry; science and poetry may stand
+over-against each other, as Keats implied by his famous toast:
+"Confusion to the man who took the poetry out of the moon," but prose
+and poetry surely are or may be practically one. We know that in
+rhythmic flow they sometimes come very close together, and nowhere
+closer than in the heightened prose and the poetry of Rossetti. Poetic
+prose may not be the best prose, just as (to use a false antithesis)
+dull poetry is called prosaic; but there is no natural antagonism
+between prose and verse as literary mediums, provided always that the
+spirit that animates them be akin. Rossetti himself constantly urged
+that in prose the first necessity was that it should be direct, and he
+knew no reproach of poetry more damning than to say it was written in
+proseman's diction. This was the key to his depreciation of Wordsworth,
+and doubtless it was this that ultimately operated with him to exclude
+the story from his published works. I took another view, and did not
+see that an accidental difference of outward form ought to prevent his
+uniting within single book-covers productions that had so much of their
+essential spirit in common. Unlike the Chinese, we do not read by sight
+only, and there is in the story such richness, freshness, and variety
+of cadence, as appeal to the ear also. Prose may be the lowest order
+of rhythmic composition, but we know it is capable of such purity,
+sweetness, strength, and elasticity, as entitle it to a place as a
+sister art with poetry. Milton, however, although he wrote the noblest
+of English prose, seemed more than half ashamed of it, as of a kind of
+left-handed performance. Goethe and Wordsworth, on the other hand, not
+to speak of Coleridge and Shelley (or yet of Keats, whose letters are
+among the very best examples extant of the English epistolary style),
+wrote prose of wonderful beauty and were not ashamed of it. In Milton's
+case the subjects, I imagine, were to blame for his indifference to his
+achievements in prose, for not even the Westminster Convention, or
+the divorce topics of _Tetrachordon_, or yet the liberty of the press,
+albeit raised to a level of philosophic first principles, were quite up
+to those fixed stars of sublimity about which it was Milton's pleasure
+to revolve. _Hand and Soul_ is in faultless harmony with Rossetti's work
+in verse, because distinguished by the same strength of imagination.
+That it was written in a single night seems extraordinary when viewed
+in relation to its sustained beauty; but it is done in a breath, and has
+all the excellencies of fervour and force that result upon that method
+of composition only.
+
+A year or two later than the date of the correspondence with which I am
+now dealing, Rossetti read aloud a fragment of a story written about
+the period of _Hand and Soul_. It was to be entitled _St. Agnes of
+Intercession_, and it dealt in a mystic way with the doctrine of the
+transmigration of souls. He constantly expressed his intention of
+finishing the story, and said that, although in its existing condition
+it was fully as long as the companion story, it would require twice as
+much more to complete it. During the time of our stay at Birchington, at
+the beginning of 1882, he seemed anxious to get to work upon it, and had
+the manuscript sent down from London for that purpose; but the packet
+lay unopened until after his death, when I glanced at it again
+to refresh my memory as to its contents. The fragment is much too
+inconclusive as to design to admit of any satisfying account of its
+plot, of which there is more, than in _Hand and Soul_. As far as it
+goes, it is the story of a young English painter who becomes the victim
+of a conviction that his soul has had a prior existence in this world.
+The hallucination takes entire possession of him, and so unsettles
+his life that he leaves England in search of relic or evidence of his
+spiritual "double." Finally, in a picture-gallery abroad, he comes face
+to face with a portrait which' he instantly recognises as the portrait
+of himself, both as he is now and as he was in the time of his
+antecedent existence. Upon inquiry, the portrait proves to be that of a
+distinguished painter centuries dead, whose work had long been the young
+Englishman's guiding beacon in methods of art. Startled beyond measure
+at the singular discovery of a coincidence which, superstition apart,
+might well astonish the most unsentimental, he sickens to a fever. Here
+the fragment ends. Late one evening, in August 1881, Rossetti gave me
+a full account of the remaining incidents, but I find myself without
+memoranda of what was said (it was never my habit to keep record of his
+or of any man's conversation), and my recollection of what passed is
+too indefinite in some salient particulars to make it safe to attempt
+to complete the outlines of the story. I consider the fragment in all
+respects finer than _Hand and Soul_, and the passage descriptive of the
+artist's identification of his own personality in the portrait on
+the walls of the gallery among the very finest pieces of picturesque,
+impassioned, and dramatic writing that Rossetti ever achieved. On one
+occasion I remarked incidentally upon something he had said of his
+enjoyment of rivers of morning air {*} in the spring of the year, that
+it would be an inquiry fraught with a curious interest to find out how
+many of those who have the greatest love of the Spring were born in it.
+
+     * Within the period of my personal knowledge of Rossetti's
+     habits, he certainly never enjoyed any "rivers of morning
+     air" at all, unless they were such as visited him in a
+     darkened bedchamber.
+
+One felt that one could name a goodly number among the English poets
+living and dead. It would be an inquiry, as Hamlet might say, such as
+would become a woman. To this Rossetti answered that he was born on old
+May-day (May 12), 1828; and thereupon he asked the date of my own birth.
+
+     The comparative dates of our births are curious.... I myself
+     was born on old May-Day (12th), in the year (1828) after
+     that in which Blake died.... You were born, in fact, just as
+     I was giving up poetry at about 25, on finding that it
+     impeded attention to what constituted another aim and a
+     livelihood into the bargain, _i.e._ painting. From that date
+     up to the year when I published my poems, I wrote extremely
+     little,--I might almost say nothing, except the renovated
+     _Jenny_ in 1858 or '59. To this again I added a passage or
+     two when publishing in 1870.
+
+Often since Rossetti's death I have reflected upon the fact that in that
+lengthy correspondence between us which preceded personal intimacy,
+he never made more than a single passing allusion to those adverse
+criticisms which did so much at one period to sadden and alter his life.
+Barely, indeed, in conversation did he touch upon that sore subject, but
+it was obvious enough to the closer observer, as well from his silence
+as from his speech, that though the wounds no longer rankled, they
+did not wholly heal. I take it as evidence of his desire to put by
+unpleasant reflections (at least whilst health was whole with him, for
+he too often nourished melancholy retrospects when health was broken
+or uncertain), that in his correspondence with me, as a young friend
+who knew nothing at first hand of his gloomier side, he constantly dwelt
+with radiant satisfaction and hopefulness on the friendly words that had
+been said of him. And as frequently as he called my attention to such
+favourable comment, he did so without a particle of vanity, and with
+only such joy as he may feel who knows in his secret heart he has
+depreciators, to find that he has ardent upholders too. In one letter he
+says:
+
+I should say that between the appearance of the poems and your lecture,
+there was one article on the subject, of a very masterly kind indeed,
+by some very scholarly hand (unknown to me), in the _New York Catholic
+World_ (I think in 1874). I retain this article, and will some day send
+it you to read.
+
+He sent me the article, and I found it, as he had found it, among the
+best things written on the subject. Naturally, the criticism was best
+where the subject dealt with impinged most upon the spirit of mediaeval
+Catholicism. Perhaps Catholicism is itself essentially mediaeval, and
+perhaps a man cannot possibly be, what the _Catholic World_ article
+called Rossetti, a "mediaeval artist heart and soul," without partaking
+of a strong religious feeling that is primarily Catholic--so much were
+the religion and art of the middle ages knit each to each. Yet, upon
+reading the article, I doubted one of the writer's inferences, namely,
+that Rossetti had inherited a Catholic devotion to the Madonna. Not his
+_Ave_ only seemed to me to live in an atmosphere of tender and sensitive
+devotion, but I missed altogether in it, as in other poems of Rossetti,
+that old, continual, and indispensable Catholic note of mystic Divine
+love lost in love of humanity which, I suppose, Mr. Arnold would call
+anthropomorphism. Years later, when I came to know Rossetti personally,
+I perceived that the writer of the article in question had not made
+a bad shot for the truth. True it was, that he had inherited a strong
+religious spirit--such as could only be called Catholic--inherited
+I say, for, though from his immediate parents, he assuredly did not
+inherit any devotion to the Madonna, his own submission to religious
+influences was too unreasoning and unquestioning to be anything but
+intuitive. Despite some worldly-mindedness, and a certain shrewdness in
+the management of the more important affairs of daily life, Rossetti's
+attitude towards spiritual things was exactly the reverse of what we
+call Protestant. During the last months of his life, when the prospect
+of leaving the world soon, and perhaps suddenly, impressed upon his
+mind a deep sense of his religious position, he yielded himself up
+unhesitatingly to the intuitive influences I speak of; and so far from
+being touched by the interminable controversies which have for ages been
+upsetting and uprearing creeds, he seemed both naturally incapable of
+comprehending differences of belief, and unwilling to dwell upon them
+for an instant. Indeed, he constantly impressed me during the last days
+of his life with the conviction, that he was by religious bias of nature
+a monk of the middle ages.
+
+As to the article in _The Catholic Magazine_ I thought I perceived from
+a curious habit of biblical quotation that it must have been written by
+an Ecclesiastic. A remark in it to the effect that old age is usually
+more indulgent than middle life to the work of first manhood, and that,
+consequently, Rossetti would be a less censorious judge of his early
+efforts at a later period of life, seemed to show that the writer
+himself was no longer a young man. Further, I seemed to see that the
+reviewer was not a professional critic, for his work displayed few of
+the well-recognised trade-marks with which the articles of the literary
+market are invariably branded. As a small matter one noticed the
+somewhat slovenly use of the editorial _we_, which at the fag-end of
+passages sometimes dropped into _I_. [Upon my remarking upon this to
+Rossetti he remembered incidentally that a similar confounding of
+the singular and plural number of the pronoun produces marvellously
+suggestive effects in a very different work, _Macbeth_, where the kingly
+_we_ is tripped up by the guilty _I_ in many places.] Rossetti wrote:
+
+I am glad you liked the _Catholic World_ article, which I certainly view
+as one of rare literary quality. I have not the least idea who is the
+writer, but am sorry now I never wrote to him under cover of the editor
+when I received it. I did send the _Dante and Circle_, but don't know
+if it was ever received or reviewed. As you have the vols, of
+_Fortnightly_, look up a little poem of mine called the _Cloud
+Confines_, a few months later, I suppose, than the tale. It is one of my
+favourites, among my own doings.
+
+I noticed at this early period, as well as later, that in Rossetti's
+eyes a favourable review was always enhanced in value if the writer
+happened to be a stranger to him; and I constantly protested that a
+friend's knowledge of one's work and sympathy with it ought not to be
+less delightful, as such, than a stranger's, however less surprising,
+though at the same time the tribute that is true to one's art without
+auxiliary aids being brought to bear in its formation must be at once
+the most satisfying assurance of the purity, strength, and completeness
+of the art itself, and of the safe and enduring quality of the
+appreciation. It is true that friends who are accustomed to our habit of
+thought and manner of expression sometimes catch our meaning before we
+have expressed it Not rarely, before our thought has reached that stage
+at which it becomes intelligible to a stranger, a word, a look, or a
+gesture will convey it perfectly and fully to a friend. And what goes on
+between minds that exist in more or less intimate communion, goes on
+to a greater degree within the individual mind where the metaphysical
+equivalents to a word or a look answer to, and are answered by, the
+half-realised conception. Hence it often happens that even where our
+touch seems to ourselves delicate and precise, a mind not initiated
+in our self-chosen method of abbreviation finds only impenetrable
+obscurity. It is then in the tentative condition of mind just indicated
+that the spirit of art comes in, and enables a man so to clothe his
+thought in lucid words and fitting imagery that strangers may know, when
+they see it, all that it is, and how he came by it. Although, therefore,
+the praise of friends should not be less delightful, as praise, than
+that tendered by strangers, there is an added element of surprise and
+satisfaction in the latter which the former cannot bring. Rossetti
+certainly never over-valued the applause of his own immediate circle,
+but still no man was more sensible of the value of the good opinion of
+one or two of his immediate friends. Returning to the correspondence, he
+says:
+
+     In what I wrote as to critiques on my poems, I meant to
+     express _special_ gratification from those written by
+     strangers to myself and yet showing full knowledge of the
+     subject and full sympathy with it. Such were Formans at the
+     time, the American one since (and far from alone in America,
+     but this the best) and more lately your own. Other known and
+     unknown critics of course wrote on the book when it
+     appeared, some very favourably and others _quite_
+     sufficiently abusive.
+
+As to _Cloud Confines_, I told Rossetti that I considered it in
+philosophic grasp the most powerful of his productions, and interesting
+as being (unlike the body of his works) more nearly akin to the spirit
+of music than that of painting.
+
+     By the bye, you are right about _Cloud Confines_, which _is_
+     my very best thing--only, having been foolishly sent to a
+     magazine, no notice whatever resulted.
+
+Rossetti was not always open to suggestions as to the need of clarifying
+obscure phrases in his verses, but on one or two occasions, when I was
+so bold as to hint at changes, I found him in highly tractable moods.
+I called his attention to what I imagined might prove to be merely a
+printer's slip in his poem (a great favourite of mine) entitled _The
+Portrait_. The second stanza ran:
+
+     Yet this, of all love's perfect prize,
+     Remains; save what in mournful guise
+     Takes counsel with my soul alone,--
+     Save what is secret and unknown,
+     Below the earth, above the sky.
+
+The words "yet" and "save" seemed to me (and to another friend) somewhat
+puzzling, and I asked if "but" in the sense of _only_ had been meant. He
+wrote:
+
+     That is a very just remark of yours about the passage in
+     _Portrait_ beginning _yet_. I meant to infer _yet only_, but
+     it certainly is truncated. I shall change the line to
+
+          Yet only this, of love's whole prize,
+          Remains, etc.
+
+     But would again be dubious though explicable. Thanks for the
+     hint.... I shall be much obliged to you for any such hints
+     of a verbal nature.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+The letters printed in the foregoing chapter are valuable as settling
+at first-hand all question of the chronology of the poems of Rossetti's
+volume of 1870. The poems of the volume of 1881 (Rose Mary and certain
+of the sonnets excepted) grew under his hand during the period of my
+acquaintance with him, and their origin I shall in due course record.
+The two preceding chapters have been for the most part devoted to such
+letters (and such explanatory matter as must needs accompany them) as
+concern principally, perhaps, the poet and his correspondent; but I
+have thrown into two further chapters a great body of highly interesting
+letters on subjects of general literary interest (embracing the fullest
+statement yet published of Rossetti's critical opinions), and have
+reserved for a more advanced section of the work a body of further
+letters on sonnet literature which arose out of the discussion of an
+anthology that I was at the time engaged in compiling.
+
+It was very natural that Coleridge should prove to be one of the first
+subjects discussed by Rossetti, who admired him greatly, and when it
+transpired that Coleridge was, perhaps, my own chief idol, and that
+whilst even yet a child I had perused and reperused not only his poetry
+but even his mystical philosophy (impalpable or obscure even to his
+maturer and more enlightened, if no more zealous, admirers), the
+disposition to write upon him became great upon both sides. "You can
+never say too much about Coleridge for me," Rossetti would write, "for
+I worship him on the right side of idolatry, and I perceive you know
+him well." Upon this one of my first remarks was that there was much in
+Coleridge's higher descriptive verse equivalent to the landscape art
+of Turner. The critical parallel Rossetti warmly approved of, adding,
+however, that Coleridge, at his best as a pictorial artist, was a
+spiritualised Turner. He instanced his,
+
+     We listened and looked sideways up,
+     The moving moon went up the sky
+     And no where did abide,
+     Softly she was going up,
+     And a star or two beside--
+     The charmed water burnt alway
+     A still and awful red.
+
+I remarked that Shelley possessed the same power of impregnating
+landscape with spiritual feeling, and this Rossetti readily allowed;
+but when I proceeded to say that Wordsworth sometimes, though rarely,
+displayed a power akin to it, I found him less warmly responsive. "I
+grudge Wordsworth every vote he gets," {*} Rossetti frequently said to
+me, both in writing, and afterwards in conversation. "The three
+greatest English imaginations," he would sometimes add, "are Shakspeare,
+Coleridge, and Shelley." I have heard him give a fourth name, Blake.
+
+     * There is a story frequently told of how, seeing two camels
+     walking together in the Zoological Gardens, keeping step in
+     a shambling way, and conversing with one another, Rossetti
+     exclaimed: "There's Wordsworth and Ruskin virtuously taking
+     a walk!"
+
+He thought Wordsworth was too much the High Priest of Nature to be
+her lover: too much concerned to transfigure into poetry his
+pantheo-Christian philosophy regarding Nature, to drop to his knees in
+simple love of her to thank God that she was beautiful. It was hard to
+side with Rossetti in his view of Wordsworth, partly because one feared
+he did not practise the patience necessary to a full appreciation of
+that poet, and was consequently apt to judge of him by fugitive lines
+read at random. In the connection in question, I instanced the lines
+(much admired by Coleridge) beginning
+
+     Suck, little babe, O suck again!
+     It cools my blood, it cools my brain,
+
+and ending--
+
+     The breeze I see is in the tree,
+     It comes to cool my babe and me.
+
+But Rossetti would not see that this last couplet denoted the point of
+artistic vision at which the poet of nature identified himself with her,
+in setting aside or superseding all proprieties of mere speech. To him
+Wordsworth's Idealism (which certainly had the German trick of keeping
+close to the ground) only meant us to understand that the forsaken
+woman through whose mouth the words are spoken (in _The Affliction of
+Margaret_ ------ of ------) saw _the breeze shake the tree_ afar off.
+And this attitude towards Wordsworth Rossetti maintained down to the
+end. I remember that sometime in March of the year in which he died, Mr.
+Theodore Watts, who was paying one of his many visits to see him in his
+last illness at the sea-side, touched, in conversation, upon the power
+of Wordsworth's style in its higher vein, and instanced a noble passage
+in the _Ode to Duty_, which runs:
+
+     Stern Lawgiver! yet thou dost wear
+     The Godhead's most benignant grace;
+     Nor know we anything so fair
+     As is the smile upon thy face;
+     Flowers laugh before thee on their beds;
+     And fragrance in thy footing treads;
+     Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong;
+     And the most ancient heavens, through Thee, are
+               fresh and strong.
+
+Mr. Watts spoke with enthusiasm of the strength and simplicity, the
+sonorousness and stately march of these lines; and numbered them, I
+think, among the noblest verses yet written, for every highest quality
+of style.
+
+But Rossetti was unyielding, and though he admitted the beauty of the
+passage, and was ungrudging in his tribute to another passage which I
+had instanced--
+
+          O joy that in our embers--
+
+he would not allow that Wordsworth ever possessed a grasp of the
+great style, or that (despite the Ode on Immortality and the sonnet on
+_Toussaint L'Ouverture_, which he placed at the head of the poet's work)
+vital lyric impulse was ever fully developed in his muse. He said:
+
+     As to Wordsworth, no one regards the great Ode with more
+     special and unique homage than I do, as a thing absolutely
+     alone of its kind among all greatest things. I cannot say
+     that anything else of his with which I have ever been
+     familiar (and I suffer from long disuse of all familiarity
+     with him) seems at all on a level with this.
+
+In all humility I regard his depreciatory opinion, not at all as a
+valuable example of literary judgment, but as indicative of a clear
+radical difference of poetic bias between the two poets, such as must
+in the same way have made Wordsworth resist Rossetti if he had appeared
+before him. I am the more confirmed in this view from the circumstance
+that Rossetti, throughout the period of my acquaintance with him, seemed
+to me always peculiarly and, if I may be permitted to say so without
+offence, strangely liable to Mr. Watts's influence in his critical
+estimates, and that the case instanced was perhaps the only one in
+which I knew him to resist Mr. Watts's opinion upon a matter of poetical
+criticism, which he considered to be almost final, as his letters to
+me, printed in Chapter VIII. of this volume, will show. I had a striking
+instance of this, and of the real modesty of the man whom I had heard
+and still hear spoken of as the most arrogant man of genius of his
+day, on one of the first occasions of my seeing him. He read out to me
+an additional stanza to the beautiful poem _Cloud Confines_: As he
+read it, I thought it very fine, and he evidently was very fond of it
+himself. But he surprised me by saying that he should not print it. On
+my asking him why, he said:
+
+"Watts, though he admits its beauty, thinks the poem would be better
+without it."
+
+"Well, but you like it yourself," said I.
+
+"Yes," he replied; "but in a question of gain or loss to a poem, I feel
+that Watts must be right."
+
+And the poem appeared in _Ballads and Sonnets_ without the stanza in
+question. The same thing occurred with regard to the omission of the
+sonnet _Nuptial Sleep_ from the new edition of the Poems in 1881. Mr.
+Watts took the view (to Rossetti's great vexation at first) that this
+sonnet, howsoever perfect in structure and beautiful from the artistic
+point of view, was "out of place and altogether incongruous in a group
+of sonnets so entirely spiritual as _The House of Life_," and Rossetti
+gave way: but upon the subject of Wordsworth in his relations to
+Coleridge, Keats, and Shelley, he was quite inflexible to the last.
+
+In a letter treating of other matters, Rossetti asked me if I thought
+"Christabel" really existed as a mediaeval name, or existed at all
+earlier than Coleridge. I replied that I had not met with it earlier
+than the date of the poem. I thought Coleridge's granddaughter must
+have been the first person to bear the name. The other names in the poem
+appear to belong to another family of names,--names with a different
+origin and range of expression,--Leoline, Geraldine, Roland, and most
+of all Bracy. It seemed to me very possible that Coleridge invented
+the name, but it was highly probable that he brought it to England from
+Germany, where, with Wordsworth, he visited Klopstock in 1798, about
+the period of the first part of the poem. The Germans have names of a
+kindred etymology and, even if my guess proved wide of the truth,
+it might still be a fact that the name had German relations. Another
+conjecture that seemed to me a reasonable one was that Coleridge evolved
+the name out of the incidents of the opening passages of the poem.
+The beautiful thing, not more from its beauty than its suggestiveness,
+suited his purpose exactly. Rossetti replied:
+
+     Resuming the thread of my letter, I come to the question of
+     the name Christabel, viz.:--as to whether it is to be found
+     earlier than Coleridge. I have now realized afresh what I
+     knew long ago, viz.:--that in the grossly garbled ballad of
+     _Syr Cauline_, in Percy's _Reliques_, there is a Ladye
+     Chrystabelle, but as every stanza in which her name appears
+     would seem certainly to be Percy's own work, I suspect him
+     to be the inventor of the name, which is assuredly a much
+     better invention than any of the stanzas; and from this
+     wretched source Coleridge probably enriched the sphere of
+     symbolic nomenclature. However, a genuine source may turn
+     up, but the name does not sound to me like a real one. As to
+     a German origin, I do not know that language, but would not
+     the second syllable be there the one accented? This seems to
+     render the name shapeless and improbable.
+
+I mentioned an idea that once possessed me despotically. It was that
+where Coleridge says
+
+     Her silken robe and inner vest
+     Dropt to her feet, and full in view
+     Behold! her bosom and half her side--
+     A sight to dream of and not to tell,. . .
+     Shield the Lady Christabel!
+
+he meant ultimately to show _eyes_ in the _bosom_ of the witch. I
+fancied that if the poet had worked out this idea in the second part,
+or in his never-compassed continuation, he must have electrified his
+readers. The first part of the poem is of course immeasurably superior
+in witchery to the second, despite two grand things in the latter--the
+passage on the severance of early friendships, and the conclusion;
+although the dexterity of hand (not to speak of the essential spirit of
+enchantment) which is everywhere present in the first part, and nowhere
+dominant in the second, exhibits itself not a little in the marvellous
+passage in which Geraldine bewitches Christabel. Touching some jocose
+allusion by Rossetti to the necessity which lay upon me to startle
+the world with a continuation of the poem based upon the lines of my
+conjectural scheme, I asked him if he knew that a continuation was
+actually published in Coleridge's own paper, _The Morning Post_. It
+appeared about 1820, and was satirical of course--hitting off many
+peculiarities of versification, if no more. With Coleridge's playful
+love of satirising himself anonymously, the continuation might even be
+his own. Rossetti said:
+
+     I do not understand your early idea of _eyes_ in the bosom
+     of Geraldine. It is described as "that bosom old," "that
+     bosom cold," which seems to show that its withered character
+     as combined with Geraldine's youth, was what shocked and
+     warned Christabel. The first edition says--
+
+          A sight to dream of, not to tell:--
+          And she is to sleep with Christabel!
+
+     I dare say Coleridge altered this, because an idea arose,
+     which I actually heard to have been reported as Coleridge's
+     real intention by a member of contemporary circles (P. G.
+     Patmore, father of Coventry P. who conveyed the report to
+     me)--viz., that Geraldine was to turn out to be a man!! I
+     believe myself that the conclusion as given by Gillman from
+     Coleridge's account to him is correct enough, only not
+     picturesquely worded. It does not seem a bad conclusion by
+     any means, though it would require fine treatment to make it
+     seem a really good one. Of course the first part is so
+     immeasurably beyond the second, that one feels Chas. Lamb's
+     view was right, and it should have been abandoned at that
+     point. The passage on sundered friendship is one of the
+     masterpieces of the language, but no doubt was written quite
+     separately and then fitted into _Christabel_. The two lines
+     about Roland and Sir Leoline are simply an intrusion and an
+     outrage. I cannot say that I like the conclusion nearly so
+     well as this. It hints at infinite beauty, but somehow
+     remains a sort of cobweb. The conception, and partly the
+     execution, of the passage in which Christabel repeats by
+     fascination the serpent-glance of Geraldine, is magnificent;
+     but that is the only good narrative passage in part two. The
+     rest seems to have reached a fatal facility of jingling, at
+     the heels whereof followed Scott.
+
+There are, I believe, many continuations of _Christabel_. Tupper did
+one! I myself saw a continuation in childhood, long before I saw the
+original, and was all agog to see it for years. Our household was all of
+Italian, not English environment, and it was only when I went to school
+later that I began to ransack bookstalls. The continuation in question
+was by one Eliza Stewart, and appeared in a shortlived monthly thing
+called _Smallwood's Magazine_, to which my father contributed
+some Italian poetry, and so it came into the house. I thought the
+continuation spirited then, and perhaps it may have been so. This must
+have been before 1840 I think.
+
+The other day I saw in a bookseller's catalogue--_Christabess_, by S. T.
+Colebritche, translated from the Doggrel by Sir Vinegar Sponge (1816).
+This seems a parody, not a continuation, in the very year of the poem's
+first appearance! I did not think it worth two shillings,--which was the
+price.... Have you seen the continuation of _Christabel_ in _European
+Magazine?_ of course it _might_ have been Coleridge's, so far as the
+date of the composition of the original was concerned; but of course it
+was not his.
+
+I imagine the "Sir Vinegar Sponge" who translated "_Christabess_ from
+the _Doggerel_" must belong to the family of Sponges described by
+Coleridge himself, who give out the liquid they take in much dirtier
+than they imbibe it. I thought it very possible that Coleridge's epigram
+to this effect might have been provoked by the lampoon referred to, and
+Rossetti also thought this probable. Immediately after meeting with the
+continuation of _Christabel_ already referred to, I came across great
+numbers of such continuations, as well as satires, parodies, reviews,
+etc., in old issues of _Blackwood, The Quarterly, and The Examiner_.
+They seemed to me, for the most part, poor in quality--the highest reach
+of comicality to which they attained being concerned with side slaps at
+_Kubla Khan_:
+
+     Better poetry I make
+     When asleep than when awake.
+     Am I sure, or am I guessing?
+     Are my eyes like those of Lessing?
+
+This latter elegant couplet was expected to serve as a scorching satire
+on a letter in the _Biographia Literaria_ in which Coleridge says he
+saw a portrait of Lessing at Klopstock's, in which the eyes seemed
+singularly like his own. The time has gone by when that flight of
+egotism on Coleridge's part seemed an unpardonable offence, and to our
+more modern judgment it scarcely seems necessary that the author of
+_Christabel_ should be charged with a desire to look radiant in the
+glory reflected by an accidental personal resemblance to the author of
+_Laokoon_. Curiously enough I found evidence of the Patmore version
+of Coleridge's intentions as to the ultimate disclosure of the sex of
+Geraldine in a review in the _Examiner_. The author was perhaps Hazlitt,
+but more probably the editor himself, but whether Hazlitt or Hunt,
+he must have been within the circle that found its rallying point at
+Highgate, and consequently acquainted with the earliest forms of the
+poem. The review is an unfavourable one, and Coleridge is told in it
+that he is the dog-in-the-manger of literature, and that his poem is
+proof of the fact that he can write better nonsense poetry than any man
+in England. The writer is particularly wroth with what he considers
+the wilful indefiniteness of the author, and in proof of a charge of
+a desire not to let the public into the secret of the poem, and of
+a conscious endeavour to mystify the reader, he deliberately accuses
+Coleridge of omitting one line of the poem as it was written, which,
+if printed, would have proved conclusively that Geraldine had seduced
+Christabel after getting drunk with her,--for such sequel is implied if
+not openly stated. I told Rossetti of this brutality of criticism, and
+he replied:
+
+     As for the passage in _Christabel_, I am not sure we quite
+     understand each other. What I heard through the Patmores (a
+     complete mistake I am sure), was that Coleridge meant
+     Geraldine to prove to be a man bent on the seduction of
+     Christabel, and presumably effecting it. What I inferred (if
+     so) was that Coleridge had intended the line as in first
+     ed.: "And she is to sleep with Christabel!" as leading up
+     too nearly to what he meant to keep back for the present.
+     But the whole thing was a figment.
+
+What is assuredly not a figment is, that an idea, such as the elder
+Patmore referred to, really did exist in the minds of Coleridge's
+so-called friends, who after praising the poem beyond measure whilst
+it was in manuscript, abused it beyond reason or decency when it was
+printed. My settled conviction is that the _Examiner_ criticism, and
+_not_ the sudden advent of the idea after the first part was written,
+was the cause of Coleridge's adopting the correction which Rossetti
+mentions.
+
+Rossetti called my attention to a letter by Lamb, about which he
+gathered a good deal of interesting conjecture:
+
+     There is (given in _Cottle_) an inconceivably sarcastic,
+     galling, and admirable letter from Lamb to Coleridge,
+     regarding which I never could learn how the deuce their
+     friendship recovered from it. Cottle says the only reason he
+     could ever trace for its being written lay in the three
+     parodied sonnets (one being _The House that Jack Built_)
+     which Coleridge published as a skit on the joint volume
+     brought out by himself, Lamb, and Lloyd. The whole thing was
+     always a mystery to me. But I have thought that the passage
+     on division between friends was not improbably written by
+     Coleridge on this occasion. Curiously enough (if so) Lamb,
+     who is said to have objected greatly to the idea of a second
+     part of _Christabel_, thought (on seeing it) that the
+     mistake was redeemed by this very passage. He _may_ have
+     traced its meaning, though, of course, its beauty alone was
+     enough to make him say so.
+
+The three satirical sonnets which Rossetti refers to appear not only in
+_Cottle_ but in a note to the _Biographia Literaria_ They were published
+first under a fictitious name in _he Monthly Magazine_ They must be
+understood as almost wholly satirical of three distinct facets of
+Coleridge's own manner, for even the sonnet in which occur the words
+
+     Eve saddens into night, {*}
+
+has its counterpart in _The Songs of the Pixies_--
+
+     Hence! thou lingerer, light!
+     Eve saddens into night,
+
+and nearly all the phrases satirised are borrowed from Coleridge's
+own poetry, not from that of Lamb or Lloyd. Nevertheless, Cottle was
+doubtless right as to the fact that Lamb took offence at Coleridge's
+conduct on this account, and Rossetti almost certainly made a good shot
+at the truth when he attributed to the rupture thereupon ensuing the
+passage on severed friendship. The sonnet on _The House that Jack Built_
+is the finest of the three as a satire.
+
+     * So in the Biographia Literaria; in Cottle, "Eve darkens
+     into night."
+
+Indeed, the figure used therein as an equipoise to "the hindward charms"
+satirises perfectly the style of writing characterised by inflated
+thought and imagery. It may be doubted if there exists anything more
+comical; but each of the companion sonnets is good in its way. The
+egotism, which was a constant reproach urged by _The Edinburgh_ critics
+and by the "Cockney Poets" against the poets of the Lake School, is
+splendidly hit off in the first sonnet; the low and creeping meanness,
+or say, simpleness, as contrasted with simplicity, of thought and
+expression, which was stealing into Wordsworth's work at that period,
+is equally cleverly ridiculed in the second sonnet. In reproducing the
+sonnets, Coleridge claims only to have satirised types. As to Lamb's
+letter, it is, indeed, hard to realise the fact that the "gentle-hearted
+Charles," as Coleridge himself named him, could write a galling letter
+to the "inspired charity-boy," for whom at an early period, and again at
+the end, he had so profound a reverence. Every word is an outrage, and
+every syllable must have hit Coleridge terribly. I called Rossetti's
+attention to the surprising circumstance that in a letter written
+immediately after the date of the one in question, Loyd tells Cottle
+that he has never known Lamb (who is at the moment staying with him) so
+happy before as _just then!_ There can hardly be a doubt, however,
+that Rossetti's conjecture is a just one as to the origin of the great
+passage in the second part of _Christabel_. Touching that passage I
+called his attention to an imperfection that I must have perceived, or
+thought I perceived long before,--an imperfection of craftsmanship that
+had taken away something of my absolute enjoyment of its many beauties.
+The passage ends--
+
+     They parted, ne'er to meet again!
+     But never either found another
+     To free the hollow heart from paining--
+     They stood aloof, the scars remaining,
+     Like cliffs which had been rent asunder;
+     A dreary sea now flows between,
+     But neither heat, nor frost, nor thunder,
+     Shall wholly do away, I ween,
+     The marks of that which once hath been.
+
+This is, it is needless to say, in almost every respect, finely felt,
+but the words italicised appeared to display some insufficiency of
+poetic vision. First, nothing but an earthquake would (speaking within
+limits of human experience) unite the two sides of a ravine; and though
+_frost_ might bring them together temporarily, _heat and thunder_ must
+be powerless to make or to unmake the _marks_ that showed the cliffs to
+have once been one, and to have been violently torn apart. Next, _heat_
+(supposing _frost_ to be the root-conception) was obviously used merely
+as a balancing phrase, and _thunder_ simply as the inevitable rhyme to
+_asunder_. I have not seen this matter alluded to, though it may have
+been mentioned, and it is certainly not important enough to make any
+serious deduction from the pleasure afforded by a passage that is in
+other respects so rich in beauty as to be able to endure such modest
+discounting. Rossetti replied:
+
+     Your geological strictures on Coleridge's "friendship"
+     passage are but too just, and I believe quite new. But I
+     would fain think that this is "to consider too nicely." I am
+     certainly willing to bear the obloquy of never having been
+     struck by what is nevertheless obvious enough. {*}... Lamb's
+     letter _is_ a teazer. The three sonnets in _The Monthly
+     Magazine_ were signed "Nehemiah Higginbotham," and were
+     meant to banter good-humouredly the joint vol. issued by
+     Coleridge, Lamb, and Lloyd,--C. himself being, of course,
+     the most obviously ridiculed. I fancy you have really hit
+     the mark as regards Coleridge's epigram and Sir Vinegar
+     Sponge. He might have been worth two shillings after all....
+     _I_ also remember noting Lloyd's assertion of Lamb's
+     exceptional happiness just after that letter. It is a
+     puzzling affair. However C. and Lamb got over it (for I
+     certainly believe they were friends later in life) no one
+     seems to have recorded. The second vol. of Cottle, after the
+     raciness of the first, is very disappointing.
+
+     * In a note on this passage, Canon Dixon writes: What is
+     meant is that in cliffs, actual cliffs, the action of these
+     agents, heat, cold, thunder even, might have an obliterating
+     power; but in the severance of friendship, there is nothing
+     (heat of nature, frost of time, thunder of accident or
+     surprise) that can wholly have the like effect.
+
+On one occasion Rossetti wrote, saying he had written a sonnet on
+Coleridge, and I was curious to learn what note he struck in dealing
+with so complex a subject. The keynote of a man's genius or character
+should be struck in a poetic address to him, just as the expressional
+individuality of a man's features (freed of the modifying or emphasising
+effects of passing fashions of dress), should be reproduced in his
+portrait; but Coleridge's mind had so many sides to it, and his
+character had such varied aspects--from keen and beautiful sensibility
+to every form of suffering, to almost utter disregard of the calls of
+domestic duty--that it seemed difficult to think what kind of idea,
+consistent with the unity of the sonnet and its simplicity of scheme,
+would call up a picture of the entire man. It goes against the grain to
+hint, adoring the man as we must, that Coleridge's personal character
+was anything less than one of untarnished purity, and certainly the
+persons chiefly concerned in the alleged neglect, Southey and his own
+family, have never joined in the strictures commonly levelled against
+him: but whatever Coleridge's personal ego may have been, his creative
+ego was assuredly not single in kind or aim. He did some noble things
+late in life (instance the passage on "Youth and Age," and that on "Work
+without Hope"), but his poetic genius seemed to desert him when Kant
+took possession of him as a gigantic windmill to do battle with, and
+it is now hard to say which was the deeper thing in him: the poetry to
+which he devoted the sunniest years of his young life, or the philosophy
+which he firmly believed it to be the main business of his later life
+to expound. In any discussion of the relative claims of these two to
+the gratitude of the ages that follow, I found Rossetti frankly took one
+side, and constantly said that the few unequal poems Coleridge had left
+us, were a legacy more stimulating, solacing, and enduring, than his
+philosophy could have been, even if he had perfected that attempt of his
+to reconcile all learning and revelation, and if, when perfected, the
+whole effort had not proved to be a work of supererogation. I doubt if
+Rossetti quite knew what was meant by Coleridge's "system," as it was
+so frequently called, and I know that he could not be induced by any
+eulogiums to do so much as look at the _Biographia Literaria_, though
+once he listened whilst I read a chapter from it. He had certainly
+little love of the German elements in Coleridge's later intellectual
+life, and hence it is small matter for surprise that in his sonnet
+he chose for treatment the more poetic side of Coleridge's genius.
+Nevertheless, I think it remains an open question whether the philosophy
+of the author of _The Ancient Mariner_ was more influenced by his
+poetry, or his poetry by his philosophy; for the philosophy is always
+tinged by the mysticism of his poetry, and his poetry is always
+adumbrated by the disposition, which afterwards become paramount, to
+dig beneath the surface for problems of life and character, and for
+"suggestions of the final mystery of existence." I have heard Rossetti
+say that what came most of all uppermost in Coleridge, was his wonderful
+intuitive knowledge and love of the sea, whose billowy roll, and break,
+and sibilation, seemed echoed in the very mechanism of his verse. Sleep,
+too, Rossetti thought, had given up to Coleridge her utmost secrets; and
+perhaps it was partly due to his own sad experience of the dread curse
+of insomnia, as well as to keen susceptibility to poetic beauty, that
+tears so frequently filled his eyes, and sobs rose to his throat when he
+recited the lines beginning
+
+     O sleep! it is a gentle thing--
+
+affirming, meantime, that nothing so simple and touching had ever been
+written on the subject. As to the sonnet, he wrote:
+
+     About Coleridge (whom I only view as a poet, his other
+     aspects being to my apprehension mere bogies) I conceive the
+     leading point about his work is its human love, and the
+     leading point about his career, the sad fact of how little
+     of it was devoted to that work. These are the points made in
+     my sonnet, and the last is such as I (alas!) can sympathise
+     with, though what has excluded more poetry with me
+     (_mountains_ of it I don't want to heap) has chiefly been
+     livelihood necessity. I 'll copy the sonnet on opposite
+     page, only I 'd rather you kept it to yourself. _Five_ years
+     of _good_ poetry is too long a tether to give his Muse, I
+     know.
+
+     His Soul fared forth (as from the deep home-grove
+          The father Songster plies the hour-long quest)
+          To feed his soul-brood hungering in the nest;
+     But his warm Heart, the mother-bird above
+     Their callow fledgling progeny still hove
+          With tented roof of wings and fostering breast
+          Till the Soul fed the soul-brood. Richly blest
+     From Heaven their growth, whose food was Human Love.
+
+     Tet ah! Like desert pools that shew the stars
+          Once in long leagues--even such the scarce-snatched hours
+          Which deepening pain left to his lordliest powers:--
+     Heaven lost through spider-trammelled prison-bars!
+          Five years, from seventy saved! yet kindling skies
+          Own them, a beacon to our centuries.
+
+As a minor point I called Rossetti's attention to the fact that
+Coleridge lived to be scarcely more than sixty, and that his poetic
+career really extended over six good years; and hence the thirteenth
+line was amended to
+
+          Six years from sixty saved.
+
+I doubted if "deepening pain" could be charged with the whole burden
+of Coleridge's constitutional procrastination, and to this objection
+Rossetti replied:
+
+     Line eleven in my first reading was "deepening _sloth_;" but
+     it seemed harsh--and--damn it all! much too like the spirit
+     of Banquo!
+
+Before Coleridge, however, as to warmth of admiration, and before him
+also as to date of influence, Keats was Rossetti's favourite among
+modern English poets. Our friend never tired of writing or talking about
+Keats, and never wearied of the society of any one who could generate
+a fresh thought concerning him. But his was a robust and
+masculine admiration, having nothing in common with the effeminate
+extra-affectionateness that has of late been so much ridiculed. His
+letters now to be quoted shall speak for themselves as to the qualities
+in Keats whereon Rossetti's appreciation of him was founded: but I may
+say in general terms that it was not so much the wealth of expression
+in the author of _Endymion_ which attracted the author of _Rose Mary_
+as the perfect hold of the supernatural which is seen in _La Belle Dame
+Sans Merci_ and in the fragment of the _Eve of St. Mark_. At the time of
+our correspondence, I was engaged upon an essay on Keats, and _a propos_
+of this Rossetti wrote:
+
+     I shall take pleasure in reading your Keats article when
+     ready. He was, among all his contemporaries who established
+     their names, the one true heir of Shakspeare. Another
+     (unestablished then, but partly revived since) was Charles
+     Wells. Did you ever read his splendid dramatic poem _Joseph
+     and his Brethren?_
+
+In this connexion, as a better opportunity may not arise, I take
+occasion to tell briefly the story of the revival of Wells. The facts
+to be related were communicated to me by Rossetti in conversation years
+after the date of the letter in which this first allusion to the
+subject was made. As a boy, Rossetti's chief pleasure was to ransack
+old book-stalls, and the catalogues of the British Museum, for forgotten
+works in the bye-ways of English poetry. In this pursuit he became
+acquainted with nearly every curiosity of modern poetic literature, and
+many were the amusing stories he used to tell at that time, and in after
+life, of the titles and contents of the literary oddities he
+unearthed. If you chanced at any moment to alight upon any obscure book
+particularly curious from its pretentiousness and pomposity, from the
+audacity of its claim, or the obscurity and absurdity of its writing,
+you might be sure that Rossetti would prove familiar with it, and be
+able to recapitulate with infinite zest its salient features; but if you
+happened to drop upon ever so interesting an edition of a book (not of
+verse) which you supposed to be known to many a reader, the chances were
+at least equal that Rossetti would prove to know nothing of it but its
+name. In poring over the forgotten pages of the poetry of the beginning
+of the century, Rossetti, whilst still a boy, met with the scriptural
+drama of _Joseph and his Brethren_. He told me the title did not much
+attract him, but he resolved to glance at the contents, and with
+that swiftness of insight which throughout life distinguished him, he
+instantly perceived its great qualities. I think he said he then wrote a
+letter on the subject to one of the current literary journals, probably
+_The Literary Gazette_, and by this means came into correspondence with
+Charles Wells himself. Rather later a relative of Wells's sought out the
+young enthusiast in London, intending to solicit his aid in an attempt
+to induce a publisher to undertake a reprint, but in any endeavours to
+this end he must have failed. For many years a copy of the poem, left
+by the author's request at Rossetti's lodgings, lay there untouched,
+and meantime the growing reputation of the young painter brought
+about certain removals from Blackfriars Bridge to other chambers, and
+afterwards to the house in Cheyne Walk. In the course of these changes
+the copy got hidden away, and it was not until numerous applications for
+it had been made that it was at length ferreted forth from the chaos of
+some similar volumes huddled together in a corner of the studio. Full of
+remorse for having so long abandoned a laudable project, Rossetti
+then took up afresh the cause of the neglected poem, and enlisted
+Mr. Swinburne's interest so warmly as to prevail with him to use his
+influence to secure its publication. This failed however; but in _The
+Athenaeum_ of April 8, 1876, appeared Mr. Watts's elaborate account of
+Wells and the poem and its vicissitudes, whereupon Messrs. Chatto and
+Windus offered to take the risk of publishing it, and the poem
+went forth with the noble commendatory essay of the young author of
+_Atalanta_, whose reputation was already almost at its height, though
+it lacked (doubtless from a touch of his constitutional procrastination)
+the appreciative comment of the discerning critic who first discovered
+it. To return to the Keats correspondence:
+
+     I am truly delighted to hear how young you are. In original
+     work, a man does some of his best things by your time of
+     life, though he only finds it out in a rage much later, at
+     some date when he expected to know no longer that he had
+     ever done them. Keats hardly died so much too early--not at
+     all if there had been any danger of his taking to the modern
+     habit eventually--treating material as product, and shooting
+     it all out as it comes. Of course, however, he wouldn't; he
+     was getting always choicer and simpler, and my favourite
+     piece in his works is _La Belle Dame Sans Merci_--I suppose
+     about his last. As to Shelley, it is really a mercy that he
+     has not been hatching yearly universes till now. He might, I
+     suppose; for his friend Trelawny still walks the earth
+     without great-coat, stockings, or underclothing, this
+     Christmas (1879). In criticism, matters are different, as to
+     seasons of production.... I am writing hurriedly and
+     horribly in every sense. Write on the subject again and I'll
+     try to answer better. All greetings to you.
+
+     P.S.--I think your reference to Keats new, and on a high
+     level It calls back to my mind an adaptation of his self-
+     chosen epitaph which I made in my very earliest days of
+     boyish rhyming, when I was rather proud to be as cockney as
+     Keats _could_ be. Here it is,--
+
+          Through one, years since damned and forgot
+               Who stabbed backs by the Quarter,
+          Here lieth one who, while Time's stream
+               Still runs, as God hath taught her,
+          Bearing man's fame to men, hath writ
+               His name upon that water.
+
+     Well, the rhyme is not so bad as Keats's
+
+                     Ear
+          Of Goddess of Theraea!--
+
+     nor (tell it not in Gath!) as---
+
+          I wove a crown before her
+          For her I love so dearly,
+          A garland for Lenora!
+
+     Is it possible the laurel crown should now hide a venerated
+     and impeccable ear which was once the ear of a cockney?
+
+This letter was written in 1879, and the opening clauses of it were no
+doubt penned under the impression, then strong on Rossetti's mind, that
+his first volume of poems would prove to be his only one; but when,
+within two years afterwards he completed _Rose Mary_, and wrote _The
+King's Tragedy_ and _The White Ship_, this accession of material
+dissipated the notion that a man does much his best work before
+twenty-five. It can hardly escape the reader that though Rossetti's
+earlier volume displayed a surprising maturity, the subsequent one
+exhibited as a whole infinitely more power and feeling, range of
+sympathy, and knowledge of life. The poet's dramatic instinct developed
+enormously in the interval between the periods of the two books, and,
+being conscious of this, Rossetti used to say in his later years that he
+would never again write poems as from his own person.
+
+     You say an excellent thing [he writes] when you ask, "Where
+     can we look for more poetry per page than Keats furnishes?"
+     It is strange that there is not yet one complete edition of
+     him. {*} No doubt the desideratum (so far as care and
+     exhaustiveness go), will be supplied when
+
+     Forman's edition appears. He is a good appreciator too, as I
+     have reason to say. You will think it strange that I have
+     not seen the Keats love-letters, but I mean to do so.
+     However, I am told they add nothing to one's idea of his
+     epistolary powers.... I hear sometimes from Buxton Forman,
+     and was sending him the other day an extract (from a book
+     called _The Unseen World_) which doubtless bears on the
+     superstition which Keats intended to develope in his lovely
+     _Eve of St. Mark_--a fragment which seems to me to rank with
+     _La Belle Dame Sans Merci_, as a clear advance in direct
+     simplicity.... You ought to have my recent Keats sonnet, so
+     I send it. Your own plan, for one on the same subject, seems
+     to me most beautiful. Do it at once. You will see that mine
+     is again concerned with the epitaph, and perhaps my reviving
+     the latter in writing you was the cause of the sonnet.
+
+     * Rossetti afterwards admitted in conversation that the
+     Aldine Edition seemed complete, though I think he did not
+     approve of the chronological arrangement therein adopted; at
+     least he thought that arrangement had many serious
+     disadvantages.
+
+Rossetti formed a very different opinion of Keats's love-letters, when,
+a year later, he came to read them. At first he shared the general view
+that letters so _intimes_ should never have been made public. Afterwards
+the book had irresistible charms for him, from the first page whereon
+his old friend, Mr. Bell Scott, has vigorously etched Severn's drawing
+of the once redundant locks of rich hair, dank and matted over
+the forehead cold with the death-dew, down to the last line of the
+letterpress. He thought Mr. Forman's work admirably done, and as for the
+letters themselves, he believed they placed Keats indisputably among
+the highest masters of English epistolary style. He considered that all
+Keats's letters proved him to be no weakling, and that whatever walk
+he had chosen he must have been a master. He seemed particularly struck
+with the apparently intuitive perception of Shakspeare's subtlest
+meanings, which certain of the letters display. In a note he said:
+
+     Forman gave me a copy of Keats's letters to Fanny Brawne.
+     The silhouette given of the lady is sadly disenchanting, and
+     may be the strongest proof existing of how much a man may
+     know about abstract Beauty without having an artist's eye
+     for the outside of it.
+
+The Keats sonnet, as first shown to me, ran as follows:
+
+     The weltering London ways where children weep,--
+        Where girls whom none call maidens laugh, where gain,
+        Hurrying men's steps, is yet by loss o'erta'en:--
+     The bright Castalian brink and Latinos' steep:--
+     Such were his paths, till deeper and more deep,
+        He trod the sands of Lethe; and long pain,
+        Weary with labour spurned and love found vain,
+     In dead Rome's sheltering shadow wrapped his sleep.
+
+     O pang-dowered Poet, whose reverberant lips
+     And heart-strung lyre awoke the moon's eclipse,--
+        Thou whom the daisies glory in growing o'er,--
+     Their fragrance clings around thy name, not writ,
+     But rumour'd in water, while the fame of it
+        Along Time's flood goes echoing evermore.
+
+I need hardly say that this sonnet seemed to me extremely noble in
+sentiment, and in music a glorious volume of sound. I felt, however,
+that it would be urged against it that it did not strike the keynote of
+the genius of Keats; that it would be said that in all the particulars
+in which Rossetti had truthfully and pathetically described London,
+Keats was in rather than of it; and that it would be affirmed that Keats
+lived in a fairy world of his own inventing, caring little for the storm
+and stress of London life. On the other hand, I knew it could be replied
+that Keats was not indifferent to the misery of city life; that it bore
+heavily upon him; that it came out powerfully and very sadly in his _Ode
+to the Nightingale_, and that it may have been from sheer torture in
+the contemplation of it that he fled away to a poetic world of his own
+creating. Moreover, Rossetti's sonnet touched the life, rather than
+the genius, of Keats, and of this it struck the keynote in the opening
+lines. I ventured to think that the second and third lines wanted a
+little clarifying in the relation in which they stood. They seemed to
+be a sudden focussing of the laughter and weeping previously mentioned,
+rather than, what they were meant to be, a natural and necessary
+equipoise showing the inner life of Keats as contrasted with his outer
+life. To such an objection as this, Rossetti said:
+
+     I am rather aghast for my own lucidity when I read what you
+     say as to the first quatrain of my Keats sonnet. However, I
+     always take these misconceptions as warnings to the Muse,
+     and may probably alter the opening as below:
+
+          The weltering London ways where children weep
+          And girls whom none call maidens laugh,--strange road,
+          Miring his outward steps who inly trode
+          The bright Castalian brink and Latinos' steep:--
+          Even such his life's cross-paths: till deathly deep
+          He toiled through sands of Lethe, etc.
+          I 'll say more anent Keats anon.
+
+About the period of this portion of the correspondence (1880) I was
+engaged reading up old periodicals dating from 1816 to 1822. My purpose
+was to get at first-hand all available data relative to the life of
+Keats. I thought I met with a good deal of fresh material, and as the
+result of my reading I believed myself able to correct a few errors
+as to facts into which previous writers on the subject had fallen. Two
+things at least I realised--first, that Keats's poetic gift developed
+very rapidly, more rapidly perhaps than that of Shelley; and, next, that
+Keats received vastly more attention and appreciation in his day than is
+commonly supposed. I found it was quite a blunder to say that the first
+volume of miscellaneous poems fell flat. Lord Houghton says in error
+that the book did not so much as seem to signal the advent of a new
+Cockney poet! It is a fact, however, that this very book, in conjunction
+with one of Shelley's and one of Hunt's, all published 1816-17, gave
+rise to the name "The Cockney School of Poets," which was invented by
+the writer signing "Z." in _Blackwood_ in the early part of 1818. Nor
+had Keats to wait for the publication of the volume before attaining
+to some poetic distinction. At the close of 1816, an article, under
+the head of "Young Poets," appeared in _The Examiner_, and in this
+both Shelley and Keats were dealt with. Then _The Quarterly_ contained
+allusions to him, though not by name, in reviews of Leigh Hunt's work,
+and _Blackwood_ mentioned him very frequently in all sorts of places as
+"Johnny Keats"--all this (or much of it) before he published anything
+except occasional sonnets and other fugitive poems in _The Examiner_ and
+elsewhere. And then when _Endymion_ appeared it was abundantly reviewed.
+_The Edinburgh_ reviewers had nothing on it (the book cannot have been
+sent to them, for in 1820 they say they have only just met with it),
+and I could not find anything in the way of _original_ criticism in
+_The Examiner_; but many provincial papers (in Manchester, Exeter, and
+elsewhere) and some metropolitan papers retorted on _The Quarterly_. All
+this, however, does not disturb the impression which (Lord Houghton and
+Mr. W. M. Rossetti notwithstanding) I have been from the first compelled
+to entertain, namely, that "labour spurned" did more than all else to
+kill Keats _in 1821_.
+
+Most men who rightly know the workings of their own minds will agree
+that an adverse criticism rankles longer than a flattering notice
+soothes; and though it be shown that Keats in 1820 was comparatively
+indifferent to the praise of _The Edinburgh_, it cannot follow that in
+1818 he must have been superior to the blame of _The Quarterly_. It is
+difficult to see why a man may not be keenly sensitive to what the world
+says about him, and yet retain all proper manliness as a part of his
+literary character. Surely it was from the mistaken impression that
+this could not be, and that an admission of extreme sensitiveness to
+criticism exposed Keats to a charge of effeminacy that Lord Houghton
+attempted to prove, against the evidence of all immediate friends,
+against the publisher's note to _Hyperion_, against the | poet's
+self-chosen epitaph, and against all but one or two of the most
+self-contained of his letters, that the soul of Keats was so far from
+being "snuffed out by an article," that it was more than ordinarily
+impervious to hostile comment, even when it came in the shape of
+rancorous abuse. In all discussion of the effects produced upon Keats
+by the reviews in _Blackwood and The Quarterly_, let it be remembered,
+first, that having wellnigh exhausted his small patrimony, Keats was
+to be dependent upon literature for his future subsistence; next, that
+Leigh Hunt attempted no defence of Keats when the bread was being taken
+out of his mouth, and that Keats felt this neglect and remarked upon
+it in a letter in which he further cast some doubt upon the purity of
+Hunt's friendship. Hunt, after Keats's death, said in reference to this:
+"Had he but given me the hint!" The _hint_, forsooth! Moreover, I can
+find no sort of allusion in _The Examiner_ for 1821, to the death of
+Keats. I told Rossetti that by the reading of the periodicals of the
+time, I formed a poor opinion of Hunt. Previously I was willing to
+believe in his unswerving loyalty to the much greater men who were his
+friends, but even that poor confidence in him must perforce be shaken
+when one finds him silent at a moment when Keats most needs his voice,
+and abusive when Coleridge is a common subject of ridicule. It was
+all very well for Hunt to glorify himself in the borrowed splendour of
+Keats's established fame when the poet was twenty years dead, and
+to make much of his intimacy with Coleridge after the homage of two
+generations had been offered him, but I know of no instance (unless in
+the case of Shelley) in which Hunt stood by his friends in the winter
+of their lives, and gave them that journalistic support which was, poor
+man, the only thing he ever had to give, whatever he might take. I have,
+however, heard Mr. H. A. Bright (one of Hawthorne's intimate friends in
+England) say that no man here impressed the American romancer so much as
+Hunt for good qualities, both of heart and head. But what I have stated
+above, I believe to be facts; and I have gathered them at first-hand,
+and by the light of them I do not hesitate to say that there is no
+reason to believe that it was Keats's illness alone that caused him to
+regard Hunt's friendship with suspicion. It is true, however, that when
+one reads Hunt's letter to Severn at Borne, one feels that he must be
+forgiven. On this pregnant subject Rossetti wrote:
+
+     Thanks for yours received to-day, and for all you say with
+     so much more kind solicitousness than the matter deserved,
+     about the opening of the Keats sonnet. I have now realized
+     that the new form is a gain in every way; and am therefore
+     glad that, though arising in accident, I was led to make the
+     change.... All you say of Keats shows that you have been
+     reading up the subject with good results. I fancy it would
+     hardly be desirable to add the sonnets you speak of (as
+     being worthless) at this date, though they might be valuable
+     for quotation as to the course of his mental and physical
+     state. I do not myself think that any poems now included
+     should be removed, but the reckless and tasteless plan of
+     the gatherings hitherto (in which the _Nightingale_ and other
+     such masterpieces are jostled indiscriminately, with such
+     wretched juvenile trash as _Lines to some Ladies on
+     receiving a Shelly etc_), should of course be amended, and
+     the rubbish (of which there is a fair quantity), removed to
+     a "Juvenile" or other such section. It is a curious fact
+     that among a poet's early writings, some will really be
+     juvenile in this sense, while others, written at the same
+     time, will perhaps take rank at last with his best efforts.
+     This, however, was not substantially the case with Keats.
+
+     As to Leigh Hunt's friendship for Keats, I think the points
+     you mention look equivocal; but Hunt was a many-laboured and
+     much belaboured man, and as much allowance as may be made on
+     this score is perhaps due to him--no more than that much.
+     His own powers stand high in various ways--poetically higher
+     perhaps than is I at present admitted, despite his
+     detestable flutter and airiness for the most part. But
+     assuredly by no means could he have stood so high in the
+     long-run, as by a loud and earnest defence of Keats. Perhaps
+     the best excuse for him is the remaining possibility of an
+     idea on his part, that any defence coming from one who had
+     himself so many powerful enemies might seem to Keats
+     rather to! damage than improve his position.
+
+     I have this minute (at last) read the first instalment of
+     your Keats paper, and return it.... One of the most marked
+     points in the early recognition of Keats's claims, as
+     compared with the recognition given to other poets, is the
+     fact that he was the only one who secured almost at once a
+     _great_ poet as a close and obvious imitator--viz., Hood,
+     whose first volume is more identical with Keats's work than
+     could be said of any other similar parallel. You quote some
+     of Keats's sayings. One of the most characteristic I think
+     is in a letter to Haydon:--
+
+     "I value more the privilege of seeing great things in
+     loneliness, than the fame of a prophet." I had not in mind
+     the quotations you give from Keats as bearing on the poetic
+     (or prophetic) mission of "doing good." I must say that I
+     should not have thought a longer career thrown away upon him
+     (as you intimate) if he had continued to the age of anything
+     only to give joy. Nor would he ever have done any "good" at
+     all. Shelley did good, and perhaps some harm with it.
+     Keats's joy was after all a flawless gift.
+
+     Keats wrote to Shelley:--"You, I am sure, will forgive me
+     for sincerely remarking that you might curb your magnanimity
+     and be more of an artist, and load every rift of your
+     subject with ore." Cheeky!--but not so much amiss. Poetry,
+     and no prophecy however, must come of that mood,--and no
+     pulpit would have held Keats's wings,--the body and mind
+     together were not heavy enough for a counterweight.... Did
+     you ever meet with
+
+<center>ENDIMION
+
+AN EXCELLENT FANCY FIRST COMPOSED IN FRENCH
+
+By Monsieur GOMBAULD
+
+AND NOW ELEGANTLY INTERPRETED
+
+By RICHARD HURST, Gentleman
+
+1639.
+
+?</center>
+
+     It has very finely engraved plates of the late Flemish type.
+     There is a poem of Vaughan's on Gombauld's _Endimion_, which
+     might make one think it more fascinating than it really is.
+     Though rather prolix, however, it has attractions as a
+     somewhat devious romantic treatment of the subject. The
+     little book is one of the first I remember in this world,
+     and I used to dip into it again and again as a child, but
+     never yet read it through. I still possess it. I dare say it
+     is not easily met with, and should suppose Keats had
+     probably never seen it. If he had, he might really have
+     taken a hint or two for his scheme, which is hardly so clear
+     even as Gombauld's, though its endless digressions teem with
+     beauty.... I do not think you would benefit at all by seeing
+     Gombauld's _Endimion_. Vaughan's poem on it might be worth
+     quoting as showing what attention the subject had received
+     before Keats. I have the poem in Gilfillan's _Less-Known
+     Poets_.
+
+Rossetti took a great interest in the fund started for the relief of
+Mme. de Llanos, Keats's sister, whose circumstances were seriously
+reduced. He wrote:
+
+     By the bye, I don't know whether the subscription for
+     Keats's old and only surviving sister (Madme de Llanos) has
+     been at all ventilated in Liverpool. It flags sorely. Do you
+     think there would be any chance in your neighbourhood? If
+     so, prospectuses, etc., could be sent.
+
+I did not view the prospect of subscriptions as very hopeful, and so
+conceived the idea of a lecture in the interests of the fund. On this
+project, Rossetti wrote:
+
+     I enclose prospectuses as to the Keats subscription. I may
+     say that I did not know the list would accompany them--still
+     less that contributions would be so low generally as to
+     leave me near the head of the list--an unenviable sort of
+     parade.... My own opinion about the lecture question is
+     this. You know best whether such a lecture could be turned
+     to the purposes of your Keats article (now in progress), or
+     rather be so much deduction from the freshness of its
+     resources: and this should be the _absolute_ test of its
+     being done or not done.... I think, if it can be done
+     without impoverishing your materials, the method of getting
+     Lord Houghton to preside and so raising as much from it as
+     possible is doubtless the right one. Of course I view it as
+     far more hopeful than mere distribution of any number of
+     prospectuses.... Even L25 would be a great contribution to
+     the fund.
+
+The lecture project was not found feasible, and hence it was abandoned.
+Meantime the kindness of friends enabled me to add to the list a good
+number of subscriptions, but feeling scarcely satisfied with any such
+success as I might be likely to have in that direction, I opened, by
+the help of a friend, a correspondence with Lord Houghton with a view
+to inducing him to apply for a pension for the lady. It then transpired
+that Lord Houghton had already applied to Lord Beaconsfield for a
+pension for Mme. Llanos, and would doubtless have got it, had not Mr.
+Buxton Forman applied for a grant from the Royal Bounty, which was
+easier to give. I told Rossetti of this fact and he said:
+
+     I am not surprised about Lord H., and feel sure it is a pity
+     he was not left to try Beaconsfield, but I judge the
+     projectors on the other side knew nothing of his intentions.
+     However, _I_ was in no way a projector.
+
+In the end Lord Houghton repeated to Mr. Gladstone the application he
+had made to Lord Beaconsfield, and succeeded.
+
+Rossetti must have been among the earliest admirers of Keats. I remarked
+on one occasion that it was very natural that Lord Houghton should
+consider himself in a sense the first among men now living to champion
+the poet and establish his name, and Rossetti admitted that this was so,
+and was ungrudging in his tribute to Lord Houghton's services towards
+the better appreciation of Keats; but he contended, nevertheless,
+that he had himself been one of the first writers of the generation
+succeeding the poet's own to admire and uphold him, and that this was
+at a time when it made demand of some courage to class him among the
+immortals, when an original edition of any of his books could be bought
+for sixpence on a bookstall, and when only Leigh Hunt, Cowden Clarke,
+Hood, Benjamin Haydon, and perhaps a few others, were still living of
+those who recognised his great gifts.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+Rossetti's primary interest in Chatterton dates back to an early period,
+as I find by the date, 1848, in the copy he possessed of the poet's
+works. But throughout a long interval he neglected Chatterton, and
+it was not until his friend Theodore Watts, who had made Chatterton
+a special study, had undertaken to select from and write upon him in
+Ward's _English Poets_, that he revived his old acquaintance. Whatever
+Rossetti did he did thoroughly, and hence he became as intimate perhaps
+with the Rowley antiques as any other man had ever been. His letters
+written during the course of his Chatterton researches must, I think,
+prove extremely interesting. He says:
+
+     Glancing at your Keats MS., I notice (in a series of
+     parallels) the names of Marlowe and Savage; but not the less
+     "marvellous" than absolutely miraculous Chatterton. Are you
+     up in his work? He is in the very first rank! Theod. Watts
+     is "doing him" for the new selection of poets by Arnold and
+     Ward, and I have contributed a sonnet to Watts's article....
+     I assure you Chatterton's name _must_ come in somewhere in
+     the parallel passage. He was as great as any English poet
+     whatever, and might absolutely, had he lived, have proved
+     the only man in England's theatre of imagination who could
+     have bandied parts with Shakspeare. The best way of getting
+     at him is in Skeat's Aldine edition (G. Bell and Co., 1875).
+     Read him carefully, and you will find his acknowledged work
+     essentially as powerful as his antiques, though less evenly
+     successful--the Rowley work having been produced in Bristol
+     leisure, however indigent, and the modern poetry in the very
+     fangs of London struggle. Strong derivative points are to be
+     found in Keats and Coleridge from the study of Chatterton. I
+     feel much inclined to send the sonnet (on Chatterton) as you
+     wish, but really think it is better not to ventilate these
+     things till in print. I have since written one on Blake. Not
+     to know Chatterton is to be ignorant of the _true_ day-
+     spring of modern romantic poetry.... I believe the 3d vol.
+     of Ward's _Selections of English Poetry_, for which Watts is
+     selecting from Chatterton, will soon be out,--but these
+     excerpts are very brief, as are the notices. The rendering
+     from the Rowley antique will be much better than anything
+     formerly done. Skeat is a thorough philologist, but no hand
+     at all when substitution becomes unavoidable in the text....
+     Read the _Ballad of Charity, the Eclogues, the songs in
+     AElla_, as a first taste. Among the modern poems _Narva and
+     Mared_, and the other _African Eclogues_. These are alone in
+     that section _poetry absolute_, and though they are very
+     unequal, it has been most truly said by Malone that to throw
+     the _African Eclogues_ into the Rowley dialect would be at
+     once a satisfactory key to the question whether Chatterton
+     showed in his own person the same powers as in the person of
+     Rowley. Among the satirical and light modern pieces there
+     are many of a first-. rate order, though generally unequal.
+     Perfect specimens, however, are _The Revenge, a Burletta,
+     Skeat, vol i; Verses to a Lady, p. 84; Journal Sixth, p. 33;
+     The Prophecy, p. 193; and opening of Fragment, p. 132._ I
+     would advise you to consult the original text.
+
+Mr. Watts, it seems, with all his admiration of Chatterton, finding that
+he could not go to Rossetti's length in comparing him with Shakspeare,
+did not in the result consider the sonnet on Chatterton referred to in
+the foregoing letter, and given below, suitable to be embodied in his
+essay:
+
+     With Shakspeare's manhood at a boy's wild heart,--
+        Through Hamlet's doubt to Shakspeare near allied,
+        And kin to Milton through his Satan's pride,--
+     At Death's sole door he stooped, and craved a dart;
+     And to the dear new bower of England's art,--
+        Even to that shrine Time else had deified,
+        The unuttered heart that soared against his side,--
+     Drove the fell point, and smote life's seals apart.
+
+     Thy nested home-loves, noble Chatterton,
+        The angel-trodden stair thy soul could trace
+        Up Redcliffe's spire; and in the world's armed space
+     Thy gallant sword-play:--these to many an one
+     Are sweet for ever; as thy grave unknown,
+        And love-dream of thine unrecorded face.
+
+Some mention was made in this connection of Rossetti's young connection,
+Oliver Madox Brown, who wrote _Gabriel Denver_ (otherwise _The Black
+Swan_) at seventeen years of age. I mentioned the indiscreet remark of
+a friend who said that Oliver had enough genius to stock a good few
+Chattertons, and thereupon Rossetti sent me the following outburst:
+
+     You must take care to be on the right tack about Chatterton.
+     I am very glad to find the gifted Oliver M. B. already an
+     embryo classic, as I always said he would be; but those who
+     compare net results in such cases as his and Chatterton's
+     cannot know what criticism means. The nett results of
+     advancing epochs, however permanent on accumulated
+     foundation-work, are the poorest of all tests as to relative
+     values. Oliver was the product of the most teeming hot-beds
+     of art and literature, and even of compulsory addiction to
+     the art of painting, in which nevertheless he was rapidly
+     becoming as much a proficient as in literature. What he
+     would have been if, like the ardent and heroic Chatterton,
+     he had had to fight a single-handed battle for art and bread
+     together against merciless mediocrity in high places,--what
+     he would _then_ have become, I cannot in the least
+     calculate; but we know what Chatterton became. Moreover, C.
+     at his death, was two years younger than Oliver--a whole
+     lifetime of advancement at that age frequently--indeed
+     always I believe in leading cases. There are few indeed whom
+     the facile enthusiasm for contemporary models does not
+     deaden to the truly balanced claims of successful efforts in
+     art. However, look at Watts's remodelled extracts when the
+     vol comes out, and also at what he says in detail as to
+     Chatterton, Coleridge, and Keats.
+
+Of course Rossetti was right in what he said of comparative criticism
+when brought to bear in such cases as those of Chatterton and Oliver
+Madox Brown. Net results are certainly the poorest tests of relative
+values where the work done belongs to periods of development. We cannot,
+however, see or know any man except through and in his work, and net
+results must usually be accepted as the only concrete foundation for
+judging of the quality of his genius. Such judgment will always be
+influenced, nevertheless, by considerations such as Rossetti mentions.
+Touching Chatterton's development, it were hardly rash to say that it
+appears incredible that the _African Eclogues_ should have been written
+by a boy of seventeen, and, in judging of their place in poetry, one is
+apt to be influenced by one's first feeling of amazement. Is it possible
+that the Rowley poems may owe much of their present distinction to the
+early astonishment that a boy should have written them, albeit they have
+great intrinsic excellencies such as may insure them a high place when
+the romance, intertwined with their history, has been long forgotten?
+But Chatterton is more talked of than read, and this has been so from
+the first. The antiques are all but unknown; certain of the acknowledged
+poems are remembered, and regarded as fervid and vigorous, and many of
+the lesser pieces are thought slight, weak, and valueless. People do not
+measure the poorer things in Chatterton with his time and opportunities,
+or they would see only amazing strength and knowledge of the world in
+all he did. Those lesser pieces were many of them dashed off to answer
+the calls of necessity, to flatter the egotism of a troublesome friend,
+or to wile away a moment of vacancy. Certainly they must not be set
+against his best efforts. As for Chatterton's life, the tragedy of it
+is perhaps the most moving example of what Coleridge might have
+termed the material pathetic. Pathetic, however, as his life was, and
+marvellous as was his genius, I miss in him the note of personal purity
+and majesty of character. I told Rossetti that, in my view, Chatterton
+lacked sincerity, and on this point he wrote:
+
+     I must protest finally about Chatterton, that he lacks
+     nothing because lacking the gradual growth of the emotional
+     in literature which becomes evident in Keats--still less its
+     excess, which would of course have been pruned, in Oliver.
+     The finest of the Rowley poems--_Eclogues, Ballad of
+     Charity, etc_., rank absolutely with the finest poetry in
+     the language, and gain (not lose) by moderation. As to what
+     you say of C.'s want of political sincerity (for I cannot
+     see to what other want you can allude), surely a boy up to
+     eighteen may be pardoned for exercising his faculty if he
+     happens to be the one among millions who can use grown men
+     as his toys. He was an absolute and untarnished hero, but
+     for that reckless defying vaunt. Certainly that most
+     vigorous passage commencing--
+
+          "Interest, thou universal God of men," etc.
+
+     reads startlingly, and comes in a questionable shape. What
+     is the answer to its enigmatical aspect? Why, that he
+     _meant_ it, and that all would mean it at his age, who had
+     his power, his daring, and his hunger. Still it does,
+     perhaps, make one doubt whether his early death were well or
+     ill for him. In the matter of Oliver (whom no one
+     appreciates more than I do), remember that it was impossible
+     to have more opportunities than _he_ had, or on the other
+     side _fewer_ than Chatterton had. Chatterton at seventeen or
+     less said--
+
+          "Flattery's a cloak, and I will put it on."
+
+Blake (probably late in life) said--
+
+          "Innocence is a winter gown."
+
+     ... I _have_ read the Chatterton article in the review
+     mentioned. If Watts had done it, it would have been
+     immeasurably better. There seems to me, who am very well up
+     in Chatterton, no point whatever made in the article. Why
+     does no one ever even allude to the two attributed portraits
+     of Chatterton--one belonging to Sir H. Taylor, and the other
+     in the Salford Museum? Both seem to be the same person
+     clearly, and a good find for Chatterton, but not conceivably
+     done from him. Nevertheless, I _suspect_ there may be a
+     sidelong genuineness in them. Chatterton was acquainted with
+     one Alcock, a miniature painter at Bristol, to whom he
+     addressed a poem. Had A. painted C. it would be among the
+     many recorded facts; but it would be singular even if, in
+     C.'s rapid posthumous fame, A. had never been asked to make
+     a reminiscent likeness of him. Prom such likeness by the
+     miniature painter these _portraits might_ derive--both being
+     life-sized oil heads. There is a savour of Keats in them,
+     though a friend, taking up the younger-looking of the two,
+     said it reminded him of Jack Sheppard! And not such a bad
+     Chatterton-compound either! But I begin to think I have said
+     all this before.... Oliver, or "Nolly," as he was always
+     called, was a sort of spread-eagle likeness of his handsome
+     father, with a conical head like Walter Scott. I must
+     confess to you, that, in this world of books, the only one
+     of his I have read, is _Gabriel Denver_, afterwards
+     reprinted in its original and superior form as _The Black
+     Swan_, but published with the former title in his lifetime.
+
+Rossetti formed no such philosophic estimate of Chatterton's
+contribution to the romantic movement in English poetry as has been
+formulated in the essay in Ward's _Poets_. A critic, in the sense of one
+possessed of a natural gift of analysis, Rossetti assuredly! was not. No
+man's instinct for what is good in poetry was ever swifter or surer than
+that of Rossetti. You might always distrust your judgment if you
+found it at variance with his where abstract power and beauty were in
+question. Sooner or later you would inevitably find yourself gravitating
+to his view. But here Rossetti's function as a critic ended. His was
+at best only the criticism of the creator. Of the gift of ultimate
+classification he had none, and never claimed to have any, although now
+and again (as where he says that Chatterton was the day-spring of
+modern romantic poetry), he seems to give sign of a power of critical
+synthesis.
+
+Rossetti's interest in Blake, both as poet and painter, dates back to
+an early period of his life. I have heard him say that at sixteen or
+seventeen years of age he was already one of Blake's warmest admirers,
+and at the time in question, 1845, the author of the _Songs of
+Innocence_ had not many readers to uphold him. About four years later,
+Rossetti made an exceptionally lucky discovery, for he then found in
+the possession of Mr. Palmer, an attendant at the British Museum, an
+original manuscript scrap-book of Blake's, containing a great body of
+unpublished poetry and many interesting designs, as well as three or
+four remarkably effective profile sketches of the author himself. The
+Mr. Palmer who held the little book was a relative of the landscape
+painter of the same name, who was Blake's friend, and hence the
+authenticity of the manuscript was ascertainable on other grounds than
+the indisputable ones of its internal evidences. The book was offered to
+Rossetti for ten shillings, but the young enthusiast was at the time a
+student of art, and not much in the way of getting or spending even
+so inconsiderable a sum. He told me, however, that at this period his
+brother William, who was, unlike himself, engaged in some reasonably
+profitable occupation, was at all times nothing loath to advance small
+sums for the purchase of such literary or other treasures as he used
+to hunt up out of obscure corners: by his help the Blake manuscript was
+bought, and proved for years a source of infinite pleasure and profit,
+resulting, as it did, in many very important additions to Blake
+literature when Gilchrist's _Life and Works_ of that author came to be
+published. It is an interesting fact, mention of which ought not to
+be omitted, that at the sale of Rossetti's library, which took place
+a little while after his decease, the scrap-book acquired in the way I
+describe was sold for one hundred and five guineas.
+
+The sum was a large one, but the little book was undoubtedly the most
+valuable literary relic of Blake then extant. About the time when a new
+edition of Gilchrist's _Life_ was in the press, Rossetti wrote:
+
+     My evenings have been rather trenched upon lately by helping
+     Mrs. Gilchrist with a new edition of the _Life of Blake_....
+     I don't know if you go in much for him. The new edition of
+     the _Life_ will include a good number of additional letters
+     (from Blake to Hayley), and some addition (though not great)
+     to my own share in the work; as well as much important
+     carrying-on of my brother's catalogue of Blake's works. The
+     illustrations will, I trust, receive valuable additions
+     also, but publishers are apt to be cautious in such
+     expenses. I am writing late at night, to fill up a fag-end
+     of bedtime, and shall write again on this head.
+
+Rossetti's "own share" in this work consisted of the writing of the
+supplementary chapter (left by Gilchrist, with one or two unimportant
+passages merely, at the beginning), and the editing of the poems. When
+there arose, subsequently, some idea of my reviewing the book, Rossetti
+wrote me the following letter, full of disinterested solicitude:
+
+     You will be quite delighted with an essay on Blake by Jas.
+     Smetham, which occurs in vol ii.; it is a noble thing; and
+     at the stupendous design called _Plague_ (vol. i.). I have
+     extracted a passage properly belonging to the same essay,
+     which is as fine as English _can_ be, and which I am sorry
+     to perceive (I think) that Mrs. G. has omitted from the body
+     of the essay because quoted in another place. This essay is
+     no less than a masterpiece. I wrote the supplementary
+     chapter (vol. i.), except a few opening paragraphs by
+     Gilchrist,--and in it have now made some mention of Smetham,
+     an old and dear friend of mine.
+
+     You will admire Shields's paper on the wonderful series of
+     Young's _Night Thoughts_. My brother and I both helped in
+     this new edition, but I added little to what I had done
+     before. I brought forward a portentous series of passages
+     about one "Scofield" in Blake's _Jerusalem_, but did not
+     otherwise write that chapter, except as regards the
+     illustrations. However, don't mention what I have done (in
+     case you write on the subject) except so far as the indices
+     show it, and of course I don't wish to be put forward at
+     all. What I do wish is, that you should say everything that
+     can be gratifying to Mrs. G. as to her husband's work. There
+     is a plate of Blake's Cottage by young Gilchrist which is
+     truly excellent.
+
+As I have already said, Rossetti traversed the bypaths of English
+literature (particularly of English poetry) as few can ever have
+traversed them. A favourite work with him was Gilfillan's _Less-Read
+British Poets_, a copy of which had been presented by Miss Boyd. He
+says:
+
+     Did you ever read Christopher Smart's _Song to David_, the
+     only great _accomplished_ poem of the last century? The
+     accomplished ones are Chatterton's,--of course I mean
+     earlier than Blake or Coleridge, and without reckoning so
+     exceptional a genius as Burns.... You will find Smart's poem
+     a masterpiece of rich imagery, exhaustive resources, and
+     reverberant sound. It is to be met with in Gilfillan's
+     _Specimens of the Less-Read British Poets_ (3 vols. Nichol,
+     Edin., 1860)....
+
+     I remember your mentioning Gilfillan as having encouraged
+     your first efforts. He was powerful, though sometimes rather
+     "tall" as a writer, generally most just as a critic, and
+     lastly, a much better man, intellectually and morally, than
+     Aytoun, who tried to "do for" him. His notice of Swift, in
+     the volume in question, has very great force and eloquence.
+     His whole edition of the _British Poets_ is the best of any
+     to read, being such fine type and convenient bulk and weight
+     (a great thing for an arm-chair reader). Unfortunately, he
+     now and then (in the _Less-Read Poets_) cuts down the
+     extracts almost to nothing, and in some cases excises
+     objectionabilities, which is unpardonable. Much better leave
+     the whole out. Also, the edition includes the usual array of
+     nobodies--Addison, Akenside, and the whole alphabet down to
+     Zany and Zero; whereas a great many of the _less-read_ would
+     have been much-read by every worthy reader if they had only
+     been printed in full. So well printed an edition of Donne
+     (for instance) would have been a great boon; but from him
+     Gilfillan only gives (among the _less-read_) the admirable
+     _Progress of the Soul_ and some of the pregnant _Holy
+     Sonnets_. Do you know Donne? There is hardly an English poet
+     better worth a thorough knowledge, in spite of his provoking
+     conceits and occasional jagged jargon.
+
+     The following paragraph on Whitehead is valuable:
+
+     Charles Whitehead's principal poem is _The Solitary_, which
+     in its day had admirers. It perhaps most recalls Goldsmith.
+     He also wrote a supernatural poem called _Ippolito_. There
+     was a volume of his poems published about 1848, or perhaps a
+     little later, by Bentley. It is disappointing, on the whole,
+     from the decided superiority of its best points to the
+     rest.... But the novel of _Richard Savage_ is very
+     remarkable,--a real character really worked out.
+
+To aid me in certain researches I was at the time engaged in making in
+the back-numbers of almost forgotten periodicals, Rossetti wrote:
+
+     The old _Monthly Mag._ was the precursor of the _New
+     Monthly_, which started about 1830, or thereabouts I think,
+     after which the old one ailed, but went on till fatal old
+     Heraud finished it off by editing it, and fairly massacred
+     that elderly innocent. You speak, in a former letter
+     (touching the continuation of _Christabel_), of "a certain
+     European magazine." Are you aware that it was as old a thing
+     as _The Gentleman's_, and went on _ad infinitum?_ Other such
+     were the _Universal Magazine, the Scots' Magazine_--all
+     endless in extent and beginning time out of mind,--to say
+     nothing of the _Ladies' Magazine and Wits' Magazine_. Then
+     there was the _Annual Register_. All these are quarters in
+     which you might prosecute researches, and might happen to
+     find something about Keats. _The Monthly Magazine_ must have
+     commenced almost as early, I believe. I cannot help thinking
+     there was a similar _Imperial Magazine_.
+
+The following letter possesses an interest independent of its subject,
+which to me, however, is interest enough. Mr. William Watson had sent
+Rossetti a copy of a volume of poems he had just published, and
+had received a letter in acknowledgment, wherein our friend, with
+characteristic appreciativeness, said many cordial words of it:
+
+     Your young friend Watson [he said in a subsequent letter]
+     wrote me in a very modest mood for one who can do as he can
+     at his age. I think I must have hurriedly mis-expressed
+     myself in writing to him, as he seems to think I wished to
+     dissuade him from following narrative poetry. Not in the
+     least--I only wished him to try his hand at clearer dramatic
+     life. The dreamy romantic really hardly needs more than one
+     vast Morris in a literature--at any rate in a century. Not
+     that I think him derivable from Morris--he goes straight
+     back to Keats with a little modification. The narrative,
+     whether condensed or developed, is at any rate a far better
+     impersonal form to work in than declamatory harangue,
+     whether calling on the stars or the Styx. I don't know in
+     the least how Watson is faring with the critics. He must not
+     be discouraged, in any case, with his real and high gifts.
+
+The young poet, in whom Rossetti saw so much to applaud, can scarcely be
+said to have fared at all at the hands of the critics.
+
+Here is a pleasant piece of literary portraiture, as valuable from the
+peep it affords into Rossetti's own character as from the description it
+gives of the rustic poet:
+
+     The other evening I had the pleasant experience of meeting
+     one to whom I have for about two years looked with interest
+     as a poet of the native rustic kind, but often of quite a
+     superior order. I don't know if you noticed, somewhere about
+     the date referred to, in _The Athenaeum_, a review of poems
+     by Joseph Skipsey. Skip-sey has exquisite--though, as in all
+     such cases (except of course Burns's) not equal--powers in
+     several directions, but his pictures of humble life are the
+     best. He is a working miner, and describes rustic loves and
+     sports, and the perils and pathos of pit-life with great
+     charm, having a quiet humour too when needed. His more
+     ambitious pieces have solid merit of feeling, but are much
+     less artistic. The other night, as I say, he came here, and
+     I found him a stalwart son of toil, and every inch a
+     gentleman. In cast of face he recalls Tennyson somewhat,
+     though more bronzed and brawned. He is as sweet and gentle
+     as a woman in manner, and recited some beautiful things of
+     his own with a special freshness to which one is quite
+     unaccustomed.
+
+Mr. Skipsey was a miner of North Shields, and in the review referred to
+much was made, in a delicate way, of his stern environments. His volume
+of lyrics is marked by the quiet humour. Rossetti speaks of, as well as
+by a rather exasperating inequality. Perhaps the best piece in it is a
+poem entitled _Thistle and Nettle_, treating with peculiar freshness of
+a country courtship. The coming together of two such entirely opposite
+natures was certainly curious, and only to be accounted for on the
+ground of Rossetti's breadth of poetic sympathy. It would be interesting
+to hear what the impressions were of such a rude son of toil upon
+meeting with one whose life must have seemed the incarnation of artistic
+luxury and indulgence. Later on I received the following:
+
+     Poor Skipsey! He has lost the friend who brought him to
+     London only the other day (T. Dixon), and who was his only
+     hold on intellectual life in his district. Dixon died
+     immediately on his return to the North, of a violent attack
+     of asthma to which he was subject. He was a rarely pure and
+     simple soul, and is doubtless gone to higher uses, though
+     few could have reached, with his small opportunities, to
+     such usefulness as he compassed here. He was Ruskin's
+     correspondent in a little book called (I think) _Work by
+     Tyne and Wear_. I got a very touching note from Skipsey on
+     the subject.
+
+From Mr. Skipsey he received a letter only a little while before his
+death, and to him he addressed one of the last epistles he penned.
+
+The following letter explains itself, and is introduced as much for
+the sake of the real humour which it displays, as because it affords an
+excellent idea of Rossetti's view of the true function of prose:
+
+     I don't like your Shakspeare article quite as well as the
+     first _Supernatural_ one, or rather I should say it does not
+     greatly add to it in my (first) view, though both might gain
+     by embodiment in one. I think there is _some_ truth in the
+     charge of metaphysical involution--the German element as I
+     should call it--and surely you are strong enough to be
+     English pure and simple. I am sure I could write 100 essays,
+     on all possible subjects (I once did project a series under
+     the title, _Essays written in the intervals of
+     Elephantiasis, Hydro-phobia, and Penal Servitude_), without
+     once experiencing the "aching void" which is filled by such
+     words as "mythopoeic," and "anthropomorphism." I do not find
+     life long enough to know in the least what they mean. They
+     are both very long and very ugly indeed--the latter only
+     suggesting to me a Vampire or Somnambulant Cannibal. (To
+     speak rationally, would not "man-evolved Godhead" be an
+     _English_ equivalent?) "Euhemeristic" also found me somewhat
+     on my beam-ends, though explanation is here given; yet I
+     felt I could do without Euhemerus; and _you_ perhaps without
+     the _humerous_. You can pardon me now; for _so_ bad a pun
+     places me at your mercy indeed. But seriously, simple
+     English in prose writing and in all narrative poetry
+     (however monumental language may become in abstract verse)
+     seems to me a treasure not to be foregone in favour of
+     German innovations. I know Coleridge went in latterly for as
+     much Germanism as his time could master; but his best genius
+     had then left him.
+
+It seems necessary to mention that I lectured in 1880, on the relation
+of politics to art, and in printing the lecture I asked Rossetti to
+accept the dedication of it, but this he declined to do in the generous
+terms I have already referred to. The letter that accompanied his
+graceful refusal is, however, so full of interesting personal matter
+that I offer it in this place, with no further explanation than that my
+essay was designed to show that just as great artists in past ages
+had participated in political struggles, so now they should not hold
+themselves aloof from controversies which immediately concern them:
+
+     I must admit, at all hazards, that my friends here consider
+     me exceptionally averse to politics; and I suppose I must
+     be, for I never read a parliamentary debate in my life! At
+     the same time I will add that, among those whose opinions I
+     most value, some think me not altogether wrong when I
+     venture to speak of the momentary momentousness and eternal
+     futility of many noisiest questions. However, you must
+     simply view me as a nonentity in any practical relation to
+     such matters. You have spoken but too generously of a sonnet
+     of mine in your lecture just received. I have written a few
+     others of the sort (which by-the-bye would not prove me a
+     Tory), but felt no vocation--perhaps no right---to print
+     them. I have always reproached myself as sorely amenable to
+     the condemnations of a very fine poem by Barberino, _On
+     Sloth against Sin_, which I translated in the Dante volume.
+     Sloth, alas! has but too much to answer for with me; and is
+     one of the reasons (though I will not say the only one), why
+     I have always fallen back on quality instead of quantity in
+     the little I have ever done. I think often with Coleridge:
+
+          Sloth jaundiced all: and from my graspless hand
+          Drop friendship's precious pearls like hour-glass sand.
+          I weep, yet stoop not: the faint anguish flows,
+          A dreamy pang in morning's feverish doze.
+
+     However, for all I might desire in the direction spoken of,
+     volition is vain without vocation; and I had better really
+     stick to knowing how to mix vermilion and ultramarine for a
+     flesh-grey, and how to manage their equivalents in verse. To
+     speak without sparing myself,--my mind is a childish one, if
+     to be isolated in Art is child's-play; at any rate I feel
+     that I do not attain to the more active and practical of the
+     mental functions of manhood. I can say this to you, because
+     I know you will make the best and not the worst of me; and
+     better than such feasible best I do not wish to appear. Thus
+     you see I don't think my name ought to head your
+     introductory paragraph--and there an end. And now of your
+     new lecture, and of the long letter I lately had from you.
+     At some moment I should like to know which pieces among the
+     translations are specially your favourites. Of the three
+     names you leash together as somewhat those of sensualists,
+     Cecco Angiolieri is really the only one--as for the
+     respectable Cino, he would be shocked indeed, though
+     certainly there are a few oddities bearing that way in the
+     sonnets between him and Dante (who is again similarly
+     reproached by his friend Cavalcanti), but I really _do_
+     suspect that in some cases similar to the one in question
+     about Cino (though not Guido and Dante) politics were really
+     meant where love was used as a metaphor.... I assure you,
+     you cannot say too much to me of this or any other work of
+     yours; in fact, I wish that we should communicate about
+     them. I have been thinking yet more on the relations of
+     politics and art. I do think seriously on consideration that
+     not only my own sluggishness, but vital fact itself, must
+     set to a great extent a _veto_ against the absolute
+     participation of artists in politics. When has it ever been
+     effected? True, Cellini was a bravo and David a good deal
+     like a murderer, and in these capacities they were not
+     without their political use in very turbulent times. But
+     when the attempt was made to turn Michael Angelo into a
+     "utility man" of that kind, he did (it is true) some
+     patriotic duty in the fortification of Florence; but it is
+     no less a fact that, when he had done all that he thought
+     became him, he retired to a certain trackless and forgotten
+     tower, and there stayed in some sort of peace (though much
+     in request) till he could lead his own life again; nor
+     should we forget the occasion on which he did not hesitate
+     even to betake himself to Venice as a refuge. Yet M. Angelo
+     was in every way a patriot, a philosopher, and a hero. I do
+     not say this to undervalue the scope of your theory. I think
+     possibilities are generally so much behind desirabilities
+     that there is no harm in any degree of incitement in the
+     right _direction_; and that is assuredly mental activity of
+     _all_ kinds. I judge you cannot suspect _me_ of thinking the
+     apotheosis of the early Italian poets (though surely
+     spiritual beauty, and not sensuality, was their general aim)
+     of more importance than the "unity of a great nation." But
+     it is in my minute power to deal successfully (I feel) with
+     the one, while no such entity, as I am, can advance or
+     retard the other; and thus mine must needs be the poorer
+     part. Nor (with alas, and again alas!) will Italy or another
+     twice have her day in its fulness.
+
+I happened to have said in speaking of self-indulgence among artists,
+that there probably existed those to whom it seemed more important to
+preserve such a pitiful possession as the poetical remains of Cecco
+Angiolieri than to secure the unity of a great nation. Rossetti half
+suspected I meant this for a playful backhanded blow at himself (for
+Cecco was a great favourite with him), and protested that no such
+individual could exist. I defended my charge by quoting Keats's--
+
+           ... the silver flow
+     Of Hero's tears, the swoon of Imogen,
+     Fair Pastorella in the bandit's den,
+     Are things to brood on with more ardency
+     Than the death-day of empires.
+
+But Rossetti grew weary of the jest:
+
+     I must protest that what you quote from Keats about "Hero's
+     tears," etc., fails to meet the text. Neither Shakspeare nor
+     Spenser assuredly was a Cecco; Marlowe may be most meant as
+     to "Hero," and he perhaps affords the shadow of a parallel
+     in career though not in work.
+
+The extract from Rosetti's letters with which I shall close this chapter
+is perhaps the most interesting yet made:
+
+     One point I must still raise, viz., that I, for one, cannot
+     conceive, even as the Ghost of a Flea, the ideal individual
+     who considers the Poetical Remains of Cecco Angiolieri of
+     more importance than the unity of a great nation! I think
+     this would have been better if much modified. Say for
+     instance--"A thing of some moment even while the contest is
+     waging for the political unity of a great nation." This is
+     the utmost reach surely of human comparative valuation. I
+     think you have brought in Benvenuto and Michael much to the
+     purpose. Shall I give you a parallel in your own style?
+
+     During the months for which poet Coleridge became private
+     Cumberback (a name in which he said his horse would have
+     concurred), it seems strange that, in such stirring times,
+     his regiment should not have been ordered off on foreign
+     service. In such case that pre-eminent member of the awkward
+     squad would assuredly have been the very first man killed.
+     Should we have been more the gainers by his patriotism or
+     the losers by his poetry? The very last man killed in the
+     last _sortie_ from Paris during the Prussian siege (he
+     _would_ go behind a buttress to "pot" a Prussian after
+     orders were given to retire, and so got "potted" himself)
+     was Henri Regnault, a painter, whose brilliant work was a
+     guiding beacon on the road of improvement in French methods
+     of art, if not in intellectual force. Who shall fail to
+     honour the noble ardour which drew him from the security of
+     his studies in Tunis to partake his country's danger? Yet
+     who shall forbear to sigh in thinking that, but for this,
+     his progressing work might still yearly be an element in
+     art-progress for Europe? Gerome and others betook themselves
+     to England instead, and are still benefiting the cause for
+     which they were before all things born. It was David who
+     said, "Si on tirait a mitraille sur les artistes, on n'y
+     tuerait pas un seul patriote!" _He_ was a patriot homicide,
+     and spoke probably what was true in the sense in which he
+     meant it. As I said, I am glad you turned Ben and Mike to
+     account, but the above is in some respects an open question.
+
+I have, as I say, a further batch of letters to introduce, but as these
+were, for the most part, written after an event which forms a land-mark
+in our acquaintance (I mean the occasion of our first meeting), I judge
+it is best to reserve them for a later section of this book. There are
+two forms, and, so far as I know, two only, in which a body of letters
+can be published with justice to the writer. Of these the first and most
+obvious form is to offer them chronologically _in extenso_ or with only
+such eliminations as seem inevitable, and the second is to tabulate them
+according to subject-matter, and print them in the order not of date but
+substance. There are advantages attending each method, and corresponding
+disadvantages also. The temptation to adopt the first of these was, in
+this case of Rossetti's letters, almost insurmountable, for nothing can
+be more charming in epistolary style than the easy grace with which the
+writer passes from point to point, evolving one idea out of another,
+interlinking subject with subject, and building up a fabric of which the
+meaning is everywhere inwoven. In this respect Rossetti's letters are
+almost as perfect as anything that ever left his hand; and, in freedom
+of phrase, in power of throwing off parenthetical reflections always
+faultlessly enunciated, in play of humour, often in eloquence (never
+becoming declamatory, and calling on "Styx or Stars"), sometimes
+in pathos, Rossetti's letters are, in a word, admirable. They
+are comparable in these respects with the best things yet done in
+English,--as pleasing and graceful as Cowper's letters, broader in range
+of subject than the letters of Keats, easier and more colloquial than
+those of Coleridge, and with less appearance of being intended for the
+public eye than is the case with the letters of Byron and of Shelley.
+Rossetti's letters have, moreover, a value quite apart from the merits
+of their epistolary style, in so far as they contain almost the only
+expression extant of his opinions on literary questions. And this is
+the circumstance that has chiefly weighed with me to offer them
+in fragmentary form interspersed with elucidatory comment bearing
+principally upon the occasions that called them forth.
+
+Such then as I have described was the nature of my intercourse with
+Rossetti during the first year and a half of our correspondence, and now
+the time had come when I was to meet my friend for the first time face
+to face. The elasticity of sympathy by which a man of genius, surrounded
+by constant friends, could yet bend to a new-comer who was a stranger
+and twenty-five years his junior, and think and feel with him; the
+generous appreciativeness by which he could bring himself to consider
+the first efforts of one quite unknown; and then the unselfishness that
+seemed always to prefer the claims of others to his own great claims,
+could command only the return of unqualified allegiance. Such were the
+feelings with which I went forth to my first meeting with Rossetti, and
+if at any later date, the ardour of my regard for him in any measure
+suffered modification, be sure when the time comes to touch upon it I
+shall make no more concealment of the causes that led to such a change
+than I have made of those circumstances, however personal in primary
+interest, that generated a friendship so unusual and to me so serious
+and important.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+It was in the autumn of 1880 that I saw Rossetti for the first time.
+Being then rather reduced in health I contemplated a visit to the
+sea-side and wrote saying that in passing through London I should avail
+myself of his oft-repeated invitation to visit him. I gave him this
+warning of my intention, remembering his declared dread of being taken
+unawares, but I came to know at a subsequent period that for one who was
+within the inner circle of his friends the necessity to advise him of
+a visit was by no means binding. His reception of my intimation of an
+intention to call upon him was received with an amount of epistolary
+ceremony which I recognise now by the light of further acquaintance as
+eminently characteristic of the man, although curiously contradictory of
+his unceremonious habits of daily life. The fact is that Rossetti was
+of an excessively nervous temperament, and rarely if ever underwent an
+ordeal more trying than a first meeting with any one to whom for some
+time previously he had looked forward with interest. Hence by return of
+the post that bore him my missive came two letters, the one obviously
+written and posted within an hour or two of the other. In the first of
+these he expressed courteously his pleasure at the prospect of seeing
+me, and appointed 8.30 p.m. the following evening as his dinner hour at
+his house in Cheyne Walk. The second letter begged me to come at 5.30 or
+6 p.m., so that we might have a long evening. "You will, I repeat," he
+says, "recognise the hole-and-cornerest of all existences in this big
+barn of mine; but come early and I shall read you some ballads, and
+we can talk of many things." An hour later than the arrival of these
+letters came a third epistle, which ran: "Of course when I speak of your
+dining with me, I mean tete-a-tete and without ceremony of any kind. I
+usually dine in my studio and in my painting coat!" I had before me a
+five hours' journey to London, so that in order to reach Chelsea at 6
+P.M., I must needs set out at mid-day, but oblivious of this necessity,
+Rossetti had actually posted a fourth letter on the morning of the day
+on which we were to meet begging me not on any account to talk, in the
+course of our interview, of a certain personal matter upon which we had
+corresponded. This fourth and final message came to hand the morning
+after the meeting, when I had the satisfaction to reflect that (owing
+more perhaps to the plethora of other subjects of interest than to any
+suspicion of its being tabooed) I had luckily eschewed the proscribed
+topic.
+
+Cheyne Walk was unknown to me at the time in question, except as the
+locality in and near which many men and women eminent in literature
+resided. It seems hard to realise that this was the case as recently as
+two years ago, now that so short an interval has associated it in one's
+mind with memories which seem to cover a large part of one's life. The
+Walk is not now exactly as picturesque as it appears in certain familiar
+old engravings; the new embankment and the gardens that separate it from
+the main thoroughfare have taken something from its beauty, but it still
+possesses many attractions, and among them a look of age which contrasts
+agreeably with the spic-and-span newness of neighbouring places. I found
+Rossetti's house, No. 16, answering in external appearances to the frank
+description he gave of it. It stands about mid-way between the Chelsea
+pier and the new redbrick mansions erected on the Chelsea embankment.
+It seems to be the oldest house in the Walk, and the exceptional
+proportions of its gate-piers, and the weight and mass of its gate and
+railings, suggests that probably at some period it stood alone, and
+commanded as grounds a large part of the space now occupied by the
+adjoining residences. Behind the house, during eighteen years of
+Rossetti's occupancy, there was a garden of almost an acre in extent,
+covering by much the larger part of the space enclosed by a block of
+four streets forming a square. At No. 4 Maclise had lived and died; at
+the same house George Eliot, after her marriage with Mr. Cross, had come
+to live; at No. 5, in the second street to the westward, Thomas Carlyle
+was still living, and a little beyond Cheyne Row stood the modest
+cottage wherein Turner died. Rossetti's house had to me the appearance
+of a plain Queen Anne erection, much mutilated by the introduction of
+unsightly bay-windows; the brickwork seemed to be falling into decay;
+the paint to be in serious need of renewal; the windows to be dull with
+the accumulation of the dust of years; the sills to bear the suspicion
+of cobwebs; the angles of the steps and the untrodden flags of the
+courtyard to be here and there overgrown with moss and weeds; and round
+the walls and up the reveals of doors and windows were creeping the
+tangled branches of the wildest ivy that ever grew untouched by shears.
+Such was the exterior of the home of the poet-painter when I walked up
+to it on the autumn evening of my first visit, and the interior of the
+house was at once like and unlike the exterior. The hall had a puzzling
+look of equal nobility and shabbiness. The floor was paved with
+beautiful white marble, which however, was partly covered with a strip
+of worn cocoa-nut matting; the ceiling was in one of its sections
+gracefully groined, and in each of the walls, which were lofty, there
+was an arched recess containing a piece of sculpture; an old inlaid
+rosewood clock filled a bulkhead on one side facing the door, and on the
+corresponding side stood a massive gas branch. A mezzotint lithograph by
+Legros was the only pictorial decoration of the walls, which were plain,
+and seemed not to have been distempered for many years. Three doors led
+out of the hall, one at each side, and one in front, and two corridors
+opened into it, but there was no sign of staircase, nor had it any light
+except such as was borrowed from the fanlight that looked into the
+porch. These facts I noted in the few minutes I stood waiting in the
+hall, but during the many months in which subsequently that house was my
+own home as well as Rossetti's, I came to see that the changes which the
+building must have undergone since the period of its erection, had so
+filled it with crooks and corners as to bewilder the most ingenious
+observer to account for its peculiarities.
+
+Very soon Rossetti came to me through the doorway in front, which proved
+to be the entrance to his studio. Holding forth both hands and crying
+'Hulloa,' he gave me that cheery, hearty greeting which I came to
+recognise as his alone, perhaps, in warmth and unfailing geniality among
+all the men of our circle. It was Italian in its spontaneity, and yet it
+was English in its manly reserve, and I remember with much tenderness of
+feeling that never to the last (not even when sickness saddened him,
+or after an absence of a few days or even hours) did it fail him when
+meeting with those friends to whom to the last he was really attached.
+Leading the way into the studio, he introduced me to his brother, who
+was there upon one of the evening visits, which at intervals of a week
+he was at that time making, with unfailing regularity. I should have
+described Rossetti, at this time, as a man who looked quite ten years
+older than his actual age, which was fifty-two, of full middle height
+and inclining to corpulence, with a round face that ought, one thought,
+to be ruddy but was pale, large grey eyes with a steady introspecting
+look, surmounted by broad protrusive brows and a clearly-pencilled ridge
+over the nose, which was well cut and had large breathing nostrils. The
+mouth and chin were hidden beneath a heavy moustache and abundant beard,
+which grew up to the ears, and had been of a mixed black-brown and
+auburn, and were now streaked with grey. The forehead was large, round,
+without protuberances, and very gently receding to where thin black
+curls, that had once been redundant, began to tumble down to the ears.
+The entire configuration of the head and face seemed to me singularly
+noble, and from the eyes upwards, full of beauty. He wore a pair of
+spectacles, and, in reading, a second pair over the first: but these
+took little from the sense of power conveyed by those steady eyes,
+and that "bar of Michael Angelo." His dress was not conspicuous, being
+however rather negligent than otherwise, and noticeable, if at all, only
+for a straight sack-coat buttoned at the throat, descending at least to
+the knees, and having large pockets cut into it perpendicularly at the
+sides. This garment was, I afterwards found, one of the articles of
+various kinds made to the author's own design. When he spoke, even in
+exchanging the preliminary courtesies of an opening conversation, I
+thought his voice the richest I had ever known any one to possess.
+It was a full deep barytone, capable of easy modulation, and with
+undertones of infinite softness and sweetness, yet, as I afterwards
+found, with almost illimitable compass, and with every gradation of tone
+at command, for the recitation or reading of poetry. The studio was a
+large room probably measuring thirty feet by twenty, and structurally as
+puzzling as the other parts of the house. A series of columns and arches
+on one side suggested that the room had almost certainly been at some
+period the site of an important staircase with a wide well, and on the
+other side a broad mullioned window reaching to the ceiling, seemed
+certainly to bear record of the occupant's own contribution to the
+peculiarities of the edifice. The fireplace was at an end of the room,
+and over and at each side of it were hung a number of fine drawings
+in chalk, chiefly studies of heads, with here and there a water-colour
+figure piece, all from Rossetti's hand. At the opposite end of the room
+hung some symbolic designs in chalk, _Pandora_ and _Proserpina_ being
+among the number, and easels of various sizes, some very large, bearing
+pictures in differing stages of completion, occupied positions on
+all sides of the floor, leaving room only for a sofa, with a bookcase
+behind, two old cabinets, two large low easy chairs, and a writing desk
+and chair at a window at the side, which was heavily darkened by the
+thick foliage of the trees that grew in the garden beyond.
+
+Dropping down on the sofa with his head laid low and his feet thrown up
+in a favourite attitude on the back, which must, I imagine, have been at
+least as easy as it was elegant, he began the conversation by bantering
+me upon what he called my "robustious" appearance compared with what he
+had been led to expect from gloomy reports of uncertain health. After a
+series of playful touches (all done in the easiest conceivable way,
+and conveying any impression on earth save the right one, that a first
+meeting with any man, however young and harmless, was little less than a
+tragic event to Rossetti) he glanced one by one at certain of the topics
+that had arisen in the course of our correspondence. I perceived that he
+was a ready, fluent, and graceful talker, with a remarkable incisiveness
+of speech, and a trick of dignifying ordinary topics in words which,
+without rising above conversation, were so exactly, though freely
+enunciated, as would have admitted of their being reported exactly as
+they fell from his lips. In some of these respects I found his brother
+William resemble him, though, if I may describe the talk of a dead
+friend by contrasting it with that of a living one bearing a natural
+affinity to it, I will say that Gabriel's conversation was perhaps more
+spontaneous, and had more variety of tone with less range of subject,
+together with the same precision and perspicuity. Very soon the talk
+became general, and then Rossetti spoke without appearance of reserve
+of his two or three intimate friends, telling me, among other things,
+of Theodore Watts, that he "had a head exactly like that of Napoleon I.,
+whom Watts," he said with a chuckle, "detests more than any character
+in history; depend upon it," he added, "such a head was not given to him
+for nothing;" that Frederick Shields was as emotional as Shelley, and
+Ford Madox Brown, whom I had met, as sententious as Dr. Johnson. I kept
+no sort of record of what passed upon the occasion in question, but I
+remember that Rossetti seemed to be playfully battering his friends in
+their absence in the assured consciousness that he was doing so in the
+presence of a well-wisher; and it was amusing to observe that, after any
+particularly lively sally, he would pause to say something in a sobered
+tone that was meant to convey the idea that he was really very jealous
+of his friends' reputation, and was merely for the sake of amusement
+giving rein to a sportive fancy. During dinner (and contrary to his
+declared habit, we did not dine in the studio) he talked a good deal
+about Oliver Madox Brown, for whom I had conceived a warm admiration,
+and to whom I had about that time addressed a sonnet.
+
+"You had a sincere admiration of the boy's gifts?" I asked.
+
+"Assuredly. I have always said that twenty years after his death his
+name will be a familiar one. _The Black Swan_ is a powerful story,
+although I must honestly say that it displays in its central incident a
+certain torpidity that to me is painful. Undoubtedly Oliver had genius,
+and must have done great things had he lived. His death was a grievous
+blow to his father. I'm glad you've written that sonnet; I wanted you to
+toss up your cap for Nolly." He spoke of Oliver's father as indisputably
+one of the greatest of living colourists, inquired earnestly into the
+progress of his frescoes at Manchester, for one of the figures in which
+I had sat, and showed me a little water-colour drawing made by Oliver
+himself when very young. Dinner being now over, I asked Rossetti to
+redeem his promise to read one of his new ballads; and as his brother,
+who had often heard it before, expressed his readiness to hear it again,
+he responded readily, and, taking a small manuscript volume out of a
+section of the bookcase that had been locked, read us _The White Ship_.
+I have spoken of the ballad as a poem at an earlier stage, but it
+remains to me, in this place, to describe the effect produced upon me by
+the author's reading. It seemed to me that I never heard anything at all
+matchable with Rossetti's elocution; his rich deep voice lent an added
+music to the music of the verse: it rose and fell in the passages
+descriptive of the wreck with something of the surge and sibilation of
+the sea itself; in the tenderer passages it was soft as a woman's, and
+in the pathetic stanzas with which the ballad closes it was profoundly
+moving. Effective as the reading sounded in that studio, I remember at
+the moment to have doubted if it would prove quite so effective from a
+public platform. Perhaps there seemed to be so much insistence on the
+rhythm, and so prolonged a tension of the rhyme sounds, as would run
+the risk of a charge of monotony if falling on ears less concerned with
+points of metrical beauty than with fundamental substance. Personally,
+however, I found the reading in the very highest degree enjoyable and
+inspiring.
+
+The evening was gone by the time the ballad was ended; and it was
+arranged that upon my return to London from the house of a friend at
+the sea-side I should again dine with Rossetti, and sleep the night
+at Cheyne Walk. I was invited to come early in order to see certain
+pictures by day-light, and it was then I saw the painter's most
+important work,--the _Dantes Dream_, which finally (and before Rossetti
+was made aware of any steps being taken to that end) I had prevailed
+with Alderman Samuelson to purchase for the public gallery at Liverpool.
+At my request, though only after some importunity, Rossetti read again
+his _White Ship_, and afterwards _Rose Mary_, the latter of which he
+told me had been written in the country shortly after the appearance of
+the first volume of poems. He remarked that it had occupied three weeks
+in the writing, and that the physical prostration ensuing had been more
+than he would care to go through again. I observed on this head, that
+though highly finished in every stanza, the ballad had an impetuous
+rush of emotion, and swift current of diction, suggesting speed in its
+composition, as contrasted with the laboured deliberation which the
+sonnets, for example, appeared to denote. I asked if his work usually
+took much out of him in physical energy.
+
+"Not my painting, certainly," he replied, "though in early years it
+tormented me more than enough. Now I paint by a set of unwritten but
+clearly-defined rules, which I could teach to any man as systematically
+as you could teach arithmetic; indeed, quite recently I sat all day for
+that very purpose with Shields, who is not so great a colourist as he is
+a draughtsman: he is a great draughtsman--none better now living, unless
+it is Leighton or Sir Noel Paton."
+
+"Still," I said, "there's usually a good deal in a picture of yours
+beside what you can do by rule."
+
+"Fundamental conception, no doubt, but beyond that not much. In
+painting, after all, there is in the less important details something of
+the craft of a superior carpenter, and the part of a picture that is not
+mechanical is often trivial enough. I don't wonder, now," he added, with
+a suspicion of a twinkle in the eye, "if you imagine that one comes down
+here in a fine frenzy every morning to daub canvas?"
+
+"I certainly imagine," I replied, "that a superior carpenter would find
+it hard to paint another _Dante's Dream_, which some people consider the
+best example yet seen of the English school."
+
+"That is friendly nonsense," rejoined my frank host, "there is now no
+English school whatever."
+
+"Well," I said, "if you deny the name to others who lay more claim to
+it, will you not at least allow it to the three or four painters who
+started with you in life?"
+
+"Not at all, unless it is to Brown, and he's more French than English;
+Hunt and Jones have no more claim to the name than I have. As for all
+the prattle about pre-Raphaelitism, I confess to you I am weary of it,
+and long have been. Why should we go on talking about the visionary
+vanities of half-a-dozen boys? We've all grown out of them, I hope, by
+now."
+
+I remarked that the pre-Raphaelite movement was no doubt a serious one
+at the beginning.
+
+"What you call the movement was serious enough, but the banding together
+under that title was all a joke. We had at that time a phenomenal
+antipathy to the Academy, and in sheer love of being outlawed signed our
+pictures with the well-known initials." I have preserved the substance
+of what Rossetti said on this point, and, as far as possible, the actual
+words have been given. On many subsequent occasions he expressed himself
+in the same way: assuredly with as much seeming depreciation of the
+painter's "craft," although certain examples of modern art called forth
+his warmest eulogies. In serious moods he would speak of pictures by
+Millais, Watts, Leighton, Burne Jones, and others, as works of the
+highest genius.
+
+Reverting to my inquiry as to whether his work took much out of him, he
+remarked that his poetry usually did. "In that respect," he said, "I am
+the reverse of Swinburne. For his method of production inspiration is
+indeed the word. With me the case is different. I lie on the couch, the
+racked and tortured medium, never permitted an instant's surcease of
+agony until the thing on hand is finished."
+
+It was obvious that what Rossetti meant by being racked and tortured,
+was that his subject possessed him; that he was enslaved by his own
+"shaping imagination." Assuredly he was the reverse of a costive poet:
+impulse was, to use his own phrase, fully developed in his muse.
+
+I made some playful allusion, assuredly not meant to involve Mr.
+Swinburne, to Sheridan's epigram on easy writing and hard reading; and
+to the Abbe de Marolles, who exultingly told some poet that his verses
+cost no trouble: "They cost you what they are worth," replied the bard.
+
+"One benefit I do derive," Rossetti added, "as a result of my method of
+composition; my work becomes condensed. Probably the man does not live
+who could write what I have written more briefly than I have done."
+
+Emphasis and condensation, I remarked, were indubitably the
+characteristics of his muse. He then read me a great body of the new
+sonnets of _The House of Life_. Sitting in that studio listening to his
+reading and looking up meantime at the chalk-drawings that hung on the
+walls, I realised how truly he had said, in correspondence, that the
+feeling pervading his pictures was such as his poetry ought to suggest.
+The affinity between the two seemed to me at that moment to be complete:
+the same half-sad, half-resigned view of life, the same glimpses of
+hope, the same foreshadowings of gloom.
+
+"You doubtless think it odd," he said at one moment, "to hear an old
+fellow read such love-poetry as much of this is, but I may tell you that
+the larger part of it, though still unpublished, was written when I was
+as young as you are. When I print these sonnets, I shall probably affix
+a note saying, that though many of them are of recent production, not a
+few are obviously the work of earlier years."
+
+I expressed admiration of the pathetic sonnet entitled _Without Her_.
+
+"I cannot tell you," he said, "at what terrible moment it was wrung from
+me."
+
+He had read it with tears of voice, subsiding at length into suppressed
+sobs and intervals of silence. As though to explain away this emotion he
+said:
+
+"All poetry, that is really poetry, affects me deeply and often to
+tears. It does not need to be pathetic or yet tender to produce such a
+result. I have known in my life two men, and two only, who are similarly
+sensitive--Tennyson, and my old friend and neighbour William Bell Scott.
+I once heard Tennyson read _Maud_, and whilst the fiery passages were
+delivered with a voice and vehemence which he alone of living men can
+compass, the softer passages and the songs made the tears course down
+his cheeks. Morris is a fine reader, and so, of his kind, though a
+little prone to sing-song, is Swinburne. Browning both reads and talks
+well--at least he did so when I knew him intimately as a young man."
+
+Rossetti went on to say that he had been among Browning's earliest
+admirers. As a boy he had seen something signed by the then unknown
+name of the author of _Paracelsus_, and wrote to him. The result was
+an intimacy. He spoke with warmest admiration of _Child Roland_; and
+referred to Elizabeth Barrett Browning in terms of regard, and, I think
+I may say, of reverence.
+
+I asked if he had ever heard Ruskin read. He replied:
+
+"I must have done so, but remember nothing clearly. On one occasion,
+however, I heard him deliver a speech, and that was something never
+to forget. When we were young, we helped Frederick Denison Maurice by
+taking classes at the Working Men's College, and there Charles Kingsley
+and others made speeches and delivered lectures. Ruskin was asked to
+do something of the kind and at length consented. He made no sort of
+preparation for the occasion: I know he did not; we were together at his
+father's house the whole of the day in question. At night we drove
+down to the College, and then he made the finest speech I ever heard. I
+doubted at the time if any written words of his were equal to it! such
+flaming diction! such emphasis! such appeal!--yet he had written his
+first and second volumes of _Modern Painters_ by that time." I have
+reproduced the substance of what Rossetti said on the occasion of my
+return visit, and, by help of letters written at the time to a friend,
+I have in many cases recalled his exact words. A certain incisiveness of
+speech which distinguished his conversation, I confess myself scarcely
+able to convey more than a suggestion of; as Mr. Watts has said in _The
+Athenaeum_, his talk showed an incisiveness so perfect that it had often
+the pleasurable surprise of wit. Rossetti had both wit and humour, but
+these, during the time that I knew him, were only occasionally present
+in his conversation, while the incisiveness was always conspicuous.
+A certain quiet play of sportive fancy, developing at intervals into
+banter, was sometimes observable in his talk with the younger and more
+familiar of his acquaintances, but for the most part his conversation
+was serious, and, during the time I knew him, often sad. I speedily
+observed that he was not of the number of those who lead or sustain
+conversation. He required to be constantly interrogated, but as a
+negative talker, if I may so describe him, he was by much the best I had
+heard. Catching one's drift before one had revealed it, and anticipating
+one's objections, he would go on from point to point, almost removing
+the necessity for more than occasional words. Nevertheless, as I say, he
+was not, in the conversations I have heard, a leading conversationalist;
+his talk was never more than talk, and in saying that it was uniformly
+sustained yet never declamatory, I think I convey an idea both of its
+merits and limitations.
+
+I understood that Rossetti had never at any period of his life been an
+early riser, and at the time of the interview in question he was more
+than ever before prone to reverse the natural order of waking and
+sleeping hours. I am convinced that during the time I was with him only
+the necessity of securing a certain short interval of daylight, by
+which it was possible to paint, prevailed with him to rise before noon.
+Alluding to this idiosyncrasy, he said: "I lie as long, or say as late,
+as Dr. Johnson used to do. You shall never know, until you discover it
+for yourself, at what hour I rise." He sat up until four A.M. on this
+night of my second visit,--no unaccustomed thing, as I afterwards
+learned. I must not omit the mention of one feature of the conversation,
+revealing to me a new side of his character, or, more properly, a new
+phase of his mind, which gave me subsequently an infinity of anxiety and
+distress. Branching off at a late hour from some entirely foreign topic,
+he begged me to tell him the facts of some unlucky debate in which I
+had long before been engaged on a public platform with some one who had
+attacked him. He had heard a report of what passed at a time when
+my name was unknown to him, as also was that of his assailant. Being
+forewarned by William Rossetti of his brother's peculiar sensitiveness
+to critical attack, and having, moreover, observed something of the kind
+myself, I tried to avoid a circumstantial statement of what passed. But
+Rossetti was, as has been said by one who knew him well, "of imagination
+all compact," and my obvious desire to shelve the subject suggested to
+his mind a thousand inferences infinitely more damaging than the fact.
+To avoid such a result I told him all, and there was little in the
+way of attack to repeat beyond a few unwelcome strictures on his poem
+_Jenny_. He listened but too eagerly to what I was saying, and then in a
+voice slower, softer, and more charged, perhaps, with emotion than I had
+heard before, said it was the old story, which began ten years before,
+and would go on until he had been hunted and hounded to his grave.
+Startled, and indeed, appalled by so grave a view of what to me had
+seemed no more than an error of critical judgment, coupled perhaps, with
+some intemperance of condemnation, I prayed of him to think no more of
+the matter, reproached myself with having yielded to his importunity,
+and begged him to remember that if one man held the opinions I had
+repeated, many men held contrary ones.
+
+"It was right of you to tell me when I asked you," he said, "though my
+friends usually keep such facts from my knowledge. As to _Jenny_, it is
+a sermon, nothing less. As I say, it is a sermon, and on a great world,
+to most men unknown, though few consider themselves ignorant of it. But
+of this conspiracy to persecute me--what remains to say but that it is
+widespread and remorseless--one cannot but feel it."
+
+I assured him there existed no conspiracy to persecute him: that he had
+ardent upholders everywhere, though it was true that few men had found
+crueller critics. He shook his head, and said I knew that what he had
+alleged was true, namely that an organised conspiracy existed, having
+for its object to annoy and injure him. Growing a little impatient of
+this delusion, so tenaciously held, against all show of reason, I told
+him that it was no more than the fever of an oppressed brain brought
+about by his reclusive habits of life, by shunning intercourse with all
+save some half dozen or more friends. "You tell me," I said, "that you
+have rarely been outside these walls for some years, and your brain has
+meanwhile been breeding a host of hallucinations, like cobwebs in a dark
+corner. You have only to go abroad, and the fresh air will blow these
+things away." But continuing for some moments longer in the same strain,
+he came to closer quarters and distressed me by naming as enemies three
+or four men who had throughout life been his friends, who have spoken of
+him since his death in words of admiration and even affection, and who
+had for a time fallen away from him or called on him but rarely, from
+contingencies due to any cause but alienated friendship.
+
+At length the time had arrived when it was considered prudent to retire.
+"You are to sleep in Watts's room to-night," he said: and then in reply
+to a look of inquiry he added, "He comes here at least twice a week,
+talking until four o'clock in the morning upon everything from poetry
+to the Pleiades, and driving away the bogies, and as he lives at Putney
+Hill, it is necessary to have a bed for him." Before going into my room
+he suggested that I should go and look, at his. It was entered from
+another and smaller room which he said that he used as a breakfast
+room. The outer room was made fairly bright and cheerful by a glittering
+chandelier (the property once, he told me, of David Garrick), and
+from the rustle of trees against the window-pane one perceived that it
+overlooked the garden; but the inner room was dark with heavy hangings
+around the walls as well as the bed, and thick velvet curtains before
+the windows, so that the candles in our hands seemed unable to light
+it, and our voices sounded thick and muffled. An enormous black oak
+chimney-piece of curious design, having an ivory crucifix on the largest
+of its ledges, covered a part of one side and reached to the ceiling.
+Cabinets, and the usual furniture of a bedroom, occupied places about
+the floor: and in the middle of it, and before a little couch, stood
+a small table on which was a wire lantern containing a candle which
+Rossetti lit from the open one in his hand--another candle meantime
+lying by its side. I remarked that he probably burned a light all night.
+He said that was so. "My curse," he added, "is insomnia. Two or three
+hours hence I shall get up and lie on the couch, and, to pass away a
+weary hour, read this book"--a volume of Boswell's _Johnson_ which I
+noticed he took out of the bookcase as we left the studio. It did not
+escape me that on the table stood two small bottles sealed and labelled,
+together with a little measuring-glass. Without looking further at it,
+but with a terrible suspicion growing over me, I asked if that were his
+medicine.
+
+"They say there is a skeleton in every cupboard," he said in a low
+voice, "and that's mine; it is chloral."
+
+When I reached the room that I was to occupy during the night, I found
+it, like Rossetti's bedroom, heavy with hangings, and black with antique
+picture panels, with a ceiling (unlike that of the other rooms in the
+house), out of all reach or sight, and so dark from various causes, that
+the candle seemed only to glimmer in it--indeed to add to the darkness
+by making it felt. Mr. Watts, as Rossetti told me, was entirely
+indifferent to these eerie surroundings, even if his fine subjective
+intellect, more prone to meditate than to observe, was ever for an
+instant conscious of them; but on myself I fear they weighed heavily,
+and augmented the feeling of closeness and gloom which had been creeping
+upon me since I entered the house. Scattered about the room in most
+admired disorder were some outlandish and unheard-of books, and all
+kinds of antiquarian and Oriental oddities, which books and oddities I
+afterwards learnt had been picked up at various times by the occupant in
+his ramblings about Chelsea and elsewhere, and never yet taken away by
+him, but left there apparently to scare the chambermaid: such as old
+carved heads and gargoyles of the most grinning and ghastly expression,
+Burmese and Chinese Buddhas in soapstone of every degree of placid
+ugliness, together, I am bound by force of truth to admit, with one
+piece of carved Italian marble in bas-relief, of great interest and
+beauty. Such was my bed-chamber for the night, and little wonder if it
+threatened to murder the innocent sleep. But it was later than 4 A.M.,
+and wearied nature must needs assert herself, and so I lay down amidst
+the odour of bygone ages.
+
+Presently Rossetti came in, for no purpose that I can remember, except
+to say that he had enjoyed my visit I replied that I should never forget
+it. "If you decide to settle in London," he said, "I trust you 'll come
+and live with me, and then many such evenings must remove the memory
+of this one." I laughed, for I thought what he hinted at to be of the
+remotest likelihood. "I have just taken sixty grains of chloral," he
+said, as he was going out; "in four hours I take sixty more, and in four
+hours after that yet another sixty."
+
+"Does not the dose increase with you?"
+
+"It has not done so perceptibly in recent years. I judge I've taken
+more chloral than any man whatever: Marshall says if I were put into a
+Turkish bath I should sweat it at every pore."
+
+There was something in his tone suggesting that he was even proud of the
+accomplishment. To me it was a frightful revelation, accounting entirely
+for what had puzzled and distressed me in his delusions already referred
+to. And now let me say that whilst it would have been on my part the
+most pitiful weakness (because the most foolish tearfulness of injuring
+a great man who was strong enough to suffer a good deal to be discounted
+from his strength), to attempt to conceal this painful side of
+Rossetti's mind, I shall not again allude to those delusions, unless
+it be to show that, coming to him with the drug which blighted half his
+life, they disappeared when it had been removed.
+
+None may rightly say to what the use of that drug was due, or what was
+due to it; the sadder side of his life was ever under its shadow; his
+occasional distrust of friends: his fear of enemies: his broken health
+and shattered spirits, all came of his indulgence in the pernicious
+thing. When I remember this I am more than willing to put by all thought
+of the little annoyances, which to me, as to other immediate friends,
+were constantly occurring through that cause, which seemed at the moment
+so vexatious and often so insupportable, but which are now forgotten.
+
+Next morning--(a clear autumn morning)--I strolled through the large
+garden at the back of the house, and of course I found it of a piece
+with what I had previously seen. A beautiful avenue of lime-trees opened
+into a grass plot of nearly an acre in extent. The trees were just as
+nature made them, and so was the grass, which in places was lying long,
+dry and withered under the sun, weeds creeping up in damp places, and
+the gravel of the pathway scattered upon the verges. This neglected
+condition of the garden was, I afterwards found, humorously charged upon
+Mr. Watts's "reluctance to interfere with nature in her clever scheme of
+the survival of the fittest," but I suspect it was due at least equally
+to the owner's personal indifference to everything of the kind.
+
+Before leaving I glanced over the bookcase. Rossetti's library was by
+no means a large one. It consisted, perhaps, of 1000 volumes, scarcely
+more; and though this was not large as comprising the library of one
+whose reading must have been in two arts pursued as special studies,
+and each involving research and minute original inquiry, it cannot be
+considered noticeably small, and it must have been sufficient. Rossetti
+differed strangely as a reader from the man to whom in bias of genius
+he was most nearly related. Coleridge was an omnivorous general reader:
+Rossetti was eclectic rather than desultory. His library contained a
+number of valuable old works of more interest to him from their plates
+than letterpress. Of this kind were _Gerard's Herbal_ (1626), supposed
+to be the source of many a hint utilised by the Morris firm, of which
+Rossetti was a member; _Poliphili Hypnerotomachia_ (1467); Heywood's
+_History of Women_ (1624); _Songe de Poliphile_ (1561); Bonnard's
+_Costumes of 12th, 13th, and l4th Centuries; Habiti Antichi_ (of
+which the designs are said to be by Titian)--printed Venice, (1664);
+_Cosmographia_, a history of the peoples of the world (1572); _Ciceronis
+Officia_ (1534), a blackletter folio, with woodcuts by Burgkmaier;
+_Jost Amman's Costumes_, with woodcuts coloured by hand; _Cento Novelle_
+(Venice, 1598); Francesco Barberino's _Documenti (d'Amore_ (Rome, 1640);
+_Decoda de Titolivio_, a Spanish blackletter, without date, but probably
+belonging to the 16th century. Besides these were various vellum-bound
+works relating to Greek and Roman allegorical and mythological subjects,
+and a number of scrap-books and portfolios containing photographs from
+nearly all the picture-galleries of Europe, but chiefly of the pictures
+of the early Florentine and Venetian schools, with an admixture of
+Spanish art. Of Michael Angelo's designs for the Sistine Chapel there
+was a fine set of photographs.
+
+These did not make up a very complete ancient artistic library, but
+Rossetti's collection of the poets was more full and valuable. There was
+a pretty little early edition of Petrarch, which appeared to have
+been presented first by John Philip Kemble to Polidori (Rossetti's
+grandfather) in 1812; then in 1853 by Polidori to his daughter,
+Rossetti's mother, Frances Rossetti; and by her in 1870 to her son. A
+splendid edition (1552) of Boccaccio's _Decamerone_ contained a number
+of valuable marginal notes, chiefly by Rossetti, the first being as
+follows:
+
+This volume contains 40 woodcuts besides many initial letters. The
+greater number, if not the whole, must certainly be by Holbein. I am
+in doubt as to the pictures heading the chapters, but think these most
+probably his, only following the usual style of such illustrations
+to Boccaccio, and consequently more Italianised than the others. The
+initial letters present for the most part games of strength or skill.
+
+There were various editions of Dante, including a very large folio
+edition of the _Commedia_, dated Florence, 1481, and the works of a
+number of Dante's contemporaries. Besides two or three editions of
+Shakspeare (the best being Dyce's, in 9 vols.), there were some of the
+Elizabethan dramatists. Coming to later poetry, I found a complete
+set of Gilfillan's _Poets_, in 45 vols. There was the curious little
+manuscript quarto (much like a shilling school-exercise book) labelled
+_Blake_, and this was, perhaps, by far the most valuable volume in the
+library. The contents and history of this book have already been given.
+
+There were two editions of Gilchrist's _Blake_; complete (or almost
+complete) sets of the works of William Morris and A. C. Swinburne,
+inscribed in the authors' autographs--the copy of _Atalanta in Calydon_
+being marked by the poet, "First copy; printed off before the dedication
+was in type." It may be remembered that Robert Brough translated
+Beranger's songs, and dedicated his volume in affectionate terms
+to Rossetti. The presentation copy of this book bore the following
+inscription:--"To D. G. Rossetti, meaning in my _heart_ what I have
+tried to say in print. Et. B. Brough. 1856." There were also several
+presentation copies from Robert Browning, Coventry Patmore, W. B. Scott,
+Sir Henry Taylor, Aubrey de Vere, Tom Taylor, Westland Marston, F.
+Locker, A. O'Shaughnessy, Sir Theodore Martin; besides volumes bearing
+the names of nearly every well-known younger writer of prose or verse.
+
+Five volumes of _Modern Painters_, together with _The Seven Lamps of
+Architecture_ and the tract on _Pre-Raphaelitism_, bore the author's
+name and Rossetti's in Mr. Ruskin's autograph. There was a fine copy in
+ten volumes of Violet-le-Duc's _Dictionnaire de l'Architecture_, and
+also of the _Biographie Generale_ in forty-six volumes, besides several
+dictionaries, concordances, and the like. There was also a copy of
+Fitzgerald's _Calderon_. Rossetti seemed to be a reader of Swedenborg,
+as White's book on the great mystic testified; also to have been at one
+time interested in the investigation of the phenomena of Spiritualism.
+Of one writer of fiction he must have been an ardent reader, for there
+were at least 100 volumes by Alexandre Dumas. German writers were
+conspicuously absent, Goethe's _Faust_ and Carlyle's translation of
+_Wilhelm, Meister_, being about the only notable German works in the
+library. Rossetti did not appear to be a collector of first editions,
+nor did it seem that he attached much importance to the mere outsides of
+his books, but of the insides he was master indeed. The impression left
+upon the mind after a rapid survey of the poet-painter's library was
+that he was a careful, but slow and thorough reader (as was seen by the
+marginal annotations which nearly every volume contained), and that,
+though very far from affected by bibliomania, he was not without pride
+in the possession of rare and valuable books.
+
+When I left the house at a late hour that morning Rossetti was not yet
+stirring, and so some months passed before I saw him again. If I had
+tried to formulate the idea--or say sensation--that possessed me at the
+moment, I think I should have said, in a word or two, that outside the
+air breathed freely. Within, the gloom, the mediaeval furniture, the
+brass censers, sacramental cups, lamps; and crucifixes conspired, I
+thought, to make the atmosphere heavy and unwholesome. As for the
+man himself who was the central spirit amidst these anachronistic
+environments, he had, if possible, attached me yet closer to himself by
+contact. Before this I had been attracted to him in admiration of his
+gifts: but now I was drawn to him, in something very like pity, for
+his isolation and suffering. Not that at this time he consciously
+made demand of much compassion, and least of all from me. Health was
+apparently whole with him, his spirits were good, and his energies were
+at their best. He had not yet known the full bitterness of the shadowed
+valley: not yet learned what it was to hunger for any cheerful society
+that would relieve him of the burden of the flesh. All that came later.
+Rossetti was one of the most magnetic of men, but it was not more his
+genius than his unhappiness that held certain of his friends by a spell.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+It was characteristic of Rossetti that he addressed me in the following
+terms probably before I had left his house: for the letter was, no
+doubt, written in that interval of sleeplessness which he had spoken of
+as his nightly visitant:
+
+I forgot to say--Don't, please, spread details as to story of _Rose
+Mary_. I don't want it to be stale or to get forestalled in the
+travelling of report from mouth to mouth. I hope it won't be too long
+before you visit town again,--I will not for an instant question that
+you would then visit me also.
+
+Six months or more intervened, however, before I was able to visit
+Rossetti again. In the meantime we corresponded as fully as before: the
+subject upon which we most frequently exchanged opinions being now the
+sonnet.
+
+     By-the-bye [he says], I cannot understand what you say of
+     Milton's, Keats's, and Coleridge's sonnets. The last, it is
+     true, was _always_ poor as a sonnetteer (I don't see much in
+     the _Autumnal Moon_). My own only exception to this verdict
+     (much as I adore Coleridge's genius) would be the ludicrous
+     sonnet on _The House that Jack built_, which is a
+     masterpiece in its way. I should not myself number the one
+     you mention of Keats's among his best half-dozen (many of
+     his are mere drafts, strange to say); and cannot at all
+     enter into your verdict on those of Milton, which seem to me
+     to be every one of exceptional excellence, though a few are
+     even finer than the rest, notably, of course, the one you
+     name. Pardon an egotistic sentence (in answer to what you
+     say so generously of _Lost Days_), if I express an opinion
+     that _Known in Vain_ and _Still-born Love_ may perhaps be
+     said to head the series in value, though _Lost Days_ might
+     be equally a favourite with me if I did not remember in what
+     but too opportune juncture it was wrung out of me. I have a
+     good number of sonnets for _The House of Life_ still in MS.,
+     which I have worked on with my best effort, and, I think,
+     will fully sustain their place. These and other things I
+     should like to show you whenever we meet again. The MS. vol.
+     I proposed to send is merely an old set of (chiefly)
+     trifles, about which I should like an opinion as to whether
+     any should be included in the future.
+
+I had spoken of Keats's sonnet beginning
+
+     To one who has been long in city pent,
+
+with its exquisite last lines--
+
+     E'en like the passage of an angel's tear
+     That falls through the clear ether silently,
+
+reminding one of a less spiritual figure--
+
+     Kings like a golden jewel
+     Down a golden stair.
+
+After his bantering me, as of old he had done, on the use of long and
+crabbed words, I hinted that he was in honour bound to agree at least
+with my disparaging judgment upon _Tetrachordon_, if only because of the
+use of words that would "have made Quintillian stare."
+
+I further instanced--
+
+     "Harry whose tuneful and well-measured song;" and
+     "Lawrence, of virtuous father virtuous son,"
+
+as examples of Milton at his weakest as a sonnet-writer. He replied:
+
+     I am sorry I must still differ somewhat from you about
+     Milton's sonnets. I think the one on _Tetrachordon_ a very
+     vigorous affair indeed. The one to Mr. H. Lawes I am half
+     disposed to give you, but not altogether--its close is
+     sweet. As to _Lawrence_, it is curious that my sister was
+     only the other day expressing to me a special relish for
+     this sonnet, and I do think it very fresh and wholesomely
+     relishing myself. It is an awful fact that sun, moon, or
+     candlelight once looked down on the human portent of Dr.
+     Johnson and Mrs. Hannah More convened in solemn conclave
+     above the outspread sonnets of Milton, with a meritorious
+     and considerate resolve of finding out for him "why they
+     were so bad." This is so stupendous a warning, that perhaps
+     it may even incline one to find some of them better than
+     they are.
+
+     Coming to Coleridge, I must confess at once that I never
+     meet in any collection with the sonnet on Schiller's
+     _Robbers_ without heading it at once with the words
+     "unconscionably bad." The habit has been a life-long one.
+     That you mention beginning--"Sweet mercy," etc., I have
+     looked for in the only Coleridge I have by me (my brother's
+     cheap edition, for all the faults of which _he_ is not at
+     all answerable), and do not find it there, nor have I it in
+     mind.
+
+     To pass to Keats. The ed. of 1868 contains no sonnet on the
+     Elgin Marbles. Is it in a later edition? Of course that on
+     Chapman's _Homer_ is supreme. It ought to be preceded {*} in
+     all editions by the one _To Homer_,
+
+          "Standing aloof in giant ignorance," etc.
+     which contains perhaps the greatest single line in Keats:
+
+          "There is a budding morrow in midnight."
+
+     * I pointed out that it was written later than the one on
+     Chapman's Homer (notwithstanding its first line) and
+     therefore should follow after it, not go before.
+
+     Other special favourites with me are--"Why did I laugh to-
+     night?"--" As Hermes once,"--"Time's sea hath been," and
+     the one _On the Flower and, Leaf_.
+
+     It is odd that several of these best ones seem to have been
+     early work, and rejected by Keats in his lifetime, while
+     some of those he printed are absolutely sorry drafts.
+
+     I had admired Coleridge's sonnet on Schiller's _Robbers_ for
+     the perhaps minor excellence of bringing vividly before the
+     mind the scenes it describes. If the sonnet is
+     unconscionably bad so perhaps is the play, the beautiful
+     scene of the setting sun notwithstanding. Eventually,
+     however, I abandoned my belligerent position as to Milton's
+     sonnets: the army of authorities I found ranged against the
+     modest earth-works within which I had entrenched myself must
+     of itself have made me quail. My utmost contention had been
+     that Milton wrote the most impassioned sonnet (_Avenge, O
+     Lord_), the two most nobly pathetic sonnets (_When I
+     consider_ and _Methought I saw_), and one of the poorest
+     sonnets (_Harry, whose tuneful_, etc.) in English poetry.
+
+     At this time (September 1880) Mr. J. Ashcroft Noble
+     published an essay on _The Sonnet in England_ in _The
+     Contemporary Review_, and relating thereto Rossetti wrote:
+
+     I have just been reading Mr. Noble's article on the sonnet.
+     As regards my own share in it, I can only say that it greets
+     me with a gratifying ray of generous recognition. It is all
+     the more pleasant to me as finding  a place in the very
+     Review which years ago opened its pages to a pseudonymous
+     attack on my poems and on myself. I see a passage in the
+     article which seems meant to indicate the want of such a
+     work on the sonnet as you are wishing to supply. I only
+     trust that you may do so, and that Mr. Noble may find a
+     field for continued poetic criticism. I am very proud to
+     think that, after my small and solitary book has been a good
+     many years published and several years out of print, it yet
+     meets with such ardent upholding by young and sincere men.
+
+     With the verdicts given throughout the article, I generally
+     sympathise, but not with the unqualified homage to
+     Wordsworth. A reticence almost invariably present is fatal
+     in my eyes to the highest pretensions on behalf of his
+     sonnets. Reticence is but a poor sort of muse, nor is
+     tentativeness (so often to be traced in his work) a good
+     accompaniment in music. Take the sonnet on _Toussaint
+     L'Ouverture_ (in my opinion his noblest, and very noble
+     indeed) and study (from Main's note) the lame and fumbling
+     changes made in various editions of the early lines, which
+     remain lame in the end. Far worse than this, study the
+     relation of the closing lines of his famous sonnet _The
+     World is too much with us_, etc., to a passage in Spenser,
+     and say whether plagiarism was ever more impudent or
+     manifest (again I derive from Main's excellent exposition of
+     the point), and then consider whether a bard was likely to
+     do this once and yet not to do it often. Primary vital
+     impulse was surely not fully developed in his muse.
+
+     I will venture to say that I wish my sister's sonnet work
+     had met with what I consider the justice due to it. Besides
+     the unsurpassed quality (in my opinion) of her best sonnets,
+     my sister has proved her poetic importance by solid and
+     noble inventive work of many kinds, which I should be proud
+     indeed to reckon among my life's claims.
+
+     I have a great weakness myself for many of Tennyson-Turner's
+     sonnets, though of course what Mr. Noble says of them is in
+     the main true, and he has certainly quoted the very finest
+     one, which has a more fervent appeal for me than I could
+     easily derive from Wordsworth in almost any case.
+
+     Will you give my thanks to Mr. Noble for his frank and
+     outspoken praise?
+
+     Let me hear of your doings and intentions.
+
+     Ever sincerely yours.
+
+
+Three names notably omitted in the article are those of Dobell, W. B.
+Scott, and Swinburne.
+
+The allusion in the foregoing letter to the work on the Sonnet which
+I was aiming to supply, bears reference to the anthology subsequently
+published under the title of _Sonnets of Three Centuries_. My first
+idea was simply to write a survey of the art and history of the
+sonnet, printing only such examples as might be embraced by my critical
+comments. Rossetti's generous sympathy was warmly engaged in this
+enterprise.
+
+     It would really warm me up much [he writes] to know of
+     _your_ editing a sonnet book You would have my best
+     cooperation as to suggesting examples, but I certainly think
+     that English sonnets (original and exceptionally translated
+     ones, the latter only _perhaps_) should be the sole scheme.
+     Curiously enough, some one wrote me the other day as to a
+     projected series of living sonneteers (other collections
+     being only of those preceding our time). I have half
+     committed myself to contributing, but not altogether as yet.
+     The name of the projector, S. Waddington, is new to me, and
+     I don't know who is to publish.... Really you ought to do
+     the sonnet-book you aspire to do. I know but of one London
+     critic (Theodore Watts) whom I should consider the leading
+     man for such a purpose, and I have tried to incite him to it
+     so often that I know now he won't do it; but I have always
+     meant _a complete_ series in which the dead poets must, of
+     course, predominate. As to a series of the living only, I
+     told you of a Mr. Waddington who seems engaged on such a
+     supplementary scheme. What his gifts for it may be I know
+     not, but I suppose he knows it is in requisition. However,
+     there need not be but one such if you felt your hand in for
+     it. His view happens to be also (as you suggest) about 160
+     sonnets. In reply to your query, I certainly think there
+     must be 20 living writers (male and female--my sister a
+     leader, I consider) who have written good sonnets such as
+     would afford an interesting and representative selection,
+     though assuredly not such as would all take the rank of
+     classics by any means. The number of sonnets now extant,
+     written by poets who did not exist as such a dozen years
+     ago, I believe to be almost infinite, and in sufficiently
+     numerous instances good, however derivative. One younger
+     poet among them, Philip Marston, has written many sonnets
+     which yield to few or none by any poet whatever; but he has
+     printed such a large number in the aggregate, and so unequal
+     one with the other, that the great ones are not to be found
+     by opening at random. "How are they (the poets) to be
+     approached?--" you innocently ask. Ye heavens! how does the
+     cat's-meat-man approach Grimalkin?--and what is that
+     relation in life when compared to the _rapport_ established
+     between the living bard and the fellow-creature who is
+     disposed to cater to his caterwauling appetite for
+     publicity? However, to be serious, I must at least exonerate
+     the bard, I am sure, from any desire to appropriate an
+     "interest in the proceeds." There are some, I feel certain,
+     to whom the collector might say with a wink, "What are you
+     going to stand?"
+
+I do not myself think that a collection of sonnets inserted at intervals
+in an essay is a good form for the purpose. Such a book is from one
+chief point a book of instantaneous reference,--it would only, perhaps,
+be read _through_ once in a lifetime. For this purpose a well-indexed
+current series is best, with any desirable essay prefixed and notes
+affixed.... I once conceived of a series, to be entitled,
+
+<center>
+
+THE ENGLISH CASTALY: A QUINTESSENCE:
+
+BEING A COLLECTION OF ALL THAT IS BEST IN ALL ENGLISH POETS,
+
+EXCEPTING WORKS OF GREAT LENGTH.
+
+</center>
+
+I still think this a good idea, but, of course, it would be an extensive
+undertaking.
+
+Later on, he wrote:
+
+     I have thought of a title for your book. What think you of
+     this?
+
+<center>
+
+A SONNET SEQUENCE
+
+FROM ELDER TO MODERN WORK,
+
+WITH FIFTY HITHERTO UNPRINTED SONNETS BY
+
+LIVING WRITERS.
+
+</center>
+
+     That would not be amiss. Tell me if you think of using the
+     title _A Sonnet Sequence_, as otherwise I might use it in
+     the _House of Life_.... What do you think of this
+     alternative title:
+
+<center>
+
+THE ENGLISH SONNET MUSE
+
+FROM ELIZABETH'S REIGN TO VICTORIA'S.
+
+</center>
+
+     I think _Castalia_ much too euphuistic, and though I
+     shouldn't like the book to be called simply still I have a
+     great prejudice against very florid titles for such
+     gatherings. _Treasury_ has been sadly run upon.
+
+I did not like _Sonnet Sequence_ for such a collection, and relinquished
+the title; moreover, I had had from the first a clearly defined scheme
+in mind, carrying its own inevitable title, which was in due course
+adopted. I may here remark that I never resisted any idea of Rossetti's
+at the moment of its inception, since resistance only led to a temporary
+outburst of self-assertion on his part. He was a man of so much
+impulse,--impulse often as violent as lawless--that to oppose him merely
+provoked anger to no good purpose, for as often as not the position
+at first adopted with so much pertinacity was afterwards silently
+abandoned, and your own aims quietly acquiesced in. On this subject of a
+title he wrote a further letter, which is interesting from more than one
+point of view:
+
+     I don't like _Garland_ at all C. Patmore collected a
+     _Children's Garland._ I think
+
+<center>
+
+ENGLISH SONNET'S
+
+PRESENT AND PAST, WITH--ETC.,
+
+</center>
+
+     would be a good title. I think I prefer _Present and Past_,
+     or _of the P. and P.,_ to _New and Old_ for your purpose;
+     but I own I am partly influenced by the fact that I have
+     settled to call my own vol. _Poems New and Old_, and don't
+     want it to get staled; but I really do think the other at
+     least as good for your purpose--perhaps more dignified.
+
+Again, in reply to a proposal of my own, he wrote:
+
+     I think _Sonnets of the Century_ an excellent idea and
+     title. I must say a mass of Wordsworth over again, like
+     Main's, is a little disheartening,--still the _best_
+     selection from him is what one wants. There is some book
+     called _A Century of Sonnets_, but this, I suppose, would
+     not matter....
+
+     I think sometimes of your sonnet-book, and have formed
+     certain views. I really would not in your place include old
+     work at all: it would be but a scanty gathering, and I feel
+     certain that what is really in requisition is a supplement
+     to Main, containing living writers (printed and un-printed)
+     put together under their authors' names (not separately) and
+     rare gleanings from those more recently dead.
+
+I fear I did not attach importance to this decision, for I now knew my
+correspondent too well to rely upon his being entirely in the same mind
+for long. Hence I was not surprised to receive the following a day or
+two later:
+
+     I lately had a conversation with Watts about your sonnet-
+     book, and find his views to be somewhat different from what
+     I had expressed, and I may add I think now he is right. He
+     says there should be a very careful selection of the elder
+     sonnets and of everything up to present century. I think he
+     is right.
+
+The fact is, that almost from the first I had taken a view similar to
+Mr. Watts's as to the design of my book, and had determined to call the
+anthology by the title it now bears. On one occasion, however, I acted
+rather without judgment in sending Rossetti a synopsis of certain
+critical tests formulated by Mr. Watts in a letter of great power and
+value.
+
+In the letter in question Mr. Watts seemed to be setting himself to
+confute some extremely ill-considered remarks made in a certain quarter
+upon the structure of the sonnet, where (following Macaulay) the critic
+says that there exists no good reason for requiring that even the
+conventional limit as to length should be observed, and that the only
+use in art of the legitimate model is to "supply a poet with something
+to do when his invention fails." I confess to having felt no little
+amazement that one so devoid of a perception of the true function of the
+sonnet should have been considered a proper person to introduce a great
+sonnet-writer; and Mr. Watts (who, however, made no mention of the
+writer) clearly demonstrated that the true sonnet has the foundation
+of its structure in a fixed metrical law, and hence, that as it is
+impossible (as Keats found out for himself) to improve upon the accepted
+form, that model--known as the Petrarchian--should, with little or no
+variation, be worked upon. Rossetti took fire, however, from a mistaken
+notion that Mr. Watts's canons, as given in the letter in question,
+and merely reported by me, were much more inflexible than they really
+proved.
+
+     Sonnets of mine _could not appear_ in any book which
+     contained such rigid rules as to rhyme, as are contained in
+     Watts's letter. I neither follow them, nor agree with them
+     as regards the English language. Every sonnet-writer should
+     show full capability of conforming to them in many
+     instances, but never to deviate from them in English must
+     pinion both thought and diction, and, (mastery once proved)
+     a series gains rather than loses by such varieties as do not
+     lessen the only absolute aim--that of beauty. The English
+     sonnet too much tampered with becomes a sort of bastard
+     madrigal. Too much, invariably restricted, it degenerates
+     into a Shibboleth.
+
+     Dante's sonnets (in reply to your question--not as part of
+     the above point) vary in arrangement. I never for a moment
+     thought of following in my book the rhymes of each
+     individual sonnet.
+
+     If sonnets of mine remain admissible, I should prefer
+     printing the two _On Cassandra to The Monochord_ and _Wine
+     of Circe_.
+
+     I would not be too anxious, were I you, about anything in
+     choice of sonnets except the brains and the music.
+
+Again he wrote:
+
+     I talked to Watts about his letter. He seems to agree with
+     me as to advisable variation of form in preference to
+     transmuting valuable thought. It would not be afc all found
+     that my best sonnets are always in the mere form which I
+     think the best. The question with me is regulated by what I
+     have to say. But in truth, if I have a distinction as a
+     sonnet-writer, it is that I never admit a sonnet which is
+     not fully on the level of every other.... Again, as to this
+     blessed question, though no one ever took more pleasure in
+     continually using the form I prefer when not interfering
+     with thought, to insist on it would after a certain point be
+     ruin to common sense.
+
+     As to what you say of _The One Hope_--it is fully equal to
+     the very best of my sonnets, or I should not have wound up
+     the series with it. But the fact is, what is peculiar
+     chiefly in the series is, that scarcely one is worse than
+     any other. You have much too great a habit of speaking of a
+     special octave, sestette, or line. Conception, my boy,
+     _fundamental brainwork_, that is what makes the difference
+     in all art. Work your metal as much as you like, but first
+     take care that it is gold and worth working. A Shakspearean
+     sonnet is better than the most perfect in form, because
+     Shakspeare wrote it.
+
+     As for Drayton, of course his one incomparable sonnet is the
+     _Love-Parting_. That is almost the best in the language, if
+     not quite. I think I have now answered queries, and it is
+     late. Good-night!
+
+Rossetti had somewhat mistaken the scope of the letter referred to,
+and when he came to know exactly what was intended, I found him in warm
+agreement with the views therein taken. I have said at an earlier stage
+that Rossetti's instinct for what was good in poetry was unfailing,
+whatever the value of his opinions on critical principles, and hence I
+felt naturally anxious to have the benefit of his views on certain of
+the elder writers. He said:
+
+     I am sorry I am no adept in elder sonnet literature. Many of
+     Donne's are remarkable--no doubt you glean some. None of
+     Shakspeare's is more indispensable than the wondrous one on
+     _Last_ (129). Hartley Coleridge's finest is
+
+          "If I have sinned in act, I may repent."
+
+     There is a fine one by Isaac Williams, evidently on the
+     death of a worldly man, and he wrote other good ones. To
+     return to the old, I think Stillingfleet's _To Williamson_
+     very fine....
+
+     I would like to send you a list of my special favourites
+     among Shakspeare's sonnets--viz.:--
+
+     15, 27, 29, 30, 36, 44, 45, 49, 50, 52, 55, 56, 59, 61, 62,
+     64, 65, 66, 68, 71, 73, 76, 77, 90, 93, 94, 97, 98, 99, 102,
+     107, 110, 116, 117, 119, 120, 123, 129, 135, 136, 138, 144,
+     145.
+
+     I made the selection long ago, and of course love them in
+     varying degrees.
+
+     There should be an essential reform in the printing of
+     Shakspeare's sonnets. After sonnet 125 should occur the
+     words _End of Part I_. The couplet-piece, numbered 126,
+     should be called _Epilogue to Part I._. Then, before 127,
+     should be printed Part II. After 152, should be put End of
+     Part II.--and the two last sonnets should be called Epilogue
+     to Part II. About these two last I have a theory of my own.
+
+     Did you ever see the excellent remarks on these sonnets in
+     my brother's _Lives of Famous Poets?_ I think a simple point
+     he mentions (for first time) fixes Pembroke clearly as the
+     male friend. I am glad you like his own two fine sonnets. I
+     wish he would write more such. By the bye, you speak with
+     great scorn of the closing couplet in sonnets. I do not
+     certainly think that form the finest, but I do think this
+     and every variety desirable in a series, and have often used
+     it myself. I like your letters on sonnets; write on all
+     points in question. The two last of Shakspeare's sonnets
+     seem to me to have a very probable (and rather elaborate)
+     meaning never yet attributed to them. Some day, when I see
+     you, we will talk it over. Did you ever see a curious book
+     by one Brown (I don't mean Armitage Brown) on Shakspeare's
+     sonnets? By the bye, he is not the source of my notion as
+     above, but a matter of fact he names helps in it. I never
+     saw Massey's book on the subject, but fancy his views and
+     Brown's are somewhat allied. You should look at what my
+     brother says, which is very concise and valuable. I hope I
+     am not omitting to answer you in any essential point, but my
+     writing-table is a chaos into which your last letters have,
+     for the moment, sunk beyond recovery.
+
+     I consider the foregoing, perhaps, the most valuable of
+     Rossetti's letters to me. I cannot remember that we ever
+     afterwards talked over the two last sonnets of Shakspeare;
+     if we did so, the meaning attached to them by him did not
+     fix itself very definitely upon my memory.
+
+     In explanation of my alleged dislike of the closing couplet,
+     I may say that a rhymed couplet at the close of a sonnet has
+     an effect upon my ear similar to that produced by the
+     couplets at the ends of some of the acts of Shakspeare's
+     plays, which were in many instances interpolated by the
+     actors to enable them to make emphatic exits.
+
+     I must now group together a number of short notes on
+     sonnets:
+
+     I think Blanco White's sonnet difficult to overrate in
+     _thought_--probably in this respect unsurpassable, but easy
+     to overrate as regards its workmanship. Of course there is
+     the one fatally disenchanting line:
+
+          While fly and leaf and insect stood revealed.
+
+     The poverty of vision which could not see at a glance that
+     fly and insect were one and the same, is, as you say, enough
+     to account for its being the writer's only sonnet (there is
+     one more however which I don't know).
+
+     I'll copy you overpage a sonnet which I consider a very fine
+     one, but which may be said to be quite unknown. It is by
+     Charles Whitehead, who wrote the very admirable and
+     exceptional novel of _Richard Savage_, published somewhere
+     about 1840.
+
+          Even as yon lamp within my vacant room
+             With arduous flame disputes the doubtful night,
+             And can with its involuntary light
+          But lifeless things that near it stand illume;
+          Yet all the while it doth itself consume,
+             And ere the sun hath reached his morning height
+             With courier beams that greet the shepherd's sight,
+          There where its life arose must be its tomb:--
+          So wastes my life away, perforce confined
+             To common things, a limit to its sphere,
+          It gleams on worthless trifles undesign'd,
+             With fainter ray each hour imprison'd here.
+          Alas to know that the consuming mind
+             Must leave its lamp cold ere the sun appear!
+
+     I am sure you will agree with me in admiring _that_. I quote
+     from memory, and am not sure that I have given line 6 quite
+     correctly....
+
+     I have just had Blanco White's only other sonnet (_On being
+     called an Old Man at 50_) copied out for you. I do certainly
+     think it ought to go in, though no better than so-so, as you
+     say. But it is just about as good as the former one, but for
+     the leading and splendid thought in the latter. Both are but
+     proseman's diction.
+
+     There is a sonnet of Chas. Wells's _On Chaucer_ which is not
+     worthy of its writer, but still you should have it. It
+     occurs among some prefatory tributes in _Chaucer
+     Modernised_, edited by E. H. Home. I don't know how you are
+     to get a copy, but the book is in the British Museum Reading
+     Room. The sonnet is signed C. W. only.
+
+     The sonnet by Wells seemed to me in every respect poor, and
+     as it was no part of my purpose (as an admirer of Wells) to
+     advertise what the poet could not do, I determined--against
+     Rossetti's judgment--not to print the sonnet.
+
+     You certainly, in my opinion, ought to print Wells's sonnet.
+     Certainly nothing so disjointed ever gave itself the name
+     before, but it ought to be available for reference, and I do
+     not agree with you in considering it weak in any sense
+     except that of structure.
+
+     There is a sonnet by Ebenezer Jones, beginning "I never
+     wholly feel that summer is high," which, though very jagged,
+     has decided merit to warrant its insertion.
+
+     As for Tennyson, he seems to have given leave for a sonnet
+     to appear in Main's book. Why not in yours? But I have long
+     ceased to know him, nor is any friend of mine in
+     communication with him.... My brother has written in his
+     time a few sonnets. Two of them I think very fine--
+     especially the one called _Shelley's Heart_, which he has
+     lately worked upon again with immense advantage.... You do
+     not tell me from whom you have received sonnets. The reason
+     which prevents my coming forward, in such a difficulty, with
+     a new sonnet of my own, is this:--which indeed you have
+     probably surmised: I know nothing would gratify malevolence,
+     after the controversy which ensued on your lecture, more
+     than to be able to assert, however falsely, that we had been
+     working in concert all along, that you were known to me from
+     the first, and that your advocacy had no real
+     spontaneity.... When you first entered on the subject, and
+     wrote your lecture, you were a perfect stranger to me, and
+     that fact greatly enhanced my pleasure in its enthusiastic
+     tone. I hope sincerely that we may have further and close
+     opportunities of intercourse, but should like whatever you
+     may write of me to come from the old source of intellectual
+     affinity only. That you should think the subject worthy of
+     further labour is a pleasure to me, but I only trust it may
+     not be a disadvantage to your book in unfriendly eyes,
+     particularly if that view happened to be the proposed
+     publisher's, in which case I should much prefer that this
+     section of your work were withdrawn for a more propitious
+     occasion.... I am very glad Brown is furthering your sonnet-
+     book--he knows so many bards. Of course if I were you, I
+     should keep an eye on the mouths even of gift-horses; but
+     were a creditable stud to be trotted out, of course I should
+     be willing; as were I one among many, the objection I noted
+     would not exist. I do not mean for a moment to say that many
+     very fine sonnets might not be obtained from poets not yet
+     known or not widely known; but known names would be the
+     things to parry the difficulty.
+
+Later he wrote:
+
+     As you know, I want to contribute to your volume if I can do
+     so without fear of the consequences hinted at in a former
+     letter as likely to ensue, so I now enclose a sonnet of my
+     own. If you are out in March 1881, you may be before my new
+     edition, but I am getting my stock together. Not a word of
+     this however, as it mustn't get into gossip paragraphs at
+     present. _The House of Life_ is now a hundred sonnets--all
+     lyrics being removed. Besides this series, I have forty-five
+     sonnets extra. I think, as you are willing, I shall use the
+     title I sent you--_A Sonnet Sequence_. I fancy the
+     alternative title would be briefer and therefore better as
+
+<center>
+
+OUR SONNET-MUSE
+
+PROM ELIZABETH TO VICTORIA
+
+</center>
+
+I could not be much concerned about the unwillingness to give me a new
+sonnet which Rossetti at first exhibited, for I knew full well that
+sooner or later the sonnet would come. Not that I recognised in him the
+faintest scintillation of the affectation so common among authors as
+to the publication of work. But the fear of any appearance of collusion
+between himself and his critics was, as he said, a bugbear that
+constantly haunted him. Owing to this, a stranger often stood a better
+chance of securing his ready and open co-operation than the most
+intimate of friends. I frequently yielded to his desire that in anything
+that I might write his name should not be mentioned--too frequently
+by far, to my infinite vexation at the time, and now to my deep and
+ineradicable regret. The sonnet-book out of which arose much of the
+correspondence printed in this chapter, contains in its preface and
+notes hardly an allusion to him, and yet he was, in my judgment, out of
+all reach and sight, the greatest sonnet-writer of his time. The sonnet
+first sent was _Pride of Youth_, but as this formed part of _The House
+of Life_ series, it was withdrawn, and _Raleigh's Cell in the Tower_
+was substituted The following hitherto unpublished sonnet was also
+contributed but withdrawn at the last moment, because of its being out
+of harmony with the sonnets selected to accompany it:
+
+               ON CERTAIN ELIZABETHAN REVIVALS.
+
+          O ruff-embastioned vast Elizabeth,
+             Bush to these bushel-bellied casks of wine,
+             Home-growth, 'tis true, but rank as turpentine,--
+          What would we with such skittle-plays at death %
+          Say, must we watch these brawlers' brandished lathe,
+             Or to their reeking wit our ears incline,
+             Because all Castaly flowed crystalline
+          In gentle Shakspeare's modulated breath!
+          What! must our drama with the rat-pit vie,
+             Nor the scene close while one is left to kill!
+                Shall this be poetry % And thou--thou--man
+                Of blood, thou cannibalic Caliban,
+          What shall be said to thee?--a poet?--Fie!
+             "An honourable murderer, if you will"
+
+     I mentioned to you [he says] William Davies, author of
+     _Songs of a Wayfarer_ (by the bye, another man has since
+     adopted his title). He has many excellent sonnets, and is a
+     valued friend of mine. I shall send you, on his behalf, a
+     copy of the book for selection of what you may please.... It
+     is very unequal, but the best truly excellent. The sonnets
+     are numerous, and some good, though the best work in the
+     book is not among them. There are two poems--_The Garden_,
+     and another called, I think, _On a dried-up Spring_, which
+     are worthy of the most fastidious collections. Many of the
+     poems are unnamed, and the whole has too much of a Herrick
+     air. . . .
+
+     It is quite refreshing to find you so pleased with my good
+     friend Davies's book, and I wish he were in London, as I
+     would have shown him what you say, which I know would have
+     given him pleasure. He is a man who suffers much from moods
+     of depression, in spite of his philosophic nature. I have
+     marked fifty pieces of different kinds throughout his book,
+     and of these twenty-nine are sonnets. Had those fifty been
+     alone printed, Davies would now be remembered and not
+     forgotten: but all poets now-a-days are redundant except
+     Tennyson. ...
+
+     I am this evening writing to Davies, who is in Rome, and
+     could not resist enclosing what you say, with so much
+     experimental appreciativeness of his book, and of his
+     intention to fill it with moral sunshine. I am sure he 'll
+     send a new sonnet if he has one, but I fancy his bardic day
+     is over. I should think he was probably not subject to
+     melancholy when he wrote the _Wayfarer_. However, he tells
+     me that his spirits have improved in Italy. One other little
+     book of Herrickian verse he has written, called _The
+     Shepherd!s Garden_, but there are no sonnets in it. Besides
+     this, he published a volume containing a record of travel of
+     a very interesting kind, and called _The Pilgrimage of the
+     Tiber_. This is well known. It is illustrated, many of the
+     drawings being by himself, for he is quite as much painter
+     as poet. He also wrote in _The Quarterly Review_ an article
+     on the sonnet (I should think about 1870 or so), and, a
+     little later, one which raised great wrath, on the English
+     School of Painting. These I have not seen. He "lacks
+     advancement," however; having fertile powers and little
+     opportunity, and being none the luckier (I think) for a
+     small independence which keeps off _compulsion_ to work,
+     though of willingness he has abundance in many directions.
+
+     There is an admirable but totally unknown living poet named
+     Dixon. I will send you two small vols, of his which he gave
+     me long ago, but please take good care of them, and return
+     them as soon as done with. I value them highly. I forgot
+     till to-day that he had written any sonnets, but I see there
+     are three in one vol. and one in another. I have marked my
+     two favourites. He should certainly be represented in your
+     book. If I live, I mean to write something about him in some
+     quarter when I can. His finest passages are as fine as any
+     living man can do. He was a canon of Carlisle Cathedral, and
+     at present has a living somewhere. If you wanted to ask him
+     for an original sonnet, you might mention my name, and
+     address him at Carlisle with _Please forward_. Of course he
+     is a Rev.
+
+     You will be sorry to hear that Davies has abandoned the hope
+     of producing a new sonnet to his own satisfaction. I have
+     again, however, urged him to the onslaught, and told him how
+     deserving you are of his efforts.
+
+     Swinburne, who is a vast admirer of my sister's, thinks the
+     _Advent_ perhaps the noblest of all her poems, and also
+     specially loves the _Passing Away_. I do not know that I
+     quite agree with your decided preference for the two sonnets
+     of hers you signalise,--the _World_ is very fine, but the
+     other, _Dead before Death_, a little sensational for her. I
+     think _After Death_ one of her noblest, and the one _After
+     Communion_. In my own view, the greatest of all her poems is
+     that on France after the siege--_To-Day for Me_. A very
+     splendid piece of feminine ascetic passion is _The Convent
+     Threshold_.
+
+     I have run the sonnet you like, _St. Luke the Painter_, into
+     a sequence with two more not yet printed, and given the
+     three a general title of _Old and New Art_, as well as
+     special titles to each. I shall annex them to _The House of
+     Life_.
+
+     Have you ever read Vaughan? He resembles Donne a good deal
+     as to quaintness, but with a more emotional personality.
+
+     I have altered the last line of octave in _Lost Days_. It
+     now runs--
+
+          "The undying throats of Hell, athirst alway."
+
+     I always had it in my mind to make a change here, as the
+     _in_ standing in the line in its former reading clashed with
+     _in_ occurring in the previous line. I have done what I
+     think is a prime sonnet on the murdered Czar, which I
+     enclose, but don't show it to a soul.
+
+     Theodore Watts is going to print a very fine sonnet of his
+     own in _The Athenaeum_. It is the first verse he ever put in
+     print, though he wrote much (when a very young man). Tell me
+     how you like it. I think he is destined to shine in that
+     class of poetry.
+
+     I knew you must like Watts's sonnets. They are splendid
+     affairs. I am not sure that I agree with you in liking the
+     first the better of the two: the second (_Natura Maligna_)
+     is perhaps the deeper and finer. I have asked Watts to give
+     you a new sonnet, and I think perhaps he will do so, or at
+     all events give you permission to use those he has printed.
+     He has just come into the room, and says he would like to
+     hear from you on the subject.
+
+     From one rather jocular sentence in your note I judge you
+     may include some sonnets of your own. I see no possible
+     reason why you should not. You are really now, at your
+     highest, among our best sonnet-writers, and have written two
+     or three sonnets that yield to few or none whatever. I am
+     forced, however, to request that you will not put in the one
+     referring to myself, from my constant bugbear of any
+     appearance of collusion. That sonnet is a very fine one--my
+     brother was showing it me again the other day. It is not my
+     personal gratification alone, though that is deep, because I
+     know you are sincere, which leads me to the conclusion that
+     it is your best, and very fine indeed. I think your
+     Cumberland sonnet admirable. The sonnet on Byron is
+     extremely musical in flow and the symbolic scenery of
+     exceptional excellence. The view taken is the question with
+     me. Byron's vehement directness, at its best, is a lasting
+     lesson: and, dubious monument as _Don Juan_ may be, it
+     towers over the century. Of course there is truth in what
+     you say; but _ought_ it to be the case? and is it the case
+     in any absolute sense? You deal frankly with your sonnets,
+     and do not shrink from radical change. I think that on
+     Oliver much better than when I saw it before. The opening
+     phrases of both octave and sestette are very fine; but the
+     second quatrain and the second terzina, though with a
+     quality of beauty, both seem somewhat to lack distinctness.
+     The word _rivers_ cannot be used with elision--the v is a
+     hard pebble in the flow, and so are the closing consonants.
+     You must put up with _streams_ if you keep the line.
+
+     You should have Bailey's dedicatory sonnet in _Festus_.
+
+     I am enclosing a fine sonnet by William Bell Scott, which I
+     wished him to let me send you for your book. It has not yet
+     been printed. I think I heard of some little chaffy matter
+     between him and you, but, doubtless, you have virtually
+     forgotten all about it. I must say frankly that I think the
+     day when you made the speech he told me of must have been
+     rather a wool-gathering one with you.... I suppose you know
+     that Scott has written a number of fine sonnets contained in
+     his vol of _Poems_ published about 1875, I think.
+
+     I directed the attention of Mr. Waddington (whom, however, I
+     don't know personally) to a most noble sonnet by Fanny
+     Kemble, beginning, "Art thou already weary of the way?" He
+     has put it in, and several others of hers, but she is very
+     unequal, and I don't know if the others should be there, but
+     you should take the one in question. It sadly wants new
+     punctuation, being vilely printed just as I first saw it
+     when a boy in some twopenny edition.
+
+     In a memoir of Gilchrist, appended now by his widow to the
+     _Life of Blake_, there is a sonnet by G., perhaps
+     interesting enough, as being exceptional, for you to ask for
+     it; but I don't advise you, if you don't think it worth.
+
+     I have received from Mrs. Meynell, a sister of Eliz.
+     Thompson, the painter, a most genuine little book of poems
+     containing some sonnets of true spiritual beauty. I must
+     send it you.
+
+     This book had just then been introduced to Rossetti with
+     much warmth of praise by Mr. Watts, and he took to it
+     vastly.
+
+This closes Rossetti's interesting letters on sonnet literature. In
+reprinting his first volume of _Poems_ he had determined to remove
+the sonnets of _The House of Life_ to the new volume of _Ballads and
+Sonnets_, and fill the space with the fragment of a poem written in
+youth, and now called _The Bride's Prelude_. He sent me a proof. The
+reader will remember that as a narrative fragment it is less
+remarkable for striking incident (though never failing of interest
+and picturesqueness) than for a slow and psychical development which
+ultimately gained a great hold of the sympathies. The poem leaves behind
+it a sense as of a sultry day. Judging first of its merits as a song
+(using the word in its broad and simple sense), the poem flows on the
+tongue with unbroken sweetness and with a variety of cadence and light
+and shade of melody which might admit of its pursuing its meanderings
+through five times its less than 50 pages, and still keeping one's
+senses awake to the constantly recurring advent of new and pleasing
+literary forms. The story is a striking one, with a great wealth of
+highly effective incident,--notably the episode of the card-playing,
+and of the father striking down the sword which Raoul turns against the
+breast of the bride. Almost equally memorable are the scenes in which
+the lover appears, and the occasional interludes of incident in which,
+between the pauses of the narrative, the bridegroom's retinue are heard
+sporting in the courtyard without.
+
+The whole atmosphere of the poem is saturated in a medievalism of spirit
+to which no lapse of modernism does violence, and the spell of romance
+which comes with that atmosphere of the middle ages is never broken, but
+preserved in the minutest most matter-of-fact details, such as the bowl
+of water that stood amidst flowers, and in which the sister Amelotte
+"slid a cup" and offered it to Aloyse to drink. But the one great charm
+of the poem lies in its subtle and most powerful psychical analysis,
+seen foreshadowed in the first mention of the bride sitting in the
+shade, but first felt strongly when she begs her sister to pray, and
+again when she tells how, at God's hint, she had whispered something of
+the whole tale to her sister who slept
+
+The dread introspection pictured after the sin is in the highest degree
+tragic, and affects one like remorse in its relentlessness, although
+less remorse than fear of discovery. The sickness of the following
+condition, with its yearnings, longings, dizziness, is very nobly
+done, and delicate as is the theme, and demanding a touch of unerring
+strength, yet lightness, the part of the poem concerned with it contains
+certain of the most beautiful and stirring things. The madness (for it
+is not less than such) in which at the sea-side, believing Urscelyn to
+be lost, the bride tells the whole tale, whilst her curse laughed within
+her to see the amazement and anger of her brothers and of her father,
+is doubtless true enough to the frenzied state of her mind; but my
+sympathies go out less to that part of the poem than to the subsequent
+part, in which the bride-mother is described as leaning along in thought
+after her child, till tears, not like a wedded girl's, fall among her
+curls. Highly dramatic, too, is the passage in which she fears to curse
+the evil men whose evil hands have taken her child, lest from evil lips
+the curse should be a blessing.
+
+The characterisation seemed to be highly powerful, and, so far as it
+went, finely contrasted. I could almost have wished that the love for
+which the bride suffers so much had been more dwelt upon, and Urscelyn
+had been made somehow more worthy of such love and sacrifice. The only
+point in which the poem struck me, after mature reflection, as less
+admirable than certain others of the author's, lay in the circumstance
+that the narrative moves slowly, but, of course, it should be remembered
+that the poem is one of emotion, not incident. There are most magical
+flashes of imagery in the poem, notably in the passage beginning
+
+     Her thought, long stagnant, stirred by speech,
+        Gave her a sick recoil;
+     As, dip thy fingers through the green
+     That masks a pool, where they have been,
+     The naked depth is black between.
+
+Rossetti wrote a valuable letter on his scheme for the completion of
+_The Bride's Prelude_:
+
+     I was much pleased with your verdict on _The Bride's
+     Prelude_. I think the poem is saved by its picturesqueness,
+     but that otherwise the story up to the point reached is too
+     purely repellent. I have the sequel quite clear in my mind,
+     and in it the mere passionate frailty of Aloyse's first love
+     would be followed by a true and noble love, rendered
+     calamitous by Urscelyn, who then (having become a powerful
+     soldier of fortune) solicits the hand of Aloyse. Thus the
+     horror which she expresses against him to her sister on the
+     bridal morning would be fully justified. Of course, Aloyse
+     would confess her fault to her second lover whose love
+     would, nevertheless, endure. The poem would gain so greatly
+     by this sequel that I suppose I must set to and finish it
+     one day, old as it is. I suppose it would be doubled, but
+     hardly more. I hate long poems.
+
+     I quite think the card-playing passage the best thing--as a
+     unit--in the poem: but your opinion encourages my own, that
+     it fails nowhere of good material. It certainly moves slowly
+     as you say, and this is quite against the rule I follow. But
+     here was no life condensed in an episode; but a story which
+     had necessarily to be told step by step, and a situation
+     which had unavoidably to be anatomised. If it is not
+     unworthy to appear with my best things, that is all I hope
+     for it. You have pitched curiously upon some of my favourite
+     touches, and very coincidently with Watts's views.
+
+Early in 1881, he wrote:
+
+     I am writing a ballad on the death of James I. of Scots. It
+     is already twice the length of _The White Ship_, and has a
+     good slice still to come. It is called _The King's Tragedy_,
+     and is a ripper I can tell you!
+
+     The other day I got from Italy a paper containing a really
+     excellent and exceptional notice of my poems, written by the
+     author of a volume also sent me containing, among other
+     translations from the English, _Jenny, Last Confession_,
+     etc.
+
+     I have been re-reading, after many years, Keats's _Otho the
+     Great_, and find it a much better thing than I remembered,
+     though only a draft.
+
+     I am much exercised as to what you mention as to a _Michael
+     Scott_ scheme of Coleridge's. Where does he speak of it, and
+     what is it? It is quite new to me; but curiously enough, I
+     have a complete scheme drawn up for a ballad, to be called
+     _Michael Scott's Wooing_, not the one I proposed beginning
+     now--and also have long designed a picture under the same
+     title, but of quite different motif! Allan Cunningham wrote
+     a romance called _Sir Michael Scott_, but I never saw it.
+
+     I have heard from Walter Severn about a subscription
+     proposed to erect a gravestone to his father beside that of
+     Keats. I should like you to copy for me your sonnet on
+     Severn. I hear it is in _The Athenaeum_, but have not seen
+     it. I was asked to prepare an inscription, which I send you.
+     Nothing would be so good as Severn's own words.
+
+     I strongly urge you to go on with your book on the
+     _Supernatural_. The closing chapter should, I think, be on
+     the _weird_ element in its perfection, as shown by recent
+     poets in the mess--i.e. those who take any lead. Tennyson
+     has it certainly here and there in imagery, but there is no
+     great success in the part it plays through his _Idylls_. The
+     Old Romaunt beats him there. The strongest instance of this
+     feeling in Tennyson that I remember is in a few lines of
+     _The Palace of Art_:
+
+          And hollow breasts enclosing hearts of flame;
+             And with dim-fretted foreheads all
+          On corpses three months old at morn she came
+             That stood against the wall.
+
+     I won't answer for the precise age of the corpses--perhaps I
+     have staled them somewhat.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+It is in the nature of these Recollections that they should be personal,
+and it can hardly occur to any reader to complain of them for being that
+which above all else they purport to be. I have hitherto, however, been
+conscious of a desire (made manifest to my own mind by the character of
+my selections from the letters written to me) to impart to this volume
+an interest as broad and general as may be. But my primary purpose is
+now, and has been from the first, to afford the best view at my command
+of Rossetti as a man; and more helpful to such purpose than any number
+of critical opinions, however interesting, have often been those
+passages in his letters where the writer has got closest to his
+correspondent in revealing most of himself. In the chapter I am now
+about to write I must perforce set aside all limitations of reserve if
+I am to convey such an idea of Rossetti's last days as fills my mind; I
+must be content to speak almost exclusively of my personal relations to
+him, to the enforced neglect of the more intimate relations of others.
+
+About six months after my first visit, Rossetti invited me to spend
+a week with him at his house, and this I was glad to be able to do. I
+found him in many important particulars a changed man. His complexion
+was brighter than before, and this circumstance taken alone might have
+been understood to indicate improved bodily health, but in actual fact
+it rather denoted in his case a retrograde physical tendency, as being
+indicative chiefly of some recent excess in the use of his pernicious
+drug. He was distinctly less inclined to corpulence, his eyes were less
+bright, and had more frequently than formerly the appearance of gazing
+upon vacancy, and when he walked to and fro in the studio, as it was
+his habit to do at intervals of about an hour, he did so with a more
+laboured sidelong motion than I had previously noticed, as though the
+body unconsciously lost and then regained some necessary control and
+command at almost every step. Half sensible, no doubt, of a reduced
+condition, or guessing perhaps the nature of my reflections from a
+certain uneasiness which it baffled my efforts to conceal, he paused for
+an instant one evening in the midst of these melancholy perambulations
+and asked me how he struck me as to health. More frankly than
+judiciously I answered promptly, Less well than formerly. It was a
+luckless remark, for Rossetti's prevailing wish at that moment was to
+conceal even from himself his lowered state, and the time was still to
+come when he should crave the questionable sympathy of those who said he
+looked even more ill than he felt. Just before this, my second visit,
+he had completed his _King's Tragedy_, and I had heard from his own lips
+how prostrate the emotional strain involved in the production of the
+poem had first left him. Casting himself now on the couch in an attitude
+indicative of unusual exhaustion, he said the ballad had taken much out
+of him. "It was as though my life ebbed out with it," he said, and in
+saying so much of the nervous tension occasioned by the work in question
+he did not overstate the truth as it presented itself to other eyes.
+Time after time while the ballad was in course of production, he had
+made effort to read it aloud to the friend to whose judgment his poetry
+was always submitted, but had as frequently failed to do so from the
+physical impossibility of restraining the tears that at every stage
+welled up out of an overwrought nature, for the poet never existed
+perhaps who, while at work, lived so vividly in the imagined situation.
+And the weight of that work was still upon him when we met again. His
+voice seemed to have lost much in quality, and in compass too to have
+diminished: or if the volume of sound remained the same, it appeared to
+have retired (so to express it) inwards, and to convey, when he spoke,
+the idea of a man speaking as much to himself as to others. More than
+ever now the scene of his life lacked for me some necessary vitality: it
+breathed an atmosphere of sorrow: it was like the dream of a distempered
+imagination out of which there came no welcome awakening, to say it was
+not true. On the side of his intellectual life Rossetti was obviously
+under less constraint with me than ever before. Previously he had seemed
+to make a conscious effort to speak generously of all contemporaries,
+and cordially of every friend with whom he was brought into active
+relations; and if, by force of some stray impulse, he was ever led to
+say a disparaging word of any one, he forthwith made a palpable, and
+sometimes amusing, effort so to obliterate the injurious impression
+as to convey the idea that he wished it to appear that he had not said
+anything at all. But now this restraint was thrown aside.
+
+I perceived that the drug by which he was enslaved caused what I may
+best characterise as intermittent waves of morbid suspiciousness as
+to the good faith of every individual, including his best, oldest,
+and truest friends, as to whom the most inexplicable delusions would
+suddenly come, and as suddenly go. He would talk in the gravest and most
+earnest way of the wrongs he had suffered at the hands of a dear friend,
+and then the moment his eloquence had drawn from me an exclamation of
+sympathy for him, he would turn round and heap upon the same individual
+an extravagance of praise for his fidelity and good faith. And now,
+he so classed his contemporaries as to leave no doubt that he was
+duly sensible of his own place amongst them, preserving, meantime, a
+dignified reticence as to the extent of his personal claims.
+
+His life was an anachronism. Such a man should have had no dealings with
+the nineteenth century: he belonged to the sixteenth, or perhaps the
+thirteenth, and in Italy not in England. It would, nevertheless, be
+wrong to say that he was wholly indifferent to important political
+issues, of which he took often a very judicial view. In dismissing
+further mention of this second and prolonged meeting with Rossetti,
+it only remains to me to say (as a necessary, if strictly personal,
+explanation of much that will follow), that on the evening preceding my
+departure, he asked me, in the event of my deciding to come to live in
+London, to take up my quarters at his house. To this proposal I made no
+reply: and neither his speech nor my silence needs any comment, and I
+shall offer none.
+
+A month or two later my own health gave way, and then, a change of
+residence being inevitable, Rossetti repeated his invitation; but a
+London campaign, under such conditions as were necessarily entailed
+by pitching one's tent with him, got further and further away, until
+I seemed to see it through the inverse end of a telescope whereof the
+slides were being drawn out, out, every day further and further. I
+determined to spend half a year among' the mountains of Cumberland,
+and went up to the Vale of St. John. Scarcely had I settled there when
+Rossetti wrote that he must himself soon leave London: that he was
+wearied out absolutely, and unable to sleep at night, that if he could
+only reach that secluded vale he would breathe a purer air mentally
+as well as physically. The mood induced by contemplation of the
+tranquillity of my retreat over-against the turmoil and distractions
+of the city _in_ which, though not _of_ which, he was, added to the
+deepening exhaustion which had already begun when I left him, had
+prevailed with him, he said, to ask me to come down to London, and
+travel back with him. "Supposing," he wrote, "I were to ask you to come
+to town in a fortnight's time from now--I returning with you for a while
+into the country--would that be feasible to you?"
+
+Once unsettled in the environments within which for years he had moved
+contentedly, a thousand reasons were found for the contemplated step,
+and simultaneously a thousand obstacles arose to impede the execution of
+it. "They have at length taken my garden," he said, "as they have long
+threatened to do, and now they are really setting about building upon
+it. I do not in the least know what my plans may be." And again: "It
+seems certain that I must leave this house and seek another. Is there
+any house in the neighbourhood of the Vale of St. John with a largish
+room one could paint in (to N. or NE.)?" The idea of his taking up his
+permanent abode so far out of the market circle was, I well knew, just
+one of those impracticable notions which, with Rossetti, were abandoned
+as soon as conceived, so I was not surprised to hear from him as
+follows, by the succeeding post: "In what I wrote yesterday I said
+something as to a possibility of leaving town, but I now perceive this
+is not practicable at present; therefore need not trouble you to take
+note of neighbouring houses." Presently he wrote again: "Bedevilments
+thicken: the garden is ploughed up, and I 've not stirred out of the
+house for a week: I must leave this place at once if I am to leave it
+alive." {*}
+
+     * It is but just to say that, although Rossetti wrote thus
+     peevishly of what was quite inevitable,--the yielding up of
+     his fine garden,--he would at other times speak of the great
+     courtesy and good-nature of Messrs. Pemberton, in allowing
+     him the use of the garden after it had been severed from the
+     property he hired.
+
+"My present purpose is to take another house in London. Could you not
+come down and beat up agents for me? I know you will not deny me your
+help. I hear of a house at Brixton, with a garden of two acres, and only
+L130 a year." In a day or two even this last hope had proved delusive:
+"I find the house at Brixton will not do, and I hear of nothing else....
+I am anxious as to having become perfectly deaf on the right side of
+my head. Partial approaches to this have sometimes occurred to me and
+passed away, so I will not be too much troubled at it." A little later
+he wrote: "Now my housekeeper is leaving me, her mother being very ill.
+Can you not come to my assistance? Come at once and we will set sail
+in one boat." I appear to have replied to this last appeal in a tone
+of some little scepticism as to his remaining long in the same mind
+relative to our mutual housemating, for subsequently he says: "At this
+writing I can see no likelihood of my not remaining in the mind that,
+in case of your coming to London, your quarters should be taken up here.
+The house is big enough for two, even if they meant to be strangers to
+each other. You would have your own rooms and we should meet just when
+we pleased. You have got a sufficient inkling of my exceptional habits
+not to be scared by them. It is true, at times my health and spirits are
+variable, but I am sure we should not be squabbling. However, it seems
+you have no intention of a quite immediate move, and we can speak
+farther of it." I readily consented to do whatever seemed feasible
+to help him out of his difficulties, which existed, however, as I
+perceived, much more in his own mind than in actual fact. I thought
+a brief holiday in the solitude within which I was then located would
+probably be helpful in restoring a tranquil condition of mind, and as
+his brother, Mr. Scott, Mr. Watts, Mr. Shields, and other friends in
+London, were of a similar opinion, efforts were made to induce him
+to undertake the journey which he had been the first to think of.
+His oldest friend, Mr. Madox Brown (whose presence would have been as
+valuable now as it had proved to be on former occasions), was away at
+Manchester, and remained there throughout the time of his last illness.
+His moods at this time were too variable to be relied upon three days
+together, and so I find him writing:
+
+     Many thanks for the information as to your Shady Vale, which
+     seems a vision--a distant one, alas!--of Paradise. Perhaps I
+     may reach it yet.... I am now thinking of writing another
+     ballad-poem to add at the end of my volume. It is romantic,
+     not historical I have a clear scheme for it and believe your
+     scenery might help me much if I could get there. When you
+     hear that scheme, you will, I believe, pronounce it
+     precisely fitted to the scenery you describe as now
+     surrounding you. That scenery I hope to reach a little
+     later, but meantime should much like to see you in London
+     and return with you.
+
+The proposed ballad was to be called _The Orchard Pits_ and was to be
+illustrative of the serpent fascination of beauty, but it was never
+written. Contented now to await the issue of events, he proceeded to
+write on subjects of general interest:
+
+     Keats (page 154, vol. i., of Houghton's Life, etc.) mentions
+     among other landscape features the Vale of St. John. So you
+     may think of him in the neighbourhood as well as (or, if you
+     like, rather than) Wordsworth.
+
+     I have been reading again Hogg's Shelley. S. appears to have
+     been as mad at Keswick as everywhere else, but not madder;--
+     that he could not compass.
+
+At this juncture some unlooked-for hitch in the arrangements then
+pending for the sale of the _Dante's Dream_ to the Corporation of
+Liverpool rendered my presence in London inevitable, and upon my arrival
+I found that Rossetti had fitted out rooms for my reception, although
+I had never down to that moment finally decided to avail myself of an
+offer which upon its first being broached, appeared to be too one-sided
+a bargain (in which of course the sacrifice seemed to be Rossetti's) to
+admit of my entertaining it. In this way I drifted into my position as
+Rossetti's housemate.
+
+The letters and scraps of notes I have embodied in the foregoing will
+probably convey a better idea of Rossetti's native irresolution, as it
+was made manifest to me in the early part of 1881, than any abstract
+definition, however faithful and exact, could be expected to do.
+Irresolution was indubitably his most noticeable quality at the time
+when I came into active relation with him; and if I be allowed to have
+any perception of character and any acquaintance with the fundamental
+traits that distinguish man from man, I shall say unhesitatingly (though
+I well know how different is the opinion of others) that irresolution
+with melancholy lay at the basis of his nature. I have heard Mr.
+Swinburne speak of a cheerfulness of deportment in early life, which
+imparted an idea as of one who could not easily be depressed. I have
+heard Mr. Watts speak of the days at Kelmscott Manor House, where
+he first knew him, and where Rossetti was the most delightful of
+companions. I have heard Canon Dixon speak of a determination of purpose
+which yielded to no sort of obstacle, but carried its point by the sheer
+vehemence with which it asserted it. I can only say that I was witness
+to neither characteristic. Of traits the reverse of these, I was
+constantly receiving evidence; but let it be remembered that before I
+joined Rossetti (which was only in the last year of his life) in that
+intimate relation which revealed to my unwilling judgment every foible
+and infirmity of character, the whole nature of the man had been
+vitiated by an enervating drug. At my meeting with him the brighter
+side of his temperament had been worn away in the night-troubles of his
+unrestful couch; and of that needful volition, which establishes for
+a man the right to rule not others but himself, only the mockery and
+inexplicable vagaries of temper remained. When I knew him, Rossetti was
+devoid of resolution. At that moment at which he had finally summoned
+up every available and imaginable reason for pursuing any particular
+course, his purpose wavered and his heart gave way. When I knew him,
+Rossetti was destitute of cheerfulness or content. At that instant,
+at which the worst of his shadowy fears had been banished by some
+fortuitous occurrence that lit up with an unceasing radiation of hope
+every prospect of life, he conjured out of its very brightness fresh
+cause for fear and sadness. True, indeed, these may have been no more
+than symptoms of those later phenomena which came of disease, and
+foreshadowed death. Other minds may reduce to a statement of cause and
+effect what I am content to offer as fact.
+
+Upon settling with Rossetti in July 1881, I perceived that his health
+was weaker. His tendency to corpulence had entirely disappeared, his
+feebleness of step had become at certain moments painfully apparent,
+and his temper occasionally betrayed signs of bitterness. To myself,
+personally, he was at this stage as genial as of old, or if for an
+instant he gave vent to an unprovoked outburst of wrath, he would far
+more than atone for it by a look of inexpressible remorse and some
+feeling words of regret, whereof the import sometimes was--
+
+I wish you were indeed my son, for though then I should still have no
+right to address you so, I should at least have some right to expect
+your forgiveness.
+
+In such moods of more than needful solicitude for one's acutest
+sensibilities, Rossetti was absolutely irresistible.
+
+As I have said, the occupant of this great gloomy house, in which I had
+now become a resident, had rarely been outside its doors for two years;
+certainly never afoot, and only in carriages with his friends. Upon the
+second night of my stay, I announced my intention of taking a walk on
+the Chelsea embankment, and begged him to accompany me. To my amazement
+he yielded, and every night for a week following, I succeeded in
+inducing him to repeat the now unfamiliar experience. It was obvious
+enough to himself that he walked totteringly, with infinite expenditure
+of physical energy, and returned in a condition of exhaustion that left
+him prostrate for an hour afterwards. The root of all this evil was soon
+apparent. He was exceeding with the chloral, and little as I expected or
+desired to exercise a moral guardianship over the habits of this great
+man, I found myself insensibly dropping into that office.
+
+Negotiations for the sale of the Liverpool picture were now complete;
+the new volume of poems and the altered edition of the old volume had
+been satisfactorily passed through the press; and it might have been
+expected that with the anxiety occasioned by these enterprises,
+would pass away the melancholy which in a nature like Rossetti's they
+naturally induced. The reverse was the fact, He became more and more
+depressed as each palpable cause of depression was removed, and more
+and more liable to give way to excess with the drug. By his brother, Mr.
+Watts, Mr. Shields, and others who had only too frequently in times past
+had experience of similar outbreaks, this failure in spirits, with
+all its attendant physical weakness, was said to be due primarily to
+hypochondriasis. Hence the returning necessity to get him away (as
+Mr. Madox Brown had done at a previous crisis) for a change of air and
+scene. Once out of this atmosphere of gloom, we hoped that amid cheerful
+surroundings his health would speedily revive. Infinite were the efforts
+that had to be made, and countless the precautions that had to be taken
+before he could be induced to set out, but at length we found ourselves
+upon our way to Keswick, at nine p.m., one evening in September, in
+a special carriage packed with as many artist's trappings and as many
+books as would have lasted for a year.
+
+We reached Penrith as the grey of dawn had overspread the sky. It was
+six o'clock as we got into the carriage that was to drive us through the
+vale of St. John to our destination at the Legberthwaite end of it. The
+morning was now calm, the mountains looked loftier, grander, and yet
+more than ever precipitous from the road that circled about their base.
+Nothing could be heard but the calls of the awakening cattle, the rumble
+of cataracts far away, and the rush and surge of those that were near.
+Rossetti was all but indifferent to our surroundings, or displayed only
+such fitful interest in them as must have been affected out of a kindly
+desire to please me. He said the chloral he had taken daring the journey
+was upon him, and he could not see. At length we reached the house that
+was for some months to be our home. It stood at the foot of a ghyll,
+which, when swollen by rain, was majestic in volume and sound. The
+little house we had rented was free from all noise other than the
+occasional voice of a child or bark of a dog. Here at least he might
+bury the memory of the distractions of the city that vexed him. Save
+for the ripple of the river that flowed at his feet, the bleating
+of sheep on Golden Howe, the echo of the axe of the woodman who was
+thinning the neighbouring wood, and the morning and evening mail-coach
+horn, he might delude himself into forgetfulness that he belonged any
+longer to this noisy earth.
+
+Next day Rossetti was exceptionally well, and astounded me by the
+proposal that we should ascend Golden Howe together--a little mountain
+of some 1000 feet that stands at the head of Thirlmere. With never a
+hope on my part of our reaching the summit, we set out for that purpose,
+but through no doubt the exhilarating effect of the mountain air, he
+actually compassed the task he had proposed to himself, and sat for an
+hour on that highest point from whence could be seen the Skiddaw range
+to the north, Haven's Crag to the west, Styx Pass and Helvellyn to the
+east, and the Dunmail Raise to the south, with the lake below. Rossetti
+was struck by the variety of configuration in the hills, and even more
+by the variety of colour. But he was no great lover of landscape beauty,
+and the majestic scene before us produced less effect upon his mind than
+might perhaps have been expected. He seemed to be almost unconscious of
+the unceasing atmospheric changes that perpetually arrest and startle.
+the observer in whom love of external nature in her grander moods has
+not been weakened by disease. The complete extent of the Vale of St.
+John could be traversed by the eye from the eminence upon which we sat.
+The valley throughout its three-mile length is absolutely secluded: one
+has only the hills for company, and to say the truth they are sometimes
+fearful company too. Usually the landscape wears a cheerful aspect, but
+at times long fleecy clouds drive midway across the mountains, leaving
+the tops visible. The scenery is highly awakening to the imagination.
+Even the country people are imaginative, and the country is full
+of ghostly legend. I was never at any moment sensible that these
+environments affected Rossetti: assuredly they never agitated him, and
+no effort did he make to turn them to account for the purposes of
+the romantic ballad he had spoken of as likely to grow amidst such
+surroundings.
+
+Being much more than ordinarily cheerful during the first evenings of
+our stay in the North, he talked sometimes of his past life and of the
+men and women he had known in earlier years. Carlyle's _Reminiscences_
+had not long before been published. Mrs. Carlyle, therein so
+extravagantly though naturally belauded, he described as a bitter
+little woman, with, however, the one redeeming quality of unostentatious
+charity: "The poor of Chelsea," he said, "always spoke well of her."
+"George Eliot," whose genius he much admired, he had ceased to know long
+before her death, but he spoke of the lady as modest and retiring, and
+amiable to a fault when the outer crust of reticence had been broken
+through. Longfellow had called upon him whilst he was painting the
+_Dante's Dream_. The old poet was Courteous and complimentary in
+the last degree; he seemed, however, to know little or nothing about
+painting as an art, and also to have fallen into the error of thinking
+that Rossetti the painter and Sossetti the poet were different men; in
+short, that the Dante of that name was the painter, and the William the
+poet. Upon leaving the house, Longfellow had said: "I have been glad to
+meet you, and should like to have met your brother; pray, tell him how
+much I admire his beautiful poem, _The Blessed Damozel_" Giving no
+hint of the error, Rossetti said he had answered, "I will tell him." He
+painted a little during our stay in the North, for it was whilst
+there that he began the beautiful replica of his _Proserpina_, now the
+property of Mr. Valpy. I found it one of my best pleasures to watch a
+picture growing under his hand, and thought it easy to see through
+the medium of his idealised heads, cold even in their loveliness,
+unsubstantial in their passion, that to the painter life had been a
+dream into which nothing entered that was not as impalpable as itself.
+Tainted by the touch of melancholy that is the blight that clings to the
+purest beauty, his pictured faces were, in my view, akin to his poetry,
+every line of which, as he sometimes recited it, seemed as though it
+echoed the burden of a bygone sorrow--the sorrow of a dream rather than
+that of a life, or of a life that had been itself a dream. I also then
+realised what Mr. Theodore Watts has said in a letter just now
+written to me from Sark, that, "apart from any question of technical
+shortcomings, one of Rossetti's strongest claims to the attention of
+posterity was that of having invented, in the three-quarter-length
+pictures painted from one face, a type of female beauty which was akin
+to none other,--which was entirely new, in short,--and which, for
+wealth of sublime and mysterious suggestion, unaided by complex dramatic
+design, was unique in the art of the world."
+
+On one occasion the talk turned on the eccentricities and affectations
+of men of genius, and I did my best to-ridicule them unsparingly, saying
+they were a purely modern extravagance, the highest intellects of other
+times being ever the sanest, Shakspeare, Cervantes, Goethe, Coleridge,
+Wordsworth; the root of the evil had been Shelley, who was mad, and in
+imitation of whose madness, modern men of genius must many of them
+be mad also, until it had come to such a pass-that if a gifted man
+conducted himself throughout life with probity and propriety we
+instantly began to doubt the value of his gifts. Rossetti evidently
+thought that in all this I was covertly hitting out at himself, and
+cut short the conversation with an unequivocal hint that he had no
+affectations, and could not account himself an authority with respect to
+them.
+
+With such talk a few of our evenings were spent, but too soon the
+insatiable craving for the drug came with renewed force, and then all
+pleasant intercourse was banished. Night after night we sat up until
+eleven, twelve, and one o'clock, watching the long hours go by with
+heavy steps; waiting, waiting, waiting for the time at which he could
+take his first draught, and drop into his pillowed place and snatch a
+dreamless sleep of three or four hours' duration.
+
+In order to break the monotony of nights such as I describe I sometimes
+read from Fielding, Richardson, and Sterne, but more frequently induced
+Rossetti to recite. Thus, with failing voice, he would again and again
+attempt, at my request, his _Cloud Confines_, or passages from _The
+King's Tragedy_, and repeatedly, also, Poe's _Ulalume_ and _Raven_. I
+remember that, touching the last-mentioned of these poems, he remarked
+that out of his love of it while still a boy his own _Blessed Damozel_
+originated. "I saw," he said, "that Poe had done the utmost it was
+possible to do with the grief of the lover on earth, and so I determined
+to reverse the conditions, and give utterance to the yearning of the
+loved one in heaven." At that time of the year the night closed in as
+early as seven or eight o'clock, and then in that little house among
+the solitary hills his disconsolate spirit would sometimes sink beyond
+solace into irreclaimable depths of depression.
+
+It was impossible that such a condition of things should last, and it
+was with unspeakable relief that I heard Rossetti express a desire to
+return home. Mr. Watts, who at that time was at Stratford-upon-Avon, had
+promised to join us, but now wrote to say that this was impossible. Had
+it been otherwise, Rossetti would willingly have remained, but now he
+longed to get back to London. His life had lost its joys. The success of
+his Liverpool picture was almost as nothing to him, and the enthusiastic
+reception given to his book gave him not more than a passing pleasure,
+though he was deeply touched by the sympathetic and exhaustive criticism
+published by Professor Dowden in _The Academy_, as well as by Professor
+Colvin's friendly monograph in _The World_. At length one night, a month
+after our arrival, we set out on our return, and well do I remember the
+pathos of his words as I helped him (now feebler than ever) into his
+house. "Thank God! home at last, and never shall I leave it again!"
+
+Very natural was the deep concern of his friends, especially of his
+brother and Mr. Shields, at finding him return even less well than he
+had set out. With deeper reliance on past knowledge of the man, Mr.
+Watts still took a hopeful view, attributing the physical prostration
+to hypochondriasis, which might, in common with all similar nervous
+ailments, impose as much pain upon the victim as if the sufferings
+complained of had a real foundation in positive disease, but might
+also give way at any moment when the victim could be induced to take
+a hopeful view of life. The cheerfulness of Mr. Watts's society, after
+what I well know must have been the lugubrious nature of my own, had at
+first its usual salutary effect upon Rossetti's spirits, and I will not
+forbear to say that I, too, welcomed it as a draught of healing morning
+air after a month-long imprisonment in an atmosphere of gloom. But I
+was not yet freed of my charge. The sense of responsibility which in the
+solitude of the mountains had weighed me down, was now indeed divided
+with his affectionate family and the friends who were Rossetti's friends
+before they were mine, and who came at this juncture with willing
+help, prompted chiefly, of course, by devotion to the great man in sore
+trouble, but also--I must allow myself to think--in one or two cases by
+desire to relieve me of some of the burden of the task that had fallen
+so unexpectedly upon me. Foremost among such disinterested friends was
+of course the friend I have spoken of so frequently in these pages,
+and for whom I now felt a growing regard arising as much out of my
+perception of the loyalty of his comradeship as the splendour of his
+gifts. But after him in solicitous service to Rossetti, at this
+moment of great need, came Frederick Shields (the fine tissue of whose
+highly-strung nature must have been sorely tried by the strain to which
+it was subjected), Mr. W. B. Scott, whose visits were never more warmly
+welcomed by Rossetti than at this season, the good and gifted Miss Boyd,
+and of course Rossetti's brother, sister, and mother, to each of whom he
+was affectionately attached. Strange enough it seemed that this man who,
+for years had shunned the world and chosen solitude when he might have
+had society, seemed at last to grow weary of his loneliness. But so it
+was. Rossetti became daily more and more dependent upon his friends
+for company that should not fail him, for never for an hour now could he
+endure to be alone. Remembering this, I almost doubt if by nature he was
+at any time a solitary. There are men who feel more deeply the sense of
+isolation amidst the busiest crowds than within the narrowest circle of
+intimates, and I have heard from Rossetti reminiscences of his earlier
+life that led me to believe that he was one of the number. Perhaps,
+after all, he wandered from the world rather from the dread than with
+the hope of solitude. In such pleasant intercourse as the visits of the
+friends I have named afforded, was the sadness of the day in a measure
+dissipated, but when night came I never failed to realise that no
+progress whatever had been made. I tried to check the craving for
+chloral, but I could as easily have checked the rising tide: and where
+the lifelong assiduity of older friends had failed to eradicate a
+morbid, ruinous, and fatal thirst, it was presumptous if not ridiculous
+to imagine that the task could be compassed by a frail creature with
+heart and nerves of wax. But the whole scene was now beginning to have
+an interest for me more personal and more serious than I have yet given
+hint of. The constant fret and fume of this life of baffled effort,
+of struggle with a deadly drug that had grown to have an objective
+existence in my mind as the existence of a fiend, was not without a
+sensible effect upon myself. I became ill for a few days with a low
+fever, but far worse than this was the fact that there was creeping over
+me the wild influence of Rossetti's own distempered imaginings.
+
+Once conscious of such influence I determined to resist it, but how to
+do so I knew not without flying utterly away from an atmosphere in which
+my best senses seemed to stagnate, and burying the memory of it for
+ever.
+
+The crisis was pending, and sooner than we expected it came. A nurse
+was engaged. One evening Dr. Westland Marston and his son Philip Bourke
+Marston came to spend a few hours with Rossetti, For a while he seemed
+much cheered by their bright society, but later on he gave those
+manifestations of uneasiness which I had learned to know too well.
+Removing restlessly from seat to seat, he ultimately threw himself
+upon the sofa in that rather awkward attitude which I have previously
+described as characteristic of him in moments of nervous agitation.
+Presently he called out that his arm had become paralysed, and, upon
+attempting to rise, that his leg also had lost its power. We were
+naturally startled, but knowing the force of his imagination in its
+influence on his bodily capacity, we tried playfully to banish the idea.
+Raising him to his feet, however, we realised that from whatever cause,
+he had lost the use of the limbs in question, and in the utmost alarm
+we carried him to his bedroom, and hurried away for Mr. Marshall It was
+found that he had really undergone a species of paralysis, called, I
+think, loss of co-ordinative power. The juncture was a critical one, and
+it was at length decided by the able medical adviser just named, that
+the time had come when the chloral, which was at the root of all this
+mischief, should be decisively, entirely, and instantly cut off. To
+compass this end a young medical man, Mr. Henry Maudsley, was brought
+into the house as a resident to watch and manage the case in the
+intervals of Mr. Marshall's visits. It is not for me to offer a
+statement of what was done, and done so ably at this period. I only know
+that morphia was at first injected as a substitute for the narcotic the
+system had grown to demand; that Rossetti was for many hours delirious
+whilst his body was passing through the terrible ordeal of having to
+conquer the craving for the former drug, and that three or four mornings
+after the experiment had been begun he awoke calm in body, and clear
+in mind, and grateful in heart. His delusions and those intermittent
+suspicions of his friends which I have before alluded to, were now gone,
+as things in the past of which he hardly knew whether in actual fact
+they had or had not been. Christmas Day was now nigh at hand, and, still
+confined to his room, he begged me to promise to spend that day with
+him; "otherwise," he said, "how sad a day it must be for me, for I
+cannot fairly ask any other." With a tenderness of sympathy I shall not
+forget, Mr. Scott had asked me to dine that day at his more cheerful
+house; but I reflected that this was to be my first Christmas in London
+and it might be Rossetti's last, so I put by pleasanter considerations.
+We dined alone, but, somewhat later, William Rossetti, with true
+brotherly affection, left the guests at his own house, and ran down
+to spend an hour with the invalid. We could hear from time to time the
+ringing of the bells of the neighbouring churches, and I noticed that
+Rossetti was not disturbed by them as he had been formerly. Indeed, the
+drug once removed, he was in every sense a changed man. He talked that
+night brightly, and with more force and incisiveness, I thought, than he
+had displayed for months. There was the ring of affection in his tone as
+he said he had always had loyal friends; and then he spoke with feeling
+of Mr. Watts's friendship, of Mr. Shields's, and afterwards he spoke of
+Mr. Burne Jones who had just previously visited him, as well as of Mr.
+Madox Brown, and his friendship of a lifetime; of Mr. Swinburne, Mr.
+Morris, Mr. Stephens, Mr. Boyce, and other early friends. He said a word
+or two of myself which I shall not repeat, and then spoke with emotion
+of his mother and sister, and of his sister who was dead, and how they
+were supported through their sore trials by religious resignation. He
+asked if I, like Shields, was a believer, and seemed altogether in a
+softer and more spiritual mood than I remember to have noticed before.
+
+With such talk we passed the Christmas night of 1881. Rossetti recovered
+power in some measure, was able to get down to the studio, and see the
+friends who called--Mr. F. E. Leyland frequently, Lord and Lady Mount
+Temple, Mrs. Sumner, Mr. Boyce, Mr. F. G. Stephens, Mr. Gilchrist, Mr.
+and Mrs. Virtue Tebbs, Mrs. Stillman, Mrs. Coronio, and Mr. C. and Mr.
+A. Ionides occasionally, as well as those previously named. A visit
+from Dr. Hueffer of the _Times_ (of whose gifts he had a high opinion),
+enlivened him perceptibly. But he did not recover, and at the end of
+January 1882 it was definitely determined that he should go to the
+sea-side. I was asked to accompany him, and did so. At the right
+juncture Mr. J. P. Seddon very hospitably tendered the use of his
+handsome bungalow at Birchington-on-Sea, a little watering-place four
+miles west of Margate. There we spent nine weeks. At first going out he
+was able to take short walks on the cliffs, or round the road that winds
+about the churchyard, but his strength grew less and less every day
+and hour. We were constantly visited by Mr. Watts, whose devotion never
+failed, and Rossetti would brighten up at the prospect of one of his
+visits, and become sensibly depressed when he had gone. Mr. William
+Sharp, too (a young friend of whose gifts as a poet Rossetti had a
+genuine appreciation, and by whom he had been visited at intervals
+for some time), came out occasionally and cheered up the sufferer in
+a noticeable degree. Then his mother and sister came and stayed in the
+house during many weeks at the last. How shall I speak of the tenderness
+of their solicitude, of their unwearying attentions, in a word of their
+ardent and reciprocated love of the illustrious son and brother for whom
+they did the thousand gentle offices which they alone could have done!
+The end was drawing on, and we all knew the fact. Rossetti had actually
+taken to poetical composition afresh, and had written a facetious ballad
+(conceived years before) of the length of _The White Ship_, called _Jan
+Van Hunks_, embodying an eccentric story of a Dutchman's wager to smoke
+against the devil. This was to appear in a miscellany of stories and
+poems by himself and Mr. Watts, a project which had been a favourite one
+of his for some years, and in which he now, in his last moments, took a
+revived interest strange and strong.
+
+About this time he derived great gratification from reading an article
+on him and his works in _Le Livre_ by Mr. Joseph Knight, an old friend
+to whom he was deeply attached, and for whose gifts he had a genuine
+admiration. Perhaps the very last letter Rossetti penned was written to
+Mr. Knight upon the subject of this article.
+
+His intellect was as powerful as in his best days, and freer than ever
+of hallucinations. But his bodily strength grew less and less. His sight
+became feebler, and then he abandoned the many novels that had recently
+solaced his idler hours, and Miss Rossetti read aloud to him. Among
+other books she read Dickens's _Tale of Two Cities_, and he seemed
+deeply touched by Sidney Carton's sacrifice, and remarked that he would
+like to paint the last scene of the story.
+
+On Wednesday morning, April 5th, I went into the bedroom to which he had
+for some days been confined, and wrote out to his dictation two sonnets
+which he had composed on a design of his called _The Sphinx_, and which
+he wished to give, together with the drawing and the ballad before
+described, to Mr. Watts for publication in the volume just mentioned.
+On the Thursday morning I found his utterance thick, and his speech from
+that cause hardly intelligible. It chanced that I had just been reading
+Mr. Buchanan's new volume of poems, and in the course of conversation
+I told him the story of the ballad called _The Lights of Leith_, and
+he was affected by the pathos of it. He had heard of that author's
+retractation{*} of the charges involved in the article published ten
+years earlier, and was manifestly touched by the dedication of the
+romance _God and the Man_. He talked long and earnestly that morning,
+and it was our last real interview. He spoke of his love of early
+English ballad literature, and of how when he first met with it he had
+said to himself: "There lies your line."
+
+
+     * The retractation, which now has a peculiar literary
+     interest, was made in the following verses, and should, I
+     think, be recorded here:
+
+     To an old Enemy.
+
+          I would have snatch'd a bay-leaf from thy brow,
+             Wronging the chaplet on an honoured head;
+          In peace and charity I bring thee now
+               A lily-flower instead.
+          Pure as thy purpose, blameless as thy song,
+             Sweet as thy spirit, may this offering be;
+          Forget the bitter blame that did thee wrong,
+               And take the gift from me!
+
+     In a later edition of the romance the following verses are
+     added to the dedication:
+
+     To Dante Gabriel Rossetti:
+
+          Calmly, thy royal robe of death around thee,
+             Thou Bleekest, and weeping brethren round thee stand--
+          Gently they placed, ere yet God's angel crown'd thee,
+               My lily in thy hand!
+          I never knew thee living, O my brother!
+             But on thy breast my lily of love now lies;
+          And by that token, we shall know each other,
+               When God's voice saith "Arise!"
+
+"Can you understand me?" he asked abruptly, alluding to the thickness of
+his utterance.
+
+"Perfectly."
+
+"Nurse Abrey cannot: what a good creature she is!"
+
+That night we telegraphed to Mr. Marshall, to Mr. W. M. Rossetti, and
+Mr. Watts, and wrote next morning to Mr. Shields, Mr. Scott, and Mr.
+Madox Brown. It had been found by the resident medical man, Dr. Harris,
+that in Rossetti's case kidney disease had supervened. His dear mother
+and I sat up until early morning with him, and when we left him his
+sister took our place and remained with him the whole of that and
+subsequent nights. He sat up in bed most of the time and said a sort of
+stupefaction had removed all pain. He crooned over odd lines of poetry.
+"My own verses torment me," he said. Then he half-sang, half-recited,
+snatches from one of Iago's songs in _Othello_. "Strange things," he
+murmured, "to come into one's head at such a moment." I told him his
+brother and Mr. Watts would be with him to-morrow. "Then you really
+think that I am dying? At _last_ you think so; but _I_ was right from
+the first."
+
+Next day, Good Friday, the friends named did come, and weak as he was,
+he was much cheered by their presence. The following day Mr. Marshall
+arrived.
+
+That gentleman recognised the alarming position of affairs, but he was
+not without hope. He administered a sort of hot bath, and on Sunday
+morning Rossetti was perceptibly brighter. Mr. Shields had now arrived,
+and one after one of his friends, including Mr. Leyland, who was at the
+time staying at Ramsgate, and made frequent calls, visited him in his
+room and found him able to listen and sometimes to talk. In the evening
+the nurse gave a cheering report of his condition, and encouraged by
+such prospects, Mr. Watts, Mr. Shields, and myself, gave way to good
+spirits, and retired to an adjoining room. About nine o'clock Mr.
+Watts left us, and returning in a short time, said he had been in the
+sickroom, and had had some talk with Rossetti, and found him cheerful.
+An instant afterwards we heard a scream, followed by a loud rapping at
+our door. We hurried into Rossetti's room and found him in convulsions.
+Mr. Watts raised him on one side, whilst I raised him on the other; his
+mother, sister, and brother, were immediately present (Mr. Shields had
+fled away for the doctor); there were a few moments of suspense, and
+then we saw him die in our arms. Mrs. William Rossetti arrived from
+Manchester at this moment.
+
+Thus on Easter Day Rossetti died. It was hard to realise that he was
+actually dead; but so it was, and the dreadful fact had at last come
+upon us with a horrible suddenness. Of the business of the next few
+days I need say nothing. I went up to London in the interval between the
+death and burial, and the old house at Chelsea, which, to my mind, in my
+time had always been desolate, was now more than ever so, that the man
+who had been its vitalising spirit lay dead eighty miles away by the
+side of the sea. It was decided to bury the poet in the churchyard
+of Birchington. The funeral, which was a private one, was attended by
+relatives and personal friends only, with one or two well-wishers from
+London.
+
+Next day we saw most of the friends away by train, and, some days later,
+Mr. Watts was with myself the last to leave. I thought we two were drawn
+the closer each to each from the loss of him by whom we were brought
+together. We walked one morning to the churchyard and found the grave,
+which nestles under the south-west porch, strewn with flowers.
+The church is an ancient and quaint early Gothic edifice, somewhat
+rejuvenated however, but with ivy creeping over its walls. The prospect
+to the north is of sea only: a broad sweep of landscape so flat and so
+featureless that the great sea dominates it. As we stood there, with the
+rumble of the rolling waters borne to us from the shore, we felt that
+though we had little dreamed that we should lay Rossetti in his last
+sleep here, no other place could be quite so fit. It was, indeed, the
+resting-place for a poet. In this bed, of all others, he must at length,
+after weary years of sleeplessness, sleep the only sleep that is deep
+and will endure. Thinking of the incidents which I have in this chapter
+tried to record, my mind reverted to a touching sonnet which the friend
+by my side had just printed; and then, for the first time, I was struck
+by its extraordinary applicability to him whom we had laid below. In its
+printed form it was addressed to Heine, and ran:
+
+     Thou knew'st that island far away and lone
+        Whose shores are as a harp, where billows break
+        In spray of music and the breezes shake
+     O'er spicy seas a woof of colour and tone,
+     While that sweet music echoes like a moan
+        In the island's heart, and sighs around the lake
+        Where, watching fearfully a watchful snake,
+     A damsel weeps upon her emerald throne.
+
+     Life's ocean, breaking round thy senses' shore,
+        Struck golden song as from the strand of day:
+        For us the joy, for thee the fell foe lay--
+     Pain's blinking snake around the fair isle's core,
+        Turning to sighs the enchanted sounds that play
+     Around thy lovely island evermore.
+
+"How strangely appropriate it is," I said, "to Rossetti, and now I
+remember how deeply he was moved on reading it."
+
+"He guessed its secret; I addressed it, for disguise, to Heine, to whom
+it was sadly inapplicable. I meant it for _him_."
+
+
+THE END.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, by
+T. Hall Caine
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK RECOLLECTIONS OF ROSSETTI ***
+
+***** This file should be named 25574.txt or 25574.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+        http://www.gutenberg.org/2/5/5/7/25574/
+
+Produced by David Widger
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.
+
+
+
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
+http://gutenberg.org/license).
+
+
+Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B.  "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark.  It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
+paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
+or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
+form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
+     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
+     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+     address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
+     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+     License.  You must require such a user to return or
+     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+     of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH F3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS' WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need, is critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation web page at http://www.pglaf.org.
+
+
+Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541.  Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
+http://pglaf.org/fundraising.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at
+809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
+business@pglaf.org.  Email contact links and up to date contact
+information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
+page at http://pglaf.org
+
+For additional contact information:
+     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+     Chief Executive and Director
+     gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+
+Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit http://pglaf.org
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations.
+To donate, please visit: http://pglaf.org/donate
+
+
+Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart is the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone.  For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+     http://www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
diff --git a/25574.zip b/25574.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..0c2c194
--- /dev/null
+++ b/25574.zip
diff --git a/LICENSE.txt b/LICENSE.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6312041
--- /dev/null
+++ b/LICENSE.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,11 @@
+This eBook, including all associated images, markup, improvements,
+metadata, and any other content or labor, has been confirmed to be
+in the PUBLIC DOMAIN IN THE UNITED STATES.
+
+Procedures for determining public domain status are described in
+the "Copyright How-To" at https://www.gutenberg.org.
+
+No investigation has been made concerning possible copyrights in
+jurisdictions other than the United States. Anyone seeking to utilize
+this eBook outside of the United States should confirm copyright
+status under the laws that apply to them.
diff --git a/README.md b/README.md
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..97037f7
--- /dev/null
+++ b/README.md
@@ -0,0 +1,2 @@
+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #25574 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/25574)
diff --git a/old/25574-h.htm.2021-01-25 b/old/25574-h.htm.2021-01-25
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..180c6dd
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/25574-h.htm.2021-01-25
@@ -0,0 +1,8977 @@
+<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
+
+<!DOCTYPE html
+   PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
+   "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd" >
+
+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en">
+  <head>
+    <title>
+      Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, by T. Hall Caine
+    </title>
+    <style type="text/css" xml:space="preserve">
+
+    body { margin:5%; background:#faebd0; text-align:justify}
+    P { text-indent: 1em; margin-top: .25em; margin-bottom: .25em; }
+    H1,H2,H3,H4,H5,H6 { text-align: center; margin-left: 15%; margin-right: 15%; }
+    hr  { width: 50%; text-align: center;}
+    .foot { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; text-indent: -3em; font-size: 90%; }
+    blockquote {font-size: 97%; font-style: italic; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%;}
+    .mynote    {background-color: #DDE; color: #000; padding: .5em; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 95%;}
+    .toc       { margin-left: 10%; margin-bottom: .75em;}
+    .toc2      { margin-left: 20%;}
+    div.fig { display:block; margin:0 auto; text-align:center; }
+    .figleft   {float: left; margin-left: 0%; margin-right: 1%;}
+    .figright  {float: right; margin-right: 0%; margin-left: 1%;}
+    .pagenum   {display:inline; font-size: 70%; font-style:normal;
+               margin: 0; padding: 0; position: absolute; right: 1%;
+               text-align: right;}
+    pre     { font-style: italic; font-size: 90%; margin-left: 10%;}
+
+</style>
+  </head>
+  <body>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+
+Project Gutenberg's Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, by T. Hall Caine
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti
+       1883
+
+Author: T. Hall Caine
+
+Release Date: May 23, 2008 [EBook #25574]
+Last Updated: October 6, 2016
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK RECOLLECTIONS OF ROSSETTI ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h1>
+      RECOLLECTIONS OF <br /> <br /> DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI
+    </h1>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      By T. Hall Caine
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <h5>
+      Roberts Brothers - 1883
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_PREF" id="link2H_PREF">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      PREFACE.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      One day towards the close of 1881 Rossetti, who was then very ill, said to
+      me:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How well I remember the beginning of our correspondence, and how little
+      did I think it would lead to such relations between us as have ensued! I
+      was at the time very solitary and depressed from various causes, and the
+      letters of so young and ardent a well-wisher, though unknown to me
+      personally, brought solace.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yours,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;were very valuable to me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mine to you were among the largest bodies of literary letters I ever
+      wrote, others being often letters of personal interest.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And so admirable in themselves,&rdquo; I added, &ldquo;and so free from the
+      discussion of any but literary subjects that many of them would bear to be
+      printed exactly as you penned them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;will be for you some day to decide.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      This was the first hint of any intention upon my part of publishing the
+      letters he had written to me; indeed, this was the first moment at which I
+      had conceived the idea of doing so. Nothing further on the subject was
+      said down to the morning of the Thursday preceding the Sunday on which he
+      died, when we talked together for the last time on subjects of general
+      interest,&mdash;subsequent interviews being concerned wholly with
+      solicitous inquiries upon my part, in common with other anxious friends,
+      as to the nature of his sufferings, and the briefest answers from him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How long have we been friends?&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I replied, between three and four years from my first corresponding with
+      him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And how long did we correspond?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Three years, nearly.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What numbers of my letters you must possess! They may perhaps even yet be
+      useful to you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      From this moment I regarded the publication of his letters as in some sort
+      a trust; and though I must have withheld them for some years if I had
+      consulted my own wishes simply, I yielded to the necessity that they
+      should be published at once, rather than run any risk of their not been
+      published at all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What I have just said will account for the circumstance that I, the
+      youngest and latest of Rossetti&rsquo;s friends, should be the first to seem to
+      stand towards him in the relation of a biographer. I say <i>seem</i> to
+      stand, for this is not a biography. It was always known to be Rossetti&rsquo;s
+      wish that if at any moment after his death it should appear that the story
+      of his life required to be written, the one friend who during many of his
+      later years knew him most intimately, and to whom he unlocked the most
+      sacred secrets of his heart, Mr. Theodore Watts, should write it, unless
+      indeed it were undertaken by his brother William. But though I know that
+      whenever Mr. Watts sets pen to paper in pursuance of such purpose, and in
+      fulfilment of such charge, he will afford us a recognisable portrait of
+      the man, vivified by picturesque illustration, the like of which few other
+      writers could compass, I also know from what Rossetti often told me of his
+      friend&rsquo;s immersion in all kinds and varieties of life, that years (perhaps
+      many years) may elapse before such a biography is given to the world. My
+      own book is, I trust, exactly what it purports to be: a volume of
+      Recollections, interwoven with letters and criticism, and preceded by such
+      a summary of the leading facts in Rossetti&rsquo;s life as seems necessary for
+      the elucidation of subsequent records. I have drawn Rossetti precisely as
+      I found him in each stage of our friendship, exhibiting his many
+      contradictions of character, extenuating nothing, and, I need hardly add,
+      setting down naught in malice. Up to this moment I have never inquired of
+      myself whether to those who have known little or nothing of Rossetti
+      hitherto, mine will seem to be on the whole favourable or unfavourable
+      portraiture; but I have trusted my admiration of the poet and affection
+      for the friend to penetrate with kindly and appreciative feeling every
+      comment I have had to offer. I was attracted to Rossetti in the first case
+      by ardent love of his genius, and retained to him ultimately by love of
+      the man. As I have said in the course of these Recollections, it was
+      largely his unhappiness that held me, with others, as by a spell, and only
+      too sadly in this particular did he in his last year realise his own
+      picture of Dante at Verona:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     Yet of the twofold life he led
+       In chainless thought and fettered will
+       Some glimpses reach us,&mdash;somewhat still
+     Of the steep stairs and bitter bread,&mdash;
+       Of the soul&rsquo;s quest whose stern avow
+       For years had made him haggard now.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      I am sensible of the difficulty and delicacy of the task I have
+      undertaken, involving, as it does, many interests and issues; and in every
+      reference to surviving relatives as well as to other persons now living,
+      with whom Rossetti was in any way allied, I have exercised in all
+      friendliness the best judgment at my command.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Clement&rsquo;s Inn, October 1882.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     *** It has not been thought necessary to attach dates to the
+     letters printed in this volume, for not only would the
+     difficulty of doing so be great, owing to the fact that
+     Rossetti rarely dated his letters, but the utility of dates
+     in such a case would be doubtful, because the substance of
+     what is said is often quite impersonal, and, where
+     otherwise, is almost independent of the time of production.
+     It may be sufficient to say that the letters were written in
+     the years 1879,1880, and 1881.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      Contents
+    </h2>
+    <table summary="">
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2H_PREF"> PREFACE. </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2H_TOC"> DETAILED CONTENTS </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2H_4_0002"> <big><b>RECOLLECTIONS OF DANTE GABRIEL
+            ROSSETTI</b></big> </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2HCH0001"> CHAPTER I. </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2HCH0002"> CHAPTER II. </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2HCH0003"> CHAPTER III. </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2HCH0004"> CHAPTER IV. </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2HCH0005"> CHAPTER V. </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2HCH0006"> CHAPTER VI. </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2HCH0007"> CHAPTER VII. </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2HCH0008"> CHAPTER VIII. </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2HCH0009"> CHAPTER IX. </a>
+          </p>
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+    </table>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <a name="link2H_TOC" id="link2H_TOC">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      CONTENTS
+    </h2>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0001"> CHAPTER I. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CHAPTER I. <br /> Gabriele Rossetti&mdash;Boyhood&mdash;The
+        pre-Raphaelite Movement&mdash;Early <br /> Manhood&mdash;The Blessed
+        Damozel&mdash;Jenny&mdash;Sister Helen&mdash;The Translations&mdash;The
+        <br /> House of Life&mdash;The Germ&mdash;Oxford and Cambridge Magazine&mdash;Blackfriars
+        <br /> Bridge&mdash;Married Life <br />
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0002"> CHAPTER II. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CHAPTER II. <br /> Chelsea&mdash;Chloral&mdash;Dante&rsquo;s Dream&mdash;Recovery
+        of the Poems&mdash;Poems&mdash;The <br /> Contemporary Controversy&mdash;Mr.
+        Theodore Watts&mdash;Rose Mary&mdash;The <br /> White Ship&mdash;The
+        King&rsquo;s Tragedy&mdash;Poetic Continuations&mdash;Cloud <br /> Confines&mdash;Journalistic
+        Slanders <br />
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0003"> CHAPTER III. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CHAPTER III. <br /> Early Intercourse&mdash;Poetic Impulses&mdash;Beginning
+        of Correspondence&mdash;Early <br /> Letters <br />
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0004"> CHAPTER IV. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CHAPTER IV. <br /> Inedited Poems&mdash;Inedited Ballads&mdash;Additions
+        to Sister Helen&mdash;Hand <br /> and Soul&mdash;St. Agnes of
+        Intercession&mdash;Catholic Opinion&mdash;Rossetti&rsquo;s <br /> Catholicism&mdash;Cloud
+        Confines&mdash;The Portrait <br />
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0005"> CHAPTER V. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CHAPTER V. <br /> Coleridge&mdash;Wordsworth&mdash;Lamb and Coleridge&mdash;Charles
+        Wells&mdash;Keats&mdash;Leigh <br /> Hunt and Keats&mdash;Keats&rsquo;s Sister
+        <br />
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0006"> CHAPTER VI. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CHAPTER VI. <br /> Chatterton&mdash;Oliver Madox Brown&mdash;Gilchrist&rsquo;s
+        Blake&mdash;George Gilfillan&mdash;Old <br /> Periodicals&mdash;A Rustic
+        Poet&mdash;Art and Politics&mdash;Letters in Biography <br />
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0007"> CHAPTER VII. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CHAPTER VII. <br /> Cheyne Walk&mdash;The House&mdash;First Meeting&mdash;Rossetti&rsquo;s
+        Personality&mdash;His <br /> Reading&mdash;The Painter&rsquo;s Craft&mdash;Mr.
+        Ruskin&mdash;Rossetti&rsquo;s Sensitiveness&mdash;His <br /> Garden&mdash;His
+        Library <br />
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0008"> CHAPTER VIII. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        CHAPTER VIII. <br /> English Sonnets&mdash;Sonnet Structure&mdash;Shakspeare&rsquo;s
+        Sonnets&mdash;Wells&rsquo;s <br /> Sonnet&mdash;Charles Whitehead&mdash;Ebenezer
+        Jones&mdash;Mr. W. M. Rossetti&mdash;A New <br /> Sonnet&mdash;Mr. W.
+        Davies&mdash;Canon Dixon&mdash;Miss Christina Rossetti&mdash;The Bride&rsquo;s
+        <br /> Prelude&mdash;The Supernatural in Poetry <br />
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0009"> CHAPTER IX. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        Last Days&mdash;Vale of St John&mdash;In the Lake Country&mdash;Return
+        to <br /> London&mdash;London&mdash;Birchington <br />
+      </p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0002" id="link2H_4_0002">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h1>
+      RECOLLECTIONS OF <br /> <br /> DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI
+    </h1>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0001" id="link2HCH0001">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER I.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Dante Gabriel Rossetti was the eldest son of Gabriele Rossetti and Frances
+      Polidori, daughter of Alfieri&rsquo;s secretary, and sister of the young
+      physician who travelled with Lord Byron. Gabriele Rossetti was a native of
+      Yasto, in the district of the Abruzzi, kingdom of Naples. He was a
+      patriotic poet of very considerable distinction; and, as a politician,
+      took a part in extorting from Ferdinand I. the Constitution of 1820. After
+      the failure of the Neapolitan insurrection, owing to the treachery of the
+      King (who asked leave of absence on a pretext of ill-health, and returned
+      with an overwhelming Austrian army), the insurrectionists were compelled
+      to fly. Some of them fell victims; others lay long in concealment.
+      Rossetti was one of the latter; and, while he was in hiding, Sir Graham
+      Moore, the English admiral, was lying with an English fleet in the bay.
+      The wife of the admiral had long been a warm admirer of the patriotic
+      hymns of Rossetti, and, when she learned his danger, she prevailed with
+      her husband to make efforts to save him. Sir Graham thereupon set out with
+      another English officer to the place of concealment, habited the poet in
+      an English uniform, placed him between them in a carriage, and put him
+      aboard a ship that sailed next day to Malta, where he obtained the
+      friendship of the governor, John Hookham Frere, by whose agency valuable
+      introductions were procured, and ultimately Rossetti established himself
+      in England. Arrived in London about 1823, he lived a cheerful life as an
+      exile, though deprived of the advantages of his Italian reputation. He
+      married in 1826, and his eldest son was born May 12, 1828, in Charlotte
+      Street, Portland Place, London. He was appointed Professor of Italian at
+      King&rsquo;s College, and died in 1854. His house was for years the constant
+      resort of Italian refugees; and the son used to say that it was from
+      observation of these visitors of his father that he depicted the principal
+      personage of his <i>Last Confession</i>. He did not live to see the
+      returning glories of his country or the consummation we have witnessed of
+      that great movement founded upon the principles for which he fought and
+      suffered. His present position in Italy as a poet and patriot is a high
+      one, a medal having been struck in his honour. An effort is even now afoot
+      to erect a statue to him in his native place, and one of the last
+      occasions upon which the son put pen to paper was when trying to make a
+      reminiscent rough portrait for the use of the sculptor. Gabriele Rossetti
+      spent his last years in the study of Dante, and his works on the subject
+      are unique, exhibiting a peculiar view of Dante&rsquo;s conception of Beatrice,
+      which he believed to be purely ideal, and employed solely for purposes of
+      speculative and political disquisition. Something of this interpretation
+      was fixed undoubtedly upon the personage by Dante himself in his later
+      writings, but whether the change were the result of a maturer and more
+      complicated state of thought, and whether the real and ideal characters of
+      Beatrice may not be compatible, are questions which the poetic mind will
+      not consider it possible to decide. Coleridge, no doubt, took a fair view
+      of Rossetti&rsquo;s theory when he said: &ldquo;Rossetti&rsquo;s view of Dante&rsquo;s meaning is
+      in great part just, but he has pushed it beyond all bounds of common
+      sense. How could a poet&mdash;and such a poet as Dante&mdash;have written
+      the details of the allegory as conjectured by Rossetti? The boundaries
+      between his allegory and his pure picturesque are plain enough, I think,
+      at first reading.&rdquo; It was, doubtless, due to his devotion to studies of
+      the Florentine that Gabriele Rossetti named after him his eldest son.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Dante Gabriel Rossetti, whose full baptismal name was Gabriel Charles
+      Dante, was educated principally at King&rsquo;s College School, London, and
+      there attained to a moderate proficiency in the ordinary classical
+      school-learning, besides a knowledge of French, which throughout life he
+      spoke well. He learned at home some rudimentary German; Italian he had
+      acquired at a very early age. There has always been some playful mention
+      of certain tragedies and translations upon which he exercised himself from
+      the ages of five to fifteen years; but it is hardly necessary to say that
+      he himself never attached value to these efforts of his precocity; he even
+      displayed, occasionally, a little irritation upon hearing them spoken of
+      as remarkable youthful achievements.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One of these productions of his adolescence, Sir Hugh the Heron, has been
+      so frequently alluded to, that it seems necessary to tell the story of it,
+      as the author himself, in conversation, was accustomed to do. At about
+      twelve years of age, the young poet wrote a scrap of a poem under this
+      title, and then cast it aside. His grandfather, Polidori, had seen the
+      fragment, however, and had conceived a much higher opinion of its merits
+      than even the natural vanity of the young author himself permitted him to
+      entertain. It had then become one of the grandfather&rsquo;s amusements to set
+      up an amateur printing-press in his own house, and occupy his leisure in
+      publishing little volumes of original verse for semi-public circulation.
+      He urged his grandson to finish the poem in question, promising it, in a
+      completed state, the dignity and distinction of type. Prompted by hope of
+      this hitherto unexpected reward, Rossetti&mdash;then thirteen to fourteen
+      years of age&mdash;finished the juvenile epic, and some bound copies of it
+      got abroad. No more was thought of the matter, and in due time the little
+      bard had forgotten that he had ever done it. But when a genuine
+      distinction had been earned by poetry that was in no way immature,
+      Rossetti discovered, by the gratuitous revelation of a friend, that a copy
+      of the youthful production&mdash;privately printed and never published&mdash;was
+      actually in the library of the British Museum. Amazed, and indeed appalled
+      as he was by this disclosure, he was powerless to remedy the evil, which
+      he foresaw would some day lead to the poem being unearthed to his injury,
+      and printed as a part of his work. The utmost he could do to avert the
+      threatened mischief he did, and this was to make an entry in a
+      commonplace-book which he kept for such uses, explaining the origin and
+      history of the poem, and expressing a conviction that it seemed to him to
+      be remarkable only from its entire paucity of even ordinary poetic
+      promise. But while this was indubitably a just estimate of these boyish
+      efforts, it is no doubt true, as we shall presently see, that Rossetti&rsquo;s
+      genius matured itself early in life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Whilst still a child, his love of literature exhibited itself, and a story
+      is told of a disaster occurring to him, when rather less than nine years
+      of age, which affords amusing proof of the ardour of his poetic nature.
+      Upon going with his brother and sisters to the house of his grandfather,
+      where as children they occupied themselves with sports appropriate to
+      their years, he proposed to improvise a part of a scene from <i>Othello</i>,
+      and cast himself for the principal <i>rôle</i>. The scene selected was the
+      closing one of the play, and began with the speech delivered to Lodovico,
+      Montano, and Gratiano, when they are about to take Othello prisoner.
+      Rossetti used to say that he delivered the lines in a frenzy of boyish
+      excitement, and coming to the words&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+              Set you down this:
+     And say, besides,&mdash;that in Aleppo once,
+       Where a malignant and a turban&rsquo;d Turk
+       Beat a Venetian, and traduced the state,
+       I took by the throat the circumcised dog,
+       And smote him&mdash;thus!&mdash;
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      he snatched up an iron chisel, that lay somewhere at hand, and, to the
+      consternation of his companions, smote himself with all his might on the
+      chest, inflicting a wound from which he bled and fainted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He is described by those who remember him, at this period, as a boy of a
+      gentle and affectionate nature, albeit prone to outbursts of
+      masterfulness. The earliest existent portraits represent a comely youth,
+      having redundant auburn hair curling all round the head, and eyes and
+      forehead of extraordinary beauty. It is said that he was brave and manly
+      of temperament, courageous as to personal suffering, eminently solicitous
+      of the welfare of others, and kind and considerate to*such as he had
+      claims upon. This is no doubt true portraiture, but it must be stated
+      (however open to explanation, on grounds of laudable self-depreciation),
+      that it is not the picture which he himself used to paint of his character
+      as a boy. He often described himself as being destitute of personal
+      courage when at school, as shrinking from the amusements of schoolfellows,
+      and fearful of their quarrels; not wholly without generous impulses, but,
+      in the main, selfish of nature and reclusive in habit of life. He was
+      certainly free from the meaningless affectation&mdash;for such it too
+      frequently is&mdash;of representing his school-days as the happiest of his
+      life. If, after so much undervaluing of himself, it were possible to trust
+      his estimate of his youthful character, he would have had you believe that
+      school was to him a place of semi-purgatorial probation,&mdash;which
+      nothing but love of his mother, and desire to meet her wishes, prevented
+      him, as an irreclaimable antischoliast, from obstinately renouncing at a
+      time when he had learned little Latin, and less Greek.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Having from childhood shown a propensity towards painting, the strong
+      inclination was fostered by his parents, and art was looked upon as his
+      future profession. Upon leaving school about 1843, he studied first at an
+      art academy near Bedford Square, and afterwards at the Eoyal Academy
+      Antique School, never, however, going to the Eoyal Academy Life School. He
+      appears to have been an assiduous student. In after life when his habit of
+      late rising had become a stock subject of banter among his intimate
+      friends, he would tell with unwonted pride how in earlier years he used to
+      rise at six A.M. once a week in order to attend a life-class held before
+      breakfast. On such occasions he was accustomed, he would say, to purchase
+      a buttered roll and cup of coffee at some stall at a street corner, so as
+      not to dislocate domestic arrangements by requiring the servants to get up
+      in the middle of the night. He left the Academy about 1848 or 1849, and in
+      the latter year exhibited his picture entitled the <i>Girlhood of Mary
+      Virgin</i>. This painting is an admirable example of his early art, before
+      the Gothicism of the early Italian painters became his quest. Better known
+      to the public than the picture is the sonnet written upon it, containing
+      the beautiful lines&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+       An angel-watered lily, that near God
+       Grows and is quiet.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      While Rossetti was still under age he associated with J. E. Millais,
+      Holman Hunt, Thomas Woolner, James Collinson, F. G. Stephens, and his
+      brother, W. M. Rossetti, in the movement called pre-Raphaelite. At the
+      beginning of his career he recognised, in common with his associates, that
+      the contemporary classicism had run to seed, and that, beyond an effort
+      after perfection of <i>technique</i>, the art of the period was all but
+      devoid of purpose, of thought, imagination, or spirituality. At such a
+      moment it was matter for little surprise that ardent young intellects
+      should go back for inspiration to the Gothicism of Giotto and the early
+      painters. There, at least, lay feeling, aim, aspiration, such as did not
+      concern itself primarily with any question of whether a subject were
+      painted well or ill, if only it were first of all a subject at all&mdash;a
+      subject involving manipulative excellence, perhaps, but feeling and
+      invention certainly. This, then, stated briefly, was the meaning of
+      pre-Raphaelitism. The name (as shall hereafter appear) was subsequently
+      given to the movement more than half in jest. It has sometimes been stated
+      that Mr. Ruskin was an initiator, but this is not strictly the case. The
+      company of young painters and writers are said to have been ignorant of
+      Mr. Ruskin&rsquo;s writings when they began their revolt against the current
+      classicism. It is a fact however, that, after perhaps a couple of years,
+      Mr. Ruskin came to the rescue of the little brotherhood (then much
+      maligned) by writing in their defence a letter in the <i>Times</i>. It is
+      easy to make too much of these early endeavours of a company of young men,
+      exceptionally gifted though the reformers undoubtedly were, and inspired
+      by an ennobling enthusiasm. In later years Rossetti was not the most
+      prominent of those who kept these beginnings of a movement constantly in
+      view; indeed, it is hardly rash to say that there were moments when he
+      seemed almost to resent the intrusion of them upon the maturity of aim and
+      handling which, in common with his brother artists, he ultimately
+      compassed. But it would be folly not to recognise the essential germs of a
+      right aspiration which grew out of that interchange of feeling and opinion
+      which, in its concrete shape, came to be termed pre-Raphaelitism. Rossetti
+      is acknowledged to have taken the most prominent part in the movement,
+      supplying, it is alleged, much of the poetic impulse as well as knowledge
+      of mediaeval art. He occupied himself in these and following years mainly
+      in the making of designs for pictures&mdash;the most important of them
+      being <i>Dante&rsquo;s Dream, Hamlet and Ophelia, Cassandra, Lucretia Borgia,
+      Giotto painting Dante&rsquo;s Portrait, The First Anniversary of the Death of
+      Beatrice Mary Magdalene at the Door of Simon the Pharisee, The Death of
+      Lady Macbeth, Desdemona&rsquo;s Death-song</i> and a great subject entitled <i>Found</i>,
+      designed and begun at twenty-five, but left incomplete at death.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All this occurred between the years 1849-1856, but three years before the
+      earlier of these dates Rossetti, as a painter, had come under an influence
+      which he was never slow to acknowledge operated powerfully on his art. In
+      1846, Mr. Ford Madox Brown exhibited designs in the Westminster
+      competition, and his cartoons deeply impressed Rossetti The young painter,
+      then nineteen years of age, wrote to the elder one, his senior by no more
+      than seven years, begging to be permitted to become a pupil. An intimacy
+      sprang up between the two, and for a while Rossetti worked in Brown&rsquo;s
+      studio; but though the friendship lasted throughout life the professional
+      relationship soon terminated. The ardour of the younger man led him into
+      the-brotherhood just referred to, but Brown never joined the
+      pre-Raphaelites, mainly, it is said, from dislike of coterie tendencies.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      About 1856, Rossetti, with two or three other young painters, gratuitously
+      undertook to paint designs on the walls of the Union Debating Hall at
+      Oxford, and about the time he was engaged upon this task he made the
+      acquaintance of Mr. William Morris, Mr. Burne Jones, and Mr. Swinburne,
+      who were undergraduates at the University. Mr. Burne Jones was intended
+      for a clerical career, but due to Rossett&rsquo;s intercession Holy Orders were
+      abandoned, to the great gain of English art. He has more than once
+      generously allowed that he owed much to Rossetti at the beginning of his
+      career, find regarded him to the last as leader of the movement with which
+      his own name is now so eminently and distinctively associated. Together,
+      and with the co-operation of Mr. William Morris and Canon Dixon, they
+      started and carried on for about a year a monthly periodical called <i>The
+      Oxford and Cambridge Magazine</i>, of which Canon Dixon, as one of the
+      projectors, shall presently tell the history. At a subsequent period Mr.
+      Burne Jones and Rossetti, together with Mr. Madox Brown and some three
+      others, associated with Mr. Morris in establishing, from the smallest of
+      all possible beginnings, the trading firm now so well known as Morris and
+      Co., and they remained partners in this enterprise down to the year 1874,
+      when a dissolution took place, leaving the business in the hands of the
+      gentleman whose name it bore, and whose energy had from the first been
+      mainly instrumental in securing its success.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It may be said that almost from the outset Rossetti viewed the public
+      exhibition of pictures as a distracting practice. Except the <i>Girlhood
+      of Mary Virgin</i>, the <i>Annunciation</i> was almost the only picture he
+      exhibited in London, though three or four water-colour drawings were at an
+      early period exhibited in Liverpool, and of these, by a curious
+      coincidence, one was the first study for the <i>Dante&rsquo;s Dream</i>, which
+      was purchased by the corporation of the city within a few months of the
+      painter&rsquo;s death. To sum up all that remains at this stage to say of
+      Rossetti as a pictorial artist down to his thirtieth year, we may describe
+      him (as he liked best to hear himself described) simply as a poetic
+      painter. If he had a special method, it might be called a distinct poetic
+      abstraction, together with a choice of mediaeval subject, and an effort
+      after no less vivid rendering of nature than was found in other painters.
+      With his early designs (the outcome of such a quest as has been indicated)
+      there came, perchance, artistic crudities enough, but assuredly there came
+      a great spirituality also. By and by Rossetti perceived that he must make
+      narrower the stream of his effort if he would have it flow deeper; and
+      then, throughout many years, he perfected his technical methods by
+      abandoning complex subject-designs, and confining himself to simple
+      three-quarter-length pictures. More shall be said on this point in due
+      course. Already, although unknown through the medium of the public
+      picture-gallery, he was recognised as the leader of a school of rising
+      young artists whose eccentricities were frequently a theme of discussion.
+      He never invited publicity, yet he was rapidly attaining to a prominent
+      position among painters.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His personal character in early manhood is described by friends as one of
+      peculiar manliness, geniality, and unselfishness. It is said that, on one
+      occasion, he put aside important work of his own in order to spend several
+      days in the studio of a friend, whose gifts were quite inconsiderable
+      compared with his, and whose prospects were all but hopeless,&mdash;helping
+      forward certain pictures, which were backward, for forthcoming exhibition.
+      Many similar acts of self-sacrifice are still remembered with gratitude by
+      those who were the recipients of them. Rossetti was king of his circle,
+      and it must be said, that in all that properly constituted kingship, he
+      took care to rule. There was then a certain determination of purpose which
+      occasionally had the look of arbitrariness, and sometimes, it is alleged,
+      a disregard of opposing opinion which partook of tyranny: but where heart
+      and not head were in question, he was assuredly the most urbane and
+      amiable of monarchs. In matters of taste in art, or criticism in poetry,
+      he would brook no opposition from any quarter; nor did he ever seem to be
+      conscious of the unreasonableness of compelling his associates to swallow
+      his opinions as being absolute and final. This disposition to govern his
+      circle co-existed, however, with the most lavish appreciation of every
+      good quality displayed by the members of it, and all the little uneasiness
+      to which his absolutism may sometimes have given rise was much more than
+      removed by constantly recurring acts of good-fellowship,&mdash;indeed it
+      was forgotten in the presence of them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A photograph which exists of Rossetti at twenty-seven conveys the idea of
+      a nature rather austere and taciturn than genial and outspoken. The face
+      is long and the cheeks sunken, the whole figure being attenuated and
+      slightly stooping; the eyes have the inward look which belonged to them in
+      later life, but the mouth, which is free from the concealment of moustache
+      or beard, is severe. The impression conveyed is of a powerful intellect
+      and ambitious nature at war with surroundings and not wholly satisfied
+      with the results. It ought to be added that, at the period in question,
+      health was uncertain with Rossetti: and this fact, added to the
+      circumstance of his being at the time in the very throes of those
+      difficulties with his art which he was soon to surmount, must be
+      understood to account for the austerity of his early portrait. Rossetti
+      was not in a distinct sense a humourist, but there came to him at
+      intervals, in earlier manhood, those outbursts of volatility, which, to
+      serious natures, act as safety-valves after prolonged tension of all the
+      powers of the mind. At such moments of levity he is described as almost
+      boyish in recklessness, plunging into any madcap escapade that might be
+      afoot with heedlessness of all consequences. Stories of misadventures,
+      quips and quiddities of every kind, were then his delight, and of these he
+      possessed a fund which no man knew better how to use. He would tell a
+      funny story with wonderful spirit and freshness of resource, always
+      leading up to the point with watchful care of the finest shades of covert
+      suggestion or innuendo, and, when the climax was reached, never denying
+      himself a hearty share in the universal laughter. One of his choicest
+      pleasures at a dinner or other such gathering was to improvise rhymes on
+      his friends, and of these the fun usually lay in the improvisatore&rsquo;s
+      audacious ascription of just those qualities which his subject did not
+      possess. Though far from devoid of worldly wisdom, and indeed possessed of
+      not a little shrewdness in his dealings with his buyers (often exhibiting
+      that rarest quality of the successful trader, the art of linking one
+      transaction with another), he was sometimes amusingly deficient in what is
+      known as common sense. In later life he used to tell with infinite zest a
+      story of a blunder of earlier years which might easily have led to serious
+      if not fatal results. He had been suffering from nervous exhaustion and
+      had been ordered to take a preparation of nux vomica. The dose was to be
+      taken three times daily: in the morning, at noon, and in the evening. One
+      afternoon he was about to start out for the house of a friend with whom he
+      had promised to lunch, when he remembered that he had not taken his first
+      daily dose of medicine. He forthwith took it, and upon setting down the
+      glass, reflected that the second dose was due, and so he took that also.
+      Putting on his hat and preparing to sally forth he further reflected that
+      before he could return the third dose ought in ordinary course to be
+      taken, and so without more deliberation he poured himself a final portion
+      and drank it off. He had thereupon scarcely turned himself about, when to
+      his horror he discovered that his limbs were growing rigid and his jaw
+      stiff. In the utmost agitation he tried to walk across the studio and
+      found himself almost incapable of the effort. His eyes seemed to leap out
+      of their sockets and his sight grew dim. Appalled and in agony, he at
+      length sprang up from the couch upon which he had dropped down a moment
+      before, and fled out of the house. The violent action speedily induced a
+      copious perspiration, and this being by much the best thing that could
+      have happened to him, carried off the poison and so saved his life. He
+      could never afterwards be induced to return to the drug in question, and
+      in the last year of his life was probably more fearfully aghast at seeing
+      the present writer take a harmless dose of it than he would have been at
+      learning that 50 grains of chloral had been taken.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had, in early manhood, the keenest relish of a funny prank, and one
+      such he used to act over again in after life with the greatest vivacity of
+      manner. Every one remembers the story told by Jefferson Hogg how Shelley
+      got rid of the old woman with the onion basket who took a place beside him
+      in a stage coach in Sussex, by seating himself on the floor and fixing a
+      tearful, woful face upon his companion, addressing her in thrilling
+      accents thus&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     For heaven&rsquo;s sake, let us sit upon the ground,
+     And tell sad stories of the death of kings.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Rossetti&rsquo;s frolic was akin to this, though the results were amusingly
+      different. It would appear that when in early years, Mr. William Morris
+      and Mr. Burne Jones occupied a studio together, they had a young servant
+      maid whose manners were perennially vivacious, whose good spirits no
+      disaster could damp, and whose pertness nothing could banish or check.
+      Rossetti conceived the idea of frightening the girl out of her
+      complacency, and calling one day on his friends, he affected the direst
+      madness, strutted ominously up to her and with the wildest glare of his
+      wild eyes, the firmest and fiercest setting of his lower lip, and began in
+      measured and resonant accents to recite the lines&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     Shall the hide of a fierce lion
+     Be stretched on a couch of wood,
+     For a daughter&rsquo;s foot to lie on,
+     Stained with a father&rsquo;s blood?
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      The poet&rsquo;s response is a soft &ldquo;Ah, no!&rdquo; but the girl, ignorant of course
+      of this, and wholly undisturbed by the bloodthirsty tone of the question
+      addressed to her, calmly fixed her eyes on the frenzied eyes before her,
+      and answered with a swift light accent and rippling laugh, &ldquo;It shall if
+      you like, sir!&rdquo; Rossetti&rsquo;s enjoyment of his discomfiture on this occasion
+      seemed never to grow less.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His life was twofold in intellectual effort, and of the directions in
+      which his energy went out the artistic alone has thus far been dealt with.
+      It has been said that he early displayed talent for writing as well as
+      painting, and, in truth, the poems that he wrote in early youth are even
+      more remarkable than the pictures that he painted. His poetic genius
+      developed rapidly after sixteen, and sprang at once to a singular and
+      perfect maturity. It is difficult to say whether it will add to the marvel
+      of mature achievement or deduct from the sense of reality of personal
+      experience, to make public the fact that <i>The Blessed Damozel</i> was
+      written when the poet was no more than nineteen. That poem is a creation
+      so pure and simple in the higher imagination, as to support the contention
+      that the author was electively related to Fra Angelico. Described briefly,
+      it may be said to embody the meditations of a beautiful girl in Paradise,
+      whose lover is in the same hour dreaming of her on earth. How the poet
+      lighted upon the conception shall be told by himself in that portion of
+      this book devoted to the writer&rsquo;s personal recollections.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>The Blessed Damozel</i> is a conception dilated to such spiritual
+      loveliness that it seems not to exist within things substantially
+      beautiful, or yet by aid of images that coalesce out of the evolving
+      memory of them, but outside of everything actual It is not merely that the
+      dream itself is one of ideal purity; the wave of impulse is pure, and
+      flows without taint of media that seem almost to know it not. The lady
+      says:&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     We two will lie i&rsquo; the shadow of
+        That living mystic tree
+     Within whose secret growth the Dove
+        Is sometimes felt to be,
+     While every leaf that His plumes touch
+        Saith His Name audibly.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Here the love involved is so etherealised as scarcely to be called human,
+      save only on the part of the mortal dreamer, in whose yearning ecstasy the
+      ear thinks it recognises a more earthly note. The lover rejoins.&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     (Alas! We two, we two, thou say&rsquo;st!
+        Yea, one wast thou with me
+     That once of old. But shall God lift
+        To endless unity
+     The soul whose likeness with thy soul
+        Was but its love for thee?)
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      It is said of the few existent examples of the art of Giorgione that,
+      around some central realisation of human passion gathers always a
+      landscape which is not merely harmonised to it, but a part of it, sharing
+      the joy or the anguish, lying silent to the breathless adoration, or
+      echoing the rapturous voice of the full pleasure of those who are beyond
+      all height and depth more than it. Something of this passive sympathy of
+      environing objects comes out in the poem:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     Around her, lovers, newly met
+        &lsquo;Mid deathless love&rsquo;s acclaims,
+     Spoke evermore among themselves
+        Their rapturous new names;
+     And the souls mounting up to God
+        Went by her like thin flames.
+
+     And still she bowed herself and stooped
+        Out of the circling charm;
+     Until her bosom must have made
+        The bar she leaned on warm,
+     And the lilies lay as if asleep
+        Along her bended arm.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      The sense induced by such imagery is akin to that which comes of rapt
+      contemplation of the deep em-blazonings of a fine stained window when the
+      sun&rsquo;s warm gules glides off before the dim twilight. And this sense as of
+      a thing existent, yet passing stealthily out of all sight away, the metre
+      of the poem helps to foster. Other metres of Rossetti&rsquo;s have a strenuous
+      reality, and rejoice in their self-assertiveness, and seem, almost, in
+      their resonant strength, to tell themselves they are very good; but this
+      may almost be said to be a disembodied voice, that lives only on the air,
+      and, like the song of a bird, is gone before its accents have been caught.
+      Of the four-and-twenty stanzas of the poem, none is more calmly musical
+      than this:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+      When round his head the aureole clings,
+        And he is clothed in white,
+      I &lsquo;ll take his hand and go with him
+        To the deep wells of light;
+      We will step down as to a stream,
+        And bathe there in God&rsquo;s sight.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Perhaps Rossetti never did anything more beautiful and spiritual than this
+      little work of his twentieth year; and more than once in later life he
+      painted the beautiful lady who is the subject of it, with the lilies lying
+      along her arm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A first draft of <i>Jenny</i> was struck off when the poet was scarcely
+      more than a boy, and taken up again years afterwards, and almost entirely
+      re-written&mdash;the only notable passage of the early poem that now
+      remains being the passage on lust. It is best described in the simplest
+      phrase, as a man&rsquo;s meditations on the life of a courtesan whom he has met
+      at a dancing-garden and accompanied home. While he sits on a couch, she
+      lies at his feet with her head on his knee and sleeps. When the morning
+      dawns he rises, places cushions beneath her head, puts some gold among her
+      hair, and leaves her. It is wisest to hazard at the outset all
+      unfavourable comment by the frankest statement of the story of the poem.
+      But the <i>motif</i> of it is a much higher thing. <i>Jenny</i> embodies
+      an entirely distinct phase of feeling, yet the poet&rsquo;s root impulse is
+      therein the same as in the case of <i>The Blessed Damozel</i>. No two
+      creations could stand more widely apart as to outward features than the
+      dream of the sainted maiden and the reality of the frail and fallen girl;
+      yet the primary prompting and the ultimate outcome are the same. The
+      ardent longing after ideal purity in womanhood, which in the one gave
+      birth to a conception whereof the very sorrow is but excess of joy found
+      expression in the other through a vivid presentment of the nameless misery
+      of unwomanly dishonour:&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     Behold the lilies of the field,
+     They toil not neither do they spin;
+     (So doth the ancient text begin,&mdash;
+     Not of such rest as one of these Can share.)
+     Another rest and ease
+     Along each summer-sated path
+     From its new lord the garden hath,
+     Than that whose spring in blessings ran
+     Which praised the bounteous husbandman,
+     Ere yet, in days of hankering breath,
+     The lilies sickened unto death.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      It was indeed a daring thing the author proposed to himself to do, and
+      assuredly no man could have essayed it who had not consciously united to
+      an unfailing and unshrinking insight, a relativeness of mind such as
+      right-hearted people might approve. To take a fallen woman, a cipher of
+      man&rsquo;s sum of lust, befouled with the shameful knowledge of the streets,
+      yet young, delicate, &ldquo;apparelled beyond parallel,&rdquo; unblessed, with a
+      beauty which, if copied by a Da Vinci&rsquo;s hand, might stand whole ages long
+      &ldquo;for preachings of what God can do,&rdquo; and then to endow such a one with the
+      sensitiveness of a poet&rsquo;s own mind, make her read afresh as though by
+      lightning, and in a dream, that story of the old pure days&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+      Much older than any history
+      That is written in any book,
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      and lastly, to gather about her an overwhelming sense of infinite solace
+      for the wronged and lost, and of the retributive justice with which man&rsquo;s
+      transgressions will be visited&mdash;this is, indeed, to hazard all things
+      in the certainty of an upright purpose and true reward.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+      Shall no man hold his pride forewarn&rsquo;d
+      Till in the end, the Day of Days,
+      At Judgment, one of his own race,
+      As frail and lost as you, shall rise,&mdash;
+      His daughter with his mother&rsquo;s eyes!
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Yet Rossetti made no treaty with puritanism, and in this respect his <i>Jenny</i>
+      has something in common with Hawthorne&rsquo;s <i>Scarlet Letter</i>&mdash;than
+      which nothing, perhaps, that is so pure, without being puritanical, has
+      reached us even from the land that gave <i>Evangeline</i> to the English
+      tongue. The guilty love of Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale is never
+      for an instant condoned, but, on the other hand, the rigorous severity of
+      the old puritan community is not dwelt upon with favour. Relentless
+      remorse must spend itself upon the man before the whole measure of his
+      misery is full, and on the woman the brand of a public shame must be borne
+      meekly to the end. But though no rancour is shown towards the austere and
+      blind morality which puts to open discharge the guilty mother whilst
+      unconsciously nourishing the yet more guilty father, we see the tenderness
+      of a love that palliates the baseness of the amour, and the bitter depths
+      of a penitence that cannot be complete until it can no longer be
+      concealed. And so with Jenny. She may have transient flashes of remorseful
+      consciousness, such as reveal to her the trackless leagues that separate
+      what she was from what she is, but no effort is made to hide the plain
+      truth that she is a courtesan, skilled only in the lures and artifices
+      peculiar to her shameful function. No reformatory promptings fit her for a
+      place at the footstool of the puritan. Nothing tells of winter yet; on the
+      other hand, no virulent diatribes are cast forth against the society that
+      shuts this woman out, as the puritan settlement turned its back on Hester
+      Prynne. But we see her and know her for what she is, a woman like unto other
+      women: desecrated but akin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This dramatic quality of sitting half-passively above their creations and
+      of leaving their ethics to find their own channels (once assured that
+      their impulses are pure), the poet and the romancer possess in common. If
+      there is a point of difference between their attitudes of mind, it is
+      where Rossetti seems to reserve his whole personal feeling for the
+      impeachment of lust;&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     Like a toad within a stone
+     Seated while Time crumbles on;
+     Which sits there since the earth was cursed
+     For Man&rsquo;s transgression at the first;
+     Which, living through all centuries,
+     Not once has seen the sun arise;
+     Whose life, to its cold circle charmed,
+     The earth&rsquo;s whole summers have not warmed;
+     Which always&mdash;whitherso the stone
+     Be flung&mdash;sits there, deaf, blind, alone;&mdash;
+     Ay, and shall not be driven out
+     Till that which shuts him round about
+     Break at the very Master&rsquo;s stroke,
+     And the dust thereof vanish as smoke,
+     And the seed of Man vanish as dust:&mdash;
+     Even so within this world is Lust.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      <i>Sister Helen</i> was written somewhat later than <i>The Blessed Damozel</i>
+      and the first draft of <i>Jenny</i>, and probably belonged to the poet&rsquo;s
+      twenty-fourth or twenty-fifth year. The ballad involves a story of
+      witchcraft A girl has been first betrayed and then deserted by her lover;
+      so, to revenge herself upon him and his newly-married bride, she burns his
+      waxen image three days over a fire, and during that time he dies in
+      torment In <i>Sister Helen</i> we touch the key-note of Rossetti&rsquo;s
+      creative gift. Even the superstition which forms the basis of the ballad
+      owes something of its individual character to the invention and poetic
+      bias of the poet. The popular superstitions of the Middle Ages were
+      usually of two kinds only. First, there were those that arose out of a
+      jealous Catholicism, always glancing towards heresy; and next there were
+      those that laid their account neither with orthodoxy nor unbelief, and
+      were purely pagan. The former were the offspring of fanaticism; the latter
+      of an appeal to appetite or passion, or fancy, or perhaps intuitive reason
+      directed blindly or unconsciously towards natural phenomena. The
+      superstition involved in <i>Sister Helen</i> partakes wholly of neither
+      character, but partly of both, with an added element of demonology. The
+      groundwork is essentially catholic, the burden of the ballad showing that
+      the tragic event lies between Hell and Heaven:&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+                  (O Mother, Mary Mother,
+      Three days to-day, between Hell and Heaven!)
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      But the superstructural overgrowth is totally undisturbed by any animosity
+      against heresy, and is concerned only with a certain ultimate demoniacal
+      justice visiting the wrongdoer. Thus far the elemental tissue of the
+      superstition has something in common with that of the German secret
+      tribunal of the steel and cord; with this difference, however, that
+      whereas the latter punishes in secret, even <i>as the deity</i>, the
+      former makes conscious compact with the powers of evil, that whatever
+      justice shall be administered upon the wicked shall first be purchased by
+      sacrifice of the good. Sister Helen may burn, alive, the body and soul of
+      her betrayer, but the dying knell that tells of the false soul&rsquo;s untimely
+      flight, tolls the loss of her own soul also:&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+      &ldquo;Ah! what white thing at the door has cross&rsquo;d,
+            Sister Helen?
+      Ah! what is this that sighs in the frost!&rdquo;
+       &ldquo;A soul that&rsquo;s lost as mine is lost,
+            Little brother!&rdquo;
+             (O Mother, Mary Mother,
+      Lost, lost, all lost, between Hell and Heaven!)
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Here lies the divergence between the lines of this and other compacts with
+      evil powers; this is the point of Rossetti&rsquo;s departure from the scheme
+      that forms the underplot of Goethe&rsquo;s <i>Faust</i>, and of Marlowe&rsquo;s <i>Faustus</i>,
+      and was intended to constitute the plan of Coleridge&rsquo;s <i>Michael Scott</i>.
+      It has been well said that the theme of the Faust is the consequence of a
+      misology, or hatred of knowledge, resulting upon an original thirst for
+      knowledge baffled. Faust never does from the beginning love knowledge for
+      itself, but he loves it for the means it affords for the acquisition of
+      power. This base purpose defeats itself; and when Faust finds that
+      learning fails to yield him the domination he craves, he hates and
+      contemns it. Away, henceforth, with all pretence to knowledge! Then
+      follows the compact, the articles to which are absolute servility of the
+      Devil on the one part, and complete possession of the soul of Faust on the
+      other. Faust is little better than a wizard from the first, for if
+      knowledge had given him what he: sought, he had never had recourse to
+      witchcraft! Helen, however, partakes in some sort of the triumphant
+      nobility of an avenging deity who has cozened hell itself, and not in
+      vain. In the whole majesty of her great wrong, she loses the originally
+      vulgar character of the witch. It is not as the consequence of a
+      poison-speck in her own heart that she has recourse to sorcery. She does
+      not love witchery for its own sake; she loves it only as the retributive
+      channel for the requital of a terrible offence. It is throughout the last
+      hour of her three-days&rsquo; conflict, merely, that we see her, but we know her
+      then not more for the revengeful woman she is than for the trustful maiden
+      she has been. When she becomes conscious of the treason wrought against
+      her, we feel that she suffers change. In the eyes of others we can see
+      her, and in our vision of her she is beautiful; but hers is the beauty of
+      fair cheeks, from which the canker frets the soft tenderness of colour,
+      the loveliness of golden hair that has lost its radiance, the sweetness of
+      eyes once dripping with the dews of the spirit, now pale, and cold, and
+      lustreless. Very soon the wrongdoer shall reap the harvest of a twofold
+      injury: this day another bride shall stand by his side. Is there, then, no
+      way to wreak the just revenge of a broken heart? <i>That</i> suggests
+      sorcery. Yes, the body and soul of the false lover may melt as before a
+      flame; but the price of vengeance is horrible. Yet why? Has not love
+      become devilish? Is not life a curse? Then wherefore shrink? The resolute
+      wronged woman must go through with it. And when the last hour comes,
+      nature itself is portentous of the virulent ill. In the wind&rsquo;s wake, the
+      moon flies through a rack of night clouds. One after one the suppliants
+      crave pardon for the distant dying lover, and last of these comes the
+      three-days&rsquo; bride.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In addition to the three great poems just traversed, Rossetti had written,
+      before the completion of his twenty-sixth year, <i>The Staff and Scrip,
+      The Burden of Nineveh, Troy Town, Eden Bower</i> and <i>The Last
+      Confession</i>, as well as a fragment of <i>The Bride&rsquo;s Prelude</i>, to
+      which it will be necessary to return. But, with a single exception, the
+      poems just named may be said to exist beside the three that have been
+      analysed, without being radically distinct from them, or touching higher
+      or other levels, and hence it is not considered needful to dwell upon them
+      at length. <i>The Last Confession</i> covers another range of feeling, it
+      is true, whereof it may be said that the nobler part is akin to that which
+      finds expression in the pure and shattered love of Othello; but it is a
+      range of feeling less characteristical, perhaps less indigenous and
+      appreciable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the years 1845-49 inclusive, Rossetti made the larger part of his
+      translations (published in 1861) from the early Italian poets, and though
+      he afterwards spoke of them as having been the work of the leisure moments
+      of many years, of their subsequent revision alone, perhaps, could this be
+      altogether true. The <i>Vita Nuova</i>, together with the many among
+      Dante&rsquo;s <i>Lyrics</i> and those of his contemporaries which elucidate
+      their personal intercourse; were translated, as well as a great body of
+      the sonnets of poets later than Dante. {*} This early and indirect
+      apprenticeship to the sonnet, as a form of composition, led to his
+      becoming, in the end, perhaps the most perfect of English sonnet-writers.
+      In youth, it was one of his pleasures to engage in exercises of
+      sonnet-skill with his brother William and his sister Christina, and, even
+      then, he attained to such proficiency, in the mere mechanism of sonnet
+      structure, that he could sometimes dash off a sonnet in ten minutes&mdash;rivalling,
+      in this particular, the impromptu productions of Hartley Coleridge. It is
+      hardly necessary to say that the poems produced, under such conditions of
+      time and other tests, were rarely, if ever, adjudged worthy of
+      publication, by the side of work to which he gave adequate deliberation.
+      But several of the sonnets on pictures&mdash;as, for example, the fine one
+      on a Venetian pastoral by Giorgione&mdash;and the political sonnet,
+      Miltonic in spirit, <i>On the Refusal of Aid between Nations</i>, were
+      written contemporaneously with the experimental sonnets in question.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     * Rossetti often remarked that he had intended to translate
+     the sonnets of Michael Angelo, until he saw Mr. Symonds&rsquo;s
+     translation, when he was so much impressed by its excellence
+     that he forthwith abandoned the purpose.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      As <i>The House of Life</i> was composed in great part at the period with
+      which we are now dealing (though published in the complete sequence nearly
+      twenty-five years later), it may be best to traverse it at this stage.
+      Though called a full series of sonnets, there is no intimation that it is
+      not fragmentary as to design; the title is an astronomical, not an
+      architectural figure. The work is at once Shakspearean and Dantesque.
+      Whilst electively akin to the <i>Vita Nuova</i>, it is broader in range,
+      the life involved being life idealised in all phases. What Rossetti&rsquo;s idea
+      was of the mission of the sonnet, as associated with life, and exhibiting
+      a similitude of it, may best be learned from his prefatory sonnet:&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    A Sonnet is a moment&rsquo;s monument,&mdash;
+      Memorial from the Soul&rsquo;s eternity
+      To one dead deathless hour. Look that it be,
+    Whether for lustral rite or dire portent,
+    Of its own arduous fulness reverent:
+      Carve it in ivory or in ebony,
+      As Day or Night may rule; and let Time see
+    Its flowering crest impearled and orient.
+    A Sonnet is a coin; its face reveals
+      The soul,&mdash;its converse, to what Power &lsquo;tis due:&mdash;
+    Whether for tribute to the august appeals
+      Of Life, or dower in Love&rsquo;s high retinue,
+    It serve; or &lsquo;mid the dark wharfs cavernous breath,
+    In Charon&rsquo;s palm it pay the toll to Death.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Rossetti&rsquo;s sonnets are of varied metrical structure; but their
+      intellectual structure is uniform, comprising in each case a flow and ebb
+      of thought within the limits of a single conception. In this latter
+      respect they have a character almost peculiar to themselves among English
+      sonnets. Rossetti was not the first English writer who deliberatively
+      separated octave and sestet, but he was the first who obeyed throughout a
+      series of sonnets the canon of the contemporary structure requiring that a
+      sonnet shall present the twofold facet of a single thought or emotion.
+      This form of the sonnet Rossetti was at least the first among English
+      writers entirely to achieve and perfectly to render. <i>The House of Life</i>
+      does not contain a sonnet which is not to some degree informed by such an
+      intellectual and musical wave; but the following is an example more than
+      usually emphatic:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    Even as a child, of sorrow that we give
+        dead, but little in his heart can find,
+        Since without need of thought to his clear mind
+    Their turn it is to die and his to live:&mdash;
+    Even so the winged New Love smiles to receive
+        Along his eddying plumes the auroral wind,
+        Nor, forward glorying, casts one look behind
+    Where night-rack shrouds the Old Love fugitive.
+
+     There is a change in every hour&rsquo;s recall,
+        And the last cowslip in the fields we see
+        On the same day with the first corn-poppy.
+     Alas for hourly change! Alas for all
+     The loves that from his hand proud youth lets fall,
+        Even as the beads of a told rosary!
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      The distinguishing excellence of craftsmanship in Rossetti&rsquo;s sonnets was
+      early recognised; but the fertility of thought, and range of emotion
+      compassed by this part of his work constitute an excellence far higher
+      than any that belongs to perfection of form, rhythm, or metre. Mr.
+      Palgrave has well said that a poet&rsquo;s story differs from a narrative in
+      being in itself a creation; that it brings its own facts; that what we
+      have to ask is not the true life of Laura, but how far Petrarch has truly
+      drawn the life of love. So with Rossetti&rsquo;s sonnets. They may or may not be
+      &ldquo;occasional.&rdquo; Many readers who enter with sympathy into the series of
+      feelings they present will doubtless insist upon regarding them as
+      autobiographical. Others, who think they see the stamp of reality upon
+      them, will perhaps accept them (as Hallam accepted the Sonnets of
+      Shakspeare) as witnesses of excessive affection, redeemed sometimes by
+      touches of nobler sentiments&mdash;if affection, however excessive, needs
+      to be redeemed. Others again will receive them as artistic embodiments of
+      ideal love upon which is placed the imprint of a passion as mythical as
+      they believe to be attached to the autobiography of Dante&rsquo;s early days.
+      But the genesis and history of these sonnets (whether the emotion with
+      which they are pervaded be actual or imagined) must be looked for within.
+      Do they realise vividly Life representative in its many phases of love,
+      joy, sorrow, and death? It must be conceded that <i>he House of Life</i>
+      touches many passions and depicts life in most of its changeful aspects.
+      It would afford an adequate test of its comprehensiveness to note how
+      rarely a mind in general sympathy with the author could come to its
+      perusal without alighting upon something that would be in harmony with its
+      mood. To traverse the work through its aspiration and foreboding, joy,
+      grief, remorse, despair, and final resignation, would involve a task too
+      long and difficult to be attempted here. Two sonnets only need be quoted
+      as at once indicative of the range of thought and feeling covered, and of
+      the sequent relation these poems bear each to each.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    By thine own tears thy song must tears beget,
+       Singer! Magic mirror thou hast none
+       Except thy manifest heart; and save thine own
+    Anguish or ardour, else no amulet.
+
+    Cisterned in Pride, verse is the feathery jet
+       Of soulless air-flung fountains; nay, more dry
+       Than the Dead Sea for throats that thirst and sigh,
+    That song o&rsquo;er which no singer&rsquo;s lids grew wet.
+
+    The Song-god&mdash;He the Sun-god&mdash;is no slave
+       Of thine: thy Hunter he, who for thy soul
+       Fledges his shaft: to the august control
+    Of thy skilled hand his quivered store he gave:
+       But if thy lips&rsquo; loud cry leap to his smart,
+       The inspired record shall pierce thy brother&rsquo;s heart.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      This is not meant to convey the same idea as Shelley&rsquo;s &ldquo;learn in
+      suffering,&rdquo; etc., but merely that a poem must move the writer in its
+      composition if it is to move the reader.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With the following <i>The House of Life</i> is made to close:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    When vain desire at last and vain regret
+       Go hand in hand to death, and all is vain,
+       What shall assuage the unforgotten pain
+    And teach the unforgetful to forget?
+
+    Shall Peace be still a sunk stream long unmet,&mdash;
+       Or may the soul at once in a green plain
+       Stoop through the spray of some sweet life-fountain,
+    And cull the dew-drenched flowering amulet?
+
+    Ah! when the wan soul in that golden air
+       Between the scriptured petals softly blown
+       Peers breathless for the gift of grace unknown,&mdash;
+    Ah! let none other alien spell soe&rsquo;er
+    But only the one Hope&rsquo;s one name be there,&mdash;
+       Not less nor more, but even that word alone.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      A writer must needs be loath to part from this section of Rossett&rsquo;s work
+      without naming some few sonnets that seem to be in all respects on a level
+      with those to which attention has been drawn. Of such, perhaps, the most
+      conspicuous are:&mdash;<i>A Day of Love; Mid-Rapture; Her Gifts; The Dark
+      Glass; True Woman; Without Her; Known in Vain; The Heart of the Night; The
+      Landmark; Stillborn Love; Lost Days</i>. But it would be difficult to
+      formulate a critical opinion in support of the superiority of almost any
+      of these&rsquo; sonnets over the others,&mdash;so balanced is their merit, so
+      equal their appeal to the imagination and heart. Indeed, it were scarcely
+      rash to say that in the language (outside Shakspeare) there exists no
+      single body of sonnets characterised by such sustained excellence of
+      vision and presentment. It must have been strange enough if the all but
+      unexampled ardour and constancy with which Rossetti pursued the art of the
+      sonnet-writer had not resulted in absolute mastery.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In 1850 <i>The Germ</i> was started under the editorship of Mr. William
+      Michael Rossetti, and to the four issues, which were all that were
+      published of this monthly magazine (designed to advocate the views of the
+      pre-Raphaelite brotherhood), Rossetti contributed certain of his early
+      poems&mdash;<i>The Blessed Damozel</i> among the number. In 1856 he
+      contributed many of the same poems, together with others, to <i>The Oxford
+      and Cambridge Magazine</i>, of which Canon Dixon has kindly undertaken to
+      tell the history. He says:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My knowledge of Dante Gabriel Rossetti was begun in connection with <i>The
+      Oxford and Cambridge Magazine</i>, a monthly periodical, which was started
+      in January 1856, and lasted a year. The projectors of this periodical were
+      Mr. William Morris, Mr. Ed. Burne Jones, and myself. The editor was Mr.
+      (now the Rev.) William Fulford. Among the original contributors were the
+      late Mr. Wilfred Heeley of Cambridge, Mr. Faulkner, now Fellow of
+      University College, Oxford, and Mr. Cormel Price. We were all
+      undergraduates. The publishers of the magazine were the late firm of Bell
+      and Daldy. We gradually associated with ourselves several other
+      contributors: above all, D. G. Rossetti.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of this undertaking the central notion was, I think, to advocate moral
+      earnestness and purpose in literature, art, and society. It was founded
+      much on Mr. Ruskin&rsquo;s teaching: it sprang out of youthful impatience, and
+      exhibited many signs of immaturity and ignorance: but perhaps it was not
+      without value as a protest against some things. The pre-Raphaelite
+      movement was then in vigour: and this Magazine came to be considered as
+      the organ of those who accepted the ideas which were brought into art at
+      that time; and, as in a manner, the successor of <i>The Germ</i>, a small
+      periodical which had been published previously by the first beginners of
+      the movement. Rossetti, in many respects the most memorable of the
+      pre-Raphaelites, became connected with our Magazine when it had been in
+      existence about six months: and he contributed to it several of the finest
+      of the poems that were afterwards collected in the former of his two
+      volumes of poems: namely, <i>The Burden of Nineveh, The Blessed Damozel,
+      and The Staff and Scrip</i>. I think that one of them, <i>The Blessed
+      Damozel</i>, had appeared previously in <i>The Germ</i>. All these poems,
+      as they now stand in the author&rsquo;s volume, have been greatly altered from
+      what they were in the Magazine: and, in being altered, not always
+      improved, at least in the verbal changes. The first of them, a sublime
+      meditation of peculiar metrical power, has been much altered, and in
+      general happily, as to the arrangement of stanzas: but not always so
+      happily as to the words. It is, however, pleasing to notice that in the
+      alterations some touches of bitterness have been effaced. The second of
+      these pieces has been brought with great skill into regular form by
+      transposition: but again one repines to find several touches gone that
+      once were there. The last of them, <i>The Staff and Scrip</i>, is, in my
+      judgment, the finest of all Rossetti&rsquo;s poems, and one of the most glorious
+      writings in the language. It exhibits in flawless perfection the gift that
+      he had above all other writers, absolute beauty and pure action. Here
+      again it is not possible to see without regret some of the verbal
+      alterations that have been made in the poem as it now stands, although the
+      chief emendation, the omission of one stanza and the insertion of another,
+      adds clearness, and was all that was wanted to make the poem perfect in
+      structure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I saw Rossetti for the first time in his lodgings over Blackfriars Bridge.
+      It was impossible not to be impressed with the freedom and kindness of his
+      manner, not less than by his personal appearance. His frank greeting,
+      bold, but gentle glance, his whole presence, produced a feeling of
+      confidence and pleasure. His voice had a great charm, both in tone, and
+      from the peculiar cadences that belonged to it I think that the leading
+      features of his character struck me more at first than the characteristics
+      of his genius; or rather, that my notion of the character of the man was
+      formed first, and was then applied to his works, and identified with them.
+      The main features of his character were, in my apprehension, fearlessness,
+      kindliness, a decision that sometimes made him seem somewhat arbitrary,
+      and condensation or concentration. He was wonderfully self-reliant. These
+      moral qualities, guiding an artistic temperament as exquisite as was ever
+      bestowed on man, made him what he was, the greatest inventor of abstract
+      beauty, both in form and colour, that this age, perhaps that the world,
+      has seen. They would also account for some peculiarities that must be
+      admitted in some of his works, want of nature, for instance. I heard him
+      once remark that it was &ldquo;astonishing how much the least bit of nature
+      helped if one put it in;&rdquo; which seemed like an acknowledgment that he
+      might have gone more to nature. Hence, however, his works always seem
+      abstract, always seem to embody some kind of typical aim, and acquire a
+      sort of sacred character.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I saw a good deal of Rossetti in London, and afterwards in Oxford, during
+      the painting of the Union debating-room. In later years our personal
+      intercourse was broken off through distance; though I saw him occasionally
+      almost to the time of his lamented death, and we had some correspondence.
+      My recollection of him is that of greatness, as might be expected of one
+      of the few who have been &ldquo;illustrious in two arts,&rdquo; and who stands by
+      himself and has earned an independent name in both. His work was great:
+      the man was greater. His conversation had a wonderful ease, precision, and
+      felicity of expression. He produced thoughts perfectly enunciated with a
+      deliberate happiness that was indescribable, though it was always simple
+      conversation, never haranguing or declamation. He was a natural leader
+      because he was a natural teacher. When he chose to be interested in
+      anything that was brought before him, no pains were too great for him to
+      take. His advice was always given warmly and freely, and when he spoke of
+      the works of others it was always in the most generous spirit of praise.
+      It was in fact impossible to have been more free from captiousness,
+      jealousy, envy, or any other form of pettiness than this truly noble man.
+      The great painter who first took me to him said, &ldquo;We shall see the
+      greatest man in Europe.&rdquo; I have it on the same authority that Rossetti&rsquo;s
+      aptitude for art was considered amongst painters to be no less
+      extraordinary than his imagination. For example, that he could take hold
+      of the extremity of the brush, and be as certain of his touch as if it had
+      been held in the usual way; that he never painted a picture without doing
+      something in colour that had never been done before; and, in particular,
+      that he had a command of the features of the human face such as no other
+      painter ever possessed. I also remember some observations by the same
+      assuredly competent judge, to the effect that Rossetti might be set
+      against the great painters of the fifteenth century, as equal to them,
+      though unlike them: the difference being that while they represented the
+      characters, whom they painted, in their ordinary and unmoved mood, he
+      represented his characters under emotion, and yet gave them wholly. It may
+      be added, perhaps, that he had a lofty standard of beauty of his own
+      invention, and that he both elevated and subjected all to beauty. Such a
+      man was not likely to be ignorant of the great root of power in art, and I
+      once saw him very indignant on hearing that he had been accused of
+      irreligion, or rather of not being a Christian. He asked with great
+      earnestness, &ldquo;Do not my works testify to my Christianity?&rdquo; I wish that
+      these imperfect recollections may be of any avail to those who cherish the
+      memory of an extraordinary genius.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Besides his contributions to <i>The Germ</i>, and to <i>The Oxford and
+      Cambridge Magazine</i>, Rossetti contributed <i>Sister Helen</i>, in 1853,
+      to a German Annual. Beyond this he made little attempt to publish his
+      poetry. He had written it for the love of writing, or in obedience to the
+      inherent impulse compelling him to do so, but of actual hope of achieving
+      by virtue of it a place among English poets he seems to have had none, or
+      next to none. In later life he used to say that Mr. Browning&rsquo;s greatness
+      and the splendour of Mr. Tennyson&rsquo;s merited renown seemed to him in those
+      early years to render all attempt on his part to secure rank by their side
+      as hopeless as presumptuous. This, he asserted, was the cause that
+      operated to restrain him from publication between 1853 and 1862, and after
+      that (as will presently be seen), another and more serious obstacle than
+      self-depreciation intervened. But in putting aside all hope of the reward
+      of poetic achievement, he did not wholly banish the memory of the work he
+      had done. He made two or more copies of the most noticeable of the poems
+      he had written, and sent them to friends eminent in letters. To Leigh Hunt
+      he sent <i>The Blessed Damozel</i>, and received in acknowledgment a
+      letter full of appreciative comment, and foretelling a brilliant future.
+      His literary friends at this time were Mr. Ruskin, Mr. and Mrs. Browning;
+      he used to see Mr. Tennyson and Carlyle at intervals, and was in constant
+      intercourse with the younger writers, Mr. Swinburne and Mr. Morris, whose
+      reputations had then to be made; Mr. Arnold, Sir Henry Taylor, Mr. Aubrey
+      de Vere, Mr. E. Brough, Mr. J. Hannay, and Mr. Monckton Milnes (Lord
+      Houghton), he met occasionally; Dobell he knew only by correspondence.
+      Though unpublished, his poems were not unknown, for besides the
+      semi-publicity they obtained by circulation &ldquo;among his private friends,&rdquo;
+       he was nothing loath to read or recite them at request, and by such means
+      a few of them secured a celebrity akin in kind and almost equal in extent
+      to that enjoyed by Coleridge&rsquo;s <i>Christabel</i> during the many years
+      preceding 1816 in which it lay in manuscript. Like Coleridge&rsquo;s poem in
+      another important particular, certain of Rossetti&rsquo;s ballads, whilst still
+      unknown to the public, so far influenced contemporary poetry that when
+      they did at length appear they had all the appearance to the uninitiated
+      of work imitated from contemporary models, instead of being, as in fact
+      they were, the primary source of inspiration for writers whose names were
+      earlier established.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Towards the beginning of his artistic career Rossetti occupied a studio,
+      with residential chambers, at Black-friars Bridge. The rooms overlooked
+      the river, and the tide rose almost to the walls of the house, which, with
+      nearly all its old surroundings, has long disappeared.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A story is told of Rossetti amidst these environments which aptly
+      illustrates almost every trait of his character: his impetuosity, and
+      superstition especially. It was his daily habit to ransack old
+      book-stalls, and carry off to his studio whatever treasures he unearthed,
+      but when, upon further investigation, he found he had been deceived as to
+      the value of a book that at first looked promising, he usually revenged
+      himself by throwing the volume through a window into the river running
+      below&mdash;a habit which he discovered (to his amusement, and
+      occasionally to his distress), that his friends, Mr. Swinburne especially,
+      imitated from him and practised at his rooms on his behalf. On one
+      occasion he discovered in some odd nook a volume long sought for, and
+      having inscribed it with his name and address, he bore it off joyfully to
+      his chambers; but finding a few days later that in some respects it
+      disappointed his expectations, he flung it through the window, and
+      banished all further thought of it. The tide had been at the flood when
+      the book disappeared, and when it ebbed, the offending volume was found by
+      a little mud-lark imbedded in the refuse of the river. The boy washed it
+      and took it back to the address it contained, expecting to find it eagerly
+      reclaimed; but, impatient and angry at sight of what he thought he had
+      destroyed, Rossetti snatched the book out of the muddy hand that proffered
+      it and flung it again into the Thames, with rather less than the courtesy
+      which might have been looked for as the reward of an act that was meant so
+      well. But the haunting volume was not even yet done with. Next morning, an
+      old man of the riverside labourer class knocked at the door, bearing in
+      his hands a small parcel rudely made up in a piece of newspaper that was
+      greasy enough to have previously contained his morning&rsquo;s breakfast. He had
+      come from where he was working below London Bridge: he had found something
+      that might have been lost by Mr. Rossetti. It was the tormenting volume:
+      the indestructible, unrelenting phantom that would not be laid! Rossetti
+      now perceived that higher agencies were at work: it was <i>not meant</i>
+      that he should get rid of the book: why should he contend against the
+      inevitable? Reverently and with both hands he took the besoiled parcel
+      from the brown palm of the labourer, placed half-a-crown there instead,
+      and restored the fearful book to its place on his shelf.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And now we come to incidents in Rossetti&rsquo;s career of which it is necessary
+      to treat as briefly as tenderly. Among the models who sat to him was Miss
+      Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal, a young lady of great personal beauty, in whom
+      he discovered a natural genius for painting and a noticeable love of the
+      higher poetic literature. He felt impelled to give her lessons, and she
+      became as much his pupil as model. Her water-colour drawings done under
+      his tuition gave proof of a wonderful eye for colour, and displayed a
+      marked tendency to style. The subjects, too, were admirably composed and
+      often exhibited unusual poetic feeling. It was very natural that such a
+      connection between persons of kindred aspirations should lead to
+      friendship and finally to love.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rossetti and Miss Siddal were married in 1860. They visited France and
+      Belgium; and this journey, together with a similar one undertaken in the
+      company of Mr. Holman Hunt in 1849, and again another in 1863, when his
+      brother was his companion, and a short residence on the Continent when a
+      boy, may be said to constitute almost the whole sum of Rossetti&rsquo;s
+      travelling. Very soon the lady&rsquo;s health began to fail, and she became the
+      victim of neuralgia. To meet this dread enemy she resorted to laudanum,
+      taking it at first in small quantities, but eventually in excess. Her
+      spirits drooped, her art was laid aside, and much of the cheerfulness of
+      home was lost to her. There was a child, but it was stillborn, and not
+      long after this disaster, it was found that Mrs. Rossetti had taken an
+      overdose of her accustomed sleeping potion and was lying dead in her bed.
+      This was in 1862, and after two years only of married life. The blow was a
+      terrible one to Rossetti, who was the first to discover what fate had
+      reserved for him. It was some days before he seemed fully to realise the
+      loss that had befallen him, and then his grief knew no bounds. The poems
+      he had written, so far as they were poems of love, were chiefly inspired
+      by and addressed to her. At her request he had copied them into a little
+      book presented to him for the purpose, and on the day of the funeral he
+      walked into the room where the body lay, and, unmindful of the presence of
+      friends, he spoke to his dead wife as though she heard, saying, as he held
+      the book, that the words it contained were written to her and for her, and
+      she must take them with her for they could not remain when she had gone.
+      Then he put the volume into the coffin between her cheek and beautiful
+      hair, and it was that day buried with her in Highgate Cemetery.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0002" id="link2HCH0002">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER II.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      It was long before Rossetti recovered from the shock of his wife&rsquo;s sudden
+      death. The loss sustained appeared to change the whole course of his life.
+      Previously he had been of a cheerful temperament, and accustomed to go
+      abroad at frequent intervals to visit friends; but after this event he
+      seemed to become for a time morose, and by nature reclusive. Not a great
+      while afterwards he removed from Blackfriars Bridge, and after a temporary
+      residence in Lincoln&rsquo;s Inn Fields, he took up his abode in the house he
+      occupied during the twenty remaining years of his life, at 16 Cheyne Walk,
+      Chelsea. This home of Rossetti&rsquo;s shall be fully described in subsequent
+      personal recollections. It was called Tudor House when he became its
+      tenant, from the tradition that Elizabeth Tudor had lived in it, and it is
+      understood to be the same that Thackeray describes in <i>Esmond</i> as the
+      home of the old Countess of Chelsey. A large garden, which recently has
+      been cut off for building purposes, lay at the back, and, doubtless, it
+      was as much due to the attractions of this piece of pleasant ground,
+      dotted over with lime-trees, and enclosed by a high wall, that Rossetti
+      went so far afield, for at that period Chelsea was not the rallying ground
+      of artists and men of letters. He wished to live a life of retirement, and
+      thought the possession of a garden in which he could take sufficient daily
+      exercise would enable him to do so. In leaving Blackfriars he destroyed
+      many things associated with his residence there, and calculated to remind
+      him of his life&rsquo;s great loss. He burnt a great body of letters, and among
+      them were many valuable ones from almost all the men and women then
+      eminent in literature and art. His great grief notwithstanding, upon
+      settling at Chelsea he began almost insensibly to interest himself in
+      furnishing the house in a beautiful and novel style. Old oak then became
+      for a time his passion, and in hunting it up he rummaged the brokers&rsquo; 
+      shops round London for miles, buying for trifles what would eventually
+      (when the fashion he started grew to be general) have fetched large sums.
+      Cabinets of all conceivable superannuated designs&mdash;so old in material
+      or pattern that no one else would look at them&mdash;were unearthed in
+      obscure corners, bolstered up by a joiner, and consigned to their places
+      in the new residence. Following old oak, Japanese furniture became
+      Rossetti&rsquo;s quest, and following this came blue china ware (of which he had
+      perhaps the first fine collection made), and then ecclesiastical and other
+      brasses, incense-burners, sacramental cups, crucifixes, Indian spice
+      boxes, mediaeval lamps, antique bronzes, and the like. In a few years he
+      had filled his house with so much curious and beautiful furniture that
+      there grew up a widespread desire to imitate his methods; and very soon
+      artists, authors, and men of fortune having no other occupation, were
+      found rummaging, as he had rummaged, for the neglected articles of the
+      centuries gone by. What he did was done, as he used to say, less from love
+      of the things hunted for, than from love of the pursuit, which, from its
+      difficulty, gave rise to a pleasurable excitement. Thus did he grieve down
+      his loss, and little did they think who afterwards followed the fashion he
+      set them, and carried his passion for antique furniture to an excess at
+      which he must have laughed, that his&rsquo; primary impulse was so far from a
+      desire to &ldquo;live up to his blue ware,&rdquo; that it was more like an effort to
+      live down to it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was during the earlier years of his residence at Chelsea that Rossetti
+      formed a habit of life which clung to him almost to the last, and did more
+      than aught else to blight his happiness. What his intimate friend has
+      lately characterised in <i>The Daily News</i> as that great curse of the
+      literary and artistic temperament, insomnia, had been hanging about him
+      since the death of his wife, and was becoming each year more and more
+      alarming. He had tried opiates, but in sparing quantities, for had he not
+      the most serious cause to eschew them? Towards 1868 he heard of the then
+      newly found drug chloral, which was accredited with all the virtues and
+      none of the vices of other known narcotics. Here then was the thing he
+      wanted; this was the blessed discovery that was to save him from days of
+      weariness and nights of misery and tears. Eagerly he procured it, took it
+      nightly in single small doses of ten grains each, and from it he received
+      pleasant and refreshing sleep. He made no concealment of his habit; like
+      Coleridge under similar conditions, he preferred to talk of it. Not yet
+      had he learned the sad truth, too soon to force itself upon him, that the
+      fumes of this dreadful drug would one day wither up his hopes and joys in
+      life: deluding him with a short-lived surcease of pain only to impose a
+      terrible legacy of suffering from which there was to be no respite. Had
+      Rossetti been master of the drug and not mastered by it, perhaps he might
+      have turned it to account at a critical juncture, and laid it aside when
+      the necessity to employ it had gradually been removed. But, alas! he gave
+      way little by little to the encroachments of an evil power with which,
+      when once it had gained the ascendant, he fought down to his dying day a
+      single-handed and losing fight.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was not, however, for some years after he began the use of it that
+      chloral produced any sensible effects of an injurious kind, and meantime
+      he pursued as usual his avocation as a painter. Mention has been made of
+      the fact that Rossetti abandoned at an early age subject designs for
+      three-quarter-length figures. Of the latter, in the period of which we are
+      now treating, he painted great numbers: among them, produced at this time
+      and later, were <i>Sibylla Palmifera and The Beloved</i> (the property of
+      Mr. George Rae), <i>La Pia and The Salutation of Beatrice</i> (Mr. F. E.
+      Leyland), <i>The Dying Beatrice</i> (Lord Mount Temple), <i>Venus Astarte</i>
+      (Mr. Fry), <i>Fiammetta</i> (Mr. Turner), <i>Proserpina</i> (Mr. Graham).
+      Of these works, solidity may be said to be the prominent characteristic.
+      The drapery of Rossetti&rsquo;s pictures is wonderfully powerful and solid; his
+      colour may be said to be at times almost matchable with that of certain of
+      the Venetian painters, though different in kind. He hated beyond most
+      things the &ldquo;varnishy&rdquo; look of some modern work; and his own oil pictures
+      had so much of the manner of frescoes in their lustreless depth, that they
+      were sometimes mistaken for water-colours, while, on the other hand, his
+      water-colours had often so much depth and brilliancy as sometimes to be
+      mistaken for oil. It is alleged in certain quarters that Rossetti was
+      deficient in some qualities of drawing, and this is no doubt a just
+      allegation; but it is beyond question that no English painter has ever
+      been a greater master of the human face, which in his works (especially
+      those painted in later years) acquires a splendid solemnity and spiritual
+      beauty and significance all but peculiar to himself. It seems proper to
+      say in such a connexion, that his success in this direction was always
+      attributed by him to the fact that the most memorable of his faces were
+      painted from a well-known friend.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Only one of his early designs, the <i>Dante&rsquo;s Dream</i>, was ever painted
+      by Rossetti on a scale commensurate with its importance, and the solemnity
+      and massive grandeur of that work leave only a feeling of regret that,
+      whether from personal indisposition on the part of the painter or lack of
+      adequate recognition on that of the public, the three or four other finest
+      designs made in youth were never carried out. As the picture in question
+      stands alone among Rossetti&rsquo;s pictorial works as a completed conception,
+      it may be well to devote a few pages to a description of it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is essential to an appreciation of <i>Dante&rsquo;s Dream</i>, that we should
+      not only fully understand the nature of the particular incident depicted
+      in the picture, but also possess a general knowledge of the lives and
+      relations of the two principal personages concerned in it. What we know,
+      to most purpose, of the early life and love of Dante, we learn from the
+      autobiography which he entitled <i>La Vita Nuova</i>. Boccaccio, however,
+      writing fifty years after the death of the great Florentine, affords a
+      more detailed statement than is furnished by Dante himself of the
+      circumstances of the poets first meeting with the lady he called Beatrice.
+      He says that it was the custom of citizens in Florence, when the time of
+      spring came round, to form social gatherings in their own quarters for
+      purposes of merry-making; that in this way Folco Portinari, a citizen of
+      mark, had collected his neighbours at his house upon the first of May,
+      1274, for pastime and rejoicing: that amongst those who came to him was
+      Alighiero Alighieri, father of Dante Alighieri, who lived within fifty
+      yards; that it was common for children to accompany their parents at such
+      merrymakings, and that Dante, then scarce nine years old, was in the house
+      on the day in question engaged in sports, appropriate to his years, with
+      other children, amongst whom was a little daughter of Folco Portinari,
+      eight years old. The child is described as being, even at this period, in
+      aspect extremely beautiful, and winning and graceful in her ways. Not to
+      dwell upon these passages of childhood, it may be sufficient to say that
+      the boy, young as he was, is said to have then conceived so deep a passion
+      for the child that maturer attachments proved powerless to efface it. Such
+      was the origin of a love that grew from childlike tenderness to manly
+      ardour, and, surviving all the buffetings of an untoward fate, is known to
+      us now and for all time in a record of so much reality and purity, as
+      seems to every right-hearted nature to be equally the story of his
+      personal attachment as the history of a passion that in Florence, six
+      centuries ago, for its mortal put on immortality.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Portinari and Alighieri were immediate neighbours, yet it does not
+      appear that the young Dante encountered the lady in any marked way until
+      nine years later, and then, in the first bloom of a gracious womanhood,
+      she is described as affording him in the street a salutation of such
+      unspeakable courtesy that he left the place where for the instant he had
+      stood sorely abashed, as one intoxicated with a love that now at first
+      knew itself for what it was. The incidents of the attachment are few in
+      facts; numerous only in emotions, and therein too uncertain and liable to
+      change to be counted. In order not to disclose a passion, which other
+      reasons than those given by the poet may have tempted him to conceal,
+      Dante affects an attachment to another lady of the city, and the rumour of
+      this brings about an estrangement with the real object of his desires,
+      which reduces the poet to such an abject condition of mind, as finally
+      results in his laying aside all counterfeiting. Portinari, the father, now
+      dies, and witnessing the tenderness with which the beautiful Beatrice
+      mourns him, Dante becomes affected with a painful infirmity, wherein his
+      mind broods over his enfeebled body, and, perceiving how frail a thing
+      life is, even though health keep with it, his brain begins to travail in
+      many imaginings, and he says within himself, &ldquo;Certainly it must some time
+      come to pass that the very gentle Beatrice will die.&rdquo; Feeling bewildered,
+      he closes his eyes, and, in a trance, he conceives that a friend comes to
+      him, and says, &ldquo;Hast thou not heard? She that was thine excellent lady has
+      been taken out of life.&rdquo; Then as he looks towards Heaven in imagination,
+      he beholds a multitude of angels who are returning upwards, having before
+      them an exceedingly white cloud; and these angels are singing, and the
+      words of their song are, &ldquo;Osanna in excelsis.&rdquo; So strong is his imagining,
+      that it seems to him that he goes to look upon the body where it has its
+      abiding-place.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     The sun ceased, and the stars began to gather,
+     And each wept at the other;
+       And birds dropp&rsquo;d at midflight out of the sky;
+       And earth shook suddenly;
+          And I was &lsquo;ware of one, hoarse and tired out,
+     Who ask&rsquo;d of me: &lsquo;Hast thou not heard it said&mdash;
+     Thy lady, she that was so fair, is dead?
+</pre>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     Then lifting up mine eyes, as the tears came,
+        I saw the angels, like a rain of manna
+        In a long flight flying back Heavenward,
+     Having a little cloud in front of them,
+        After the which they went, and said &lsquo;Hosanna;&rsquo; 
+        And if they had said more, you should have heard.
+</pre>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+        Then Love said, &lsquo;Now shall all things be made clear:
+     Come, and behold our lady where she lies
+     These &lsquo;wildering phantasies
+        Then carried me to see my lady dead.
+        Even as I there was led,
+            Her ladies with a veil were covering her;
+     And with her was such very humbleness
+     That she appeared to say, &lsquo;I am at peace.&rsquo; 
+                        (Dante and his Circle.)
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      The trance proves to be a premonition of the event, for, shortly after
+      writing the poem in which his imaginings find record, Dante says, &ldquo;The
+      Lord God of Justice called my most gracious lady unto Himself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It is with the incidents of the dream that Rossetti has dealt. The
+      principal personage in the picture is, of course, Dante himself. Of the
+      poet&rsquo;s face, two old and accredited witnesses remain to us&mdash;the
+      portrait of Giotto and the mask supposed to be copied from a similar one
+      taken after death. Giotto&rsquo;s portrait represents Dante at the age of
+      twenty-seven. The face has a feminine delicacy of outline, yet is full of
+      manly beauty; strength and tenderness are seen blended in its lineaments.
+      It might be that of a poet, a scholar, a courtier, or yet a soldier; and
+      in Dante it is all combined.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Such, as seen in Giotto, was the great Florentine when Beatrice beheld
+      him. The familiar mask represents that youthful beauty as somewhat
+      saddened by years of exile, by the accidents of an unequal fortune, and by
+      the long brooding memory of his life&rsquo;s one, deep, irreparable loss. We see
+      in it the warrior who served in the great battle of Campaldino: the
+      mourner who sought refuge from grief in the action and danger of the war
+      waged by Florence upon Pisa: the magistrate whose justice proved his ruin:
+      the exile who ate bitter bread when Florence banished the greatest of her
+      sons. The mask is as full as the portrait of intellect and feeling, of
+      strength and character, but it lacks something of the early sweetness and
+      sensibility. Rossetti&rsquo;s portraiture retains the salient qualities of both
+      portrait and mask. It represents Dante in his twenty-seventh year; the
+      face gives hint of both poet and soldier, for behind clear-cut features
+      capable of strengthening into resolve and rigour lie whole depths of
+      tenderest sympathy. The abstracted air, the self-centred look, the eyes
+      that seem to see only what the mind conceives and casts forward from
+      itself; the slow, uncertain, half-reluctant gait,&mdash;these are
+      profoundly true to the man and the dream.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of Beatrice, no such description is given either in the <i>Vita Nuova</i>
+      or the <i>Commedia</i> as could afford an artist a definite suggestion.
+      Dante&rsquo;s love was an idealised passion; it concerned itself with spiritual
+      beauty, whereof the emotions excited absorbed every merely physical
+      consideration. The beauty of Beatrice in the <i>Vita Nuova</i> is like a
+      ray of sunshine flooding a landscape&mdash;we see it only in the effect it
+      produces. All we know with certainty is that her hair was light, that her
+      face was pale, and that her smile was one of thoughtful sweetness. These
+      hints of a beautiful person Rossetti has wrought into a creation of such
+      purity that, lovely as she is in death, as in life, we think less of her
+      loveliness than of her loveableness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The personage of Love, who plays throughout the <i>Vita Nuova</i> a
+      mystical part is not the Pagan Love, but a youth and Christian Master, as
+      Dante terms him, sometimes of severe and terrible aspect. He is
+      represented in the picture as clad in a flame-coloured garment (for it is
+      in a mist of the colour of fire that he appears to the lover), and he
+      wears the pilgrim&rsquo;s scallop-shell on his shoulder as emblem of that
+      pilgrimage on earth which Love is.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The chamber wherein the body of Beatrice has its abiding-place is, to
+      Dante&rsquo;s imaginings, a chamber of dreams. Visionary as the mind of the
+      dreamer, it discloses at once all that goes forward within its own narrow
+      compass, together with the desolate streets of the city of Florence,
+      which, to his fancy, sits silent for his loss, and the long flight of
+      angels above that bear away the little cloud, to which is given a vague
+      semblance of the beatified Beatrice. As if just fallen back in sleep, the
+      beautiful lady lies in death, her hands folded across her breast, and a
+      glory of golden hair flowing over her shoulders. With measured tread Dante
+      approaches the couch led by the winged and scarlet Love, but, as though
+      fearful of so near and unaccustomed an approach, draws slowly backward on
+      his half-raised foot, while the mystical emblem of his earthly passion
+      stands droopingly between him the living, and his lady the dead, and takes
+      the kiss that he himself might never have. In life they must needs be
+      apart, but thus in death they are united, for the hand of the pilgrim, who
+      is the embodiment of his love, holds his hand even as the master&rsquo;s lips
+      touch her lips. Two ladies of the chamber are covering her with a pall,
+      and on the dreamer they fix sympathetic eyes. The floor is strewn with
+      poppies&mdash;emblems equally of the sleep in which the lover walks, and
+      of the sleep that is the sleep of death. The may-bloom in the pall, the
+      apple-blossom in the hand of Love, the violets and roses in the frieze of
+      the alcove, symbolise purity and virginity, the life that is cut off in
+      its spring, the love that is consummated in death before the coming of
+      fruit. Suspended from the roof is a scroll, bearing the first words of the
+      wail from the Lamentations of Jeremiah, quoted by Dante himself:&mdash;&ldquo;How
+      doth the city sit solitary, that was full of people! How is she become as
+      a widow, she that was great among the nations!&rdquo; In the ascending and
+      descending staircase on either iand fly doves of the same glowing colour
+      as Love, and these are emblems of his presence in the house. Over all
+      flickers the last beam of a lamp which has burnt through the long night,
+      and which the dawn of a new day sees die away&mdash;fit symbol of the life
+      that has now taken flight with the heavenly host, leaving behind it only
+      the burnt-out socket where the live flame lived.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Full of symbol as this picture is, it is furthermore permeated by a
+      significance that is not occult. It bears witness to the possible strength
+      of a passion that is so spiritual as to be without taint of sense; and to
+      a confident belief in an immortality wherein the utmost limits of a
+      blessedness not of this world may be compassed. Such are in this picture
+      the simpler, yet deeper, symbols, that all who look may read. Sir Noel
+      Paton has written of this work:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I was so dumbfounded by the beauty of that great picture of Rosetti&rsquo;s,
+      called <i>Dante&rsquo;s Dream</i>, that I was usable to give any expression to
+      the emotions it excited&mdash;emotions such as I do not think any other
+      picture, except the <i>Madonna di San Sisto</i> at Dresden, ever stirred
+      within me. The memory of such a picture is like the memory of sublime and
+      perfect music; it makes any one who <i>fully</i> feels it&mdash;<i>silent</i>.
+      Fifty years hence it will be named among the half-dozen supreme pictures
+      of the world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rossetti had buried the only complete copy of his poems with his wife at
+      Highgate, and for a time he had been able to put by the thought of them;
+      but as one by one his friends, Mr. Morris, Mr. Swinburne, and others,
+      attained to distinction as poets, he began to hanker after poetic
+      reputation, and to reflect with pain and regret upon the hidden fruits of
+      his best effort. Rossetti&mdash;in all love of his memory be it spoken&mdash;was
+      after all a frail mortal; of unstable character: of variable purpose: a
+      creature of impulse and whim, and with a plentiful lack of the backbone of
+      volition. With less affection he would not have buried his book; with more
+      strength of will he had not done so; or, having done so, he had never
+      wished to undo what he had done; or having undone it, he would never have
+      tormented himself with the memory of it as of a deed of sacrilege. But
+      Rossetti had both affection enough to do it and weakness enough to have it
+      undone. After an infinity of self-communions he determined to have the
+      grave opened, and the book extracted. Endless were the preparations
+      necessary before such a work could be begun. Mr. Home Secretary Bruce had
+      to be consulted. At length preliminaries were complete, and one night,
+      seven and a half years after the burial, a fire was built by the side of
+      the grave, and then the coffin was raised and opened. The body is
+      described as perfect upon coming to light.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Whilst this painful work was being done the unhappy author of it was
+      sitting alone and anxious, and full of self-reproaches at the house of the
+      friend who had charge of it. He was relieved and thankful when told that
+      all was over. The volume was not much the worse for the years it had lain
+      in the grave. Deficiencies were filled in from memory, the manuscript was
+      put in the press, and in 1870 the reclaimed work was issued under the
+      simple title of <i>Poems</i>.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The success of the book was almost without precedent; seven editions were
+      called for in rapid succession. It was reviewed with enthusiasm in many
+      quarters. Yet that was a period in which fresh poetry and new poets arose,
+      even as they now arise, with all the abundance and timeliness of poppies
+      in autumn. It is probable enough that of the circumstances attending the
+      unexampled early success of this first volume only the remarkable fact is
+      still remembered that, from a bookseller&rsquo;s standpoint, it ran a
+      neck-and-neck race with Disraeli&rsquo;s <i>Lothair</i> at a time when political
+      romance was found universally appetising, and poetry, as of old, a drug.
+      But it will not be forgotten that certain subsidiary circumstances were
+      thought to have contributed to the former success. Of these the most
+      material was the reputation Rossetti had already achieved as a painter by
+      methods which awakened curiosity as much as they aroused enthusiasm. The
+      public mind became sensibly affected by the idea that the poems of the new
+      poet were not to be regarded as the emanations of a single individual, but
+      as the result of a movement in which Rossetti had played one of the most
+      prominent parts. Mr. F. Hueffer, in prefacing the Tauchnitz edition of the
+      poems with a pleasant memoir, has comprehensively denominated that
+      movement the <i>renaissance of mediæval feeling</i>, but at the outset it
+      acquired popularly, for good or ill, the more rememberable name of
+      pre-Raphaelitism. What the shibboleth was of the originators of the school
+      that grew out of it concerned men but little to ascertain; and this was a
+      condition of indifference as to the logic of the movement which was
+      occasioned partly by the known fact that the most popular of its leaders,
+      Mr. Millais, had long been shifting ground. It was enough that the new
+      sect had comprised dissenters from the creed once established, that the
+      catholic spirit of art which lived with the lives of Elmore, Goodall, and
+      Stone was long dead, and that none of the coteries for love of which the
+      old faith, exemplified in the works of men such as these, had been put
+      aside, possessed such an appeal for the imagination as this, now that
+      twenty years of fairly consistent endeavour had cleared away the cloud of
+      obloquy that gathered about it when it began. And so it came to be thought
+      that the poems of Rossetti were to exhibit a new phase of this movement,
+      involving kindred issues, and opening up afresh in the poetic domain the
+      controversies which had been waged and won in the pictorial. Much to this
+      purpose was said at the time to account for the success of a book whose
+      popular qualities were I manifestly inconsiderable; and much to similar
+      purpose will doubtless long be said by those who affect to believe that a
+      concatenation of circumstances did for Rossetti&rsquo;s earlier work a service
+      which could not attend his subsequent one. But the explanation was
+      inadequate, and had for its immediate outcome a charge of narrowed range
+      of poetic sympathy with which Rossetti&rsquo;s admirers had not laid their
+      account.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A renaissance of mediæval feeling the movement in art assuredly involved,
+      but the essential part of it was another thing, of which mediævalism was
+      palpably independent. How it came to be considered the fundamental element
+      is not difficult to show. In an eminent degree the originators of the new
+      school in painting were colourists, having, perhaps, in their effects, a
+      certain affinity to the early Florentine masters, and this accident of
+      native gift had probably more to do in determining the precise direction
+      of the <i>intellectual</i> sympathy than any external agency. The art
+      feeling which formed the foundation of the movement existed apart from it,
+      or bore no closer relation to it than kinship of powers induced. When
+      Rossetti&rsquo;s poetry came it was seen to be animated by a choice of
+      subject-matter akin to that which gave individual character to his
+      painting, but this was because coeval efforts in two totally distinct arts
+      must needs bear the family resemblance, each to each, which belong to all
+      the offspring of a thoroughly harmonised mind. The poems and the pictures,
+      however, had not more in common than can be found in the early poems and
+      early dramas of Shakspeare. Nay, not so much; for whereas in his poems
+      Shakspeare was constantly evolving certain shades of feeling and begetting
+      certain movements of thought which were soon to find concrete and final
+      collocation in the dramatic creations, in his pictures Rossetti was first
+      of all a dissenter from all prescribed canons of taste, whilst in his
+      poems he was in harmony with the catholic spirit which was as old as
+      Shakspeare himself, and found revival, after temporary eclipse, in
+      Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, and Tennyson. Choice of mediaeval theme would
+      not in itself have been enough to secure a reversal of popular feeling
+      against work that contained no germs of the sensational; and hence we must
+      conclude that Mr. Swinburne accounted more satisfactorily for the instant
+      popularity of Rossetti&rsquo;s poetry when he claimed for it those innate utmost
+      qualities of beauty and strength which are always the first and last
+      constituents of poetry that abides. Indeed those qualities and none other,
+      wholly independent of auxiliary aids, must now as then go farthest to
+      determine Rossetti&rsquo;s final place among poets.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Such as is here described was the first reception given to Rossetti&rsquo;s
+      volume of poetry; but at the close of 1871, there arose out of it a long
+      and acrimonious controversy. It seems necessary to allude to this painful
+      matter, because it involved serious issues; but an effort alike after
+      brevity and impartiality of comment shall be observed in what is said of
+      it. In October of the year mentioned, an article entitled <i>The Fleshly
+      School of Poetry</i>, and signed &ldquo;Thomas Maitland,&rdquo; appeared in <i>The
+      Contemporary Review</i>. {*} It consisted in the main of an impeachment of
+      Rossetti&rsquo;s poetry on the ground of sensuality, though it embraced a broad
+      denunciation of the sensual tendencies of the age in art, music, poetry,
+      the drama, and social life generally. Sensuality was regarded as the
+      phenomenon of the age. &ldquo;It lies,&rdquo; said the writer, &ldquo;on the drawing-room
+      table, shamelessly naked and dangerously fair. It is part of the pretty
+      poem which the belle of the season reads, and it breathes away the
+      pureness of her soul like the poisoned breath of the girl in Hawthorne&rsquo;s
+      tale. It covers the shelves of the great Oxford-Street librarian, lurking
+      in the covers of three-volume novels. It is on the French booksellers&rsquo; 
+      counters, authenticated by the signature of the author of the <i>Visite de
+      Noces</i>. It is here, there, and everywhere, in art, literature, life,
+      just as surely as it is in the <i>Fleurs de Mal</i>, the Marquis de Sade&rsquo;s
+      <i>Justine</i>, or the <i>Monk</i> of Lewis. It appeals to all tastes, to
+      all dispositions, to all ages. If the querulous man of letters has his
+      Baudelaire, the pimpled clerk has his <i>Day&rsquo;s Doings</i>, and the
+      dissipated artisan his <i>Day and Night.</i>&rdquo; When the writer set himself
+      to inquire into the source of this social cancer, he refused to believe
+      that English society was honeycombed and rotten. He accounted for the
+      portentous symptoms that appalled him by attributing the evil to a fringe
+      of real English society, chiefly, if not altogether, resident in London:
+      &ldquo;a sort of demi-monde, not composed, like that other in France, of simple
+      courtesans, but of men and women of indolent habits and aesthetic tastes,
+      artists, literary persons, novel writers, actors, men of genius and men of
+      talent, butterflies and gadflies of the human kind, leading a lazy
+      existence from hand to mouth.&rdquo; It was to this Bohemian fringe of society
+      that the writer attributed the &ldquo;gross and vulgar conceptions of life which
+      are formulated into certain products of art, literature, and criticism.&rdquo;
+       Dealing with only one form of the social phenomenon, with sensualism so
+      far as it appeared to affect contemporary poetry, the writer proceeded
+      with a literary retrospect intended to show that the fair dawn of our
+      English poetry in Chaucer and the Elizabethan dramatists had been
+      overclouded by a portentous darkness, a darkness &ldquo;vaporous,&rdquo; &ldquo;miasmic,&rdquo;
+       coming from a &ldquo;fever-cloud generated first in Italy and then blown
+      westward,&rdquo; sucking up on its way &ldquo;all that was most unwholesome from the
+      soil of France.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     * In this summary, the pamphlet reprint has been followed in
+     preference to the original article as it appeared in the
+     Review.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Just previously to and contemporaneously with the rise of Dante, there had
+      flourished a legion of poets of greater or less ability, but all more or
+      less characterised by affectation, foolishness, and moral blindness:
+      singers of the falsetto school, with ballads to their mistress&rsquo;s eyebrow,
+      sonnets to their lady&rsquo;s lute, and general songs of a fiddlestick; peevish
+      men for the most part, as is the way of all fleshly and affected beings;
+      men so ignorant of human subjects and materials as to be driven in their
+      sheer bankruptcy of mind to raise Hope, Love, Fear, Rage (everything but
+      Charity) into human entities, and to treat the body and upholstery of a
+      dollish woman as if, in itself, it constituted a whole universe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After tracing the effect of the &ldquo;moral poison&rdquo; here seen in its inception
+      through English poetry from Surrey and Wyat to Cowley, the writer
+      recognised a &ldquo;tranquil gleam of honest English light&rdquo; in Cowper, who
+      &ldquo;spread the seeds of new life&rdquo; soon to re-appear in Wordsworth, Coleridge,
+      Southey, Lamb, and Scott. In his opinion the &ldquo;Italian disease would now
+      have died out altogether,&rdquo; but for a &ldquo;fresh importation of the obnoxious
+      matter from France.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      At this stage came a denunciation of the representation of &ldquo;abnormal types
+      of diseased lust and lustful disease&rdquo; as seen in Charles Baudelaire&rsquo;s <i>Fleurs
+      de Mal</i>, with the conclusion that out of &ldquo;the hideousness of <i>Femmes
+      Damnées</i>&rdquo; came certain English poems. &ldquo;This,&rdquo; said the writer, &ldquo;is our
+      double misfortune&mdash;to have a nuisance, and to have it at second-hand.
+      We might have been more tolerant to an unclean thing if it had been in
+      some sense a product of the soil&rdquo; All that is here summarised, however,
+      was but preparatory to the real object of the article, which was to assail
+      Rossetti&rsquo;s new volume.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The poems were traversed in detail, with but little (and that the most
+      grudging) admission of their power and beauty, and the very sharpest
+      accentuation of their less spiritual qualities. Since the publication of
+      the article in question, events have taken such a turn that it is no
+      longer either necessary or wise to quote the strictures contained in it,
+      however they might be fenced by juster views. The gravamen of the charge
+      against Rossetti, Mr. Swinburne, and Mr. Morris alike&mdash;setting aside
+      all particular accusations, however serious&mdash;was that they had &ldquo;bound
+      themselves into a solemn league and covenant to extol fleshliness as the
+      distinct and supreme end of poetic and pictorial art; to aver that poetic
+      expression is greater than poetic thought, and by inference that the body
+      is greater than the soul, and sound superior to sense.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Such, then, is a synopsis of the hostile article of which the nucleus
+      appeared in <i>The Contemporary Review</i>, and it were little less than
+      childish to say that events so important as the publication of the article
+      and subsequent pamphlet, and the controversy that arose out of them,
+      should, from their unpleasantness and futility, from the bad passions
+      provoked by them, or yet from the regret that followed after them, be
+      passed over in sorrow and silence. For good or ill, what was written on
+      both sides will remain. It has stood and will stand. Sooner or later the
+      story of this literary quarrel will be told in detail and in cold blood,
+      and perhaps with less than sufficient knowledge of either of the parties
+      concerned in it, or sympathy with their aims. No better fate, one might
+      think, could befall it than to be dealt with, however briefly, by a writer
+      whose affections were warmly engaged on one side, while his convictions
+      and bias of nature forced him to recognise the justice of the other&mdash;stripped,
+      of course, of the cruelties with which literary error but too obviously
+      enshrouded it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Whatever the effect produced upon the public mind by the article in
+      question (and there seems little reason to think it was at all material),
+      the effect upon two of the writers attacked was certainly more than
+      commensurate with the assault. Mr. Morris wisely attempted no reply to the
+      few words of adverse criticism in which his name was specifically
+      involved; but Mr. Swinburne retorted upon his adversary with the torrents
+      of invective of which he has a measureless command. Rossetti&rsquo;s course was
+      different. Greatly concerned at the bitterness, as well as startled by the
+      unexpectedness of the attack, he wrote in the first moments of indignation
+      a full and point-for-point rejoinder, and this he printed in the form of a
+      pamphlet, and had a great number struck off; but with constitutional
+      irresolution (wisely restraining him in this case), he destroyed every
+      copy, and contented himself with writing a temperate letter on the subject
+      to <i>The Athenæum</i>, December 16, 1871. He said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A sonnet, entitled <i>Nuptial Sleep</i>, is quoted and abused at page 338
+      of the Review, and is there dwelt upon as a &ldquo;whole poem,&rdquo; describing
+      &ldquo;merely animal sensations.&rdquo; It is no more a whole poem in reality than is
+      any single stanza of any poem throughout the book. The poem, written
+      chiefly in sonnets, and of which this is one sonnet-stanza, is entitled <i>The
+      House of Life</i>; and even in my first published instalment of the whole
+      work (as contained in the volume under notice), ample evidence is included
+      that no such passing phase of description as the one headed <i>Nuptial
+      Sleep</i> could possibly be put forward by the author of <i>The House of
+      Life</i> as his own representative view of the subject of love. In proof
+      of this I will direct attention (among the love-sonnets of this poem), to
+      Nos. 2, 8, 11, 17, 28, and more especially 13. [Here <i>Love Sweetness</i>
+      is printed.] Any reader may bring any artistic charge he pleases against
+      the above sonnet; but one charge it would be impossible to maintain
+      against the writer of the series in which it occurs, and that is, the wish
+      on his part to assert that the body is greater than the soul. For here all
+      the passionate and just delights of the body are declared&mdash;somewhat
+      figuratively, it is true, but unmistakeably&mdash;to be as naught if not
+      ennobled by the concurrence of the soul at all times. Moreover, nearly one
+      half of this series of sonnets has nothing to do with love, but treats of
+      quite other life-influences. I would defy any one to couple with fair
+      quotation of sonnets 29, 30, 31, 39, 40, 43, or others, the slander that
+      their author was not impressed, like all other thinking men, with the
+      responsibilities and higher mysteries of life; while sonnets 35, 36, and
+      37, entitled <i>The Choice</i>, sum up the general view taken in a manner
+      only to be evaded by conscious insincerity. Thus much for <i>The House of
+      Life</i>, of which the sonnet <i>Nuptial Sleep</i> is one stanza,
+      embodying, for its small constituent share, a beauty of natural universal
+      function, only to be reprobated in art if dwelt on (as I have shown that
+      it is not here), to the exclusion of those other highest things of which
+      it is the harmonious concomitant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It had become known that the article in the <i>Review</i> was not the work
+      of the unknown Thomas Maitland, whose name it bore, and on this head
+      Rossetti wrote:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Here a critical organ, professedly adopting the principle of open
+      signature, would seem, in reality, to assert (by silent practice, however,
+      not by annunciation) that if the anonymous in criticism was&mdash;as
+      itself originally indicated&mdash;but an early caterpillar stage, the
+      nominate too is found to be no better than a homely transitional
+      chrysalis, and that the ultimate butterfly form for a critic who likes to
+      sport in sunlight, and yet elude the grasp, is after all the pseudonymous.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It transpired, in subsequent correspondence (of which there was more than
+      enough), that the actual writer was Mr. Robert Buchanan, then a young
+      author who had risen into distinction as a poet, and who was consequently
+      suspected, by the writers and disciples of the Rossetti school, of being
+      actuated much more by feelings of rivalry than by desire for the public
+      good. Mr. Buchanan&rsquo;s reply to the serious accusation of having assailed a
+      brother-poet pseudonymously was that the false signature was affixed to
+      the article without his knowledge, &ldquo;in order that the criticism might rest
+      upon its own merits, and gain nothing from the name of the real writer.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was an unpleasant controversy, and what remains as an impartial
+      synopsis of it appears to be this: that there was actually manifest in the
+      poetry of certain writers a tendency to deviate from wholesome reticence,
+      and that this dangerous tendency came to us from France, where deep-seated
+      unhealthy passion so gave shape to the glorification of gross forms of
+      animalism as to excite alarm that what had begun with the hideousness of
+      <i>Femmes Damnées</i> would not even end there; finally, that the
+      unpleasant truth demanded to be spoken&mdash;by whomsoever had courage
+      enough to utter it&mdash;that to deify mere lust was an offence and an
+      outrage. So much for the justice on Mr. Buchanan&rsquo;s side; with the mistaken
+      criticism linking the writers of Dante&rsquo;s time with French writers of the
+      time of Baudelaire it is hardly necessary to deal. On the other hand, it
+      must be said that the sum-total of all the English poetry written in
+      imitation of the worst forms of this French excess was probably less than
+      one hundred lines; that what was really reprehensible in the English
+      imitation of the poetry of the French School was, therefore, too
+      inconsiderable to justify a wholesale charge against it of an endeavour to
+      raise the banner of a black ambition whose only aim was to ruin society;
+      that Rossetti, who was made to bear the brunt of attack, was a man who
+      never by direct avowal, or yet by inference, displayed the faintest
+      conceivable sympathy with the French excesses in question, and who never
+      wrote a line inspired by unwholesome passion. As the pith of Mr.
+      Buchanan&rsquo;s accusation of 1871 lay here, and as Mr. Buchanan has, since
+      then, very manfully withdrawn it, {*} we need hardly go further; but, as
+      more recent articles in prominent places, <i>The Edinburgh Review, The
+      British Quarterly Review, and again The Contemporary Review</i>, have
+      repeated what was first said by him on the alleged unwholesomeness of
+      Rossetti&rsquo;s poetic impulses, it may be as well to admit frankly, and at
+      once (for the subject will arise in the future as frequently as this
+      poetry is under discussion) that love of bodily beauty did underlie much
+      of the poet&rsquo;s work. But has not the same passion made the back-bone of
+      nine-tenths of the noblest English poetry since Chaucer? If it is objected
+      that Rossetti&rsquo;s love of physical beauty took new forms, the rejoinder is
+      that it would have been equally childish and futile to attempt to
+      prescribe limits for it. All this we grant to those unfriendly critics who
+      refuse to see that spiritual beauty and not sensuality was Rossetti&rsquo;s
+      actual goal.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     * Writing to me on this subject since Rossetti&rsquo;s death, Mr.
+     Buchanan says:&mdash;&ldquo;In perfect frankness, let me say a few
+     words concerning our old quarrel. While admitting freely
+     that my article in the C. R. was unjust to Rossetti&rsquo;s claims
+     as a poet, I have ever held, and still hold, that it
+     contained nothing to warrant the manner in which it was
+     received by the poet and his circle. At the time it was
+     written, the newspapers were full of panegyric; mine was a
+     mere drop of gall in an ocean of <i>eau sucrée</i>. That it could
+     have had on any man the effect you describe, I can scarcely
+     believe; indeed, I think that no living man had so little to
+     complain of as Rossetti, on the score of criticism. Well, my
+     protest was received in a way which turned irritation into
+     wrath, wrath into violence; and then ensued the paper war
+     which lasted for years. If you compare what I have written
+     of Rossetti with what his admirers have written of myself, I
+     think you will admit that there has been some cause for me
+     to complain, to shun society, to feel bitter against the
+     world; but happily, I have a thick epidermis, and the
+     courage of an approving conscience. I was unjust, as I have
+     said; most unjust when I impugned the purity and
+     misconceived the passion of writings too hurriedly read and
+     reviewed currente calamo; but I was at least honest and
+     fearless, and wrote with no personal malignity. Save for the
+     action of the literary defence, if I may so term it, my
+     article would have been as ephemeral as the mood which
+     induced its composition. I make full admission of Rossetti&rsquo;s
+     claims to the purest kind of literary renown, and if I were
+     to criticise his poems now, I should write very differently.
+     But nothing will shake my conviction that the cruelty, the
+     unfairness, the pusillanimity has been on the other side,
+     not on mine. The amende of my Dedication in God and the Man
+     was a sacred thing; between his spirit and mine; not between
+     my character and the cowards who have attacked it. I thought
+     he would understand,&mdash;which would have been, and indeed is,
+     sufficient. I cried, and cry, no truce with the horde of
+     slanderers who hid themselves within his shadow. That is
+     all. But when all is said, there still remains the pity that
+     our quarrel should ever have been. Our little lives are too
+     short for such animosities. Your friend is at peace with
+     God,&mdash;that God who will justify and cherish him, who has
+     dried his tears, and who will turn the shadow of his sad
+     life-dream into full sunshine. My only regret now is that we
+     did not meet,&mdash;that I did not take him by the hand; but I am
+     old-fashioned enough to believe that this world is only a
+     prelude, and that our meeting may take place&mdash;even yet.&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      To Rossetti, the poet, the accusation of extolling fleshliness as the
+      distinct and supreme end of art was, after all, only an error of critical
+      judgment; but to Rossetti, the man, the charge was something far more
+      serious. It was a cruel and irremediable wound inflicted upon a fine
+      spirit, sensitive to attack beyond all sensitiveness hitherto known among
+      poets. He who had withheld his pictures from exhibition from dread of the
+      distracting influences of popular opinion, he who for fifteen years had
+      withheld his poems from print in obedience first to an extreme modesty of
+      personal estimate and afterwards to the commands of a mastering affection
+      was likely enough at forty-two years of age (after being loaded by the
+      disciples that idolised him with only too much of the &ldquo;frankincense of
+      praise and myrrh of flattery&rdquo;) to feel deeply the slander that he had
+      unpacked his bosom of unhealthy passions. But to say that Rossetti felt
+      the slander does not express his sense of it. He had replied to his
+      reviewer and had acted unwisely in so doing; but when one after one&mdash;in
+      the <i>Quarterly Review, the North American Review</i>, and elsewhere, in
+      articles more or less ignorant, uncritical, and stupid&mdash;the
+      accusations he had rebutted were repeated with increased bitterness, he
+      lost all hope of stemming the torrent of hostile criticism. He had, as we
+      have seen, for years lived in partial retirement, enjoying at intervals a
+      garden party behind the house, or going about occasionally to visit
+      relatives and acquaintances, but now he became entirely reclusive,
+      refusing to see any friends except the three or four intimate ones who
+      were constantly with him. Nor did the mischief end there. We have spoken
+      of his habitual use of chloral, which was taken at first in small doses as
+      a remedy for insomnia and afterwards indulged in to excess at moments of
+      physical prostration or nervous excitement. To that false friend he came
+      at this time with only too great assiduity, and the chloral, added to the
+      seclusive habit of life, induced a series of terrible though intermittent
+      illnesses and a morbid condition of mind in which for a little while he
+      was the victim of many painful delusions. It was at this time that the
+      soothing friendship of Dr. Gordon Hake, and his son Mr. George Hake, was
+      of such inestimable service to Rossetti. Having appeared myself on the
+      scene much later I never had the privilege of knowing either of these two
+      gentlemen, for Mr. George Hake was already gone away to Cyprus and Dr.
+      Hake had retired very much into the bosom of his own family where, as is
+      rumoured, he has been engaged upon a literary work which will establish
+      his fame. But I have often heard Mr. Theodore Watts speak with deep
+      emotion and eloquent enthusiasm of the tender kindness and loyal zeal
+      shown to Rossetti during this crisis by Mr. Bell Scott, and by Dr. Hake
+      and his son. As to Mr. Theodore Watts, whose brotherly devotion to him,
+      and beneficial influence over him from that time forward are so well
+      known, this must be considered by those who witnessed it to be almost
+      without precedent or parallel even in the beautiful story of literary
+      friendships, and it does as much honour to the one as to the other. No
+      light matter it must have been to lay aside one&rsquo;s own long-cherished
+      life-work and literary ambitions to be Rossetti&rsquo;s closest friend and
+      brother, at a moment like the present, when he imagined the world to be
+      conspiring against him; but through these evil days, and long after them
+      down to his death, the friend that clung closer than a brother was with
+      him, as he himself said, to protect, to soothe, to comfort, to divert, to
+      interest, and inspire him&mdash;asking, meantime, no better reward than
+      the knowledge that a noble mind and nature was by such sacrifice lifted
+      out of sorrow. Among the world&rsquo;s great men the greatest are sometimes
+      those whose names are least on our lips, and this is because selfish aims
+      have been so subordinate in their lives to the welfare of others as to
+      leave no time for the personal achievements that win personal distinction;
+      but when the world comes to the knowledge of the price that has been paid
+      for the devotion that enables others to enjoy their renown, shall it not
+      reward with a double meed of gratitude the fine spirits to whom ambition
+      has been as nothing against fidelity of friendship? Among the latest words
+      I heard from Rossetti was this: &ldquo;Watts is a hero of friendship;&rdquo; and
+      indeed he has displayed his capacity for participation in the noblest part
+      of comradeship, that part, namely, which is far above the mere traffic
+      that too often goes by the name, and wherein self-love always counts upon
+      being the gainer. If in the end it should appear that he has in his own
+      person done less than might have been hoped for from one possessed of his
+      splendid gifts, let it not be overlooked that he has influenced in a quite
+      incalculable degree, and influenced for good, several of the foremost
+      among those who in their turn have influenced the age. As Rossetti&rsquo;s
+      faithful friend, and gifted medical adviser, Mr. John Marshall has often
+      declared, there were periods when Rossetti&rsquo;s very life may be said to have
+      hung upon Mr. Watts&rsquo;s power to cheer and soothe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Efforts were afoot about the year 1872 to induce Rossetti to visit Italy&mdash;a
+      journey which, strangely enough, he had never made&mdash;but this he could
+      not be prevailed upon to do. In the hope of diverting his mind from the
+      unwholesome matters that too largely engaged it, his brother and friends,
+      prominent among whom at this time were Mr. Bell Scott, Mr. Ford Madox
+      Brown, Mr. W. Graham, and Dr. Gordon Hake, as well as his assistant and
+      friend, Mr. H. T. Dunn, and Mr. George Hake, induced him to seek a change
+      in Scotland, and there he speedily recovered tone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Immediately upon the publication of his first volume, and incited thereto
+      by the early success of it, he had written the poem <i>Rose Mary</i>, as
+      well as two lyrics published at the time in <i>The Fortnightly Review</i>;
+      but he suffered so seriously from the subsequent assaults of criticism,
+      that he seemed definitely to lay aside all hope of producing further
+      poetry, and, indeed, to become possessed of the delusion that he had for
+      ever lost all power of doing so. It is an interesting fact, well known in
+      his own literary circle, that his taking up poetry afresh was the result
+      of a fortuitous occurrence. After one of his most serious illnesses, and
+      in the hope of drawing off his attention from himself, and from the gloomy
+      forebodings which in an invalid&rsquo;s mind usually gather about his own too
+      absorbing personality, a friend prevailed upon him, with infinite
+      solicitation, to try his hand afresh at a sonnet. The outcome was an
+      effort so feeble as to be all but unrecognisable as the work of the author
+      of the sonnets of <i>The House of Life</i>, but with more shrewdness and
+      friendliness (on this occasion) than frankness, the critic lavished
+      measureless praise upon it, and urged the poet to renewed exertion. One by
+      one, at longer or shorter intervals, sonnets were written, and this
+      exercise did more towards his recovery than any other medicine, with the
+      result besides that Rossetti eventually regained all his old dexterity and
+      mastery of hand. The artifice had succeeded beyond every expectation
+      formed of it, serving, indeed, the twofold end of improving the invalid&rsquo;s
+      health by preventing his brooding over unhealthy matters, and increasing
+      the number of his accomplished works. Encouraged by such results, the
+      friend went on to induce Rossetti to write a ballad, and this purpose he
+      finally achieved by challenging the poet&rsquo;s ability to compose in the
+      simple, direct, and emphatic style, which is the style of the ballad
+      proper, as distinguished from the elaborate, ornate, and condensed diction
+      which he had hitherto worked in. Put upon his mettle, the outcome of this
+      second artifice practised upon him, was that he wrote <i>The White Ship</i>,
+      and afterwards <i>The King&rsquo;s Tragedy</i>.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thus was Rossetti already immersed in this revived occupation of poetic
+      composition, and had recovered a healthy* tone of body, before he became
+      conscious of what was being done with him. It is a further amusing fact
+      that one day he requested to be shown the first sonnet which, in view of
+      the praise lavished upon it by the friend on whose judgment he reposed,
+      had encouraged him to renewed effort. The sonnet was bad: the critic knew
+      it was bad, and had from the first hour of its production kept it
+      carefully out of sight, and was now more than ever unwilling to show it.
+      Eventually, however, by reason of ceaseless importunity, he returned it to
+      its author, who, upon reading it, cried: &ldquo;You fraud! you said this sonnet
+      was good, and it&rsquo;s the worst I <i>ever</i> wrote.&rdquo; &ldquo;The worst ever written
+      would perhaps be a truer criticism,&rdquo; was the reply, as the studio
+      resounded with a hearty laugh, and the poem was committed to the flames.
+      It would appear that to this occurrence we probably owe a large portion of
+      the contents of the volume of 1881.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As we say, <i>Rose Mary</i> was the first to be written of the leading
+      poems that found places in his final volume. This ballad (or ballad
+      romance, for ballad it can hardly be called) is akin to <i>Sister Helen</i>
+      in <i>motif</i>. The superstition involved owes something in this case as
+      in the other to the invention and poetic bias of the poet. It has,
+      however, less of what has been called the Catholic element, and is more
+      purely Pagan. It is, therefore, as entirely undisturbed by animosity
+      against heresy, and is concerned only with an ultimate demoniacal justice
+      visiting the wrongdoer. The main point of divergency lies in the
+      circumstance that Rose Mary, unlike Helen, is the undesigning instrument
+      of evil powers, and that her blind deed is the means by which her own and
+      her lover&rsquo;s sin and his treachery become revealed. A further material
+      point of divergency lies in the fact that unlike Helen, who loses her soul
+      (as the price of revenge, directed against her betrayer), Rose Mary loses
+      her life (as the price of vengeance directed against the evil race),
+      whilst her soul gains rest. The superstition is that associated with the
+      beryl stone, wherein the pure only may read the future, and from which
+      sinful eyes must chase the spirits of grace and leave their realm to be
+      usurped by the spirits of fire, who seal up the truth or reveal it by
+      contraries. Rose Mary, who has sinned with her lover, is bidden to look in
+      the beryl and learn where lurks the ambush that waits to take his life as
+      he rides at break of day. Hiding, but remembering her transgression, she
+      at first shrinks, but at length submits, and the blessed spirits by whom
+      the stone has been tenanted give place to the fiery train. The stone is
+      not sealed to her; and the long spell being ministered, she is satisfied.
+      But she has read the stone by contraries, and her lover falls into the
+      hand of his enemy. By his death is their secret sin made known. And then a
+      newer shame is revealed, not to her eyes, but to her mother&rsquo;s: even the
+      treachery of the murdered man. Ignorant of this to the end, Eose Mary
+      seeks to work a twofold ransoming by banishing from the beryl the evil
+      powers. With the sword of her father (by whom the accursed gift had been
+      brought from Palestine), she cleaves the heart of the stone, and with the
+      broken spell her own life breaks.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It will readily be seen that the scheme of the ballad does not afford
+      opportunity for a memorable incursion in the domain of character. Rose
+      Mary herself as a creation is not comparable with Helen. But the ballad
+      throughout is nevertheless a triumph of the higher imagination. Nowhere
+      else (to take the lowest ground) has Rossetti displayed so great a gift of
+      flashing images upon the mind at once by a single expression.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     Closely locked, they clung without speech,
+     And the mirrored souls shook each to each,
+     As the cloud-moon and the water-moon
+     Shake face to face when the dim stars swoon
+     In stormy bowers of the night&rsquo;s mid-noon.
+
+     Deep the flood and heavy the shock
+     When sea meets sea in the riven rock:
+     But calm is the pulse that shakes the sea
+     To the prisoned tide of doom set free
+     In the breaking heart of Rose Mary.
+
+     She knew she had waded bosom-deep
+     Along death&rsquo;s bank in the sedge of sleep.
+     And now in Eose Mary&rsquo;s lifted eye
+     &lsquo;Twas shadow alone that made reply
+     To the set face of the soul&rsquo;s dark shy.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Nor has Rossetti anywhere displayed a more sustained picturesqueness. One
+      episode stands forth vividly even among so many that are conspicuous. The
+      mother has left her daughter in a swoon to seek help of the priest who has
+      knelt unweariedly by the dead body of her daughter&rsquo;s lover, now lying on
+      the ingle-bench in the hall. When the priest has gone and the castle folk
+      have left her alone, the lady sinks to her knees beside the corpse. Great
+      wrong the dead man has done to her and hers, and perhaps God has wrought
+      this doom of his for a sign; but well she knows, or thinks she knows, that
+      if life had remained with him his love would have been security for their
+      honour. She stoops with a sob to kiss the dead, but before her lips touch
+      the cold brow she sees a packet half-hidden in the dead man&rsquo;s breast. It
+      is a folded paper about which the blood from a spear-thrust has grown
+      clotted, and inside is a tress of golden hair. Some pledge of her child&rsquo;s
+      she thinks it, and proceeds to undo the paper&rsquo;s folds, and then learns the
+      treachery of the fallen knight and suffers a bitterer pang than came of
+      the knowledge of her daughter&rsquo;s dishonour. It is a love-missive from the
+      sister of his foe and murderer.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     She rose upright with a long low moan,
+     And stared in the dead man&rsquo;s face new-known.
+     Had it lived indeed? she scarce could tell:
+     &lsquo;Twas a cloud where fiends had come to dwell,&mdash;
+     A mask that hung on the gate of Hell.
+
+     She lifted the lock of gleaming hair,
+     And smote the lips and left it there.
+     &ldquo;Here&rsquo;s gold that Hell shall take for thy toll!
+     Full well hath thy treason found its goal,
+     O thou dead body and damned soul!&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      Anything finer than this it would be hard to discover in English narrative
+      poetry. Every word goes to build up the story: every line is
+      quintessential: every flash of thought helps to heighten the emotion.
+      Indeed the closing lines rise entirely above the limits of ballad poetry
+      into the realm of dramatic diction. But perhaps the crowning glory and
+      epic grandeur of the poem comes at the close. Awakened from her swoon,
+      Rose Mary makes her way to the altar-cell and there she sees the
+      beryl-stone lying between the wings of some sculptured beast. Within the
+      fated glass she beholds Death, Sorrow, Sin and Shame marshalled past in
+      the glare of a writhing flame, and thereupon follows a scene scarcely less
+      terrible than Juliet&rsquo;s vision of the tomb of the Capulets. But she has
+      been told within this hour that her weak hand shall send hence the evil
+      race by whom the stone is possessed, and with a stern purpose she reaches
+      her father&rsquo;s dinted sword. Then when the beryl is cleft to the core, and
+      Rose Mary lies in her last gracious sleep&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     With a cold brow like the snows ere May,
+     With a cold breast like the earth till spring,
+     With such a smile as the June days bring&mdash;
+     A clear voice pronounces her beatitude:
+
+     Already thy heart remembereth
+     No more his name thou sought&rsquo;st in death:
+     For under all deeps, all heights above,&mdash;
+     So wide the gulf in the midst thereof,&mdash;
+     Are Hell of Treason and Heaven of Love.
+
+     Thee, true soul, shall thy truth prefer
+     To blessed Mary&rsquo;s rose-bower:
+     Warmed and lit is thy place afar
+     With guerdon-fires of the sweet love-star,
+     Where hearts of steadfast lovers are.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      The White Ship was written in 1880; <i>The King&rsquo;s Tragedy</i> in the
+      spring of 1881. These historical ballads we must briefly consider
+      together. The memorable events of which Rossetti has made poetic record
+      are, in <i>The White Ship</i>, those associated with the wreck of the ship
+      in which the son and daughter of Henry I. of England set sail from France,
+      and in <i>The King&rsquo;s Tragedy</i>, with the death of James the First of
+      Scots. The story of the one is told by the sole survivor, Herold, the
+      butcher of Rouen; and of the other by Catherine Douglas, the maid of
+      honour who received popularly the name of Kate Barlass, in recognition of
+      her heroic act when she barred the door with her arm against the murderers
+      of the King. It is scarcely possible to conceive in either case a diction
+      more perfectly adapted to the person by whom it is employed. If we compare
+      the language of these ballads with that of the sonnets or other poems
+      spoken in the author&rsquo;s own person, we find it is not first of all
+      gorgeous, condensed, emphatic. It is direct, simple, pure and musical;
+      heightened, it is true, by imagery acquired in its passage through the
+      medium of the poet&rsquo;s mind, but in other respects essentially the language
+      of the historical personages who are made to speak. The diction belongs in
+      each case to the period of the ballad in which it is employed, and yet
+      there is no wanton use of archaisms, or any disposition manifested to
+      resort to meretricious artifices by which to impart an appearance of
+      probability to the story other than that which comes legitimately of sheer
+      narrative excellence. The characterisation is that of history with the
+      features softened that constituted the prose of real life, and with the
+      salient, moral, and intellectual lineaments brought into relief. Herein
+      the ballad may do that final justice which history itself withholds. Thus
+      the King Henry of <i>The White Ship</i> is governed by lust of dominion
+      more than by parental affection; and the Prince, his son, is a lawless,
+      shameless youth; intolerant, tyrannical, luxurious, voluptuous, yet
+      capable of self-sacrifice even amidst peril of death.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     When he should be King, he oft would vow,
+     He &lsquo;d yoke the peasant to his own plough.
+     O&rsquo;er him the ships score their furrows now.
+     God only knows where his soul did wake,
+     But I saw him die for his sister&rsquo;s sake.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      The King James of <i>The King&rsquo;s Tragedy</i> is of a righteous and fearless
+      nature, strong yet sensitive, unbending before the pride and hate of
+      powerful men, resolute, and ready even where fate itself declares that
+      death lurks where his road must lie; his beautiful Queen Jane is sweet,
+      tender, loving, devoted&mdash;meet spouse for a poet and king. The
+      incidents too are those of history: the choice and final collocation of
+      them, and the closing scene in which the queen mourns her husband, being
+      the sum of the author&rsquo;s contribution. And those incidents are in the
+      highest degree varied and picturesque. The author has not achieved a more
+      vivid pictorial presentment than is displayed in these latest ballads from
+      his pen. It would be hard to find in his earlier work anything bearing
+      more clearly the stamp of reality than the descriptions of the wreck in <i>The
+      White Ship</i>, of the two drowning men together on the mainyard, of the
+      morning dawning over the dim sea-sky&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     At last the morning rose on the sea
+     Like an angel&rsquo;s wing that beat towards me&mdash;
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      and of the little golden-haired boy in black whose foot patters down the
+      court of the king. Certainly Rossetti has never attained a higher
+      pictorial level than he reaches in the descriptions of the summoned
+      Parliament in <i>The King&rsquo;s Tragedy</i>, of the journey to the
+      Charterhouse of Perth, of the woman on the rock of the black beach of the
+      Scottish sea, of the king singing to the queen the song he made while
+      immured by Bolingbroke at Windsor, of the knock of the woman at the outer
+      gate, of her voice at night beneath the window, of the death in <i>The Pit
+      of Fortune&rsquo;s Wheel</i>. But all lesser excellencies must make way in our
+      regard before a distinguishing spiritualising element which exists in
+      these ballads only, or mainly amongst the author&rsquo;s works. Natural portents
+      are here first employed as factors of poetic creation. Presentiment,
+      foreboding, omen become the essential tissue of works that are lifted by
+      them into the higher realm of imagination. These supernatural constituents
+      penetrate and pervade <i>The White Ship</i>; and <i>The King&rsquo;s Tragedy</i>
+      is saturated in the spirit of them. We do not speak of the incidents
+      associated with the wraith that haunts the isles, but of the less palpable
+      touches which convey the scarce explicable sense of a change of voice when
+      the king sings of the pit that is under fortune&rsquo;s wheel:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     And under the wheel, beheld I there
+        An ugly Pit as deep as hell,
+     That to behold I quaked for fear:
+        And this I heard, that who therein fell
+     Came no more up, tidings to tell:
+     Whereat, astound of the fearful sight,
+     I wot not what to do for fright.
+               (The King&rsquo;s Quair.)
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      It is the shadow of the supernatural that hangs over the king, and very
+      soon it must enshroud him. One of the most subtle and impressive of the
+      natural portents is that which presents itself to the eyes of Catherine
+      when the leaguers have first left the chamber, and the moon goes out and
+      leaves black the royal armorial shield on the painted window-pane:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     And the rain had ceased, and the moonbeams lit
+        The window high in the wall,&mdash;
+     Bright beams that on the plank that I knew
+        Through the painted pane did fall
+     And gleamed with the splendour of Scotland&rsquo;s crown
+        And shield armorial.
+
+     But then a great wind swept up the skies,
+        And the climbing moon fell back;
+     And the royal blazon fled from the floor,
+        And nought remained on its track;
+     And high in the darkened window-pane
+        The shield and the crown were black.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      It has been said that <i>Sister Helen</i> strikes the keynote of
+      Rossetti&rsquo;s creative gift; it ought to be added that <i>The King&rsquo;s Tragedy</i>
+      touches his highest reach of imagination.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Having in the early part of 1881 brought together a sufficient quantity of
+      fresh poetry to fill a volume, Rossetti began negotiations for publishing
+      it. Anticipatory announcements were at that time constantly appearing in
+      many quarters, not rarely accompanied by an outspoken disbelief in the
+      poet&rsquo;s ability to achieve a second success equal to his first. In this way
+      it often happens to an author, that, having achieved a single conspicuous
+      triumph, the public mind, which has spontaneously offered him the tribute
+      of a generous recognition, forthwith gravitates towards a disposition to
+      become silently but unmistakeably sceptical of his power to repeat it.
+      Subsequent effort in such a case is rarely regarded with that confidence
+      which might be looked for as the reward of achievement, and which goes far
+      to prepare the mind for the ready acceptance of any genuine triumph.
+      Indeed, a jealous attitude is often unconsciously adopted, involving a
+      demand for special qualities, for which, perchance, the peculiar character
+      of the past success has created an appetite, or obedience to certain
+      arbitrary tests, which, though passively present in the recognised work,
+      have grown mainly out of critical analysis of it, and are neither radical
+      nor essential. Where, moreover, such conspicuous success has been followed
+      by an interval of years distinguished by no signal effort, the sceptical
+      bias of the public mind sometimes complacently settles into a conviction
+      (grateful alike to its pride and envy, whilst consciously hurtful to its
+      more generous impulses), that the man who made it lived once indeed upon
+      the mountains, but has at length come down to dwell finally upon the
+      plain. Literary biography furnishes abundant examples of this imperfection
+      of character, a foible, indeed, which in its multiform manifestations,
+      probably goes as far as anything else to interfere with the formation of a
+      just and final judgment of an author&rsquo;s merit within his own lifetime. When
+      it goes the length of affirming that even a great writer&rsquo;s creative
+      activity usually finds not merely central realisation, but absolute
+      exhaustion within the limits of some single work, to reason against it is
+      futile, and length of time affords it the only satisfying refutation. One
+      would think that it could scarcely require to be urged that creative
+      impulse, once existent within a mind, can never wholly depart from it, but
+      must remain to the end, dependent, perhaps, for its expression in some
+      measure on external promptings, variable with the variations of physical
+      environments, but always gathering innate strength for the hour (silent
+      perchance, or audible only within other spheres), when the inventive
+      faculty shall be harmonised, animated, and lubricated to its utmost
+      height. Nevertheless, Coleridge encountered the implied doubtfulness of
+      his contemporaries, that the gift remained with him to carry to its
+      completion the execution of that most subtle mid-day witchery, which, as
+      begun in <i>Christabel</i>, is probably the most difficult and elusive
+      thing ever attempted in the field of romance. Goethe, too, found himself
+      face to face with outspoken distrust of his continuation of <i>Faust</i>;
+      and even Cervantes had perforce to challenge the popular judgment which
+      long refused to allow that the second part of <i>Don Quixote</i>, with all
+      its added significance, was adequate to his original simple conception.
+      Indeed that author must be considered fortunate who effects a reversal of
+      the public judgment against the completion of a fragment, and the
+      repetition of a complete and conspicuous success.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When Rossetti published his first volume of poems in 1870, he left only
+      his <i>House of Life</i> incomplete; but amongst the readers who then
+      offered spontaneous tribute to that series of sonnets, and still treasured
+      it as a work of all but faultless symmetry, built up by aid of a blended
+      inspiration caught equally from Shakspeare and from Dante, with a
+      superadded psychical quality peculiar to its author, there were many, even
+      amongst the friendliest in sympathy, who heard of the completed sequence
+      with a sense of doubt. Such is the silent and unreasoning and all but
+      irrevocable edict of all popular criticism against continuations of works
+      which have in fragmentary form once made conquest of the popular
+      imagination. Moreover, Rossetti&rsquo;s first volume achieved a success so
+      signal and unexpected as to subject this second and maturer book to the
+      preliminary ordeal of such a questioning attitude of mind as we speak of,
+      as the unfailing and ungracious reward of a conspicuous triumph. In the
+      interval of eleven years, Rossetti had essayed no notable achievement, and
+      his name had been found attached only to such fugitive efforts as may have
+      lived from time to time a brief life in the pages of the <i>Athenæum</i>
+      and <i>Fortnightly</i>. Of the works in question two only come now within
+      our province to mention. The first and most memorable was the poem <i>Cloud
+      Confines</i>. Inadequate as the critical attention necessarily was which
+      this remarkable lyric obtained, indications were not wanting that it had
+      laid unconquerable siege to the sympathies of that section of the public
+      in whose enthusiasm the life of every creative work is seen chiefly to
+      abide. There was in it a lyrical sweetness scarcely ever previously
+      compassed by its author, a cadent undertoned symphony that first gave
+      testimony that the poet held the power of conveying by words a sensible
+      eflfect of great music, even as former works of his had given testimony to
+      his power of conveying a sensible eflfect by great painting. But to these
+      metrical excellencies was added an element new to Rossetti&rsquo;s poetry, or
+      seen here for the first time conspicuously. Insight and imagination of a
+      high order, together with a poetic instinct whose promptings were sure,
+      had already found expression in more than one creation moulded into an
+      innate chasteness of perfected parts and wedded to nature with an unerring
+      fidelity. But the range of nature was circumscribed, save only in the one
+      exception of a work throbbing with the sufferings and sorrows of a
+      shadowed side of modern life. To this lyric, however, there came as basis
+      a fundamental conception that made aim to grapple with the pro-foundest
+      problems compassed by the mysteries of life and death, and a temper to
+      yield only where human perception fails. Abstract indeed in theme the
+      lyric is, but few are the products of thought out of which imagination has
+      delved a more concrete and varied picturesqueness:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     What of the heart of hate
+        That beats in thy breast, O Time?&mdash;
+        Bed strife from the furthest prime,
+     And anguish of fierce debate; that shatters her slain,
+        And peace that grinds them as grain,
+        And eyes fixed ever in vain
+     On the pitiless eyes of Fate.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      The second of the fugitive efforts alluded to was a prose work entitled <i>Hand
+      and Soul</i>. More poem than story, this beautiful idyl may be briefly
+      described as mainly illustrative of the struggles of the transition period
+      through which, as through a slough, all true artists must pass who have
+      been led to reflect deeply upon the aims and ends of their calling before
+      they attain that goal of settled purpose in which they see it to be best
+      to work from their own heart simply, without regard for the spectres that
+      would draw them apart into quagmires of moral aspiration. These two works
+      and an occasional sonnet, such as that on the greatly gifted and untimely
+      lost Oliver Madox Brown, made the sum of all {*} that was done, in the
+      interval of eleven years between the dates of the first volume and of that
+      which was now to be published, to keep before the public a name which rose
+      at once into distinction, and had since, without feverish periodical
+      bolstering, grown not less but more in the ardent upholding of sincere men
+      who, in number and influence, comprised a following as considerable
+      perhaps as owned allegiance to any contemporary.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     * A ballad appeared in The Dark Blue.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Having brought these biographical and critical notes to the point at which
+      they overlap the personal recollections that form the body of this volume,
+      it only remains to say that during the years in which the poems just
+      reviewed were being written Rossetti was living at his house in Chelsea a
+      life of unbroken retirement. At this time, however (1877-81), his
+      seclusion was not so complete as it had been when he used to see scarcely
+      any one but Mr. Watts and his own family, with an occasional visit from
+      Lord and Lady Mount Temple, Mrs. Sumner, etc. Once weekly he was now
+      visited by his brother William, twice weekly by his attached and gifted
+      friend Frederick J. Shields, occasionally by his old friends William Bell
+      Scott and Ford Madox Brown. For the rest, he rarely if ever left the
+      precincts of his home. It was a placid and undisturbed existence such as
+      he loved. Health too (except for one serious attack in 1877), was good
+      with him, and his energies were, as we have seen, at their best.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His personal amiability was, perhaps, never more conspicuous than in these
+      tranquil years; yet this was the very time when paragraphs injurious to
+      his character found their way into certain journals. Among the numerous
+      stories illustrative of his alleged barbarity of manners was the one which
+      has often been repeated both in conversation and in print to the effect
+      that H.E.H. the Princess Louise was rudely repulsed from his door.
+      Rossetti was certainly not easy to approach, but the geniality of his
+      personal bearing towards those who had commands upon his esteem was always
+      unfailing, and knowledge of this fact must have been enough to give the
+      lie to the injurious calumny just named. Nevertheless, Rossetti, who was
+      deeply moved by the imputation, thought it necessary to contradict it
+      emphatically, and as the letter in which he did this is a thoroughly
+      outspoken and manly one, and touches an important point in his character,
+      I reprint it in this place:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     16 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, S.W., December 28, 1878.
+
+     My attention has been directed to the following paragraph
+     which has appeared in the newspapers:&mdash;&ldquo;A very disagreeable
+     story is told about a neighbour of Mr. Whistler&rsquo;s, whose
+     works are not exhibited to the vulgar herd; the Princess
+     Louise in her zeal, therefore, graciously sought them at the
+     artist&rsquo;s studio, but was rebuffed by a &lsquo;Not at home&rsquo; and an
+     intimation that he was not at the beck and call of
+     princesses. I trust it is not true,&rdquo; continues the writer of
+     the paragraph, &ldquo;that so medievally minded a gentleman is
+     really a stranger to that generous loyalty to rank and sex,
+     that dignified obedience,&rdquo; etc.
+
+     The story is certainly &ldquo;disagreeable&rdquo; enough; but if I am
+     pointed at as the &ldquo;near neighbour of Mr. Whistler&rsquo;s&rdquo; who
+     rebuffed, in this rude fashion, the Princess Louise, I can
+     only say that it is a <i>canard</i> devoid of the smallest
+     nucleus of truth. Her Royal Highness has never called upon
+     me; and I know of only two occasions when she has expressed
+     a wish to do so. Some years ago Mr. Theodore Martin spoke to
+     me upon the subject; but I was at that time engaged upon an
+     important work, and the delays thence arising caused the
+     matter to slip through. And I heard no more upon the subject
+     till last summer, when Mr. Theodore Watts told me that the
+     Princess, in conversation, had mentioned my name to him, and
+     that he had then assured her that I should &ldquo;feel honoured
+     and charmed to see her,&rdquo; and suggested her making an
+     appointment. Her Royal Highness knew that Mr. Watts, as one
+     of my most intimate friends, would not have thus expressed
+     himself without feeling fully warranted in so doing; and had
+     she called she would not, I trust, have found me wanting in
+     that &ldquo;generous loyalty&rdquo; which is due not more to her exalted
+     position than to her well-known charm of character and
+     artistic gifts. It is true enough that I do not run after
+     great people on account of their mere social position, but I
+     am, I hope, never rude to them; and the man who could rebuff
+     the Princess Louise must be a curmudgeon indeed.
+
+     D. G. Rossetti.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      At the very juncture in question Lord Lome was suddenly and unexpectedly
+      appointed Governor-General of Canada, and, leaving England, Her Royal
+      Highness did not return until Rossetti&rsquo;s health had somewhat suddenly
+      broken down, and it was impossible for him to see any but his most intimate
+      friends.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0003" id="link2HCH0003">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER III.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      My intercourse with Rossetti, epistolary and personal, extended over a
+      period of between three and four years. During the first two of these
+      years I was, as this volume must show, his constant correspondent, during
+      the third year his attached friend, and during the portion of the fourth
+      year of our acquaintance terminating with his life, his daily companion
+      and housemate. It is a part of my purpose to help towards the elucidation
+      of Rossetti&rsquo;s personal character by a simple, and I trust, unaffected
+      statement of my relations to him, and so I begin by explaining that my
+      knowledge of the man was the sequel to my admiration of the poet. Not
+      accident (the agency that usually operates in such cases), but his genius
+      and my love of it, began the friendship between us. Of Rossetti&rsquo;s
+      pictorial art I knew little, until very recent years, beyond what could be
+      gathered from a few illustrations to books. My acquaintance with his
+      poetry must have been made at the time of the publication of the first
+      volume in 1870, but as I did not then possess a copy of the book, and do
+      not remember to have seen one, my knowledge of the work must have been
+      merely such as could be gleaned from the reading of reviews. The unlucky
+      controversy, that subsequently arose out of it, directed afresh my
+      attention, in common with that of others, to Rossetti and his school of
+      poetry, with the result of impressing my mind with qualities of the work
+      that were certainly quite outside the issues involved in the discussion.
+      Some two or three years after that acrimonious controversy had subsided,
+      an accident, sufficiently curious to warrant my describing it, produced
+      the effect of converting me from a temperate believer in the charm of
+      music and colour in Rossetti&rsquo;s lyric verse, to an ardent admirer of his
+      imaginative genius as displayed in the higher walks of his art.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I had set out with a knapsack to make one of my many periodical walking
+      tours of the beautiful lake country of Westmoreland and Cumberland.
+      Beginning the journey at Bowness&mdash;as tourists, if they will accept
+      the advice of one who knows perhaps the whole of the country, ought always
+      to do&mdash;I walked through Dungeon Ghyll, climbed the Stake Pass,
+      descended into Borrowdale, and traced the course of the winding Derwent to
+      that point at which it meets the estuary of the lake, and where stands the
+      Derwentwater Hotel. A rain and thunder storm was gathering over the Black
+      Sail and Great Gable as I reached the summit of the Pass, and travelling
+      slowly northwards it had overtaken me. Before I reached the hotel, my
+      resting-place for the night, I was certainly as thoroughly saturated as
+      any one in reasonable moments could wish to be. I remember that as I
+      passed into the shelter of the porch an elderly gentleman, who was
+      standing there, remarked upon the severity of the storm, inquired what
+      distance I had travelled, and expressed amazement that on such a day, when
+      mists were floating, any one could have ventured to cover so much
+      dangerous mountain-country,&mdash;which he estimated as nearly thirty
+      miles in extent. Beyond observing that my interlocutor was friendly in
+      manner and knew the country intimately, I do not remember to have
+      reflected either then or afterwards upon his personality except perhaps
+      that he might have answered to Wordsworth&rsquo;s scarcely definite description
+      of his illustrious friend as &ldquo;a noticeable man,&rdquo; with the further
+      parallel, I think, of possessing &ldquo;large grey eyes.&rdquo; After attending to the
+      obvious necessity of dry garments in exchange for wet ones, and otherwise
+      comforting myself after a fatiguing day&rsquo;s march, I descended to the
+      drawing-room of the hotel, where a company of persons were trying, with
+      that too formal cordiality peculiar to English people, who are
+      accidentally thrown together in the course of a holiday, to get rid of the
+      depression which results upon dishearteningly unpropitious weather. Music,
+      as usual, was the gracious angel employed to banish the fiend of ennui,
+      but among those who took no part either in the singing or playing, other
+      than that of an enforced auditor, was the elderly gentleman, my quondam
+      acquaintance of the porch, who stood apart in an alcove looking through a
+      window. I stepped up to him and renewed our talk. The storm had rather
+      increased than abated since my arrival; the thunder which before had
+      rumbled over the distant Langdale Pikes was breaking in sharp peals over
+      our heads, and flashes of sheeted lightning lit up the gathering darkness
+      that lay between us and Castle Crag. A playful allusion to &ldquo;poor Tom&rdquo; and
+      to King Lear&rsquo;s undisputed sole enjoyment of such a scene (except as viewed
+      from the ambush of a comfortable hotel) led to the discovery, very welcome
+      to both at a moment when we were at bay for an evening&rsquo;s occupation, that
+      besides knowledge and love of the country round about us, we had in common
+      some knowledge and much love of the far wider realm of books. Thereupon
+      ensued a talk chiefly on authors and their works which lasted until long
+      after the music had ceased, until the elemental as well as instrumental
+      storm had passed, and the guests had slipped away one after one, and the
+      last remaining servant of the house had, by the introduction of a couple
+      of candles, given us a palpable hint that in the opinion of that guardian
+      of a country inn the hour was come and gone when well-regulated persons
+      should betake themselves to bed. To my delight my friend knew nearly every
+      prominent living author, could give me personal descriptions of them, as
+      well as scholarly and well-digested criticisms of their works. He was
+      certainly no ordinary man, but who he was I have never learned with
+      certainty, though I cherish the agreeable impression that I could give a
+      shrewd guess. At one moment the talk turned on <i>Festus</i>, and then I
+      heard the most lucid and philosophical account of that work I have ever
+      listened to or read. I was told that the author of <i>Festus</i> had never
+      (in all the years that had elapsed since its publication, when he was in
+      his earliest manhood, though now he is grown elderly) ceased to emend it,
+      notwithstanding the protestations of critics; and that an improved and
+      enlarged edition of the poem might probably appear after his death. Struck
+      with the especial knowledge displayed of the author in question, I asked
+      if he happened to be a friend. Then, with a scarcely perceptible smile
+      playing about the corners of the mouth (a circumstance without
+      significance for me at the time and only remembered afterwards), my new
+      acquaintance answered: &ldquo;He is my oldest and dearest friend.&rdquo; Next morning
+      I saw my night-long conversationalist in company with a clergyman get on
+      to the Buttermere coach and wave his hand to me as they vanished under the
+      trees that overhung the Buttermere road, but in answer to many inquiries
+      the utmost I could learn of my interesting acquaintance was that he was
+      somehow understood to be a great author, and a friend of Charles Kingsley,
+      who, I think they said, was or had been with him there or elsewhere that
+      year. Whether besides being the &ldquo;oldest and dearest friend&rdquo; of the author
+      of <i>Festus</i>, my delightful companion was Philip James Bailey himself
+      I have never learned to this day, and can only cherish a pleasant trust;
+      but what remains as really important in this connexion is that whosoever
+      he was he originated my first real love of Rossetti&rsquo;s poetry, and gave me
+      my first realisable idea of the man. Taking up from the table some popular
+      <i>Garland, Casket, Treasury</i>, or other anthology of English poetry, he
+      pointed out a sonnet entitled <i>Lost Days</i> (to which, indeed, a friend
+      at home had directed my attention), and dwelt upon its marvellous strength
+      of spiritual insight, and power of symbolic phrase. Of course the sonnet
+      was Rossetti&rsquo;s. It is impossible for me to describe the effect produced
+      upon me by sonnet and exposition. I resolved not to live many days longer
+      without acquiring a knowledge of the body of Rossetti&rsquo;s work. Perceiving
+      that the gentleman knew something of the poet, I put questions to him
+      which elicited the fact that he had met him many years earlier at, I think
+      he said, Mrs. Gaskell&rsquo;s, when Rossetti was a rather young man, known only
+      as a painter and the leader of an eccentric school in art. He described
+      him as a little dark man, with fine eyes under a broad brow, with a deep
+      voice, and Bohemian habits&mdash;&ldquo;a little Italian, in short.&rdquo; [Little, by
+      the way, Rossetti could not properly be said to be, but opinions as to
+      physical proportions being so liable to vary, I may at once mention that
+      he was exactly five feet eight inches in height, and except in early
+      manhood, when he was somewhat attenuated, well built in proportion.] He
+      further described Rossetti&rsquo;s manners as those of a man in deliberate
+      revolt against society; delighting in an opportunity to startle
+      well-ordered persons out of their propriety, and to silence by sheer
+      vehemence of denunciation the seemly protests of very good and very gentle
+      folk. The portraiture seems to me now to bear the impress of truth, unlike
+      as it is in some particulars to the man as I knew him. When once, however,
+      years after the event recorded, I bantered Rossetti on the amiable picture
+      of him I had received from a stranger, he admitted that it was in the main
+      true to his character early in life, and recounted an instance in which,
+      from sheer perversity, or at best for amusement, he had made the late Dean
+      Stanley aghast with horror at the spectacle of a young man, born in a
+      Christian country, and in the nineteenth century, defending (in sport) the
+      vices of Neronian Home.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The outcome of this first serious and sufficient introduction to
+      Rossetti&rsquo;s poetry was that I forthwith devoted time to reading and
+      meditating upon it. Ultimately I lectured twice or thrice on the subject
+      in Liverpool, first at the Royal Institution, and afterwards at the Free
+      Library. The text of that lecture I still preserve, and as in all
+      probability it did more than anything else to originate the friendship I
+      afterwards enjoyed with the poet, I shall try to convey very briefly an
+      idea of its purpose.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Against both friendly and unfriendly critics of Rossetti I held that to
+      place him among the &ldquo;aesthetic&rdquo; poets was an error of classification. It
+      seemed to me that, unlike the poets properly so described, he had nothing
+      in common with the Caliban of Mr. Browning, who worked &ldquo;for work&rsquo;s sole
+      sake;&rdquo; and, unlike them yet further, the topmost thing in him was indeed
+      love of beauty, but the deepest thing was love of uncomely right. The
+      fusion of these elements in Rossetti softened the mythological Italian
+      Catholicism that I recognised as a leading thing in him, and subjugated
+      his sensuous passion. I thought it wrong to say that Rossetti had part or
+      lot with those false artists, or no artists, who assert, without fear or
+      shame, that the manner of doing a thing should be abrogated or superseded
+      by the moral purpose of its being done. On the other hand, Rossetti
+      appeared to make no conscious compromise with the Puritan principle of
+      doing good; and to demand first of his work the lesson or message it had
+      for us were wilfully to miss of pleasure while we vainly strove for
+      profit. He was too true an artist to follow art into its byeways of moral
+      significance, and thereby cripple its broader arms; but at the same time
+      all this absorption of the artist in his art seemed to me to live and work
+      together with the personal instincts of the man. An artist&rsquo;s nature cannot
+      escape the colouring it gets from the human side of his nature, because it
+      is of the essence of art to appeal to its own highest faculties largely
+      through the channel of moral instincts: that music is exquisite and colour
+      splendid, first, because they have an indescribable significance, and next
+      because they respond to mere sense. But it appeared to me to be one thing
+      to work for &ldquo;work&rsquo;s sole sake,&rdquo; with an overruling moral instinct that
+      gravitates, as Mr. Arnold would say, towards conduct, and quite another
+      thing to absorb art in moral purposes. I thought that Rossetti&rsquo;s poetry
+      showed how possible it is, without making conscious compromise with that
+      puritan principle of doing good of which Keats at one period became
+      enamoured, to be unconsciously making for moral ends. There was for me a
+      passive puritanism in <i>Jenny</i> which lived and worked together with
+      the poet&rsquo;s purely artistic passion for doing his work supremely well.
+      Every thought in <i>Dante at Verona</i> and <i>The Last Confession</i>
+      seemed mixed with and coloured by a personal moral instinct that was safe
+      and right.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This was perhaps the only noticeable feature of my lecture, and knowing
+      Rossetti&rsquo;s nature, as since the lecture I have learned to know it, I feel
+      no great surprise that such pleading for the moral impulses animating his
+      work should have been of all things the most likely to engage his
+      affections. Just as Coleridge always resented the imputation that he had
+      ever been concerned with Wordsworth and Southey in the establishment of a
+      school of poetry, and contended that, in common with his colleagues, he
+      had been inspired by no desire save that of imitating the best examples of
+      Greece and Home, so Rossetti (at least throughout the period of my
+      acquaintance with him) invariably shrank from classification with the
+      poetry of æstheticism, and aspired to the fame of a poet who had been
+      prompted primarily by the highest of spiritual emotions, and to whom the
+      sensations of the body were as naught, unless they were sanctified by the
+      concurrence of the soul. My lecture was printed, but quite a year elapsed
+      after its preparation before it occurred to me that Rossetti himself might
+      derive a moment&rsquo;s gratification from knowledge of the fact that he had one
+      ardent upholder and sincere well-wisher hitherto unknown to him. At length
+      I sent him a copy of the magazine containing my lecture on his poetry. A
+      post or two later brought me the following reply:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     Dear Mr. Caine,&mdash;
+
+     I am much struck by the generous enthusiasm displayed in
+     your Lecture, and by the ability with which it is written.
+     Your estimate of the impulses influencing my poetry is such
+     as I should wish it to suggest, and this suggestion, I
+     believe, it will have always for a true-hearted nature. You
+     say that you are grateful to me: my response is, that I am
+     grateful to you: for you have spoken up heartily and
+     unfalteringly for the work you love.
+
+     I daresay you sometimes come to London. I should be very
+     glad to know you, and would ask you, if you thought of
+     calling, to give me a day&rsquo;s notice when to expect you, as I
+     am not always able to see visitors without appointment. The
+     afternoon, about 5, might suit me, or else the evening about
+     9.30. With all best wishes, yours sincerely,
+
+     D. G. Rossetti.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      This was the first of nearly two hundred letters in all received from
+      Rossetti in the course of our acquaintance. A day or two later the
+      following supplementary note reached me:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     I return your article. In reading it, I feel it a
+     distinction that my minute plot in the poetic field should
+     have attracted the gaze of one who is able to traverse its
+     widest ranges with so much command. I shall be much pleased
+     if the plan of calling on me is carried out soon&mdash;at any
+     rate I trust it will be so eventually.... Have you got, or
+     do you know, my book of translations called <i>Dante and his
+     Circle?</i> If not, I &lsquo;ll send you one....
+
+     I have been reading again your article on <i>The Supernatural
+     in Poetry</i>. It is truly admirable&mdash;such work must soon make
+     you a place. The dramatic paper I thought suffered from some
+     immaturity.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      It is hardly necessary to say that I was equally delighted with the warmth
+      of the reception accorded to my essay, and with the revelation the letters
+      appeared to contain of a sincere and unselfish nature. My purpose,
+      however, which was a modest one, had been served, and I made no further
+      attempt to continue the correspondence, least of all did I expect or
+      desire to originate anything of the nature of a friendship. In my reply to
+      his note, however, I had asked him to accept the dedication of a little
+      work of mine, and when, with abundant courtesy, he had declined to do so
+      on very sufficient grounds, I felt satisfied that matters between us
+      should rest where they were. It is a pleasing recollection, nevertheless,
+      that Rossetti himself had taken a different view of the relation that had
+      grown up between us, and by many generous appeals induced me to put by all
+      further thoughts of abandoning the correspondence out of regard for him.
+      There had ensued an interval in which I did not write to him, whereupon he
+      addressed to me a hurried note, saying:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     Let me have a line from you. I am haunted by the idea, that
+     in declining the dedication, I may have hurt you. I assure
+     you I should be proud to be associated in any way with your
+     work, but gave you my very reasons.
+
+     I shall be pleased if you do not think them sufficient, and
+     still carry out your original intention.... At least write
+     to me.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      I replied to this letter (containing, as it did, the expression of so much
+      more than the necessary solicitude), by saying that I too had been
+      haunted, but it had been by the fear that I had been asking too much of
+      his attention. As to the dedication, so far from feeling hurt, by
+      Rossetti&rsquo;s declining it, I had grown to see that such was the only course
+      that remained to him to take. The terms in which he had replied to my
+      offer of it (so far from being of a kind to annoy or hurt me), had, to my
+      thinking, been only generous, sympathetic, and beautiful. Again he wrote:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     My dear Caine,&mdash;
+
+     Let me assure you at once that correspondence with yourself
+     is one of my best pleasures, and that you cannot write too
+     much or too often for <i>me</i>; though after what you have told
+     me as to the apportioning of your time, I should be
+     unwilling to encroach unduly upon it. Neither should I on my
+     side prove very tardy in reply, as you are one to whom I
+     find there <i>is</i> something to say when I sit down with a pen
+     and paper. I have a good deal of enforced evening leisure,
+     as it is seldom I can paint or draw by gaslight. It would
+     not be right in me to refrain from saying that to meet with
+     one so &ldquo;leal and true&rdquo; to myself as you are has been a
+     consolation amid much discouragement.... I perceive you have
+     had a complete poetic career which you have left behind to
+     strike out into wider waters.... The passage on Night, which
+     you say was written under the planet Shelley, seems to me
+     (and to my brother, to whom I read it) to savour more of the
+     &ldquo;mortal moon&rdquo;&mdash;that is, of a weird and sombre
+     Elizabethanism, of which Beddoes may be considered the
+     modern representative. But we both think it has an
+     unmistakeable force and value; and if you can write better
+     poetry than this, let your angel say unto you, <i>Write</i>.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      I take it that it would be wholly unwise of me in selecting excerpts from
+      Rossetti&rsquo;s letters entirely to withhold the passages that concern
+      exclusively (so far as their substance goes) my own early doings or
+      try-ings-to-do; for it ought to be a part of my purpose to lay bare the
+      beginnings of that friendship by virtue of which such letters exist. I can
+      only ask the readers of these pages to accept my assurance, that whatever
+      the number and extent of the passages which I publish that are necessarily
+      in themselves of more interest to myself personally than to the public
+      generally, they are altogether disproportionate to the number and extent
+      of those I withhold. I cannot, however, resist the conclusion that such
+      picture as they afford of a man beyond the period of middle life capable
+      of bending to a new and young friend, and of thinking with and for him, is
+      not without an exceptional literary interest as being so contrary to
+      every-day experience. Hence, I am not without hope that the occasional
+      references to myself which in the course of these extracts I shall feel it
+      necessary to introduce, may be understood to be employed by me as much for
+      their illustrative value (being indicative of Rossetti&rsquo;s character), as
+      for any purpose less purely impersonal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The passage of verse referred to was copied out for Rossetti in reply to
+      an inquiry as to whether I had written poetry. Prompted no doubt by the
+      encouragement derived in this instance, I submitted from time to time
+      other verses to Rossetti, as subsequent letters show, but it says
+      something for the value of his praise that whatever the measure of it when
+      his sympathies were fairly aroused, and whatever his natural tendency to
+      look for the characteristic merits rather than defects of compositions
+      referred to his judgment, his candour was always prominent among his good
+      qualities when censure alone required to be forthcoming. Among many frank
+      utterances of an opinion early formed, that whatever my potentialities as
+      a writer of prose, I had but small vocation as a writer of poetry, I
+      preserve one such utterance, which will, I trust, be found not less
+      interesting to other readers from affording a glimpse of the writer&rsquo;s
+      attitude towards the old controversy touching the several and
+      distinguishing elements that contribute to make good prose on the one hand
+      and good verse on the other.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On one occasion he had sent me his fine sonnet on Keats, then just
+      written, and, in acknowledging the receipt of it with many expressions of
+      admiration, I remarked that for some days I had been struggling
+      desperately, in all senses, to incubate a sonnet on the same somewhat
+      hackneyed subject. I had not written a line or put pen to paper for the
+      purpose, but I could tell him, in general terms, what my unaccomplished
+      marvel of sonnet-craft was to be about.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rossetti replied saying that the scheme for a sonnet was &ldquo;extremely
+      beautiful,&rdquo; and urging me to &ldquo;do it at once.&rdquo; Alas for my intrepidity, &ldquo;do
+      it&rdquo; I did, with the result of awakening my correspondent to the certainty
+      that, whatever embowerings I had in my mind, that shy bird the sonnet
+      would seek in vain for a nest to hide in there. It asked so much special
+      courage to send a first attempt at sonneteering to the greatest living
+      master of the sonnet that moral daring alone ought to have got me off
+      lightly, but here is Rossetti&rsquo;s reply, valuable now, as well for the view
+      it affords of the poet&rsquo;s attitude towards the sonnet as a medium of
+      expression, as for other reasons already assigned. The opening passage
+      alludes to a lyric of humble life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      You may be sure I do not mean essential discouragement when I say that,
+      full as <i>Nell</i> is of reality and pathos, your swing of arm seems to
+      me firmer and freer in prose than in verse. I do think I see your field to
+      lie chiefly in the achievements of fervid and impassioned prose.... I am
+      sure that, when sending me your first sonnet, you wished me to say quite
+      frankly what I think of it. Well, I do not think it shows a special
+      vocation for this condensed and emphatic form. The prose version you sent
+      me seems to say much more distinctly what this says with some want of
+      force. The octave does not seem to me very clearly put, and the sestet
+      does not emphasize in a sufficiently striking way the idea which the prose
+      sketch conveyed to me,&mdash;that of Keats&rsquo;s special privilege in early
+      death: viz., the lovely monumentalized image he bequeathed to us of the
+      young poet. Also I must say that more special originality and even <i>newness</i>
+      (though this might be called a vulgarizing word), of thought and picture
+      in individual lines&mdash;more of this than I find here&mdash;seems to me
+      the very first qualification of a sonnet&mdash;otherwise it puts forward
+      no right to be so short, but might seem a severed passage from a longer
+      poem depending on development. I would almost counsel you to try the same
+      theme again&mdash;or else some other theme in sonnet-form. I thought the
+      passage on Night you sent showed an aptitude for choice imagery. I should
+      much like to see something which you view as your best poetic effort
+      hitherto. After all, there is no need that every gifted writer should take
+      the path of poetry&mdash;still less of sonneteering. I am confident in
+      your preference for frankness on my part.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I tried the theme again before I abandoned it, and was so fortunate as to
+      get him to admit a degree of improvement such as led to his desiring to
+      recall his conjectural judgment on my possibilities as a sonnet-writer,
+      but as the letters in which he characterises the advance are neither so
+      terse in criticism, nor so interesting from the exposition of principles,
+      as the one quoted, I pass them by. With more confidence in my ultimate
+      comparative success than I had ever entertained, Rossetti was only anxious
+      that I should engage in that work to which I. could address myself with a
+      sense of command; and I think it will be agreed that, where temperate
+      confidence in what the future may legitimately hold for one is united to
+      earnest and rightly directed endeavour in the present, it is often a good
+      thing for the man who stands on the threshold of life (to whom,
+      nevertheless, the path passed seems ever to stretch out of sight
+      backwards) to be told the extent to which, little enough at the most, his
+      clasp (to use a phrase of Mr. Browning) may be equal to his grasp.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My residing, as I did, at a distance from London, was at once the
+      difficulty which for a time prevented our coming together and the
+      necessity for correspondence by virtue of which these letters exist. As I
+      failed, however, from hampering circumstance, to meet at once with
+      himself, Rossetti invariably displayed a good deal of friendly anxiety to
+      bring me into contact with his friends as frequently as occasion rendered
+      it feasible to do so. In this way I met with Mr. Madox Brown, who was at
+      the moment engaged on his admirable frescoes in the Manchester Town Hall,
+      and in this way also I met with other friends of his resident in my
+      neighbourhood. When I came to know him more intimately I perceived that
+      besides the kindliness of intention which had prompted him to bring me
+      into what he believed to be agreeable associations, he had adopted this
+      course from the other motive of desiring to be reassured as to the
+      comparative harmlessness of my personality, for he usually followed the
+      introduction to a friend by a private letter of thanks for the reception
+      accorded me, and a number of dexterously manipulated allusions, which
+      always, I found, produced the desired result of eliciting the required
+      information (to be gleaned only from personal intercourse) as to my manner
+      and habits. Later in our acquaintance, I found that he, like all
+      meditative men, had the greatest conceivable dread of being taken
+      unawares, and that there was no safer way for any fresh acquaintance to
+      insure his taking violently against him, than to take the step of coming
+      down upon him suddenly, and without appointment, or before a sufficient
+      time had elapsed between the beginning of the friendship and the actual
+      personal encounter, to admit of his forming preconceived ideas of the
+      manner of man to expect. The agony he suffered upon the unexpected visit
+      of even the most ardent of well-wishers could scarcely be realised at the
+      moment, from the apparent ease, and assumed indifference of his outward
+      bearing, and could only be known to those who were with him after the
+      trying ordeal had been passed, or immediately before the threatened
+      intrusion had been consummated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Early in our correspondence a friend of his, an art critic of distinction,
+      visited Liverpool with the purpose of lecturing on the valuable examples
+      of Byzantine art in the Eoyal Institution of that city. The lecture was, I
+      fear, almost too good and quite too technical for some of the hearers,
+      many of whom claim (and with reason) to be lovers of art, and cover the
+      walls of their houses with beautiful representations of lovely landscape,
+      but at the same time erect huge furnaces which emit vast volumes of black
+      smoke such as prevent the sky of any Liverpool landscape being for an
+      instant lovely. I doubt if the lecture could have been treated more
+      popularly, but there was manifestly a lack of merited appreciation. The
+      archaisms of some of the pictures chosen for illustration (early Byzantine
+      examples exclusively) appeared to cause certain of the audience to smile
+      at much of the lecturer&rsquo;s enthusiasm. Fortunately the man chiefly
+      concerned seemed unconscious of all this. And indeed, however he fared in
+      public, in private he was only too &ldquo;dreadfully attended.&rdquo; After the
+      lecture a good many folks gave him the benefit of their invaluable
+      opinions on various art questions, and some, as was natural, made pitiful
+      slips. I observed with secret and scarcely concealed satisfaction his
+      courageous loyalty in defence of his friends, and his hitting out in their
+      defence when he believed them to be assailed. One superlative
+      intelligence, eager to do honour to the guest, yet ignorant of his claim
+      to such honour, gave him a wonderfully facile and racy comment on the
+      pre-Raphaelite painters, and, in particular, made the ridiculous blunder
+      of a deliberate attack upon Rossetti, and then paused for breath and for
+      the lecturer&rsquo;s appreciative response; of course, Rossetti&rsquo;s friend was not
+      to be drawn into such disloyalty for an instant, even to avoid the risk of
+      ruffling the plumage of the mightiest of the corporate cacklers. Rossetti
+      had permitted me in his name to meet his friend, and in writing
+      subsequently I alluded to the affection with which he had been mentioned,
+      also to something that had been said of his immediate surroundings, and to
+      that frank championing of his claims which I have just described.
+      Rossetti&rsquo;s reply to this is interesting as affording a pathetic view of
+      his isolation of life and of the natural affectionateness of his nature:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     I am very glad you were welcomed by dear staunch S&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;, as
+     I felt sure you would be. He holds the honourable position
+     of being almost the only living art-critic who has really
+     himself worked through the art-schools practically, and
+     learnt to draw and paint. He is one of my oldest and best
+     friends, of whom few can be numbered at my age, from causes
+     only too varying.
+
+          Go from me, summer friends, and tarry not,&mdash;
+          I am no summer friend, but wintry cold, etc.
+
+     So be it, as needs must be,&mdash;not for all, let us hope, and
+     not with all, as good S&mdash;&mdash;&mdash; shews. I have not seen him
+     since his return. I wrote him a line to thank him for his
+     friendly reception of you, and he wrote in return to thank
+     me for your acquaintance, and spoke very pleasantly of you.
+     Your youth seems to have surprised him. I sent a letter of
+     his to your address. I hope you may see more of him. . . .
+     You mention something he said to you of me and my
+     surroundings. They are certainly <i>quiet</i> enough as fax as
+     retirement goes, and I have often thought I should enjoy the
+     presence of a congenial and intellectual housefellow and
+     boardfellow in this big barn of mine, which is actually
+     going to rack and ruin for want of use. But where to find
+     the welcome, the willing, and the able combined in one? . . .
+     I was truly concerned to hear of the attack of ill-health
+     you have suffered from, though you do not tell me its exact
+     nature. I hope it was not accompanied by any such symptoms
+     as you mentioned before. . . . I myself have had similar
+     symptoms (though not so fully as you describe), and have
+     spat blood at intervals for years, but now think nothing of
+     it&mdash;nor indeed ever did,&mdash;waiting for further alarm signals
+     which never came.
+
+     . . . By-the-bye, I have since remembered that Burne Jones,
+     many years ago, had such an experience as you spoke of
+     before&mdash;quite as bad certainly. He was weak for some time
+     after, and has frequently been reminded in minor ways of it,
+     but seems now (at about forty-six or forty-seven) to be more
+     settled in health and stronger, perhaps, than ever
+     before.... Your letter holds out the welcome probability of
+     meeting you here ere long.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      This friendly solicitude regarding my health was excited by the revelation
+      of what seemed to me at the time a startling occurrence, but has doubtless
+      frequently happened to others, and has certainly since happened to myself
+      without provoking quite so much outcry. The blood-spitting to which
+      Rossetti here alleges he was liable was of a comparatively innocent
+      nature. In later years he was assuredly not altogether a hero as to
+      personal suffering, and I afterwards found that, upon the periodical
+      recurrence of the symptom, he never failed to become convinced that he
+      spat arterial blood, and that on each occasion he had received his
+      death-warrant. Proof enough was adduced that the blood came from the minor
+      vessels of the throat, and this was undoubtedly the case in the majority
+      of instances, but whether the same explanation applied to one alarming
+      occurrence which I shall now recount, seems to me uncertain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      During the two or three weeks preceding our departure for Cumberland, in
+      the autumn of 1881, during the time of our residence there and during the
+      first few weeks after our return to London, Rossetti was afflicted by a
+      violent cough. I noticed that it troubled him almost exclusively in the
+      night-time, and after the taking of chloral; that it was sometimes
+      attended by vomiting; and that it invariably shook his whole system so
+      terribly as to leave him for a while entirely prostrate from sheer
+      physical exhaustion. The spectacle was a painful one, and I watched
+      closely its phenomena, with the result of convincing myself that whatever
+      radical mischief lay at the root of it, the damage done was seriously
+      augmented by a conscious giving way to it, induced, I thought, by hope of
+      the relief it sometimes afforded the stomach to get rid of the nauseous
+      drug at a moment of reduced digestive vitality. Then it became my fear
+      that in these violent and prolonged retchings internal injury might be
+      sustained, and so I begged him to try to restrain the tendency to cough so
+      much and often. He took the remonstrance with great goodnature (observing
+      that he perceived I thought he was putting it on), but I was not conscious
+      that at any moment he acted upon my suggestion. At the time in question I
+      was under the necessity of leaving him for a day or two every week in
+      order to fulfil, a course of lecturing engagements at a distance; and upon
+      my return in each instance I was told much of all that had happened to him
+      in the interval. On one occasion, however, I was conscious that something
+      had occurred of which he desired to make a disclosure, for amongst the
+      gifts that Rossetti had not got was that of concealing from his intimate
+      friends any event, however trifling, or however important, which weighed
+      upon his mind. At length I begged him to say what had happened, whereupon,
+      with great reluctance and many protestations of his intention to observe
+      silence, and constant injunctions as to secrecy, he told me that during
+      the night of my absence, in the midst of one of his bouts of coughing, he
+      had discharged an enormous quantity of blood. &ldquo;I know this is the final
+      signal,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;and I shall die.&rdquo; I did my utmost to compose him by
+      recounting afresh the personal incident hinted at, with many added
+      features of (I trust) justifiable exaggeration, but it is hardly necessary
+      to say that I did not hold the promise I gave him as to secrecy
+      sufficiently sacred, or so exclusive, as to forbid my revealing the whole
+      circumstance to his medical attendant. I may add that from that moment the
+      cough entirely disappeared.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To return from this reminiscence of a later period to the beginnings,
+      three years earlier, of our correspondence, I will bring the present
+      chapter to a close by quoting short passages from three letters written on
+      the eve of my first visit to Rossetti, in 1880:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     I will be truly glad to meet you when you come to town. You
+     will recognise the hole-and-cornerest of all existences; but
+     I&rsquo;ll read you a ballad or two, and have Brown&rsquo;s report to
+     back my certainty of liking you.... I would propose that you
+     should dine with me at 8.30 on the Monday of your visit, and
+     spend the evening.... Better come at 5.30 to 6 (if feasible
+     to you), that I may try to show you a picture by daylight...
+     Of course, when I speak of your dining with me, I mean tête-
+     à-tête, and without ceremony of any kind. I usually dine in
+     my studio, and in my painting coat. I judge this will reach
+     you in time for a note to reach <i>me</i>. Telegrams I hate. In
+     hope of the pleasure of a meeting, yours ever.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      How that &ldquo;hole-and-cornerest of all existences&rdquo; struck an ardent admirer
+      of the poet-painter&rsquo;s genius, and a devoted lover of his personal
+      character, as then revealed to me, I hope to describe in a later section
+      of this book. Meantime I must proceed to cull from the epistolary
+      treasures I possess a number of interesting passages on literary subjects,
+      called forth in the course of an intercourse which, at that stage, had few
+      topics of a private nature to divert it from a channel of impersonal
+      discussion. It is a fact that the letters written to me by Rossetti in the
+      year 1880 deal so largely with literary affairs (chiefly of the past) as
+      to be almost capable of <i>verbatim</i> reproduction, even at the present
+      short interval after his death. If they were to be reproduced, they would
+      be found to cover two hundred pages of the present volume, and to be so
+      easy, fluent, varied, and wholly felicitous as to style, and full of
+      research and reflection as to substance, as probably to earn for the
+      writer a foremost place for epistolary power. Indeed, I am not without
+      hope that this accession of a fresh reputation may result even upon the
+      excerpts I have decided to introduce.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0004" id="link2HCH0004">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER IV.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      It was very natural that our earliest correspondence should deal chiefly
+      with Rossetti&rsquo;s own works, for those works gave rise to it. He sent me a
+      copy of his translations from early Italian poets (<i>Dante and his Circle</i>),
+      and a copy of his story, entitled <i>Hand and Soul</i>. In posting the
+      latter, he said:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     I don&rsquo;t know if you ever saw a sort of story of mine called
+     <i>Hand and Soul</i>. I send you one with this, as printed to go
+     in my poems (though afterwards omitted, being, nevertheless,
+     more poem than story). I printed it since in the
+     <i>Fortnightly</i>&mdash;and, I believe, abolished one or two extra
+     sentimentalities. You may have seen it there. In case it&rsquo;s
+     stale, I enclose with this a sonnet which <i>must</i> be new, for
+     I only wrote it the other day.
+
+     I have already, in the proper place in this volume, said how
+     the story first struck me. Perhaps I had never before
+     reading it seen quite so clearly the complete mission as
+     well as enforced limitations of true art. All the many
+     subtle gradations in the development of purpose were there
+     beautifully pictured in a little creation that was charming
+     in the full sense of a word that has wellnigh lost its
+     charm. For all such as cried out against pursuits
+     originating in what Keats had christened &ldquo;the infant chamber
+     of sensation,&rdquo; and for all such as demanded that everything
+     we do should be done to &ldquo;strengthen God among men,&rdquo; the
+     story provided this answer: &ldquo;When at any time hath He cried
+     unto thee, saying, &lsquo;My son, lend me thy shoulder, for I
+     fall&rsquo;?&rdquo;
+ 
+     The sonnet sent, and spoken of as having just been written
+     (the letter bears post-mark February 1880), was the sonnet
+     on the sonnet. It is throughout beautiful and in two of its
+     lines (those depicting the dark wharf and the black Styx)
+     truly magnificent. It appears most to be valued, however, as
+     affording a clue to the attitude of mind adopted towards
+     this form of verse by the greatest master of it in modern
+     poetry. I think it is Mr. Pater who says that a fine poem in
+     manuscript carries an aroma with it, and a sensation of
+     music. I must have enjoyed the pleasure of such a presence
+     somewhat frequently about this period, for many of the poems
+     that afterwards found places in the second volume of ballads
+     and sonnets were sent to me from time to time.
+
+     I should like to know what were the three or four vols. on
+     Italian poetry which you mentioned in a former letter, and
+     which my book somewhat recalled to your mind. I was not
+     aware of any such extensive <i>English</i> work on the subject.
+     Or do you perhaps mean Trucchi&rsquo;s Italian <i>Dugento Poésie
+     inédite?</i> I am sincerely delighted at your rare interest in
+     what I have sent you&mdash;both the translations, story, etc.&mdash;I
+     enclose three printed pieces meant for my volume but
+     omitted:&mdash;the ballad, because it deals trivially with a base
+     amour (it was written <i>very</i> early) and is therefore really
+     reprehensible to some extent; the Shakspeare sonnet, because
+     of its incongruity with the rest of the poems, and also
+     because of the insult (however jocose) to the worshipful
+     body of tailors; and the political sonnet for reasons which
+     are plain enough, though the date at which I wrote it (not
+     without feeling) involves now a prophetic value. In a MS.
+     vol. I have a sonnet (1871) <i>After the German Subjugation of
+     France</i>, which enforces the prophecy by its fulfilment. In
+     this MS. vol. are a few pieces which were the only ones I
+     copied in doubt as to their admission when I printed the
+     poems, but none of which did I admit. One day I &lsquo;ll send it
+     for you to look at. It contains a few sonnets bearing on
+     public matters, but only a few. Tell me what you think on
+     reading my things. All you said in your letter of this
+     morning was very grateful to me. I have a fair amount by me
+     in the way of later MS. which I may shew you some day when
+     we meet. Meanwhile I feel that your energies are already in
+     full swing&mdash;work coming on the heels of work&mdash;and that your
+     time cannot long be deferred as regards your place as a
+     writer.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      The ballad of which Rossetti here speaks as dealing trivially with a base
+      amour is entitled <i>Dennis Shand</i>. Though an early work, it affords
+      perhaps the best evidence extant of the poet&rsquo;s grasp of the old ballad
+      style: it runs easiest of all his ballads, and is in some respects his
+      best. Mr. J. A. Symonds has, in my judgment, made the error of speaking of
+      Rossetti as incapable of reproducing the real note of such ballads as <i>Chevy
+      Chase</i> and <i>Sir Patrick Spens</i>. Mr. Symonds was right in his
+      eloquent comments (<i>Macmillan&rsquo;s Magazine</i>, February 1882), so far as
+      they concern the absence from <i>Rose Mary, The King&rsquo;s Tragedy, and The
+      White Ship</i> of the sinewy simplicity of the old singers. But in those
+      poems Rossetti attempted quite another thing. There is a development of
+      the English ballad that is entirely of modern product, being far more
+      complex than the primitive form, and getting rid to some extent of the
+      out-worn notion of the ballad being actually sung to set music, but
+      retaining enough of the sweep of a free rhythm to carry a sensible effect
+      as of being chanted when read. This is a sort of ballad-romance, such as
+      <i>Christabel</i> and <i>The Lay of the Last Minstrel</i>; and this, and
+      this only, was what Rossetti aimed after, and entirely compassed in his
+      fine works just mentioned. But (as Rossetti himself remarked to me in
+      conversation when I repeated Mr. Symonds&rsquo;s criticism, and urged my own
+      grounds of objection to it), that the poet was capable of the directness
+      and simplicity which characterise the early ballad-writers, he had given
+      proof in <i>The Staff and Scrip and Stratton Water. Dennis Shand</i> is
+      valuable as evidence going in the same direction, but the author&rsquo;s
+      objection to it, on ethical grounds, must here prevail to withhold it from
+      publication.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Shakspeare sonnet, spoken of in the letter as being withheld on
+      account of its incongruity with the rest of the poems, was published in an
+      early <i>Academy</i>, notwithstanding its jocose allusion to the
+      worshipful body of tailors. As it is little known, and really very
+      powerful in itself, and interesting as showing the author&rsquo;s power over
+      words in a new direction, I print it in this place.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+             ON THE SITE OF A MULBERRY TREE.
+
+     Planted by Wm. Shakspeare; felled by the Rev. F. Gastrell.
+     This tree, here fall&rsquo;n, no common birth or death
+        Shared with its kind. The world&rsquo;s enfranchised son,
+        Who found the trees of Life and Knowledge one,
+     Here set it, frailer than his laurel-wreath.
+
+     Shall not the wretch whose hand it fell beneath
+        Rank also singly&mdash;the supreme unhung?
+        Lo! Sheppard, Turpin, pleading with black tongue
+     This viler thief&rsquo;s unsuffocated breath!
+
+     We &lsquo;U search thy glossary, Shakspeare! whence almost,
+        And whence alone, some name shall be reveal&rsquo;d
+          For this deaf drudge, to whom no length of ears
+          Sufficed to catch the music of the spheres;
+        Whose soul is carrion now,&mdash;too mean to yield
+     Some tailor&rsquo;s ninth allotment of a ghost.
+
+                   Stratford-on-Avon.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      The other sonnets referred to, those, namely, on the <i>French Liberation
+      of Italy</i>, and the <i>German Subjugation of France</i>, display all
+      Rossetti&rsquo;s mastery of craftsmanship. In strength of vision, in fertility
+      of rhythmic resource, in pliant handling, these sonnets are, in my
+      judgment, among the best written by the author; and if I do not quote them
+      here, or altogether regret that they do not appear in the author&rsquo;s works,
+      it is not because I have any sense of their possibly offending against the
+      delicate sensibilities of an age in which it seems necessary to hide out
+      of sight whatever appears to impinge upon the domain of what is called our
+      lower nature.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The circumstance has hardly obtained even so much as a passing mention
+      that Rossetti made certain very important additions to the ballad of <i>Sister
+      Helen</i>, just before passing the old volume through the press afresh for
+      publication, contemporaneously with the new book. The letters I am now to
+      quote show the origin of those additions, and are interesting, as
+      affording a view of the author&rsquo;s estimate of the gain in respect of
+      completeness of conception, and sterner tragic spirit which resulted upon
+      their adoption.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I was very glad to have the three articles together, including the one in
+      which you have written on myself. Looking at this again, it seems to me
+      you must possess the <i>best</i> edition (the Tauchnitz, which has my last
+      emendations). Otherwise I have been meaning all along to offer you a copy
+      of this edition, as I have some. Who was your informant as to dates of the
+      poems, etc.? They are not correct, yet show some inkling. <i>Jenny</i> (in
+      a first form) was written almost as early as <i>The Blessed Damozel</i>,
+      which I wrote (and have altered little since), when I was eighteen. It was
+      first printed when I was twenty-one. Of the first <i>Jenny</i>, perhaps
+      fifty lines survive here and there, but I felt it was quite beyond me then
+      (a world I was then happy enough to be a stranger to), and later I
+      re-wrote it completely. I will give you correct particulars at some time.
+      <i>Sister Helen</i>, I may mention, was written either in 1851 or
+      beginning of 1852, and was printed in something called <i>The Düsseldorf
+      Annual</i> {*} (published in Germany) in 1853; though since much revised
+      in detail&mdash;not in the main. You will be horror-struck to hear that
+      the first main addition to this poem was made by me only a few days ago!&mdash;eight
+      stanzas (six together, and two scattered ones) involving a new incident!!
+      Your hair is on end, I know, but if you heard the stanzas, they would
+      smooth if not curl it. The gain is immense.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     * In The Düsseldorf Annual the poem was signed H. H. H., and
+     in explanation of this signature Rossetti wrote on his own
+     copy the following characteristic note:&mdash;&ldquo;The initials as
+     above were taken from the lead-pencil.&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      In reply to this I told Rossetti that, as a &ldquo;jealous honourer&rdquo; of his, I
+      confessed to some uneasiness when I read that he had been making important
+      additions to <i>Sister Helen</i>. That I could not think of a stage of the
+      story that would bear so to be severed from what goes before or comes
+      after it as to admit of interpolation might not of itself go for much; but
+      the entire ballad was so rounded into unity, one incident so naturally
+      begetting the next, and the combined incidents so properly building up a
+      fabric of interest of which the meaning was all inwoven, that I could not
+      but fear that whatever the gain in certain directions, the additions of
+      any stanzas involving a new incident might, in some measure, cripple the
+      rest. Even though the new stanzas were as beautiful, or yet more beautiful
+      than the old ones, and the incident as impressive as any that goes before
+      it, or comes after it, the gain to the poem as an individual creation was
+      not, I thought, assured because people used to say my style was hard.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rossetti was mistaken in supposing that I possessed the latest and best
+      edition of his <i>Poems</i>, but I had seen the latest of all English
+      editions, and had noted in it several valuable emendations which, in
+      subsequent quotation, I had been careful to employ. One of these seemed to
+      me to involve an immeasurable gain. A stanza of <i>Sister Helen</i>, in
+      its first form, ran:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     Oh, the wind is sad in the iron chill,
+          Sister Helen,
+     And weary sad they look by the hill;
+     But Keith of Ewern &lsquo;s sadder still,
+          Little brother.&mdash;etc. etc.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      In the later edition the fourth line of this stanza ran:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     But he and I are sadder still.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      The change adds enormously to one&rsquo;s estimate of the characterisation. All
+      through the ballad one wants to feel that, despite the bitterness of her
+      speech, the heart of the relentless witch is breaking. Like <i>The Broken
+      Heart</i> of Ford, the ballad with the amended line was a masterly picture
+      of suppressed emotion. I hoped the new incident touched the same chord.
+      Rossetti replied:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     Thanks for your present letter, which I will answer with
+     pleasurable care. At present I send you the Tauchnitz
+     edition of my things. The bound copy is hideous, but more
+     convenient&mdash;the other pretty. You will find a good many
+     things bettered (I believe) even on the <i>latest</i> English
+     edition. I did not remember that the line you quote from
+     <i>Sister Helen</i> appeared in the new form at all in an English
+     issue. I am greatly pleased at your thinking it, as I do,
+     quite a transfiguring change... The next point I have marked
+     in your letter is that about the additions to <i>Sister
+     Helen</i>. Of course I knew that your hair must arise from your
+     scalp in protest. But what should you say if Keith of Ewern
+     were a three days&rsquo; bridegroom&mdash;if the spell had begun on the
+     wedding-morning&mdash;and if the bride herself became the last
+     pleader for mercy? I fancy you will see your way now. The
+     culminating, irresistible provocation helps, I think, to
+     humanize Helen, besides lifting the tragedy to a yet sterner
+     height.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      If I had felt (as Rossetti predicted I should) an uneasy sensation about
+      the roots of the hair upon hearing that he was making important additions
+      to the ballad which seemed to me to be the finest of his works, the
+      sensation in that quarter was not less, but more, upon learning the nature
+      of those additions. But I mistook the character of the new incidents. That
+      Sister Helen should be herself the abandoned <i>bride</i> of Ewern (for so
+      I understood the poet&rsquo;s explanation), and, as such, the last pleader for
+      mercy, pointed, I thought, in the direction of the humanizing emendation
+      (&ldquo;But he and I are sadder still &ldquo;) which had given me so much pleasure.
+      That Keith of Ewern should be a three-days&rsquo; bridegroom, and that the spell
+      should begin on the wedding morning, were incidents that seemed to
+      intensify every line of the poem. In this view of Rossetti&rsquo;s account of
+      the additions, there were certainly difficulties out of which I could see
+      no way, but I seemed to realise that Helen&rsquo;s hate, like Macbeth&rsquo;s
+      ambition, had overleaped itself, and fallen on the other side, and that
+      she would undo her work, if to return were not harder than to go on; her
+      initiate sensibility had gained hard use, but even as hate recoils on
+      love, so out of the ashes of hate love had arisen. In this view of the
+      characterisation of Helen, the parallel with Macbeth struck me more and
+      more as I thought of it. When Macbeth kills Duncan, and hears the grooms
+      of the chamber cry in their sleep&mdash;&ldquo;God bless us,&rdquo; he cannot say
+      &ldquo;Amen,&rdquo;
+     </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     I had most need of blessing, and Amen
+     Stuck in my throat.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Helen pleading too late for mercy against the potency of the spell she
+      herself had raised, seemed to me an incident that raised her to the utmost
+      height of tragic creation. But Rossetti&rsquo;s purpose was at once less
+      ambitious and more satisfying.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     Your passage as to the changes in <i>Sister Helen</i> could not
+     well (with all its fine suggestiveness) be likely to meet
+     exactly a reality which had not been submitted to your eye
+     in the verses themselves. It is the <i>bride of Keith</i> who is
+     the last pleader&mdash;as vainly as the others, and with a yet
+     more exulting development of vengeance in the forsaken
+     witch. The only acknowledgment by her of a mutual misery is
+     still found in the line you spotted as so great a gain
+     before, and in the last line she speaks. I ought to have
+     sent the stanzas to explain them properly, but have some
+     reluctance to ventilate them at present, much as I should
+     like the opportunity of reading them to you. They will meet
+     your eye in due course, and I am sure of your approval also
+     as regards their value to the ballad.... Don&rsquo;t let the
+     changes in <i>Helen</i> get wind overmuch. I want them to be new
+     when published. Answer this when you can. I like getting
+     your epistles.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      The fresh stanzas in question, which had already obtained the suffrages of
+      his brother, of Mr. Bell Scott, and other qualified critics, were
+      subsequently sent to me. They are as follows. After Keith of Keith, the
+      father of Sister Helen&rsquo;s sometime lover, has pleaded for his son in vain,
+      the last suppliant to arrive is his son&rsquo;s bride:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     A lady here, by a dark steed brought,
+          Sister Helen,
+     So darkly clad I saw her not.
+     &ldquo;See her now or never see aught,
+          Little brother!&rdquo;
+           (<i>O Mother, Mary Mother</i>,
+     <i>Whit more to see, between Hell and Heaven?</i>)
+
+     &ldquo;Her hood falls back, and the moon shines fair,
+          Sister Helen,
+     On the Lady of Ewern&rsquo;s golden hair.&rdquo;
+      &ldquo;Blest hour of my power and her despair,
+          Little brother!&rdquo;
+           (O Mother, Mary Mother,
+     Hour blest and bann&rsquo;d, between Hell and Heaven!)
+
+     &ldquo;Pale, pale her cheeks, that in pride did glow,
+          Sister Helen,
+     &lsquo;Neath the bridal-wreath three days ago.&rdquo;
+      &ldquo;One morn for pride and three days for woe,
+          Little brother!&rdquo;
+           (O Mother, Mary Mother,
+     Three days, three nights, between Hell and Heaven!)
+
+     &ldquo;Her clasp&rsquo;d hands stretch from her bending head,
+          Sister Helen;
+     With the loud wind&rsquo;s wail her sobs are wed.&rdquo;
+      &ldquo;What wedding-strains hath her bridal bed,
+          Little brother?&rdquo;
+           (O Mother, Mary Mother,
+     What strain but death&rsquo;s, between Hell and Heaven?)
+
+     &ldquo;She may not speak, she sinks in a swoon,
+          Sister Helen,&mdash;
+     She lifts her lips and gasps on the moon.&rdquo;
+      &ldquo;Oh! might I but hear her soul&rsquo;s blithe tune,
+          Little brother!&rdquo;
+           (O Mother, Mary Mother,
+     Her woe&rsquo;s dumb cry, between Hell and Heaven!)
+
+     &ldquo;They&rsquo;ve caught her to Westholm&rsquo;s saddle-bow,
+     Sister Helen,
+     And her moonlit hair gleams white in its flow.&rdquo;
+      &ldquo;Let it turn whiter than winter snow,
+          Little brother!&rdquo;
+           (O Mother, Mary Mother,
+     Woe-withered gold, between Hell and Heaven!)
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Besides these there are two new stanzas, one going before, and the other
+      following after, the six stanzas quoted, but as the scattered passages
+      involve no farther incident, and are rather of interest as explaining and
+      perfecting the idea here expressed, than valuable in themselves, I do not
+      reprint them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I think it must be allowed, by fit judges, that nothing more subtly
+      conceived than this incident can be met with in English poetry, though
+      something akin to it was projected by Coleridge in an episode of his
+      contemplated <i>Michael Scott</i>. It is&mdash;in the full sense of an
+      abused epithet&mdash;too weird to be called picturesque. But the crowning
+      merit of the poem still lies, as I have said, in the domain of character.
+      Through all the outbursts of her ignescent hate Sister Helen can never
+      lose the ineradicable relics of her human love:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+          But he and I are sadder still.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      As Rossetti from time to time made changes in his poems, he transcribed
+      the amended verses in a copy of the Tauchnitz edition which he kept
+      constantly by him. Upon reference to this little volume some days after
+      his death, I discovered that he had prefaced <i>Sister Helen</i> with a
+      note written in pencil, of which he had given me the substance in
+      conversation about the time of the publication of the altered version, but
+      which he abandoned while passing the book through the press. The note
+      (evidently designed to precede the ballad) runs:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     It is not unlikely that some may be offended at seeing the
+     additions made thus late to the ballad of <i>S. H.</i> My best
+     excuse is that I believe some will wonder with myself that
+     such a climax did not enter into the first conception.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      At the foot of the poem this further note is written:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     I wrote this ballad either in 1851 or early in 1852. It was
+     printed in a thing called <i>The Düsseldorf Annual</i> in (I
+     think) 1853&mdash;published in Germany. {*}
+
+     * In the same private copy of the Poems the following
+     explanatory passage was written over the much-discussed
+     sonnet, entitled, The Monochord:&mdash;&ldquo;That sublimated mood of
+     the soul in which a separate essence of itself seems as it
+     were to oversoar and survey it.&rdquo; Neither the style nor the
+     substance is characteristic of Rossetti, and though I do not
+     at the moment remember to have met with the passage
+     elsewhere, I doubt not it is a quotation. That quotation
+     marks are employed is not in itself evidence of much moment,
+     for Rossetti had Coleridge&rsquo;s enjoyment of a literary
+     practical joke, and on one occasion prefixed to a story in
+     manuscript a long passage on noses purporting to be from
+     Tristram Shandy, but which is certainly not discoverable in
+     Sterne&rsquo;s story.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      The next letter I shall quote appears to explain itself:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     There is a last point in your long letter which I have not
+     noticed, though it interested me much: viz., what you say of
+     your lecture on my poetry; your idea of possibly returning
+     to and enlarging it would, if carried out, be welcome to me.
+     I suppose ere long I must get together such additional work
+     as I have to show&mdash;probably a good deal added to the old
+     vol. (which has been for some time out of print) and one
+     longer poem by itself. <i>The House of Life</i>, when next
+     issued, will I trust be doubled in number of sonnets; it is
+     nearly so already. Your writing that essay in one day, and
+     the information as to subsequent additions, I noted, and
+     should like to see the passage on <i>Jenny</i> which you have not
+     yet used, if extant. The time taken in composition reminds
+     me of the fact (so long ago!) that I wrote the tale of <i>Hand
+     and Soul</i> (with the exception of an opening page or two) all
+     in one night in December 1849, beginning I suppose about 2
+     A.M. and ending about 7. In such a case a landscape and sky
+     all unsurmised open gradually in the mind&mdash;a sort of
+     spiritual <i>Turner</i>, among whose hills one ranges and in
+     whose waters one strikes out at unknown liberty; but I have
+     found this only in nightlong work, which I have seldom
+     attempted, for it leaves one entirely broken, and this state
+     was mine when I described the like of it at the close of the
+     story, ah! once again, how long ago! I have thought of
+     including this story in next issue of poems, but am
+     uncertain. What think you?
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      It seemed certain that <i>Hand and Soul</i> ought not to continue to lie
+      in the back numbers, of a magazine. The story, being more poem than aught
+      else, might properly lay claim to a place in any fresh collection of the
+      author&rsquo;s works. I could see no natural objection on the score of its being
+      written in prose. As Coleridge and Wordsworth both aptly said, prose is
+      not the antithesis of poetry; science and poetry may stand over-against
+      each other, as Keats implied by his famous toast: &ldquo;Confusion to the man
+      who took the poetry out of the moon,&rdquo; but prose and poetry surely are or
+      may be practically one. We know that in rhythmic flow they sometimes come
+      very close together, and nowhere closer than in the heightened prose and
+      the poetry of Rossetti. Poetic prose may not be the best prose, just as
+      (to use a false antithesis) dull poetry is called prosaic; but there is no
+      natural antagonism between prose and verse as literary mediums, provided
+      always that the spirit that animates them be akin. Rossetti himself
+      constantly urged that in prose the first necessity was that it should be
+      direct, and he knew no reproach of poetry more damning than to say it was
+      written in proseman&rsquo;s diction. This was the key to his depreciation of
+      Wordsworth, and doubtless it was this that ultimately operated with him to
+      exclude the story from his published works. I took another view, and did
+      not see that an accidental difference of outward form ought to prevent his
+      uniting within single book-covers productions that had so much of their
+      essential spirit in common. Unlike the Chinese, we do not read by sight
+      only, and there is in the story such richness, freshness, and variety of
+      cadence, as appeal to the ear also. Prose may be the lowest order of
+      rhythmic composition, but we know it is capable of such purity, sweetness,
+      strength, and elasticity, as entitle it to a place as a sister art with
+      poetry. Milton, however, although he wrote the noblest of English prose,
+      seemed more than half ashamed of it, as of a kind of left-handed
+      performance. Goethe and Wordsworth, on the other hand, not to speak of
+      Coleridge and Shelley (or yet of Keats, whose letters are among the very
+      best examples extant of the English epistolary style), wrote prose of
+      wonderful beauty and were not ashamed of it. In Milton&rsquo;s case the
+      subjects, I imagine, were to blame for his indifference to his
+      achievements in prose, for not even the Westminster Convention, or the
+      divorce topics of <i>Tetrachordon</i>, or yet the liberty of the press,
+      albeit raised to a level of philosophic first principles, were quite up to
+      those fixed stars of sublimity about which it was Milton&rsquo;s pleasure to
+      revolve. <i>Hand and Soul</i> is in faultless harmony with Rossetti&rsquo;s work
+      in verse, because distinguished by the same strength of imagination. That
+      it was written in a single night seems extraordinary when viewed in
+      relation to its sustained beauty; but it is done in a breath, and has all
+      the excellencies of fervour and force that result upon that method of
+      composition only.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A year or two later than the date of the correspondence with which I am
+      now dealing, Rossetti read aloud a fragment of a story written about the
+      period of <i>Hand and Soul</i>. It was to be entitled <i>St. Agnes of
+      Intercession</i>, and it dealt in a mystic way with the doctrine of the
+      transmigration of souls. He constantly expressed his intention of
+      finishing the story, and said that, although in its existing condition it
+      was fully as long as the companion story, it would require twice as much
+      more to complete it. During the time of our stay at Birchington, at the
+      beginning of 1882, he seemed anxious to get to work upon it, and had the
+      manuscript sent down from London for that purpose; but the packet lay
+      unopened until after his death, when I glanced at it again to refresh my
+      memory as to its contents. The fragment is much too inconclusive as to
+      design to admit of any satisfying account of its plot, of which there is
+      more, than in <i>Hand and Soul</i>. As far as it goes, it is the story of
+      a young English painter who becomes the victim of a conviction that his
+      soul has had a prior existence in this world. The hallucination takes
+      entire possession of him, and so unsettles his life that he leaves England
+      in search of relic or evidence of his spiritual &ldquo;double.&rdquo; Finally, in a
+      picture-gallery abroad, he comes face to face with a portrait which&rsquo; he
+      instantly recognises as the portrait of himself, both as he is now and as
+      he was in the time of his antecedent existence. Upon inquiry, the portrait
+      proves to be that of a distinguished painter centuries dead, whose work
+      had long been the young Englishman&rsquo;s guiding beacon in methods of art.
+      Startled beyond measure at the singular discovery of a coincidence which,
+      superstition apart, might well astonish the most unsentimental, he sickens
+      to a fever. Here the fragment ends. Late one evening, in August 1881,
+      Rossetti gave me a full account of the remaining incidents, but I find
+      myself without memoranda of what was said (it was never my habit to keep
+      record of his or of any man&rsquo;s conversation), and my recollection of what
+      passed is too indefinite in some salient particulars to make it safe to
+      attempt to complete the outlines of the story. I consider the fragment in
+      all respects finer than <i>Hand and Soul</i>, and the passage descriptive
+      of the artist&rsquo;s identification of his own personality in the portrait on
+      the walls of the gallery among the very finest pieces of picturesque,
+      impassioned, and dramatic writing that Rossetti ever achieved. On one
+      occasion I remarked incidentally upon something he had said of his
+      enjoyment of rivers of morning air {*} in the spring of the year, that it
+      would be an inquiry fraught with a curious interest to find out how many
+      of those who have the greatest love of the Spring were born in it.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     * Within the period of my personal knowledge of Rossetti&rsquo;s
+     habits, he certainly never enjoyed any &ldquo;rivers of morning
+     air&rdquo; at all, unless they were such as visited him in a
+     darkened bedchamber.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      One felt that one could name a goodly number among the English poets
+      living and dead. It would be an inquiry, as Hamlet might say, such as
+      would become a woman. To this Rossetti answered that he was born on old
+      May-day (May 12), 1828; and thereupon he asked the date of my own birth.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     The comparative dates of our births are curious.... I myself
+     was born on old May-Day (12th), in the year (1828) after
+     that in which Blake died.... You were born, in fact, just as
+     I was giving up poetry at about 25, on finding that it
+     impeded attention to what constituted another aim and a
+     livelihood into the bargain, <i>i.e.</i> painting. From that date
+     up to the year when I published my poems, I wrote extremely
+     little,&mdash;I might almost say nothing, except the renovated
+     <i>Jenny</i> in 1858 or &lsquo;59. To this again I added a passage or
+     two when publishing in 1870.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Often since Rossetti&rsquo;s death I have reflected upon the fact that in that
+      lengthy correspondence between us which preceded personal intimacy, he
+      never made more than a single passing allusion to those adverse criticisms
+      which did so much at one period to sadden and alter his life. Barely,
+      indeed, in conversation did he touch upon that sore subject, but it was
+      obvious enough to the closer observer, as well from his silence as from
+      his speech, that though the wounds no longer rankled, they did not wholly
+      heal. I take it as evidence of his desire to put by unpleasant reflections
+      (at least whilst health was whole with him, for he too often nourished
+      melancholy retrospects when health was broken or uncertain), that in his
+      correspondence with me, as a young friend who knew nothing at first hand
+      of his gloomier side, he constantly dwelt with radiant satisfaction and
+      hopefulness on the friendly words that had been said of him. And as
+      frequently as he called my attention to such favourable comment, he did so
+      without a particle of vanity, and with only such joy as he may feel who
+      knows in his secret heart he has depreciators, to find that he has ardent
+      upholders too. In one letter he says:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I should say that between the appearance of the poems and your lecture,
+      there was one article on the subject, of a very masterly kind indeed, by
+      some very scholarly hand (unknown to me), in the <i>New York Catholic
+      World</i> (I think in 1874). I retain this article, and will some day send
+      it you to read.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He sent me the article, and I found it, as he had found it, among the best
+      things written on the subject. Naturally, the criticism was best where the
+      subject dealt with impinged most upon the spirit of mediæval Catholicism.
+      Perhaps Catholicism is itself essentially mediæval, and perhaps a man
+      cannot possibly be, what the <i>Catholic World</i> article called
+      Rossetti, a &ldquo;mediæval artist heart and soul,&rdquo; without partaking of a
+      strong religious feeling that is primarily Catholic&mdash;so much were the
+      religion and art of the middle ages knit each to each. Yet, upon reading
+      the article, I doubted one of the writer&rsquo;s inferences, namely, that
+      Rossetti had inherited a Catholic devotion to the Madonna. Not his <i>Ave</i>
+      only seemed to me to live in an atmosphere of tender and sensitive
+      devotion, but I missed altogether in it, as in other poems of Rossetti,
+      that old, continual, and indispensable Catholic note of mystic Divine love
+      lost in love of humanity which, I suppose, Mr. Arnold would call
+      anthropomorphism. Years later, when I came to know Rossetti personally, I
+      perceived that the writer of the article in question had not made a bad
+      shot for the truth. True it was, that he had inherited a strong religious
+      spirit&mdash;such as could only be called Catholic&mdash;inherited I say,
+      for, though from his immediate parents, he assuredly did not inherit any
+      devotion to the Madonna, his own submission to religious influences was
+      too unreasoning and unquestioning to be anything but intuitive. Despite
+      some worldly-mindedness, and a certain shrewdness in the management of the
+      more important affairs of daily life, Rossetti&rsquo;s attitude towards
+      spiritual things was exactly the reverse of what we call Protestant.
+      During the last months of his life, when the prospect of leaving the world
+      soon, and perhaps suddenly, impressed upon his mind a deep sense of his
+      religious position, he yielded himself up unhesitatingly to the intuitive
+      influences I speak of; and so far from being touched by the interminable
+      controversies which have for ages been upsetting and uprearing creeds, he
+      seemed both naturally incapable of comprehending differences of belief,
+      and unwilling to dwell upon them for an instant. Indeed, he constantly
+      impressed me during the last days of his life with the conviction, that he
+      was by religious bias of nature a monk of the middle ages.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As to the article in <i>The Catholic Magazine</i> I thought I perceived
+      from a curious habit of biblical quotation that it must have been written
+      by an Ecclesiastic. A remark in it to the effect that old age is usually
+      more indulgent than middle life to the work of first manhood, and that,
+      consequently, Rossetti would be a less censorious judge of his early
+      efforts at a later period of life, seemed to show that the writer himself
+      was no longer a young man. Further, I seemed to see that the reviewer was
+      not a professional critic, for his work displayed few of the
+      well-recognised trade-marks with which the articles of the literary market
+      are invariably branded. As a small matter one noticed the somewhat
+      slovenly use of the editorial <i>we</i>, which at the fag-end of passages
+      sometimes dropped into <i>I</i>. [Upon my remarking upon this to Rossetti
+      he remembered incidentally that a similar confounding of the singular and
+      plural number of the pronoun produces marvellously suggestive effects in a
+      very different work, <i>Macbeth</i>, where the kingly <i>we</i> is tripped
+      up by the guilty <i>I</i> in many places.] Rossetti wrote:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I am glad you liked the <i>Catholic World</i> article, which I certainly
+      view as one of rare literary quality. I have not the least idea who is the
+      writer, but am sorry now I never wrote to him under cover of the editor
+      when I received it. I did send the <i>Dante and Circle</i>, but don&rsquo;t know
+      if it was ever received or reviewed. As you have the vols, of <i>Fortnightly</i>,
+      look up a little poem of mine called the <i>Cloud Confines</i>, a few
+      months later, I suppose, than the tale. It is one of my favourites, among
+      my own doings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I noticed at this early period, as well as later, that in Rossetti&rsquo;s eyes
+      a favourable review was always enhanced in value if the writer happened to
+      be a stranger to him; and I constantly protested that a friend&rsquo;s knowledge
+      of one&rsquo;s work and sympathy with it ought not to be less delightful, as
+      such, than a stranger&rsquo;s, however less surprising, though at the same time
+      the tribute that is true to one&rsquo;s art without auxiliary aids being brought
+      to bear in its formation must be at once the most satisfying assurance of
+      the purity, strength, and completeness of the art itself, and of the safe
+      and enduring quality of the appreciation. It is true that friends who are
+      accustomed to our habit of thought and manner of expression sometimes
+      catch our meaning before we have expressed it Not rarely, before our
+      thought has reached that stage at which it becomes intelligible to a
+      stranger, a word, a look, or a gesture will convey it perfectly and fully
+      to a friend. And what goes on between minds that exist in more or less
+      intimate communion, goes on to a greater degree within the individual mind
+      where the metaphysical equivalents to a word or a look answer to, and are
+      answered by, the half-realised conception. Hence it often happens that
+      even where our touch seems to ourselves delicate and precise, a mind not
+      initiated in our self-chosen method of abbreviation finds only
+      impenetrable obscurity. It is then in the tentative condition of mind just
+      indicated that the spirit of art comes in, and enables a man so to clothe
+      his thought in lucid words and fitting imagery that strangers may know,
+      when they see it, all that it is, and how he came by it. Although,
+      therefore, the praise of friends should not be less delightful, as praise,
+      than that tendered by strangers, there is an added element of surprise and
+      satisfaction in the latter which the former cannot bring. Rossetti
+      certainly never over-valued the applause of his own immediate circle, but
+      still no man was more sensible of the value of the good opinion of one or
+      two of his immediate friends. Returning to the correspondence, he says:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     In what I wrote as to critiques on my poems, I meant to
+     express <i>special</i> gratification from those written by
+     strangers to myself and yet showing full knowledge of the
+     subject and full sympathy with it. Such were Formans at the
+     time, the American one since (and far from alone in America,
+     but this the best) and more lately your own. Other known and
+     unknown critics of course wrote on the book when it
+     appeared, some very favourably and others <i>quite</i>
+     sufficiently abusive.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      As to <i>Cloud Confines</i>, I told Rossetti that I considered it in
+      philosophic grasp the most powerful of his productions, and interesting as
+      being (unlike the body of his works) more nearly akin to the spirit of
+      music than that of painting.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     By the bye, you are right about <i>Cloud Confines</i>, which <i>is</i>
+     my very best thing&mdash;only, having been foolishly sent to a
+     magazine, no notice whatever resulted.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Rossetti was not always open to suggestions as to the need of clarifying
+      obscure phrases in his verses, but on one or two occasions, when I was so
+      bold as to hint at changes, I found him in highly tractable moods. I
+      called his attention to what I imagined might prove to be merely a
+      printer&rsquo;s slip in his poem (a great favourite of mine) entitled <i>The
+      Portrait</i>. The second stanza ran:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     Yet this, of all love&rsquo;s perfect prize,
+     Remains; save what in mournful guise
+     Takes counsel with my soul alone,&mdash;
+     Save what is secret and unknown,
+     Below the earth, above the sky.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      The words &ldquo;yet&rdquo; and &ldquo;save&rdquo; seemed to me (and to another friend) somewhat
+      puzzling, and I asked if &ldquo;but&rdquo; in the sense of <i>only</i> had been meant.
+      He wrote:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     That is a very just remark of yours about the passage in
+     <i>Portrait</i> beginning <i>yet</i>. I meant to infer <i>yet only</i>, but
+     it certainly is truncated. I shall change the line to
+
+          Yet only this, of love&rsquo;s whole prize,
+          Remains, etc.
+
+     But would again be dubious though explicable. Thanks for the
+     hint.... I shall be much obliged to you for any such hints
+     of a verbal nature.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0005" id="link2HCH0005">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER V.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The letters printed in the foregoing chapter are valuable as settling at
+      first-hand all question of the chronology of the poems of Rossetti&rsquo;s
+      volume of 1870. The poems of the volume of 1881 (Rose Mary and certain of
+      the sonnets excepted) grew under his hand during the period of my
+      acquaintance with him, and their origin I shall in due course record. The
+      two preceding chapters have been for the most part devoted to such letters
+      (and such explanatory matter as must needs accompany them) as concern
+      principally, perhaps, the poet and his correspondent; but I have thrown
+      into two further chapters a great body of highly interesting letters on
+      subjects of general literary interest (embracing the fullest statement yet
+      published of Rossetti&rsquo;s critical opinions), and have reserved for a more
+      advanced section of the work a body of further letters on sonnet
+      literature which arose out of the discussion of an anthology that I was at
+      the time engaged in compiling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was very natural that Coleridge should prove to be one of the first
+      subjects discussed by Rossetti, who admired him greatly, and when it
+      transpired that Coleridge was, perhaps, my own chief idol, and that whilst
+      even yet a child I had perused and reperused not only his poetry but even
+      his mystical philosophy (impalpable or obscure even to his maturer and
+      more enlightened, if no more zealous, admirers), the disposition to write
+      upon him became great upon both sides. &ldquo;You can never say too much about
+      Coleridge for me,&rdquo; Rossetti would write, &ldquo;for I worship him on the right
+      side of idolatry, and I perceive you know him well.&rdquo; Upon this one of my
+      first remarks was that there was much in Coleridge&rsquo;s higher descriptive
+      verse equivalent to the landscape art of Turner. The critical parallel
+      Rossetti warmly approved of, adding, however, that Coleridge, at his best
+      as a pictorial artist, was a spiritualised Turner. He instanced his,
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     We listened and looked sideways up,
+     The moving moon went up the sky
+     And no where did abide,
+     Softly she was going up,
+     And a star or two beside&mdash;
+     The charmed water burnt alway
+     A still and awful red.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      I remarked that Shelley possessed the same power of impregnating landscape
+      with spiritual feeling, and this Rossetti readily allowed; but when I
+      proceeded to say that Wordsworth sometimes, though rarely, displayed a
+      power akin to it, I found him less warmly responsive. &ldquo;I grudge Wordsworth
+      every vote he gets,&rdquo; {*} Rossetti frequently said to me, both in writing,
+      and afterwards in conversation. &ldquo;The three greatest English imaginations,&rdquo;
+       he would sometimes add, &ldquo;are Shakspeare, Coleridge, and Shelley.&rdquo; I have
+      heard him give a fourth name, Blake.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     * There is a story frequently told of how, seeing two camels
+     walking together in the Zoological Gardens, keeping step in
+     a shambling way, and conversing with one another, Rossetti
+     exclaimed: &ldquo;There&rsquo;s Wordsworth and Ruskin virtuously taking
+     a walk!&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      He thought Wordsworth was too much the High Priest of Nature to be her
+      lover: too much concerned to transfigure into poetry his pantheo-Christian
+      philosophy regarding Nature, to drop to his knees in simple love of her to
+      thank God that she was beautiful. It was hard to side with Rossetti in his
+      view of Wordsworth, partly because one feared he did not practise the
+      patience necessary to a full appreciation of that poet, and was
+      consequently apt to judge of him by fugitive lines read at random. In the
+      connection in question, I instanced the lines (much admired by Coleridge)
+      beginning
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     Suck, little babe, O suck again!
+     It cools my blood, it cools my brain,
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      and ending&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     The breeze I see is in the tree,
+     It comes to cool my babe and me.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      But Rossetti would not see that this last couplet denoted the point of
+      artistic vision at which the poet of nature identified himself with her,
+      in setting aside or superseding all proprieties of mere speech. To him
+      Wordsworth&rsquo;s Idealism (which certainly had the German trick of keeping
+      close to the ground) only meant us to understand that the forsaken woman
+      through whose mouth the words are spoken (in <i>The Affliction of Margaret</i>
+      &mdash;&mdash;&mdash; of &mdash;&mdash;&mdash;) saw <i>the breeze shake
+      the tree</i> afar off. And this attitude towards Wordsworth Rossetti
+      maintained down to the end. I remember that sometime in March of the year
+      in which he died, Mr. Theodore Watts, who was paying one of his many
+      visits to see him in his last illness at the sea-side, touched, in
+      conversation, upon the power of Wordsworth&rsquo;s style in its higher vein, and
+      instanced a noble passage in the <i>Ode to Duty</i>, which runs:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     Stern Lawgiver! yet thou dost wear
+     The Godhead&rsquo;s most benignant grace;
+     Nor know we anything so fair
+     As is the smile upon thy face;
+     Flowers laugh before thee on their beds;
+     And fragrance in thy footing treads;
+     Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong;
+     And the most ancient heavens, through Thee, are
+               fresh and strong.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Watts spoke with enthusiasm of the strength and simplicity, the
+      sonorousness and stately march of these lines; and numbered them, I think,
+      among the noblest verses yet written, for every highest quality of style.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But Rossetti was unyielding, and though he admitted the beauty of the
+      passage, and was ungrudging in his tribute to another passage which I had
+      instanced&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+          O joy that in our embers&mdash;
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      he would not allow that Wordsworth ever possessed a grasp of the great
+      style, or that (despite the Ode on Immortality and the sonnet on <i>Toussaint
+      L&rsquo;Ouverture</i>, which he placed at the head of the poet&rsquo;s work) vital
+      lyric impulse was ever fully developed in his muse. He said:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     As to Wordsworth, no one regards the great Ode with more
+     special and unique homage than I do, as a thing absolutely
+     alone of its kind among all greatest things. I cannot say
+     that anything else of his with which I have ever been
+     familiar (and I suffer from long disuse of all familiarity
+     with him) seems at all on a level with this.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      In all humility I regard his depreciatory opinion, not at all as a
+      valuable example of literary judgment, but as indicative of a clear
+      radical difference of poetic bias between the two poets, such as must in
+      the same way have made Wordsworth resist Rossetti if he had appeared
+      before him. I am the more confirmed in this view from the circumstance
+      that Rossetti, throughout the period of my acquaintance with him, seemed
+      to me always peculiarly and, if I may be permitted to say so without
+      offence, strangely liable to Mr. Watts&rsquo;s influence in his critical
+      estimates, and that the case instanced was perhaps the only one in which I
+      knew him to resist Mr. Watts&rsquo;s opinion upon a matter of poetical
+      criticism, which he considered to be almost final, as his letters to me,
+      printed in Chapter VIII. of this volume, will show. I had a striking
+      instance of this, and of the real modesty of the man whom I had heard and
+      still hear spoken of as the most arrogant man of genius of his day, on one
+      of the first occasions of my seeing him. He read out to me an additional
+      stanza to the beautiful poem <i>Cloud Confines</i>: As he read it, I
+      thought it very fine, and he evidently was very fond of it himself. But he
+      surprised me by saying that he should not print it. On my asking him why,
+      he said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Watts, though he admits its beauty, thinks the poem would be better
+      without it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, but you like it yourself,&rdquo; said I.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; he replied; &ldquo;but in a question of gain or loss to a poem, I feel
+      that Watts must be right.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And the poem appeared in <i>Ballads and Sonnets</i> without the stanza in
+      question. The same thing occurred with regard to the omission of the
+      sonnet <i>Nuptial Sleep</i> from the new edition of the Poems in 1881. Mr.
+      Watts took the view (to Rossetti&rsquo;s great vexation at first) that this
+      sonnet, howsoever perfect in structure and beautiful from the artistic
+      point of view, was &ldquo;out of place and altogether incongruous in a group of
+      sonnets so entirely spiritual as <i>The House of Life</i>,&rdquo; and Rossetti
+      gave way: but upon the subject of Wordsworth in his relations to
+      Coleridge, Keats, and Shelley, he was quite inflexible to the last.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In a letter treating of other matters, Rossetti asked me if I thought
+      &ldquo;Christabel&rdquo; really existed as a mediæval name, or existed at all earlier
+      than Coleridge. I replied that I had not met with it earlier than the date
+      of the poem. I thought Coleridge&rsquo;s granddaughter must have been the first
+      person to bear the name. The other names in the poem appear to belong to
+      another family of names,&mdash;names with a different origin and range of
+      expression,&mdash;Leoline, Géraldine, Roland, and most of all Bracy. It
+      seemed to me very possible that Coleridge invented the name, but it was
+      highly probable that he brought it to England from Germany, where, with
+      Wordsworth, he visited Klopstock in 1798, about the period of the first
+      part of the poem. The Germans have names of a kindred etymology and, even
+      if my guess proved wide of the truth, it might still be a fact that the
+      name had German relations. Another conjecture that seemed to me a
+      reasonable one was that Coleridge evolved the name out of the incidents of
+      the opening passages of the poem. The beautiful thing, not more from its
+      beauty than its suggestiveness, suited his purpose exactly. Rossetti
+      replied:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     Resuming the thread of my letter, I come to the question of
+     the name Christabel, viz.:&mdash;as to whether it is to be found
+     earlier than Coleridge. I have now realized afresh what I
+     knew long ago, viz.:&mdash;that in the grossly garbled ballad of
+     <i>Syr Cauline</i>, in Percy&rsquo;s <i>Reliques</i>, there is a Ladye
+     Chrystabelle, but as every stanza in which her name appears
+     would seem certainly to be Percy&rsquo;s own work, I suspect him
+     to be the inventor of the name, which is assuredly a much
+     better invention than any of the stanzas; and from this
+     wretched source Coleridge probably enriched the sphere of
+     symbolic nomenclature. However, a genuine source may turn
+     up, but the name does not sound to me like a real one. As to
+     a German origin, I do not know that language, but would not
+     the second syllable be there the one accented? This seems to
+     render the name shapeless and improbable.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      I mentioned an idea that once possessed me despotically. It was that where
+      Coleridge says
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     Her silken robe and inner vest
+     Dropt to her feet, and full in view
+     Behold! her bosom and half her side&mdash;
+     A sight to dream of and not to tell,. . .
+     Shield the Lady Christabel!
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      he meant ultimately to show <i>eyes</i> in the <i>bosom</i> of the witch.
+      I fancied that if the poet had worked out this idea in the second part, or
+      in his never-compassed continuation, he must have electrified his readers.
+      The first part of the poem is of course immeasurably superior in witchery
+      to the second, despite two grand things in the latter&mdash;the passage on
+      the severance of early friendships, and the conclusion; although the
+      dexterity of hand (not to speak of the essential spirit of enchantment)
+      which is everywhere present in the first part, and nowhere dominant in the
+      second, exhibits itself not a little in the marvellous passage in which
+      Géraldine bewitches Christabel. Touching some jocose allusion by Rossetti
+      to the necessity which lay upon me to startle the world with a
+      continuation of the poem based upon the lines of my conjectural scheme, I
+      asked him if he knew that a continuation was actually published in
+      Coleridge&rsquo;s own paper, <i>The Morning Post</i>. It appeared about 1820,
+      and was satirical of course&mdash;hitting off many peculiarities of
+      versification, if no more. With Coleridge&rsquo;s playful love of satirising
+      himself anonymously, the continuation might even be his own. Rossetti
+      said:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     I do not understand your early idea of <i>eyes</i> in the bosom
+     of Géraldine. It is described as &ldquo;that bosom old,&rdquo; &ldquo;that
+     bosom cold,&rdquo; which seems to show that its withered character
+     as combined with Geraldine&rsquo;s youth, was what shocked and
+     warned Christabel. The first edition says&mdash;
+
+          A sight to dream of, not to tell:&mdash;
+          And she is to sleep with Christabel!
+
+     I dare say Coleridge altered this, because an idea arose,
+     which I actually heard to have been reported as Coleridge&rsquo;s
+     real intention by a member of contemporary circles (P. G.
+     Patmore, father of Coventry P. who conveyed the report to
+     me)&mdash;viz., that Géraldine was to turn out to be a man!! I
+     believe myself that the conclusion as given by Gillman from
+     Coleridge&rsquo;s account to him is correct enough, only not
+     picturesquely worded. It does not seem a bad conclusion by
+     any means, though it would require fine treatment to make it
+     seem a really good one. Of course the first part is so
+     immeasurably beyond the second, that one feels Chas. Lamb&rsquo;s
+     view was right, and it should have been abandoned at that
+     point. The passage on sundered friendship is one of the
+     masterpieces of the language, but no doubt was written quite
+     separately and then fitted into <i>Christabel</i>. The two lines
+     about Roland and Sir Leoline are simply an intrusion and an
+     outrage. I cannot say that I like the conclusion nearly so
+     well as this. It hints at infinite beauty, but somehow
+     remains a sort of cobweb. The conception, and partly the
+     execution, of the passage in which Christabel repeats by
+     fascination the serpent-glance of Géraldine, is magnificent;
+     but that is the only good narrative passage in part two. The
+     rest seems to have reached a fatal facility of jingling, at
+     the heels whereof followed Scott.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      There are, I believe, many continuations of <i>Christabel</i>. Tupper did
+      one! I myself saw a continuation in childhood, long before I saw the
+      original, and was all agog to see it for years. Our household was all of
+      Italian, not English environment, and it was only when I went to school
+      later that I began to ransack bookstalls. The continuation in question was
+      by one Eliza Stewart, and appeared in a shortlived monthly thing called <i>Smallwood&rsquo;s
+      Magazine</i>, to which my father contributed some Italian poetry, and so
+      it came into the house. I thought the continuation spirited then, and
+      perhaps it may have been so. This must have been before 1840 I think.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The other day I saw in a bookseller&rsquo;s catalogue&mdash;<i>Christabess</i>,
+      by S. T. Colebritche, translated from the Doggrel by Sir Vinegar Sponge
+      (1816). This seems a parody, not a continuation, in the very year of the
+      poem&rsquo;s first appearance! I did not think it worth two shillings,&mdash;which
+      was the price.... Have you seen the continuation of <i>Christabel</i> in
+      <i>European Magazine?</i> of course it <i>might</i> have been Coleridge&rsquo;s,
+      so far as the date of the composition of the original was concerned; but
+      of course it was not his.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I imagine the &ldquo;Sir Vinegar Sponge&rdquo; who translated &ldquo;<i>Christabess</i> from
+      the <i>Doggerel</i>&rdquo; must belong to the family of Sponges described by
+      Coleridge himself, who give out the liquid they take in much dirtier than
+      they imbibe it. I thought it very possible that Coleridge&rsquo;s epigram to
+      this effect might have been provoked by the lampoon referred to, and
+      Rossetti also thought this probable. Immediately after meeting with the
+      continuation of <i>Christabel</i> already referred to, I came across great
+      numbers of such continuations, as well as satires, parodies, reviews,
+      etc., in old issues of <i>Blackwood, The Quarterly, and The Examiner</i>.
+      They seemed to me, for the most part, poor in quality&mdash;the highest
+      reach of comicality to which they attained being concerned with side slaps
+      at <i>Kubla Khan</i>:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     Better poetry I make
+     When asleep than when awake.
+     Am I sure, or am I guessing?
+     Are my eyes like those of Lessing?
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      This latter elegant couplet was expected to serve as a scorching satire on
+      a letter in the <i>Biographia Literaria</i> in which Coleridge says he saw
+      a portrait of Lessing at Klopstock&rsquo;s, in which the eyes seemed singularly
+      like his own. The time has gone by when that flight of egotism on
+      Coleridge&rsquo;s part seemed an unpardonable offence, and to our more modern
+      judgment it scarcely seems necessary that the author of <i>Christabel</i>
+      should be charged with a desire to look radiant in the glory reflected by
+      an accidental personal resemblance to the author of <i>Laokoon</i>.
+      Curiously enough I found evidence of the Patmore version of Coleridge&rsquo;s
+      intentions as to the ultimate disclosure of the sex of Géraldine in a
+      review in the <i>Examiner</i>. The author was perhaps Hazlitt, but more
+      probably the editor himself, but whether Hazlitt or Hunt, he must have
+      been within the circle that found its rallying point at Highgate, and
+      consequently acquainted with the earliest forms of the poem. The review is
+      an unfavourable one, and Coleridge is told in it that he is the
+      dog-in-the-manger of literature, and that his poem is proof of the fact
+      that he can write better nonsense poetry than any man in England. The
+      writer is particularly wroth with what he considers the wilful
+      indefiniteness of the author, and in proof of a charge of a desire not to
+      let the public into the secret of the poem, and of a conscious endeavour
+      to mystify the reader, he deliberately accuses Coleridge of omitting one
+      line of the poem as it was written, which, if printed, would have proved
+      conclusively that Géraldine had seduced Christabel after getting drunk
+      with her,&mdash;for such sequel is implied if not openly stated. I told
+      Rossetti of this brutality of criticism, and he replied:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     As for the passage in <i>Christabel</i>, I am not sure we quite
+     understand each other. What I heard through the Patmores (a
+     complete mistake I am sure), was that Coleridge meant
+     Géraldine to prove to be a man bent on the seduction of
+     Christabel, and presumably effecting it. What I inferred (if
+     so) was that Coleridge had intended the line as in first
+     ed.: &ldquo;And she is to sleep with Christabel!&rdquo; as leading up
+     too nearly to what he meant to keep back for the present.
+     But the whole thing was a figment.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      What is assuredly not a figment is, that an idea, such as the elder
+      Patmore referred to, really did exist in the minds of Coleridge&rsquo;s
+      so-called friends, who after praising the poem beyond measure whilst it
+      was in manuscript, abused it beyond reason or decency when it was printed.
+      My settled conviction is that the <i>Examiner</i> criticism, and <i>not</i>
+      the sudden advent of the idea after the first part was written, was the
+      cause of Coleridge&rsquo;s adopting the correction which Rossetti mentions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rossetti called my attention to a letter by Lamb, about which he gathered
+      a good deal of interesting conjecture:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     There is (given in <i>Cottle</i>) an inconceivably sarcastic,
+     galling, and admirable letter from Lamb to Coleridge,
+     regarding which I never could learn how the deuce their
+     friendship recovered from it. Cottle says the only reason he
+     could ever trace for its being written lay in the three
+     parodied sonnets (one being <i>The House that Jack Built</i>)
+     which Coleridge published as a skit on the joint volume
+     brought out by himself, Lamb, and Lloyd. The whole thing was
+     always a mystery to me. But I have thought that the passage
+     on division between friends was not improbably written by
+     Coleridge on this occasion. Curiously enough (if so) Lamb,
+     who is said to have objected greatly to the idea of a second
+     part of <i>Christabel</i>, thought (on seeing it) that the
+     mistake was redeemed by this very passage. He <i>may</i> have
+     traced its meaning, though, of course, its beauty alone was
+     enough to make him say so.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      The three satirical sonnets which Rossetti refers to appear not only in <i>Cottle</i>
+      but in a note to the <i>Biographia Literaria</i> They were published first
+      under a fictitious name in <i>he Monthly Magazine</i> They must be
+      understood as almost wholly satirical of three distinct facets of
+      Coleridge&rsquo;s own manner, for even the sonnet in which occur the words
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     Eve saddens into night, {*}
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      has its counterpart in <i>The Songs of the Pixies</i>&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     Hence! thou lingerer, light!
+     Eve saddens into night,
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      and nearly all the phrases satirised are borrowed from Coleridge&rsquo;s own
+      poetry, not from that of Lamb or Lloyd. Nevertheless, Cottle was doubtless
+      right as to the fact that Lamb took offence at Coleridge&rsquo;s conduct on this
+      account, and Rossetti almost certainly made a good shot at the truth when
+      he attributed to the rupture thereupon ensuing the passage on severed
+      friendship. The sonnet on <i>The House that Jack Built</i> is the finest
+      of the three as a satire.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     * So in the Biographia Literaria; in Cottle, &ldquo;Eve darkens
+     into night.&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      Indeed, the figure used therein as an equipoise to &ldquo;the hindward charms&rdquo;
+       satirises perfectly the style of writing characterised by inflated thought
+      and imagery. It may be doubted if there exists anything more comical; but
+      each of the companion sonnets is good in its way. The egotism, which was a
+      constant reproach urged by <i>The Edinburgh</i> critics and by the
+      &ldquo;Cockney Poets&rdquo; against the poets of the Lake School, is splendidly hit
+      off in the first sonnet; the low and creeping meanness, or say,
+      simpleness, as contrasted with simplicity, of thought and expression,
+      which was stealing into Wordsworth&rsquo;s work at that period, is equally
+      cleverly ridiculed in the second sonnet. In reproducing the sonnets,
+      Coleridge claims only to have satirised types. As to Lamb&rsquo;s letter, it is,
+      indeed, hard to realise the fact that the &ldquo;gentle-hearted Charles,&rdquo; as
+      Coleridge himself named him, could write a galling letter to the &ldquo;inspired
+      charity-boy,&rdquo; for whom at an early period, and again at the end, he had so
+      profound a reverence. Every word is an outrage, and every syllable must
+      have hit Coleridge terribly. I called Rossetti&rsquo;s attention to the
+      surprising circumstance that in a letter written immediately after the
+      date of the one in question, Loyd tells Cottle that he has never known
+      Lamb (who is at the moment staying with him) so happy before as <i>just
+      then!</i> There can hardly be a doubt, however, that Rossetti&rsquo;s conjecture
+      is a just one as to the origin of the great passage in the second part of
+      <i>Christabel</i>. Touching that passage I called his attention to an
+      imperfection that I must have perceived, or thought I perceived long
+      before,&mdash;an imperfection of craftsmanship that had taken away
+      something of my absolute enjoyment of its many beauties. The passage ends&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     They parted, ne&rsquo;er to meet again!
+     But never either found another
+     To free the hollow heart from paining&mdash;
+     They stood aloof, the scars remaining,
+     Like cliffs which had been rent asunder;
+     A dreary sea now flows between,
+     But neither heat, nor frost, nor thunder,
+     Shall wholly do away, I ween,
+     The marks of that which once hath been.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      This is, it is needless to say, in almost every respect, finely felt, but
+      the words italicised appeared to display some insufficiency of poetic
+      vision. First, nothing but an earthquake would (speaking within limits of
+      human experience) unite the two sides of a ravine; and though <i>frost</i>
+      might bring them together temporarily, <i>heat and thunder</i> must be
+      powerless to make or to unmake the <i>marks</i> that showed the cliffs to
+      have once been one, and to have been violently torn apart. Next, <i>heat</i>
+      (supposing <i>frost</i> to be the root-conception) was obviously used
+      merely as a balancing phrase, and <i>thunder</i> simply as the inevitable
+      rhyme to <i>asunder</i>. I have not seen this matter alluded to, though it
+      may have been mentioned, and it is certainly not important enough to make
+      any serious deduction from the pleasure afforded by a passage that is in
+      other respects so rich in beauty as to be able to endure such modest
+      discounting. Rossetti replied:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     Your geological strictures on Coleridge&rsquo;s &ldquo;friendship&rdquo;
+      passage are but too just, and I believe quite new. But I
+     would fain think that this is &ldquo;to consider too nicely.&rdquo; I am
+     certainly willing to bear the obloquy of never having been
+     struck by what is nevertheless obvious enough. {*}... Lamb&rsquo;s
+     letter <i>is</i> a teazer. The three sonnets in <i>The Monthly
+     Magazine</i> were signed &ldquo;Nehemiah Higginbotham,&rdquo; and were
+     meant to banter good-humouredly the joint vol. issued by
+     Coleridge, Lamb, and Lloyd,&mdash;C. himself being, of course,
+     the most obviously ridiculed. I fancy you have really hit
+     the mark as regards Coleridge&rsquo;s epigram and Sir Vinegar
+     Sponge. He might have been worth two shillings after all....
+     <i>I</i> also remember noting Lloyd&rsquo;s assertion of Lamb&rsquo;s
+     exceptional happiness just after that letter. It is a
+     puzzling affair. However C. and Lamb got over it (for I
+     certainly believe they were friends later in life) no one
+     seems to have recorded. The second vol. of Cottle, after the
+     raciness of the first, is very disappointing.
+
+     * In a note on this passage, Canon Dixon writes: What is
+     meant is that in cliffs, actual cliffs, the action of these
+     agents, heat, cold, thunder even, might have an obliterating
+     power; but in the severance of friendship, there is nothing
+     (heat of nature, frost of time, thunder of accident or
+     surprise) that can wholly have the like effect.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      On one occasion Rossetti wrote, saying he had written a sonnet on
+      Coleridge, and I was curious to learn what note he struck in dealing with
+      so complex a subject. The keynote of a man&rsquo;s genius or character should be
+      struck in a poetic address to him, just as the expressional individuality
+      of a man&rsquo;s features (freed of the modifying or emphasising effects of
+      passing fashions of dress), should be reproduced in his portrait; but
+      Coleridge&rsquo;s mind had so many sides to it, and his character had such
+      varied aspects&mdash;from keen and beautiful sensibility to every form of
+      suffering, to almost utter disregard of the calls of domestic duty&mdash;that
+      it seemed difficult to think what kind of idea, consistent with the unity
+      of the sonnet and its simplicity of scheme, would call up a picture of the
+      entire man. It goes against the grain to hint, adoring the man as we must,
+      that Coleridge&rsquo;s personal character was anything less than one of
+      untarnished purity, and certainly the persons chiefly concerned in the
+      alleged neglect, Southey and his own family, have never joined in the
+      strictures commonly levelled against him: but whatever Coleridge&rsquo;s
+      personal ego may have been, his creative ego was assuredly not single in
+      kind or aim. He did some noble things late in life (instance the passage
+      on &ldquo;Youth and Age,&rdquo; and that on &ldquo;Work without Hope&rdquo;), but his poetic
+      genius seemed to desert him when Kant took possession of him as a gigantic
+      windmill to do battle with, and it is now hard to say which was the deeper
+      thing in him: the poetry to which he devoted the sunniest years of his
+      young life, or the philosophy which he firmly believed it to be the main
+      business of his later life to expound. In any discussion of the relative
+      claims of these two to the gratitude of the ages that follow, I found
+      Rossetti frankly took one side, and constantly said that the few unequal
+      poems Coleridge had left us, were a legacy more stimulating, solacing, and
+      enduring, than his philosophy could have been, even if he had perfected
+      that attempt of his to reconcile all learning and revelation, and if, when
+      perfected, the whole effort had not proved to be a work of supererogation.
+      I doubt if Rossetti quite knew what was meant by Coleridge&rsquo;s &ldquo;system,&rdquo; as
+      it was so frequently called, and I know that he could not be induced by
+      any eulogiums to do so much as look at the <i>Biographia Literaria</i>,
+      though once he listened whilst I read a chapter from it. He had certainly
+      little love of the German elements in Coleridge&rsquo;s later intellectual life,
+      and hence it is small matter for surprise that in his sonnet he chose for
+      treatment the more poetic side of Coleridge&rsquo;s genius. Nevertheless, I
+      think it remains an open question whether the philosophy of the author of
+      <i>The Ancient Mariner</i> was more influenced by his poetry, or his
+      poetry by his philosophy; for the philosophy is always tinged by the
+      mysticism of his poetry, and his poetry is always adumbrated by the
+      disposition, which afterwards become paramount, to dig beneath the surface
+      for problems of life and character, and for &ldquo;suggestions of the final
+      mystery of existence.&rdquo; I have heard Rossetti say that what came most of
+      all uppermost in Coleridge, was his wonderful intuitive knowledge and love
+      of the sea, whose billowy roll, and break, and sibilation, seemed echoed
+      in the very mechanism of his verse. Sleep, too, Rossetti thought, had
+      given up to Coleridge her utmost secrets; and perhaps it was partly due to
+      his own sad experience of the dread curse of insomnia, as well as to keen
+      susceptibility to poetic beauty, that tears so frequently filled his eyes,
+      and sobs rose to his throat when he recited the lines beginning
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     O sleep! it is a gentle thing&mdash;
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      affirming, meantime, that nothing so simple and touching had ever been
+      written on the subject. As to the sonnet, he wrote:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     About Coleridge (whom I only view as a poet, his other
+     aspects being to my apprehension mere bogies) I conceive the
+     leading point about his work is its human love, and the
+     leading point about his career, the sad fact of how little
+     of it was devoted to that work. These are the points made in
+     my sonnet, and the last is such as I (alas!) can sympathise
+     with, though what has excluded more poetry with me
+     (<i>mountains</i> of it I don&rsquo;t want to heap) has chiefly been
+     livelihood necessity. I &lsquo;ll copy the sonnet on opposite
+     page, only I &lsquo;d rather you kept it to yourself. <i>Five</i> years
+     of <i>good</i> poetry is too long a tether to give his Muse, I
+     know.
+
+     His Soul fared forth (as from the deep home-grove
+          The father Songster plies the hour-long quest)
+          To feed his soul-brood hungering in the nest;
+     But his warm Heart, the mother-bird above
+     Their callow fledgling progeny still hove
+          With tented roof of wings and fostering breast
+          Till the Soul fed the soul-brood. Richly blest
+     From Heaven their growth, whose food was Human Love.
+
+     Tet ah! Like desert pools that shew the stars
+          Once in long leagues&mdash;even such the scarce-snatched hours
+          Which deepening pain left to his lordliest powers:&mdash;
+     Heaven lost through spider-trammelled prison-bars!
+          Five years, from seventy saved! yet kindling skies
+          Own them, a beacon to our centuries.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      As a minor point I called Rossetti&rsquo;s attention to the fact that Coleridge
+      lived to be scarcely more than sixty, and that his poetic career really
+      extended over six good years; and hence the thirteenth line was amended to
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+          Six years from sixty saved.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      I doubted if &ldquo;deepening pain&rdquo; could be charged with the whole burden of
+      Coleridge&rsquo;s constitutional procrastination, and to this objection Rossetti
+      replied:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     Line eleven in my first reading was &ldquo;deepening <i>sloth</i>;&rdquo; but
+     it seemed harsh&mdash;and&mdash;damn it all! much too like the spirit
+     of Banquo!
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Before Coleridge, however, as to warmth of admiration, and before him also
+      as to date of influence, Keats was Rossetti&rsquo;s favourite among modern
+      English poets. Our friend never tired of writing or talking about Keats,
+      and never wearied of the society of any one who could generate a fresh
+      thought concerning him. But his was a robust and masculine admiration,
+      having nothing in common with the effeminate extra-affectionateness that
+      has of late been so much ridiculed. His letters now to be quoted shall
+      speak for themselves as to the qualities in Keats whereon Rossetti&rsquo;s
+      appreciation of him was founded: but I may say in general terms that it
+      was not so much the wealth of expression in the author of <i>Endymion</i>
+      which attracted the author of <i>Rose Mary</i> as the perfect hold of the
+      supernatural which is seen in <i>La Belle Dame Sans Merci</i> and in the
+      fragment of the <i>Eve of St. Mark</i>. At the time of our correspondence,
+      I was engaged upon an essay on Keats, and <i>à propos</i> of this Rossetti
+      wrote:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     I shall take pleasure in reading your Keats article when
+     ready. He was, among all his contemporaries who established
+     their names, the one true heir of Shakspeare. Another
+     (unestablished then, but partly revived since) was Charles
+     Wells. Did you ever read his splendid dramatic poem <i>Joseph
+     and his Brethren?</i>
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      In this connexion, as a better opportunity may not arise, I take occasion
+      to tell briefly the story of the revival of Wells. The facts to be related
+      were communicated to me by Rossetti in conversation years after the date
+      of the letter in which this first allusion to the subject was made. As a
+      boy, Rossetti&rsquo;s chief pleasure was to ransack old book-stalls, and the
+      catalogues of the British Museum, for forgotten works in the bye-ways of
+      English poetry. In this pursuit he became acquainted with nearly every
+      curiosity of modern poetic literature, and many were the amusing stories
+      he used to tell at that time, and in after life, of the titles and
+      contents of the literary oddities he unearthed. If you chanced at any
+      moment to alight upon any obscure book particularly curious from its
+      pretentiousness and pomposity, from the audacity of its claim, or the
+      obscurity and absurdity of its writing, you might be sure that Rossetti
+      would prove familiar with it, and be able to recapitulate with infinite
+      zest its salient features; but if you happened to drop upon ever so
+      interesting an edition of a book (not of verse) which you supposed to be
+      known to many a reader, the chances were at least equal that Rossetti
+      would prove to know nothing of it but its name. In poring over the
+      forgotten pages of the poetry of the beginning of the century, Rossetti,
+      whilst still a boy, met with the scriptural drama of <i>Joseph and his
+      Brethren</i>. He told me the title did not much attract him, but he
+      resolved to glance at the contents, and with that swiftness of insight
+      which throughout life distinguished him, he instantly perceived its great
+      qualities. I think he said he then wrote a letter on the subject to one of
+      the current literary journals, probably <i>The Literary Gazette</i>, and
+      by this means came into correspondence with Charles Wells himself. Rather
+      later a relative of Wells&rsquo;s sought out the young enthusiast in London,
+      intending to solicit his aid in an attempt to induce a publisher to
+      undertake a reprint, but in any endeavours to this end he must have
+      failed. For many years a copy of the poem, left by the author&rsquo;s request at
+      Rossetti&rsquo;s lodgings, lay there untouched, and meantime the growing
+      reputation of the young painter brought about certain removals from
+      Blackfriars Bridge to other chambers, and afterwards to the house in
+      Cheyne Walk. In the course of these changes the copy got hidden away, and
+      it was not until numerous applications for it had been made that it was at
+      length ferreted forth from the chaos of some similar volumes huddled
+      together in a corner of the studio. Full of remorse for having so long
+      abandoned a laudable project, Rossetti then took up afresh the cause of
+      the neglected poem, and enlisted Mr. Swinburne&rsquo;s interest so warmly as to
+      prevail with him to use his influence to secure its publication. This
+      failed however; but in <i>The Athenæum</i> of April 8, 1876, appeared Mr.
+      Watts&rsquo;s elaborate account of Wells and the poem and its vicissitudes,
+      whereupon Messrs. Chatto and Windus offered to take the risk of publishing
+      it, and the poem went forth with the noble commendatory essay of the young
+      author of <i>Atalanta</i>, whose reputation was already almost at its
+      height, though it lacked (doubtless from a touch of his constitutional
+      procrastination) the appreciative comment of the discerning critic who
+      first discovered it. To return to the Keats correspondence:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     I am truly delighted to hear how young you are. In original
+     work, a man does some of his best things by your time of
+     life, though he only finds it out in a rage much later, at
+     some date when he expected to know no longer that he had
+     ever done them. Keats hardly died so much too early&mdash;not at
+     all if there had been any danger of his taking to the modern
+     habit eventually&mdash;treating material as product, and shooting
+     it all out as it comes. Of course, however, he wouldn&rsquo;t; he
+     was getting always choicer and simpler, and my favourite
+     piece in his works is <i>La Belle Dame Sans Merci</i>&mdash;I suppose
+     about his last. As to Shelley, it is really a mercy that he
+     has not been hatching yearly universes till now. He might, I
+     suppose; for his friend Trelawny still walks the earth
+     without great-coat, stockings, or underclothing, this
+     Christmas (1879). In criticism, matters are different, as to
+     seasons of production.... I am writing hurriedly and
+     horribly in every sense. Write on the subject again and I&rsquo;ll
+     try to answer better. All greetings to you.
+
+     P.S.&mdash;I think your reference to Keats new, and on a high
+     level It calls back to my mind an adaptation of his self-
+     chosen epitaph which I made in my very earliest days of
+     boyish rhyming, when I was rather proud to be as cockney as
+     Keats <i>could</i> be. Here it is,&mdash;
+
+          Through one, years since damned and forgot
+               Who stabbed backs by the Quarter,
+          Here lieth one who, while Time&rsquo;s stream
+               Still runs, as God hath taught her,
+          Bearing man&rsquo;s fame to men, hath writ
+               His name upon that water.
+
+     Well, the rhyme is not so bad as Keats&rsquo;s
+
+                     Ear
+          Of Goddess of Theræa!&mdash;
+
+     nor (tell it not in Gath!) as&mdash;-
+
+          I wove a crown before her
+          For her I love so dearly,
+          A garland for Lenora!
+
+     Is it possible the laurel crown should now hide a venerated
+     and impeccable ear which was once the ear of a cockney?
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      This letter was written in 1879, and the opening clauses of it were no
+      doubt penned under the impression, then strong on Rossetti&rsquo;s mind, that
+      his first volume of poems would prove to be his only one; but when, within
+      two years afterwards he completed <i>Rose Mary</i>, and wrote <i>The
+      King&rsquo;s Tragedy</i> and <i>The White Ship</i>, this accession of material
+      dissipated the notion that a man does much his best work before
+      twenty-five. It can hardly escape the reader that though Rossetti&rsquo;s
+      earlier volume displayed a surprising maturity, the subsequent one
+      exhibited as a whole infinitely more power and feeling, range of sympathy,
+      and knowledge of life. The poet&rsquo;s dramatic instinct developed enormously
+      in the interval between the periods of the two books, and, being conscious
+      of this, Rossetti used to say in his later years that he would never again
+      write poems as from his own person.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     You say an excellent thing [he writes] when you ask, &ldquo;Where
+     can we look for more poetry per page than Keats furnishes?&rdquo;
+      It is strange that there is not yet one complete edition of
+     him. {*} No doubt the desideratum (so far as care and
+     exhaustiveness go), will be supplied when
+
+     Forman&rsquo;s edition appears. He is a good appreciator too, as I
+     have reason to say. You will think it strange that I have
+     not seen the Keats love-letters, but I mean to do so.
+     However, I am told they add nothing to one&rsquo;s idea of his
+     epistolary powers.... I hear sometimes from Buxton Forman,
+     and was sending him the other day an extract (from a book
+     called <i>The Unseen World</i>) which doubtless bears on the
+     superstition which Keats intended to develope in his lovely
+     <i>Eve of St. Mark</i>&mdash;a fragment which seems to me to rank with
+     <i>La Belle Dame Sans Merci</i>, as a clear advance in direct
+     simplicity.... You ought to have my recent Keats sonnet, so
+     I send it. Your own plan, for one on the same subject, seems
+     to me most beautiful. Do it at once. You will see that mine
+     is again concerned with the epitaph, and perhaps my reviving
+     the latter in writing you was the cause of the sonnet.
+
+     * Rossetti afterwards admitted in conversation that the
+     Aldine Edition seemed complete, though I think he did not
+     approve of the chronological arrangement therein adopted; at
+     least he thought that arrangement had many serious
+     disadvantages.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Rossetti formed a very different opinion of Keats&rsquo;s love-letters, when, a
+      year later, he came to read them. At first he shared the general view that
+      letters so <i>intimes</i> should never have been made public. Afterwards
+      the book had irresistible charms for him, from the first page whereon his
+      old friend, Mr. Bell Scott, has vigorously etched Severn&rsquo;s drawing of the
+      once redundant locks of rich hair, dank and matted over the forehead cold
+      with the death-dew, down to the last line of the letterpress. He thought
+      Mr. Forman&rsquo;s work admirably done, and as for the letters themselves, he
+      believed they placed Keats indisputably among the highest masters of
+      English epistolary style. He considered that all Keats&rsquo;s letters proved
+      him to be no weakling, and that whatever walk he had chosen he must have
+      been a master. He seemed particularly struck with the apparently intuitive
+      perception of Shakspeare&rsquo;s subtlest meanings, which certain of the letters
+      display. In a note he said:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     Forman gave me a copy of Keats&rsquo;s letters to Fanny Brawne.
+     The silhouette given of the lady is sadly disenchanting, and
+     may be the strongest proof existing of how much a man may
+     know about abstract Beauty without having an artist&rsquo;s eye
+     for the outside of it.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      The Keats sonnet, as first shown to me, ran as follows:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     The weltering London ways where children weep,&mdash;
+        Where girls whom none call maidens laugh, where gain,
+        Hurrying men&rsquo;s steps, is yet by loss o&rsquo;erta&rsquo;en:&mdash;
+     The bright Castalian brink and Latinos&rsquo; steep:&mdash;
+     Such were his paths, till deeper and more deep,
+        He trod the sands of Lethe; and long pain,
+        Weary with labour spurned and love found vain,
+     In dead Rome&rsquo;s sheltering shadow wrapped his sleep.
+
+     O pang-dowered Poet, whose reverberant lips
+     And heart-strung lyre awoke the moon&rsquo;s eclipse,&mdash;
+        Thou whom the daisies glory in growing o&rsquo;er,&mdash;
+     Their fragrance clings around thy name, not writ,
+     But rumour&rsquo;d in water, while the fame of it
+        Along Time&rsquo;s flood goes echoing evermore.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      I need hardly say that this sonnet seemed to me extremely noble in
+      sentiment, and in music a glorious volume of sound. I felt, however, that
+      it would be urged against it that it did not strike the keynote of the
+      genius of Keats; that it would be said that in all the particulars in
+      which Rossetti had truthfully and pathetically described London, Keats was
+      in rather than of it; and that it would be affirmed that Keats lived in a
+      fairy world of his own inventing, caring little for the storm and stress
+      of London life. On the other hand, I knew it could be replied that Keats
+      was not indifferent to the misery of city life; that it bore heavily upon
+      him; that it came out powerfully and very sadly in his <i>Ode to the
+      Nightingale</i>, and that it may have been from sheer torture in the
+      contemplation of it that he fled away to a poetic world of his own
+      creating. Moreover, Rossetti&rsquo;s sonnet touched the life, rather than the
+      genius, of Keats, and of this it struck the keynote in the opening lines.
+      I ventured to think that the second and third lines wanted a little
+      clarifying in the relation in which they stood. They seemed to be a sudden
+      focussing of the laughter and weeping previously mentioned, rather than,
+      what they were meant to be, a natural and necessary equipoise showing the
+      inner life of Keats as contrasted with his outer life. To such an
+      objection as this, Rossetti said:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     I am rather aghast for my own lucidity when I read what you
+     say as to the first quatrain of my Keats sonnet. However, I
+     always take these misconceptions as warnings to the Muse,
+     and may probably alter the opening as below:
+
+          The weltering London ways where children weep
+          And girls whom none call maidens laugh,&mdash;strange road,
+          Miring his outward steps who inly trode
+          The bright Castalian brink and Latinos&rsquo; steep:&mdash;
+          Even such his life&rsquo;s cross-paths: till deathly deep
+          He toiled through sands of Lethe, etc.
+          I &lsquo;ll say more anent Keats anon.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      About the period of this portion of the correspondence (1880) I was
+      engaged reading up old periodicals dating from 1816 to 1822. My purpose
+      was to get at first-hand all available data relative to the life of Keats.
+      I thought I met with a good deal of fresh material, and as the result of
+      my reading I believed myself able to correct a few errors as to facts into
+      which previous writers on the subject had fallen. Two things at least I
+      realised&mdash;first, that Keats&rsquo;s poetic gift developed very rapidly,
+      more rapidly perhaps than that of Shelley; and, next, that Keats received
+      vastly more attention and appreciation in his day than is commonly
+      supposed. I found it was quite a blunder to say that the first volume of
+      miscellaneous poems fell flat. Lord Houghton says in error that the book
+      did not so much as seem to signal the advent of a new Cockney poet! It is
+      a fact, however, that this very book, in conjunction with one of Shelley&rsquo;s
+      and one of Hunt&rsquo;s, all published 1816-17, gave rise to the name &ldquo;The
+      Cockney School of Poets,&rdquo; which was invented by the writer signing &ldquo;Z.&rdquo; in
+      <i>Blackwood</i> in the early part of 1818. Nor had Keats to wait for the
+      publication of the volume before attaining to some poetic distinction. At
+      the close of 1816, an article, under the head of &ldquo;Young Poets,&rdquo; appeared
+      in <i>The Examiner</i>, and in this both Shelley and Keats were dealt
+      with. Then <i>The Quarterly</i> contained allusions to him, though not by
+      name, in reviews of Leigh Hunt&rsquo;s work, and <i>Blackwood</i> mentioned him
+      very frequently in all sorts of places as &ldquo;Johnny Keats&rdquo;&mdash;all this
+      (or much of it) before he published anything except occasional sonnets and
+      other fugitive poems in <i>The Examiner</i> and elsewhere. And then when
+      <i>Endymion</i> appeared it was abundantly reviewed. <i>The Edinburgh</i>
+      reviewers had nothing on it (the book cannot have been sent to them, for
+      in 1820 they say they have only just met with it), and I could not find
+      anything in the way of <i>original</i> criticism in <i>The Examiner</i>;
+      but many provincial papers (in Manchester, Exeter, and elsewhere) and some
+      metropolitan papers retorted on <i>The Quarterly</i>. All this, however,
+      does not disturb the impression which (Lord Houghton and Mr. W. M.
+      Rossetti notwithstanding) I have been from the first compelled to
+      entertain, namely, that &ldquo;labour spurned&rdquo; did more than all else to kill
+      Keats <i>in 1821</i>.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Most men who rightly know the workings of their own minds will agree that
+      an adverse criticism rankles longer than a flattering notice soothes; and
+      though it be shown that Keats in 1820 was comparatively indifferent to the
+      praise of <i>The Edinburgh</i>, it cannot follow that in 1818 he must have
+      been superior to the blame of <i>The Quarterly</i>. It is difficult to see
+      why a man may not be keenly sensitive to what the world says about him,
+      and yet retain all proper manliness as a part of his literary character.
+      Surely it was from the mistaken impression that this could not be, and
+      that an admission of extreme sensitiveness to criticism exposed Keats to a
+      charge of effeminacy that Lord Houghton attempted to prove, against the
+      evidence of all immediate friends, against the publisher&rsquo;s note to <i>Hyperion</i>,
+      against the | poet&rsquo;s self-chosen epitaph, and against all but one or two
+      of the most self-contained of his letters, that the soul of Keats was so
+      far from being &ldquo;snuffed out by an article,&rdquo; that it was more than
+      ordinarily impervious to hostile comment, even when it came in the shape
+      of rancorous abuse. In all discussion of the effects produced upon Keats
+      by the reviews in <i>Blackwood and The Quarterly</i>, let it be
+      remembered, first, that having wellnigh exhausted his small patrimony,
+      Keats was to be dependent upon literature for his future subsistence;
+      next, that Leigh Hunt attempted no defence of Keats when the bread was
+      being taken out of his mouth, and that Keats felt this neglect and
+      remarked upon it in a letter in which he further cast some doubt upon the
+      purity of Hunt&rsquo;s friendship. Hunt, after Keats&rsquo;s death, said in reference
+      to this: &ldquo;Had he but given me the hint!&rdquo; The <i>hint</i>, forsooth!
+      Moreover, I can find no sort of allusion in <i>The Examiner</i> for 1821,
+      to the death of Keats. I told Rossetti that by the reading of the
+      periodicals of the time, I formed a poor opinion of Hunt. Previously I was
+      willing to believe in his unswerving loyalty to the much greater men who
+      were his friends, but even that poor confidence in him must perforce be
+      shaken when one finds him silent at a moment when Keats most needs his
+      voice, and abusive when Coleridge is a common subject of ridicule. It was
+      all very well for Hunt to glorify himself in the borrowed splendour of
+      Keats&rsquo;s established fame when the poet was twenty years dead, and to make
+      much of his intimacy with Coleridge after the homage of two generations
+      had been offered him, but I know of no instance (unless in the case of
+      Shelley) in which Hunt stood by his friends in the winter of their lives,
+      and gave them that journalistic support which was, poor man, the only
+      thing he ever had to give, whatever he might take. I have, however, heard
+      Mr. H. A. Bright (one of Hawthorne&rsquo;s intimate friends in England) say that
+      no man here impressed the American romancer so much as Hunt for good
+      qualities, both of heart and head. But what I have stated above, I believe
+      to be facts; and I have gathered them at first-hand, and by the light of
+      them I do not hesitate to say that there is no reason to believe that it
+      was Keats&rsquo;s illness alone that caused him to regard Hunt&rsquo;s friendship with
+      suspicion. It is true, however, that when one reads Hunt&rsquo;s letter to
+      Severn at Borne, one feels that he must be forgiven. On this pregnant
+      subject Rossetti wrote:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     Thanks for yours received to-day, and for all you say with
+     so much more kind solicitousness than the matter deserved,
+     about the opening of the Keats sonnet. I have now realized
+     that the new form is a gain in every way; and am therefore
+     glad that, though arising in accident, I was led to make the
+     change.... All you say of Keats shows that you have been
+     reading up the subject with good results. I fancy it would
+     hardly be desirable to add the sonnets you speak of (as
+     being worthless) at this date, though they might be valuable
+     for quotation as to the course of his mental and physical
+     state. I do not myself think that any poems now included
+     should be removed, but the reckless and tasteless plan of
+     the gatherings hitherto (in which the <i>Nightingale</i> and other
+     such masterpieces are jostled indiscriminately, with such
+     wretched juvenile trash as <i>Lines to some Ladies on
+     receiving a Shelly etc</i>), should of course be amended, and
+     the rubbish (of which there is a fair quantity), removed to
+     a &ldquo;Juvenile&rdquo; or other such section. It is a curious fact
+     that among a poet&rsquo;s early writings, some will really be
+     juvenile in this sense, while others, written at the same
+     time, will perhaps take rank at last with his best efforts.
+     This, however, was not substantially the case with Keats.
+
+     As to Leigh Hunt&rsquo;s friendship for Keats, I think the points
+     you mention look equivocal; but Hunt was a many-laboured and
+     much belaboured man, and as much allowance as may be made on
+     this score is perhaps due to him&mdash;no more than that much.
+     His own powers stand high in various ways&mdash;poetically higher
+     perhaps than is I at present admitted, despite his
+     detestable flutter and airiness for the most part. But
+     assuredly by no means could he have stood so high in the
+     long-run, as by a loud and earnest defence of Keats. Perhaps
+     the best excuse for him is the remaining possibility of an
+     idea on his part, that any defence coming from one who had
+     himself so many powerful enemies might seem to Keats
+     rather to! damage than improve his position.
+
+     I have this minute (at last) read the first instalment of
+     your Keats paper, and return it.... One of the most marked
+     points in the early recognition of Keats&rsquo;s claims, as
+     compared with the recognition given to other poets, is the
+     fact that he was the only one who secured almost at once a
+     <i>great</i> poet as a close and obvious imitator&mdash;viz., Hood,
+     whose first volume is more identical with Keats&rsquo;s work than
+     could be said of any other similar parallel. You quote some
+     of Keats&rsquo;s sayings. One of the most characteristic I think
+     is in a letter to Haydon:&mdash;
+
+     &ldquo;I value more the privilege of seeing great things in
+     loneliness, than the fame of a prophet.&rdquo; I had not in mind
+     the quotations you give from Keats as bearing on the poetic
+     (or prophetic) mission of &ldquo;doing good.&rdquo; I must say that I
+     should not have thought a longer career thrown away upon him
+     (as you intimate) if he had continued to the age of anything
+     only to give joy. Nor would he ever have done any &ldquo;good&rdquo; at
+     all. Shelley did good, and perhaps some harm with it.
+     Keats&rsquo;s joy was after all a flawless gift.
+
+     Keats wrote to Shelley:&mdash;&ldquo;You, I am sure, will forgive me
+     for sincerely remarking that you might curb your magnanimity
+     and be more of an artist, and load every rift of your
+     subject with ore.&rdquo; Cheeky!&mdash;but not so much amiss. Poetry,
+     and no prophecy however, must come of that mood,&mdash;and no
+     pulpit would have held Keats&rsquo;s wings,&mdash;the body and mind
+     together were not heavy enough for a counterweight.... Did
+     you ever meet with
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      ENDIMION<br /><br /> AN EXCELLENT FANCY FIRST COMPOSED IN FRENCH<br /><br />
+      By Monsieur GOMBAULD<br /><br /> AND NOW ELEGANTLY INTERPRETED<br /><br /> By
+      RICHARD HURST, Gentleman<br /><br /> 1639.<br /><br /> ?
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     It has very finely engraved plates of the late Flemish type.
+     There is a poem of Vaughan&rsquo;s on Gombauld&rsquo;s <i>Endimion</i>, which
+     might make one think it more fascinating than it really is.
+     Though rather prolix, however, it has attractions as a
+     somewhat devious romantic treatment of the subject. The
+     little book is one of the first I remember in this world,
+     and I used to dip into it again and again as a child, but
+     never yet read it through. I still possess it. I dare say it
+     is not easily met with, and should suppose Keats had
+     probably never seen it. If he had, he might really have
+     taken a hint or two for his scheme, which is hardly so clear
+     even as Gombauld&rsquo;s, though its endless digressions teem with
+     beauty.... I do not think you would benefit at all by seeing
+     Gombauld&rsquo;s <i>Endimion</i>. Vaughan&rsquo;s poem on it might be worth
+     quoting as showing what attention the subject had received
+     before Keats. I have the poem in Gilfillan&rsquo;s <i>Less-Known
+     Poets</i>.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Rossetti took a great interest in the fund started for the relief of Mme.
+      de Llanos, Keats&rsquo;s sister, whose circumstances were seriously reduced. He
+      wrote:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     By the bye, I don&rsquo;t know whether the subscription for
+     Keats&rsquo;s old and only surviving sister (Madme de Llanos) has
+     been at all ventilated in Liverpool. It flags sorely. Do you
+     think there would be any chance in your neighbourhood? If
+     so, prospectuses, etc., could be sent.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      I did not view the prospect of subscriptions as very hopeful, and so
+      conceived the idea of a lecture in the interests of the fund. On this
+      project, Rossetti wrote:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     I enclose prospectuses as to the Keats subscription. I may
+     say that I did not know the list would accompany them&mdash;still
+     less that contributions would be so low generally as to
+     leave me near the head of the list&mdash;an unenviable sort of
+     parade.... My own opinion about the lecture question is
+     this. You know best whether such a lecture could be turned
+     to the purposes of your Keats article (now in progress), or
+     rather be so much deduction from the freshness of its
+     resources: and this should be the <i>absolute</i> test of its
+     being done or not done.... I think, if it can be done
+     without impoverishing your materials, the method of getting
+     Lord Houghton to preside and so raising as much from it as
+     possible is doubtless the right one. Of course I view it as
+     far more hopeful than mere distribution of any number of
+     prospectuses.... Even £25 would be a great contribution to
+     the fund.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      The lecture project was not found feasible, and hence it was abandoned.
+      Meantime the kindness of friends enabled me to add to the list a good
+      number of subscriptions, but feeling scarcely satisfied with any such
+      success as I might be likely to have in that direction, I opened, by the
+      help of a friend, a correspondence with Lord Houghton with a view to
+      inducing him to apply for a pension for the lady. It then transpired that
+      Lord Houghton had already applied to Lord Beaconsfield for a pension for
+      Mme. Llanos, and would doubtless have got it, had not Mr. Buxton Forman
+      applied for a grant from the Royal Bounty, which was easier to give. I
+      told Rossetti of this fact and he said:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     I am not surprised about Lord H., and feel sure it is a pity
+     he was not left to try Beaconsfield, but I judge the
+     projectors on the other side knew nothing of his intentions.
+     However, <i>I</i> was in no way a projector.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      In the end Lord Houghton repeated to Mr. Gladstone the application he had
+      made to Lord Beaconsfield, and succeeded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rossetti must have been among the earliest admirers of Keats. I remarked
+      on one occasion that it was very natural that Lord Houghton should
+      consider himself in a sense the first among men now living to champion the
+      poet and establish his name, and Rossetti admitted that this was so, and
+      was ungrudging in his tribute to Lord Houghton&rsquo;s services towards the
+      better appreciation of Keats; but he contended, nevertheless, that he had
+      himself been one of the first writers of the generation succeeding the
+      poet&rsquo;s own to admire and uphold him, and that this was at a time when it
+      made demand of some courage to class him among the immortals, when an
+      original edition of any of his books could be bought for sixpence on a
+      bookstall, and when only Leigh Hunt, Cowden Clarke, Hood, Benjamin Haydon,
+      and perhaps a few others, were still living of those who recognised his
+      great gifts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0006" id="link2HCH0006">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER VI.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Rossetti&rsquo;s primary interest in Chatterton dates back to an early period,
+      as I find by the date, 1848, in the copy he possessed of the poet&rsquo;s works.
+      But throughout a long interval he neglected Chatterton, and it was not
+      until his friend Theodore Watts, who had made Chatterton a special study,
+      had undertaken to select from and write upon him in Ward&rsquo;s <i>English
+      Poets</i>, that he revived his old acquaintance. Whatever Rossetti did he
+      did thoroughly, and hence he became as intimate perhaps with the Rowley
+      antiques as any other man had ever been. His letters written during the
+      course of his Chatterton researches must, I think, prove extremely
+      interesting. He says:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     Glancing at your Keats MS., I notice (in a series of
+     parallels) the names of Marlowe and Savage; but not the less
+     &ldquo;marvellous&rdquo; than absolutely miraculous Chatterton. Are you
+     up in his work? He is in the very first rank! Theod. Watts
+     is &ldquo;doing him&rdquo; for the new selection of poets by Arnold and
+     Ward, and I have contributed a sonnet to Watts&rsquo;s article....
+     I assure you Chatterton&rsquo;s name <i>must</i> come in somewhere in
+     the parallel passage. He was as great as any English poet
+     whatever, and might absolutely, had he lived, have proved
+     the only man in England&rsquo;s theatre of imagination who could
+     have bandied parts with Shakspeare. The best way of getting
+     at him is in Skeat&rsquo;s Aldine edition (G. Bell and Co., 1875).
+     Read him carefully, and you will find his acknowledged work
+     essentially as powerful as his antiques, though less evenly
+     successful&mdash;the Rowley work having been produced in Bristol
+     leisure, however indigent, and the modern poetry in the very
+     fangs of London struggle. Strong derivative points are to be
+     found in Keats and Coleridge from the study of Chatterton. I
+     feel much inclined to send the sonnet (on Chatterton) as you
+     wish, but really think it is better not to ventilate these
+     things till in print. I have since written one on Blake. Not
+     to know Chatterton is to be ignorant of the <i>true</i> day-
+     spring of modern romantic poetry.... I believe the 3d vol.
+     of Ward&rsquo;s <i>Selections of English Poetry</i>, for which Watts is
+     selecting from Chatterton, will soon be out,&mdash;but these
+     excerpts are very brief, as are the notices. The rendering
+     from the Rowley antique will be much better than anything
+     formerly done. Skeat is a thorough philologist, but no hand
+     at all when substitution becomes unavoidable in the text....
+     Read the <i>Ballad of Charity, the Eclogues, the songs in
+     Ælla</i>, as a first taste. Among the modern poems <i>Narva and
+     Mared</i>, and the other <i>African Eclogues</i>. These are alone in
+     that section <i>poetry absolute</i>, and though they are very
+     unequal, it has been most truly said by Malone that to throw
+     the <i>African Eclogues</i> into the Rowley dialect would be at
+     once a satisfactory key to the question whether Chatterton
+     showed in his own person the same powers as in the person of
+     Rowley. Among the satirical and light modern pieces there
+     are many of a first-. rate order, though generally unequal.
+     Perfect specimens, however, are <i>The Revenge, a Burletta,
+     Skeat, vol i; Verses to a Lady, p. 84; Journal Sixth, p. 33;
+     The Prophecy, p. 193; and opening of Fragment, p. 132.</i> I
+     would advise you to consult the original text.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Watts, it seems, with all his admiration of Chatterton, finding that
+      he could not go to Rossetti&rsquo;s length in comparing him with Shakspeare, did
+      not in the result consider the sonnet on Chatterton referred to in the
+      foregoing letter, and given below, suitable to be embodied in his essay:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     With Shakspeare&rsquo;s manhood at a boy&rsquo;s wild heart,&mdash;
+        Through Hamlet&rsquo;s doubt to Shakspeare near allied,
+        And kin to Milton through his Satan&rsquo;s pride,&mdash;
+     At Death&rsquo;s sole door he stooped, and craved a dart;
+     And to the dear new bower of England&rsquo;s art,&mdash;
+        Even to that shrine Time else had deified,
+        The unuttered heart that soared against his side,&mdash;
+     Drove the fell point, and smote life&rsquo;s seals apart.
+
+     Thy nested home-loves, noble Chatterton,
+        The angel-trodden stair thy soul could trace
+        Up Redcliffe&rsquo;s spire; and in the world&rsquo;s armed space
+     Thy gallant sword-play:&mdash;these to many an one
+     Are sweet for ever; as thy grave unknown,
+        And love-dream of thine unrecorded face.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Some mention was made in this connection of Rossetti&rsquo;s young connection,
+      Oliver Madox Brown, who wrote <i>Gabriel Denver</i> (otherwise <i>The
+      Black Swan</i>) at seventeen years of age. I mentioned the indiscreet
+      remark of a friend who said that Oliver had enough genius to stock a good
+      few Chattertons, and thereupon Rossetti sent me the following outburst:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     You must take care to be on the right tack about Chatterton.
+     I am very glad to find the gifted Oliver M. B. already an
+     embryo classic, as I always said he would be; but those who
+     compare net results in such cases as his and Chatterton&rsquo;s
+     cannot know what criticism means. The nett results of
+     advancing epochs, however permanent on accumulated
+     foundation-work, are the poorest of all tests as to relative
+     values. Oliver was the product of the most teeming hot-beds
+     of art and literature, and even of compulsory addiction to
+     the art of painting, in which nevertheless he was rapidly
+     becoming as much a proficient as in literature. What he
+     would have been if, like the ardent and heroic Chatterton,
+     he had had to fight a single-handed battle for art and bread
+     together against merciless mediocrity in high places,&mdash;what
+     he would <i>then</i> have become, I cannot in the least
+     calculate; but we know what Chatterton became. Moreover, C.
+     at his death, was two years younger than Oliver&mdash;a whole
+     lifetime of advancement at that age frequently&mdash;indeed
+     always I believe in leading cases. There are few indeed whom
+     the facile enthusiasm for contemporary models does not
+     deaden to the truly balanced claims of successful efforts in
+     art. However, look at Watts&rsquo;s remodelled extracts when the
+     vol comes out, and also at what he says in detail as to
+     Chatterton, Coleridge, and Keats.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Of course Rossetti was right in what he said of comparative criticism when
+      brought to bear in such cases as those of Chatterton and Oliver Madox
+      Brown. Net results are certainly the poorest tests of relative values
+      where the work done belongs to periods of development. We cannot, however,
+      see or know any man except through and in his work, and net results must
+      usually be accepted as the only concrete foundation for judging of the
+      quality of his genius. Such judgment will always be influenced,
+      nevertheless, by considerations such as Rossetti mentions. Touching
+      Chatterton&rsquo;s development, it were hardly rash to say that it appears
+      incredible that the <i>African Eclogues</i> should have been written by a
+      boy of seventeen, and, in judging of their place in poetry, one is apt to
+      be influenced by one&rsquo;s first feeling of amazement. Is it possible that the
+      Rowley poems may owe much of their present distinction to the early
+      astonishment that a boy should have written them, albeit they have great
+      intrinsic excellencies such as may insure them a high place when the
+      romance, intertwined with their history, has been long forgotten? But
+      Chatterton is more talked of than read, and this has been so from the
+      first. The antiques are all but unknown; certain of the acknowledged poems
+      are remembered, and regarded as fervid and vigorous, and many of the
+      lesser pieces are thought slight, weak, and valueless. People do not
+      measure the poorer things in Chatterton with his time and opportunities,
+      or they would see only amazing strength and knowledge of the world in all
+      he did. Those lesser pieces were many of them dashed off to answer the
+      calls of necessity, to flatter the egotism of a troublesome friend, or to
+      wile away a moment of vacancy. Certainly they must not be set against his
+      best efforts. As for Chatterton&rsquo;s life, the tragedy of it is perhaps the
+      most moving example of what Coleridge might have termed the material
+      pathetic. Pathetic, however, as his life was, and marvellous as was his
+      genius, I miss in him the note of personal purity and majesty of
+      character. I told Rossetti that, in my view, Chatterton lacked sincerity,
+      and on this point he wrote:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     I must protest finally about Chatterton, that he lacks
+     nothing because lacking the gradual growth of the emotional
+     in literature which becomes evident in Keats&mdash;still less its
+     excess, which would of course have been pruned, in Oliver.
+     The finest of the Rowley poems&mdash;<i>Eclogues, Ballad of
+     Charity, etc</i>., rank absolutely with the finest poetry in
+     the language, and gain (not lose) by moderation. As to what
+     you say of C.&lsquo;s want of political sincerity (for I cannot
+     see to what other want you can allude), surely a boy up to
+     eighteen may be pardoned for exercising his faculty if he
+     happens to be the one among millions who can use grown men
+     as his toys. He was an absolute and untarnished hero, but
+     for that reckless defying vaunt. Certainly that most
+     vigorous passage commencing&mdash;
+
+          &ldquo;Interest, thou universal God of men,&rdquo; etc.
+
+     reads startlingly, and comes in a questionable shape. What
+     is the answer to its enigmatical aspect? Why, that he
+     <i>meant</i> it, and that all would mean it at his age, who had
+     his power, his daring, and his hunger. Still it does,
+     perhaps, make one doubt whether his early death were well or
+     ill for him. In the matter of Oliver (whom no one
+     appreciates more than I do), remember that it was impossible
+     to have more opportunities than <i>he</i> had, or on the other
+     side <i>fewer</i> than Chatterton had. Chatterton at seventeen or
+     less said&mdash;
+
+          &ldquo;Flattery&rsquo;s a cloak, and I will put it on.&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      Blake (probably late in life) said&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+          &ldquo;Innocence is a winter gown.&rdquo;
+ 
+     ... I <i>have</i> read the Chatterton article in the review
+     mentioned. If Watts had done it, it would have been
+     immeasurably better. There seems to me, who am very well up
+     in Chatterton, no point whatever made in the article. Why
+     does no one ever even allude to the two attributed portraits
+     of Chatterton&mdash;one belonging to Sir H. Taylor, and the other
+     in the Salford Museum? Both seem to be the same person
+     clearly, and a good find for Chatterton, but not conceivably
+     done from him. Nevertheless, I <i>suspect</i> there may be a
+     sidelong genuineness in them. Chatterton was acquainted with
+     one Alcock, a miniature painter at Bristol, to whom he
+     addressed a poem. Had A. painted C. it would be among the
+     many recorded facts; but it would be singular even if, in
+     C.&lsquo;s rapid posthumous fame, A. had never been asked to make
+     a reminiscent likeness of him. Prom such likeness by the
+     miniature painter these <i>portraits might</i> derive&mdash;both being
+     life-sized oil heads. There is a savour of Keats in them,
+     though a friend, taking up the younger-looking of the two,
+     said it reminded him of Jack Sheppard! And not such a bad
+     Chatterton-compound either! But I begin to think I have said
+     all this before.... Oliver, or &ldquo;Nolly,&rdquo; as he was always
+     called, was a sort of spread-eagle likeness of his handsome
+     father, with a conical head like Walter Scott. I must
+     confess to you, that, in this world of books, the only one
+     of his I have read, is <i>Gabriel Denver</i>, afterwards
+     reprinted in its original and superior form as <i>The Black
+     Swan</i>, but published with the former title in his lifetime.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Rossetti formed no such philosophic estimate of Chatterton&rsquo;s contribution
+      to the romantic movement in English poetry as has been formulated in the
+      essay in Ward&rsquo;s <i>Poets</i>. A critic, in the sense of one possessed of a
+      natural gift of analysis, Rossetti assuredly! was not. No man&rsquo;s instinct
+      for what is good in poetry was ever swifter or surer than that of
+      Rossetti. You might always distrust your judgment if you found it at
+      variance with his where abstract power and beauty were in question. Sooner
+      or later you would inevitably find yourself gravitating to his view. But
+      here Rossetti&rsquo;s function as a critic ended. His was at best only the
+      criticism of the creator. Of the gift of ultimate classification he had
+      none, and never claimed to have any, although now and again (as where he
+      says that Chatterton was the day-spring of modern romantic poetry), he
+      seems to give sign of a power of critical synthesis.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rossetti&rsquo;s interest in Blake, both as poet and painter, dates back to an
+      early period of his life. I have heard him say that at sixteen or
+      seventeen years of age he was already one of Blake&rsquo;s warmest admirers, and
+      at the time in question, 1845, the author of the <i>Songs of Innocence</i>
+      had not many readers to uphold him. About four years later, Rossetti made
+      an exceptionally lucky discovery, for he then found in the possession of
+      Mr. Palmer, an attendant at the British Museum, an original manuscript
+      scrap-book of Blake&rsquo;s, containing a great body of unpublished poetry and
+      many interesting designs, as well as three or four remarkably effective
+      profile sketches of the author himself. The Mr. Palmer who held the little
+      book was a relative of the landscape painter of the same name, who was
+      Blake&rsquo;s friend, and hence the authenticity of the manuscript was
+      ascertainable on other grounds than the indisputable ones of its internal
+      evidences. The book was offered to Rossetti for ten shillings, but the
+      young enthusiast was at the time a student of art, and not much in the way
+      of getting or spending even so inconsiderable a sum. He told me, however,
+      that at this period his brother William, who was, unlike himself, engaged
+      in some reasonably profitable occupation, was at all times nothing loath
+      to advance small sums for the purchase of such literary or other treasures
+      as he used to hunt up out of obscure corners: by his help the Blake
+      manuscript was bought, and proved for years a source of infinite pleasure
+      and profit, resulting, as it did, in many very important additions to
+      Blake literature when Gilchrist&rsquo;s <i>Life and Works</i> of that author
+      came to be published. It is an interesting fact, mention of which ought
+      not to be omitted, that at the sale of Rossetti&rsquo;s library, which took
+      place a little while after his decease, the scrap-book acquired in the way
+      I describe was sold for one hundred and five guineas.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The sum was a large one, but the little book was undoubtedly the most
+      valuable literary relic of Blake then extant. About the time when a new
+      edition of Gilchrist&rsquo;s <i>Life</i> was in the press, Rossetti wrote:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     My evenings have been rather trenched upon lately by helping
+     Mrs. Gilchrist with a new edition of the <i>Life of Blake</i>....
+     I don&rsquo;t know if you go in much for him. The new edition of
+     the <i>Life</i> will include a good number of additional letters
+     (from Blake to Hayley), and some addition (though not great)
+     to my own share in the work; as well as much important
+     carrying-on of my brother&rsquo;s catalogue of Blake&rsquo;s works. The
+     illustrations will, I trust, receive valuable additions
+     also, but publishers are apt to be cautious in such
+     expenses. I am writing late at night, to fill up a fag-end
+     of bedtime, and shall write again on this head.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Rossetti&rsquo;s &ldquo;own share&rdquo; in this work consisted of the writing of the
+      supplementary chapter (left by Gilchrist, with one or two unimportant
+      passages merely, at the beginning), and the editing of the poems. When
+      there arose, subsequently, some idea of my reviewing the book, Rossetti
+      wrote me the following letter, full of disinterested solicitude:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     You will be quite delighted with an essay on Blake by Jas.
+     Smetham, which occurs in vol ii.; it is a noble thing; and
+     at the stupendous design called <i>Plague</i> (vol. i.). I have
+     extracted a passage properly belonging to the same essay,
+     which is as fine as English <i>can</i> be, and which I am sorry
+     to perceive (I think) that Mrs. G. has omitted from the body
+     of the essay because quoted in another place. This essay is
+     no less than a masterpiece. I wrote the supplementary
+     chapter (vol. i.), except a few opening paragraphs by
+     Gilchrist,&mdash;and in it have now made some mention of Smetham,
+     an old and dear friend of mine.
+
+     You will admire Shields&rsquo;s paper on the wonderful series of
+     Young&rsquo;s <i>Night Thoughts</i>. My brother and I both helped in
+     this new edition, but I added little to what I had done
+     before. I brought forward a portentous series of passages
+     about one &ldquo;Scofield&rdquo; in Blake&rsquo;s <i>Jerusalem</i>, but did not
+     otherwise write that chapter, except as regards the
+     illustrations. However, don&rsquo;t mention what I have done (in
+     case you write on the subject) except so far as the indices
+     show it, and of course I don&rsquo;t wish to be put forward at
+     all. What I do wish is, that you should say everything that
+     can be gratifying to Mrs. G. as to her husband&rsquo;s work. There
+     is a plate of Blake&rsquo;s Cottage by young Gilchrist which is
+     truly excellent.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      As I have already said, Rossetti traversed the bypaths of English
+      literature (particularly of English poetry) as few can ever have traversed
+      them. A favourite work with him was Gilfillan&rsquo;s <i>Less-Read British Poets</i>,
+      a copy of which had been presented by Miss Boyd. He says:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     Did you ever read Christopher Smart&rsquo;s <i>Song to David</i>, the
+     only great <i>accomplished</i> poem of the last century? The
+     accomplished ones are Chatterton&rsquo;s,&mdash;of course I mean
+     earlier than Blake or Coleridge, and without reckoning so
+     exceptional a genius as Burns.... You will find Smart&rsquo;s poem
+     a masterpiece of rich imagery, exhaustive resources, and
+     reverberant sound. It is to be met with in Gilfillan&rsquo;s
+     <i>Specimens of the Less-Read British Poets</i> (3 vols. Nichol,
+     Edin., 1860)....
+
+     I remember your mentioning Gilfillan as having encouraged
+     your first efforts. He was powerful, though sometimes rather
+     &ldquo;tall&rdquo; as a writer, generally most just as a critic, and
+     lastly, a much better man, intellectually and morally, than
+     Aytoun, who tried to &ldquo;do for&rdquo; him. His notice of Swift, in
+     the volume in question, has very great force and eloquence.
+     His whole edition of the <i>British Poets</i> is the best of any
+     to read, being such fine type and convenient bulk and weight
+     (a great thing for an arm-chair reader). Unfortunately, he
+     now and then (in the <i>Less-Read Poets</i>) cuts down the
+     extracts almost to nothing, and in some cases excises
+     objectionabilities, which is unpardonable. Much better leave
+     the whole out. Also, the edition includes the usual array of
+     nobodies&mdash;Addison, Akenside, and the whole alphabet down to
+     Zany and Zero; whereas a great many of the <i>less-read</i> would
+     have been much-read by every worthy reader if they had only
+     been printed in full. So well printed an edition of Donne
+     (for instance) would have been a great boon; but from him
+     Gilfillan only gives (among the <i>less-read</i>) the admirable
+     <i>Progress of the Soul</i> and some of the pregnant <i>Holy
+     Sonnets</i>. Do you know Donne? There is hardly an English poet
+     better worth a thorough knowledge, in spite of his provoking
+     conceits and occasional jagged jargon.
+
+     The following paragraph on Whitehead is valuable:
+
+     Charles Whitehead&rsquo;s principal poem is <i>The Solitary</i>, which
+     in its day had admirers. It perhaps most recalls Goldsmith.
+     He also wrote a supernatural poem called <i>Ippolito</i>. There
+     was a volume of his poems published about 1848, or perhaps a
+     little later, by Bentley. It is disappointing, on the whole,
+     from the decided superiority of its best points to the
+     rest.... But the novel of <i>Richard Savage</i> is very
+     remarkable,&mdash;a real character really worked out.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      To aid me in certain researches I was at the time engaged in making in the
+      back-numbers of almost forgotten periodicals, Rossetti wrote:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     The old <i>Monthly Mag.</i> was the precursor of the <i>New
+     Monthly</i>, which started about 1830, or thereabouts I think,
+     after which the old one ailed, but went on till fatal old
+     Heraud finished it off by editing it, and fairly massacred
+     that elderly innocent. You speak, in a former letter
+     (touching the continuation of <i>Christabel</i>), of &ldquo;a certain
+     European magazine.&rdquo; Are you aware that it was as old a thing
+     as <i>The Gentleman&rsquo;s</i>, and went on <i>ad infinitum?</i> Other such
+     were the <i>Universal Magazine, the Scots&rsquo; Magazine</i>&mdash;all
+     endless in extent and beginning time out of mind,&mdash;to say
+     nothing of the <i>Ladies&rsquo; Magazine and Wits&rsquo; Magazine</i>. Then
+     there was the <i>Annual Register</i>. All these are quarters in
+     which you might prosecute researches, and might happen to
+     find something about Keats. <i>The Monthly Magazine</i> must have
+     commenced almost as early, I believe. I cannot help thinking
+     there was a similar <i>Imperial Magazine</i>.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      The following letter possesses an interest independent of its subject,
+      which to me, however, is interest enough. Mr. William Watson had sent
+      Rossetti a copy of a volume of poems he had just published, and had
+      received a letter in acknowledgment, wherein our friend, with
+      characteristic appreciativeness, said many cordial words of it:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     Your young friend Watson [he said in a subsequent letter]
+     wrote me in a very modest mood for one who can do as he can
+     at his age. I think I must have hurriedly mis-expressed
+     myself in writing to him, as he seems to think I wished to
+     dissuade him from following narrative poetry. Not in the
+     least&mdash;I only wished him to try his hand at clearer dramatic
+     life. The dreamy romantic really hardly needs more than one
+     vast Morris in a literature&mdash;at any rate in a century. Not
+     that I think him derivable from Morris&mdash;he goes straight
+     back to Keats with a little modification. The narrative,
+     whether condensed or developed, is at any rate a far better
+     impersonal form to work in than declamatory harangue,
+     whether calling on the stars or the Styx. I don&rsquo;t know in
+     the least how Watson is faring with the critics. He must not
+     be discouraged, in any case, with his real and high gifts.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      The young poet, in whom Rossetti saw so much to applaud, can scarcely be
+      said to have fared at all at the hands of the critics.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Here is a pleasant piece of literary portraiture, as valuable from the
+      peep it affords into Rossetti&rsquo;s own character as from the description it
+      gives of the rustic poet:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     The other evening I had the pleasant experience of meeting
+     one to whom I have for about two years looked with interest
+     as a poet of the native rustic kind, but often of quite a
+     superior order. I don&rsquo;t know if you noticed, somewhere about
+     the date referred to, in <i>The Athenæum</i>, a review of poems
+     by Joseph Skipsey. Skip-sey has exquisite&mdash;though, as in all
+     such cases (except of course Burns&rsquo;s) not equal&mdash;powers in
+     several directions, but his pictures of humble life are the
+     best. He is a working miner, and describes rustic loves and
+     sports, and the perils and pathos of pit-life with great
+     charm, having a quiet humour too when needed. His more
+     ambitious pieces have solid merit of feeling, but are much
+     less artistic. The other night, as I say, he came here, and
+     I found him a stalwart son of toil, and every inch a
+     gentleman. In cast of face he recalls Tennyson somewhat,
+     though more bronzed and brawned. He is as sweet and gentle
+     as a woman in manner, and recited some beautiful things of
+     his own with a special freshness to which one is quite
+     unaccustomed.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Skipsey was a miner of North Shields, and in the review referred to
+      much was made, in a delicate way, of his stern environments. His volume of
+      lyrics is marked by the quiet humour. Rossetti speaks of, as well as by a
+      rather exasperating inequality. Perhaps the best piece in it is a poem
+      entitled <i>Thistle and Nettle</i>, treating with peculiar freshness of a
+      country courtship. The coming together of two such entirely opposite
+      natures was certainly curious, and only to be accounted for on the ground
+      of Rossetti&rsquo;s breadth of poetic sympathy. It would be interesting to hear
+      what the impressions were of such a rude son of toil upon meeting with one
+      whose life must have seemed the incarnation of artistic luxury and
+      indulgence. Later on I received the following:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     Poor Skipsey! He has lost the friend who brought him to
+     London only the other day (T. Dixon), and who was his only
+     hold on intellectual life in his district. Dixon died
+     immediately on his return to the North, of a violent attack
+     of asthma to which he was subject. He was a rarely pure and
+     simple soul, and is doubtless gone to higher uses, though
+     few could have reached, with his small opportunities, to
+     such usefulness as he compassed here. He was Ruskin&rsquo;s
+     correspondent in a little book called (I think) <i>Work by
+     Tyne and Wear</i>. I got a very touching note from Skipsey on
+     the subject.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      From Mr. Skipsey he received a letter only a little while before his
+      death, and to him he addressed one of the last epistles he penned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The following letter explains itself, and is introduced as much for the
+      sake of the real humour which it displays, as because it affords an
+      excellent idea of Rossetti&rsquo;s view of the true function of prose:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     I don&rsquo;t like your Shakspeare article quite as well as the
+     first <i>Supernatural</i> one, or rather I should say it does not
+     greatly add to it in my (first) view, though both might gain
+     by embodiment in one. I think there is <i>some</i> truth in the
+     charge of metaphysical involution&mdash;the German element as I
+     should call it&mdash;and surely you are strong enough to be
+     English pure and simple. I am sure I could write 100 essays,
+     on all possible subjects (I once did project a series under
+     the title, <i>Essays written in the intervals of
+     Elephantiasis, Hydro-phobia, and Penal Servitude</i>), without
+     once experiencing the &ldquo;aching void&rdquo; which is filled by such
+     words as &ldquo;mythopoeic,&rdquo; and &ldquo;anthropomorphism.&rdquo; I do not find
+     life long enough to know in the least what they mean. They
+     are both very long and very ugly indeed&mdash;the latter only
+     suggesting to me a Vampire or Somnambulant Cannibal. (To
+     speak rationally, would not &ldquo;man-evolved Godhead&rdquo; be an
+     <i>English</i> equivalent?) &ldquo;Euhemeristic&rdquo; also found me somewhat
+     on my beam-ends, though explanation is here given; yet I
+     felt I could do without Euhemerus; and <i>you</i> perhaps without
+     the <i>humerous</i>. You can pardon me now; for <i>so</i> bad a pun
+     places me at your mercy indeed. But seriously, simple
+     English in prose writing and in all narrative poetry
+     (however monumental language may become in abstract verse)
+     seems to me a treasure not to be foregone in favour of
+     German innovations. I know Coleridge went in latterly for as
+     much Germanism as his time could master; but his best genius
+     had then left him.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      It seems necessary to mention that I lectured in 1880, on the relation of
+      politics to art, and in printing the lecture I asked Rossetti to accept
+      the dedication of it, but this he declined to do in the generous terms I
+      have already referred to. The letter that accompanied his graceful refusal
+      is, however, so full of interesting personal matter that I offer it in
+      this place, with no further explanation than that my essay was designed to
+      show that just as great artists in past ages had participated in political
+      struggles, so now they should not hold themselves aloof from controversies
+      which immediately concern them:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     I must admit, at all hazards, that my friends here consider
+     me exceptionally averse to politics; and I suppose I must
+     be, for I never read a parliamentary debate in my life! At
+     the same time I will add that, among those whose opinions I
+     most value, some think me not altogether wrong when I
+     venture to speak of the momentary momentousness and eternal
+     futility of many noisiest questions. However, you must
+     simply view me as a nonentity in any practical relation to
+     such matters. You have spoken but too generously of a sonnet
+     of mine in your lecture just received. I have written a few
+     others of the sort (which by-the-bye would not prove me a
+     Tory), but felt no vocation&mdash;perhaps no right&mdash;-to print
+     them. I have always reproached myself as sorely amenable to
+     the condemnations of a very fine poem by Barberino, <i>On
+     Sloth against Sin</i>, which I translated in the Dante volume.
+     Sloth, alas! has but too much to answer for with me; and is
+     one of the reasons (though I will not say the only one), why
+     I have always fallen back on quality instead of quantity in
+     the little I have ever done. I think often with Coleridge:
+
+          Sloth jaundiced all: and from my graspless hand
+          Drop friendship&rsquo;s precious pearls like hour-glass sand.
+          I weep, yet stoop not: the faint anguish flows,
+          A dreamy pang in morning&rsquo;s feverish doze.
+
+     However, for all I might desire in the direction spoken of,
+     volition is vain without vocation; and I had better really
+     stick to knowing how to mix vermilion and ultramarine for a
+     flesh-grey, and how to manage their equivalents in verse. To
+     speak without sparing myself,&mdash;my mind is a childish one, if
+     to be isolated in Art is child&rsquo;s-play; at any rate I feel
+     that I do not attain to the more active and practical of the
+     mental functions of manhood. I can say this to you, because
+     I know you will make the best and not the worst of me; and
+     better than such feasible best I do not wish to appear. Thus
+     you see I don&rsquo;t think my name ought to head your
+     introductory paragraph&mdash;and there an end. And now of your
+     new lecture, and of the long letter I lately had from you.
+     At some moment I should like to know which pieces among the
+     translations are specially your favourites. Of the three
+     names you leash together as somewhat those of sensualists,
+     Cecco Angiolieri is really the only one&mdash;as for the
+     respectable Cino, he would be shocked indeed, though
+     certainly there are a few oddities bearing that way in the
+     sonnets between him and Dante (who is again similarly
+     reproached by his friend Cavalcanti), but I really <i>do</i>
+     suspect that in some cases similar to the one in question
+     about Cino (though not Guido and Dante) politics were really
+     meant where love was used as a metaphor.... I assure you,
+     you cannot say too much to me of this or any other work of
+     yours; in fact, I wish that we should communicate about
+     them. I have been thinking yet more on the relations of
+     politics and art. I do think seriously on consideration that
+     not only my own sluggishness, but vital fact itself, must
+     set to a great extent a <i>veto</i> against the absolute
+     participation of artists in politics. When has it ever been
+     effected? True, Cellini was a bravo and David a good deal
+     like a murderer, and in these capacities they were not
+     without their political use in very turbulent times. But
+     when the attempt was made to turn Michael Angelo into a
+     &ldquo;utility man&rdquo; of that kind, he did (it is true) some
+     patriotic duty in the fortification of Florence; but it is
+     no less a fact that, when he had done all that he thought
+     became him, he retired to a certain trackless and forgotten
+     tower, and there stayed in some sort of peace (though much
+     in request) till he could lead his own life again; nor
+     should we forget the occasion on which he did not hesitate
+     even to betake himself to Venice as a refuge. Yet M. Angelo
+     was in every way a patriot, a philosopher, and a hero. I do
+     not say this to undervalue the scope of your theory. I think
+     possibilities are generally so much behind desirabilities
+     that there is no harm in any degree of incitement in the
+     right <i>direction</i>; and that is assuredly mental activity of
+     <i>all</i> kinds. I judge you cannot suspect <i>me</i> of thinking the
+     apotheosis of the early Italian poets (though surely
+     spiritual beauty, and not sensuality, was their general aim)
+     of more importance than the &ldquo;unity of a great nation.&rdquo; But
+     it is in my minute power to deal successfully (I feel) with
+     the one, while no such entity, as I am, can advance or
+     retard the other; and thus mine must needs be the poorer
+     part. Nor (with alas, and again alas!) will Italy or another
+     twice have her day in its fulness.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      I happened to have said in speaking of self-indulgence among artists, that
+      there probably existed those to whom it seemed more important to preserve
+      such a pitiful possession as the poetical remains of Cecco Angiolieri than
+      to secure the unity of a great nation. Rossetti half suspected I meant
+      this for a playful backhanded blow at himself (for Cecco was a great
+      favourite with him), and protested that no such individual could exist. I
+      defended my charge by quoting Keats&rsquo;s&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+           ... the silver flow
+     Of Hero&rsquo;s tears, the swoon of Imogen,
+     Fair Pastorella in the bandit&rsquo;s den,
+     Are things to brood on with more ardency
+     Than the death-day of empires.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      But Rossetti grew weary of the jest:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     I must protest that what you quote from Keats about &ldquo;Hero&rsquo;s
+     tears,&rdquo; etc., fails to meet the text. Neither Shakspeare nor
+     Spenser assuredly was a Cecco; Marlowe may be most meant as
+     to &ldquo;Hero,&rdquo; and he perhaps affords the shadow of a parallel
+     in career though not in work.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      The extract from Rosetti&rsquo;s letters with which I shall close this chapter
+      is perhaps the most interesting yet made:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     One point I must still raise, viz., that I, for one, cannot
+     conceive, even as the Ghost of a Flea, the ideal individual
+     who considers the Poetical Remains of Cecco Angiolieri of
+     more importance than the unity of a great nation! I think
+     this would have been better if much modified. Say for
+     instance&mdash;&ldquo;A thing of some moment even while the contest is
+     waging for the political unity of a great nation.&rdquo; This is
+     the utmost reach surely of human comparative valuation. I
+     think you have brought in Benvenuto and Michael much to the
+     purpose. Shall I give you a parallel in your own style?
+
+     During the months for which poet Coleridge became private
+     Cumberback (a name in which he said his horse would have
+     concurred), it seems strange that, in such stirring times,
+     his regiment should not have been ordered off on foreign
+     service. In such case that pre-eminent member of the awkward
+     squad would assuredly have been the very first man killed.
+     Should we have been more the gainers by his patriotism or
+     the losers by his poetry? The very last man killed in the
+     last <i>sortie</i> from Paris during the Prussian siege (he
+     <i>would</i> go behind a buttress to &ldquo;pot&rdquo; a Prussian after
+     orders were given to retire, and so got &ldquo;potted&rdquo; himself)
+     was Henri Regnault, a painter, whose brilliant work was a
+     guiding beacon on the road of improvement in French methods
+     of art, if not in intellectual force. Who shall fail to
+     honour the noble ardour which drew him from the security of
+     his studies in Tunis to partake his country&rsquo;s danger? Yet
+     who shall forbear to sigh in thinking that, but for this,
+     his progressing work might still yearly be an element in
+     art-progress for Europe? Gérome and others betook themselves
+     to England instead, and are still benefiting the cause for
+     which they were before all things born. It was David who
+     said, &ldquo;Si on tirait à mitraille sur les artistes, on n&rsquo;y
+     tuerait pas un seul patriote!&rdquo; <i>He</i> was a patriot homicide,
+     and spoke probably what was true in the sense in which he
+     meant it. As I said, I am glad you turned Ben and Mike to
+     account, but the above is in some respects an open question.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      I have, as I say, a further batch of letters to introduce, but as these
+      were, for the most part, written after an event which forms a land-mark in
+      our acquaintance (I mean the occasion of our first meeting), I judge it is
+      best to reserve them for a later section of this book. There are two
+      forms, and, so far as I know, two only, in which a body of letters can be
+      published with justice to the writer. Of these the first and most obvious
+      form is to offer them chronologically <i>in extenso</i> or with only such
+      eliminations as seem inevitable, and the second is to tabulate them
+      according to subject-matter, and print them in the order not of date but
+      substance. There are advantages attending each method, and corresponding
+      disadvantages also. The temptation to adopt the first of these was, in
+      this case of Rossetti&rsquo;s letters, almost insurmountable, for nothing can be
+      more charming in epistolary style than the easy grace with which the
+      writer passes from point to point, evolving one idea out of another,
+      interlinking subject with subject, and building up a fabric of which the
+      meaning is everywhere inwoven. In this respect Rossetti&rsquo;s letters are
+      almost as perfect as anything that ever left his hand; and, in freedom of
+      phrase, in power of throwing off parenthetical reflections always
+      faultlessly enunciated, in play of humour, often in eloquence (never
+      becoming declamatory, and calling on &ldquo;Styx or Stars&rdquo;), sometimes in
+      pathos, Rossetti&rsquo;s letters are, in a word, admirable. They are comparable
+      in these respects with the best things yet done in English,&mdash;as
+      pleasing and graceful as Cowper&rsquo;s letters, broader in range of subject
+      than the letters of Keats, easier and more colloquial than those of
+      Coleridge, and with less appearance of being intended for the public eye
+      than is the case with the letters of Byron and of Shelley. Rossetti&rsquo;s
+      letters have, moreover, a value quite apart from the merits of their
+      epistolary style, in so far as they contain almost the only expression
+      extant of his opinions on literary questions. And this is the circumstance
+      that has chiefly weighed with me to offer them in fragmentary form
+      interspersed with elucidatory comment bearing principally upon the
+      occasions that called them forth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Such then as I have described was the nature of my intercourse with
+      Rossetti during the first year and a half of our correspondence, and now
+      the time had come when I was to meet my friend for the first time face to
+      face. The elasticity of sympathy by which a man of genius, surrounded by
+      constant friends, could yet bend to a new-comer who was a stranger and
+      twenty-five years his junior, and think and feel with him; the generous
+      appreciativeness by which he could bring himself to consider the first
+      efforts of one quite unknown; and then the unselfishness that seemed
+      always to prefer the claims of others to his own great claims, could
+      command only the return of unqualified allegiance. Such were the feelings
+      with which I went forth to my first meeting with Rossetti, and if at any
+      later date, the ardour of my regard for him in any measure suffered
+      modification, be sure when the time comes to touch upon it I shall make no
+      more concealment of the causes that led to such a change than I have made
+      of those circumstances, however personal in primary interest, that
+      generated a friendship so unusual and to me so serious and important.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0007" id="link2HCH0007">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER VII.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      It was in the autumn of 1880 that I saw Rossetti for the first time. Being
+      then rather reduced in health I contemplated a visit to the sea-side and
+      wrote saying that in passing through London I should avail myself of his
+      oft-repeated invitation to visit him. I gave him this warning of my
+      intention, remembering his declared dread of being taken unawares, but I
+      came to know at a subsequent period that for one who was within the inner
+      circle of his friends the necessity to advise him of a visit was by no
+      means binding. His reception of my intimation of an intention to call upon
+      him was received with an amount of epistolary ceremony which I recognise
+      now by the light of further acquaintance as eminently characteristic of
+      the man, although curiously contradictory of his unceremonious habits of
+      daily life. The fact is that Rossetti was of an excessively nervous
+      temperament, and rarely if ever underwent an ordeal more trying than a
+      first meeting with any one to whom for some time previously he had looked
+      forward with interest. Hence by return of the post that bore him my
+      missive came two letters, the one obviously written and posted within an
+      hour or two of the other. In the first of these he expressed courteously
+      his pleasure at the prospect of seeing me, and appointed 8.30 p.m. the
+      following evening as his dinner hour at his house in Cheyne Walk. The
+      second letter begged me to come at 5.30 or 6 p.m., so that we might have a
+      long evening. &ldquo;You will, I repeat,&rdquo; he says, &ldquo;recognise the
+      hole-and-cornerest of all existences in this big barn of mine; but come
+      early and I shall read you some ballads, and we can talk of many things.&rdquo;
+       An hour later than the arrival of these letters came a third epistle,
+      which ran: &ldquo;Of course when I speak of your dining with me, I mean
+      tête-à-tête and without ceremony of any kind. I usually dine in my studio
+      and in my painting coat!&rdquo; I had before me a five hours&rsquo; journey to London,
+      so that in order to reach Chelsea at 6 P.M., I must needs set out at
+      mid-day, but oblivious of this necessity, Rossetti had actually posted a
+      fourth letter on the morning of the day on which we were to meet begging
+      me not on any account to talk, in the course of our interview, of a
+      certain personal matter upon which we had corresponded. This fourth and
+      final message came to hand the morning after the meeting, when I had the
+      satisfaction to reflect that (owing more perhaps to the plethora of other
+      subjects of interest than to any suspicion of its being tabooed) I had
+      luckily eschewed the proscribed topic.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Cheyne Walk was unknown to me at the time in question, except as the
+      locality in and near which many men and women eminent in literature
+      resided. It seems hard to realise that this was the case as recently as
+      two years ago, now that so short an interval has associated it in one&rsquo;s
+      mind with memories which seem to cover a large part of one&rsquo;s life. The
+      Walk is not now exactly as picturesque as it appears in certain familiar
+      old engravings; the new embankment and the gardens that separate it from
+      the main thoroughfare have taken something from its beauty, but it still
+      possesses many attractions, and among them a look of age which contrasts
+      agreeably with the spic-and-span newness of neighbouring places. I found
+      Rossetti&rsquo;s house, No. 16, answering in external appearances to the frank
+      description he gave of it. It stands about mid-way between the Chelsea
+      pier and the new redbrick mansions erected on the Chelsea embankment. It
+      seems to be the oldest house in the Walk, and the exceptional proportions
+      of its gate-piers, and the weight and mass of its gate and railings,
+      suggests that probably at some period it stood alone, and commanded as
+      grounds a large part of the space now occupied by the adjoining
+      residences. Behind the house, during eighteen years of Rossetti&rsquo;s
+      occupancy, there was a garden of almost an acre in extent, covering by
+      much the larger part of the space enclosed by a block of four streets
+      forming a square. At No. 4 Maclise had lived and died; at the same house
+      George Eliot, after her marriage with Mr. Cross, had come to live; at No.
+      5, in the second street to the westward, Thomas Carlyle was still living,
+      and a little beyond Cheyne Row stood the modest cottage wherein Turner
+      died. Rossetti&rsquo;s house had to me the appearance of a plain Queen Anne
+      erection, much mutilated by the introduction of unsightly bay-windows; the
+      brickwork seemed to be falling into decay; the paint to be in serious need
+      of renewal; the windows to be dull with the accumulation of the dust of
+      years; the sills to bear the suspicion of cobwebs; the angles of the steps
+      and the untrodden flags of the courtyard to be here and there overgrown
+      with moss and weeds; and round the walls and up the reveals of doors and
+      windows were creeping the tangled branches of the wildest ivy that ever
+      grew untouched by shears. Such was the exterior of the home of the
+      poet-painter when I walked up to it on the autumn evening of my first
+      visit, and the interior of the house was at once like and unlike the
+      exterior. The hall had a puzzling look of equal nobility and shabbiness.
+      The floor was paved with beautiful white marble, which however, was partly
+      covered with a strip of worn cocoa-nut matting; the ceiling was in one of
+      its sections gracefully groined, and in each of the walls, which were
+      lofty, there was an arched recess containing a piece of sculpture; an old
+      inlaid rosewood clock filled a bulkhead on one side facing the door, and
+      on the corresponding side stood a massive gas branch. A mezzotint
+      lithograph by Legros was the only pictorial decoration of the walls, which
+      were plain, and seemed not to have been distempered for many years. Three
+      doors led out of the hall, one at each side, and one in front, and two
+      corridors opened into it, but there was no sign of staircase, nor had it
+      any light except such as was borrowed from the fanlight that looked into
+      the porch. These facts I noted in the few minutes I stood waiting in the
+      hall, but during the many months in which subsequently that house was my
+      own home as well as Rossetti&rsquo;s, I came to see that the changes which the
+      building must have undergone since the period of its erection, had so
+      filled it with crooks and corners as to bewilder the most ingenious
+      observer to account for its peculiarities.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Very soon Rossetti came to me through the doorway in front, which proved
+      to be the entrance to his studio. Holding forth both hands and crying
+      &lsquo;Hulloa,&rsquo; he gave me that cheery, hearty greeting which I came to
+      recognise as his alone, perhaps, in warmth and unfailing geniality among
+      all the men of our circle. It was Italian in its spontaneity, and yet it
+      was English in its manly reserve, and I remember with much tenderness of
+      feeling that never to the last (not even when sickness saddened him, or
+      after an absence of a few days or even hours) did it fail him when meeting
+      with those friends to whom to the last he was really attached. Leading the
+      way into the studio, he introduced me to his brother, who was there upon
+      one of the evening visits, which at intervals of a week he was at that
+      time making, with unfailing regularity. I should have described Rossetti,
+      at this time, as a man who looked quite ten years older than his actual
+      age, which was fifty-two, of full middle height and inclining to
+      corpulence, with a round face that ought, one thought, to be ruddy but was
+      pale, large grey eyes with a steady introspecting look, surmounted by
+      broad protrusive brows and a clearly-pencilled ridge over the nose, which
+      was well cut and had large breathing nostrils. The mouth and chin were
+      hidden beneath a heavy moustache and abundant beard, which grew up to the
+      ears, and had been of a mixed black-brown and auburn, and were now
+      streaked with grey. The forehead was large, round, without protuberances,
+      and very gently receding to where thin black curls, that had once been
+      redundant, began to tumble down to the ears. The entire configuration of
+      the head and face seemed to me singularly noble, and from the eyes
+      upwards, full of beauty. He wore a pair of spectacles, and, in reading, a
+      second pair over the first: but these took little from the sense of power
+      conveyed by those steady eyes, and that &ldquo;bar of Michael Angelo.&rdquo; His dress
+      was not conspicuous, being however rather negligent than otherwise, and
+      noticeable, if at all, only for a straight sack-coat buttoned at the
+      throat, descending at least to the knees, and having large pockets cut
+      into it perpendicularly at the sides. This garment was, I afterwards
+      found, one of the articles of various kinds made to the author&rsquo;s own
+      design. When he spoke, even in exchanging the preliminary courtesies of an
+      opening conversation, I thought his voice the richest I had ever known any
+      one to possess. It was a full deep barytone, capable of easy modulation,
+      and with undertones of infinite softness and sweetness, yet, as I
+      afterwards found, with almost illimitable compass, and with every
+      gradation of tone at command, for the recitation or reading of poetry. The
+      studio was a large room probably measuring thirty feet by twenty, and
+      structurally as puzzling as the other parts of the house. A series of
+      columns and arches on one side suggested that the room had almost
+      certainly been at some period the site of an important staircase with a
+      wide well, and on the other side a broad mullioned window reaching to the
+      ceiling, seemed certainly to bear record of the occupant&rsquo;s own
+      contribution to the peculiarities of the edifice. The fireplace was at an
+      end of the room, and over and at each side of it were hung a number of
+      fine drawings in chalk, chiefly studies of heads, with here and there a
+      water-colour figure piece, all from Rossetti&rsquo;s hand. At the opposite end
+      of the room hung some symbolic designs in chalk, <i>Pandora</i> and <i>Proserpina</i>
+      being among the number, and easels of various sizes, some very large,
+      bearing pictures in differing stages of completion, occupied positions on
+      all sides of the floor, leaving room only for a sofa, with a bookcase
+      behind, two old cabinets, two large low easy chairs, and a writing desk
+      and chair at a window at the side, which was heavily darkened by the thick
+      foliage of the trees that grew in the garden beyond.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Dropping down on the sofa with his head laid low and his feet thrown up in
+      a favourite attitude on the back, which must, I imagine, have been at
+      least as easy as it was elegant, he began the conversation by bantering me
+      upon what he called my &ldquo;robustious&rdquo; appearance compared with what he had
+      been led to expect from gloomy reports of uncertain health. After a series
+      of playful touches (all done in the easiest conceivable way, and conveying
+      any impression on earth save the right one, that a first meeting with any
+      man, however young and harmless, was little less than a tragic event to
+      Rossetti) he glanced one by one at certain of the topics that had arisen
+      in the course of our correspondence. I perceived that he was a ready,
+      fluent, and graceful talker, with a remarkable incisiveness of speech, and
+      a trick of dignifying ordinary topics in words which, without rising above
+      conversation, were so exactly, though freely enunciated, as would have
+      admitted of their being reported exactly as they fell from his lips. In
+      some of these respects I found his brother William resemble him, though,
+      if I may describe the talk of a dead friend by contrasting it with that of
+      a living one bearing a natural affinity to it, I will say that Gabriel&rsquo;s
+      conversation was perhaps more spontaneous, and had more variety of tone
+      with less range of subject, together with the same precision and
+      perspicuity. Very soon the talk became general, and then Rossetti spoke
+      without appearance of reserve of his two or three intimate friends,
+      telling me, among other things, of Theodore Watts, that he &ldquo;had a head
+      exactly like that of Napoleon I., whom Watts,&rdquo; he said with a chuckle,
+      &ldquo;detests more than any character in history; depend upon it,&rdquo; he added,
+      &ldquo;such a head was not given to him for nothing;&rdquo; that Frederick Shields was
+      as emotional as Shelley, and Ford Madox Brown, whom I had met, as
+      sententious as Dr. Johnson. I kept no sort of record of what passed upon
+      the occasion in question, but I remember that Rossetti seemed to be
+      playfully battering his friends in their absence in the assured
+      consciousness that he was doing so in the presence of a well-wisher; and
+      it was amusing to observe that, after any particularly lively sally, he
+      would pause to say something in a sobered tone that was meant to convey
+      the idea that he was really very jealous of his friends&rsquo; reputation, and
+      was merely for the sake of amusement giving rein to a sportive fancy.
+      During dinner (and contrary to his declared habit, we did not dine in the
+      studio) he talked a good deal about Oliver Madox Brown, for whom I had
+      conceived a warm admiration, and to whom I had about that time addressed a
+      sonnet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You had a sincere admiration of the boy&rsquo;s gifts?&rdquo; I asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Assuredly. I have always said that twenty years after his death his name
+      will be a familiar one. <i>The Black Swan</i> is a powerful story,
+      although I must honestly say that it displays in its central incident a
+      certain torpidity that to me is painful. Undoubtedly Oliver had genius,
+      and must have done great things had he lived. His death was a grievous
+      blow to his father. I&rsquo;m glad you&rsquo;ve written that sonnet; I wanted you to
+      toss up your cap for Nolly.&rdquo; He spoke of Oliver&rsquo;s father as indisputably
+      one of the greatest of living colourists, inquired earnestly into the
+      progress of his frescoes at Manchester, for one of the figures in which I
+      had sat, and showed me a little water-colour drawing made by Oliver
+      himself when very young. Dinner being now over, I asked Rossetti to redeem
+      his promise to read one of his new ballads; and as his brother, who had
+      often heard it before, expressed his readiness to hear it again, he
+      responded readily, and, taking a small manuscript volume out of a section
+      of the bookcase that had been locked, read us <i>The White Ship</i>. I
+      have spoken of the ballad as a poem at an earlier stage, but it remains to
+      me, in this place, to describe the effect produced upon me by the author&rsquo;s
+      reading. It seemed to me that I never heard anything at all matchable with
+      Rossetti&rsquo;s elocution; his rich deep voice lent an added music to the music
+      of the verse: it rose and fell in the passages descriptive of the wreck
+      with something of the surge and sibilation of the sea itself; in the
+      tenderer passages it was soft as a woman&rsquo;s, and in the pathetic stanzas
+      with which the ballad closes it was profoundly moving. Effective as the
+      reading sounded in that studio, I remember at the moment to have doubted
+      if it would prove quite so effective from a public platform. Perhaps there
+      seemed to be so much insistence on the rhythm, and so prolonged a tension
+      of the rhyme sounds, as would run the risk of a charge of monotony if
+      falling on ears less concerned with points of metrical beauty than with
+      fundamental substance. Personally, however, I found the reading in the
+      very highest degree enjoyable and inspiring.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The evening was gone by the time the ballad was ended; and it was arranged
+      that upon my return to London from the house of a friend at the sea-side I
+      should again dine with Rossetti, and sleep the night at Cheyne Walk. I was
+      invited to come early in order to see certain pictures by day-light, and
+      it was then I saw the painter&rsquo;s most important work,&mdash;the <i>Dantés
+      Dream</i>, which finally (and before Rossetti was made aware of any steps
+      being taken to that end) I had prevailed with Alderman Samuelson to
+      purchase for the public gallery at Liverpool. At my request, though only
+      after some importunity, Rossetti read again his <i>White Ship</i>, and
+      afterwards <i>Rose Mary</i>, the latter of which he told me had been
+      written in the country shortly after the appearance of the first volume of
+      poems. He remarked that it had occupied three weeks in the writing, and
+      that the physical prostration ensuing had been more than he would care to
+      go through again. I observed on this head, that though highly finished in
+      every stanza, the ballad had an impetuous rush of emotion, and swift
+      current of diction, suggesting speed in its composition, as contrasted
+      with the laboured deliberation which the sonnets, for example, appeared to
+      denote. I asked if his work usually took much out of him in physical
+      energy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not my painting, certainly,&rdquo; he replied, &ldquo;though in early years it
+      tormented me more than enough. Now I paint by a set of unwritten but
+      clearly-defined rules, which I could teach to any man as systematically as
+      you could teach arithmetic; indeed, quite recently I sat all day for that
+      very purpose with Shields, who is not so great a colourist as he is a
+      draughtsman: he is a great draughtsman&mdash;none better now living,
+      unless it is Leighton or Sir Noel Paton.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Still,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;there&rsquo;s usually a good deal in a picture of yours beside
+      what you can do by rule.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Fundamental conception, no doubt, but beyond that not much. In painting,
+      after all, there is in the less important details something of the craft
+      of a superior carpenter, and the part of a picture that is not mechanical
+      is often trivial enough. I don&rsquo;t wonder, now,&rdquo; he added, with a suspicion
+      of a twinkle in the eye, &ldquo;if you imagine that one comes down here in a
+      fine frenzy every morning to daub canvas?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I certainly imagine,&rdquo; I replied, &ldquo;that a superior carpenter would find it
+      hard to paint another <i>Dante&rsquo;s Dream</i>, which some people consider the
+      best example yet seen of the English school.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is friendly nonsense,&rdquo; rejoined my frank host, &ldquo;there is now no
+      English school whatever.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;if you deny the name to others who lay more claim to it,
+      will you not at least allow it to the three or four painters who started
+      with you in life?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not at all, unless it is to Brown, and he&rsquo;s more French than English;
+      Hunt and Jones have no more claim to the name than I have. As for all the
+      prattle about pre-Raphaelitism, I confess to you I am weary of it, and
+      long have been. Why should we go on talking about the visionary vanities
+      of half-a-dozen boys? We&rsquo;ve all grown out of them, I hope, by now.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I remarked that the pre-Raphaelite movement was no doubt a serious one at
+      the beginning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What you call the movement was serious enough, but the banding together
+      under that title was all a joke. We had at that time a phenomenal
+      antipathy to the Academy, and in sheer love of being outlawed signed our
+      pictures with the well-known initials.&rdquo; I have preserved the substance of
+      what Rossetti said on this point, and, as far as possible, the actual
+      words have been given. On many subsequent occasions he expressed himself
+      in the same way: assuredly with as much seeming depreciation of the
+      painter&rsquo;s &ldquo;craft,&rdquo; although certain examples of modern art called forth
+      his warmest eulogies. In serious moods he would speak of pictures by
+      Millais, Watts, Leighton, Burne Jones, and others, as works of the highest
+      genius.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Reverting to my inquiry as to whether his work took much out of him, he
+      remarked that his poetry usually did. &ldquo;In that respect,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;I am
+      the reverse of Swinburne. For his method of production inspiration is
+      indeed the word. With me the case is different. I lie on the couch, the
+      racked and tortured medium, never permitted an instant&rsquo;s surcease of agony
+      until the thing on hand is finished.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was obvious that what Rossetti meant by being racked and tortured, was
+      that his subject possessed him; that he was enslaved by his own &ldquo;shaping
+      imagination.&rdquo; Assuredly he was the reverse of a costive poet: impulse was,
+      to use his own phrase, fully developed in his muse.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I made some playful allusion, assuredly not meant to involve Mr.
+      Swinburne, to Sheridan&rsquo;s epigram on easy writing and hard reading; and to
+      the Abbé de Marolles, who exultingly told some poet that his verses cost
+      no trouble: &ldquo;They cost you what they are worth,&rdquo; replied the bard.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;One benefit I do derive,&rdquo; Rossetti added, &ldquo;as a result of my method of
+      composition; my work becomes condensed. Probably the man does not live who
+      could write what I have written more briefly than I have done.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Emphasis and condensation, I remarked, were indubitably the
+      characteristics of his muse. He then read me a great body of the new
+      sonnets of <i>The House of Life</i>. Sitting in that studio listening to
+      his reading and looking up meantime at the chalk-drawings that hung on the
+      walls, I realised how truly he had said, in correspondence, that the
+      feeling pervading his pictures was such as his poetry ought to suggest.
+      The affinity between the two seemed to me at that moment to be complete:
+      the same half-sad, half-resigned view of life, the same glimpses of hope,
+      the same foreshadowings of gloom.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You doubtless think it odd,&rdquo; he said at one moment, &ldquo;to hear an old
+      fellow read such love-poetry as much of this is, but I may tell you that
+      the larger part of it, though still unpublished, was written when I was as
+      young as you are. When I print these sonnets, I shall probably affix a
+      note saying, that though many of them are of recent production, not a few
+      are obviously the work of earlier years.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I expressed admiration of the pathetic sonnet entitled <i>Without Her</i>.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I cannot tell you,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;at what terrible moment it was wrung from
+      me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He had read it with tears of voice, subsiding at length into suppressed
+      sobs and intervals of silence. As though to explain away this emotion he
+      said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All poetry, that is really poetry, affects me deeply and often to tears.
+      It does not need to be pathetic or yet tender to produce such a result. I
+      have known in my life two men, and two only, who are similarly sensitive&mdash;Tennyson,
+      and my old friend and neighbour William Bell Scott. I once heard Tennyson
+      read <i>Maud</i>, and whilst the fiery passages were delivered with a
+      voice and vehemence which he alone of living men can compass, the softer
+      passages and the songs made the tears course down his cheeks. Morris is a
+      fine reader, and so, of his kind, though a little prone to sing-song, is
+      Swinburne. Browning both reads and talks well&mdash;at least he did so
+      when I knew him intimately as a young man.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Rossetti went on to say that he had been among Browning&rsquo;s earliest
+      admirers. As a boy he had seen something signed by the then unknown name
+      of the author of <i>Paracelsus</i>, and wrote to him. The result was an
+      intimacy. He spoke with warmest admiration of <i>Child Roland</i>; and
+      referred to Elizabeth Barrett Browning in terms of regard, and, I think I
+      may say, of reverence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I asked if he had ever heard Ruskin read. He replied:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I must have done so, but remember nothing clearly. On one occasion,
+      however, I heard him deliver a speech, and that was something never to
+      forget. When we were young, we helped Frederick Denison Maurice by taking
+      classes at the Working Men&rsquo;s College, and there Charles Kingsley and
+      others made speeches and delivered lectures. Ruskin was asked to do
+      something of the kind and at length consented. He made no sort of
+      preparation for the occasion: I know he did not; we were together at his
+      father&rsquo;s house the whole of the day in question. At night we drove down to
+      the College, and then he made the finest speech I ever heard. I doubted at
+      the time if any written words of his were equal to it! such flaming
+      diction! such emphasis! such appeal!&mdash;yet he had written his first
+      and second volumes of <i>Modern Painters</i> by that time.&rdquo; I have
+      reproduced the substance of what Rossetti said on the occasion of my
+      return visit, and, by help of letters written at the time to a friend, I
+      have in many cases recalled his exact words. A certain incisiveness of
+      speech which distinguished his conversation, I confess myself scarcely
+      able to convey more than a suggestion of; as Mr. Watts has said in <i>The
+      Athenæum</i>, his talk showed an incisiveness so perfect that it had often
+      the pleasurable surprise of wit. Rossetti had both wit and humour, but
+      these, during the time that I knew him, were only occasionally present in
+      his conversation, while the incisiveness was always conspicuous. A certain
+      quiet play of sportive fancy, developing at intervals into banter, was
+      sometimes observable in his talk with the younger and more familiar of his
+      acquaintances, but for the most part his conversation was serious, and,
+      during the time I knew him, often sad. I speedily observed that he was not
+      of the number of those who lead or sustain conversation. He required to be
+      constantly interrogated, but as a negative talker, if I may so describe
+      him, he was by much the best I had heard. Catching one&rsquo;s drift before one
+      had revealed it, and anticipating one&rsquo;s objections, he would go on from
+      point to point, almost removing the necessity for more than occasional
+      words. Nevertheless, as I say, he was not, in the conversations I have
+      heard, a leading conversationalist; his talk was never more than talk, and
+      in saying that it was uniformly sustained yet never declamatory, I think I
+      convey an idea both of its merits and limitations.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I understood that Rossetti had never at any period of his life been an
+      early riser, and at the time of the interview in question he was more than
+      ever before prone to reverse the natural order of waking and sleeping
+      hours. I am convinced that during the time I was with him only the
+      necessity of securing a certain short interval of daylight, by which it
+      was possible to paint, prevailed with him to rise before noon. Alluding to
+      this idiosyncrasy, he said: &ldquo;I lie as long, or say as late, as Dr. Johnson
+      used to do. You shall never know, until you discover it for yourself, at
+      what hour I rise.&rdquo; He sat up until four A.M. on this night of my second
+      visit,&mdash;no unaccustomed thing, as I afterwards learned. I must not
+      omit the mention of one feature of the conversation, revealing to me a new
+      side of his character, or, more properly, a new phase of his mind, which
+      gave me subsequently an infinity of anxiety and distress. Branching off at
+      a late hour from some entirely foreign topic, he begged me to tell him the
+      facts of some unlucky debate in which I had long before been engaged on a
+      public platform with some one who had attacked him. He had heard a report
+      of what passed at a time when my name was unknown to him, as also was that
+      of his assailant. Being forewarned by William Rossetti of his brother&rsquo;s
+      peculiar sensitiveness to critical attack, and having, moreover, observed
+      something of the kind myself, I tried to avoid a circumstantial statement
+      of what passed. But Rossetti was, as has been said by one who knew him
+      well, &ldquo;of imagination all compact,&rdquo; and my obvious desire to shelve the
+      subject suggested to his mind a thousand inferences infinitely more
+      damaging than the fact. To avoid such a result I told him all, and there
+      was little in the way of attack to repeat beyond a few unwelcome
+      strictures on his poem <i>Jenny</i>. He listened but too eagerly to what I
+      was saying, and then in a voice slower, softer, and more charged, perhaps,
+      with emotion than I had heard before, said it was the old story, which
+      began ten years before, and would go on until he had been hunted and
+      hounded to his grave. Startled, and indeed, appalled by so grave a view of
+      what to me had seemed no more than an error of critical judgment, coupled
+      perhaps, with some intemperance of condemnation, I prayed of him to think
+      no more of the matter, reproached myself with having yielded to his
+      importunity, and begged him to remember that if one man held the opinions
+      I had repeated, many men held contrary ones.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was right of you to tell me when I asked you,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;though my
+      friends usually keep such facts from my knowledge. As to <i>Jenny</i>, it
+      is a sermon, nothing less. As I say, it is a sermon, and on a great world,
+      to most men unknown, though few consider themselves ignorant of it. But of
+      this conspiracy to persecute me&mdash;what remains to say but that it is
+      widespread and remorseless&mdash;one cannot but feel it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I assured him there existed no conspiracy to persecute him: that he had
+      ardent upholders everywhere, though it was true that few men had found
+      crueller critics. He shook his head, and said I knew that what he had
+      alleged was true, namely that an organised conspiracy existed, having for
+      its object to annoy and injure him. Growing a little impatient of this
+      delusion, so tenaciously held, against all show of reason, I told him that
+      it was no more than the fever of an oppressed brain brought about by his
+      reclusive habits of life, by shunning intercourse with all save some half
+      dozen or more friends. &ldquo;You tell me,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;that you have rarely been
+      outside these walls for some years, and your brain has meanwhile been
+      breeding a host of hallucinations, like cobwebs in a dark corner. You have
+      only to go abroad, and the fresh air will blow these things away.&rdquo; But
+      continuing for some moments longer in the same strain, he came to closer
+      quarters and distressed me by naming as enemies three or four men who had
+      throughout life been his friends, who have spoken of him since his death
+      in words of admiration and even affection, and who had for a time fallen
+      away from him or called on him but rarely, from contingencies due to any
+      cause but alienated friendship.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At length the time had arrived when it was considered prudent to retire.
+      &ldquo;You are to sleep in Watts&rsquo;s room to-night,&rdquo; he said: and then in reply to
+      a look of inquiry he added, &ldquo;He comes here at least twice a week, talking
+      until four o&rsquo;clock in the morning upon everything from poetry to the
+      Pleiades, and driving away the bogies, and as he lives at Putney Hill, it
+      is necessary to have a bed for him.&rdquo; Before going into my room he
+      suggested that I should go and look, at his. It was entered from another
+      and smaller room which he said that he used as a breakfast room. The outer
+      room was made fairly bright and cheerful by a glittering chandelier (the
+      property once, he told me, of David Garrick), and from the rustle of trees
+      against the window-pane one perceived that it overlooked the garden; but
+      the inner room was dark with heavy hangings around the walls as well as
+      the bed, and thick velvet curtains before the windows, so that the candles
+      in our hands seemed unable to light it, and our voices sounded thick and
+      muffled. An enormous black oak chimney-piece of curious design, having an
+      ivory crucifix on the largest of its ledges, covered a part of one side
+      and reached to the ceiling. Cabinets, and the usual furniture of a
+      bedroom, occupied places about the floor: and in the middle of it, and
+      before a little couch, stood a small table on which was a wire lantern
+      containing a candle which Rossetti lit from the open one in his hand&mdash;another
+      candle meantime lying by its side. I remarked that he probably burned a
+      light all night. He said that was so. &ldquo;My curse,&rdquo; he added, &ldquo;is insomnia.
+      Two or three hours hence I shall get up and lie on the couch, and, to pass
+      away a weary hour, read this book&rdquo;&mdash;a volume of Boswell&rsquo;s <i>Johnson</i>
+      which I noticed he took out of the bookcase as we left the studio. It did
+      not escape me that on the table stood two small bottles sealed and
+      labelled, together with a little measuring-glass. Without looking further
+      at it, but with a terrible suspicion growing over me, I asked if that were
+      his medicine.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They say there is a skeleton in every cupboard,&rdquo; he said in a low voice,
+      &ldquo;and that&rsquo;s mine; it is chloral.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      When I reached the room that I was to occupy during the night, I found it,
+      like Rossetti&rsquo;s bedroom, heavy with hangings, and black with antique
+      picture panels, with a ceiling (unlike that of the other rooms in the
+      house), out of all reach or sight, and so dark from various causes, that
+      the candle seemed only to glimmer in it&mdash;indeed to add to the
+      darkness by making it felt. Mr. Watts, as Rossetti told me, was entirely
+      indifferent to these eerie surroundings, even if his fine subjective
+      intellect, more prone to meditate than to observe, was ever for an instant
+      conscious of them; but on myself I fear they weighed heavily, and
+      augmented the feeling of closeness and gloom which had been creeping upon
+      me since I entered the house. Scattered about the room in most admired
+      disorder were some outlandish and unheard-of books, and all kinds of
+      antiquarian and Oriental oddities, which books and oddities I afterwards
+      learnt had been picked up at various times by the occupant in his
+      ramblings about Chelsea and elsewhere, and never yet taken away by him,
+      but left there apparently to scare the chambermaid: such as old carved
+      heads and gargoyles of the most grinning and ghastly expression, Burmese
+      and Chinese Buddhas in soapstone of every degree of placid ugliness,
+      together, I am bound by force of truth to admit, with one piece of carved
+      Italian marble in bas-relief, of great interest and beauty. Such was my
+      bed-chamber for the night, and little wonder if it threatened to murder
+      the innocent sleep. But it was later than 4 A.M., and wearied nature must
+      needs assert herself, and so I lay down amidst the odour of bygone ages.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Presently Rossetti came in, for no purpose that I can remember, except to
+      say that he had enjoyed my visit I replied that I should never forget it.
+      &ldquo;If you decide to settle in London,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;I trust you &lsquo;ll come and
+      live with me, and then many such evenings must remove the memory of this
+      one.&rdquo; I laughed, for I thought what he hinted at to be of the remotest
+      likelihood. &ldquo;I have just taken sixty grains of chloral,&rdquo; he said, as he
+      was going out; &ldquo;in four hours I take sixty more, and in four hours after
+      that yet another sixty.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Does not the dose increase with you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It has not done so perceptibly in recent years. I judge I&rsquo;ve taken more
+      chloral than any man whatever: Marshall says if I were put into a Turkish
+      bath I should sweat it at every pore.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was something in his tone suggesting that he was even proud of the
+      accomplishment. To me it was a frightful revelation, accounting entirely
+      for what had puzzled and distressed me in his delusions already referred
+      to. And now let me say that whilst it would have been on my part the most
+      pitiful weakness (because the most foolish tearfulness of injuring a great
+      man who was strong enough to suffer a good deal to be discounted from his
+      strength), to attempt to conceal this painful side of Rossetti&rsquo;s mind, I
+      shall not again allude to those delusions, unless it be to show that,
+      coming to him with the drug which blighted half his life, they disappeared
+      when it had been removed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      None may rightly say to what the use of that drug was due, or what was due
+      to it; the sadder side of his life was ever under its shadow; his
+      occasional distrust of friends: his fear of enemies: his broken health and
+      shattered spirits, all came of his indulgence in the pernicious thing.
+      When I remember this I am more than willing to put by all thought of the
+      little annoyances, which to me, as to other immediate friends, were
+      constantly occurring through that cause, which seemed at the moment so
+      vexatious and often so insupportable, but which are now forgotten.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Next morning&mdash;(a clear autumn morning)&mdash;I strolled through the
+      large garden at the back of the house, and of course I found it of a piece
+      with what I had previously seen. A beautiful avenue of lime-trees opened
+      into a grass plot of nearly an acre in extent. The trees were just as
+      nature made them, and so was the grass, which in places was lying long,
+      dry and withered under the sun, weeds creeping up in damp places, and the
+      gravel of the pathway scattered upon the verges. This neglected condition
+      of the garden was, I afterwards found, humorously charged upon Mr. Watts&rsquo;s
+      &ldquo;reluctance to interfere with nature in her clever scheme of the survival
+      of the fittest,&rdquo; but I suspect it was due at least equally to the owner&rsquo;s
+      personal indifference to everything of the kind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Before leaving I glanced over the bookcase. Rossetti&rsquo;s library was by no
+      means a large one. It consisted, perhaps, of 1000 volumes, scarcely more;
+      and though this was not large as comprising the library of one whose
+      reading must have been in two arts pursued as special studies, and each
+      involving research and minute original inquiry, it cannot be considered
+      noticeably small, and it must have been sufficient. Rossetti differed
+      strangely as a reader from the man to whom in bias of genius he was most
+      nearly related. Coleridge was an omnivorous general reader: Rossetti was
+      eclectic rather than desultory. His library contained a number of valuable
+      old works of more interest to him from their plates than letterpress. Of
+      this kind were <i>Gerard&rsquo;s Herbal</i> (1626), supposed to be the source of
+      many a hint utilised by the Morris firm, of which Rossetti was a member;
+      <i>Poliphili Hypnerotomachia</i> (1467); Heywood&rsquo;s <i>History of Women</i>
+      (1624); <i>Songe de Poliphile</i> (1561); Bonnard&rsquo;s <i>Costumes of 12th,
+      13th, and l4th Centuries; Habiti Antichi</i> (of which the designs are
+      said to be by Titian)&mdash;printed Venice, (1664); <i>Cosmographia</i>, a
+      history of the peoples of the world (1572); <i>Ciceronis Officia</i>
+      (1534), a blackletter folio, with woodcuts by Burgkmaier; <i>Jost Amman&rsquo;s
+      Costumes</i>, with woodcuts coloured by hand; <i>Cento Novelle</i>
+      (Venice, 1598); Francesco Barberino&rsquo;s <i>Documenti (d&rsquo;Amore</i> (Rome,
+      1640); <i>Décoda de Titolivio</i>, a Spanish blackletter, without date,
+      but probably belonging to the 16th century. Besides these were various
+      vellum-bound works relating to Greek and Roman allegorical and
+      mythological subjects, and a number of scrap-books and portfolios
+      containing photographs from nearly all the picture-galleries of Europe,
+      but chiefly of the pictures of the early Florentine and Venetian schools,
+      with an admixture of Spanish art. Of Michael Angelo&rsquo;s designs for the
+      Sistine Chapel there was a fine set of photographs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These did not make up a very complete ancient artistic library, but
+      Rossetti&rsquo;s collection of the poets was more full and valuable. There was a
+      pretty little early edition of Petrarch, which appeared to have been
+      presented first by John Philip Kemble to Polidori (Rossetti&rsquo;s grandfather)
+      in 1812; then in 1853 by Polidori to his daughter, Rossetti&rsquo;s mother,
+      Frances Rossetti; and by her in 1870 to her son. A splendid edition (1552)
+      of Boccaccio&rsquo;s <i>Decamerone</i> contained a number of valuable marginal
+      notes, chiefly by Rossetti, the first being as follows:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This volume contains 40 woodcuts besides many initial letters. The greater
+      number, if not the whole, must certainly be by Holbein. I am in doubt as
+      to the pictures heading the chapters, but think these most probably his,
+      only following the usual style of such illustrations to Boccaccio, and
+      consequently more Italianised than the others. The initial letters present
+      for the most part games of strength or skill.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There were various editions of Dante, including a very large folio edition
+      of the <i>Commedia</i>, dated Florence, 1481, and the works of a number of
+      Dante&rsquo;s contemporaries. Besides two or three editions of Shakspeare (the
+      best being Dyce&rsquo;s, in 9 vols.), there were some of the Elizabethan
+      dramatists. Coming to later poetry, I found a complete set of Gilfillan&rsquo;s
+      <i>Poets</i>, in 45 vols. There was the curious little manuscript quarto
+      (much like a shilling school-exercise book) labelled <i>Blake</i>, and
+      this was, perhaps, by far the most valuable volume in the library. The
+      contents and history of this book have already been given.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There were two editions of Gilchrist&rsquo;s <i>Blake</i>; complete (or almost
+      complete) sets of the works of William Morris and A. C. Swinburne,
+      inscribed in the authors&rsquo; autographs&mdash;the copy of <i>Atalanta in
+      Calydon</i> being marked by the poet, &ldquo;First copy; printed off before the
+      dedication was in type.&rdquo; It may be remembered that Robert Brough
+      translated Béranger&rsquo;s songs, and dedicated his volume in affectionate
+      terms to Rossetti. The presentation copy of this book bore the following
+      inscription:&mdash;&ldquo;To D. G. Rossetti, meaning in my <i>heart</i> what I
+      have tried to say in print. Et. B. Brough. 1856.&rdquo; There were also several
+      presentation copies from Robert Browning, Coventry Patmore, W. B. Scott,
+      Sir Henry Taylor, Aubrey de Vere, Tom Taylor, Westland Marston, F. Locker,
+      A. O&rsquo;Shaughnessy, Sir Theodore Martin; besides volumes bearing the names
+      of nearly every well-known younger writer of prose or verse.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Five volumes of <i>Modern Painters</i>, together with <i>The Seven Lamps
+      of Architecture</i> and the tract on <i>Pre-Raphaelitism</i>, bore the
+      author&rsquo;s name and Rossetti&rsquo;s in Mr. Ruskin&rsquo;s autograph. There was a fine
+      copy in ten volumes of Violet-le-Duc&rsquo;s <i>Dictionnaire de l&rsquo;Architecture</i>,
+      and also of the <i>Biographie Générale</i> in forty-six volumes, besides
+      several dictionaries, concordances, and the like. There was also a copy of
+      Fitzgerald&rsquo;s <i>Calderon</i>. Rossetti seemed to be a reader of
+      Swedenborg, as White&rsquo;s book on the great mystic testified; also to have
+      been at one time interested in the investigation of the phenomena of
+      Spiritualism. Of one writer of fiction he must have been an ardent reader,
+      for there were at least 100 volumes by Alexandre Dumas. German writers
+      were conspicuously absent, Goethe&rsquo;s <i>Faust</i> and Carlyle&rsquo;s translation
+      of <i>Wilhelm, Meister</i>, being about the only notable German works in
+      the library. Rossetti did not appear to be a collector of first editions,
+      nor did it seem that he attached much importance to the mere outsides of
+      his books, but of the insides he was master indeed. The impression left
+      upon the mind after a rapid survey of the poet-painter&rsquo;s library was that
+      he was a careful, but slow and thorough reader (as was seen by the
+      marginal annotations which nearly every volume contained), and that,
+      though very far from affected by bibliomania, he was not without pride in
+      the possession of rare and valuable books.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When I left the house at a late hour that morning Rossetti was not yet
+      stirring, and so some months passed before I saw him again. If I had tried
+      to formulate the idea&mdash;or say sensation&mdash;that possessed me at
+      the moment, I think I should have said, in a word or two, that outside the
+      air breathed freely. Within, the gloom, the mediaeval furniture, the brass
+      censers, sacramental cups, lamps; and crucifixes conspired, I thought, to
+      make the atmosphere heavy and unwholesome. As for the man himself who was
+      the central spirit amidst these anachronistic environments, he had, if
+      possible, attached me yet closer to himself by contact. Before this I had
+      been attracted to him in admiration of his gifts: but now I was drawn to
+      him, in something very like pity, for his isolation and suffering. Not
+      that at this time he consciously made demand of much compassion, and least
+      of all from me. Health was apparently whole with him, his spirits were
+      good, and his energies were at their best. He had not yet known the full
+      bitterness of the shadowed valley: not yet learned what it was to hunger
+      for any cheerful society that would relieve him of the burden of the
+      flesh. All that came later. Rossetti was one of the most magnetic of men,
+      but it was not more his genius than his unhappiness that held certain of
+      his friends by a spell.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0008" id="link2HCH0008">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER VIII.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      It was characteristic of Rossetti that he addressed me in the following
+      terms probably before I had left his house: for the letter was, no doubt,
+      written in that interval of sleeplessness which he had spoken of as his
+      nightly visitant:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I forgot to say&mdash;Don&rsquo;t, please, spread details as to story of <i>Rose
+      Mary</i>. I don&rsquo;t want it to be stale or to get forestalled in the
+      travelling of report from mouth to mouth. I hope it won&rsquo;t be too long
+      before you visit town again,&mdash;I will not for an instant question that
+      you would then visit me also.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Six months or more intervened, however, before I was able to visit
+      Rossetti again. In the meantime we corresponded as fully as before: the
+      subject upon which we most frequently exchanged opinions being now the
+      sonnet.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     By-the-bye [he says], I cannot understand what you say of
+     Milton&rsquo;s, Keats&rsquo;s, and Coleridge&rsquo;s sonnets. The last, it is
+     true, was <i>always</i> poor as a sonnetteer (I don&rsquo;t see much in
+     the <i>Autumnal Moon</i>). My own only exception to this verdict
+     (much as I adore Coleridge&rsquo;s genius) would be the ludicrous
+     sonnet on <i>The House that Jack built</i>, which is a
+     masterpiece in its way. I should not myself number the one
+     you mention of Keats&rsquo;s among his best half-dozen (many of
+     his are mere drafts, strange to say); and cannot at all
+     enter into your verdict on those of Milton, which seem to me
+     to be every one of exceptional excellence, though a few are
+     even finer than the rest, notably, of course, the one you
+     name. Pardon an egotistic sentence (in answer to what you
+     say so generously of <i>Lost Days</i>), if I express an opinion
+     that <i>Known in Vain</i> and <i>Still-born Love</i> may perhaps be
+     said to head the series in value, though <i>Lost Days</i> might
+     be equally a favourite with me if I did not remember in what
+     but too opportune juncture it was wrung out of me. I have a
+     good number of sonnets for <i>The House of Life</i> still in MS.,
+     which I have worked on with my best effort, and, I think,
+     will fully sustain their place. These and other things I
+     should like to show you whenever we meet again. The MS. vol.
+     I proposed to send is merely an old set of (chiefly)
+     trifles, about which I should like an opinion as to whether
+     any should be included in the future.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      I had spoken of Keats&rsquo;s sonnet beginning
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     To one who has been long in city pent,
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      with its exquisite last lines&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     E&rsquo;en like the passage of an angel&rsquo;s tear
+     That falls through the clear ether silently,
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      reminding one of a less spiritual figure&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     Kings like a golden jewel
+     Down a golden stair.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      After his bantering me, as of old he had done, on the use of long and
+      crabbed words, I hinted that he was in honour bound to agree at least with
+      my disparaging judgment upon <i>Tetrachordon</i>, if only because of the
+      use of words that would &ldquo;have made Quintillian stare.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I further instanced&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     &ldquo;Harry whose tuneful and well-measured song;&rdquo; and
+     &ldquo;Lawrence, of virtuous father virtuous son,&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      as examples of Milton at his weakest as a sonnet-writer. He replied:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     I am sorry I must still differ somewhat from you about
+     Milton&rsquo;s sonnets. I think the one on <i>Tetrachordon</i> a very
+     vigorous affair indeed. The one to Mr. H. Lawes I am half
+     disposed to give you, but not altogether&mdash;its close is
+     sweet. As to <i>Lawrence</i>, it is curious that my sister was
+     only the other day expressing to me a special relish for
+     this sonnet, and I do think it very fresh and wholesomely
+     relishing myself. It is an awful fact that sun, moon, or
+     candlelight once looked down on the human portent of Dr.
+     Johnson and Mrs. Hannah More convened in solemn conclave
+     above the outspread sonnets of Milton, with a meritorious
+     and considerate resolve of finding out for him &ldquo;why they
+     were so bad.&rdquo; This is so stupendous a warning, that perhaps
+     it may even incline one to find some of them better than
+     they are.
+
+     Coming to Coleridge, I must confess at once that I never
+     meet in any collection with the sonnet on Schiller&rsquo;s
+     <i>Robbers</i> without heading it at once with the words
+     &ldquo;unconscionably bad.&rdquo; The habit has been a life-long one.
+     That you mention beginning&mdash;&ldquo;Sweet mercy,&rdquo; etc., I have
+     looked for in the only Coleridge I have by me (my brother&rsquo;s
+     cheap edition, for all the faults of which <i>he</i> is not at
+     all answerable), and do not find it there, nor have I it in
+     mind.
+
+     To pass to Keats. The ed. of 1868 contains no sonnet on the
+     Elgin Marbles. Is it in a later edition? Of course that on
+     Chapman&rsquo;s <i>Homer</i> is supreme. It ought to be preceded {*} in
+     all editions by the one <i>To Homer</i>,
+
+          &ldquo;Standing aloof in giant ignorance,&rdquo; etc.
+     which contains perhaps the greatest single line in Keats:
+
+          &ldquo;There is a budding morrow in midnight.&rdquo;
+ 
+     * I pointed out that it was written later than the one on
+     Chapman&rsquo;s Homer (notwithstanding its first line) and
+     therefore should follow after it, not go before.
+
+     Other special favourites with me are&mdash;&ldquo;Why did I laugh to-
+     night?&rdquo;&mdash;&rdquo; As Hermes once,&rdquo;&mdash;&ldquo;Time&rsquo;s sea hath been,&rdquo; and
+     the one <i>On the Flower and, Leaf</i>.
+
+     It is odd that several of these best ones seem to have been
+     early work, and rejected by Keats in his lifetime, while
+     some of those he printed are absolutely sorry drafts.
+
+     I had admired Coleridge&rsquo;s sonnet on Schiller&rsquo;s <i>Robbers</i> for
+     the perhaps minor excellence of bringing vividly before the
+     mind the scenes it describes. If the sonnet is
+     unconscionably bad so perhaps is the play, the beautiful
+     scene of the setting sun notwithstanding. Eventually,
+     however, I abandoned my belligerent position as to Milton&rsquo;s
+     sonnets: the army of authorities I found ranged against the
+     modest earth-works within which I had entrenched myself must
+     of itself have made me quail. My utmost contention had been
+     that Milton wrote the most impassioned sonnet (<i>Avenge, O
+     Lord</i>), the two most nobly pathetic sonnets (<i>When I
+     consider</i> and <i>Methought I saw</i>), and one of the poorest
+     sonnets (<i>Harry, whose tuneful</i>, etc.) in English poetry.
+
+     At this time (September 1880) Mr. J. Ashcroft Noble
+     published an essay on <i>The Sonnet in England</i> in <i>The
+     Contemporary Review</i>, and relating thereto Rossetti wrote:
+
+     I have just been reading Mr. Noble&rsquo;s article on the sonnet.
+     As regards my own share in it, I can only say that it greets
+     me with a gratifying ray of generous recognition. It is all
+     the more pleasant to me as finding  a place in the very
+     Review which years ago opened its pages to a pseudonymous
+     attack on my poems and on myself. I see a passage in the
+     article which seems meant to indicate the want of such a
+     work on the sonnet as you are wishing to supply. I only
+     trust that you may do so, and that Mr. Noble may find a
+     field for continued poetic criticism. I am very proud to
+     think that, after my small and solitary book has been a good
+     many years published and several years out of print, it yet
+     meets with such ardent upholding by young and sincere men.
+
+     With the verdicts given throughout the article, I generally
+     sympathise, but not with the unqualified homage to
+     Wordsworth. A reticence almost invariably present is fatal
+     in my eyes to the highest pretensions on behalf of his
+     sonnets. Reticence is but a poor sort of muse, nor is
+     tentativeness (so often to be traced in his work) a good
+     accompaniment in music. Take the sonnet on <i>Toussaint
+     L&rsquo;Ouverture</i> (in my opinion his noblest, and very noble
+     indeed) and study (from Main&rsquo;s note) the lame and fumbling
+     changes made in various editions of the early lines, which
+     remain lame in the end. Far worse than this, study the
+     relation of the closing lines of his famous sonnet <i>The
+     World is too much with us</i>, etc., to a passage in Spenser,
+     and say whether plagiarism was ever more impudent or
+     manifest (again I derive from Main&rsquo;s excellent exposition of
+     the point), and then consider whether a bard was likely to
+     do this once and yet not to do it often. Primary vital
+     impulse was surely not fully developed in his muse.
+
+     I will venture to say that I wish my sister&rsquo;s sonnet work
+     had met with what I consider the justice due to it. Besides
+     the unsurpassed quality (in my opinion) of her best sonnets,
+     my sister has proved her poetic importance by solid and
+     noble inventive work of many kinds, which I should be proud
+     indeed to reckon among my life&rsquo;s claims.
+
+     I have a great weakness myself for many of Tennyson-Turner&rsquo;s
+     sonnets, though of course what Mr. Noble says of them is in
+     the main true, and he has certainly quoted the very finest
+     one, which has a more fervent appeal for me than I could
+     easily derive from Wordsworth in almost any case.
+
+     Will you give my thanks to Mr. Noble for his frank and
+     outspoken praise?
+
+     Let me hear of your doings and intentions.
+
+     Ever sincerely yours.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Three names notably omitted in the article are those of Dobell, W. B.
+      Scott, and Swinburne.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The allusion in the foregoing letter to the work on the Sonnet which I was
+      aiming to supply, bears reference to the anthology subsequently published
+      under the title of <i>Sonnets of Three Centuries</i>. My first idea was
+      simply to write a survey of the art and history of the sonnet, printing
+      only such examples as might be embraced by my critical comments.
+      Rossetti&rsquo;s generous sympathy was warmly engaged in this enterprise.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     It would really warm me up much [he writes] to know of
+     <i>your</i> editing a sonnet book You would have my best
+     cooperation as to suggesting examples, but I certainly think
+     that English sonnets (original and exceptionally translated
+     ones, the latter only <i>perhaps</i>) should be the sole scheme.
+     Curiously enough, some one wrote me the other day as to a
+     projected series of living sonneteers (other collections
+     being only of those preceding our time). I have half
+     committed myself to contributing, but not altogether as yet.
+     The name of the projector, S. Waddington, is new to me, and
+     I don&rsquo;t know who is to publish.... Really you ought to do
+     the sonnet-book you aspire to do. I know but of one London
+     critic (Theodore Watts) whom I should consider the leading
+     man for such a purpose, and I have tried to incite him to it
+     so often that I know now he won&rsquo;t do it; but I have always
+     meant <i>a complete</i> series in which the dead poets must, of
+     course, predominate. As to a series of the living only, I
+     told you of a Mr. Waddington who seems engaged on such a
+     supplementary scheme. What his gifts for it may be I know
+     not, but I suppose he knows it is in requisition. However,
+     there need not be but one such if you felt your hand in for
+     it. His view happens to be also (as you suggest) about 160
+     sonnets. In reply to your query, I certainly think there
+     must be 20 living writers (male and female&mdash;my sister a
+     leader, I consider) who have written good sonnets such as
+     would afford an interesting and representative selection,
+     though assuredly not such as would all take the rank of
+     classics by any means. The number of sonnets now extant,
+     written by poets who did not exist as such a dozen years
+     ago, I believe to be almost infinite, and in sufficiently
+     numerous instances good, however derivative. One younger
+     poet among them, Philip Marston, has written many sonnets
+     which yield to few or none by any poet whatever; but he has
+     printed such a large number in the aggregate, and so unequal
+     one with the other, that the great ones are not to be found
+     by opening at random. &ldquo;How are they (the poets) to be
+     approached?&mdash;&rdquo; you innocently ask. Ye heavens! how does the
+     cat&rsquo;s-meat-man approach Grimalkin?&mdash;and what is that
+     relation in life when compared to the <i>rapport</i> established
+     between the living bard and the fellow-creature who is
+     disposed to cater to his caterwauling appetite for
+     publicity? However, to be serious, I must at least exonerate
+     the bard, I am sure, from any desire to appropriate an
+     &ldquo;interest in the proceeds.&rdquo; There are some, I feel certain,
+     to whom the collector might say with a wink, &ldquo;What are you
+     going to stand?&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      I do not myself think that a collection of sonnets inserted at intervals
+      in an essay is a good form for the purpose. Such a book is from one chief
+      point a book of instantaneous reference,&mdash;it would only, perhaps, be
+      read <i>through</i> once in a lifetime. For this purpose a well-indexed
+      current series is best, with any desirable essay prefixed and notes
+      affixed.... I once conceived of a series, to be entitled,
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      THE ENGLISH CASTALY: A QUINTESSENCE: BEING A COLLECTION OF ALL THAT IS
+      BEST IN ALL ENGLISH POETS, EXCEPTING WORKS OF GREAT LENGTH.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I still think this a good idea, but, of course, it would be an extensive
+      undertaking.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Later on, he wrote:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     I have thought of a title for your book. What think you of
+     this?
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      A SONNET SEQUENCE FROM ELDER TO MODERN WORK, WITH FIFTY HITHERTO UNPRINTED
+      SONNETS BY LIVING WRITERS.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     That would not be amiss. Tell me if you think of using the
+     title <i>A Sonnet Sequence</i>, as otherwise I might use it in
+     the <i>House of Life</i>.... What do you think of this
+     alternative title:
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      THE ENGLISH SONNET MUSE FROM ELIZABETH&rsquo;S REIGN TO VICTORIA&rsquo;S.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     I think <i>Castalia</i> much too euphuistic, and though I
+     shouldn&rsquo;t like the book to be called simply still I have a
+     great prejudice against very florid titles for such
+     gatherings. <i>Treasury</i> has been sadly run upon.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      I did not like <i>Sonnet Sequence</i> for such a collection, and
+      relinquished the title; moreover, I had had from the first a clearly
+      defined scheme in mind, carrying its own inevitable title, which was in
+      due course adopted. I may here remark that I never resisted any idea of
+      Rossetti&rsquo;s at the moment of its inception, since resistance only led to a
+      temporary outburst of self-assertion on his part. He was a man of so much
+      impulse,&mdash;impulse often as violent as lawless&mdash;that to oppose
+      him merely provoked anger to no good purpose, for as often as not the
+      position at first adopted with so much pertinacity was afterwards silently
+      abandoned, and your own aims quietly acquiesced in. On this subject of a
+      title he wrote a further letter, which is interesting from more than one
+      point of view:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     I don&rsquo;t like <i>Garland</i> at all C. Patmore collected a
+     <i>Children&rsquo;s Garland.</i> I think
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      ENGLISH SONNET&rsquo;S PRESENT AND PAST, WITH&mdash;ETC.,
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     would be a good title. I think I prefer <i>Present and Past</i>,
+     or <i>of the P. and P.,</i> to <i>New and Old</i> for your purpose;
+     but I own I am partly influenced by the fact that I have
+     settled to call my own vol. <i>Poems New and Old</i>, and don&rsquo;t
+     want it to get staled; but I really do think the other at
+     least as good for your purpose&mdash;perhaps more dignified.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Again, in reply to a proposal of my own, he wrote:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     I think <i>Sonnets of the Century</i> an excellent idea and
+     title. I must say a mass of Wordsworth over again, like
+     Main&rsquo;s, is a little disheartening,&mdash;still the <i>best</i>
+     selection from him is what one wants. There is some book
+     called <i>A Century of Sonnets</i>, but this, I suppose, would
+     not matter....
+
+     I think sometimes of your sonnet-book, and have formed
+     certain views. I really would not in your place include old
+     work at all: it would be but a scanty gathering, and I feel
+     certain that what is really in requisition is a supplement
+     to Main, containing living writers (printed and un-printed)
+     put together under their authors&rsquo; names (not separately) and
+     rare gleanings from those more recently dead.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      I fear I did not attach importance to this decision, for I now knew my
+      correspondent too well to rely upon his being entirely in the same mind
+      for long. Hence I was not surprised to receive the following a day or two
+      later:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     I lately had a conversation with Watts about your sonnet-
+     book, and find his views to be somewhat different from what
+     I had expressed, and I may add I think now he is right. He
+     says there should be a very careful selection of the elder
+     sonnets and of everything up to present century. I think he
+     is right.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      The fact is, that almost from the first I had taken a view similar to Mr.
+      Watts&rsquo;s as to the design of my book, and had determined to call the
+      anthology by the title it now bears. On one occasion, however, I acted
+      rather without judgment in sending Rossetti a synopsis of certain critical
+      tests formulated by Mr. Watts in a letter of great power and value.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the letter in question Mr. Watts seemed to be setting himself to
+      confute some extremely ill-considered remarks made in a certain quarter
+      upon the structure of the sonnet, where (following Macaulay) the critic
+      says that there exists no good reason for requiring that even the
+      conventional limit as to length should be observed, and that the only use
+      in art of the legitimate model is to &ldquo;supply a poet with something to do
+      when his invention fails.&rdquo; I confess to having felt no little amazement
+      that one so devoid of a perception of the true function of the sonnet
+      should have been considered a proper person to introduce a great
+      sonnet-writer; and Mr. Watts (who, however, made no mention of the writer)
+      clearly demonstrated that the true sonnet has the foundation of its
+      structure in a fixed metrical law, and hence, that as it is impossible (as
+      Keats found out for himself) to improve upon the accepted form, that model&mdash;known
+      as the Petrarchian&mdash;should, with little or no variation, be worked
+      upon. Rossetti took fire, however, from a mistaken notion that Mr. Watts&rsquo;s
+      canons, as given in the letter in question, and merely reported by me,
+      were much more inflexible than they really proved.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     Sonnets of mine <i>could not appear</i> in any book which
+     contained such rigid rules as to rhyme, as are contained in
+     Watts&rsquo;s letter. I neither follow them, nor agree with them
+     as regards the English language. Every sonnet-writer should
+     show full capability of conforming to them in many
+     instances, but never to deviate from them in English must
+     pinion both thought and diction, and, (mastery once proved)
+     a series gains rather than loses by such varieties as do not
+     lessen the only absolute aim&mdash;that of beauty. The English
+     sonnet too much tampered with becomes a sort of bastard
+     madrigal. Too much, invariably restricted, it degenerates
+     into a Shibboleth.
+
+     Dante&rsquo;s sonnets (in reply to your question&mdash;not as part of
+     the above point) vary in arrangement. I never for a moment
+     thought of following in my book the rhymes of each
+     individual sonnet.
+
+     If sonnets of mine remain admissible, I should prefer
+     printing the two <i>On Cassandra to The Monochord</i> and <i>Wine
+     of Circe</i>.
+
+     I would not be too anxious, were I you, about anything in
+     choice of sonnets except the brains and the music.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Again he wrote:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     I talked to Watts about his letter. He seems to agree with
+     me as to advisable variation of form in preference to
+     transmuting valuable thought. It would not be afc all found
+     that my best sonnets are always in the mere form which I
+     think the best. The question with me is regulated by what I
+     have to say. But in truth, if I have a distinction as a
+     sonnet-writer, it is that I never admit a sonnet which is
+     not fully on the level of every other.... Again, as to this
+     blessed question, though no one ever took more pleasure in
+     continually using the form I prefer when not interfering
+     with thought, to insist on it would after a certain point be
+     ruin to common sense.
+
+     As to what you say of <i>The One Hope</i>&mdash;it is fully equal to
+     the very best of my sonnets, or I should not have wound up
+     the series with it. But the fact is, what is peculiar
+     chiefly in the series is, that scarcely one is worse than
+     any other. You have much too great a habit of speaking of a
+     special octave, sestette, or line. Conception, my boy,
+     <i>fundamental brainwork</i>, that is what makes the difference
+     in all art. Work your metal as much as you like, but first
+     take care that it is gold and worth working. A Shakspearean
+     sonnet is better than the most perfect in form, because
+     Shakspeare wrote it.
+
+     As for Drayton, of course his one incomparable sonnet is the
+     <i>Love-Parting</i>. That is almost the best in the language, if
+     not quite. I think I have now answered queries, and it is
+     late. Good-night!
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Rossetti had somewhat mistaken the scope of the letter referred to, and
+      when he came to know exactly what was intended, I found him in warm
+      agreement with the views therein taken. I have said at an earlier stage
+      that Rossetti&rsquo;s instinct for what was good in poetry was unfailing,
+      whatever the value of his opinions on critical principles, and hence I
+      felt naturally anxious to have the benefit of his views on certain of the
+      elder writers. He said:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     I am sorry I am no adept in elder sonnet literature. Many of
+     Donne&rsquo;s are remarkable&mdash;no doubt you glean some. None of
+     Shakspeare&rsquo;s is more indispensable than the wondrous one on
+     <i>Last</i> (129). Hartley Coleridge&rsquo;s finest is
+
+          &ldquo;If I have sinned in act, I may repent.&rdquo;
+ 
+     There is a fine one by Isaac Williams, evidently on the
+     death of a worldly man, and he wrote other good ones. To
+     return to the old, I think Stillingfleet&rsquo;s <i>To Williamson</i>
+     very fine....
+
+     I would like to send you a list of my special favourites
+     among Shakspeare&rsquo;s sonnets&mdash;viz.:&mdash;
+
+     15, 27, 29, 30, 36, 44, 45, 49, 50, 52, 55, 56, 59, 61, 62,
+     64, 65, 66, 68, 71, 73, 76, 77, 90, 93, 94, 97, 98, 99, 102,
+     107, 110, 116, 117, 119, 120, 123, 129, 135, 136, 138, 144,
+     145.
+
+     I made the selection long ago, and of course love them in
+     varying degrees.
+
+     There should be an essential reform in the printing of
+     Shakspeare&rsquo;s sonnets. After sonnet 125 should occur the
+     words <i>End of Part I</i>. The couplet-piece, numbered 126,
+     should be called <i>Epilogue to Part I.</i>. Then, before 127,
+     should be printed Part II. After 152, should be put End of
+     Part II.&mdash;and the two last sonnets should be called Epilogue
+     to Part II. About these two last I have a theory of my own.
+
+     Did you ever see the excellent remarks on these sonnets in
+     my brother&rsquo;s <i>Lives of Famous Poets?</i> I think a simple point
+     he mentions (for first time) fixes Pembroke clearly as the
+     male friend. I am glad you like his own two fine sonnets. I
+     wish he would write more such. By the bye, you speak with
+     great scorn of the closing couplet in sonnets. I do not
+     certainly think that form the finest, but I do think this
+     and every variety desirable in a series, and have often used
+     it myself. I like your letters on sonnets; write on all
+     points in question. The two last of Shakspeare&rsquo;s sonnets
+     seem to me to have a very probable (and rather elaborate)
+     meaning never yet attributed to them. Some day, when I see
+     you, we will talk it over. Did you ever see a curious book
+     by one Brown (I don&rsquo;t mean Armitage Brown) on Shakspeare&rsquo;s
+     sonnets? By the bye, he is not the source of my notion as
+     above, but a matter of fact he names helps in it. I never
+     saw Massey&rsquo;s book on the subject, but fancy his views and
+     Brown&rsquo;s are somewhat allied. You should look at what my
+     brother says, which is very concise and valuable. I hope I
+     am not omitting to answer you in any essential point, but my
+     writing-table is a chaos into which your last letters have,
+     for the moment, sunk beyond recovery.
+
+     I consider the foregoing, perhaps, the most valuable of
+     Rossetti&rsquo;s letters to me. I cannot remember that we ever
+     afterwards talked over the two last sonnets of Shakspeare;
+     if we did so, the meaning attached to them by him did not
+     fix itself very definitely upon my memory.
+
+     In explanation of my alleged dislike of the closing couplet,
+     I may say that a rhymed couplet at the close of a sonnet has
+     an effect upon my ear similar to that produced by the
+     couplets at the ends of some of the acts of Shakspeare&rsquo;s
+     plays, which were in many instances interpolated by the
+     actors to enable them to make emphatic exits.
+
+     I must now group together a number of short notes on
+     sonnets:
+
+     I think Blanco White&rsquo;s sonnet difficult to overrate in
+     <i>thought</i>&mdash;probably in this respect unsurpassable, but easy
+     to overrate as regards its workmanship. Of course there is
+     the one fatally disenchanting line:
+
+          While fly and leaf and insect stood revealed.
+
+     The poverty of vision which could not see at a glance that
+     fly and insect were one and the same, is, as you say, enough
+     to account for its being the writer&rsquo;s only sonnet (there is
+     one more however which I don&rsquo;t know).
+
+     I&rsquo;ll copy you overpage a sonnet which I consider a very fine
+     one, but which may be said to be quite unknown. It is by
+     Charles Whitehead, who wrote the very admirable and
+     exceptional novel of <i>Richard Savage</i>, published somewhere
+     about 1840.
+
+          Even as yon lamp within my vacant room
+             With arduous flame disputes the doubtful night,
+             And can with its involuntary light
+          But lifeless things that near it stand illume;
+          Yet all the while it doth itself consume,
+             And ere the sun hath reached his morning height
+             With courier beams that greet the shepherd&rsquo;s sight,
+          There where its life arose must be its tomb:&mdash;
+          So wastes my life away, perforce confined
+             To common things, a limit to its sphere,
+          It gleams on worthless trifles undesign&rsquo;d,
+             With fainter ray each hour imprison&rsquo;d here.
+          Alas to know that the consuming mind
+             Must leave its lamp cold ere the sun appear!
+
+     I am sure you will agree with me in admiring <i>that</i>. I quote
+     from memory, and am not sure that I have given line 6 quite
+     correctly....
+
+     I have just had Blanco White&rsquo;s only other sonnet (<i>On being
+     called an Old Man at 50</i>) copied out for you. I do certainly
+     think it ought to go in, though no better than so-so, as you
+     say. But it is just about as good as the former one, but for
+     the leading and splendid thought in the latter. Both are but
+     proseman&rsquo;s diction.
+
+     There is a sonnet of Chas. Wells&rsquo;s <i>On Chaucer</i> which is not
+     worthy of its writer, but still you should have it. It
+     occurs among some prefatory tributes in <i>Chaucer
+     Modernised</i>, edited by E. H. Home. I don&rsquo;t know how you are
+     to get a copy, but the book is in the British Museum Reading
+     Room. The sonnet is signed C. W. only.
+
+     The sonnet by Wells seemed to me in every respect poor, and
+     as it was no part of my purpose (as an admirer of Wells) to
+     advertise what the poet could not do, I determined&mdash;against
+     Rossetti&rsquo;s judgment&mdash;not to print the sonnet.
+
+     You certainly, in my opinion, ought to print Wells&rsquo;s sonnet.
+     Certainly nothing so disjointed ever gave itself the name
+     before, but it ought to be available for reference, and I do
+     not agree with you in considering it weak in any sense
+     except that of structure.
+
+     There is a sonnet by Ebenezer Jones, beginning &ldquo;I never
+     wholly feel that summer is high,&rdquo; which, though very jagged,
+     has decided merit to warrant its insertion.
+
+     As for Tennyson, he seems to have given leave for a sonnet
+     to appear in Main&rsquo;s book. Why not in yours? But I have long
+     ceased to know him, nor is any friend of mine in
+     communication with him.... My brother has written in his
+     time a few sonnets. Two of them I think very fine&mdash;
+     especially the one called <i>Shelley&rsquo;s Heart</i>, which he has
+     lately worked upon again with immense advantage.... You do
+     not tell me from whom you have received sonnets. The reason
+     which prevents my coming forward, in such a difficulty, with
+     a new sonnet of my own, is this:&mdash;which indeed you have
+     probably surmised: I know nothing would gratify malevolence,
+     after the controversy which ensued on your lecture, more
+     than to be able to assert, however falsely, that we had been
+     working in concert all along, that you were known to me from
+     the first, and that your advocacy had no real
+     spontaneity.... When you first entered on the subject, and
+     wrote your lecture, you were a perfect stranger to me, and
+     that fact greatly enhanced my pleasure in its enthusiastic
+     tone. I hope sincerely that we may have further and close
+     opportunities of intercourse, but should like whatever you
+     may write of me to come from the old source of intellectual
+     affinity only. That you should think the subject worthy of
+     further labour is a pleasure to me, but I only trust it may
+     not be a disadvantage to your book in unfriendly eyes,
+     particularly if that view happened to be the proposed
+     publisher&rsquo;s, in which case I should much prefer that this
+     section of your work were withdrawn for a more propitious
+     occasion.... I am very glad Brown is furthering your sonnet-
+     book&mdash;he knows so many bards. Of course if I were you, I
+     should keep an eye on the mouths even of gift-horses; but
+     were a creditable stud to be trotted out, of course I should
+     be willing; as were I one among many, the objection I noted
+     would not exist. I do not mean for a moment to say that many
+     very fine sonnets might not be obtained from poets not yet
+     known or not widely known; but known names would be the
+     things to parry the difficulty.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Later he wrote:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     As you know, I want to contribute to your volume if I can do
+     so without fear of the consequences hinted at in a former
+     letter as likely to ensue, so I now enclose a sonnet of my
+     own. If you are out in March 1881, you may be before my new
+     edition, but I am getting my stock together. Not a word of
+     this however, as it mustn&rsquo;t get into gossip paragraphs at
+     present. <i>The House of Life</i> is now a hundred sonnets&mdash;all
+     lyrics being removed. Besides this series, I have forty-five
+     sonnets extra. I think, as you are willing, I shall use the
+     title I sent you&mdash;<i>A Sonnet Sequence</i>. I fancy the
+     alternative title would be briefer and therefore better as
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      OUR SONNET-MUSE PROM ELIZABETH TO VICTORIA
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I could not be much concerned about the unwillingness to give me a new
+      sonnet which Rossetti at first exhibited, for I knew full well that sooner
+      or later the sonnet would come. Not that I recognised in him the faintest
+      scintillation of the affectation so common among authors as to the
+      publication of work. But the fear of any appearance of collusion between
+      himself and his critics was, as he said, a bugbear that constantly haunted
+      him. Owing to this, a stranger often stood a better chance of securing his
+      ready and open co-operation than the most intimate of friends. I
+      frequently yielded to his desire that in anything that I might write his
+      name should not be mentioned&mdash;too frequently by far, to my infinite
+      vexation at the time, and now to my deep and ineradicable regret. The
+      sonnet-book out of which arose much of the correspondence printed in this
+      chapter, contains in its preface and notes hardly an allusion to him, and
+      yet he was, in my judgment, out of all reach and sight, the greatest
+      sonnet-writer of his time. The sonnet first sent was <i>Pride of Youth</i>,
+      but as this formed part of <i>The House of Life</i> series, it was
+      withdrawn, and <i>Raleigh&rsquo;s Cell in the Tower</i> was substituted The
+      following hitherto unpublished sonnet was also contributed but withdrawn
+      at the last moment, because of its being out of harmony with the sonnets
+      selected to accompany it:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+               ON CERTAIN ELIZABETHAN REVIVALS.
+
+          O ruff-embastioned vast Elizabeth,
+             Bush to these bushel-bellied casks of wine,
+             Home-growth, &lsquo;tis true, but rank as turpentine,&mdash;
+          What would we with such skittle-plays at death %
+          Say, must we watch these brawlers&rsquo; brandished lathe,
+             Or to their reeking wit our ears incline,
+             Because all Castaly flowed crystalline
+          In gentle Shakspeare&rsquo;s modulated breath!
+          What! must our drama with the rat-pit vie,
+             Nor the scene close while one is left to kill!
+                Shall this be poetry % And thou&mdash;thou&mdash;man
+                Of blood, thou cannibalic Caliban,
+          What shall be said to thee?&mdash;a poet?&mdash;Fie!
+             &ldquo;An honourable murderer, if you will&rdquo;
+ 
+     I mentioned to you [he says] William Davies, author of
+     <i>Songs of a Wayfarer</i> (by the bye, another man has since
+     adopted his title). He has many excellent sonnets, and is a
+     valued friend of mine. I shall send you, on his behalf, a
+     copy of the book for selection of what you may please.... It
+     is very unequal, but the best truly excellent. The sonnets
+     are numerous, and some good, though the best work in the
+     book is not among them. There are two poems&mdash;<i>The Garden</i>,
+     and another called, I think, <i>On a dried-up Spring</i>, which
+     are worthy of the most fastidious collections. Many of the
+     poems are unnamed, and the whole has too much of a Herrick
+     air. . . .
+
+     It is quite refreshing to find you so pleased with my good
+     friend Davies&rsquo;s book, and I wish he were in London, as I
+     would have shown him what you say, which I know would have
+     given him pleasure. He is a man who suffers much from moods
+     of depression, in spite of his philosophic nature. I have
+     marked fifty pieces of different kinds throughout his book,
+     and of these twenty-nine are sonnets. Had those fifty been
+     alone printed, Davies would now be remembered and not
+     forgotten: but all poets now-a-days are redundant except
+     Tennyson. ...
+
+     I am this evening writing to Davies, who is in Rome, and
+     could not resist enclosing what you say, with so much
+     experimental appreciativeness of his book, and of his
+     intention to fill it with moral sunshine. I am sure he &lsquo;ll
+     send a new sonnet if he has one, but I fancy his bardic day
+     is over. I should think he was probably not subject to
+     melancholy when he wrote the <i>Wayfarer</i>. However, he tells
+     me that his spirits have improved in Italy. One other little
+     book of Herrickian verse he has written, called <i>The
+     Shepherd!s Garden</i>, but there are no sonnets in it. Besides
+     this, he published a volume containing a record of travel of
+     a very interesting kind, and called <i>The Pilgrimage of the
+     Tiber</i>. This is well known. It is illustrated, many of the
+     drawings being by himself, for he is quite as much painter
+     as poet. He also wrote in <i>The Quarterly Review</i> an article
+     on the sonnet (I should think about 1870 or so), and, a
+     little later, one which raised great wrath, on the English
+     School of Painting. These I have not seen. He &ldquo;lacks
+     advancement,&rdquo; however; having fertile powers and little
+     opportunity, and being none the luckier (I think) for a
+     small independence which keeps off <i>compulsion</i> to work,
+     though of willingness he has abundance in many directions.
+
+     There is an admirable but totally unknown living poet named
+     Dixon. I will send you two small vols, of his which he gave
+     me long ago, but please take good care of them, and return
+     them as soon as done with. I value them highly. I forgot
+     till to-day that he had written any sonnets, but I see there
+     are three in one vol. and one in another. I have marked my
+     two favourites. He should certainly be represented in your
+     book. If I live, I mean to write something about him in some
+     quarter when I can. His finest passages are as fine as any
+     living man can do. He was a canon of Carlisle Cathedral, and
+     at present has a living somewhere. If you wanted to ask him
+     for an original sonnet, you might mention my name, and
+     address him at Carlisle with <i>Please forward</i>. Of course he
+     is a Rev.
+
+     You will be sorry to hear that Davies has abandoned the hope
+     of producing a new sonnet to his own satisfaction. I have
+     again, however, urged him to the onslaught, and told him how
+     deserving you are of his efforts.
+
+     Swinburne, who is a vast admirer of my sister&rsquo;s, thinks the
+     <i>Advent</i> perhaps the noblest of all her poems, and also
+     specially loves the <i>Passing Away</i>. I do not know that I
+     quite agree with your decided preference for the two sonnets
+     of hers you signalise,&mdash;the <i>World</i> is very fine, but the
+     other, <i>Dead before Death</i>, a little sensational for her. I
+     think <i>After Death</i> one of her noblest, and the one <i>After
+     Communion</i>. In my own view, the greatest of all her poems is
+     that on France after the siege&mdash;<i>To-Day for Me</i>. A very
+     splendid piece of feminine ascetic passion is <i>The Convent
+     Threshold</i>.
+
+     I have run the sonnet you like, <i>St. Luke the Painter</i>, into
+     a sequence with two more not yet printed, and given the
+     three a general title of <i>Old and New Art</i>, as well as
+     special titles to each. I shall annex them to <i>The House of
+     Life</i>.
+
+     Have you ever read Vaughan? He resembles Donne a good deal
+     as to quaintness, but with a more emotional personality.
+
+     I have altered the last line of octave in <i>Lost Days</i>. It
+     now runs&mdash;
+
+          &ldquo;The undying throats of Hell, athirst alway.&rdquo;
+ 
+     I always had it in my mind to make a change here, as the
+     <i>in</i> standing in the line in its former reading clashed with
+     <i>in</i> occurring in the previous line. I have done what I
+     think is a prime sonnet on the murdered Czar, which I
+     enclose, but don&rsquo;t show it to a soul.
+
+     Theodore Watts is going to print a very fine sonnet of his
+     own in <i>The Athenæum</i>. It is the first verse he ever put in
+     print, though he wrote much (when a very young man). Tell me
+     how you like it. I think he is destined to shine in that
+     class of poetry.
+
+     I knew you must like Watts&rsquo;s sonnets. They are splendid
+     affairs. I am not sure that I agree with you in liking the
+     first the better of the two: the second (<i>Natura Maligna</i>)
+     is perhaps the deeper and finer. I have asked Watts to give
+     you a new sonnet, and I think perhaps he will do so, or at
+     all events give you permission to use those he has printed.
+     He has just come into the room, and says he would like to
+     hear from you on the subject.
+
+     From one rather jocular sentence in your note I judge you
+     may include some sonnets of your own. I see no possible
+     reason why you should not. You are really now, at your
+     highest, among our best sonnet-writers, and have written two
+     or three sonnets that yield to few or none whatever. I am
+     forced, however, to request that you will not put in the one
+     referring to myself, from my constant bugbear of any
+     appearance of collusion. That sonnet is a very fine one&mdash;my
+     brother was showing it me again the other day. It is not my
+     personal gratification alone, though that is deep, because I
+     know you are sincere, which leads me to the conclusion that
+     it is your best, and very fine indeed. I think your
+     Cumberland sonnet admirable. The sonnet on Byron is
+     extremely musical in flow and the symbolic scenery of
+     exceptional excellence. The view taken is the question with
+     me. Byron&rsquo;s vehement directness, at its best, is a lasting
+     lesson: and, dubious monument as <i>Don Juan</i> may be, it
+     towers over the century. Of course there is truth in what
+     you say; but <i>ought</i> it to be the case? and is it the case
+     in any absolute sense? You deal frankly with your sonnets,
+     and do not shrink from radical change. I think that on
+     Oliver much better than when I saw it before. The opening
+     phrases of both octave and sestette are very fine; but the
+     second quatrain and the second terzina, though with a
+     quality of beauty, both seem somewhat to lack distinctness.
+     The word <i>rivers</i> cannot be used with elision&mdash;the v is a
+     hard pebble in the flow, and so are the closing consonants.
+     You must put up with <i>streams</i> if you keep the line.
+
+     You should have Bailey&rsquo;s dedicatory sonnet in <i>Festus</i>.
+
+     I am enclosing a fine sonnet by William Bell Scott, which I
+     wished him to let me send you for your book. It has not yet
+     been printed. I think I heard of some little chaffy matter
+     between him and you, but, doubtless, you have virtually
+     forgotten all about it. I must say frankly that I think the
+     day when you made the speech he told me of must have been
+     rather a wool-gathering one with you.... I suppose you know
+     that Scott has written a number of fine sonnets contained in
+     his vol of <i>Poems</i> published about 1875, I think.
+
+     I directed the attention of Mr. Waddington (whom, however, I
+     don&rsquo;t know personally) to a most noble sonnet by Fanny
+     Kemble, beginning, &ldquo;Art thou already weary of the way?&rdquo; He
+     has put it in, and several others of hers, but she is very
+     unequal, and I don&rsquo;t know if the others should be there, but
+     you should take the one in question. It sadly wants new
+     punctuation, being vilely printed just as I first saw it
+     when a boy in some twopenny edition.
+
+     In a memoir of Gilchrist, appended now by his widow to the
+     <i>Life of Blake</i>, there is a sonnet by G., perhaps
+     interesting enough, as being exceptional, for you to ask for
+     it; but I don&rsquo;t advise you, if you don&rsquo;t think it worth.
+
+     I have received from Mrs. Meynell, a sister of Eliz.
+     Thompson, the painter, a most genuine little book of poems
+     containing some sonnets of true spiritual beauty. I must
+     send it you.
+
+     This book had just then been introduced to Rossetti with
+     much warmth of praise by Mr. Watts, and he took to it
+     vastly.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      This closes Rossetti&rsquo;s interesting letters on sonnet literature. In
+      reprinting his first volume of <i>Poems</i> he had determined to remove
+      the sonnets of <i>The House of Life</i> to the new volume of <i>Ballads
+      and Sonnets</i>, and fill the space with the fragment of a poem written in
+      youth, and now called <i>The Bride&rsquo;s Prelude</i>. He sent me a proof. The
+      reader will remember that as a narrative fragment it is less remarkable
+      for striking incident (though never failing of interest and
+      picturesqueness) than for a slow and psychical development which
+      ultimately gained a great hold of the sympathies. The poem leaves behind
+      it a sense as of a sultry day. Judging first of its merits as a song
+      (using the word in its broad and simple sense), the poem flows on the
+      tongue with unbroken sweetness and with a variety of cadence and light and
+      shade of melody which might admit of its pursuing its meanderings through
+      five times its less than 50 pages, and still keeping one&rsquo;s senses awake to
+      the constantly recurring advent of new and pleasing literary forms. The
+      story is a striking one, with a great wealth of highly effective incident,&mdash;notably
+      the episode of the card-playing, and of the father striking down the sword
+      which Raoul turns against the breast of the bride. Almost equally
+      memorable are the scenes in which the lover appears, and the occasional
+      interludes of incident in which, between the pauses of the narrative, the
+      bridegroom&rsquo;s retinue are heard sporting in the courtyard without.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The whole atmosphere of the poem is saturated in a medievalism of spirit
+      to which no lapse of modernism does violence, and the spell of romance
+      which comes with that atmosphere of the middle ages is never broken, but
+      preserved in the minutest most matter-of-fact details, such as the bowl of
+      water that stood amidst flowers, and in which the sister Amelotte &ldquo;slid a
+      cup&rdquo; and offered it to Aloyse to drink. But the one great charm of the
+      poem lies in its subtle and most powerful psychical analysis, seen
+      foreshadowed in the first mention of the bride sitting in the shade, but
+      first felt strongly when she begs her sister to pray, and again when she
+      tells how, at God&rsquo;s hint, she had whispered something of the whole tale to
+      her sister who slept
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The dread introspection pictured after the sin is in the highest degree
+      tragic, and affects one like remorse in its relentlessness, although less
+      remorse than fear of discovery. The sickness of the following condition,
+      with its yearnings, longings, dizziness, is very nobly done, and delicate
+      as is the theme, and demanding a touch of unerring strength, yet
+      lightness, the part of the poem concerned with it contains certain of the
+      most beautiful and stirring things. The madness (for it is not less than
+      such) in which at the sea-side, believing Urscelyn to be lost, the bride
+      tells the whole tale, whilst her curse laughed within her to see the
+      amazement and anger of her brothers and of her father, is doubtless true
+      enough to the frenzied state of her mind; but my sympathies go out less to
+      that part of the poem than to the subsequent part, in which the
+      bride-mother is described as leaning along in thought after her child,
+      till tears, not like a wedded girl&rsquo;s, fall among her curls. Highly
+      dramatic, too, is the passage in which she fears to curse the evil men
+      whose evil hands have taken her child, lest from evil lips the curse
+      should be a blessing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The characterisation seemed to be highly powerful, and, so far as it went,
+      finely contrasted. I could almost have wished that the love for which the
+      bride suffers so much had been more dwelt upon, and Urscelyn had been made
+      somehow more worthy of such love and sacrifice. The only point in which
+      the poem struck me, after mature reflection, as less admirable than
+      certain others of the author&rsquo;s, lay in the circumstance that the narrative
+      moves slowly, but, of course, it should be remembered that the poem is one
+      of emotion, not incident. There are most magical flashes of imagery in the
+      poem, notably in the passage beginning
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     Her thought, long stagnant, stirred by speech,
+        Gave her a sick recoil;
+     As, dip thy fingers through the green
+     That masks a pool, where they have been,
+     The naked depth is black between.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Rossetti wrote a valuable letter on his scheme for the completion of <i>The
+      Bride&rsquo;s Prelude</i>:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     I was much pleased with your verdict on <i>The Bride&rsquo;s
+     Prelude</i>. I think the poem is saved by its picturesqueness,
+     but that otherwise the story up to the point reached is too
+     purely repellent. I have the sequel quite clear in my mind,
+     and in it the mere passionate frailty of Aloyse&rsquo;s first love
+     would be followed by a true and noble love, rendered
+     calamitous by Urscelyn, who then (having become a powerful
+     soldier of fortune) solicits the hand of Aloyse. Thus the
+     horror which she expresses against him to her sister on the
+     bridal morning would be fully justified. Of course, Aloyse
+     would confess her fault to her second lover whose love
+     would, nevertheless, endure. The poem would gain so greatly
+     by this sequel that I suppose I must set to and finish it
+     one day, old as it is. I suppose it would be doubled, but
+     hardly more. I hate long poems.
+
+     I quite think the card-playing passage the best thing&mdash;as a
+     unit&mdash;in the poem: but your opinion encourages my own, that
+     it fails nowhere of good material. It certainly moves slowly
+     as you say, and this is quite against the rule I follow. But
+     here was no life condensed in an episode; but a story which
+     had necessarily to be told step by step, and a situation
+     which had unavoidably to be anatomised. If it is not
+     unworthy to appear with my best things, that is all I hope
+     for it. You have pitched curiously upon some of my favourite
+     touches, and very coincidently with Watts&rsquo;s views.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Early in 1881, he wrote:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     I am writing a ballad on the death of James I. of Scots. It
+     is already twice the length of <i>The White Ship</i>, and has a
+     good slice still to come. It is called <i>The King&rsquo;s Tragedy</i>,
+     and is a ripper I can tell you!
+
+     The other day I got from Italy a paper containing a really
+     excellent and exceptional notice of my poems, written by the
+     author of a volume also sent me containing, among other
+     translations from the English, <i>Jenny, Last Confession</i>,
+     etc.
+
+     I have been re-reading, after many years, Keats&rsquo;s <i>Otho the
+     Great</i>, and find it a much better thing than I remembered,
+     though only a draft.
+
+     I am much exercised as to what you mention as to a <i>Michael
+     Scott</i> scheme of Coleridge&rsquo;s. Where does he speak of it, and
+     what is it? It is quite new to me; but curiously enough, I
+     have a complete scheme drawn up for a ballad, to be called
+     <i>Michael Scott&rsquo;s Wooing</i>, not the one I proposed beginning
+     now&mdash;and also have long designed a picture under the same
+     title, but of quite different motif! Allan Cunningham wrote
+     a romance called <i>Sir Michael Scott</i>, but I never saw it.
+
+     I have heard from Walter Severn about a subscription
+     proposed to erect a gravestone to his father beside that of
+     Keats. I should like you to copy for me your sonnet on
+     Severn. I hear it is in <i>The Athenæum</i>, but have not seen
+     it. I was asked to prepare an inscription, which I send you.
+     Nothing would be so good as Severn&rsquo;s own words.
+
+     I strongly urge you to go on with your book on the
+     <i>Supernatural</i>. The closing chapter should, I think, be on
+     the <i>weird</i> element in its perfection, as shown by recent
+     poets in the mess&mdash;i.e. those who take any lead. Tennyson
+     has it certainly here and there in imagery, but there is no
+     great success in the part it plays through his <i>Idylls</i>. The
+     Old Romaunt beats him there. The strongest instance of this
+     feeling in Tennyson that I remember is in a few lines of
+     <i>The Palace of Art</i>:
+
+          And hollow breasts enclosing hearts of flame;
+             And with dim-fretted foreheads all
+          On corpses three months old at morn she came
+             That stood against the wall.
+
+     I won&rsquo;t answer for the precise age of the corpses&mdash;perhaps I
+     have staled them somewhat.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0009" id="link2HCH0009">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER IX.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      It is in the nature of these Recollections that they should be personal,
+      and it can hardly occur to any reader to complain of them for being that
+      which above all else they purport to be. I have hitherto, however, been
+      conscious of a desire (made manifest to my own mind by the character of my
+      selections from the letters written to me) to impart to this volume an
+      interest as broad and general as may be. But my primary purpose is now,
+      and has been from the first, to afford the best view at my command of
+      Rossetti as a man; and more helpful to such purpose than any number of
+      critical opinions, however interesting, have often been those passages in
+      his letters where the writer has got closest to his correspondent in
+      revealing most of himself. In the chapter I am now about to write I must
+      perforce set aside all limitations of reserve if I am to convey such an
+      idea of Rossetti&rsquo;s last days as fills my mind; I must be content to speak
+      almost exclusively of my personal relations to him, to the enforced
+      neglect of the more intimate relations of others.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      About six months after my first visit, Rossetti invited me to spend a week
+      with him at his house, and this I was glad to be able to do. I found him
+      in many important particulars a changed man. His complexion was brighter
+      than before, and this circumstance taken alone might have been understood
+      to indicate improved bodily health, but in actual fact it rather denoted
+      in his case a retrograde physical tendency, as being indicative chiefly of
+      some recent excess in the use of his pernicious drug. He was distinctly
+      less inclined to corpulence, his eyes were less bright, and had more
+      frequently than formerly the appearance of gazing upon vacancy, and when
+      he walked to and fro in the studio, as it was his habit to do at intervals
+      of about an hour, he did so with a more laboured sidelong motion than I
+      had previously noticed, as though the body unconsciously lost and then
+      regained some necessary control and command at almost every step. Half
+      sensible, no doubt, of a reduced condition, or guessing perhaps the nature
+      of my reflections from a certain uneasiness which it baffled my efforts to
+      conceal, he paused for an instant one evening in the midst of these
+      melancholy perambulations and asked me how he struck me as to health. More
+      frankly than judiciously I answered promptly, Less well than formerly. It
+      was a luckless remark, for Rossetti&rsquo;s prevailing wish at that moment was
+      to conceal even from himself his lowered state, and the time was still to
+      come when he should crave the questionable sympathy of those who said he
+      looked even more ill than he felt. Just before this, my second visit, he
+      had completed his <i>King&rsquo;s Tragedy</i>, and I had heard from his own lips
+      how prostrate the emotional strain involved in the production of the poem
+      had first left him. Casting himself now on the couch in an attitude
+      indicative of unusual exhaustion, he said the ballad had taken much out of
+      him. &ldquo;It was as though my life ebbed out with it,&rdquo; he said, and in saying
+      so much of the nervous tension occasioned by the work in question he did
+      not overstate the truth as it presented itself to other eyes. Time after
+      time while the ballad was in course of production, he had made effort to
+      read it aloud to the friend to whose judgment his poetry was always
+      submitted, but had as frequently failed to do so from the physical
+      impossibility of restraining the tears that at every stage welled up out
+      of an overwrought nature, for the poet never existed perhaps who, while at
+      work, lived so vividly in the imagined situation. And the weight of that
+      work was still upon him when we met again. His voice seemed to have lost
+      much in quality, and in compass too to have diminished: or if the volume
+      of sound remained the same, it appeared to have retired (so to express it)
+      inwards, and to convey, when he spoke, the idea of a man speaking as much
+      to himself as to others. More than ever now the scene of his life lacked
+      for me some necessary vitality: it breathed an atmosphere of sorrow: it
+      was like the dream of a distempered imagination out of which there came no
+      welcome awakening, to say it was not true. On the side of his intellectual
+      life Rossetti was obviously under less constraint with me than ever
+      before. Previously he had seemed to make a conscious effort to speak
+      generously of all contemporaries, and cordially of every friend with whom
+      he was brought into active relations; and if, by force of some stray
+      impulse, he was ever led to say a disparaging word of any one, he
+      forthwith made a palpable, and sometimes amusing, effort so to obliterate
+      the injurious impression as to convey the idea that he wished it to appear
+      that he had not said anything at all. But now this restraint was thrown
+      aside.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I perceived that the drug by which he was enslaved caused what I may best
+      characterise as intermittent waves of morbid suspiciousness as to the good
+      faith of every individual, including his best, oldest, and truest friends,
+      as to whom the most inexplicable delusions would suddenly come, and as
+      suddenly go. He would talk in the gravest and most earnest way of the
+      wrongs he had suffered at the hands of a dear friend, and then the moment
+      his eloquence had drawn from me an exclamation of sympathy for him, he
+      would turn round and heap upon the same individual an extravagance of
+      praise for his fidelity and good faith. And now, he so classed his
+      contemporaries as to leave no doubt that he was duly sensible of his own
+      place amongst them, preserving, meantime, a dignified reticence as to the
+      extent of his personal claims.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His life was an anachronism. Such a man should have had no dealings with
+      the nineteenth century: he belonged to the sixteenth, or perhaps the
+      thirteenth, and in Italy not in England. It would, nevertheless, be wrong
+      to say that he was wholly indifferent to important political issues, of
+      which he took often a very judicial view. In dismissing further mention of
+      this second and prolonged meeting with Rossetti, it only remains to me to
+      say (as a necessary, if strictly personal, explanation of much that will
+      follow), that on the evening preceding my departure, he asked me, in the
+      event of my deciding to come to live in London, to take up my quarters at
+      his house. To this proposal I made no reply: and neither his speech nor my
+      silence needs any comment, and I shall offer none.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A month or two later my own health gave way, and then, a change of
+      residence being inevitable, Rossetti repeated his invitation; but a London
+      campaign, under such conditions as were necessarily entailed by pitching
+      one&rsquo;s tent with him, got further and further away, until I seemed to see
+      it through the inverse end of a telescope whereof the slides were being
+      drawn out, out, every day further and further. I determined to spend half
+      a year among&rsquo; the mountains of Cumberland, and went up to the Vale of St.
+      John. Scarcely had I settled there when Rossetti wrote that he must
+      himself soon leave London: that he was wearied out absolutely, and unable
+      to sleep at night, that if he could only reach that secluded vale he would
+      breathe a purer air mentally as well as physically. The mood induced by
+      contemplation of the tranquillity of my retreat over-against the turmoil
+      and distractions of the city <i>in</i> which, though not <i>of</i> which,
+      he was, added to the deepening exhaustion which had already begun when I
+      left him, had prevailed with him, he said, to ask me to come down to
+      London, and travel back with him. &ldquo;Supposing,&rdquo; he wrote, &ldquo;I were to ask
+      you to come to town in a fortnight&rsquo;s time from now&mdash;I returning with
+      you for a while into the country&mdash;would that be feasible to you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Once unsettled in the environments within which for years he had moved
+      contentedly, a thousand reasons were found for the contemplated step, and
+      simultaneously a thousand obstacles arose to impede the execution of it.
+      &ldquo;They have at length taken my garden,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;as they have long
+      threatened to do, and now they are really setting about building upon it.
+      I do not in the least know what my plans may be.&rdquo; And again: &ldquo;It seems
+      certain that I must leave this house and seek another. Is there any house
+      in the neighbourhood of the Vale of St. John with a largish room one could
+      paint in (to N. or NE.)?&rdquo; The idea of his taking up his permanent abode so
+      far out of the market circle was, I well knew, just one of those
+      impracticable notions which, with Rossetti, were abandoned as soon as
+      conceived, so I was not surprised to hear from him as follows, by the
+      succeeding post: &ldquo;In what I wrote yesterday I said something as to a
+      possibility of leaving town, but I now perceive this is not practicable at
+      present; therefore need not trouble you to take note of neighbouring
+      houses.&rdquo; Presently he wrote again: &ldquo;Bedevilments thicken: the garden is
+      ploughed up, and I &lsquo;ve not stirred out of the house for a week: I must
+      leave this place at once if I am to leave it alive.&rdquo; {*}
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     * It is but just to say that, although Rossetti wrote thus
+     peevishly of what was quite inevitable,&mdash;the yielding up of
+     his fine garden,&mdash;he would at other times speak of the great
+     courtesy and good-nature of Messrs. Pemberton, in allowing
+     him the use of the garden after it had been severed from the
+     property he hired.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My present purpose is to take another house in London. Could you not come
+      down and beat up agents for me? I know you will not deny me your help. I
+      hear of a house at Brixton, with a garden of two acres, and only £130 a
+      year.&rdquo; In a day or two even this last hope had proved delusive: &ldquo;I find
+      the house at Brixton will not do, and I hear of nothing else.... I am
+      anxious as to having become perfectly deaf on the right side of my head.
+      Partial approaches to this have sometimes occurred to me and passed away,
+      so I will not be too much troubled at it.&rdquo; A little later he wrote: &ldquo;Now
+      my housekeeper is leaving me, her mother being very ill. Can you not come
+      to my assistance? Come at once and we will set sail in one boat.&rdquo; I appear
+      to have replied to this last appeal in a tone of some little scepticism as
+      to his remaining long in the same mind relative to our mutual housemating,
+      for subsequently he says: &ldquo;At this writing I can see no likelihood of my
+      not remaining in the mind that, in case of your coming to London, your
+      quarters should be taken up here. The house is big enough for two, even if
+      they meant to be strangers to each other. You would have your own rooms
+      and we should meet just when we pleased. You have got a sufficient inkling
+      of my exceptional habits not to be scared by them. It is true, at times my
+      health and spirits are variable, but I am sure we should not be
+      squabbling. However, it seems you have no intention of a quite immediate
+      move, and we can speak farther of it.&rdquo; I readily consented to do whatever
+      seemed feasible to help him out of his difficulties, which existed,
+      however, as I perceived, much more in his own mind than in actual fact. I
+      thought a brief holiday in the solitude within which I was then located
+      would probably be helpful in restoring a tranquil condition of mind, and
+      as his brother, Mr. Scott, Mr. Watts, Mr. Shields, and other friends in
+      London, were of a similar opinion, efforts were made to induce him to
+      undertake the journey which he had been the first to think of. His oldest
+      friend, Mr. Madox Brown (whose presence would have been as valuable now as
+      it had proved to be on former occasions), was away at Manchester, and
+      remained there throughout the time of his last illness. His moods at this
+      time were too variable to be relied upon three days together, and so I
+      find him writing:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     Many thanks for the information as to your Shady Vale, which
+     seems a vision&mdash;a distant one, alas!&mdash;of Paradise. Perhaps I
+     may reach it yet.... I am now thinking of writing another
+     ballad-poem to add at the end of my volume. It is romantic,
+     not historical I have a clear scheme for it and believe your
+     scenery might help me much if I could get there. When you
+     hear that scheme, you will, I believe, pronounce it
+     precisely fitted to the scenery you describe as now
+     surrounding you. That scenery I hope to reach a little
+     later, but meantime should much like to see you in London
+     and return with you.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      The proposed ballad was to be called <i>The Orchard Pits</i> and was to be
+      illustrative of the serpent fascination of beauty, but it was never
+      written. Contented now to await the issue of events, he proceeded to write
+      on subjects of general interest:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     Keats (page 154, vol. i., of Houghton&rsquo;s Life, etc.) mentions
+     among other landscape features the Vale of St. John. So you
+     may think of him in the neighbourhood as well as (or, if you
+     like, rather than) Wordsworth.
+
+     I have been reading again Hogg&rsquo;s Shelley. S. appears to have
+     been as mad at Keswick as everywhere else, but not madder;&mdash;
+     that he could not compass.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      At this juncture some unlooked-for hitch in the arrangements then pending
+      for the sale of the <i>Dante&rsquo;s Dream</i> to the Corporation of Liverpool
+      rendered my presence in London inevitable, and upon my arrival I found
+      that Rossetti had fitted out rooms for my reception, although I had never
+      down to that moment finally decided to avail myself of an offer which upon
+      its first being broached, appeared to be too one-sided a bargain (in which
+      of course the sacrifice seemed to be Rossetti&rsquo;s) to admit of my
+      entertaining it. In this way I drifted into my position as Rossetti&rsquo;s
+      housemate.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The letters and scraps of notes I have embodied in the foregoing will
+      probably convey a better idea of Rossetti&rsquo;s native irresolution, as it was
+      made manifest to me in the early part of 1881, than any abstract
+      definition, however faithful and exact, could be expected to do.
+      Irresolution was indubitably his most noticeable quality at the time when
+      I came into active relation with him; and if I be allowed to have any
+      perception of character and any acquaintance with the fundamental traits
+      that distinguish man from man, I shall say unhesitatingly (though I well
+      know how different is the opinion of others) that irresolution with
+      melancholy lay at the basis of his nature. I have heard Mr. Swinburne
+      speak of a cheerfulness of deportment in early life, which imparted an
+      idea as of one who could not easily be depressed. I have heard Mr. Watts
+      speak of the days at Kelmscott Manor House, where he first knew him, and
+      where Rossetti was the most delightful of companions. I have heard Canon
+      Dixon speak of a determination of purpose which yielded to no sort of
+      obstacle, but carried its point by the sheer vehemence with which it
+      asserted it. I can only say that I was witness to neither characteristic.
+      Of traits the reverse of these, I was constantly receiving evidence; but
+      let it be remembered that before I joined Rossetti (which was only in the
+      last year of his life) in that intimate relation which revealed to my
+      unwilling judgment every foible and infirmity of character, the whole
+      nature of the man had been vitiated by an enervating drug. At my meeting
+      with him the brighter side of his temperament had been worn away in the
+      night-troubles of his unrestful couch; and of that needful volition, which
+      establishes for a man the right to rule not others but himself, only the
+      mockery and inexplicable vagaries of temper remained. When I knew him,
+      Rossetti was devoid of resolution. At that moment at which he had finally
+      summoned up every available and imaginable reason for pursuing any
+      particular course, his purpose wavered and his heart gave way. When I knew
+      him, Rossetti was destitute of cheerfulness or content. At that instant,
+      at which the worst of his shadowy fears had been banished by some
+      fortuitous occurrence that lit up with an unceasing radiation of hope
+      every prospect of life, he conjured out of its very brightness fresh cause
+      for fear and sadness. True, indeed, these may have been no more than
+      symptoms of those later phenomena which came of disease, and foreshadowed
+      death. Other minds may reduce to a statement of cause and effect what I am
+      content to offer as fact.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Upon settling with Rossetti in July 1881, I perceived that his health was
+      weaker. His tendency to corpulence had entirely disappeared, his
+      feebleness of step had become at certain moments painfully apparent, and
+      his temper occasionally betrayed signs of bitterness. To myself,
+      personally, he was at this stage as genial as of old, or if for an instant
+      he gave vent to an unprovoked outburst of wrath, he would far more than
+      atone for it by a look of inexpressible remorse and some feeling words of
+      regret, whereof the import sometimes was&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I wish you were indeed my son, for though then I should still have no
+      right to address you so, I should at least have some right to expect your
+      forgiveness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In such moods of more than needful solicitude for one&rsquo;s acutest
+      sensibilities, Rossetti was absolutely irresistible.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As I have said, the occupant of this great gloomy house, in which I had
+      now become a resident, had rarely been outside its doors for two years;
+      certainly never afoot, and only in carriages with his friends. Upon the
+      second night of my stay, I announced my intention of taking a walk on the
+      Chelsea embankment, and begged him to accompany me. To my amazement he
+      yielded, and every night for a week following, I succeeded in inducing him
+      to repeat the now unfamiliar experience. It was obvious enough to himself
+      that he walked totteringly, with infinite expenditure of physical energy,
+      and returned in a condition of exhaustion that left him prostrate for an
+      hour afterwards. The root of all this evil was soon apparent. He was
+      exceeding with the chloral, and little as I expected or desired to
+      exercise a moral guardianship over the habits of this great man, I found
+      myself insensibly dropping into that office.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Negotiations for the sale of the Liverpool picture were now complete; the
+      new volume of poems and the altered edition of the old volume had been
+      satisfactorily passed through the press; and it might have been expected
+      that with the anxiety occasioned by these enterprises, would pass away the
+      melancholy which in a nature like Rossetti&rsquo;s they naturally induced. The
+      reverse was the fact, He became more and more depressed as each palpable
+      cause of depression was removed, and more and more liable to give way to
+      excess with the drug. By his brother, Mr. Watts, Mr. Shields, and others
+      who had only too frequently in times past had experience of similar
+      outbreaks, this failure in spirits, with all its attendant physical
+      weakness, was said to be due primarily to hypochondriasis. Hence the
+      returning necessity to get him away (as Mr. Madox Brown had done at a
+      previous crisis) for a change of air and scene. Once out of this
+      atmosphere of gloom, we hoped that amid cheerful surroundings his health
+      would speedily revive. Infinite were the efforts that had to be made, and
+      countless the precautions that had to be taken before he could be induced
+      to set out, but at length we found ourselves upon our way to Keswick, at
+      nine p.m., one evening in September, in a special carriage packed with as
+      many artist&rsquo;s trappings and as many books as would have lasted for a year.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We reached Penrith as the grey of dawn had overspread the sky. It was six
+      o&rsquo;clock as we got into the carriage that was to drive us through the vale
+      of St. John to our destination at the Legberthwaite end of it. The morning
+      was now calm, the mountains looked loftier, grander, and yet more than
+      ever precipitous from the road that circled about their base. Nothing
+      could be heard but the calls of the awakening cattle, the rumble of
+      cataracts far away, and the rush and surge of those that were near.
+      Rossetti was all but indifferent to our surroundings, or displayed only
+      such fitful interest in them as must have been affected out of a kindly
+      desire to please me. He said the chloral he had taken daring the journey
+      was upon him, and he could not see. At length we reached the house that
+      was for some months to be our home. It stood at the foot of a ghyll,
+      which, when swollen by rain, was majestic in volume and sound. The little
+      house we had rented was free from all noise other than the occasional
+      voice of a child or bark of a dog. Here at least he might bury the memory
+      of the distractions of the city that vexed him. Save for the ripple of the
+      river that flowed at his feet, the bleating of sheep on Golden Howe, the
+      echo of the axe of the woodman who was thinning the neighbouring wood, and
+      the morning and evening mail-coach horn, he might delude himself into
+      forgetfulness that he belonged any longer to this noisy earth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Next day Rossetti was exceptionally well, and astounded me by the proposal
+      that we should ascend Golden Howe together&mdash;a little mountain of some
+      1000 feet that stands at the head of Thirlmere. With never a hope on my
+      part of our reaching the summit, we set out for that purpose, but through
+      no doubt the exhilarating effect of the mountain air, he actually
+      compassed the task he had proposed to himself, and sat for an hour on that
+      highest point from whence could be seen the Skiddaw range to the north,
+      Haven&rsquo;s Crag to the west, Styx Pass and Helvellyn to the east, and the
+      Dunmail Raise to the south, with the lake below. Rossetti was struck by
+      the variety of configuration in the hills, and even more by the variety of
+      colour. But he was no great lover of landscape beauty, and the majestic
+      scene before us produced less effect upon his mind than might perhaps have
+      been expected. He seemed to be almost unconscious of the unceasing
+      atmospheric changes that perpetually arrest and startle. the observer in
+      whom love of external nature in her grander moods has not been weakened by
+      disease. The complete extent of the Vale of St. John could be traversed by
+      the eye from the eminence upon which we sat. The valley throughout its
+      three-mile length is absolutely secluded: one has only the hills for
+      company, and to say the truth they are sometimes fearful company too.
+      Usually the landscape wears a cheerful aspect, but at times long fleecy
+      clouds drive midway across the mountains, leaving the tops visible. The
+      scenery is highly awakening to the imagination. Even the country people
+      are imaginative, and the country is full of ghostly legend. I was never at
+      any moment sensible that these environments affected Rossetti: assuredly
+      they never agitated him, and no effort did he make to turn them to account
+      for the purposes of the romantic ballad he had spoken of as likely to grow
+      amidst such surroundings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Being much more than ordinarily cheerful during the first evenings of our
+      stay in the North, he talked sometimes of his past life and of the men and
+      women he had known in earlier years. Carlyle&rsquo;s <i>Reminiscences</i> had
+      not long before been published. Mrs. Carlyle, therein so extravagantly
+      though naturally belauded, he described as a bitter little woman, with,
+      however, the one redeeming quality of unostentatious charity: &ldquo;The poor of
+      Chelsea,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;always spoke well of her.&rdquo; &ldquo;George Eliot,&rdquo; whose
+      genius he much admired, he had ceased to know long before her death, but
+      he spoke of the lady as modest and retiring, and amiable to a fault when
+      the outer crust of reticence had been broken through. Longfellow had
+      called upon him whilst he was painting the <i>Dante&rsquo;s Dream</i>. The old
+      poet was Courteous and complimentary in the last degree; he seemed,
+      however, to know little or nothing about painting as an art, and also to
+      have fallen into the error of thinking that Rossetti the painter and
+      Sossetti the poet were different men; in short, that the Dante of that
+      name was the painter, and the William the poet. Upon leaving the house,
+      Longfellow had said: &ldquo;I have been glad to meet you, and should like to
+      have met your brother; pray, tell him how much I admire his beautiful
+      poem, <i>The Blessed Damozel</i>&rdquo; Giving no hint of the error, Rossetti
+      said he had answered, &ldquo;I will tell him.&rdquo; He painted a little during our
+      stay in the North, for it was whilst there that he began the beautiful
+      replica of his <i>Proserpina</i>, now the property of Mr. Valpy. I found
+      it one of my best pleasures to watch a picture growing under his hand, and
+      thought it easy to see through the medium of his idealised heads, cold
+      even in their loveliness, unsubstantial in their passion, that to the
+      painter life had been a dream into which nothing entered that was not as
+      impalpable as itself. Tainted by the touch of melancholy that is the
+      blight that clings to the purest beauty, his pictured faces were, in my
+      view, akin to his poetry, every line of which, as he sometimes recited it,
+      seemed as though it echoed the burden of a bygone sorrow&mdash;the sorrow
+      of a dream rather than that of a life, or of a life that had been itself a
+      dream. I also then realised what Mr. Theodore Watts has said in a letter
+      just now written to me from Sark, that, &ldquo;apart from any question of
+      technical shortcomings, one of Rossetti&rsquo;s strongest claims to the
+      attention of posterity was that of having invented, in the
+      three-quarter-length pictures painted from one face, a type of female
+      beauty which was akin to none other,&mdash;which was entirely new, in
+      short,&mdash;and which, for wealth of sublime and mysterious suggestion,
+      unaided by complex dramatic design, was unique in the art of the world.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      On one occasion the talk turned on the eccentricities and affectations of
+      men of genius, and I did my best to-ridicule them unsparingly, saying they
+      were a purely modern extravagance, the highest intellects of other times
+      being ever the sanest, Shakspeare, Cervantes, Goethe, Coleridge,
+      Wordsworth; the root of the evil had been Shelley, who was mad, and in
+      imitation of whose madness, modern men of genius must many of them be mad
+      also, until it had come to such a pass-that if a gifted man conducted
+      himself throughout life with probity and propriety we instantly began to
+      doubt the value of his gifts. Rossetti evidently thought that in all this
+      I was covertly hitting out at himself, and cut short the conversation with
+      an unequivocal hint that he had no affectations, and could not account
+      himself an authority with respect to them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With such talk a few of our evenings were spent, but too soon the
+      insatiable craving for the drug came with renewed force, and then all
+      pleasant intercourse was banished. Night after night we sat up until
+      eleven, twelve, and one o&rsquo;clock, watching the long hours go by with heavy
+      steps; waiting, waiting, waiting for the time at which he could take his
+      first draught, and drop into his pillowed place and snatch a dreamless
+      sleep of three or four hours&rsquo; duration.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In order to break the monotony of nights such as I describe I sometimes
+      read from Fielding, Richardson, and Sterne, but more frequently induced
+      Rossetti to recite. Thus, with failing voice, he would again and again
+      attempt, at my request, his <i>Cloud Confines</i>, or passages from <i>The
+      King&rsquo;s Tragedy</i>, and repeatedly, also, Poe&rsquo;s <i>Ulalume</i> and <i>Raven</i>.
+      I remember that, touching the last-mentioned of these poems, he remarked
+      that out of his love of it while still a boy his own <i>Blessed Damozel</i>
+      originated. &ldquo;I saw,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;that Poe had done the utmost it was
+      possible to do with the grief of the lover on earth, and so I determined
+      to reverse the conditions, and give utterance to the yearning of the loved
+      one in heaven.&rdquo; At that time of the year the night closed in as early as
+      seven or eight o&rsquo;clock, and then in that little house among the solitary
+      hills his disconsolate spirit would sometimes sink beyond solace into
+      irreclaimable depths of depression.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was impossible that such a condition of things should last, and it was
+      with unspeakable relief that I heard Rossetti express a desire to return
+      home. Mr. Watts, who at that time was at Stratford-upon-Avon, had promised
+      to join us, but now wrote to say that this was impossible. Had it been
+      otherwise, Rossetti would willingly have remained, but now he longed to
+      get back to London. His life had lost its joys. The success of his
+      Liverpool picture was almost as nothing to him, and the enthusiastic
+      reception given to his book gave him not more than a passing pleasure,
+      though he was deeply touched by the sympathetic and exhaustive criticism
+      published by Professor Dowden in <i>The Academy</i>, as well as by
+      Professor Colvin&rsquo;s friendly monograph in <i>The World</i>. At length one
+      night, a month after our arrival, we set out on our return, and well do I
+      remember the pathos of his words as I helped him (now feebler than ever)
+      into his house. &ldquo;Thank God! home at last, and never shall I leave it
+      again!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Very natural was the deep concern of his friends, especially of his
+      brother and Mr. Shields, at finding him return even less well than he had
+      set out. With deeper reliance on past knowledge of the man, Mr. Watts
+      still took a hopeful view, attributing the physical prostration to
+      hypochondriasis, which might, in common with all similar nervous ailments,
+      impose as much pain upon the victim as if the sufferings complained of had
+      a real foundation in positive disease, but might also give way at any
+      moment when the victim could be induced to take a hopeful view of life.
+      The cheerfulness of Mr. Watts&rsquo;s society, after what I well know must have
+      been the lugubrious nature of my own, had at first its usual salutary
+      effect upon Rossetti&rsquo;s spirits, and I will not forbear to say that I, too,
+      welcomed it as a draught of healing morning air after a month-long
+      imprisonment in an atmosphere of gloom. But I was not yet freed of my
+      charge. The sense of responsibility which in the solitude of the mountains
+      had weighed me down, was now indeed divided with his affectionate family
+      and the friends who were Rossetti&rsquo;s friends before they were mine, and who
+      came at this juncture with willing help, prompted chiefly, of course, by
+      devotion to the great man in sore trouble, but also&mdash;I must allow
+      myself to think&mdash;in one or two cases by desire to relieve me of some
+      of the burden of the task that had fallen so unexpectedly upon me.
+      Foremost among such disinterested friends was of course the friend I have
+      spoken of so frequently in these pages, and for whom I now felt a growing
+      regard arising as much out of my perception of the loyalty of his
+      comradeship as the splendour of his gifts. But after him in solicitous
+      service to Rossetti, at this moment of great need, came Frederick Shields
+      (the fine tissue of whose highly-strung nature must have been sorely tried
+      by the strain to which it was subjected), Mr. W. B. Scott, whose visits
+      were never more warmly welcomed by Rossetti than at this season, the good
+      and gifted Miss Boyd, and of course Rossetti&rsquo;s brother, sister, and
+      mother, to each of whom he was affectionately attached. Strange enough it
+      seemed that this man who, for years had shunned the world and chosen
+      solitude when he might have had society, seemed at last to grow weary of
+      his loneliness. But so it was. Rossetti became daily more and more
+      dependent upon his friends for company that should not fail him, for never
+      for an hour now could he endure to be alone. Remembering this, I almost
+      doubt if by nature he was at any time a solitary. There are men who feel
+      more deeply the sense of isolation amidst the busiest crowds than within
+      the narrowest circle of intimates, and I have heard from Rossetti
+      reminiscences of his earlier life that led me to believe that he was one
+      of the number. Perhaps, after all, he wandered from the world rather from
+      the dread than with the hope of solitude. In such pleasant intercourse as
+      the visits of the friends I have named afforded, was the sadness of the
+      day in a measure dissipated, but when night came I never failed to realise
+      that no progress whatever had been made. I tried to check the craving for
+      chloral, but I could as easily have checked the rising tide: and where the
+      lifelong assiduity of older friends had failed to eradicate a morbid,
+      ruinous, and fatal thirst, it was presumptous if not ridiculous to imagine
+      that the task could be compassed by a frail creature with heart and nerves
+      of wax. But the whole scene was now beginning to have an interest for me
+      more personal and more serious than I have yet given hint of. The constant
+      fret and fume of this life of baffled effort, of struggle with a deadly
+      drug that had grown to have an objective existence in my mind as the
+      existence of a fiend, was not without a sensible effect upon myself. I
+      became ill for a few days with a low fever, but far worse than this was
+      the fact that there was creeping over me the wild influence of Rossetti&rsquo;s
+      own distempered imaginings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Once conscious of such influence I determined to resist it, but how to do
+      so I knew not without flying utterly away from an atmosphere in which my
+      best senses seemed to stagnate, and burying the memory of it for ever.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The crisis was pending, and sooner than we expected it came. A nurse was
+      engaged. One evening Dr. Westland Marston and his son Philip Bourke
+      Marston came to spend a few hours with Rossetti, For a while he seemed
+      much cheered by their bright society, but later on he gave those
+      manifestations of uneasiness which I had learned to know too well.
+      Removing restlessly from seat to seat, he ultimately threw himself upon
+      the sofa in that rather awkward attitude which I have previously described
+      as characteristic of him in moments of nervous agitation. Presently he
+      called out that his arm had become paralysed, and, upon attempting to
+      rise, that his leg also had lost its power. We were naturally startled,
+      but knowing the force of his imagination in its influence on his bodily
+      capacity, we tried playfully to banish the idea. Raising him to his feet,
+      however, we realised that from whatever cause, he had lost the use of the
+      limbs in question, and in the utmost alarm we carried him to his bedroom,
+      and hurried away for Mr. Marshall It was found that he had really
+      undergone a species of paralysis, called, I think, loss of co-ordinative
+      power. The juncture was a critical one, and it was at length decided by
+      the able medical adviser just named, that the time had come when the
+      chloral, which was at the root of all this mischief, should be decisively,
+      entirely, and instantly cut off. To compass this end a young medical man,
+      Mr. Henry Maudsley, was brought into the house as a resident to watch and
+      manage the case in the intervals of Mr. Marshall&rsquo;s visits. It is not for
+      me to offer a statement of what was done, and done so ably at this period.
+      I only know that morphia was at first injected as a substitute for the
+      narcotic the system had grown to demand; that Rossetti was for many hours
+      delirious whilst his body was passing through the terrible ordeal of
+      having to conquer the craving for the former drug, and that three or four
+      mornings after the experiment had been begun he awoke calm in body, and
+      clear in mind, and grateful in heart. His delusions and those intermittent
+      suspicions of his friends which I have before alluded to, were now gone,
+      as things in the past of which he hardly knew whether in actual fact they
+      had or had not been. Christmas Day was now nigh at hand, and, still
+      confined to his room, he begged me to promise to spend that day with him;
+      &ldquo;otherwise,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;how sad a day it must be for me, for I cannot
+      fairly ask any other.&rdquo; With a tenderness of sympathy I shall not forget,
+      Mr. Scott had asked me to dine that day at his more cheerful house; but I
+      reflected that this was to be my first Christmas in London and it might be
+      Rossetti&rsquo;s last, so I put by pleasanter considerations. We dined alone,
+      but, somewhat later, William Rossetti, with true brotherly affection, left
+      the guests at his own house, and ran down to spend an hour with the
+      invalid. We could hear from time to time the ringing of the bells of the
+      neighbouring churches, and I noticed that Rossetti was not disturbed by
+      them as he had been formerly. Indeed, the drug once removed, he was in
+      every sense a changed man. He talked that night brightly, and with more
+      force and incisiveness, I thought, than he had displayed for months. There
+      was the ring of affection in his tone as he said he had always had loyal
+      friends; and then he spoke with feeling of Mr. Watts&rsquo;s friendship, of Mr.
+      Shields&rsquo;s, and afterwards he spoke of Mr. Burne Jones who had just
+      previously visited him, as well as of Mr. Madox Brown, and his friendship
+      of a lifetime; of Mr. Swinburne, Mr. Morris, Mr. Stephens, Mr. Boyce, and
+      other early friends. He said a word or two of myself which I shall not
+      repeat, and then spoke with emotion of his mother and sister, and of his
+      sister who was dead, and how they were supported through their sore trials
+      by religious resignation. He asked if I, like Shields, was a believer, and
+      seemed altogether in a softer and more spiritual mood than I remember to
+      have noticed before.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With such talk we passed the Christmas night of 1881. Rossetti recovered
+      power in some measure, was able to get down to the studio, and see the
+      friends who called&mdash;Mr. F. E. Leyland frequently, Lord and Lady Mount
+      Temple, Mrs. Sumner, Mr. Boyce, Mr. F. G. Stephens, Mr. Gilchrist, Mr. and
+      Mrs. Virtue Tebbs, Mrs. Stillman, Mrs. Coronio, and Mr. C. and Mr. A.
+      Ionides occasionally, as well as those previously named. A visit from Dr.
+      Hueffer of the <i>Times</i> (of whose gifts he had a high opinion),
+      enlivened him perceptibly. But he did not recover, and at the end of
+      January 1882 it was definitely determined that he should go to the
+      sea-side. I was asked to accompany him, and did so. At the right juncture
+      Mr. J. P. Seddon very hospitably tendered the use of his handsome bungalow
+      at Birchington-on-Sea, a little watering-place four miles west of Margate.
+      There we spent nine weeks. At first going out he was able to take short
+      walks on the cliffs, or round the road that winds about the churchyard,
+      but his strength grew less and less every day and hour. We were constantly
+      visited by Mr. Watts, whose devotion never failed, and Rossetti would
+      brighten up at the prospect of one of his visits, and become sensibly
+      depressed when he had gone. Mr. William Sharp, too (a young friend of
+      whose gifts as a poet Rossetti had a genuine appreciation, and by whom he
+      had been visited at intervals for some time), came out occasionally and
+      cheered up the sufferer in a noticeable degree. Then his mother and sister
+      came and stayed in the house during many weeks at the last. How shall I
+      speak of the tenderness of their solicitude, of their unwearying
+      attentions, in a word of their ardent and reciprocated love of the
+      illustrious son and brother for whom they did the thousand gentle offices
+      which they alone could have done! The end was drawing on, and we all knew
+      the fact. Rossetti had actually taken to poetical composition afresh, and
+      had written a facetious ballad (conceived years before) of the length of
+      <i>The White Ship</i>, called <i>Jan Van Hunks</i>, embodying an eccentric
+      story of a Dutchman&rsquo;s wager to smoke against the devil. This was to appear
+      in a miscellany of stories and poems by himself and Mr. Watts, a project
+      which had been a favourite one of his for some years, and in which he now,
+      in his last moments, took a revived interest strange and strong.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      About this time he derived great gratification from reading an article on
+      him and his works in <i>Le Livre</i> by Mr. Joseph Knight, an old friend
+      to whom he was deeply attached, and for whose gifts he had a genuine
+      admiration. Perhaps the very last letter Rossetti penned was written to
+      Mr. Knight upon the subject of this article.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His intellect was as powerful as in his best days, and freer than ever of
+      hallucinations. But his bodily strength grew less and less. His sight
+      became feebler, and then he abandoned the many novels that had recently
+      solaced his idler hours, and Miss Rossetti read aloud to him. Among other
+      books she read Dickens&rsquo;s <i>Tale of Two Cities</i>, and he seemed deeply
+      touched by Sidney Carton&rsquo;s sacrifice, and remarked that he would like to
+      paint the last scene of the story.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On Wednesday morning, April 5th, I went into the bedroom to which he had
+      for some days been confined, and wrote out to his dictation two sonnets
+      which he had composed on a design of his called <i>The Sphinx</i>, and
+      which he wished to give, together with the drawing and the ballad before
+      described, to Mr. Watts for publication in the volume just mentioned. On
+      the Thursday morning I found his utterance thick, and his speech from that
+      cause hardly intelligible. It chanced that I had just been reading Mr.
+      Buchanan&rsquo;s new volume of poems, and in the course of conversation I told
+      him the story of the ballad called <i>The Lights of Leith</i>, and he was
+      affected by the pathos of it. He had heard of that author&rsquo;s
+      retractation{*} of the charges involved in the article published ten years
+      earlier, and was manifestly touched by the dedication of the romance <i>God
+      and the Man</i>. He talked long and earnestly that morning, and it was our
+      last real interview. He spoke of his love of early English ballad
+      literature, and of how when he first met with it he had said to himself:
+      &ldquo;There lies your line.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     * The retractation, which now has a peculiar literary
+     interest, was made in the following verses, and should, I
+     think, be recorded here:
+
+     To an old Enemy.
+
+          I would have snatch&rsquo;d a bay-leaf from thy brow,
+             Wronging the chaplet on an honoured head;
+          In peace and charity I bring thee now
+               A lily-flower instead.
+          Pure as thy purpose, blameless as thy song,
+             Sweet as thy spirit, may this offering be;
+          Forget the bitter blame that did thee wrong,
+               And take the gift from me!
+
+     In a later edition of the romance the following verses are
+     added to the dedication:
+
+     To Dante Gabriel Rossetti:
+
+          Calmly, thy royal robe of death around thee,
+             Thou Bleekest, and weeping brethren round thee stand&mdash;
+          Gently they placed, ere yet God&rsquo;s angel crown&rsquo;d thee,
+               My lily in thy hand!
+          I never knew thee living, O my brother!
+             But on thy breast my lily of love now lies;
+          And by that token, we shall know each other,
+               When God&rsquo;s voice saith &ldquo;Arise!&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Can you understand me?&rdquo; he asked abruptly, alluding to the thickness of
+      his utterance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Perfectly.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nurse Abrey cannot: what a good creature she is!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      That night we telegraphed to Mr. Marshall, to Mr. W. M. Rossetti, and Mr.
+      Watts, and wrote next morning to Mr. Shields, Mr. Scott, and Mr. Madox
+      Brown. It had been found by the resident medical man, Dr. Harris, that in
+      Rossetti&rsquo;s case kidney disease had supervened. His dear mother and I sat
+      up until early morning with him, and when we left him his sister took our
+      place and remained with him the whole of that and subsequent nights. He
+      sat up in bed most of the time and said a sort of stupefaction had removed
+      all pain. He crooned over odd lines of poetry. &ldquo;My own verses torment me,&rdquo;
+       he said. Then he half-sang, half-recited, snatches from one of Iago&rsquo;s
+      songs in <i>Othello</i>. &ldquo;Strange things,&rdquo; he murmured, &ldquo;to come into
+      one&rsquo;s head at such a moment.&rdquo; I told him his brother and Mr. Watts would
+      be with him to-morrow. &ldquo;Then you really think that I am dying? At <i>last</i>
+      you think so; but <i>I</i> was right from the first.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Next day, Good Friday, the friends named did come, and weak as he was, he
+      was much cheered by their presence. The following day Mr. Marshall
+      arrived.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That gentleman recognised the alarming position of affairs, but he was not
+      without hope. He administered a sort of hot bath, and on Sunday morning
+      Rossetti was perceptibly brighter. Mr. Shields had now arrived, and one
+      after one of his friends, including Mr. Leyland, who was at the time
+      staying at Ramsgate, and made frequent calls, visited him in his room and
+      found him able to listen and sometimes to talk. In the evening the nurse
+      gave a cheering report of his condition, and encouraged by such prospects,
+      Mr. Watts, Mr. Shields, and myself, gave way to good spirits, and retired
+      to an adjoining room. About nine o&rsquo;clock Mr. Watts left us, and returning
+      in a short time, said he had been in the sickroom, and had had some talk
+      with Rossetti, and found him cheerful. An instant afterwards we heard a
+      scream, followed by a loud rapping at our door. We hurried into Rossetti&rsquo;s
+      room and found him in convulsions. Mr. Watts raised him on one side,
+      whilst I raised him on the other; his mother, sister, and brother, were
+      immediately present (Mr. Shields had fled away for the doctor); there were
+      a few moments of suspense, and then we saw him die in our arms. Mrs.
+      William Rossetti arrived from Manchester at this moment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thus on Easter Day Rossetti died. It was hard to realise that he was
+      actually dead; but so it was, and the dreadful fact had at last come upon
+      us with a horrible suddenness. Of the business of the next few days I need
+      say nothing. I went up to London in the interval between the death and
+      burial, and the old house at Chelsea, which, to my mind, in my time had
+      always been desolate, was now more than ever so, that the man who had been
+      its vitalising spirit lay dead eighty miles away by the side of the sea.
+      It was decided to bury the poet in the churchyard of Birchington. The
+      funeral, which was a private one, was attended by relatives and personal
+      friends only, with one or two well-wishers from London.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Next day we saw most of the friends away by train, and, some days later,
+      Mr. Watts was with myself the last to leave. I thought we two were drawn
+      the closer each to each from the loss of him by whom we were brought
+      together. We walked one morning to the churchyard and found the grave,
+      which nestles under the south-west porch, strewn with flowers. The church
+      is an ancient and quaint early Gothic edifice, somewhat rejuvenated
+      however, but with ivy creeping over its walls. The prospect to the north
+      is of sea only: a broad sweep of landscape so flat and so featureless that
+      the great sea dominates it. As we stood there, with the rumble of the
+      rolling waters borne to us from the shore, we felt that though we had
+      little dreamed that we should lay Rossetti in his last sleep here, no
+      other place could be quite so fit. It was, indeed, the resting-place for a
+      poet. In this bed, of all others, he must at length, after weary years of
+      sleeplessness, sleep the only sleep that is deep and will endure. Thinking
+      of the incidents which I have in this chapter tried to record, my mind
+      reverted to a touching sonnet which the friend by my side had just
+      printed; and then, for the first time, I was struck by its extraordinary
+      applicability to him whom we had laid below. In its printed form it was
+      addressed to Heine, and ran:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     Thou knew&rsquo;st that island far away and lone
+        Whose shores are as a harp, where billows break
+        In spray of music and the breezes shake
+     O&rsquo;er spicy seas a woof of colour and tone,
+     While that sweet music echoes like a moan
+        In the island&rsquo;s heart, and sighs around the lake
+        Where, watching fearfully a watchful snake,
+     A damsel weeps upon her emerald throne.
+
+     Life&rsquo;s ocean, breaking round thy senses&rsquo; shore,
+        Struck golden song as from the strand of day:
+        For us the joy, for thee the fell foe lay&mdash;
+     Pain&rsquo;s blinking snake around the fair isle&rsquo;s core,
+        Turning to sighs the enchanted sounds that play
+     Around thy lovely island evermore.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How strangely appropriate it is,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;to Rossetti, and now I
+      remember how deeply he was moved on reading it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He guessed its secret; I addressed it, for disguise, to Heine, to whom it
+      was sadly inapplicable. I meant it for <i>him</i>.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      THE END. <br /><br />
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, by
+T. Hall Caine
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK RECOLLECTIONS OF ROSSETTI ***
+
+***** This file should be named 25574-h.htm or 25574-h.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+        http://www.gutenberg.org/2/5/5/7/25574/
+
+Produced by David Widger
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.
+
+
+
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase &ldquo;Project
+Gutenberg&rdquo;), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
+http://gutenberg.org/license).
+
+
+Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B.  &ldquo;Project Gutenberg&rdquo; is a registered trademark.  It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
+paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation (&ldquo;the Foundation&rdquo;
+ or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase &ldquo;Project Gutenberg&rdquo; appears, or with which the phrase &ldquo;Project
+Gutenberg&rdquo; is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase &ldquo;Project Gutenberg&rdquo; associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+&ldquo;Plain Vanilla ASCII&rdquo; or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original &ldquo;Plain Vanilla ASCII&rdquo; or other
+form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
+     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
+     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+     address specified in Section 4, &ldquo;Information about donations to
+     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.&rdquo;
+ 
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+     License.  You must require such a user to return or
+     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+     of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+&ldquo;Defects,&rdquo; such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the &ldquo;Right
+of Replacement or Refund&rdquo; described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH F3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you &lsquo;AS-IS&rsquo; WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need, is critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm&rsquo;s
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation web page at http://www.pglaf.org.
+
+
+Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service.  The Foundation&rsquo;s EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541.  Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
+http://pglaf.org/fundraising.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state&rsquo;s laws.
+
+The Foundation&rsquo;s principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at
+809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
+business@pglaf.org.  Email contact links and up to date contact
+information can be found at the Foundation&rsquo;s web site and official
+page at http://pglaf.org
+
+For additional contact information:
+     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+     Chief Executive and Director
+     gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+
+Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit http://pglaf.org
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations.
+To donate, please visit: http://pglaf.org/donate
+
+
+Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart is the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone.  For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+     http://www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
+
+
+</pre>
+  </body>
+</html>