Читать книгу Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - Sir Hall Caine - Страница 6

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.