ending with the despairing cry upon the deaf goddess of repose—

Many such nights Rossetti bore, we may well believe, before he fled at last, when rational means seemed of no avail against his malady, to that most dangerous source of ease, the too free use of chloral. Several times he partially shook off the habit, and intervals of comparative comfort and cheerfulness were frequent until 1872, when other phases of illness, independent of it though still of nervous origin, further undermined the constitution already weakened by years of abnormal strain. A respite of a very pleasant kind was afforded him in the successive autumns of 1868–69 by his visits to Miss Boyd at Penkill, in Perthshire, where, in company with other congenial spirits, he spent some weeks of comparative happiness and ease. Here he was induced to resume his poetry, which, save for a few significant sonnets, had lain in abeyance since that sad day on which he had buried his manuscripts in the grave of his early love. Now, yielding with much reluctance and conflict of heart to the persuasion of friends who knew the value of the poems thus lost to literature, he gave permission for the coffin to be exhumed, and the manuscripts removed. The story of this delicate task, and of its judicious and successful fulfilment under the personal superintendence of two or three intimate friends of the widower, has already been related in detail by one of the eye-witnesses aforesaid. The poems, after seven years’ concealment in the quiet grave in Highgate Cemetery, were duly restored to their author’s hand. This having been done, he set to work arranging, re-writing, and adding some of the finest work of his poetic maturity to a collection of poems which should be an immortal record and perpetuation of his love.

Towards the close of 1869 Rossetti began to share with his friend William Morris the romantic and picturesque old manor house of Kelmscott, near Lechdale, in Gloucestershire; a district full of interesting landscape, and haunted by the inspiring shade of Shelley, who there wrote his characteristic fragment, “A Summer Evening in Lechdale Churchyard.” The scenery of the surrounding country is brought in vivid glimpses here and there into Rossetti’s poetry, as, for instance, in “Down Stream” (“Between Holmscote and Hurstcote”) and other lyrics of his later life. Here he painted “The Bower Maiden”—a pretty country lass with marigolds. But a great part of his time was still spent at home in Chelsea, where in 1871 he at last completed the finest oil version of “Dante’s Dream.” Save for the incomparable “Beata Beatrix,” it is the summing-up of all his highest interpretations of the Dante spirit; the consummation of his gospel of romantic love. His friend Mr. Val Prinsep quotes Rossetti as writing in a letter about this time:—“I should like of all things to show you my big picture ‘Dante’s Dream’ now, if you are ever in town. Indeed, I should probably have written to you before this of the picture being in a state to see, on the chance of its accelerating your movements townwards, but was deterred from doing so by the fact that every special appointment I have made to show it has been met by the clerk of the weather with such a careful provision of absolute darkness for that day and hour, that I tempt my fate no more in that way, as the picture cannot absolutely be seen except in a fair light, and one’s nerves do not hold out for ever under such onslaughts.... Everyone who has seen the ‘Dante’s Dream’ (not yet quite finished, but close upon), has seemed so thoroughly pleased with it that I think I may hope without vanity some progress has been made, and this I feel sure I shall carry on in my next work. Of course I have only shown the ‘Dante’ to a few, as otherwise I might spend my time in nothing else, the picture blocking up the whole studio when displayed.”

Ten years later, in 1881, the “Dante’s Dream” gained for the painter one of the very few popular triumphs of his lifetime. It was exhibited at Liverpool, bought by the Corporation of that city for £1,500, hung in the Walker Art Gallery, where it now remains; and instantly took rank among the greatest masterpieces of modern art. “Fifty years hence,” said Sir Noel Paton, “it will be counted among the half-dozen supreme pictures of the world.”

The story of the last ten years of Rossetti’s private life, clouded by frequent ill-health, and disturbed by that most intolerable of a poet’s trials, a literary controversy, remains yet to be told by him who shared most intimately the seclusion and the affliction of that troublous period, Mr. Theodore Watts; whose oft-quoted sonnet to his friend, as Mr. Coulson Kernahan has said, gives a fuller picture of Rossetti than volumes of prose could do, and therefore commands insertion here:

The mingled pain and privilege of Mr. Watts’s ministry was shared to a great degree by Lord and Lady Mount Temple, Mrs. Sumner, Dr. Gordon Hake and his son, Mr. George Hake, Mr. Madox Brown, Mr. Frederick Shields, and Mr. Sandys. Mr. Leyland also saw him frequently, and added generous and unremitting friendship to his patronage of the wayward painter’s work. He was the purchaser of some of the most important pictures of Rossetti’s last decade, including the beautiful “Dis Manibus,” or “The Roman Widow,” (1874), which remains unsurpassed for delicate purity and depth of colour by any of the masterpieces of his prime; “Mnemosyne,” or “La Ricordanza,” or “The Lamp of Memory” (1876–78), one of his most noble and impressive symbolic figures; “The Sea-Spell,” (1875–77), and a replica of “The Blessed Damozel” (1873–77), which he painted for Mr. William Graham in illustration of his own poem:

The publication, in 1870, of Rossetti’s volume of “Poems,” containing, together with some of his loveliest short lyrics, “The Blessed Damozel,” and the “House of Life” sonnets, led the way for that unfortunate attack upon him in the critical press which undoubtedly contributed to the shortening of his days, however regrettable may have been the hyper-sensitive manner in which the poet met his arraignment. In 1871 an article signed “Thomas Maitland” was published in the “Contemporary Review,” entitled “The Fleshly School of Poetry,” in which Rossetti’s poems were attacked, from an avowedly moral point of view, on the ground of sensuality. Ignoring the essential principles of all Rossetti’s work—the sacredness of the senses as the instruments of the soul—the meaning of all physical beauty as the witness of an immanent God—the writer deliberately charged him with pandering to the lowest instincts of his readers, and being, in short, the prophet of that later and grossly materialistic phase of European art of which the very name Pre-Raphaelite was a repudiation. It is not surprising that to a deeply (if undefinedly) religious nature like Rossetti’s this should have seemed the hardest blow that could have been dealt at his art and at him. The publication of the magazine article, however, seriously disconcerted him at the moment. It was not until the offensive and wholly unfair indictment was re-issued in the following year in pamphlet form that it began to assume a more serious aspect in the victim’s eyes. Criticism of his poetic methods he could have borne with equanimity. Indifference and neglect seldom troubled him. He cared little for popularity, and was no seeker after fame, although he naturally desired the appreciation of those whose judgment was of real account in literature. But he did care for his general reputation as a clean-lived and pure-minded man. This charge assailed the ethical foundations of all his work. He had seen in the loveliest things of earth the vessels and channels of the loveliness of heaven. And that this should be counted to him for sensuality—that the love which had been to him “a worship and a regeneration” should be held up to scorn as a gross and carnal passion—that was the intolerable thing!

Not that he lacked defenders. His own answer, under the title of “The Stealthy School of Criticism,” in the columns of the “Athenæum,” was more than supported by Mr. Swinburne’s indignant challenge, “Under the Microscope;” and other loyal friends contributed to a sufficient vindication. Save in the too morbid imagination of the poet, the attack soon lapsed, for the most part, into the oblivion it deserved; more especially since the writer, a few years later, had the manliness to retract his charge, and to make a candid apology, though a tardy one,for having uttered it. But not so easily could the pain given to Rossetti be overcome. He now began to shrink intensely from society, fearing at all points to encounter that suspicion of his artistic work. Suffering acutely from nervous prostration and insomnia, he yielded himself the more fully to the fatal chloral habit which only aggravated his condition. In the autumn of 1872 he spent some weeks at the house of Dr. Gordon Hake at Roehampton, and proceeded thence with Mr. Madox Brown, Mr. George Hake, and Mr. Bell Scott to Stobhall in Perthshire, on the Tay. Returning to the south in improved health, Rossetti and Mr. George Hake proceeded at once to Kelmscott Manor, where they settled for a considerable time. Rossetti indeed remained for nearly two years, gradually resuming his artistic work, and regaining at times something of his old vivacity and high spirits: only a few friends went to and fro in visits full of mutual delight and inspiration. The beautiful old house, and the quaint, romantic chamber that served for studio, became the resort of poets and artists, critics and connoisseurs, disciples and aspirants, in companies small indeed, but brilliant and memorable as any that gathered round the young Pre-Raphaelites in Newman Street or the maturer masters of art and song that assembled in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea. Mr. William Morris and his family were there frequently; Dr. Gordon Hake made a visit, and afterwards embodied his memories in his sequence of sonnets addressed to Mr.Theodore Watts, “The New Day,” one of which deserves quotation:

And as his health continued to improve, Rossetti’s poetry and painting rose again to their highest level. The former, indeed, is thought by some sound critics to reach at this juncture a superb merit unattained before; for it was here that he wrote the first of the three great romantic ballads which mark the zenith of his poetic power. “Rose Mary” stands supreme in this incomparable category. Nor did he ever far surpass, if at all, his pictures of this period,—“The Bower Maiden” (1873) for frank and vigorous natural beauty in the pretty child with the fresh-blowing marigolds, “Dis Manibus” or “The Roman Widow” (1874) for delicate and simple pathos in the treatment of the classic world; and “Proserpine” (1874) for the sombre moral tragedy symbolized in the classic story, seldom, if ever, so interpreted on canvas before.

In these years also he painted the beautiful “Garland Girl,” “La Ghirlandata” (1873), and “Veronica Veronese” (1872), called at first “The Day-dream,” but wholly distinct from the later work of that date; reverted, or endeavoured to revert in sketches, to his old fantasy of “Michael Scott’s Wooing,” and resumed a subject begun in 1864, but never quite fully worked out, “The Boat of Love,” suggested by Dante’s second Sonnet,—“Guido, vorrei che tu e Lapo ed io,” and representing Dante and Beatrice embarking in a boat with his friend and brother-poet Guido Calvacanti, and his lady Giovanna, and Lapo degli Uberti and his love.

In the autumn of 1874 Rossetti returned to Chelsea, and again made his headquarters at 16, Cheyne Walk, where he remained, save for two visits to the seaside, until 1880. Here he worked from time to time at the picture illustrative of his own early poem, “The Blessed Damozel,”—the sole instance, by the way, of Rossetti’s completion of a subject in verse before attempting it on canvas; and began what promised to be among the most profound of his mystical creations, “The Sphinx” or “The Question,” and also the last subject he ever took from the “Vita Nuova” of Dante, “La Donna della Finestra,” or “Our Lady of Pity.” These two, as well as “The Boat of Love,” remained unfinished in his studio. To this fruitful decade belong an excellent replica of an early water-colour, “The Damozel of the Sanct Grael” (1874); the exquisite crayon drawing “The Spirit of the Rainbow” (1877); and four splendid oils, “The Sea Spell” (1876), “A Vision of Fiametta” (1878), “The Day-dream” and “Mnemosyne” or “The Lamp of Memory” (1880). To 1875 is due “La Bello Mano” (“The Beautiful Hand”). In 1879 he made a crayon drawing, which he called “Sancta Lilias,” for an Annunciation; depicting a girl unfolding a white scarf from a tall lily which she carries in her hand; but the sketch was never finished, nor advanced beyond the crayon stage.

In 1875 Rossetti took for a time a pleasant and secluded house near Bognor,—Aldwick Lodge, standing in its own grounds, wellnigh buried in shrubbery, in a lane west of the town, and near (as Dr. Hake tells us in some delightful reminiscences of a visit there) “to the roughest bit of beach on the Sussex coast.” Here, gathering together his mother, sister, and aunts, and such intimate friends as Dr. Hake and Mr. Theodore Watts, he enjoyed at the close of this year a Christmas week to which he afterwards looked back as to one of the happiest he ever spent.

It was at Bognor that Rossetti, influenced, no doubt, by his companionship, woke for the first time to the magic of the sea. It is extraordinary that so passionately romantic a spirit as his should have remained, until the eve of his fiftieth year, absolutely unaffected by that profound and intimate sway which the sea holds over the poetic nature once brought, however distantly, within even the rumour and echo of its majestic voice. Now the spell he had so long eluded was cast upon him with irresistible force. He began to haunt the shore with a child’s eagerness for the grandeur and the urgent mystery of tides. Day after day he paced the beach for miles together, pursuing the new vision, the new rapture of the stimulated sense. The surf, tumultuous and loud on that wild coast, enthralled him like a charm; the waves drove his fancy to new spheres; his poetry was turned to fresh scenes and subjects; he began to write “The White Ship,” the first, though perhaps not the greatest, of his historic ballads. For the time, he was absorbed almost wholly in that revelation of splendour and power,—in the primal glories of sea and sky; “two symbols of the infinite,” as the captive Mazzini called them.

But when we wonder at the lateness of this æsthetic development on Rossetti’s part, we must remember that he was naturally without that love of terrestrial and cosmical Nature for her own sake that is the commonly-accepted attribute of poets. There was in his whole being no trace of Pantheism, no worship of external loveliness apart from conscious life. To him the sole joy of life was in the human; the supreme tragedy of life was in the sexual. The conception of the two elemental principles—the man-principle and the woman-principle—striving, uniting, prevailing, against all the forces of destiny, sufficed him for his conception of the universe. He was utterly alien to the Wordsworth spirit; its serene monism was abhorrent to him. Apart as he lived from intellectual speculation, he was, in his unformulated and unconscious philosophy, dualistic to the core; as all true Romance must ever be. For the essence of Romance is in its recognition of the conflict between matter and spirit, between Nature and Man. Even its joy and exultation in the physical life as the channel of the Higher Spirit takes its glory from the sense of conquest over the Lower Spirit which threatens it from the same unknown world behind all. Therefore there lies always beneath the awe and wonder of romance towards the natural and the supernatural world a deep instinct of rebellion, of antagonism, which debars it from the Wordsworth spirit, at peace with earth and heaven. Resignation there may be in romance; acquiescence, never. There may come, indeed, a passionate and whole-hearted love of natural scenery, a frank delight, as in the Celtic temper, in every external object that can minister to man’s æsthetic enjoyment of beauty as a revelation of the divine. But the limits of the divine grow more perceptible as man emerges from the childhood of the world. “There hath passed away a glory from the earth.” Rossetti knew this—“knew” it, not in the intellectual sense of the word; and therefore he could never turn to Nature for that regenerating rest and peace which in some moods—not quite the highest—she can give. He never gained that next stage of spiritual emancipation and enrichment at which the sense of conflict is its own reward; as when the soldier, with “his soul well-knit” and every nerve schooled and chastened on the eve of a great battle, feels a profound repose, a diviner calm than that of the acclaimed victor. “The man who, though his fights be all defeats, still fights”—as Coventry Patmore sang while Rossetti was yet young—has verily seen “the beginnings of peace.”

It was at Bognor, too, that he began work upon the most ambitious of all his great symbolic figures, the “Venus Astarte,” or “Astarte Syriaca,” in which he strove—vainly perhaps, but with a superb effort towards a superhuman task—to combine and express all the mystic sensuousness and occult magic of Orientalism with the clear and scientific wisdom of the Western world. The Syrian Venus stands “between the sun and moon a mystery,” attended by winged and torch-bearing choristers; eloquent of the painter’s long and last struggle to reconcile sense, emotion, and intellect in the highest consummation of pictorial art.

In the following summer (1876) Rossetti paid a pleasant visit, at the invitation of Lord and Lady Mount Temple, to their house at Broadlands, in Hampshire, where he made some progress with the best version of “The Blessed Damozel.” The predella to this work, in which the lover left on earth is seen waiting beside a river for the vision of the Beloved, was painted from the beechwoods of the neighbourhood.

In 1876 Rossetti went with Madox Brown, Mr. George Hake, Mr. Theodore Watts, and his mother and sister to Herne Bay. Ill health had now settled permanently upon him, and painting became more difficult and intermittent, yet his technical power remained for the most part singularly unimpaired. In 1878 he completed “A Vision of Fiametta,”—an admirable and wholly new version of the subject from Boccaccio which he had treated some years back. Fiametta is in the painter’s thought an angel of immortality:

—his bright Easter-maiden, with the crimson bird on the bough beside her, the symbol of warm, full-blooded life, as is the soft red robe she wears,—of life so rich and sweet as to yield the guarantee of victory; the spirit that can defy death and be its own assurance of resurrection. The apple-blossoms fall in scattered petals to the ground as she pushes the boughs apart with her lifted hand. Behind her is a stormy April sky, but around her head there plays a light, as of hope beyond the grave. She is the covenant of eternal spring, for she

But now the time was nigh when “Death’s dark storm” must break upon Rossetti. The last great and sane strength of his genius was spent upon poetry,—in the crowning of his romantic ballads with the masterpiece of their class, “The King’s Tragedy.” This was published, in a volume entitled “Ballads and Sonnets,” in 1881. The previous year had seen the completion of the last important picture that ever came fully finished from his hand,—an oil version of the almost full-length figure replicated several times, under the name of “The Day-dream,” and consisting of the most beautiful and perfect of his portraits of Mrs. William Morris.

Of the laborious conscientiousness of Rossetti’s practice in painting it may here be said that it has been greatly under-estimated by those who only saw the less serious side of his complex and self-contradictory nature. That “the capacity for taking infinite pains” developed with the genius which gave it scope is abundantly attested by those who witnessed not only his restless roving from one task to another, but also the ungrudging concentration of toil which he bestowed in turns upon them all. Mr. Shields, who for years was a constant companion in Rossetti’s studio, says in his too-brief record of that intimacy:—“One evening when the fine full-length figure, holding an open book and honeysuckle, called ‘The Day-dream,’ was nearly completed, I found him standing far off from it in the dusky light and searching it critically. ‘It seems to me, that the lower limbs are too short: what do you think?’ An examination compelled me to endorse his fears. It was enough. Condemnation to the effacement of half the picture was instantly passed. Long sprays of young sycamore, rich with the ruddy buds of early spring, crossed before the lady’s green skirt. That sacrificed, it was not possible to save the foliage, and the season was too far advanced for fresh reference to nature. The first necessary step therefore was to copy these on to a clean canvas; that done, he determinately scraped out the large erring surface, corrected the proportions of the figure, and then calmly re-painted all, striking lastly the sycamore boughs into their new places from the rescued studies.” An even more laborious re-painting, says the same authority, was effected in the final oil version of “Dante’s Dream,” completed in 1871. The figure of one of the ladies attendant at the bedside of the dead Beatrice failed to satisfy him in the disposition of her drapery. At the last moment he set to work to make entirely new studies for the robe in question, and almost wholly re-painted the figure that wore it.

In the autumn of 1881, which witnessed the publication of his second volume of original poetry, Rossetti went with his friend Mr. Hall Caine, the eminent novelist, to spend some weeks at a little farmhouse in the Vale of St. John, near Keswick, Cumberland. The surrounding scenery was of a wildly beautiful kind, well calculated to soothe and inspire the city-pent poets; but Rossetti was by this time too ill to find relief from nervous strain in the long walks which he had enjoyed at Bognor. He paced instead, for hours together, the quaint little sitting-room where, night after night, he would read aloud from the treasures of modern fiction. Of Rossetti’s acute critical faculty, and his sound literary judgment alike in poetry and prose romance, abundant testimony has been given by the many privileged to enjoy from year to year, especially in the period of his prime, the inestimable help and delight of his enthusiastic counsel and his frank, outspoken, but never ungenerous criticism. Such witness is fully endorsed by Mr. Caine’s records even of this last autumn of his life, when, through shattered health and failing hopes for his own future, he retained in a great measure the mental vision and acumen of happier days, as well as his own creative power in design and poetry. Rossetti never tired of these nightly discussions of the inexhaustible topics of literary art: he loved to prolong them far into the morning hours; and often, as his friend has told us, they saw the sunrise break over the great hills as they went at last to rest.

Nor was the year without fruit in painting. The pathetic picture of “La Pia,” a new design in oils, though with a title used for a sketch in 1867, ranks high among his later performances. The subject, briefly broached in Dante’s “Purgatorio,” deals with the imprisonment of the young wife of Nello dell’ Pietra of Siena in a fortress in the Maremma, in the midst of a noxious swamp. Rossetti was still at work, too, upon the great symbolic picture in which he was endeavouring to sum up all that he had implied in his maturer treatment of womanly beauty,—the mystic and solemn “Venus Astarte” or “Astarte Syriaca” (the Syrian Venus). The “Cassandra” proposed by him somewhile previously was never far advanced, but he had painted in 1880 a somewhat inferior oil version of a subject which had been the favourite of his youth, “The Salutation of Beatrice.”

One of the very few public triumphs which came to Rossetti in his lifetime stands in the annals of 1881. His great picture, “Dante’s Dream,” painted ten years earlier, was purchased by the Corporation of Liverpool for £1,500, and hung in the Walker Art Gallery, where it was at once hailed with general and almost unalloyed praise.

Early in February, 1882, prostrated by an attack of a semi-paralytic character, Rossetti was removed to Birchington-on-Sea, near Margate, where his old friend, Mr. John P. Seddon, had generously placed a house known as West Cliff Bungalow at his disposal. Mr. Hall Caine went with him, and they were soon joined by the artist’s mother, sister, and brother, and visited frequently by Mr. Watts, and by the young poet Mr. William Sharp, Mr. Shields, and Mr. Leyland, who brought with him Rossetti’s long-trusted medical adviser, Dr. John Marshall, to add his counsels to the unremitting care of the local physician, Dr. Harris.

Even within sight of the fast-approaching end, his earnest spirit did not falter in its aspirations, nor was the grasp of the busy hand upon its loved work relaxed altogether. He now executed a beautiful little oil sketch of a subject which he had attempted many years before—“Joan of Arc Kissing the Sword of Deliverance;” a striking and pathetic allegory of his own soul’s attitude, as he stood ready to greet with glad and fearless reverence the long-impending sword of the last Deliverer. He was one of those to whom, as George Eliot once said, early death takes the aspect of salvation.

At Birchington he reverted also to his picture of ten years back, “Proserpine.” His last poetry was written less than a week before his death, in two sonnets illustrative of his yet unfinished picture, “The Question,” or “The Sphinx,” in which the figures of Youth, Manhood, and Age appear before the Mother of Mystery. Early in youth Rossetti had made a resolution that no day should pass without some piece of work, however imperfect, issuing from his hands, and amid much pain and weakness, sorrow and discouragement, he kept that resolution almost till his dying day.

On Good Friday, the 7th of April, he became rapidly worse, but remained cheerful and composed. On Easter Day the shadow of death hung over the little household. In the evening the group of watchers gathered with increasing apprehension round the bed. “I think I shall die to-night,” said Rossetti quietly, some hours before the end. Soon after nine o’clock a momentary struggle gave warning of the approaching rest. His mother, sister, and brother, Mr. Theodore Watts, Mr. Shields, Mr. Hall Caine, Dr. Harris and the nurse were with him, when, twenty minutes later, he passed away, meeting the Deliverer in perfect calm; seeing, as he himself expressed it, “on Death’s dark storm the rainbow of the soul.”

On Easter Monday Mr. Shields, at the request of the bereaved family, made a careful and accurate pencil drawing of the head of his late friend as he lay ready for the last sad rites. A plaster cast of the head, by Brucciani, was also made, but was not considered satisfactory.

It was decided that the funeral should take place at Birchington; and there, in the quiet little graveyard on the cliffs, Rossetti was laid to rest. Mr. William Sharp and Philip Bourke Marston (who died five years later) were among the mourners, besides those already gathered in the house of grief.

The quiet hamlet of Birchington-on-Sea is now a well-loved place of pilgrimage. The quaint, un-English-looking house in which the poet-painter died is honoured as “Rossetti Bungalow.” In the old, shingle-towered, ivy-grown church, a stained-glass memorial window, his mother’s gift, shows, in the one light, his own design, “The Passover in the Holy Family,” and, in the other, Christ giving sight to a blind minstrel,—the work of his old friend, Mr. Shields. In the churchyard, opposite the south-west porch, the old verger shows, with touching pride and enthusiasm, a beautiful Runic cross, on the face of which is this inscription:

And at the back the following:

Another interesting memorial has since been established in the form of a drinking fountain, designed by Mr. Seddon, with a bronze bust modelled by Mr. Madox Brown, erected by subscription in 1887 in front of the old house, 16, Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, which was Rossetti’s home for twenty years.

An estimate of the disposition and character of such a man as Rossetti will not be lightly attempted by those who can only honour his memory from afar; having never added to the deep enjoyment of his art the privilege of personal intercourse with the artist. His tender and passionate affection, his chivalrous loyalty, his gracious bonhomie, his winning dignity, are matters so familiar to all who really knew him, as to render eulogy alike superfluous and impertinent. Of the other side of that magnetic personality,—of his hyper-sensitive pride, his morbid isolation of his suffering self from those healthy breezes of broad intellectual life which it is so easy to prescribe, so bitterly hard for a nature such as his to stand against,—of these things it may be said with all sympathy and reverence that they were the price of his greatness. There are some temperaments so finely organized, so delicately strung, that even joy is painful to them. They cannot lose in the sense of delight the consciousness of what that delight has cost them. They perceive so acutely the realities, the conditions, of life, that an hour of rapture makes them more quick to the pain behind and before. Such was Shelley, such were Keats and Byron; such was Dante Gabriel Rossetti. It is the curse of the artistic temperament: it is the blessing of Art.

“There are some of us,” said Shelley, “who have loved an Antigone before we visited this earth, and must pursue through life that unregainable ideal.” “I think,” he added, in words that might well be applied to Rossetti, “one is always in love with something or other; the error consists in seeking in a mortal image the likeness of what is, perhaps, eternal.” In other words, Rossetti was an idealist, and for the idealist there is no primrose path to heaven. His soul was too open to the ideal to be proof against the actual. His whole nature was like an Æolian harp, responsive through the whole gamut of thought and sense to every breath of circumstance or destiny that played about the world around it. For him there was no life without emotion. He craved sensation, as one craves a narcotic, to destroy its own results. Ennui was his bane. Nothing in his history is more pathetic than his need, in later years, of the perpetual ministry of close friends. The delicate instrument that could never be silent was hard to keep in tune. It demanded a firm and tender hand laid upon all those quivering strings of being to merge the discords into some sort of harmony, even if it were always in a minor key. Such a hand he found more than once among those that knew and loved him, but he found it supremely in the friendship of Mr. Theodore Watts, to whom his last poems were dedicated.