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YALE UNIVERSITY
LIBRARY

.Elisabetb Xutber Carp
Tennyson. His Homes, His Friends, and His
Work. With 18 illustrations in photogravure,
and some other illustrations. Large 8°, $3.75
Browning, Poet and Man. A Survey. With
25 illustrations in photogravure, and some
other illustrations. Large 8° . . . $3.7,
The Rossettis: Dante Gabriel and Christina.
With 27 illustrations in photogravure, and
some other illustrations. Large 8° . $3.75

G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS
NEW YORK & LONDON

THE ROSSETTIS

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Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1855.

Copyright, 1900
BY
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PREFACE.
IN writing of Rossetti I have written of a man
who cannot by any possibility be known
through one biographer alone. Those who
came in contact with him received impressions as
various as strong, and he has been to a singular
extent the object of both eulogy and detraction.
In his letters he gives a presentation of himself
undoubtedly faithful so far as it goes, but it does
not go very far. In his poems and in his pictures
we find revelations of his attitude toward life which
to a large degree supplement the letters, and in the
numerous and frequently contradictory opinions ex
pressed by his companions we have many glimpses
of an individuality that puzzled them despite the
frankness with which it was manifested to them,
or perhaps because of that frankness.
To trace the true Rossetti by these clues is a task
that could successfully be accomplished only by one
who could reinforce them by personal knowledge,
but to give an impression in which the striking
peculiarities of Rossetti's recorded actions shall not
IV

preface.

take precedence over his essential qualities and dis
cernible motives ought not to be impossible to any
one with the already published material at hand,
and to this end I have directed my efforts. My
general estimate of his character and temperament
has been directly influenced, not merely by this
published material, but to a considerable degree by
a correspondence now in the possession of Mr.
Samuel Bancroft, Jr., of Wilmington, Delaware, to
whose cordial generosity I owe the opportunity of
thus seeing Rossetti as he appeared at moments of
absolute unreserve. To Mr. Bancroft I am also in
debted for the invaluable privilege of studying
characteristic examples of Rossetti's work precisely
as he would have wished them to be studied ; in
the home, that is, of their owner, and among sur
roundings suited to them.
In Mr. Bancroft's house hang the Lady Lilith,
the Found, the Magdalen, the Water Willow, the
Ruth Herbert study in gold and umber, the portrait
in coloured chalks of Mr. F. R. Leyland, and an
early study of still-life belonging to the years pre
ceding Pre-Raphaelitism, — a collection representa
tive of almost every period and style known to
Rossetti's art. By the courtesy of the owner, re
productions of all these save the last two, have
been made for the present book directly from the
originals which in two cases (the Ruth Herbert and
the Magdalen) have never before been reproduced.
The drawing by Frederick Shields of Rossetti after

preface. v
death is also reproduced from the original pencil
sketch in the possession of Mr. Bancroft to whom
thanks are due as well for the loan of many valuable
autotypes by which comparatively satisfactory illus
trations of Rossetti's work were insured.
Upon these contributions the greater part of the
interest of the book beyond that of other Rossetti
books depends. In taking this opportunity for
special acknowledgment of the debt, I realise that
no acknowledgment can adequately measure the
extent to which my work has thus been furthered.
I wish also to express my obligation to Mr. W.
J. Stillman and to Mr. P. B. Wight for their full
and prompt response to my inquiries, and to Mr.
Russell Sturgis for the loan of The Crayon and The
New Path.
The two chapters on Christina Rossetti bear to
the rest of the text much the proportion borne,
perhaps, by her limited life and product to her
brother's more complicated career. In laying stress
upon elements of her character not much dwelt
upon by previous- writers, I have not, I trust, over
stepped the bounds of reasonable inference, and
have not to my own mind, certainly, lessened the
appeal of her peculiar charm and distinction.

CONTENTS.

I. — The Family ....
II. — The Pre-Raphaelites, English and Amer
ICAN 
III. — The Germ 
IV. — Miss Siddal 
V. — The Middle Years
VI. — Translations and Original Poems
VII. — Life at Cheyne Walk and Kelmscott
VIII. — Painting from 1862 to 1870
IX. — The Closing Years
X. — Character and Temperament
XI. — Christina Rossetti
XII.— Christina Rossetti : Her Poetry

22 536992
1 16
141
163 186
216228251

ILLUSTRATIONS.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1855 . Frontispiece
The Girlhood of Mary Virgin .
Rossetti' s first important painting.
Carved Stone Ornaments .
From the National Academy of Design.
Found 
Photographed from the original, with isochromatic plate, by
courtesy of Mr. Samuel Bancroft, Jr.
Beat a Beatrix 
The Seed of David ....
Centre of Triptych, Llandaff Cathedral.
The Damsel of the San Grael .
Mrs. Stillman (Miss Marie Spartali)
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1861
Dr. Johnson and the Methodist Ladies at The
Mitre 
Algernon Charles Swinburne .
From water-colour by Rossetti.
Study for "Dante's Dream " Scarf holder
Mrs. IV. J. Stillman (Miss Spartali. J
Study for Head of Dante .
Drawn from Mr. IV. f. Stillman.

Page
32
48 76 9° 96
102 106
108 no 112
124 132

x mitistratione. Page
Rosa Triplex  l48
National Gallery, London.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti  164
From a photograph, Cheyne Walk, 1864.
Lady Lilith  168
Photographed from original by courtesy ofthe owner,
Mr. Samuel Bancroft, fr.
Joan of Arc  H2
From the painting in possession of Mr. S. T. Peters, New York.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti  186
By G. F. JVatts. By permission of Mr. Frederick Hollyer.
Fiammetta  194
Painted from Mrs. Stillman.
Mary Magdalen with the Alabaster Box . . 196
Photographed from original painting, hitherto unphotographed, by
courtesy ofthe owner, Mr. Samuel Bancroft, Jr.
The Loving Cup  204
Crayon.
Sketch of Ruth Herbert  210
An experiment in method. The high lights are the
bare paper ; the colour is gold powder mixed on
the palette in gum ; the shadows accentuated in
umber ; the lips slightly reddened ; the eyes blue.
Photographed from the original, which has not before been repro
duced, by ihe courtesy of Mr. Samuel Bancroft, Jr.
Pencil Drawing by Frederick Shields of " The
Dead Rossetti' the Morning after his
Death at Birchington .... 214
Photographed from the original by courtesy ofthe owner,
Mr. Samuel Bancroft, Jr.
Rossetti Fountain  216
Designed by J. P. Seddon. Bust by Ford Madox Brown.

Ullustrations. »
Page
Memorial Fountain to Dante Gabriel Rossetti . 218
Designed by John P. Seddon, Architect.
(Bust of Rossetti by Ford Madox Brown. J
Proserpine  226
Christina G. Rossetti  228
Christina Rossetti  230
(Early sketch by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. J
From "New Poems," etc., Macmillan & Co.
Mrs. and Miss Christina Rossetti, 1877 . . 234
Rossetti's Tombstone in Birchington Churchyard, 246
Title-page to " The Prince's Progress " . . 261

CHAPTER I.
THE FAMILY.
IN the case of the Rossettis the biography of any
one individual may very well seem "only an
episode in the epic of the family," so striking is
the character of each generation that we can trace.
The name itself indicates that somewhere among the
Della Guardias, from whom the family are descended,
occurred a blond branch to which the nickname Ros
setti, or " reddish people," was attached and clung.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti himself retained a suggestion
of this ruddy tinge in the colour of his hair, which
was dark, but with a certain auburn brightness, slow
to fade out of it.
Mr. Knight has described Dante Gabriel's grand
father, Nicola Rossetti, as "connected with the iron
trade," but Mr. William Rossetti speaks of him sim
ply as a blacksmith of very moderate means and a
"somewhat severe and irascible nature," living in
the little Italian town of Vasto on the Adriatic coast,
about eighteen miles from Termoli. In this artisan
of remote Abruzzo we get a forewarning of the

2 Gbe IRossettis.
poignant sensibility that caused more than one tur
bulent epoch in the career of his gifted grandson.
He died, in fact, from wounded feelings, shortly after
the French-republican invasion of the Kingdom of
Naples in 1799, when the French put some affront
upon him. " I believe," Mr. William Rossetti writes,
"they gave him a sound beating for failing or neglect
ing to furnish required provisions, and, being unable
to stomach this, or to resent it as he would have
liked, his health declined, and soon he was no
more." As a mortuary inscription to him reads, he "poor
and honourable, lovingly sent in boyhood to their
first studies his sons, carefully nurtured in child
hood." Of these sons there were four, all of whom earned
some degree of notice in verse-making, and three of
whom became more or less distinguished, Gabriele
(father of Dante Gabriel), the most so, showing from
his youth extraordinary aptitude in writing, in draw
ing, and in music. His beautiful tenor voice made
his companions feel that he was putting aside an
obvious career in declining to train himself for the
operatic stage. His fine little drawings in the sepia
which he himself extracted from the cuttlefish seem
to his son William, who has spent his life among
artists, of surpassing merit in their especial line. His
writing procured him in his own country and in
England a fame not lasting, perhaps, but genuine.
While he was in Italy and very young he wrote

Gbe Jamil)?. 3
largely in verse, and the following little poems will
show something of the quality of his lyrical gift,
which was more agreeable than impressive.
AMORE E SPEMA.
Gemelli in petto a noi
Nascono Amore e Speme,
Vivono sempre insieme,
Muoiono insieme ancor.
Troppo ne' vezzi tuoi,
Troppo, o crudel, ti fidi,
Se ni me la Speme uccidi,
Con essa uccidi Amor.
LOVE AND HOPE.
Like twins in our bosom are born
The passions of Love and Hope,
They know no separate scope,
Together they live and die.
Cruel Lady, beware, to scorn,
Too much you confide in your charm,
If the hope in my heart you should harm
Love, stricken, beside it must lie.
LA RIMEMBRANZA.
Qui la vidi ; e si specchiava
Su' quest' onda si tranquilla :
Qui s'accorse ch' io guardava,
E si tinse di rossor :
Ah, d'allor che se mi piacque
Quella languidor pupilla,
I susurri di quest' acque
Par che parlino d'amor.1
1 See article on " The Rossettis," by William Sharp, in the Fortnightly Review for
1886.

4 Gbe 1Ro66etti9.
RECOLLECTION.
Here I saw her bending over,
Mirrored on the tranquil stream :
Here she saw me look and love her,
And a ruddy red she grew.
Since, that lingering glance recalling,
As it pleased my lover's dream,
I hear the waters speak in falling,
Murmuring Love — and Love, anew.
His poems were chiefly, however, of a patriotic
order and stirring to the popular mind, so much so
that they brought him into difficulties with the king,
against whom they were not perhaps directed but to
whom they proved extremely offensive. When, for
example, Ferdinand I. granted a constitution to Naples
in 1820, Rossetti hailed the dawn of the fortunate
day with an ode commencing " Sei pur bella cogli
astri sui crine" (Lovely art thou with stars in hair)
which charmed the Neapolitans. As the brief period
of independence closed in 1821 with the king's aboli
tion ofthe constitution, Rossetti, then occupying the
post of Curator of Ancient Marbles and Bronzes in the
Museum of Naples, was denounced and proscribed
with his fellow constitutionalists. He succeeded by
the aid of Sir Graham Moore in getting to Malta,
whence, after a stay of two years and a half, he went
to England, to remain there for the rest of his life.
Shortly after his arrival in England he became
acquainted with the Polidori family, the same to
which Byron's erratic physician belonged, and other
wise notable for a tendency to long life on the part

£be Jfamity. 5
of its members, nine of them attaining an average
age of eighty-eight years, and for their bookish tastes
and aptitude in learning languages.
Falling in love with the second daughter, Frances
Mary Lavinia, Rossetti married her in 1826. By the
end of 1830 they had four children ; Maria Francesca,
born on the 17th of February, 1827 ; Gabriel Charles
Dante, later called Dante Gabriel, on the 12th of May,
1828 ; William Michael, on the 25th of September,
1829; and Christina Georgina, on the 5th of De
cember, 1830.
Both Rossetti and his wife were keenly alive to
the obligations of family life, and these children, so
nearly of an age that the four, according to their
mother's notion, were no more trouble than one to
rear, were provided with all the comforts necessary
to their well-being. A good physician and more
books than usually appear in households of small
means were counted among the necessities. A com
fortable scale of living adapted to hearty appetites
was maintained through all variations of income, and
no butcher or baker or candle-stick maker, says Mr.
William Rossetti, had ever a claim upon them for six
pence unpaid. An honourable dinginess and thread
bare aspect were much preferable to debt, and there
were no absurd devices for "keeping up appear
ances," a hearty contentment with very simple ways
of living characterising parents and children.
Teaching was the most available means of liveli
hood for one in Rossetti's position, and from 1831

6 Hbc IRoseettis.
until 1844 he occupied the Italian Professorship in
King's College, London. He also wrote from a curi
ous point of view a number of books on Dante Ali-
ghieri, whose " darkness of the exiled years " he
shared, adding to it the pathetic physical darkness
of failing sight, but never wholly losing the lightness
of heart that keeps the most serious Italian as a lit
tle child in certain ways of thinking and behaving.
Lowell quotes from his Disamina the following pas
sage that shows, despite its touch of grandiloquence,
the gallant ideal by which he shaped his course of
passionate study :
" My Italy, my sweetest Italy, for having loved
thee too much I have lost thee, and perhaps — ah !
may God avert the omen ! But more proud than
sorrowful for an evil endured for thee alone, I con
tinue to consecrate my vigils to thee alone — An exile
full of anguish, perchance availed to sublime the
more in thy Alighieri that lofty soul which was a
beautiful gift of thy smiling sky ; and an exile equally
wearisome and undeserved now avails, perhaps, to
sharpen my small genius so that it may penetrate
into what he left written for thy instruction and for
his glory."
Lowell adds to this quotation the words, — " Ros
setti is himself a proof that a noble mind need not
be narrowed by misfortune. His Comment (unhappily
incomplete) is one of the most valuable and sug
gestive." National sentiment never waned or flickered with

Gbe Tamils. 7
this ardent-minded exile. Although he liked much
that was English, — the English standard of morality,
the English Constitution, the English people, Eng
lish coal-fires and English beer,— the companions of
his choice, those who gathered in his plain rooms
and formed the circle of his daily interests, were his
countrymen. 'To be an Italian, was a passport to his good
will," Mr. William Rossetti declares, "and whether
the Italian was a nobleman, a professional gentleman,
a small musical hanger-on, a maccaroni man, or a
mere waif and stray churned by the pitiless sea of
expatriation, he equally welcomed him, if only he
were an honest soul and not a spia (spy). Hardly
an organ-man or plaster-cast vender passed our street-
door without being interrogated by my father, ' Di
che paese siete ? ' (' What part of Italy do you come
from?')" Thus the Rossetti children were brought early
into contact with an amazing number and variety of
people, — musicians, painters, writers, scholars, ven
ders, teachers, politicians ; some of them singular
figures of heroic and unquiet aspect ; not all of them
wholly decent and reputable ; a few of them, as
Mazzini and members ofthe Bonaparte family, closely
connected with events that were to pass into history.
They thronged about Rossetti, chiefly, it would
seem, for the satisfaction of discussing Italian poli
tics and denouncing Louis Philippe, Rossetti taking
a vehement part and contributing to the zest of the

8 Gbe IRossettis.
occasion by reciting from his own patriotic poems
and keeping his visitors in a whirl of emotion. No
food for the physical man save ' ' a cup or two of tea
or of coffee with a slice of bread and butter," either
stimulated or interfered with intellectual feasts, and,
in fact, a larger hospitality would have been dif
ficult, as Rossetti's declining health and a preference
in the public mind for German in place of Italian
forced the family to "a real tussle for the means of
subsistence " during the latter part of his life.
The four children, busying themselves with their
own affairs, nevertheless took in much of the ani
mated discourse that went on about them with the
result, on Dante Gabriel's part, at least, of a hearty
indifference to current politics as he grew up, and a
general tendency to depart from his father's opinions
regarding subjects on which they both spent thought
and feeling. How much unconscious influence was
exerted over them all by the dramatic, emotional at
mosphere and the continual exchange of vehement
ideas, cannot in the least be estimated, as their
minds and characters developed along quite inde
pendent lines despite the underlying family likeness
among them.
Where they were English and not Italian, how
ever, they drew either from the single English strain
in their mother's family, or were shaped by their as
sociations outside their homes. On their father's
tombstone is engraved the line from Jeremiah, " He
shall return no more to see his native country," nor

£be ffamilp. 9
did he ever go back in the flesh, but he did all that
he could to surround himself and his children with
the very breath and spirit of Italy.
Their mother is described as having an English
rather than Italian aspect, but Dante Gabriel, in
drawing her, accentuated a few strikingly Italian
characteristics about the mouth and eyes. She was
religious in temperament, extremely domestic, fond
of reading, simple and dignified in manner, warm in
feeling, steady in action ; a fortress of defence for her
children and for her husband, against the difficulties
that assailed them. That she was not altogether
blinded by her affections is indicated by a remark
made in her old age and quoted with considerable
relish by her son William, to whom perhaps it ap
plied as little as to any member of the family. " I
always had a passion for intellect," she said, "and
my wish was that my husband should be distin
guished for intellect, and my children too. I have
had my wish, and I now wish that there were a little
less intellect in the family so as to allow for a little
more common sense."
To her children she was always more or less a
heroine, the object of their unbounded admiration
as of their love. Christina resembled her in face,
as we can see from Dante Gabriel's portrait ot the
mother and daughter side by side, the one in ad
vanced age, the other in middle life but looking in
certain marked respects the elder of the two. Of
the household these were the two inseparable ones,

10 (Tbe IRossettis.
who clung to each other in sickness and in health ;
but that there was not in any case any barrier of
formality between mother and children is thoroughly
attested by Dante Gabriel's letters, in which a great
display of filial tenderness goes with unconstrained
playfulness of address. ' ' Good Antique, " he writes,
or " Dearest Darling," or " I shall certainly see you
in an evening or two, you dear old thing," or,
"There is an aunt of 'Miss Boyd's — a year or two
younger than your funny old self! "
Her long, careful management of a household dif
ficult to manage under the best of circumstances
seems to have confirmed in her habits of economy
that persevered long after they were strictly neces
sary. Dante Gabriel writes to a friend in 1873 that
he is sending his "poor old Mummy" a sealskin
cloak as a present, as she and Christina on a previous
visit " had only a small rug between them." " My
Mummy travels," he adds, "with a trunk all over
nails which she has had ever since she was sixteen.
It is covered with deerskin and is very curious. It
is still as good as new for all purposes, and has on it
her initials before she was married."
Up to the age of seven or eight all the children
got what teaching they had from their mother, and
the two girls were educated entirely by her. Her
methods could not have been lax or ineffective, as
Dante Gabriel, anything but a student by tempera
ment, could read with ease, write legibly, and spell
with perfect correctness when at the age of five or

Ebe Jfamil.?. n
six he copied out his first poem, "The Slave," in
which the blank verse also was correct in accent and
number of feet, a fact that does not seem to Mr.
William Rossetti particularly surprising, since he
cannot remember, he says, any time, when, know
ing what a verse was, they did not also know and
feel what a correct verse was.
The prompt command of these "tools of the
mind " quickly resulted with all the children in fervent
literary and artistic interests. Dante Gabriel, who
"surged through the pages of his Shelley like a
flame," at sixteen, was "ramping" through Scott's
poems at eight or nine, and before he was seven was
illustrating Henry VI., Hamlet having been the chief
love of his fifth year, with Faust to follow it. Since
Mr. Watts-Dunton has written of him as the great
protagonist of the " Renascence of the Spirit of
Wonder in poetry and art," it is interesting to observe
his delight as a boy in works dealing with mysteries
beyond human experience. His taste for ghosts was
even stronger than that of the average child, and he
had a fine discrimination regarding them. He always
knew the difference, his brother tells us, between
the ghost in Hamlet and a ghost by Monk Lewis.
Brigands pleased him, also, and murderers, but the
romance of love with which he was later to be so
much occupied, he greeted with ecstasies of scorn.
" Often' and fatuously did they laugh " over Cole
ridge's " Genevieve," the poem which Dante Gabriel
marked in one of his latest years with the word

12 Gbe IRossettie.
" Perfection," and for which he made in his twenty-
first year an exquisite illustration in pen and ink,
sitting up the whole of an August night to perfect it.
Christina Rossetti, who, "compared with the rest
of the family, read very little," also knew her Shakes
peare and Scott at an early age, and became acquainted
with Keats when she was nine. Maria, whose dis
position was studious, liked history and Grecian
mythology and had an "Iliad fit" at twelve or
thirteen. It is not surprising to find that with these tastes
the Rossettis were not game-loving or athletic child
ren. Dante Gabriel in particular is described as hav
ing no ambition whatever in these directions. Neither
did he take any delight whatever in the arts of handi
craft, with all his heart disliking whatever required
mechanical skill or dexterity. Not even Polidori's
printing-press alluringly situated in a summer-house
tempted him to investigation of its too practical pro
blems, and he tried few amusements that required
practice and exercise. He once joined Ford Madox
Brown for a time in rifle-shooting at a target, and by
a happy chance hit the bull's-eye with his first shot,
raising false hopes in the breast of his instructor.
After that, however, he never even hit the target. Mr.
Stephens declares that to call him a rower is certainly
an error, since when he was in his boat he proposed
to throw over one of the stretchers because it was
in his way. He never cared to swim, nor could
he ride.

(Tbe ffamity. 13
This strain of incapacity accounts in a measure
for his inability to master the technical side of his
own beautiful art. To draw consummately demands,
as a basis at least, something of the constructive
power essential to a bridge-builder, and as much
persistent discipline as the average boy is willing to
give to his athletics ! Rossetti had little constructive
power, and could not discipline himself in work or
play. If he had not been marvellously gifted with
the faculty of visualising his ideas, and moulding
them clumsily but powerfully into form upon the
flat canvas, he must have been lost as a painter.
In place of active sports and lively games, the
Rossetti children put rhyming, painting, and acting,
showing no great precocity in any one of these
directions, but a general quickness of interest and
alertness of mind. They were much like the de
lightful children of whom Stevenson writes out of
his full knowledge of his own quaint childhood.
They walked in a vain show and among mists and
rainbows, " passionate after dreams and unconcerned
about realities." Like Stevenson, too, they knew
" Skeltery " and were incessantly buying sheets of
" a penny plain and two-pence coloured," preferring
the plain for the joy of colouring the engraved figures
with true Pre-Raphaelite hues, bright red, blue, and
yellow. The drawings made by Dante Gabriel in
his noble attempt to illustrate the Iliad are con
demned by his brother as " not in any tolerable de
gree good or even promising," although the two

h Gbe IRossettte.
examples reproduced in Marillier's splendid volume
are unquestionably above the attainment of the aver
age child of a dozen years. There are, however,
no stories of youthful accomplishment to vie with
the prodigious feats of Millais's infancy.
One impish trick recorded of Dante Gabriel de
serves mention not at all for its cleverness, which is
somewhat wanting, but because it marks the first
showing of that irrepressible instinct for " play-act
ing" which was with him at his birth, and which did
not leave him till his death — which in fact made the
terrible last months of his life more pitiable and grue
some than anything else could have done. When
he was about five years old he had a habit of walk
ing in the street in an attitude of deformity until he
attained his desired result, an expression of sympa
thy on the part of a passer-by. Then he would
straighten up, and run away laughing. How similar
to this picture of him is that given by Mr. Watts-
Dunton after his death in an effort to give a true im
pression of the cheerful side of his character, which
this friend thought had been too much ignored.
" The truth is," he writes, " that there was in him a
sort of wilfulness of the spoilt child, unreasonable,
and to me unaccountable, which impelled him, ex
cept when alone with me, to assume that gloom and
that air of the misanthrope which deceived even his
brother. And the only excuse — if indeed there be
one — for the distressing asperities which disfigure
my old friend Bell Scott's mention of him in his

Gbe Jfamilp. 15
autobiography is to be found in this fantastic whim,
so painful to many a friend and so cruelly unjust to
himself." The picture of the household as a whole, gained
from the very few writers who remember its earlier
years, is that of a strongly united little group, with
almost complete similarity of tastes, living a little
apart from the world about them and sufficient to
each other for entertainment and companionship,
developing each one rather slowly to a certain point,
and then abruptly attaining great maturity of ex
pression and thought, and taking life as it came with
directness and a certain kind of simplicity not incom
patible with great complexity of nature. In Dante
Gabriel, in particular, this simplicity was one of the
dominant enlightening characteristics by which many
most wayward manifestations might be explained,
and through which a great confusion of result was
frequently arrived at. It is also the stamp by which
Christina's poetry is known from all other poetry
which in other respects resembles hers.
Christina and Dante Gabriel are naturally the
figures that stand out most plainly from the family
group, and different as they came to be, the two
little creatures look much alike in the long per
spective of their childhood. Both made illustrative
drawings, Christina's of little merit ; both wrote
poetry as a kind of game, Christina showing the
greater cleverness in this perhaps ; both had hearts
overflowing with affectionate interest in animals of

1 6 Gbe IRossettis.
every conceivable description, from dormice and
hedgehogs at home to the armadillos, sloths, tigers,
and elephants, of the Zoological Gardens ; both had,
it would seem, rather irritable tempers and not very
firm health, and both were desultory in their habits
of study. Maria is said to have epitomised the temperaments
of all four children, declaring that she herself had the
good sense, William the good nature, Gabriel the
good heart, and Christina the bad temper of their
beloved father and mother I1*-
By the beginning of 1837 the two boys were both
in school ; first at a little day-school kept by a Rev.
Mr. Paul, and later at the King's College Day-School,
where Dante Gabriel stayed five and William Ros
setti eight years. This first experience of rubbing
against the outside world after the close seclusion of
their home life was not entirely happy. We learn
from William Rossetti that Dante Gabriel was usually
pretty near the head of his classes, that when he left
school he could write an excellent hand, was up to
Sallust, Ovid, and Virgil, in Latin, knew something
of Greek which he promptly forgot, understood
French well enough to plunge into French novels,
and had "some inkling on subjects of history, geo
graphy, etc.," but learned "nothing whatever" of
"anything even distantly tending to science," such
as algebra and geometry. This was not a poor
equipment for a boy of fourteen ; but from his broth-
1 See Mackenzie Bell's Christina Rossetti: a Biographical and Critical
Study.

Gbe ffamilp. 17
er's dark allusions both boys suffered much moral
deterioration through the wickedness of their school
fellows, and constant exposure to an atmosphere
that " reeked too perceptibly of unveracity, slipperi-
ness, and shirking." Dante Gabriel's own picture of
his schoolboy aspect is painted in the gloomiest
colours. He was destitute of personal courage,
shrank from the amusements of his fellows, was
afraid of their quarrels, and although not wholly
without generous impulses, was in the main selfish
of nature and reclusive in habit of life. William Ros
setti substitutes "self-willed " for selfish, and denies
that his brother was a coward, admitting that he
was not fond of "that loutish horse-play and that
scrambling pugnacity which are so eminently dis
tinctive of the British stripling. " Certainly he did not
at the King's College School, or any other, gain the
exact habits, the "instruments of true thought,"
which Bagehot calls the "very keys and openings,
the exclusive access " to the knowledge beloved of
youth. He diligently nursed his fancies and fed his
sympathies, and turned a cold shoulder to discipline
in all its forms. He knew this foe under every con
ceivable disguise and never was cajoled into show
ing a friendliness for it that he was far from feeling.
In 1842 1 he left the King's College School (William
remaining three years longer), to commence regu
larly hi-s art education. The drawing academy
known as " Sass's " and kept by F. S. Cary, the son
1 Mr. William Rossetti now thinks 1 84 1 .

1 8 Zbe IRossettis.
of the translator of Dante, was the natural place to
choose at that time, and Dante Gabriel spent there
about four years in studying the antique and the
human skeleton, and learning perhaps as little as one
so greatly endowed could learn of these preliminaries
to the making of pictures. By his fellow student,
J. A. Vintner, he is remembered as wayward and
brusque, affectionate, generous, boisterous, unap
proachable, and generally contradictory. "A bare
throat, a falling, ill-kept collar, boots not over famil
iar with brushes, black and well-worn habiliments,
including not the ordinary jacket of the period, but a
loose dress-coat which had once been new — these
were the outward and visible signs of a mood which
cared even less for appearances than the art-student
of those days was accustomed to care, which un
doubtedly was little enough." With this unpromis
ing exterior he had, when addressed, a manner that
was courteous, gentle, winsome, and marked by
cultivation and the air of good breeding.
From Cary's he went in 1846 to the Antique
School of the Royal Academy, where he stayed a
couple of years without making marked progress.
Six years of drawing from the antique with anatomi
cal study might have been expected to ground him
in the fundamental principles of an orthodox art
education in England, and to prepare him for the
long course of drawing from the nude which must
have followed had he been a Frenchman. And, as a
matter of fact, while he did not learn anything with

Gbe Jfamil)?. 19
academic thoroughness he did acquire during these
ineffectual, these dabbling years, a command of his
pencil that made him able to produce in black and
white some very beautiful drawings. When his
pencil sketch of his grandfather was exhibited at the
New Gallery in 1897, its true and delicate modelling
claimed the attention of critics among the rich and
sumptuous designs of his later years ; and the little
illustration of Coleridge's " Genevieve " is pure dis
tinction and rhythmic charm of line.
The most obvious achievements of these years,
however, were gained at random in the fascinating
by-paths of learning. His attendance at the Academy
was irregular, and his truant hours were many of
them spent in the Old Reading-room of the British
Museum, " hunting up volumes of the most ancient
Italian lyrists, and also volumes of modern British
poets, and maybe of French as well." The poems
he liked he translated. Dante, who during his child
hood had been a thin literary ghost haunting his
father's presence, became when he was fifteen or
sixteen years old a new poet, young, and passion
ately human, tumultuously in love, and master of
a lovely language, the friendly, eager, grave, and
rapturous guide to a New Life which the boy set
about interpreting as no one else has ever inter
preted it. More than a dozen years later, when
painting had gained the upper hand, these early
translations, exquisitely perfected, were put into
print, preserving the pungency and grace of

20 Gbe IRoseettie.
Rossetti's best time, ofthe most impressionable of all
his impressionable years. At this time, too, he
" read up all manner of old romaunts to pitch upon
stunning words for poetry," showing early and
with the most matter of fact nonchalance his ap
preciation of the value of the right vocabulary,
" faithful to the colouring of his own spirit."
A modern guide, also, he now discovered, Brown
ing, whose poems were an endless delight, and from
whom he gave endless recitations. The " involved
style" of the author of "Paracelsus" and " Sor-
dello " made no especial tax on the understanding
of one to whom the eccentricities of the English
tongue were already familiar. He found in the
poems "passion, observation, aspiration, mediasval-
ism, the dramatic perception of character, act, and
incident " that made them the very theatre of his
own confident, absorbing dreams.
One more name must be added to make the trio
controlling the direction of his thought before the
end of his second decade. William Blake, jeering
at Correggio, Titian, Rubens, and other masters of
the past, and producing designs of mystical signifi
cance and profound imagination, brought "balsam
to Rossetti's soul and grist to his mill." In 1847 he
borrowed ten shillings of his brother to seize an
opportunity for purchasing one of Blake's MS. books
at the museum, and the work of the two boys in
copying out the tangled poetry and prose in the
precious volume was the basis of all their after

Gbe 3famU$. 21
interest in Blake literature, and resulted finally, on
William Rossetti's part, in the Aldine edition of
Blake's work, as yet without a rival.
About this central current of inspiration Rossetti's
life played somewhat wantonly. The theatre, good
or bad, was a joy to him ; novels, trashy and great,
were "enormously admired" by him; artists of
mediocre talent fixed his attention ; he was fond of
joking, of loud laughter, and, above all, fond of ad
miring, and of expressing his admiration. Thus he
gravitated toward the point of departure from any
thing resembling conventional methods of training,
until in 1848 he broke the bonds that could not hold
him so lightly as to be endurable.

CHAPTER II.
THE PRE-RAPHAELITES, ENGLISH AND
AMERICAN.
PRE-RAPHAELITISM has suffered from the
tendency of human nature to define a thing,
" in order," as someone has said, " to save
the trouble of understanding it." Through various
and contradictory definitions it has been held re
sponsible for many artistic sins and also credited
with an amount of virtue it hardly could claim.
At once the most discerning and least didactic state
ment of it is given by a painter who appreciated its
" dramatic program " without falling under its spell.
" Pre-Raphaelitism," he says, " is the Pre-Raphaelite
Brotherhood, of course." And this Brotherhood
was what ? Little more in reality than a band of a
few enthusiastic young men — (" Thank God that
they are young," said Ruskin)— who had eager
minds, interesting ideas to express, and a great deter
mination, not by any means upheld by their technical
skill, to express them. Their name, somewhat but
not altogether misleading, led to an uproar against

Zbe ipre^lRapbaeUtes. 23
them which their pictures would never, perhaps,
have raised ; this uproar, amounting to persecution,
aroused the abounding sympathy of Ruskin, and his
defence produced a great reaction in their favour,
with the curious result that by the time the little
organisation had wearied of its own existence and
dissolved, it was pretty well fixed in the public mind
as a revolutionary influence, a "school."
The part played by Rossetti in all this was a
peculiar one. Because he had so little in common
with most of his companions ; because his independ
ent genius was so little dominated, or even guided,
by any hard-and-fast principles he might profess, or
which might be professed for him ; because his con
tribution to the Brotherhood was not chiefly the
veracity in workmanship, the conscientiousness of
detail, the morality of motive, demanded by them,
but a deep vein of imaginative romance inherited or
derived from the great dreamers of mediaeval Italy,
and a lovely sense of colour blooming with exotic
brilliancy in the foggy atmosphere of London, — for
these very reasons, by which he is set apart from
and above the Brotherhood, he has come to be re
garded as its chief exponent and representative, and,
after fifty years, is still spoken of as Rossetti, the
leader of the Pre-Raphaelites. His admirers can
smile with perfect good-humour over the claims of
Millais's filial biographer, who quotes his father's
assertion, made, it must be said, with a tinge of
superior virtue in the tone, that " Rossetti's art was

24 £be 1Ro0setti6.
not Pre-Raphaelite at all— highly imaginative and
original and not without elements of beauty," but
"not Nature." Not nature indeed, but temperament
and the supreme expression of a sentiment quite
unknown in England or in any other one spot where
brushes were at that time touching canvas ; a senti
ment belonging to two ages and two countries
united in one man, and that man singularly himself
and unsubordinated to influences of either lower or
higher kind.
His interest in the little Brotherhood was ardent
enough, however, and is easily traced. The history
of the brief interval between his connection with it
and his previous study in the Academy shows him
beating about in unrestrained impatience to be free
from the direction of others, although he was not
then or later indifferent to the opinions of those
about him, or disinclined to learn from them as
much as he could without interfering with his own
pronounced tendencies and predilections.
By the end of 1847, it was perfectly plain to him
that his path in art lay in some other direction than
through the successive gates#of the Royal Academy.
Two more years at the Antique before he could hope
to enter the painting school was a prospect that ap
palled him. He was eager to venture on colour, but
quite unequal to the hazard. " Every time I attempt
to express my ideas in colour," he wrote to his Aunt
Charlotte Polidori, "I find myself baffled, not by
want of ability — I feel this and why should I not

Gbe pre*1Rapbaelite0. 25
say it? — but by ignorance of certain apparently
insignificant technicalities, which with the guidance
of an experienced artist might soon be acquired." The
means to this end were provided by Miss Polidori,
who from her regular income as a governess was
alone of all the family capable of producing "com
fortable extra sums " to further the desires of her
relatives. Rossetti had two men in view who "by
some unaccountable accident" had not obtained
public renown, but either of whom he would trust
with his education as a painter. Ford Madox Brown
was one, and to him he wrote the first ofthe series
of extravagantly appreciative and sincere letters
which, like milestones, marked his admirations to
the end of his life.
From various causes, — ill-success in his work,
domestic trouble, and poverty, — Brown's temper in
his earlier years was saturnine, and there is a tradi
tion that when he received from this unknown cor
respondent a rhapsody on the pictures so sadly
neglected by the public, coupled with a hope that he
"might possibly admit pupils to profit by his in
valuable assistance," the applicant feeling convinced
in that case of having " some chance in the Art," he
provided himself with a stout stick and sallied forth
to call on the " Gabriel C. Rossetti " who signed the
letter, prepared to cudgel him for an impudent joke.
Rossetti's sincerity of manner, however, literally
disarmed him, and he left the house "a friend for
that day in 1848, and a friend for life."

26 Gbe 1Ro00etti0.
His advice to Rossetti was less radical than the
latter had hoped it would be. He had himself been
well equipped in several art schools for more than one
branch of his profession, and rigid and long-continued
attention to those insignificant technicalities which
Rossetti had hoped soon to acquire seemed to him
an essential of learning to paint. He recommended
his pupil to do some copying, and to paint still-life
(" pickle-jars ") with him during the day, and in the
evening to attend an academy where the students
drew from the model. This advice Rossetti received
with respectful gratitude and followed for a time.
One ofthe bottle studies which he painted, obviously
in a spirit of dutiful acquiescence, is owned by Mr.
Bancroft of Wilmington, Delaware, and shows how
closely his first steps in colour followed the path of
his master. The actual hues of the red and blue
bottles and the red curtain are singularly like those
of Brown's Romeo and Juliet which hangs in the
same house, though less pure and bright and wholly
without glow or beauty, while a reclining figure,
substituted at a later period for the anatomical horse
at first forming a part of the inspiring composition,
betrays, despite the attempt to subdue it to its sur
roundings, a liveliness and fusion of colour that are
Rossetti's own and will not down.
In a few months, not having found what he
sought, he was mapping out a new course that
shortly led him to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
He saw in the Spring Exhibition at the Royal Academy

Gbe pre*1Rapbaelite0. 27
Holman Hunt's painting, from The Eve of St. Agnes,
and, thinking it the finest picture of the year, went up
to him and boisterously told him as much. Later he
called upon Hunt at his studio, and grumbled to him
about the pickle-jars, and by the 20th of August,
1848, the two young men were sharing a studio
together at No. 7 Cleveland Street, Rossetti at last in
an atmosphere that suited him, combining still-life
with figure painting in a composition of his own, at
Hunt's suggestion and under his criticism.
Thirty-eight years later Hunt recalled the vivid
incidents of this companionship with a care as minute
as any he spent upon his early drawings. Whatever
Rossetti was in after life, in those days he exercised
an influence anything but depressing upon his friends.
His eager mind, at once receptive and narrow, his
spontaneity and expansiveness, made him a comrade
of enlivening power and charm. In the Cleveland
Street studio talk was as much a part of the day's
program as painting. Hunt was twenty-one, Ros
setti a year younger. Both had convictions upon
art and opinions upon all other subjects that had
swum within their ken. Though they are now
thought of as having been at that time inspired by
the same ideals and subject to the same predilections,
their discussions indicate significant diversities. Geo
logy and astronomy seemed to Hunt full of poetic sug
gestions; but, for Rossetti, "What could it matter
whether the earth moved round the sun or the sun
travelled about the earth ! " Natural science and the

28 £be 1Ro00etti0.
development of human progress, which forcibly
appealed to Hunt, seemed to Rossetti equally unin
teresting.' Hunt had already attained his firm faith in
chronological detail as an important element in Script
ural and historical painting. Rossetti, on the con
trary, felt with most other romantic painters that
taking thought for accuracy in costume and accuracy
in type killed the poetic nature of the design. With
Hunt, even then, design was illustration of events, a
catalogue raisonnee ; with Rossetti, then as ever
after, design was, above all, the expression of emotion
and thought. Both painters, however, dwelt lovingly
upon the chances of a radiant future when worthy
pupils were to disseminate their cherished ideas,
and cause art to take its proper place in modern life.
Hunt ventured to express doubt ofthe British public's
pliability. But Rossetti confidently swept aside this
idle fear: "Were there not hundreds of young
aristocrats and millionaires growing up who would
be only too glad to get due direction how to make
the country glorious as Greece and Italy had
been ? " When we think of Rossetti's influence
upon Morris, "setting the author of The Earthly
Paradise," according to Harry Quilter, "on the
road to that decoration which has changed the
look of half the houses in London and substituted
art for ugliness all over the kingdom " ; when we
think of his influence on Burne-Jones, and of the
rivalry with Whistler in the possession of beautiful
bric-a-brac, that raised its price in every shop in

Gbe lpre*1RapbaeHte0. 29
London, and made it coveted, we realise that he
carried his extravagant prophecy more than a little
way toward fulfilment.
In the many and long intervals of his work, Ros
setti was fond of " chanting, in a voice rich and full
of passion," pages upon pages of poetry, Italian or
English, ancient or modern, and usually, as Brown
ing's Sordello, not popular or well-known. But when
he had once sat down, Hunt says, and was "im
mersed in the effort to express his purpose, and the
difficulties had to be wrestled with, his tongue was
hushed ; he remained fixed and inattentive to all
that went on about him ; he rocked himself to and
fro, and at times he moaned lowly, or hummed for a
brief minute as if telling off some idea. All this
while he peered intently before him, looking hungry
and eager, and passing by in his regard any who
came before him as if not seen at all. Then he
would often get up and walk out of the room with
out saying a word. Years afterward when he became
stout, and men with a good deal of reason found a
resemblance in him to the bust of Shakespeare at
Stratford-upon-Avon, and still later when he had
outgrown this resemblance, it seemed to me that it
was in these early days only that the soul within had
been truly seen in his face. In these early days, with
all his headstrongness and a certain want of con
sideration, his life within was untainted to an exem
plary degree, and he worthily rejoiced in the poetic
atmosphere of the sacred and spiritual dreams that

30 £be 1Ro00etti0.
then encircled him, however some of his noisy
demonstrations might hinder this from being re
cognised by a hasty judgment." That those who
knew him in later years only, had also a glimpse ot
this spiritual beauty in his face through its many
indications of different qualities, and found "the
visionary gleam," the "glory and the dream " not
entirely passed away from it, is most evident from
Watts-Dunton's description of him as the painter
D'Arcy in his novel Aylwin. "If it [the face of
D'Arcy] was not beautiful in detail," hesays, "it was
illuminated by an expression that gave a unity of
beauty to the whole. And what was the expression ?
I can only describe it by saying that it was the ex
pression of genius ; and it had that imperious mag
netism which I had never before seen in any face save
thatofSinfi Lovell."
The studio in which Rossetti and Hunt alternately
talked and worked is described by Mr. Stephens as a
dismal place, with one big eastern window giving
upon a most unlovely view of monotonous heaps of
damp, orange-coloured piles of timber, and with
walls painted dark maroon made dingier by stains of
dust and smoke. The picture with which Rossetti
struggled gallantly in the gaunt large room, against
the crafts and assaults of technical deficiency, was
The Girlhood of Mary Virgin, " a little flat and grey
and rather thin in painting," but exquisite in its
charm of pure and quiet suggestion, and marvellous
as the work of a boy without usual training or usual

Gbe pre*1Rapbelite0. 3*
self-control. There is no hint in its austerity of the
plumb-line rigidity common to the work of students,
nor are there traces of stippling smoothness or bravado
of careless brushwork. In place of these we find the
restraint of scholarly intuitions, chaste youthful re
verence for delicate and dreamy sentiment, and firm
if not robust modelling. The whole picture suggests
what Mr. LaFarge has called " respectful methods —
the methods of religious life," and the symbolism
with which it is charged indicates the esoteric, the
mystical mind already at work beneath the young
man's careless, defiant, blustering exterior. The
figures are those of Mary for which Christina sat, St.
Anna, which was a faithful portrait of Rossetti's
mother, and St. Joachim, painted from a man em
ployed in the Rossetti family to black boots and do
other such odds and ends of service.
The accessories are a three-flowered lily, tended
by a quaint, ascetic young angel ; six large volumes
on the floor, inscribed with the names ofthe cardinal
virtues ; by Mary's side some long sharp thorns, em
blematical of the future passion ; a vine trained by
Joachim into the pattern of a cross, a dove sur
rounded by a gilded halo, a lamp of antique shape, a
vase holding a rose, and a glimpse of Galilean land
scape. For the frame, Rossetti had printed a slip of
gold paper with two sonnets explanatory ofthe pic
ture : the one beginning, "This is that Blessed Mary
pre-elect," and the other, "These are the symbols ;
on that cloth of red I' the centre is the Tripoint."

32 Gbe 1Ro00etti0.
It is fnteresting to find Rossetti thus at the very
beginning, with his first exhibited picture, planning
for it a frame that should be harmonious with it, and
a sonnet that should explain it, as he did fifteen
years later for The Lady Lilith, and Venus Verti-
cordia, and twenty years later for Penelope, and
nearly thirty years later for Astarte Syriaca. It was
this habit of his that gave rise to Whistler's story of
finding him once quite eager over a projected pict
ure with which some weeks later he was progress
ing "finely," — the frame having been made for the
still blank canvas. Later still, while the canvas was
yet pristine, all was reported as going well, the son
net having been written. Whistler's suggestion at
this point was that the sonnet should be put in the
frame, and the work considered over.
To get sufficient command over himself and his
instruments for this so nearly adequate expression
of his idea demanded from Rossetti an effort that
shows him characteristically as strong in will as
many events of his life show him weak. " It is the
more to his honour," Mr. Stephens says, that
"while his facility in verse was rare, brilliant, and
great, he had at this period to undergo agonies of
toil, and passionately, so to say, to tear himself to
pieces while he became a painter according to the
lofty standards of Madox Brown, Holman Hunt, and
John Millais. These, as well as other friends of his,
witnessed the greatness of the struggle and hon
oured accordingly the victor of that strenuous

The Girlhood of Mary Virgin.
Rossetti's first important painting.

Gbe pre*1Rapbaelite0. 33
self-contest." It was a contest he was destined to
repeat in many fields to the end of his life.
While painting The Girlhood of Mary Virgin,
Rossetti saw much of Millais, whom he had met
before at the Royal Academy and in the little Cyclo-
graphic Society, and the triple friendship on which
the Brotherhood rested began. Millais was the
type, well-known to art-schools, of "prize" stu
dent. A year younger than Rossetti, he was al
ready hung with medals, and an exhibitor of some
importance. He was intimate with Hunt, who saw
in him " a generous, quick enthusiasm " and a spirit
on fire with eagerness to seize whatever he saw to
be good. Although he liked Rossetti at first, the two
were as fitted to mingle as oil and water, and Millais
records in later years that " D. G. Rossetti was a
queer fellow, and impossible as a boon companion —
so dogmatic and so irritable when opposed."
Millais and Hunt had already made a compact
"to adopt a style of absolute independence as to
art-dogma and convention." When Rossetti heard
of it he became an easy and enthusiastic convert,
and suggested the idea of a Brotherhood. Thomas
Woolner, the sculptor ; James Collinson, a painter,
and pronounced by Rossetti "a stunner," on the
strength of one interesting picture ; Frederic George
Stephens, an art critic, and apparently the only one
of the number who had much acquaintance with
the actual pre-Raphaelite art, and William Rossetti
were enrolled as members. At Millais's house in

34 Gbe 1Ro00etti0.
Gower Street they were shown what Ruskin calls
Lasinio's "execrable engravings" from the frescos
of Gozzoli, Orcagna, and others in the Campo Santo
at Pisa, as examples of the sort of art-spirit with
which they should sympathise, and the crusade of
the P.-R.B.'s began.
Their code, as Mr. William Rossetti records it,
was simple and inoffensive enough. They were: (i)
to have genuine ideas to express ; (2) to study nature
attentively, so as to know how to express them ; (3)
to sympathise with what is direct and serious and
heartfelt in previous art, to the exclusion of what is
conventional and self-parading and learned by rote ;
(4) most indispensable of all, they were to produce
thoroughly good pictures and statues.
They held monthly meetings and daily meetings,
for that matter, to discuss questions of art and litera
ture, and, as far as can be discovered, bore themselves
with self-respect. Their habits, together and sepa
rately, were those of wholesome, well-bred, seri
ous-minded young men. Millais's biographer calls
attention to the fact that at a period when, as Thack
eray has shown us, " all Bohemia was saturated with
tobacco, spirits, and quaint oaths," the Brotherhood
neither smoked, drank, nor swore. None of the
prejudice with which they were presently to be
regarded could be laid therefore to any waywardness
or wantonness of character.
Nor was their chosen principle of naturalism en
tirely new or entirely without honour in England.

£be pre*1Rapbaelite0. 35
William Dyce, whose sympathy with the early Flor
entines had attracted the attention of Overbeck as
early as 1828, was made full member of the Royal
Academy in 1848, and his work for the school of de
sign at Somerset House had already called forth a
commonplace but earnest argument in the Quarterly
Review in favour of precisely that attention to reality
and acquaintance with facts so ardently advocated by
the Brotherhood. " Painting," said the writer, " no
less than poetry is the child of Nature, and the fresher
it comes from her hand the purer will be its produc
tions." Followers of the "true school from which
alone a national style can originate " must feel as
sured that every lane and hedgerow and cornfield is
rich with purer models than art has ever produced,
and that there, if they take the eye of Raphael with
them, even Raphael may be surpassed." And as
early as 1843, Ruskin had besought the young
artists of England to "go to nature in all single
ness of heart, and walk with her laboriously and
trustingly, having no other thought but how best
to penetrate her meaning, rejecting nothing, select
ing nothing, and scorning nothing," — advice which
no young artist was ever quite so mad as literally
to follow, but which Ruskin assumed had been
followed "to the letter" by the Brotherhood, when
his attention was called to them in the midst of their
difficulties. The fact that the paintings exhibited by Ros
setti, Millais, and Hunt in 1849, were tolerably well

36 £be 1Ro00etti0.
received, shows also that the three painters were not
outraging any accepted canons of taste by revolu
tionary treatment. In May; Rossetti wrote to his
aunt that his picture that year (The Girlhood of Mary
Virgin) had created some interest, and that the
Atheneeum and the Builder approved it, as the Art
Journal did later.
The trouble that befell the Brotherhood seems
really to have started when they made of each other
Sairey Gamp's demand : " Give it a name, I beg! "
The name chosen was a marvel of infelicity, so far as
its effect upon the public was concerned. The idol
of English art circles at that time was Raphael. His
suave manner had begotten endless imitation, and
he had long been made to stand sponsor to a smooth
style easily acquired, and wholly, of course, innocent
of his radiant serenity. According to Ruskin, the
typical art student was taught that Nature was full
of faults, but that Raphael was perfection ; that the
more he copied Raphael the better, and that after
much copying of Raphael he should try what he
could do himself in a Raphaelesque but yet original
manner. A Pre-Raphaelite, then, must be the same
as an Anti-Raphaelite : to go back of the master for
ideals could be nothing less than denial of the mas
ter ; moreover, before Raphael was Mediasvalism,
and the revival of Mediaevalism in England was just
then taking the objectionable form of Puseyism.
Consequently a "Pre-Raphaelite" who painted re
ligious pictures with somewhat archaic simplicity,

£be fl>re*1RapbaeIite0. 37
and belonged to a Brotherhood, was probably a
Puseyite and a danger to be reckoned with.
Therefore, after the public for two years in suc
cession had seen in its exhibitions pictures bearing
the initials P.-R. B., and had learned, through some
sad garrulity of Rossetti's own, what the mysterious
letters stood for, the dogs of war were let loose and
bayed for a time unceasingly.
"That two youths of the respective ages of
eighteen and twenty," wrote Ruskin in 1851,
" should have conceived for themselves a totally
independent and sincere method of study, and en
thusiastically persevered in it against every kind of
dissuasion and opposition, is strange enough ; that
in the third or fourth year of their efforts they should
have produced works in many parts not inferior to
the best of Albert Diirer, this is perhaps not less
strange. But the loudness and universality of the
howl which the common critics of the press have
raised against them, the utter absence of all gener
ous help or encouragement from those who can both
measure their toil and appreciate their success, and the
shrill, shallow laughter of those who can do neither
the one nor the other, — these are the strangest of all
— unimaginable unless they had been experienced."
Charles Dickens was among their more vehement
assailants. In Household Words he warned his read
ers ofthe corruptness ofthe new school with a mani
fest ignorance and solemn presumption worthy of
his own immortal Pecksniff.

38 Gbe 1Ro00etti0.
" You come into the Royal Academy Exhibition,"
he says, "which is familiar with the works of
Wilkie, Etty, Collins, Mulready, Eastlake, Leslie,
Maclise— to the contemplation of a Holy Family.
You will have the goodness to discharge from your
minds all post-Raphael ideas, all religious aspira
tions, all elevating thoughts, all tender, awful, sor
rowful, ennobling, sacred, graceful, and beautiful
associations, and to prepare yourself as befits such a
subject — pre-Raphaelly considered — for the lowest
depths of what is mean, odious, repulsive, and
revolting." These mean, odious, repulsive, and revolting
compositions were The Christian Missionary by
Hunt, and The Boy Christ in the Carpenter's Shop
by Millais, the latter a naive and tenderly wrought
conception of the poignant text :
"And one shall say unto Him, What are these
wounds in Thine hands ? Then He shall answer,
Those with which I was wounded in the house of
my friends."
In the " Free Gallery " of Portland Place, a gallery
in which the exhibitors paid for wall-space, and the
public paid for admission, hung at the same time
the only less reviled Ecce Ancilla Domini (later
called The Annunciation) by Rossetti, of which Mr.
George Moore wrote a few years ago :
" Here at least there is drama, and the highest
form of drama — spiritual drama ; here, at least, there
is story, and the highest form of story — symbol and

Gbe pre*1Rapbaelite0. 39
suggestion. Rossetti has revealed the essence of this
intensely human story — a story that, whenever we
look below the surface which is mediaeval and re
ligious, we recognise as a story of to-day, of yester
day, of all time." Painted on an oil panel 28^ x 17
inches, the white effect of the little Virgin crouching
on her bed, confronted by the tall white-robed angel
with his lily, is daringly broken by the deep blue of
the bed-curtains, the girl's reddish hair, and the red
screen in the foreground. The lovely eyes of the
Virgin, " dawn-tinted eyes," Mr. Moore calls them,.
"filled with ache, dream, and expectation," are the
dominant charm ofthe simple subject, so technically
amiss, and so right in sentiment. This picture,
hanging now in the National Gallery beside the great
masterpieces ofthe past, in merit "far below them,
of course, but not afraid of them,"1 was described by
the Atheneeum as "an unintelligent imitation ofthe
mere technicalities of old art — golden glories, fanciful
scribblings on the frames, and other infantine ab
surdities," the writer admitting only that "a certain
expression in the eyes of the ill-drawn face of the
Virgin affords a gleam of something high in intention,
but it is still not the true inspiration." It is small
wonder that Rossetti abandoned precipitately his
idea of a third picture for the Virgin series, deciding
that the class of pictures which "had his natural
preference " was " not for the market." But it is in
dicative of a certain sturdy honesty of attitude
1 John LaFarge.

40 Gbe 1Ro00etti0.
toward criticism which too often has been denied him,
that when his brother was permitted by the Spectator
to publish in that paper, in 1851, an article on Pre-
Raphaelitism, he begged him not to attempt to de
fend his mediaevalisms, "which were absurd, but
rather say that there was enough good in the works
to give assurance that these were merely superficial."
Like other painters of great emotional force, he
was disinclined to sentimentalise over his work, and
referred cheerfully to this finest example of his early
style as "the blessed white eyesore " and "blessed
white daub." In painting on it he had shown him
self free from the hard-and-fast principle falsely
attributed to the Pre-Raphaelites, — the obligation,
that is, to paint only from the model, "rejecting
nothing, selecting nothing, and scorning nothing."
" Yesterday," he records in one of his familiar letters,
"after giving up the angel's head as a bad job
(owing to William's malevolent expression), I took to
working it up out of my own intelligence, and got it
better by a great deal than it has yet been. I have
put a gilt saucer behind his head— which crowns the
China-ese character of the picture." In the main,
like the rest of the Pre-Raphaelites, he went to nature
for his facts, and when nature failed him, he trusted
always to his "own intelligence" and copied no
one. Before the Ecce Ancilla Domini was sold, Ruskin
had heard through Coventry Patmore that a group
of young artists were being persecuted, had examined

ftbe pre*1Rapbaelite0. 41
the case, marshalled his arguments, called up all his
powers of rhetoric, and through a series of letters to
the Times defended the Pre-Raphaelites, explained
them, expressed them, and finally committed them
to a set of principles much more pronounced than
those originally held by them. This championship
following violent assault was precisely what was
needed to fix the name and significance of the Pre-
Raphaelite Brotherhood in a more formal and per
manent shape than even its members had dreamed
of. It also crystallised the error by which, after fifty
years and numerous refutations, Ruskin is still held
responsible not merely for the defence of the Brother
hood but for its formation. Whatever connection he
had with this must consist merely of the unrecorded
influence of his first volume of Modem Painters upon
Holman Hunt, the only Brother who took the trouble
to read it.
The very year that was marked by the denuncia
tions hurled from Denmark Hill against the enemies
of the Brotherhood was marked also by its dissolu
tion. By the end of 1850, the regular meetings had
died out. In 1851, Collinson withdrew in deference
to his Romanist preoccupations, and Walter Howell
Deverell was nominated and elected in his place ; the
validity of the election was questioned, there was a
flurry of discussion, an important meeting, a set of
new and stringent rules, — and immediately the or
ganisation collapsed like the boyish affair it was.
There were no more meetings, there was no more

42 ftbe 1Ro00etti0.
activity. "I fancy," writes Mr. William Rossetti,
"that Mr. Stephens and myself [the two members
who were not artists] were the two members who
most sincerely regretted this disruption."
In the present day, the most tangible reminder of
the Pre-Raphaelite tempest is found in the large
prices commanded by the paintings of the Brothers
in their P.-R. B. period, and even by the reprints of
their especial mouthpiece, the magazine called The
Germ, the original numbers of which sold in 1850
for a shilling apiece, in 1896 at seven pounds, and in
1898 at twelve guineas for the set of four numbers.
A limited edition reprinted in America recently
brought from twelve to fifteen dollars a copy for the
last few copies, the first selling at six dollars.
The "blessed white daub," for which Rossetti in
1850 asked fifty pounds, was sold to the nation in
1886 for eight hundred pounds— all of which proves
Rossetti a prophet as well as a painter, as in 1868 he
wrote to Madox Brown :
" The epoch of Pre-Raphaelitism was a short one
which is quite over and its products will be excep
tionally valuable one day, but not yet." The artistic
value of Pre-Raphaelitism in relation to the art of
England is not so easily determined. As M. Merime
pointed out, these combatants for realism had nothing
much to fight, no " academy " in the French sense,
no artistic traditions, nothing but a style of colouring
fashionable in the studios, " une methode de bar-
bouillage." They were chiefly praised, as they were

Gbe jpre=1Rapbaelite0. 43
chiefly blamed, by an ethical and literary standard,
by the English standard as it then existed. Nor can
we place entirely to their credit the fact that this
standard no longer exists there, or to speak more
truly, that two standards now exist there, by which
pictures are judged — the intellectual, and the artistic.
Yet one thing is certain, — and Rossetti was not more
responsible for it than Millais and Hunt and Ruskin,—
Pre-Raphaelitism stirred the English art-world to its
depths by making it inquire where before it had ac
cepted ; by making it doubt where before it had wor
shipped ; by making it for an interval at least look
with its own eyes at problems of design and colour
which before it had ignored, and which afterward it
considered almost as defining a mission. Certainly,
as Mr. Russell Sturgis has said on more than one
occasion, "the influence ofthe Pre-Raphaelites and
the profound instinct which first was seen strongly
in the Pre-Raphaelites have made the English school
what it is."
The connection between the English Pre-Raphael
ites and the writers and painters sometimes called by
that name in America is very slight, but perfectly
distinct, and forms an interesting phase of our own
rather complex national expression.
A people more positively moral than artistic or
intellectual or emotional, it was natural that we
should take kindly to an art with an ethical creed,
and respond promptly to the strenuous appeal made
by Mr. Ruskin for sincerity of method and elevation

44 £be 1Ro00etti0.
of subject. By his chart chiefly we sailed our toy
boat of Pre-Raphaelitism. The message reached us
first, apparently, through Mr. William J. Stillman,
who, having studied painting under F. E. Church for
a year without hope, stimulated by Modern Painters
set sail for England in 1850 to see pictures and find a
guide he could trust. He made the acquaintance of
Ruskin ; an acquaintance fatal, he now reflects, to the
career of a painter whose head had already "gone
far beyond " his technical attainment. He visited the
exhibitions of that significant year, of course, in which
Millais and Rossetti were represented, gaining the im
pression that "if ever English figure-painting rose
out of mediocrity, it would be through the work of
the P.-R. B.," and he returned to America with a fer
mentation of art ideas in his brain, " in which," he
says, "the influence of Turner, Pyne, the teachings
of Wehnert, and the work of the Pre-Raphaelites
mingled with the influence of Ruskin, and especially
the preconception of art-work derived from the de
scriptions, often strangely misleading, of the Modern
Painters." One of the results of this fermentation was The
Crayon, "A Journal devoted to the Graphic Arts
and the literature related to them," founded in 1855 by
Mr. Stillman and J. Durand. A variety of opinions,
ranging from those of Rembrandt Peale and Daniel
Huntington to those of William Rossetti and Rus
kin, found expression in its columns, but the weight
of its influence was thrown on the side of the

£be pre*1Rapbaelite0. 45
painters who rebelled against classicism and academ
ic theories. The motto on its title-page was this
ominous sentence from Modem Painters:
" Whence, in fine, looking to the whole kingdom
of organic nature we find that our full receiving of
its beauty depends first on the sensibility and then
on the accuracy and touchstone faithfulness of the
heart in its moral judgments."
In the editorials, also, the spirit of the editor,
"the Ruskinian Apostle," the "American Pre-Ra
phaelite," as he was called, is not to be mistaken.
" The true method of study," he earnestly dictates,
"is to take small portions of scenes, and there to
explore perfectly, and with the most insatiable curios
ity, every object presented, and to define them with
the carefulness of a topographer. We must learn to
see as well as to draw, for in our careless way of re
garding Nature, we see as weakly as though it were
only sketched instead of being finished. To make a
single study of a portion of a landscape in this way,
is more worth than a summer's sketching." It is
not strange that a young man holding these doc
trines with much the reverence his Puritan ancestors
had for the teachings of St. Paul, should have ap
plied them to his own work regardful of the letter
that killeth. In his recently printed reminiscences
he tells us that he spent the daylight hours of every
day for three months on a twenty-five by thirty inch
study of a wood scene with a violet in the fore
ground. " It was not art," he adds, "but the public

46 (Tbe 1Ro00etti0.
did not know this any more than I did, and I was
admitted to a place which I believe was one of the
highest among my contemporaries at home, in a
way that led to little even in its complete success."
Before The Crayon died out in 1861, the influ
ence sown by its Pre-Raphaelite contributors had
spread and was ready to bear fruit. In i860 Thomas
C. Farrer, a young Englishman who had learned to
draw in the free night school which Ruskin carried
on in London with the help of Rossetti, Woolner,
and one or two others, came to America filled with
his master's enthusiasm. He found to his surprise
" a few sympathisers with the views he had imbibed
in the Ruskin school to give him a cordial welcome."
He even found a few artists and architects who had
long sought to emancipate themselves from the con
ventionality of the prevailing school. At the end of
a couple of years of friendly intercourse and ardent
discussion these young men organised themselves in
the "Association for the Advancement of Truth in
Art." It was the child of the P.-R. B. S. The final
clause of its declaration of purposes read :
" We hold that the revival of Art in our own time,
of which the principal manifestations have been in
England, is full of promise for the future and con
solation for the present. That the Pre-Raphaelite
school is founded on principles of eternal truth.
That the efforts for the restoration of the so-called
Gothic Art have been, in the main, well directed.
That the hope for true Art in the future is in

£bc fl>re*1Rapbaelite0. w
the complete and permanent success of this great
reformation." Of course an " organ " was needed, and there was
promptly established a fervid little magazine entitled
The New Path. Its mission was to ' ' summon the
young to enter into the earnest, loving study of God's
work of nature." "The artists of America," the
opening paper announces, ' ' are nearly all young men ;
they are not hampered by too many traditions, and
they enjoy the almost inestimable advantage of hav
ing no past, no masters, and no schools. Add that
they work for an unsophisticated, and, so far as Art
is concerned, uneducated public, which, whatever
else may stand in the way, will not be prevented by
any prejudice or preconceived notions from accepting
any really good work which may be set before it.
These are solid advantages, hardly possessed in such
a degree by any other society, and make a good
foundation on which to build well and beautifully
for the future."
The " unhampered young artists " believed in the
union of the arts of architecture, sculpture, and
painting, and The New Path contained a great deal
of information and some by no means unworthy
criticism in these different directions. One of the
members of the Association was P. B. Wight, the
architect ofthe National Academy of Design building
at Twenty-third Street and Fourth Avenue, now,
alas, abandoned and awaiting destruction. This
building was designed in an essentially Pre-Raphaelite

48 (Tbe 1Ro00etti0.
spirit. "The painters, sculptors, and architects,"
Mr. Wight says, "were actuated by a common
antipathy to everything that was meretricious, con
ventional, and false," and the result was an individual
and lovely work, with many defects but with pecul
iarly endearing merits. One departure from con
ventional methods was the realistic stone carving in
the manner of old Gothic ornament. The workmen
had to be trained to this, at first working from clay
models, then learning to study natural forms and
express them with spirit ; finding great enjoyment
in the work and hunting out motives for themselves
in field and garden plants. Considering the difficul
ties, these carved ornaments are remarkably good.
They belong, of course, to what is called imitative
art, and might easily have been surpassed in beauty
by good copies of conventional designs. The charm
they have lies chiefly in the unmistakable sincerity
of the method, the hall-mark of true Pre-Raphael
itism. The lilies and bulrushes of the spandrels on
the staircase of the Academy are neither botanically
accurate nor agreeably composed, but they show a
simple devotion and a genuine preoccupation with
the natural model that covers their lack of "style"
in the higher sense of that much-misused word.
Other details were made equally true to the prin
ciple of " Truth in Art." The iron railing, for exam
ple, was made of wrought-iron rods, ornamented
with leaves cut from thin sheet iron and connected
with the body of the railing by slender stems of

Carved Stone Ornaments.
From the National Academy of Design.

Gbe fl>re*1RapbaeUte0. 49
wrought iron. The little drinking-fountain with its
beautiful marble basin is architectural in treatment
and seems in place as a part of the building, and the
mosaic of the pavement in the vestibule is a charm
ing, if little-appreciated, combination of yellow, pur
ple, and grey marbles. The comment at the end of
a careful description of the then new structure, in The
New Path, reads sadly in the light of its approaching
demolition :
"This solidly and admirably built, richly decorated
building, a noble design well carried out, will remain
for ages unless fire destroy it ; its lesson ought not
to be lost upon this generation, it will not be lost on
the next," said the writer, who knew not his Amer
ica.1 It is not easy to trace the exact influence of the
artists who laboured with such intense and joyous
earnestness for the advancement of what they be
lieved was in very deed truth, the whole truth, and
nothing but the truth in Art. There were three of
them whose work has at least found its way into
private collections, where it is cherished with con
stant and affectionate delight, — Farrer, above men
tioned, John W. Hill, and his son, John Henry Hill.
Farrer was the leader in the Association. His
was the self-conscious not the self-abnegating, the
personal not the religious, temperament. He was at
1 In speaking thus of the Academy as a Pre-Raphaelite building, I have not
meant to connect it directly with the Pre-Raphaelite movement in America except as
it was inspired by their ideals, and the outcome of study along the lines approved by
Ruskin. When Mr. Wight was in college he came under the influence of Ruskin's
4

50 £be 1Ro00etti0.
one with his subject, in love with its effect on his
emotions as well as with its external aspect, absorbed
in the psychologic value of a limited and relatively
simple scene. A dead bluebird on the snow, a swal
low's flight across the pale purple evening, a single
hill-crown against a sunset of flaming yellow, glow
with the intimation of truth beyond the fact. With
this poetic sensitiveness went a power for minute
drawing of detail quite unequalled. A patch of weeds
and grass and tiny wild flowers a few inches square
became under his pencil such a revelation of com
plex and delicate beauty as, literally, only the lens
discloses to the ordinary eye. Here too, however,
there was the suggestion of individual feeling, the
imaginative touch. Later, when Farrer had returned
to England, his methods changed completely, but
he never lost the marvellous accuracy of eye and
hand in whatever he chose to render.
The work of the elder Hill was marked by a
strong predilection for the happier moods of na
ture. His sunny fields were green with the lux
uriant growth of fortunate summers. His skies were
of the bluest. His flowers, of which he painted
many in many kinds, were perfect and were invari
ably studied in the outdoor light. He abhorred the
studio and its aids and it is almost literally true that,
save for some rare copying, he never worked beneath
writings and "then began to admire Italian Gothic," he says. The Academy has so
often been called a copy of the Palace of the Doges that it is interesting to learn from
its originator that its details were all, except the carving, which was sui generis,
"studied from Florentine and Veronese originals, and not from Venetian models."

Gbe fl>re*=1RapbaeUte0. 51
a roof. He even eschewed the favouring level light
ofthe afternoon, preferring the flooding radiance of
the full day. But he was saved from the worst trials
of these conditions by his attention to specific rather
than general effects and his frank insensitiveness to
mystery. Those who remember him will not easily
dissociate his gentle, sincere, happy work from the
qualities of his own nature, singularly simple and
lovely and gracious as it was.
John Henry Hill painted in much the same spirit,
with a less literal interest in the phenomena of nature
and a more personal effort toward expression. One
of his pictures criticised in The New Path was con
demned for its "broad flat touches nearly half an
inch long (!) in dead flat colour." His colour, how
ever, comes near to representing in our little history
of unimpressive art the phase represented in the
great movement of French art by the brilliant imper
sonal style of Monet. His shadows are as unbe-
fogged as those of the Frenchman, and his half-tones
are blithe with unmixed yellows, blues, and reds.
Even the idol of his most profound worship, Turner,
could not wheedle him into acquiescence with the
black moods of his Calais Pier or The Shipwreck,
while the colour of The Old Temeraire seemed to
him when he first saw it perfectly natural and "all
that he could wish."
One of the fillips given by The New Path to
America's interest in art was in the direction of
house decoration. We had no William Morris to

52 Gbe 1Ro00etti0.
carry out in practical production the aesthetic plans
of the new school ; but it was something to have
the plans before the Philadelphia Exhibition in 1876
changed our ideas so completely. The ground was
at least prepared for seed. Clarence Cook was the
principal writer on household art, and in his articles
of nearly forty years ago are found many of the
principles governing the best type of house decora
tion practised to-day. A vigorous protest was made
against the Wilton carpets of florid design, the
crimson hangings, the gilded wall-papers, the " ele
gant drawing-ropm tables, their legs studied from
the hinder-legs of dogs," the bedsteads with enorm
ous head-boards towering "in ticklish height above
the pillows, five feet wide and about as high, and
nowhere more than an inch and a quarter thick,"
which constituted in i860 the ideal furnishings of
a more or less costly home. A corresponding plea
was made for hardwood floors and rugs, for the
pleasant and plain design of the ironing table, "a
box below, a seat upon the box, the table-top tipped
upright forming a back to the seat," for tapestry
hangings, for the graceful shapes of Venetian glass,
and for many another detail of decoration since be
come accepted as a mark of cultivated taste.
Thus in America as in England the name Pre-
Raphaelitism stood for sincere methods and personal
ideas, and the Pre-Raphaelites were the "men of
progress " in their respective countries.

CHAPTER III.
THE GERM.
NOT many months after the organisation of the
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, the desire came
into Dante Rossetti's mind to establish a
magazine in which he and the other six Brothers, as
well as outside sympathisers, might present their
ideas to the public. None of his companions appear
to have been on fire with this ambition, but Rossetti
was not to be denied and "with varying degrees of
reluctance his friends yielded." In July, 1849, the
project was under vigorous discussion. On the
thirteenth it was to be a sixpenny monthly, for which
four or five would write and one make an etching,
each subscribing a guinea, thus becoming a proprietor.
On the fifteenth it was changed to a forty-page affair
with two etchings, and was to be sold for a shilling a
number. The first name suggested for it was
Monthly Thoughts in Literature and Art. This was
changed to Thoughts towards Nature at Dante
Rossetti's instigation. Presently the peculiar title
The Germ was chosen from many others implying
53

54 ftbe 1Ro00etti0.
varying degrees of hopefulness as to its mission in
the world, among them The Precursor, The Advent,
The Illuminator, The Die, The Chariot, The Goad,
The Acorn, The Alert, The Spur. The full title was
finally The Germ: Thoughts towards Nature in
Poetry, Literature, and Art. Two numbers ap
peared under this title, the result of earnest collabora
tion among the Brothers, and the next two numbers
were given the more commonplace designation Art
and Poetry : Thoughts towards Nature, a change of
which Rossetti was the chief advocate, his business
sense rebelling against undue eccentricity, as we see
from his discussion ofthe preposition " towards " in
the subtitle. " I think * towards ' is much the better, "
he wrote to his brother, " ' toward ' being altogether
between you, me, and Tennyson : and it is well to
seem as little affected as possible."
The original name, The Germ, suffered what the
philologists call a " sound shift " from the soft to the
hard " g," some outsider, ignorant of a word not so
much in use then as now, having pronounced it
"Gurm," a pronunciation gleefully adopted by the
reverend Brotherhood, and since seriously used
against them as typical of the "affectation" they
wished to avoid.
Amid the preliminary bustle of planning and issu
ing The Germ, Rossetti went with Holman Hunt on
a trip to Paris and Belgium, the three or four weeks
of his stay constituting the longest Continental visit
he ever made. The impression it produced upon

Gbe <5erm. 55
him cannot be called in any marked degree important
to his art, and his letters have in them more refer
ences to what is going on at home than to his own
experiences. In one ofthe numerous sonnets written
on the journey he indicates with less exaggeration
than might be supposed the attitude of the two
young travellers toward the treasures ofthe Louvre :
Meanwhile Hunt and myself race at full speed
Along the Louvre, and yawn from school to school,
Wishing worn-out those masters known as old.
And no man asks of Browning ; though indeed
(As the book travels with me) any fool
Who would might hear Sordello's story told.
His first " race " through the gallery revealed to
him, however, " a most wonderful copy of a fresco
by Angelico, a tremendous Van Eyck, some mighty
things by that real stunner Lionardo, some ineffably
poetical Mantegnas (as different as day from night
from what we have in England), several wonderful
Early Christians whom nobody ever heard of, some
tremendous portraits by some Venetian whose name
I forget, and a stunning Francis I. by Titian." A
few days later he wrote : " There are very few good
things at the Louvre besides what I mentioned in my
last. There is a wonderful head by Raphael, how
ever : another wonderful head by I know not whom:
and a pastoral — at least a kind of pastoral — by Gior
gione, which is so intensely fine that I condescended
to sit down before it and write a sonnet."
At frequent stages of his sight-seeing he thus

56 Gbe 1Ro00etti0.
condescended, and The Germ was the richer for his
experience by six "Sonnets for Pictures," The Car
illon (verses on the fantastic chimes of Antwerp
and Bruges), and the remarkable Pax Vobis (later
called World's Worth), which won for him the
praise of a Catholic writer who compared it to "a
thought from A Kempis elaborated into verse," be
sides the poem which in The Germ is called From
the Cliffs, and in its later and extended form, Sea
Limits. In certain respects this poem is as beauti
ful as any written by him, and has in full measure
the quality so rare with him of a Wordsworthian
outlook upon nature, a blending of imagination with
the tranquil contemplation of natural objects. Like
most of these early poems it was composed in haste
and on the inspiration of the moment. It was slightly
changed before its appearance in The Germ and
greatly changed in the final form, how much for the
better may be seen from a comparison of the two
versions ofthe first stanza :
FROM THE CLIFFS : NOON.
The sea is in its listless chime :
Like Time's lapse rendered audible;
The murmur ofthe earth's large shell.
In a sad blueness beyond rhyme
It ends : Sense, without Thought, can pass
No stadium further. Since Time was,
This sound hath told the lapse of Time.
THE SEA LIMITS.
Consider the sea's listless chime :
Time's self it is, made audible, —

Gbe (Berm. 57
The murmur of the earth's own shell.
Secret continuance sublime
Is the sea's end : our sight may pass
No furlong further. Since time was,
This sound hath told the lapse of time.
A letter to James Collinson sent from Bruges
shows Rossetti's enthusiasm for that "stunning"
town to be dependent chiefly upon the beautiful
architecture, the absence of Rubens, and the pre
sence of Memling. The latter he at once worshipped.
'His greatest production," he writes, "is a large
tryptich in the hospital of St. John representing in its
three compartments : firstly, The Decollation of St.
John Baptist ; secondly, The Mystic Marriage of St.
Catherine to the Infant Saviour; and thirdly, The
Vision of St. John Evangelist in Patmos. I shall not
attempt any description ; I assure you that the per
fection of character and even drawing, the astound
ing finish, the glory of colour, and above all the
pure religious sentiment and ecstatic poetry of these
works, is not to be conceived or described. Even in
seeing them, the mind is at first bewildered by such
Godlike completeness ; and only after some while
has elapsed can at all analyse the causes of its awe
and admiration ; and then finds these feelings so
much increased by analysis that the last impression
left is mainly one of utter shame at its own inferior
ity." Decidedly to Memling belongs the honour
of having been the early painter with whom the
independent Rossetti felt most affinity. He brings
into The Carillon a touch of the personal feeling

58 Gbe 1Ro00etti0.
toward him and his companion, Van Eyck, which a
" follower" has for his " master."
John Memmeling and John Van Eyck
Hold state at Bruges. In sore shame
I scanned the works that keep their name.
The carillon which then did strike
Mine ears, was heard of theirs alike :
It set me closer unto them.
The first number of The Germ was published on
or about January i, 1850. On the front of the cover
appeared a sonnet by William Rossetti written in a
spirit conciliatory to critics : on the back was a pro
spectus embodying a creed, and announcing that the
periodical would consist "of original Poems, Stories
to develop thought and principle, Essays concerning
Art and other subjects, and analytic Reviews of cur
rent Literature — particularly of Poetry " ; and that
throughout the writings on art the endeavour would
be "to encourage and enforce an entire adherence to
the simplicity of nature ; and also to direct attention,
as an auxiliary medium, to the comparatively few
works which Art has yet produced in this spirit."
The youth of most of the contributors is perhaps
indicated in the dejection characterising the poetry
chosen for this number, four of the nine poems hav
ing death for their subject.
They strike, however, the true note of poetry.
The magazine opens with Thomas Woolner's My
Beautiful Lady, followed by the supplementary
Of My Lady in Death, each of which unites to

Gbe ©erm. 59
lovely cadences the element of deep emotion deli
cately regulated and restrained by the "severely
simple art" of their author, the "sculpturesque"
art which to Coventry Patmore seemed his defect.
Two stanzas from the second poem will serve to
show the true Pre-Raphaelite method in writing,
the same method which, applied to painting, im
pelled Millais to surround his dead Ophelia with
banks of surpassingly realistic flowers and grasses :
About her window, at the dawn,
From the vine's crooked boughs
Birds chirruped an arouse :
Flies, buzzing, strengthened with the morn ; —
She '11 not hear them again
At random strike the pane :
No more upon the close-cut lawn,
Her garment's sun-white hem
Bend the prim daisy's stem,
In walking forth to see what flowers are born.
No more she il watch the dark-green rings
Stained quaintly on the lea,
To image fairy glee;
While thro' dry grass a faint breeze sings,
And swarms of insects revel
Along the sultry level: —
No more will watch their brilliant wings,
Now lightly dip, now soar,
Then sink, and rise once more.
My lady's death makes dear these trivial things.
After these poems (the two comprising fifty
stanzas), follow a sonnet on The Love of Beauty,
by Ford Madox Brown ; a long, dull paper on The
Subject in Art, by John Lucas Tupper; a graceful

60 ZTbe 1Ro00etti0.
little poem called The Seasons, by Coventry Pat-
more (the gaining of which had seemed to Rossetti
a bit of unparalleled good fortune); Dreamland,
by Christina Rossetti; My. Sister's Sleep, by Dante
Gabriel ; the prose story, Hand and Soul, by
Dante Gabriel ; a thirteen-page review of Arthur
Hugh Clough's The Bothie of Toper-na-fuosich,
by William Rossetti ; a sonnet, Her First Season,
by William Rossetti ; a poem called A Sketch
from Nature by John Lucas Tupper; and the gloomy
little verses, An End, by Christina Rossetti.
To a student of Rossetti the most important con
tribution to this number of The Germ is Hand and
Soul, written at white heat, its author sitting up the
whole of a December night to finish it in time. It
is the only narrative in prose that he ever did finish
and contains the promise of an unusual style, a dic
tion as pure and limpid and direct as that of Haw
thorne, though far more personal. In substance it is
the chronicle of the psychological life of a supposed
Italian painter of the thirteenth century, Chiaro
dell' Erma by name ; of his desire for fame, and sub
sequent contempt for what he found to be so easily
gained ; of his rather ignoble revival at the prospect
of being surpassed by a more faithful worker ; of
his conversion to subjects of moral greatness at
which men cared little to look ; and of his ultimate
model appearing to him in the shape of his own
soul embodied in the person of a beautiful woman,
who chides him while she comforts, and whose

ftbe (Berm. 61
portrait he paints with jealous truth that his soul
may stand before him always and perplex him no
more. The Epilogue describes this portrait as hang
ing in the Pitti Gallery of Florence, and gives partic
ulars concerning it with an air of such good faith
that more than one Passionate Pilgrim has sought
there for it in vain.
Notwithstanding the somewhat boyish and mor
bid tone of Hand and Soul, the little tale is rich in
thoughts and suggestions that are not boyish cer
tainly, and that show Rossetti on intimate terms
with conscience. It was not boyish, for example,
nor was it in accordance with the influences of his
youth, to read presumption in the efforts of men
to teach godliness.
" How is it that thou, a man," Chiaro's soul says
to him, " wouldst say coldly to the mind what God
hath said to the heart warmly ? Thy will was
honest and wholesome ; but look well lest this
also be folly, ... to say, ' I, in doing this, do
strengthen God among men.' When at any time
hath he cried unto thee, saying, ' My son, lend me
thy shoulder, for I fall ' ? Deemest thou the men
who enter God's temple in malice, to the provoking
of blood, and neither for his love nor for his wrath
will abate their purpose, . . . shall afterwards
stand with thee in the porch, midway between Him
and themselves, to give ear unto thy thin voice,
which merely the fall of their visors can drown, and
to see thy hands, stretched feebly, tremble among

62 ftbe 1Ro00erti0.
their swords ? Give thou to God no more than he
asketh of thee : but to man also, that which is man's.
In all that thou doest work from thine own heart,
simply ; for his heart is as thine, when thine is wise
and humble ; and he shall have understanding of
thee." While Hand and Soul is the only complete prose
work by Rossetti, a fragment remains of a story
called St. Agnes of the Intercession, begun at about
the same time, which shows even more clearly the
preoccupation of the young writer with unprosaic
thoughts. It is written in a plainer narrative style,
but has for its theme the more fantastic history of an
English painter, convinced that his soul has lived in
this world prior to his birth, and finding in con
firmation of this belief two portraits in a Florentine
gallery resembling in minute detail his betrothed
and himself.
"That it was my portrait, — that the St. Agnes
was the portrait of Mary, — and that both had been
painted by myself four hundred years ago, — this
now rose up distinctly before me as the one and
only solution of so startling a mystery, and as being,
in fact, that result round which, or some portion of
which, my soul had been blindly hovering, uncertain
of itself." Here we find the legendary idea later repeated in
the picture How They Met Themselves, for which the
first design was drawn in 1851. St. Agnes of the
Intercession was intended for the fifth number of

Gbe (Serm. 63
The Germ, but the number never appeared and the
story was never finished, although in 1882 Rossetti,
with his curious clinging to the inventions of his
past, had the manuscript sent down to Birchington
that he might complete it.
In the second number of the magazine came The
Blessed Damo^el, the first version of which was
written in 1846 or 1847, and in which, as in the
Ecce Ancilla Domini, we touch Rossetti's mind at
a period when his mystical and his earthly tenden
cies were nearest together. Later, when he saw
more fully the sumptuous beauty ofthe physical and
natural world ; when his colour grew heavier with
rich and splendid hues, when his forms had ripened
into more opulent loveliness, when his words were
chosen with a more instructed sense of emotional
meaning, something had fallen from his style both
in writing and in painting, some fine cloak of youth
ful aspiration toward the higher interpretation of
feeling and thought, and of hesitation in grasping the
vulgar truths within reach of the common hand.
Only for two or three years had he both dispositions
equally, the years of his assumed Pre-Raphaelitism,
when his genius, hardly unfolded from the sheath
was enchanting, and never more so than in The
Blessed Damo%el, the unmatched delicacy and ten
derness of which surpass the most inspired love-
poems of Tennyson or Keats.
Poe's Raven, according to Mr. Caine, was the father
of this poem, Rossetti having felt that Poe had done

64 Gbe 1Ro00etti0.
the utmost it was possible to do with the grief of the
lover upon earth, and determining to reverse the con
ditions and give expression to the grief of the one in
heaven. The son of a free-thinking father and a
mother who was a devout member of the Church of
England, Rossetti himself was not given to religious
observance and was certainly not a Romanist in creed
or habit, but his delight in the Christian symbol elab
orated in colour and form and harmonious with the
most poignant moods ofthe soul, was an inalienable
part of his mental equipment. His imagery was such
as to appeal to a devout imagination under the poetic
guidance of the Church. His earliest prepossessions
linked his visions of an unknown world to the visi
ble signs familiar to incense-laden sanctuaries, and
one of his latest impulses turned him toward the
confessional "for the absolution of his sins." " Alone
among the higher artists of his age," Mr. Swinburne
says of him, "he has felt and given the mere physical
charm of Christianity with no admixture of doctrine
or of doubt." The Blessed Damo^el is a treasury of
mediaeval emblems, of phraseology not belonging to
any religious sect or type but representing the aesthetic
and dramatic mood of a faith that has preserved from
age to age the devotional spirit in loveliness of out
ward form.
If it was indeed Poe who suggested the poem it
was no less Dante who inspired it ; all that is curious
and foreign in it to the reader of modern poetry finds
its counterpart in the spirit of the Vita Nuova. The

£be (Berm. 65
damozel, upon the terrace of God's house, and seek
ing "the groves where the lady Mary is " among the
souls that, "mounting up to God, went by her like
thin flames," is of kin with Beatrice, who, "gone
up into high Heaven, the kingdom where the angels
are at peace, " woke "wonder in the Eternal Sire,"
and spread "even there a light of Love" which
made the angels glad. But this is not to say that
Rossetti's was an imitative gift. Without Dante he
could not perhaps have shaped his beautiful illusions
into images of such splendid rhetorical colour, he
made his own the mediaeval habit of thought because
it fitted him and became his quality of mind ; but the
feeling informing his words is dependent upon no
forerunner nor upon any contemporary influence. In
the final stanzas of The Blessed Damozel he sets
his seal upon a haunting imaginative sentiment that
whenever it appeared in his work was always to
confirm his genius :
" There will I ask of Christ the Lord
Thus much for him and me : —
To have more blessing than on earth
In nowise : but to be
As then we were, — being as then
At peace. Yea, verily.
"Yea, verily ; when he is come
We will do thus and thus :
Till this my vigil seem quite strange
And almost fabulous ;
We two will live at once, one life ;
And peace shall be with us."

66 £be 1Ro00etti0.
She gazed and listened, and then said,
Less sad of speech than mild :
"All this is when he comes." She ceased :
The light thrilled past her, filled
With angels in strong level lapse.
Her eyes prayed, and she smiled.
(I saw her smile.) But soon their flight
Was vague 'mid the poised spheres.
And then she cast her arms along
The golden barriers,
And laid her face between her hands,
And wept. (I heard her tears.)
Of the fifty-one contributions to The Germ twen
ty-six belong to the Rossettis, and of these only five
are prose. Christina's poems were published under
the pseudonym of Ellen Alleyn, which Dante Gabriel
composed for her, and, with the exception of the
familiar little song beginning, "Ah! roses for the
flush of youth," are rather feeble examples of her
talent, which developed less early than her brother's.
Other contributors than those already mentioned
were Calder Campbell, James Collinson, Walter
Howell Deverell, John Orchard, William Bell Scott,
F. G. Stephens, and George F. Tupper.
The most marked feature of the contents of the
magazine as a whole is freedom from the polemical
attitude of mind. The rebellion of the young
reformers against prevailing conventions found ex
pression chiefly in the production of work of an un
conventional character. This surprising lack of
dogmatism and even of explanation, has been no
ticed by Mr. Noble in his paper on A Pre-Raphaelite

£be (Berm. 67
Magazine, published just after Rossetti's death. A
few articles of a dialectic cast marred the pages, but
these were in a small minority, and were not in them
selves attractive. The true message of The Germ was
embodied in the poems and etchings and criticisms
testifying to the earnest convictions of their authors
by the care and originality of their workmanship.
The etchings, on which much stress was laid, were,
curiously, decidedly less successful than the literary
portion of the magazine. Only one, the first, by
Holman Hunt (illustrative of Woolner's poems), pos
sesses any elements of real beauty. The second, by
Collinson, is stiff and flaccid, and hopelessly unsug-
gestive. The third is Madox Brown's, and cost him,
he says, 31s. 6d., bringing him in nothing, not even
self-satisfaction, as it was little to his liking. It was
done hastily, to take the place of one by Rossetti,
whose fastidious taste would not be satisfied by his
own production. The fourth is by Walter Deverell,
and portrays much of the extravagance and crudity
with which the P.-R.B.'s were charged.
Neither pictures, poems, nor tales, however, were
of a quality to sell The Germ. The founders made
laudable efforts toward financial success, advertising
in The Atheneeum, sending copies to personages in
high places, as Sir Robert Peel and Lord John Rus
sell, and to the principal club-houses, arranging with
the porter of Somerset House to sell to the School of
Design students, introducing it among artists' colour-
men, and employing many other devices to make

68 Gbe lRo00etti0.
friends for it, with a resulting sale of two hundred
out of the seven hundred copies of the first issue.
"It now becomes a most momentous question,"
William Rossetti records in the Pre-Raphaelite Diary,
immediately after the publication of No. 2, " whether
we shall be in a position to bring out a 3rd No."
Upon learning a week or so later that some forty
copies ofthe second number have sold, he makes the
disheartening entry : "This is the last knockdown
blow. We certainly cannot attempt a 3rd No." At
this point the Tupper brothers intervened, proposing
to carry the magazine on for one or two numbers
further, "to give it a fair trial," at their own risk;
advertising it more extensively, "a very friendly
action on their part."
But the little periodical was doomed, and died
with the publication ofthe fourth number, " leaving
a legacy" of the printer's bill, some thirty-three
pounds, which in course of time was cleared off, with
the result that none ofthe company "ever again made
any proposal for publishing a magazine." It struck
an almost unheeded note, yet it was the intellectual
prototype of The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine,
which ran during the year 1856, and of The Cen
tury Guild Hobby-Horse, which proclaimed from the
Chiswick Press the " unity of art," during the brief
term of its existence. It should not perhaps be said
that The Germ did not in any sense fructify, although
an attempt to trace the precise relation between the
fruit and the seed would be hazardous enough.

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CHAPTER IV.
MISS SIDDAL.
THE year 1850 was the visible starting-point of
a number of the principal threads twisted
thereafter into the puzzling pattern of Ros
setti's life. In that year the Ecce Ancilla Domini,
the first picture in which he tried for and achieved
psychological expression, was exhibited ; The
Blessed Damo^el was printed, in which are de
fined the finest qualities of his later poems with
" anticipative notes obscurely struck"; and in that
year he met Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal, who until her
death formed his most absorbing preoccupation,
and was the first object of that impetuous, depend
ent fondness which lay at the root of his imaginations
and of many of his acts. "For Rossetti," Pater
said with truth, "the great affections of persons to
each other, swayed and determined, in the case of
his highly pictorial genius, mainly by that so-called
material loveliness, formed the great undeniable
reality in things, the solid resisting substance, in a
world where all beside might be but shadow."
6q
70 Ebe 1Ro00etti0.
Miss Siddal was a milliner's assistant when Ros
setti first knew her. The Pre-Raphaelite Brother,
Walter Deverell, discovered her in a shop which he
was visiting with his mother, and her extraordinary
type of beauty prompted him to try to obtain sit
tings from her. In this, with his mother's aid, he
succeeded, and soon she was posing for the various
members of the Brotherhood. She was hardly sev
enteen years old, graceful and dignified in manner,
with a touch of the disdain that one observes in
every one of Rossetti's drawings of her. Her edu
cation was ordinary, but her mind was receptive
and individual, judging from the pictures and poems
produced under Rossetti's influence, — poor enough,
certainly, according to all technical standards, but
distinguished by a simplicity verging on stiffness,
and by a very plaintive and despondent but not a
cloying sentiment. Before her training by the
Brotherhood, she had shown her proclivities by
hunting out Tennyson's poems for herself, having
found one or two of them upon "a piece of paper
which she had brought home to her mother wrapped
around a pat of butter." Her father has been re
ported in turn a cutler, a watchmaker, and an auc
tioneer. One of her neighbours, who knew her as a
child and was kind to her, is known to the British
public as "a murderer, more than commonly exe
crable, who was duly hanged." Thus her environ
ment was obviously not favourable to refinement of
manner or spirit, yet there is no dissenting voice

m>i00 Stttoal. 71
to the chorus praising her innate sensitiveness and
purity. Ruskin, with characteristic expansiveness,
called her " a noble glorious creature," and his father
said that by her look and manner she might have
been a Countess. Madame Belloc found her "not
in the least like a Countess " but with "the look of
one who read her Bible and said her prayers every
night." Swinburne remembers "her matchless
grace, loveliness, courage, endurance, wit, humour,
heroism, and sweetness" as "too dear and sacred
to be profaned by any attempt at expression." Ros
setti himself, in one significant passage of a letter to
William Allingham (1854), shows his appreciation
not merely of her charm but of the aspirations to
ward cultivation and growth which she commonly
hid under light and " chaffing "talk.
" It seems hard to me," he says, "when I look.
at her sometimes, working or too ill to work, and
think how many without one tithe of her genius or
greatness of spirit have granted them abundant:
health and opportunity to labour through the little
they can or will do, while perhaps her soul is never
to bloom nor her bright hair to fade, but after hardly
escaping from degradation and corruption all she
might have been must sink out again unprofitably in
that dark house where she was born. How truly
she may say, 'No man cared for my soul.' I do not
mean to make myself an exception, for how long I
have known her, and not thought of this till so late
— perhaps too late."

72 Gbe TRo00ettis.
Ofthe "so-called material loveliness" which
meant to Rossetti as much at least as it meant to
Dante in his Beatrice, she had much more than
the usual share. Mr. William Rossetti describes her
as " tall, finely formed, with a lofty neck, and regu
lar yet somewhat uncommon features, greenish-blue
unsparkling eyes, large, perfect eyelids, brilliant
complexion, and a lavish, heavy wealth of coppery-
golden hair." If we add to these details the ex
pression which suggested a morbid languor and
dreaminess in curious contrast with the richness of
colouring and form, we see at once how adequately
she fitted Rossetti's Dantesque dreams with her defi
nite yet visionary beauty. Beata Beatrix she was to
him from the beginning to the end, and only one —
the last of the many Beatrices of his pictures — was
done from anyone else.
At the time she entered upon her duties as a
model the Brothers were depending greatly upon
one another for the figures in their Pre-Raphaelite
pictures. Their intention to cleave to nature had its
practical difficulties, and their purses could not, per
haps, bear the strain of many hired models, to say
nothing of the inferiority of these in most cases in
precisely those traits of physiognomy which they
most valued. Thus we find them upheld in the
role of model as in that of artist by their exuberant
enthusiasm, Rossetti posing all night for Madox
Brown's Chaucer, Stephens standing for Millais's
exquisite picture of Ferdinand Lured by Ariel until

flDi00 Sfttoal. 73
he lost control of his muscles, having to be carried
from the room, and Deverell, Stephens, and both
Rossettis serving for the figures of Millais's Lorenzo
and Isabella.
With their conscientious notions the office was
no sinecure. Millais's biographer tells the story of
Miss Siddal's experience in posing for the Ophelia.
" In order that the artist might get the proper set of
the garments in water and the right atmosphere and
aqueous effects," he says, " she had to lie in a large
bath filled with water, which was kept at an even
temperature by lamps placed beneath. One day,
just as the picture was nearly finished, the lamps
went out unnoticed by the artist, who was so in
tensely absorbed in his work that he thought of
nothing else, and the poor lady was kept floating in
the cold water till she was quite benumbed. She
herself never complained of this, but the result was
that she contracted a severe cold, and her father
wrote to Millais, threatening him with an action for
fifty pounds' damages for his carelessness. Event
ually the matter was satisfactorily compromised.
Millais paid the doctor's bill ; and Miss Siddal, quickly
recovering, was none the worse for her cold bath."
This episode occurred in 185 1 and Rossetti is re
ported as at that time already in love with Miss
Siddal. Their engagement took place, according to
Mr. William Rossetti, probably before or not long
after the close of the year, lasted nine years, and
ended somewhat precipitately at last, in marriage, in

74 £be 1Ro00etti0.
i860, when death seemed about to cut short the
lady's life and the dalliance of the peculiar intercourse.
" Like all the important things I ever meant to
do," Rossetti wrote to his mother on the eve of his
marriage, "to fulfil duty or secure happiness — this
one has been deferred almost beyond possibility. I
have hardly deserved that Lizzy should still consent
to it, but she has done so, and I trust I may still have
time to prove my thankfulness to her."
In part the delay was due to Miss Siddal's capri
cious and waning health making all plans difficult
to form and carry out ; in part it was due to Ros
setti's fluctuating finances and unconquerable inabil
ity to hoard, whatever the inducement ; in part also
it was undoubtedly due to his procrastinating tem
perament, and hesitation in changing the habitual
groove in which he moved. "Why does he not
marry her !" wrote Madox Brown in 1855 ; and in
the same year Ruskin wrote, apparently in reply to
an appeal for advice from Rossetti : " I have had no
time yet to think over your letter ; but my feeling at
the first reading is that it would be best for you to
marry, for the sake of giving Miss Siddal complete
protection and care, and putting an end to the pe
culiar sadness and want of you hardly know what,
that there is in both of you."
The following year, again, Madox Brown recorded
a night spent in " Gabriel's " company listening until
half-past three in the morning to his plans for getting
married " and then off to Algeria ! "

fHM00 Stobal. 75
So matters drifted without too much comfort for
either of the lovers. That Rossetti was indifferent
is the last thing to be conjectured. His brother de
scribes him as "a lover of boundless enthusiasm and
fondness. He made no secret of his condition in the
close circle of his nearer intimates. To all other per
sons he wrapped himself in impenetrable silence, not
without some defiant tone ; and he employed pet
names for his fair one, of which Guggum, Guggums,
or Gug, was the most frequent if not the most eupho
nious." Some of his manifestations of Romeo ardour
were quite as absurd as this ridiculous and highly
characteristic diminutive "Guggum," which he found
pleasure in murmuring over and again to himself at
his work. His anger flamed up readily at any slight,
real or fancied, to Miss Siddal, and the fertility of his
imagination gave him many bad quarter-hours. He
was at odds on one occasion with Mrs. Madox Brown
for the crime of " doing " him out of an hour of Miss
Siddal's society; on another occasion there was a cool
ness between him and Christina because the latter
was not adequately impressed by Miss Siddal ; and
Stephens, the P.-R.B., fell into disfavour "through
speaking irreverentially on the subject of Guggum."
All this was part of the mingled boyishness and sensi
bility that made him all his life, and notably during
these years between youth and maturity, anything but
soothing to these who became, despite themselves,
more or less absorbed in his doings and at the mercy
of his comings and goings. The unconventionality

76 £be 1Ro00etti0.
of his temperament soared to heights of fantastic
conduct that showed nerves at high tension long be
fore drug or sorrow had affected them. His brother
records his propensity for doing whatever he liked
" simply because he liked it, and without any self-
accommodation to what other people might like in
stead." Thus, although according to the same
authority he " neither drank nor gambled nor betted
nor smoked nor amused himself in any rough and
ready manner," he was a disturbing as well as enliv
ening element in the lives of his friends. Madox
Brown describes with fervour a visit from him, made
during the early stages of his famous " calf picture,"
when he shared Brown's restricted quarters to be
near a calf and a cart of the requisite aspect. After
nearly a month of painting with endless emendations
and no perceptible progress from day to day, "all the
time he wearing my overcoat, which I want, and a
pair of my breeches, besides food and an unlimited
supply of turpentine," matters approached a crisis.
His host was obliged to "tell him delicately that he
must go," or else go home at night by the 'bus,
which he considered too expensive, or else ride to
his work in the morning and walk home at night,
which he said he should never think of. And in the
end he went. On another occasion he invited Mr.
and Mrs. Brown to go with him to the theatre, on
"orders," and forgot that after a certain hour no one
could get in without paying the price of admission,
which his guests were obliged to do for themselves,

Found.
Photographed from the original, with isochromatic plate,
by courtesy of Mr. Samuel Bancroft, Jr.

fHM00 Sibbal. 77
he being in an impecunious state. At still another
time he invited the Browns to dine at his house,
" and never came home, of course." These are fair
examples of the entire disregard of the preferences
and frequently of the rights of others characterising
Rossetti in the practical affairs of life. It is not sur
prising that even Miss Siddal complained of his " ab
surd goings-on." What is, perhaps, surprising, is
the fact that his friends clung to him as they did,
Madox Brown declaring him at his worst " never
quite unpleasant nor ever unbearable," and Watts-
Dunton, who knew him only in later years when
health and courage both were broken, finding in
him "an irresistible charm " that made him "a more
fascinating companion than almost any other man
could have been in the most brilliant health and
spirits." A partial explanation of such contradictions
may lie in his tacit assumption that all men regarded
friendship as he did, and would count it disloyalty
not merely to decline, but to fail to run after the
chance of being generous. On the very pages that
narrate his various misdeeds we read the other story:
his readiness in time of need, his delight in furthering
the fortunes of painters who might have been con
sidered rivals, his liberal grace in the manner of giv
ing, his entire freedom from small-mindedness and
vulgarity. He loved nothing so little as a hesitating
response to the call of a friend in trouble.
His attitude in such a case is well shown by an
anecdote told by Mr. Hughes. " It was from Munro

78 Zbe 1Ro00etti0.
I had the story, " he says, ' ' that D. G. R. , having spent
his honeymoon and all his money in Paris, was re
turning, when he read in a paper he got on the way,
of the sudden death of a friend (not a great friend at
all, I think), a writer named Brough, one of the class
of which James Hannay was a prominent type — a
young man with a wife and two little children. Ros
setti knew that ways and means would be doubly de
ficient to the widow in such circumstances. He had
spent all his own now ; but a certain portion of that
existed in jewelry upon Mrs. Rossetti, who no doubt
fully sympathised with the trouble in question, so that
when they reached London they did not go straight
home, but drove first to a pawnbroker, and then to
the Brough lodgings, and after that home, with en
tirely empty pockets but I expect two very full hearts. "
And if he was generous with money, which he
knew quite well how to get, but valued only for the
delight of parting with it, he was even more generous
with time and effort, on which he put a higher price.
An entry in Madox Brown's diary for 1856 records a
different impression from the rueful complaint of
misused hospitality the year before.
"Gabriel got Elliot," he says, "a parson who
writes for the Daily News, and the editor to come and
see my pictures and has been at the trouble of writ
ing a long article on them for that journal — Really
Gabriel seems bent upon making my fortune at one
blow. Never did fellow, I think, so bestir himself
for a rival before ; it is very good and very great to

!*IDi00 Siooal. 79
act so. Ever since he has felt he had hurt me some
little time ago he has done nothing but keep on mak
ing amends to me, one after another. As Carlyle
says of Mirabeau, how much easier it is to note the
flaws in a circle than to grasp the whole sweep of its
circumference." Toward Miss Siddal Rossetti seems to have acted
much as he did toward his friends in general, al
though there is nothing to show specific lack of con
sideration in any records of his conduct, and certainly
no hint of caprice or change in his affection for her.
Year after year during their long engagement he was
harassed by anxiety concerning her health, fears for
the future, and sympathy with sufferings which all his
impetuous kindness was powerless to alleviate. . . .
He had frequently to find prompt means of supplying
her with money for the trips to other climates de
manded by her condition, and on one occasion he
painted a picture composed in three compartments
(the Francesca da Rimini of 1855) in a week, working
day and night, to get thirty-five guineas to relieve
the penniless. condition in which she found herself at
Paris en route to Nice. There are indications that she,
like himself, was no adept in the art of managing
funds, and Ruskin (who bought the picture) writes
with reference to this episode, "You are such absurd
creatures both of you. I don't say you do wrong,
because you don't seem to know what is wrong, but
just do whatever you like as far as possible — as
puppies and tomtits do."

80 £be 1Ro00etti0.
Had it not been for Ruskin the course of Rosset
ti's true love would have run far more turbulently
than it did. The friendship between the two men
is unique in some of its phases, and a history in
small of Ruskin's temperament and methods. They
met in 1854, Ruskin inspired to call upon Rossetti
by seeing the water-colour called Dante Drawing an
Angel in Memory of Beatrice which a dealer by the
name of MacCracken had recently bought. " He
seems," Rossetti wrote, "in a mood to make my
fortune," and he was, in fact, prompt to assume the
role described by Mr. Marillier as " a curious com
bination of patron, friend, and mentor, not a little
suggestive of the benevolent god in the background
of a classical drama." Rossetti was dining with
him at Camberwell when summoned to his father's
death-bed, and Ruskin's letter of sympathy is the
first of a long and interesting series marking the
growth, and unfortunately the decline, of intimacy.
In this letter are mentioned the gift to Rossetti of all
Ruskin's writings, pleasure at the suggestion of a
drawing from Rossetti in acknowledgment, and a
commission for another drawing, to be paid for with
fifteen guineas. All the notes were struck at once,
— appreciation of Rossetti's "very noble powers,"
the desire, never very far from Ruskin's heart, to
bestow and to make happy, the hint of supreme
confidence in his own ability to judge of art, and
throughout the joy of copartnership with genius,
with unacknowledged and unrewarded genius re-

rnM00 sio&ai. 8 1
served for him to acknowledge and reward. These
elements, fused by a great magnanimity and kind
ness of heart, made a sentiment supremely Ruskin-
ian in quality, to which Rossetti responded, and
which did not seem to him, he being a giver himself
and whole-hearted in his sympathies, so extraordin
ary as it might seem to the average person of sensible
and selfish motives.
The ground once broken, Ruskin pushed on with
energy. In 1855 he made a proposal — set in a
framework of jewel-like words and charming per
suasive arguments — that Rossetti should paint for
him regularly, up to a certain value, thus insuring
a small but comfortable income in place of doubtful
returns from a capricious if not wholly unappreci-
ative public. This arrangement or something like
it was duly carried out, both Rossetti and Ruskin
bearing themselves for a long time gallantly in the
somewhat difficult position they thus assumed to
ward each other. The prices put upon the paint
ings were very moderate and were frequently raised
by Ruskin five or ten pounds above Rossetti's
valuation. For this fine generosity Ruskin had at
least the amusement — and perhaps it should not
have been grudged him — of pulling Rossetti's pic
tures to pieces when he chose, of teaching him with
the kindest and most amiable didacticism how they
might be improved, of criticising, with entire good
nature and a humorous touch, his disorderly habits,
his dilly-dallying ways, his nervous impulses,
6

82 £be 1Ro00etti0.
"sticking pins into him, "to use Rossetti's own phrase,
"for a couple of hours every three days." A man
of even less independence of thought and less way
wardness in action might have found this friendly
pestering disconcerting, and Rossetti certainly found
it so. He seems, however, to have had a just enough
idea of the obligation involved in the acceptance
of so much kindness to have accepted in a spirit
of affectionate banter criticisms that from others
he would probably have met with vigorous resent
ment. Although the intimate relation subsided
after a period of years, there was in it at least no dis
coverable trace of self-complacent patronage on the
one side or ignoble sycophancy on the other. Both
men were eminently self-respecting and pre-emin
ently sincere, and Ruskin comes near to justifying
the more complimentary portion of his own remark
able description of himself given in an early letter
to Rossetti : " I am," he says, " very self-indulgent,
very proud, very obstinate, and very resentful : on
the other side, I am very upright — nearly as just
as I suppose it is possible for man to be in this world
— exceedingly fond of making people happy, and
devotedly reverent to all true mental or moral power.
I never betrayed a trust— never wilfully did an un
kind thing — and never, in little or large matters,
depreciated another that I might raise myself. I
believe I once had affections as warm as most peo
ple ; but partly from evil chance and partly from
foolish misplacing of them, they have got tumbled

fHM00 Sttrtml. 83
down and broken to pieces. It is a very great,
in the long run the greatest, misfortune of my life
that on the whole, my relations, cousins and so
forth, are persons with whom I can have no sympa
thy, and that circumstances have always somehow
or another kept me out of the way of the people
of whom I could have made friends. So that I have
no friendships and no loves.
" Now you know the best and worst of me ; and
you may rely upon it it is the truth. If you hear
people say I am utterly hard and cold, depend upon
it it is untrue. Though I have no friendships and no
loves I cannot read the epitaph of the Spartans at
Thermopylae with a steady voice to the end ; and
there is an old glove in one of my drawers that has
lain there these eighteen years, which is worth
something to me yet. If, on the other hand, you
ever feel disposed to think me particularly good, you
will be just as wrong as most people are on the
other side. My pleasures are in seeing, thinking,
reading, and making people happy (if I can consist
ently with my own comfort). And I take these
pleasures. And I suppose, if my pleasures were in
smoking, betting, dicing, and giving pain, I should
take those pleasures. It seems to me that one man is
made one way, and one another — the measure of effort
and self-denial can never be known, except by each
conscience to itself. Mine is small enough."
Of the author of such a letter and of the gracious
actions preluded by and necessitating such letters,

84 £be 1Ro00etti0.
may well be said what Mr. Brownell has written of
him, that "in the pursuit of saintliness, measure
had no interest for him."
This saintliness was almost immediately extended
to cover Miss Siddal as well as Rossetti. Early in
1855 Ruskin bought all her drawings, declaring that
they went ahead of Rossetti's own, which, according
to Madox Brown, was "like Ruskin, the incarnation
of exaggeration." Soon after he proposed to her a
choice of two plans, by one of which he was to buy
everything she did as fast as she did it, and by the
other of which he was to settle upon her a hundred
and fifty pounds a year and to have all that she did
up to that sum. The second plan was adopted,
and by means of it while it lasted Miss Siddal was
able to take far better care of her health than she
otherwise could have done, in itself enough to burn
gratitude into Rossetti's soul, and spur him out of
the selfishness in small things that marred a nature
of large generosity and deep loyalty. That it failed
somewhat of this, and that Ruskin had occasion to
complain, albeit rather childishly, of feeling himself
outside of the stronger affections at least of the two
people who owed so much of their happiness and
comfort to him, is one of the uncomfortable circum
stances with which a biographer of Rossetti has to
deal. " I fancy," Ruskin wrote to him in a mood of
depression, " I fancy I gall you by my want of sym
pathy in many things, and so lose hold of you."
And undoubtedly he did. Moreover his attitude,

flDi00 Stttoal. 85
kind and generous as it was, was not, as we have
said, very different from Rossetti's own attitude,
limited by his opportunities, toward everyone about
him who had pictures to sell and needed money and
appreciation ; nor did Rossetti on his part ask love,
gratitude, or anything else in return. The methods
of the latter were as interesting as they were charit
able. He could give the appreciation lavishly enough ;
the money he could not give as lavishly, but he did
not hesitate to enlist the services of those who had
it. Madox Brown speaks of his going to a Suffolk
Street exhibition and finding there the picture of a
butcher-boy, by some unknown young artist, which
struck him as uncommonly worthy. " He not only
tried to get Ruskin and Boyd to purchase it," Brown
records, "but got Dallas to give it a good notice in
the Times, and would have done the Lord knows
what for the man had it been in his power. I could
narrate a hundred instances of the most noble and
disinterested conduct towards his art-rivals which
places him far above others in his greatness of soul,
and yet he will, on the most trivial occasion, hate
and backbite anyone who gives him offence." This
helps to explain the suggestion of ingratitude in his
too indifferent manner toward Ruskin, his unwilling
ness, as the latter puts it, "to put on a dressing-
gown and run in for a minute rather than not see
him, or paint on a picture in an unsightly state,
rather than not amuse him when he was ill." Ros
setti's theory was obviously that a visible need

86 ftbe 1Ro00etti0.
demanded an immediate relief, and it did not matter
much from whom the relief came, himself or an
other, so long as it came promptly and ungrudg
ingly. He gave and took all his life, and while he
was abundantly willing to acknowledge in Ruskin's
case the indebtedness he was under and to meet him
in a manly fashion on all important questions, he
either did not feel enough at home with him or did
not like him quite well enough to repay him with
the small sacrifices that would have pleased him, and
apparently he felt no special obligation to make the
effort. In the case of Madox Brown, whose unfriend
liness with Ruskin was a thorn in Rossetti's side,
there was a very different sentiment, and of lifelong
endurance, with more freedom, more ups and downs,
more reciprocity. " \f you can disregard," Rossetti
writes to him on one occasion, " as I know you do,
fhe great obligations under which you have laid me
in early life and which were real ones, as involving
real troubles to yourself undertaken for the sake of
one who was quite a stranger to you at the outset —
what can / think of a matter which gives me no
trouble whatever, and in which, were I inactive, I
should sin against affection, gratitude, and, highest
of all, conviction as an artist."
After Rossetti's marriage to Miss Siddal (on the
23rd of May, i860) they settled down at 14 Chatham
Place, Blackfriars Bridge, where he had for some
years rented chambers. To gain additional room
he took also the second floor of the house adjoining,

flDt00 Stofcal. 87
and had doors cut through to make it like a modern
apartment. Here they lived gaily enough except for
the unremitting anxiety caused by the matter of
health. "Married life," Mr. William Rossetti truly
says, " cannot be exactly happy when one of the
spouses is perpetually and grievously ill. Affection
ate and tender it may be, but not happy ; indeed the
very affection bars the possibility of happiness."
Their way of living, so much criticised by Mr.
Bell Scott, with its odd bachelor freedom and irreg
ular hours, was nevertheless well suited to their
tastes, and they managed in one way and another
to pilfer a number of small delights from the miserly
Fate that ruled them. Not the least of these was
the decoration of their rooms, one of which was
"completely hung round with Lizzie's drawings."
For another room Rossetti made a wall-paper design
of tall trees with fruit, to be printed on brown or
blue paper, in rich tones of Venetian red, black, and
yellow. " We have got our rooms quite jolly now,"
he wrote to William Allingham. ' ' Our drawing-room
is a beauty, I assure you, already. ... I should
like you to see how nice they are and how many
nice things we have got in them."
At this period of his life Rossetti is reported "a
thorough cockney " in his tastes, liking nothing
better than wandering through the streets of London,
delighting in London slang,' and fond of investigating
all the amusements of the lower classes. "Many a
night," writes Mr. Val Prinsep, "during the years

88 Gbe 1Ro00etti0.
'58, '59, and '60, have I been his companion in these
wanderings." On one occasion they went together
to a sparring benefit at the Rotunda Theatre in the
Blackfriars Road. " Rossetti was no sportsman and
nothing of a bruiser," Mr. Prinsep says, "but he
wanted to see it and I took him." " I recollect," he
continues, " our being shown on to the stage, where
we took our places among a lot of sporting ' bungs,'
an evidence of about as low an audience as could be
found even in London. Rossetti reclined on his
chair and hummed to himself in his usual absent
manner as he looked at the roughs around him.
Possibly the grim scene reminded him of the Inferno
of his namesake, Dante. Pair after pair of young
fellows stood up, sparred, received more or less
'gruel,' and retired after their three rounds. Pre
sently there stepped forward a negro. After his
round he sat in his corner and was attended to by
his friends, who fanned and otherwise refreshed him.
While he was being fanned the ' nigger ' assumed a
seraphic expression which was most comic. ' Look ! '
cried Rossetti, in a loud voice, ' Uncle Tom aspiring
to heaven, by Jove ! ' The whole house ' rose ' with
delight. One of the ' patrons ' seated by us wanted
to stand us a pint apiece."
From such scenes of this mixed world which he
was well enough pleased with, Rossetti turned to
gratify another side of his contradictory but always
eager temperament by drawing exquisite pictures of
his wife, " more beautifully, perfectly, and tenderly,"

fllM00 Stofcal. 89
Ruskin says, than he ever drew from anyone else at
any moment in his career.
Mrs. Rossetti's health was hardly equal to the
nocturnal rambles ; though she and her husband
were fond of going out for their meals wherever and
whenever the fancy struck them, and their habits
chimed well together. To some extent she continued
her own drawing after their marriage. "Her last
designs," Rossetti wrote to Allingham in the autumn
of i860, "would, I am sure, surprise and delight
you, and I hope she is going to do better than ever
now. I feel surer every time she works that she has
real genius — none of your make-believe — in con
ception and colour, and if she can only add a little
more of the precision in carrying out which it so
much needs health and strength to attain, she will,
I am sure, paint such pictures as no woman painted
yet. But it is no use hoping for too much."
Very little hope indeed proved too much. In the
spring of 1861, a child was born that did not live.
During the following months her health, already so
frail, steadily declined. One of her most distressing
symptoms was a form of neuralgia for which her
physician prescribed laudanum. On the 10th of
February, 1862, she dined wfth her husband and
Mr. Swinburne at the Sabloniere Hotel in Leicester
Square. She and Rossetti returned early, and Ros
setti left her to give his lecture at the Working Men's
College. When he reached home again he found
her unconscious from an overdose of the laudanum.

90 ftbe 1Ro00etti0.
At twenty minutes past seven the following morning
she died. Thus the brief period of Rossetti's mar
ried life ended.
In losing his wife he lost also the loveliest of
his models. In the picture Beata Beatrix, painted a
year after her death, we see her face spiritualised by
its expression of pure and exquisite repose ; a me
morial the more tender and beautiful that it conveys
to the public no idea of its true inspiration, but rests
upon its connection with Dante's Beatrice. Rossetti
himself thus describes it in a letter :
" The picture illustrates the Vita Nuova, embody
ing symbolically the death of Beatrice as treated in
that work. The picture is not intended at all to
represent death, but to render it under the semblance
of a trance, in which Beatrice, seated at a balcony
overlooking the city, is suddenly rapt from earth to
heaven. "You will remember how Dante dwells on the
desolation ofthe city in connection with the incident
of her death, and for this reason I have introduced it
as my background, and made the figures of Dante
and Love passing through the street and gazing om
inously on one another, conscious of the event ;
while the bird, a messenger of death, drops the
poppy between the hands of Beatrice. She, through
her shut lids, is conscious of a new world, as ex
pressed in the last words of the Vita Nuova,— That
blessed Beatrice who now gazeth continually on His
countenance qui est per omnia scecula benedictus."

Beata Beatrix.

fllM00 Sibfcal. 91
On the frame ofthe picture are the words from Jere
miah uttered by Dante when Beatrice's death had
" despoiled the city of all dignity " : " Quomodo sedet
sola civitas." To have indulged in any exuberance
of sentiment concerning a work in which he had
preserved the most profound associations of his life
would not have been Rossetti ; but the flawless
charm of the upturned face, surrounded by its glory
of red-gold hair, speaks much more eloquently than
words ofthe mood ofthe painter toward his subject.

CHAPTER V.
THE MIDDLE YEARS.
UP to the date we have now reached Rossetti's
works show great variety. It was the ' ' first
free running " of the wine, and the years
between 1850 and 1863 may justifiably be called the
years of his splendour and vigour as a painter. Dur
ing this period his dramatic invention was at its
height, and his colour was brilliant without the hot
tones that came into it later. "Many of the little
pictures of this time," Mr. Sidney Colvinsays, "flash
and glow like jewels or the fragments of some gor
geous painted window." He was nourishing his
mind on the Bible, on Dante, on Browning, and on
the Arthurian Legends, and from these sources he
drew an inspiration at once more virile and more
tender than the personal inspiration of his later pic
tures. Before he had begun to paint at all he had
drawn some complicated designs illustrative of vari
ous themes suggested by his reading, and as early as
1849 he started an elaborate composition based on a
line from Pippa Passes ("Hist! said Kate the
92

Gbe flDibMe JJ)ear0. 93
Queen "), which he cut up, and parts of which he
sold as late as 1865. In the same year he painted a
remarkable little water-colour from Browning's poem
The Laboratory — probably his first attempt in the
medium so triumphantly mastered by him in after life.
It is painted over the pen-and-ink in which the de
sign is drawn, is "brilliant and striking in colour,"
and, according to Mr. Stephens, reflects the influence
ofthe Flemish and Italian pictures which he had seen
on his recent trip with Holman Hunt. As in the
picture of Dr. Johnson at The Mitre made eleven
years later, the types have nothing at all in common
with the sensitive spiritual types of his other early
drawings or the impassioned, sensuous types of his
later work. They are good, solid flesh and blood,
and the expressions are those of strong, violent hu
man emotions, far removed from the romance and
revery to which his hand was commonly subdued.
He made at this time innumerable designs for
pictures, some of which were never carried out,
while others were carried out again and again in
crayon, in water-colour, and in oil. Many if not
most of his later pictures were planned, Mr. Marillier
says, during these earliest days of restless, energetic
interests. He frequently seemed to such friends as
the faithfully industrious Brown to be " working very
hard and doing nothing," "diffuse and inconse
quent" in his methods, dashing off in the midst of
work, for which a definite commission had been
given, to carry out a sudden idea involving much

94

£be 1Ro00etti0.

time and trouble, painting, discussing, and arguing
his liveliest in the hours between midnight and the
dawn, translating sonnets at breakfast, and " making
the whole place miserable" indeed for those who
yearned after " moderate tasks and moderate leisure,
quiet living, strict-kept measure," in their professional
routine. But with all this apparent indecision and
prodigality in experiment, Rossetti was very tena
cious of his ideas, and capable of renewing a train of
thought or impression after long interruption. In
this sense he was not inconsequent but concentrated.
His first conception of a picture held a mature idea
from which he did not usually depart, despite his fre
quent changes in matters of detail. One reason for
his proverbial dilatoriness was undoubtedly his "dif
fuse " manner of working, which permitted much in
terruption to the principal matters in hand ; but
another reason lay in the exacting demand he made
upon himself to realise his ideal. ' ' With me progress
always is and always will be gradual in everything,"
he wrote in 1853; and again, " I shall never, I suppose,
get over the weakness of making a thing as good as
I can manage, and must take to charging on that
principle. " This meant that when he proposed to do
a drawing for thirty-five guineas, he put so much
thought and work on it before he called it finished as
to make it worth much more by his own scale of val
uation. Even the rude little drawings for pictures
never painted are striking for a certain completeness
of suggestion which they convey. They show that

Gbe fflMfcole lj)ear0. 95
the idea was clearly defined before the pencil began
its work, and the next process was not to prune away
irrelevant forms and details, but to add embellish
ment to embellishment until the composition be
came sumptuous with lavish and always significant
decoration. When Holman Hunt had taken Rossetti in hand
to rescue him from bottle-painting, he had mapped
out this plan of work for him : He was to take a
drawing in which the idea was thus full-grown, and
draw it to a large scale on a large canvas. Then he
was to paint around the figures a setting of vines,
flowers, or still-life drawn conscientiously from na
ture or from models. This became his habit and,
like most of his habits, was of long continuance.
He seldom painted even a single figure that was not
surrounded by flowers, or decorative accessories,
and in some of his pictures, the Lilith for example,
and the Joan of Arc, the beauty of the lilies, roses,
jugs and vases, and of the superb draperies far sur
passes the beauty of the flesh-painting. In spite of
the many glimpses we get of drawings rushed
through in a single night, of illustrations brought in
" at the last gasp of time " to exasperated publishers,
and of decorations begun without any knowledge
of the technical principles involved, indicating that,
as Mr. Layard has said, he was "eaten up with the
impatience of genius," his work when done was not
scamped or slighted, but curiously, elaborately, and
beautifully wrought.

96 £be 1Ro00etti0.
No better proof of this can be found than is fur
nished by the history of his period of book illustra
tion, one of the several excursions from his usual
path made during these executive years. His first
essay was in 1855, a woodcut for William Ailing-
ham's Day and Night Songs, illustrating The Maids
of Elfen-Mere. He was so innocent of the tricks of
the engraver's trade at first as not to reverse the
drawing on the block, but he made a charming
design, working on it at intervals from the first
"scratches for its arrangement " in the August of
1854 until the spring of 1855, when it was turned
out from the hands of the engraver, Dalziel, "as
hard as a nail, yet flabby and vapid to the last
degree." Mr. Marillier has reproduced one of the
preparatory drawings as well as the illustration in
the form given it by the engraver, and while a cer
tain power and distinction cannot be denied to the
latter it is easy to understand Rossetti's frank fury at
its aspect in contrast with the sensitive modelling
and gracious line of the drawing. The fault, he
admits, may be in a measure his own, — "not of de
ficient care, for I took the very greatest, but of
over-elaboration of parts, perplexing them for the
engraver." The engraver, however, had not always
followed his line where it was clear, and the result
at all events was " a conceited-looking failure," and
"such an incredible mull" that it "could not pos
sibly appear." Mr. Allingham thought differently
and urged Rossetti to allow it to be used. Finally

The Seed of David.
Centre of Triptych, Llandaff Cathedral.

_¦• ¦*?>._

Gbe JTDibMe U?ear0. 97
the latter consented, reflecting that by going over it
carefully and cutting out lines "the human character
might be partially substituted for the oyster and
goldfish cast of features, and other desirable changes
effected." Poor Dalziel seems not to have been par
ticularly penitent, and asked to know how one was
to engrave a drawing that was partly in ink, partly
in pencil, and partly in red chalk !
In January, 1855, just as the Allingham block was
ready for the engraver, Rossetti received a propos
ition from Moxon to do some of the designs for
the illustrated edition of Tennyson's poems which
eventually came out in 1857. He picked out for his
purpose poems on which one could "allegorise on
one's own hook," The Palace of Art, Mariana in the
South, The Lady of Shalott, and Sir Galahad, and
on these themes he certainly "allegorised" to his
heart's desire. The woodcuts were not, however,
at all to his heart's desire. As with The Maids of
Elfen-Mere, he took infinite pains, only to find his
designs — so "jolly quaint, but very lovely," accord
ing to Madox Brown — quite different from his idea
of what they should be. "These engravers!" he
wrote to Allingham. "What ministers of wrath!
Your drawing comes to them, like Agag, delicately,
and is hewn in pieces before the Lord Harry. I
took more pains with one block lately than I had
with anything for a long while. It came back to
me on paper the other day, with Dalziel performing
his cannibal jig in the corner [his signature in very

98 Gbe 1Ro00etti0.
irregular letters], and I have really felt like an invalid
ever since. As yet, I fare best with W. J. Linton.
He keeps stomach-aches for you, but Dalziel deals
in fevers and agues."
The design for The Lady of Shalott he drew
twice over for the sake of an alteration, and "cor
rected, altered, protested, and sent blocks back to
be amended " until not only engraver but publisher
was insane with worry. It passed into a grim jest
that "Rossetti killed Moxon," the publisher dying
soon after the publication of the illustrated Tennyson.
In this passion for perfection Rossetti was pro
foundly justified, and the more so, in these cases,
that for a long time the public knew his work almost
solely through his illustrations, and that into these
illustrations he put so much of his peculiar distinc
tion and charm as to make them his own expres
sion much more than an expression of the author's
idea. In fact, Tennyson seen through Rossetti is
not nearly so much Tennyson as Rossetti is Ros
setti when seen through Dalziel. The annoyances
that follow such inadequate interpretation as he
complained of are demonstrated by the construc
tion put by Mr. Layard, an appreciative student of
Rossetti's work, upon the drawing of St. Cecily for
The Palace of Art. The angel in this drawing is
bending over St. Cecily, "seemingly munching the
fair face of the lovely martyr" with mouth "wide
open," he thinks. This effect is produced solely by
a coarse and unintelligent rendering of one of the

Gbe nDtttole Jt>ear0. 99
roses in St. Cecily's wreath, but it makes possible
Mr. Layard's disconcerting assumption that Rossetti
was perpetrating a joke involving something like
the betrayal of a literary trust.
Despite his sufferings (and in part because of
them) these struggles with the block resulted in
important contributions to the name and fame of
Rossetti. "T. . . . [Tennyson] loathes my de
signs," he wrote to Allingham, but the public did not
loathe them, and to William Morris they were the
star that guided him toward his own interesting
essays in the art of wood-engraving. Owing to
the care and pride of authorship that made Rossetti
a difficult co-operator, his woodcut drawings were
almost all of them done first on paper, so that his
own interpretation of his own idea was preserved
from oblivion, as was not the case with much of the
work done by the then modern method of drawing
directly on the block.
From illustration Rossetti turned with ardour and
facility and the confidence of ignorance to wrestle
with problems of decorative art. In 1856 he was
commissioned to paint a reredos in three compart
ments for the cathedral at Llandaff, which John P.
Seddon was restoring. This was "a big thing,"
which he went into "with a howl of delight" after
his little work, and did not finish until 1864, receiving
.£400 for his labour.
During the same year he met William Morris and
Edward Burne-Jones, the latter having come up in

ioo Gbe 1Ro00etti0.
vacation from Oxford to London, where he visited
Rossetti in his studio at Blackfriars. The ultimate
result of the visit, which was to change Burne-Jones
from an ecclesiastic to a painter, is well known. He
began painting under Rossetti's friendly guidance,
and his master prescribed for him the very course
enjoined upon himself so long ago by Madox Brown.
He was first to spend his time in learning to master
his materials, and in watching Rossetti's own meth
ods of work. He was next to attempt literal tran
scription ; then to devote his study to the methods
and masters of the past, and, finally to work out his
own individuality. " In all things a better friend to
others than to himself," says Mr. Hueffer, " Rossetti
watched over Burne-Jones's development with single-
hearted devotion. He allowed him the run of his
studio and the use of his models, made him his daily
companion, and studied with him."
During this time Morris used to come up from
Oxford almost every week to spend Sunday with
his friend, and the three would go to the play on
Saturday night, and after it was over, if Rossetti's
" imperious impatience of bad acting " allowed them
to stay it out, they would sit, after the fashion of
Rossetti's followers, in ardent discussion until the
small hours of the morning, the younger men daz
zled and dominated and eager to obey the orders of
the "master."
By the end of the year Morris and Burne-Jones
were both settled in London, and Rossetti's descrip-

Gbe mM&ble Jl)ear0. 101
tion of them to Allingham shows an admiration as
enthusiastic, if not as worshipful, as that which they
frankly bore him.
"Both, I find," he wrote, "are wonders after
their kind. Jones is doing designs which quite put
one to shame, so full are they of everything — Aurora
Leighs of art. He will take the lead in no time.
Morris, besides writing those capital tales, writes
poems which are really better than the tales. . . .
His facility at poetising puts one in a rage. He has
been writing at all for little more than a year, I be
lieve, and has already poetry enough for a big book.
You know he is a millionaire, and buys pictures. He
bought Hughes's April Love, and lately several wa
ter-colours of mine, and a landscape by Brown, — in
deed, seems as if he would never stop, as I have three
or four more commissions from him. To one of my
water-colours, called The Blue Closet, he has written
a stunning poem. You would think him one of the
finest little fellows alive, with a touch of the inco
herent, but a real man. He and Jones have taken
those rooms in Red Lion Square which poor Deverell
and I used to have, and where the only sign of life,
when I found them the other day, on going to en
quire, all dusty and unused, was an address written
up by us on the wall of a bedroom, so pale and
watery had been all subsequent inmates, not a trace
of whom remained. Morris is rather doing the mag
nificent there, and is having some intensely mediae
val furniture made — tables and chairs like incubi and

102

Gbe 1Ro00etti0.

succubi. He and I have painted the back of a chair
with figures and inscriptions in gules and vert and
azure, and we are all three going to cover a cabinet
with pictures. Morris means to be an architect, and
to that end has set about becoming a painter, at
which he is making progress. In all illumination
and work of that kind he is quite unrivalled by any
thing modern that I know— Ruskin says better than
anything ancient."
In these rooms of Red Lion Square, with their
furniture done "in gules and vert and azure," we
see the great house of Morris & Co. in embryo, its
master and head "deeply under the spell of Rosset
ti's influence," and at his best when "imitating
Gabriel " as far as possible. Nor did Gabriel falter
as a guide of lordly impulses. Never had any fol
lower of his to complain of tame or hesitating en
couragement on the part of the leader. In 1857 he
and Morris went up to Oxford during the long vaca
tion and visited the Debating Hall of the Union So
ciety then in process of construction. The architect,
Benjamin Woodward, was fighting for the new
Gothic style of architecture against the old semi-
classical, and " a feeling of glorification and enthusi
asm was in the air " with which Rossetti promptly
became infected. He proposed that he and some
of his friends should decorate the ten window-bays
of the room and the ceiling, doing the work gratu
itously, merely the expenses of the little band to be
assumed by the Union. The Arthurian Legend, at

The Damsel of the San Grael.

(Tbe fllMfcole H>ear0. 103
that time the pet literature of both Morris and Ros
setti, was to furnish the themes for the decorations ;
the work, which must of course include a large
number of figures above life-size, was to be finished
in six weeks. The building committee accepted this
extraordinary proposition, and Rossetti, Burne-Jones,
Morris, Arthur Hughes, Valentine Prinsep, Spencer
Stanhope, and Pollen, entered bravely upon their
task. "A more brilliant company," Mr. Stephens
reflects, " it would, out of Paradise, be difficult to
select." Brilliant they were indeed, but they knew
no better than to paint in tempera directly upon a
new brick wall with only a coat of whitewash be
tween them and destruction.
"There is no work like it in the delightfulness of
the doing, and none, I believe, in which one might
hope to delight others more according to his pow
ers," Rossetti wrote to Professor Norton, as the
pure, bright colours of the designs commenced to
glow upon the walls " like the margin of an illumin
ated manuscript."
Six months instead of six weeks were given to
the painting, and it was then resigned unfinished,
to fade rapidly out of sight under the onslaughts
of the British climate. To-day, Mr. Marillier says,
it is "a dingy blur of colours in which may be dis
tinguished the occasional vague form of an armoured
limb or a patch of flowery background. The roof
alone, which was redecorated in 1875, remains a
success, and a tribute to the genius of William

104 ft be 1Ro00etti0.
Morris, whose design for it — almost his first work
of the kind — was done in a single day and carried
out with customary energy and vehemence."
Despite the breakdown of these great opera
tions, certain results of importance accrued to Ros
setti from this stay at Oxford. For one thing he
gained the material for some fine drawings and
water-colours, and for another he gained a model
whose curious type of beauty influenced for better
or for worse a large proportion of his subsequent
painting. This model was a Miss Burden, whom he
saw at the theatre one night, admired extravagantly,
and knew as promptly as possible in order to beg for
sittings. Soon after, she became the wife of Morris.
Her pale face in its setting of dusky and richly wav
ing hair is seen in The Day-Dream, in Revery, in
Aurea Catena, in La Donna della Fiamma, in Pan
dora, in Proserpine, in The Water Willow, and in
many other pictures of Rossetti's later period. Her
"deep look," filled with the melancholy of "un
happy Proserpine," suggests " strange ways of
thought " indeed, with little cheer, whether it
meets you from the clouds of smoke curling out
of Pandora's violated box, or from the lovely
"thronged boughs of the shadowy sycamore" in
Rossetti's own garden. Its mystery is not alto
gether alluring, and the widespread theory, grow
ing out of its great unlikeness to the expression of
any other face known to the picture-loving world
— that it especially represents Rossetti's art and

ft be fllMbMe H)ear0. 105
predilection — has kept many people from recognising
his more robust and more admirable qualities. It
was a curious fate that gave him this model at just
the point in his career when his tendency toward
mystery and symbolism was gaining ascendency
over the sturdier tendencies of his youthful art.
In Aylwin the painter D'Arcy (Rossetti) shows
to Winifred four pictures of women, two brunettes
and two blondes, and asks her to classify them ac
cording to her own view. Winifred finds the differ
ence "one of soul" selecting as the nobler types
the pictures painted not from hired models, but
from D'Arcy's friends and asks if an artist's success
depend greatly upon the model. " It does indeed,"
he replies; "such success as I have won since my
great loss is very largely owing to those two ladies,
one so grand and the other so sweet, whom you are
admiring." The " one so grand " was Mrs. Morris,
the "one so sweet" was Mr. Stillman's young
Greek wife, who " with reassuring eyes most fair, a
presage and a promise, stands" among the " Spring-
flushed apple-growth " of Fiammetta.
In his list of the models who appear in his
brother's pictures, Mr. William Rossetti mentions
"a pure-blooded gipsy " as the prototype ofthe dark
woman to the right of the spectator in the barbaric-
ally beautiful painting called The Beloved. This
undoubtedly is the Sinfi Lovell who plays so promi
nent a part in Aylwin, but how many of the incid
ents connecting her generous Romany life with

106 ftbe 1Ro00etti0.
that of D'Arcy are founded upon fact can only be
told us by Mr. Watts-Dunton himself. Her humor
ous account of D'Arcy's chivalrous attitude toward
her, given in the preface of the third edition of The
Coming of Love, may safely be read, however, as
representing the spirit if not the act of Rossetti in
dealing with those dependent upon him, or having in
his own estimation a claim upon his consideration.
The model who possibly did most to counteract
the effect upon Rossetti's painting of the gloomy,
Proserpine type of beauty, is she who posed for the
figure of the woman in Found, and who for the fol
lowing twenty years appeared from time to time in
important pictures, in the Lady with the Fan, in Fazio's
Mistress, in Bocca Baciata, in the original Lilith.
This was "Fanny Cornforth," later Mrs. Hughes,
later Mrs. Schott, who exercised, to quote Mr. Maril-
lier's words, "Almost as remarkable an influence
over Rossetti's life as over his art." Her long waving
hair has been variously described as pale gold, har
vest yellow, and red of the shade "belonging to a
certain type of Englishwomen in Sussex and Surrey,
and seen in combination with brown eyes." Her
figure, so far from realising the slender stateliness of
Rossetti's ideal, was plump enough to suggest to his
extravagantly facetious fancy the agreeable nickname
of ' ' Elephant. " Her features were notable for a certain
kind of beauty, but not that which an imaginative
painter instinctively idealises. In most cases, if not
in all, Rossetti's pictures of her are portraits pure and

Mrs. Stillman (Miss Marie Spartali).

ftbe fllMfcble H)ear0. 107
simple ; in them the painter ceases to puzzle you ; he
sees as you see, opulent lines and firm flesh, their
robust beauty glorified by the ripest and most glow
ing colour.
The strain of his poetic idea has slipped from him
in these pictures and he paints as did Rubens and
Titian, with frank delight in splendid surfaces, forms,
and textures. He is never so much a poet as when
he is painting Elizabeth Siddal or Mrs. Morris, but
he is perhaps never so much a painter as when he is
painting " Fanny Cornforth."
To return to his association with Morris, — he
threw himself into the manifold interests of this arch
itect, poet, decorator, and social reformer, with all
the peculiar versatility that enlivened without ever
threatening his overmastering vocation. Notwith
standing many and striking similarities of taste, it
would be difficult to recall two men more tempera
mentally unlike than Morris and Rossetti. Morris, as
he is described by Mr. Mackail, was interested in
things much more than in people. He had indeed
" the capacity for loyal friendships and for deep affec
tions, but even of these one might almost say that
they did not penetrate to the central part of him."
The thing done, the story, or the building or the
picture, was what he cared about. And in the or
dinary concerns of life he was "strangely incurious
of individuals. " He could work ' ' with anyone, sym
pathetic to him or not, so long as they helped along
the work in hand." Although the sufferings of

108 ftbe 1Ro00etti0.
classes of men weighed upon his spirit, he was not
the friend to whom one would go for sympathy in
distress, being often moved, indeed, to "a strange
sort of impatience by the sight of personal suffering."
Rossetti once said of him (in " one of those flashes
of hard insight that made him so terrible a friend "),
" Did you ever notice that Top never gives a penny
to a beggar ? "
How different this was from Rossetti, the lavish,
the magnificent, the expansive, and to a degree
the uncalculating, it is hardly necessary to point
out. On the score of irritability Morris far outdis
tanced Rossetti, — the occasional outbreaks recorded
of the latter reading like the fretting of a lamb beside
the periods of storm and gesticulation in which Morris
indulged, or the still more ferocious periods of noble
restraint, such as the one in which he chewed a tea
spoon entirely out of shape in order to keep himself
within bounds.
When Morris moved from Red Lion Square to
what has long been known as "the Red House" at
Upton near Bexley Heath, Woolwich, he enlisted his
friends to aid in its decoration. Rossetti painted on
one ofthe doors two panels in oil representing Dante
meeting Beatrice in Florence and in the garden of
Eden. The Dantis Amor was also painted for a cab
inet in the Red House. The difficulty Morris found
in getting furniture and draperies of a kind to make
the place a true " House Beautiful " confirmed in him
a desire to undertake the reforms with which his name

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, i8bi.

ftbe fUMoole lj)ear0. 109
has been connected for the past forty years. He
panted for furniture in quaint designs, for wall-paper
that should decorate the surface it covered, for glass
stained in accordance with the. true principles of
vitraux, for carpets and hangings in satisfactory dyes.
Then why not have them ? The house was hardly
finished when the plan for the Morris company was
set on foot. "We are organising," wrote Rossetti,
in 1 86 1, " (but this is quite under the rose as yet,) a
company for the production of furniture and decora
tions of all kinds for the sale of which we are going
to open an actual shop ! The men concerned are
Madox Brown, Jones, Topsy, Webb (the architect of
T's house), P. P. Marshall, Faulkner, and myself.
Each of us is now producing, at his own charges,
one or two (and some of us more) things toward the
stock. We are not intending to compete with  's
costly rubbish or anything of that sort, but to give
real good taste at the price as far as possible of ordinary
furniture. We expect to start in some shape about
May or June, but not to go into any expense in
premises at first." In April of the following year
Faulkner writes of meetings resembling those of the
Jolly Masons in character, and adds, "Our firm has
arrived at the dignity of exhibition at the Great Ex
hibition, where we have already sent some stained
glass, and where they obtained a medal for ' imitation
of Gothic patterns ' and shall shortly send some fur
niture which will doubtless cause the majority ofthe
spectators to admire. The getting ready of our

no ftbe 1Ro00etti0.
things has cost more tribulation and swearing to
Topsy than these exhibitions will be worth."
Rossetti, Mr. Mackail observes, displayed in con
nection with this enterprise " business qualities of a
high order and the eye of a trained financier for any
thing that had money in it." And in the prospectus
ofthe new firm he discovers evil traces of Rossetti's
" slashing hand "and contempt of difficulties and in
difference to scrupulous accuracy of statement, all
of which have been basely justified in the eyes of
the world by the amazing success of the little com
pany first quartered in a few rooms of No. 8, Red
Lion Square, with a small kiln for firing glass and
tiles in the basement. Morris, of course, was the
prime mover in the actual work of the firm. He ham
mered and tinkered and dabbled in dyes and wove
and designed and painted. Not even the embroider
ies were neglected by his short, thick, adaptable fin
gers. "Top has taken to worsted work," Rossetti
sarcastically records. But Rossetti himself was fairly
zealous in work at first, and the years 1861-62 show
a creditable record of designs for windows and for
furniture decoration.
One of the earlier ventures of the firm was the
"King Rene's Honeymoon Cabinet" made for John
P. Seddon in illustration of the theory he was urg
ing elsewhere, " and has never since ceased from
urging," that "in the unity and fellowship of the
several arts lies their power." Mr. Seddon himself
contributed to the decoration some jocular designs

Dr. Johnson and the Methodist Ladies
at The Mitre.

ftbe fUMoole JI)ear0. m
representing the judicial relations of an architect
with a greedy client on one side and with a grasp
ing builder on the other. The panels were painted
in oil by Rossetti, Madox Brown, and Burne-Jones,
the larger designs representing King Rene and his
bride enjoying their honeymoon in the practice of
the arts in which he was an amateur. "Music"
fell to Rossetti's lot, and his version, unlike those
of his fellow decorators, shows the king more atten
tive to the bride than to the art, and is very win
ning and modern, in strong contrast to the clumsily
mediaeval figures of Madox Brown's design. The
smaller panels represented the seasons, Rossetti
painting Spring.
Besides this experimental work, and his regular
painting, which up to 1863 included more than
seventy-five oil and water-colours, Rossetti taught
for a time in the Working-Men's College, of which
Frederic D. Maurice was head, and in which Ruskin
was deeply interested. "It is to be remembered
of Rossetti with loving honour," Ruskin writes in
Prceterita, ' ' that he was the only one of our modern
painters who taught disciples for love of them."
His method was characteristic and unlike that which
he used with Burne-Jones. Remembering his own
detestation of " bottles " he set his pupils to draw
ing straight from the model and in colour. " None
of your Free-Hand Drawing-Books used," he wrote
to Bell Scott who was a teacher in the Government
Schools ; "the British mind is brought to bear on the

112

ftbe 1Ro00etti0.

British mug at once, and with results that would as
tonish you." He would put a bird or a boy before
his class and say : " Do it ! " without any preliminary
explanations. While he was thus engaged in nursing disparate
and dormant sympathies into flame, his human in
terests as well as his intellectual preoccupations rose
highest. The portraits of these years tell their
story of inspiring and inspiriting associations. Ten
nyson, Browning, Swinburne, Ruskin, all belong to
this division of time. Also all but the last of his
little visits to the Continent were made before the
death of his wife in 1862. No traveller, no ad
venturer in body or mind, these foreign trips made
but a superficial impression on him and apparently
not any impression at all upon his work. Some of
his critics have traced pertinently enough in his early
style reminiscences of Memling, whom he so much
admired on his first trip abroad, and have found
suggestions of Titian in the later work. But the
unstudious way in which he flitted through the
galleries, the readiness with which he formed and
discarded prejudices, the incidental lightness of his
criticisms show that he did not in any particular
sense __ depend upon outside influences, however
potent, to form his own individuality. That he did
not, accounts in part, of course, for his weakness as
well as for his strength. It would be a mistake,
however, to judge very deeply of his predilections
from the expression he gives to them in his letters.

Algernon Charles Swinburne.
From water-colour by Rossetti.

ftbe fUMbble H?ear0. 113
Always possessed with a boyish horror of fine writ
ing, much addicted to the slang his little circle of
intimates delighted in, and scornful of criticism ex
cepting from him who " can prove what he saith
with his hand," he said once regarding his own
criticism that he was only at home with facts,
and that he could not think of much to say
about things, so that such an expression as " some
mighty things by that real stunner Lionardo " may
be considered to cover as many emotions as a page
or two of Ruskin's eloquent appreciations.
When he was in Paris in 1849 with Holman Hunt
he ran across Browning in the Louvre, a little later
he discovered Pauline in the British Museum, in its
anonymous form, and, convinced of its authorship,
wrote to Browning about it. This led to a closer
acquaintance, and Rossetti saw Browning frequently
when the latter was in London in 1852 and again in
1855, and during the ten days Rossetti spent in
Paris in the autumn of 1855 their friendship so
ripened that he was ready to "boast of some in
timacy with the glorious Robert." Browning's por
trait, begun in London, was finished in Paris, and
Rossetti then looked forward to painting both
Browning and his wife in oil, a plan that, unfortun
ately for the memory of Mrs. Browning's sensitive
and charming face, was never carried out. How
much more the temper of Browning's mind appealed
to Rossetti than the profuse sweetness of Ruskin's
is very plainly seen in Rossetti's comments on the

114 ftbe 1Ro00etti0.
work of the two men. Referring to a passage in
Modern Painters in which Ruskin quotes from
Browning's poem, The Bishop Orders his Tomb at
Saint Praxed's Church, and compares Browning
with Longfellow, he writes to Allingham : " Really,
the omissions in Browning's passage are awful, and
the union with Longfellow worse. How I loathe
Wishi-Washi — of course without reading it. I
have not been so happy in loathing anything for a
long while — except, I think. Leaves of Grass by that
Orson of yours."
This unsentimental side of Rossetti, this sturdi-
ness that chimed so well with Browning's, is not the
quality oftenest seen in his paintings, yet it is a
quality that much impressed the companions of his
early prime. To a large degree he lost it in his later
struggles with melancholia, but he was never en
tirely without it, and it found a curiously complete
expression in the picture painted immediately after
his marriage, the Dr. Johnson at the Mitre. Bos-
well's Life of Johnson shared, with the Life of Keats
and Benvenuto Cellini's Autobiography, the most
lively enthusiasm expressed by Rossetti for bio
graphical literature, and from the Life of Johnson he
chose an anecdote of particularly Johnsonian flavor
to develop according to his own idea, first in a pen-
and-ink drawing, and then in colour. The scene
is laid in the Mitre Tavern after the dinner with
the two young women of Staffordshire. Maxwell
was the Doctor's companion on this occasion, but

ftbe fllMbble Jl)ear0. 115
Rossetti substituted Boswell's more familiar counte
nance. The treatment is a triumph of realism, such
masterly realism as Honore Daumier's in his admira
ble water-colours. The vitality and interest of the
faces are not confused or overborne by any intricate
problem of psychology, and the painter's technical
ability appears thus to be freed to challenge any
doubt of its adequacy. Yet the psychological tem
per is there to give value and significance to the
vigorously prosaic reality. It is perhaps ungracious
praise to say that no Frenchman would be ashamed
of having painted Dr. Johnson at the Mitre, but it
conveys as well as may be the sense of the beholder
that in this picture Rossetti stepped with a Gargan
tuan stride outside his special faculty and sentiment,
outside his national temperament, outside his techni
cal limitations even, and with a fine gusto took his
place momentarily among the realists.

CHAPTER VI.
TRANSLATIONS AND ORIGINAL POEMS.
WHILE tracing the course of Rossetti's paint
ing during the dozen or more years of
what are called his first and second pe
riods, we have left at one side his practice in poetry.
It was one of his pet theories that English poetry
died with Keats while English painting was in the
very morning of its youth. This conviction, sup
ported by the fact that his father much discouraged
his frequent and apparently whimsical diversions
from painting, aided him to an early decision be
tween the two modes of expression almost equally
natural to him. By the time he was twenty-four he
had "abandoned poetry" by his own assertion.
After that he did not resume regular composition
until 1869, seven years after the death of his wife,
although the impulse that had driven him in boy
hood to the translations from the early Italians, and
to such original work as The Blessed Damo^el, was
never entirely quiet within him. The story of his
literary career up to the appearance ofthe volume of
n6

translations anb ©riainal poems. 117
1870 is briefly told, and, by virtue of one incident, is
perhaps the most curious in the history of modern
poets. "I wish one could live by writing poetry," he
wrote to Madox Brown in 187 1; "I think I 'd see
painting d  d if one could." Twenty-three years
before, while he was still irresolute, he had written
to Leigh Hunt to find if perchance one could live by
writing poetry, such poetry as his own, of which he
sent specimens. Leigh Hunt's response was gratify
ing enough to Rossetti the poet, so much so that he
" could not quote any part of it lest it should seem
like conceit," but to Rossetti the practical man it was
disheartening. The translations brought forth the
criticism that he was altogether "not so musical as
pictorial," but the original poems revealed an "un
questionable poet, thoughtful, imaginative, and with
rare powers of expression." " I hailed you as such
without any misgiving," said the elder writer, " and
beside your Dantesque heavens (without any hell to
spoil them), admired the complete and genial round
of your sympathies with humanity." Nevertheless
there was no encouragement to adopt poetry as a
profession. "I hardly need tell you," Leigh Hunt
continued, certainly from the fulness of experience,
— " I hardly need tell you that poetry, even the very
best,— nay, the best, in this respect, is apt to be the
worst — is not a thing for a man to live upon while
he is in the flesh, however immortal it may render
him in spirit."

n8 ftbe 1Ro00etti0.
The truth of this Rossetti could not deny, and in
1853 he laid poetry aside as a luxury not to be in
dulged in. He had then been writing in a desultory
way for some eight or ten years, beginning (as at the
close of his life he ended) with a ballad, Sir Hugh
the Heron, which old Gaetano Polidori valued highly
enough to have printed at the private printing-press.
This ballad, much to Rossetti's chagrin, found its way
eventually to the British Museum Library. Its author
left behind him a memorandum of its worthlessness,
as there was no knowing, he said, "what fool might
some day foist the absurd trash into print " as one
of his print-worthy productions. " It is curious and
surprising to myself," he added, " as evincing absol
utely no promise at all — less than should exist even
at twelve." The life led by Rossetti between the years of
twelve and twenty had been precisely the sort to
foster poetic instincts, however, and train the poetic
faculty. In 1844 and 1845 when he was studying
German he made a translation of Burger's Lenore and
of part of the Nibelungenlied. And from Dante, —
the young, rapt lover Dante of the Vita Nuova, —
always present in his father's study, he had turned as
we have seen to the Italian poets of the thirteenth
century, revelling in their complicated forms and in
tricate rhymes. Beatrice was no ghost to him, nor
were the dead loves of these Italians buried to him
beneath the gracefully elaborate metres of their po
etic style, so new and so fascinating to them in its

translations anb ©riginal poems. 119
modernity at the time of their writing. It was his
birthright to realise them not merely learnedly but
personally, and to interpret them with the authority
of fellow-feeling, showing the sincerity, the serious,
deep emotions lying at the heart of the multitud
inous artifices and mannerisms. Not at all in the
spirit brought by him to his illustrations did he work
at these translations. Here the responsibility of
rendering another's idea with absolute faithfulness
rested duly upon him. "The life-blood of rhythmi
cal translation," he writes in his preface to The Early
Italian Poets, "is this commandment that a good
poem shall not be turned into a bad one. The only
true motive for putting poetry into a fresh language
must be to endow a fresh nation, as far as possible,
with one more possession of beauty." "The task
of the translator (and with all humility be it
spoken)," he continues, "is one of some self-denial.
Often would he avail himself of any special grace of
his own idiom and epoch, if only his will belonged
to him ; often would some cadence serve him but
for his author's structure — some structure but for his
author's cadence ; often the beautiful turn of a stanza
must be weakened to adopt some rhyme which will
tally, and he sees the poet revelling in abundance of
language where himself is scantily supplied. Now
he would slight the matter for the music, and now
the music for the matter ; but no, he must deal to
each alike. Sometimes too a flaw in the work galls
him, and he would fain remove it, doing for the poet

120 ftbe IRossettis.
that which age denied him, but no, it is not in the
bond." These translations he kept by him for almost as
many years as he had lived when he commenced to
make them, altering them fastidiously, handing them
about in manuscript among the friends whose criti
cisms he valued, and weighing well the suggestions
thus invited. "Of course you know our common
race too well," he wrote to Allingham, "to think I
should always benefit by a warning though one
should rise from the grave — but I am sure I should
get something out of you." In this way the poems
were passed in review by Coventry Patmore, Count
Saffi, Ruskin, and others, who bade him count upon
their literary success and ' ' something in money also. "
Ruskin, at that time still much to the fore as a ready
staff to lean upon in time of need, guaranteed to his
own publishers the sum of a hundred pounds if they
would undertake the risk of publication, and in 1861,
at a time of great anxiety for Rossetti on the score
of his wife's health, the little volume was brought
out. In the course of eight years it made him the
richer by nine pounds, the profits having that much
more than covered Ruskin's guarantee.
Many critics, however, found with Coventry Pat-
more that it was "one of the very few really pre
cious books in the English or any other language."
Its title in the first edition was The Early Italian
Poets, later changed to Dante and His Circle in order
to give due prominence to the greatest name of all.

ftranslations anb ©riotnal poems. 121
Besides the translation of the Vita Nuova it contained
separate can^oniere, sonnets, and ballata by Dante
himself and by his predecessors and contemporaries.
Rossetti's idea, in his own words, was "to give a
full view of that epoch of poetry," in its sentiment,
taste and manner, and he "should not have cared to
do the work at all unless completely from a literary
point of view." In this he succeeded. To avoid
the distress of a text "hampered with numerals
for reference " and "sticking fast " at the bottom of
the page in "a slough of verbal analysis," he was
obliged, he said, to put in " a good deal of my own
prose," and very excellent prose it was, bringing be
fore the reader the dim and unfamiliar figures of
Cavalcanti, Orlandi, Angiolieri, and their group, in
vivid portraiture as the wit, the bore, or the scamp
ofthe society and time in which they lived.
Through the translations themselves we have a
curious glimpse of the influences that above all
others dominated Rossetti's mind, whether he was
painting pictures or writing hiV-o'wn can^oniere.
We see him at heart an Italian and in his most
potent interest an Italian of these very Middle Ages.
It is, perhaps, perilously/ easy to find in the accid
ents of his name and lineage an exaggerated sug
gestion of his likeness to the Alighieri, but it is no
exaggeration to find in what his critics called "an
appropriate instinct of style " the spontaneous re
sponse of one in an alien age and country to the
voice of his own time and place; — the voice of a

122

ftbe IRossettis.

time wayward, passionate, poetic, filled with youth
ful eagerness, charm, gaiety, and riot of thought,
awakening to literature and art and the finer aspects
of love, fresh in morning activities, puzzled and
delirious with the delight of new-born powers ; the
voice of a place most courtly, rich, and beautiful,
one in which to be joyous and generous and tender
and ardent, despite mysticism, treachery, and suspi
cion abounding. The theme of the early poets is
frequently love of the most pitiable and wailing
type, the lovers " sighing and sorrowing, and languid
at the heart," but the examples chosen by Rossetti
show also an aspiration toward the loftier elements
of Dante's love for Beatrice, the qualities that trans
formed mediaeval love-making from a profession to
an ideal. More than one of the poets can say with
Jacopo da Lentino :
Marvellously elate,
Love makes my spirit warm
With noble sympathies.
Nor is that side of human nature which is ex
ternal and unsentimental neglected. In the exuber
ant sonnets of Folgore da San Geminiano we have
hints of a spacious Elizabethan life, not less brilliant
and genial because the "blithe and lordly Fellow
ship " to which the sonnets are dedicated destroyed
itself in hare-brained pleasuring. Here is the one
for February :
In February I give you gallant sport
Of harts and hinds and great wild boars ; and all

ftranslations anb ©riainal poems. 123
Your company good foresters and tall,
With buskins strong, with jerkins close and short ;
And in your leashes hounds of brave report ;
And from your purses plenteous money fall,
In very spleen of misers' starveling gall,
Who at your generous customs snarl and snort.
At dusk wend homeward, ye and all your folk,
All laden from the wilds, to your carouse
With merriment and with songs accompanied :
And so draw wine and let the kitchen smoke ;
And so be until the first watch glorious ;
Then sound sleep to you till the day be wide.
In the New Life even more than in the poems we
have the evidence of Rossetti's sympathy with his
subject in the pure, delightful, easy diction. His
translation as a translation has been given a very
high place if not the highest. As an example of
gracious, lovely English, firm, significant, and pliable,
it may fairly be deemed flawless. If we set a page
of it by the side of a page from Sir Theodore Martin's
version, which appeared almost at the same time, we
get the contrast between worthy interpretation, con
scientious and formal, and such expressive render
ing as seems in itself original expression.
Take the passage describing the grief of Beatrice
over the death of her father. Rossetti's version runs
as follows :
" Not many days after this (it being the will of
the most High God, who also from Himself put not
away death), the father of wonderful Beatrice, going
out of this life, passed certainly into glory. Thereby

124 ftbe IRossettis.
it happened, as of very sooth it might not be other
wise, that this lady was made full of the bitterness
of grief : seeing that such a parting is very grievous
unto those friends who are left, and that no other
friendship is like to that between a good parent and
a good child ; and furthermore considering that this
lady was good in the supreme degree, and her father
(as by many it hath been truly averred) of exceeding
goodness. And because it is the usage of that city
that men meet with men in such a grief, and women
with women, certain ladies of her companionship
gathered themselves unto Beatrice, where she kept
alone in her weeping : and as they passed in and out
I could hear them speak concerning her, how she
wept. At length two of them went by me, who
said : ' Certainly she grieveth in such sort that one
might die for pity, beholding her.' Then, feeling
the tears upon my face, I put up my hands to hide
them : and had it not been that I hoped to hear more
concerning her (seeing that where I sat, her friends
passed continually in and out), I should assuredly
have gone thence to be alone, when I felt the tears
come." Compare with this Sir Theodore Martin's careful
periods :
"Not many days after this sonnet was written
(so it was ordained by that glorious Lord of Heaven,
who Himself refused not to undergo death) he who
had been the progenitor of all the wondrous perfec
tions which were displayed in that most excelling

Study for "Dante's Dream" Scarf holder.
Mrs. IV. J. Stillman (Miss Spartali).

ftranslations anb ©riginal poems. 125
Beatrice, departing from this life passed of a surety
into eternal glory. Wherefore, forasmuch as such a
separation is most sad to those who are left behind,
and to whom he who has passed away was dear :
and as, moreover, there is no relation so dear as that
of a good father to a good child, and of a good child
to a good father ; and as this lady was pre-eminently
good, and her father (as by many is thought, and as
in truth he was) was likewise eminently good, it
needs not to declare that her grief was most bitter
and abounding. And seeing that according to the
usage of the aforesaid city, women at these woful
seasons unite their grief with women, and men with
men, many ladies repaired to the place where Beatrice
bewailed her loss with many tears ; certain of which
ladies I saw returning thence, and heard them speak
of that most gentle being, and how profound was
her affliction. And amongst others these words
reached me — ' She weeps so, that whoever sees her
must surely die of pity.' Then these ladies passed
on, and I remained in such distress that my cheeks
were bathed in tears, to conceal which I had again
and again to raise my hands to my eyes. And had
it not been that I hoped to hear more about her (for
where I stood the greater proportion of these ladies
as they quitted her, were obliged to pass), I should
have sought concealment incontinently the fit of
weeping seized me."
We realise that it is Rossetti and not the English
writer who has found in Dante's narrative the natural

126 ftbe IRossettis.
statement of a very natural state of mind, and who
in the words of one of his reviewers has "so man
aged matters that he brings his English readers face
to face with the great Florentine of six hundred years
ago, and silences that ominous question so constantly
recurring to the readers of translations from ancient
and mediaeval literature, " How did this read to the
author's contemporaries of his own race ?"
Rossetti's original poems had gone hand in hand
with the translations, some of the best belonging to
the time preceding Pre-Raphaelitism. In 1861 he
had an idea of collecting all that he had written in a
companion volume to The Early Italian Poets, and
bringing the two volumes out at the same time.
This project had to be relinquished, but he still
looked forward to publishing the original poems in
the near future. The dramatic impulse that pre
vented him was one of the amazing manifestations
of a mind rooted in emotion, only to be equalled in
strangeness by the impulse that years later resulted
in the publication of the volume of 1870.
In the anguish of mind following his wife's death
he considered that the poems had been written
upon, many of them, when she was suffering, and
were thus in a sense records of neglect of her. For
this reason he took the manuscript book in which
they were copied and placed it in her coffin to be
buried with her, thus putting away a long-deferred
hope of recognition as a poet.
Seven and a half years after, with his health

ftranslations anb ©riginal poems. 127
breaking, eyesight threatened, and nerves yielding
to the strain of almost constant insomnia, he began
again to think of poetry as a resource and stimu
lus in his partially disabled condition. His friends
urged his writing again, and more than one has
taken to himself the flattering unction of having
been the first to revive in his mind the old inter
est and faculty. In the spring of 1868 three of the
sonnets written for pictures appeared in a pamphlet
review of pictures of that year, prepared by Mr.
Swinburne and Mr. William Rossetti in collabora
tion. The next year several sonnets were printed
in the Fortnightly Review, and preparations were
made for printing a volume of poems for Rossetti's
own convenience and not for publication, — to serve
merely as a working basis for a larger volume when
the material should be ready, and because, as he
said, he found blundered transcripts of some of his
old things flying about, which would at some time
have got into print perhaps, — " a thing afflictive to
one's bogie."
Then began the importunities of those who held
Rossetti's fame dearer than his dignity. He was
besought to recover the buried poems for the rescue
of some which he possessed only in fragmentary
form and others of which he had kept no memo
randum at all. He naturally was disinclined to such
a step; but ultimately he yielded. It is not the only
recorded act of his life that is difficult to understand,
but it is the only act recorded in which vanity seems

128 ftbe IRossettis.
to play a prominent part ; and to dismiss it as an
isolated and uncharacteristic manifestation of a self-
magnifying spirit from which on all other occasions
he is seen to be singularly free, is perhaps wiser, and
is certainly simpler than to attempt td account for it
in any more favourable way.
There is, however, an extraordinary interest in
knowing the character and quality of poems worthy
in the eyes of their author of such a sacrifice of deli
cate feeling. What, then, was the volume of 1870?
First of all, it was a volume of strikingly original and
personal work, although, looking at it in the light of
the translations, it shows convincingly the source
from which it springs. " The Poetry of the Italian
Middle Age," said one of its most discerning critics,
" is undoubtedly that which above others has pene
trated into the constitution of this writer and be
come a vital part of himself. There are two ways
in which this tells upon his original writing : one by
furnishing him with subjects, the other by colouring
and entering into his treatment of subjects arising
elsewhere." It would be difficult to find in the his
tory of English poetry another example of so con
siderable a body of verse so circumscribed in its area
of sentiment. The treasure of Rossetti's intellect
was rich but not various, deep but not broad. He
had no lesson to teach ; he had no philosophy to
explain ; he had but a few general reflections upon
the life of the many to put into words ; he had com
paratively little to say about external nature : what

ftranslation0 anb ©rkjinal poem0. 129
he had at heart to communicate — the true message
of all his poetry — was his unalterable and poignant
belief that To have loved and been beloved again
Is loftiest reach of Hope's bright wing.
Nor was he a generaliser on this absorbing subject.
It was his own love and his peculiar delight in it
that was always present to his mind.
It had colour and form : it was, in a word, a pict
ure ofthe soul's state. Pictorial and passionate are the
adjectives that equally fit The Blessed Damo^el, Sister
Helen, Troy Town and Stratton Water, A Last Con
fession, and all the sonnets of The House of Life, des
pite the diverse settings of these poems. The ' ' ever-
present apprehension of the spiritual world and of
the struggle of the soul with earthly conditions,"
constitutes the romantic spirit with which Mr.
Watts-Dunton says Rossetti's work is filled, and this
romantic spirit in love, never with the grotesque, as
sometimes happened with Coleridge and with Blake,
but always with beauty, most often expresses itself
in terms of egoism. This is most plainly seen in the
sonnets of The House of Life, fifty of which appeared
in the 1870 edition. In these sonnets every phase
of feeling is "a port at which the writer's self has
touched." No mood is too evanescent, too strained,
or too sacred, to be embodied in symbols the mate
rialism of which has given rise to severe criticism.
For many a long day the English mind has been in-

130 ftbe 1Ro00ettis.
clined to forego the aesthetic satisfaction of endowing
abstract thoughts with human attributes, but Ros
setti stopped at no degree, of anthropomorphism.
Frequently the result is merely a more than usually
vivid diction, as in the lines :
Lo ! Love, the child once ours ; and Song, whose hair
Blew like a flame and blossomed like a wreath ;
And Art, whose eyes were worlds by God found fair,
or else admirably simple and touching, as in the case
of the "little outcast hour," which "might have
been but could not be " meeting in Heaven the two
souls to whom it belonged, and leaping to them
with the words, "I am your child: O parents, ye
have come ! "
In other instances, however, the feeling is itself
overpowered and distorted by the weight of the in
tense materialisation. In the effort toward speech
the unspeakable becomes something that in the first
conception it is not, something far more gross, more
earthly, and less true. Where the poet probably in
tends to intimate divinely exalted influences alive in
the forms of things, the forms themselves are so
definitely realised as to clog the reader's imagination
instead of helping it. If we cared to get only the
finest essence of this poetry, only what would reveal
its author on his more elevated and spiritual side, it
would be easy to make a selection including such
poems as the Ave, The Blessed Damo^el, Brother
Hilary, The Portrait, The One Hope, Old and New
Art, and perhaps half a dozen more from the 1870

ftranslation0 anb ©riginal poem0. 131
volume that should show him dedicate to chastened
sentiment and what may be called religious expres
sion. But it would not, of course, any more than
a selection from the opposite side of his poetry, be
the true Rossetti in all the puzzling complexity of
his " chainless thought and fettered will."
The poetic form which best brought out Rossetti's
excellence was the ballad. " Ballads," Mr. Andrew
Lang declares, "are a voice from secret places, from
silent peoples, and old times long dead ; and as such
they stir us in a strangely intimate fashion to which
artistic verse can never attain." Rossetti here was
in his element. A theme of legendary significance,
an interweaving of the supernatural, a strong primi
tive emotion, an ancient flexible form, — these ele
ments he fuses with magical felicity.
The gruesome ballad oi Sister Helen, although far
less beautiful and winning in its art than The Blessed
Damo^el, is, on the whole, the most perfect of his
achievements in this mode of expression. Its basis
is the well-known superstition of the waxen image
make in the likeness of one on whom vengeance is
to be taken, and then burned down, the victim dying
in slow torment pari passu with the melting of the
image. Each stanza begins with two lines of quest
ioning or comment from the little brother on the
balcony, followed by a single line of fierce reply
from the sister within at her incantations, and ending
with a burden or chorus, the subtle variations of
which inform the scene with the emotion of the

1 32 ftbe 1RO0settis.
onlooker. In every detail, in the swiftness of the
drama, in the rapid, red-hot dialogue, in the direct
appeal to the reader's wonder and awe, in the recur
ring phrases, it answers the requirements of genuine
balladry. And again, in a way, Rossetti triumphs
outside of his natural range, for cruelty was a quality
entirely foreign to his nature, and one that he was
not prone to depict in his art, yet more relentless
and vindictive passion, barbaric in its bitterness, can
hardly be imagined than is concentrated in the an
swers of the sorceress. He knew perfectly by in
stinct what a ballad should be to compete with the
tribe of Sir Patrick Spens and Chevy Chace, and
sent his inspiration like an arrow to the centre of his
target. If we compare Sister Helen with such at
tempts to realise the antique spirit of straightforward,
unfeigned passion as Bell Scott's Glenkindie, or
Robert Buchanan's The Ballad of Judas Iscariot, we
see at once the difference between the natural primi
tive and the detached student of early forms.
Of the remaining poems two, at least, claim
special mention as representative of Rossetti's range
and equipment. The most notable is the Dante at
Verona, full and rich with the Dante sympathy of its
author, and with incidents and suggestions drawn
from his intimate knowledge of Dante's history.
Curiously, this poem has less the movement of im
passioned thought than almost any other in the
book. The compensation lies in the reflective tone
rising to a height of dignity and calm seldom shown

Study for Head of Dante.
Drawn from Mr. IV. J. Stillman.

ftranslations anb ©riginal poems. 133
by Rossetti in his poetry, but conspicuous in his
personal letters on subjects involving deep feeling.
The son of an exiled father, he came prepared to
the contemplation of such misery as the flower of
Italian cities forced upon the greatest of Italians, and
Dante's thoughts and sufferings are real to him as to
a Florentine, although he never had set foot upon
the streets of Florence. Yet in the following stanzas
we get the effect of the long perspective, the retro
spective view from which the fire of present emotion
is absent ; and we miss the thrill one might expect.
Follow his feet's appointed way ;
But little light we find that clears
The darkness of the exiled years.
Follow his spirit's journey : — nay,
What fires are blent, what winds are blown
On paths his feet may tread alone ?
Yet of the twofold life he led
In chainless thought and fettered will
Some glimpses reach us, — somewhat still
Ofthe steep stairs and bitter bread, —
Of the soul's quest whose stern avow
For years had made him haggard now.
Alas ! the Sacred Song whereto
Both heaven and earth had set their hand
Not only at Fame's gate did stand
Knocking to claim the passage through,
But toiled to ope that heavier door
Which Florence shut for evermore.
Shall not his birth's baptismal Town
One last high presage yet fulfil,

134 ftbe IRossettis.
And at that font in Florence still
His forehead take the laurel-crown ?
O God ! or shall dead souls deny
The undying soul its prophecy ?
Aye, 't is their hour. Not yet forgot
The bitter words he spoke that day
When for some great charge far away
Her rulers his acceptance sought.
" And if I go, who stays ? " — so rose
His scorn : — " And if I stay, who goes ? "
" Lo ! thou art gone now, and we stay "
(The curled lips mutter) : "and no star
Is from thy mortal paths so far
As streets where childhood knew the way.
To Heaven and Hell thy feet may win,
But thine own house they come not in."
Therefore, the loftier rose the song
To touch the secret things of God,
The deeper pierced the hate that trod
On base men's track who wrought the wrong ;
Till the soul's effluence came to be
Its own exceeding agony.
Arriving only to depart,
From court to court, from land to land,
Like flame within the naked hand
His body bore his burning heart
That still on Florence strove to bring
God's fire for a burnt-offering.
This is the poetry of deep contemplation but not
in any sense of drama.
The other poem, Jenny, bears much the same
relation to Dante at Verona that the picture Found
bears to the pictures in which Dante figures. The

ftranslations anb ©riginal poems. 135
step is taken from the ancient to the modern, and
from the intellectual and emotional to the moral.
The poem and the picture form, each in its especial
art, the singular exception to Rossetti's unmoralising
tendency. The subject is the wretchedly familiar
one of innocence departed, a subject popular with
the little group of English poets just then before the
public, and the treatment is grave. How much its
effect is the matter of individual temperament on the
part of the reader is shown by the conflicting criti
cisms from writers of equal authority. It is inter
esting to bear in mind Rossetti's own attitude toward
the poem, as he has expressed it in a letter to his
aunt whose disapprobation he obviously feared and
deprecated. " You may be sure I did not fail to think
of you when I inscribed copies (of the Poems) to
friends and relatives," he writes, "but, to speak
frankly, I was deterred from sending it to you by
the fact of the book including one poem (Jenny),
of which I felt uncertain whether you would be
pleased with it. I am not ashamed of having written
it (indeed, I assure you that I would never have
written it if I thought it unfit to be read with good
results) ; but I feared it might startle you somewhat,
and so put off sending you the book. I now do so
by this post, and hope that some if not all of the
pieces may be quite to your taste. Indeed, I hope
that even Jenny may be so, for my mother likes it
on the whole the best in the volume after some
consideration."

136 ftbe IRossettis.
None of the poems that went into the 1870
volume took their place without minute revision.
Wherever Rossetti's conscience may have played
him false it was never in the line of laxity regarding
the perfection of his workmanship. His letters prior
to the publication of the poems indicate endless con
sultations, corrections, and insertions. " In Pen
umbra I have altered in last stanza ' rasp the sands '
to 'chafe.' The other seemed violent and inexact,"
he writes. And again : " Your last line to the Satan
sonnet I adopted with a slight change, but am rather
uncertain whether I may not change back again."
His horror of plagiarism was carried to extreme limits.
On one occasion he considered omitting the three
important sonnets of The House of Life headed The
Choice because the idea of a single line ("They die
not, never having lived") was identical with the idea
expressed at the close of Browning's In a Gondola.
"The point is just what is wanted and not possible
to alter," he writes. The care he had for the form
of his work was extended to its appearance before
the public. He was concerned that the volume
which had been so long in the making should receive
due welcome at its debut and he had no mind to be
a voice crying in the wilderness. The sensitiveness
that kept him from attempting to force the doors of
public galleries with his pictures made him curiously
anxious for the fate of his poems. Undoubtedly the
majority of poets have cared as much, but in most
cases pride or vanity steps in to save appearances,

ftranslations anb ©riginal poems. 137
and proud and self-reliant as Rossetti was in many
respects, both qualities failed him somewhat in the
question of launching his volume. Bell Scott in his
amazing autobiography declares that to the last
moment " he would work the oracle, and get all his
friends to prepare laudatory critical articles to fill all
the leading journals." That he did nothing of the
kind his brother has shown conclusively, his friends,
among them Swinburne and Morris and Sidney
Colvin and Joseph Knight, having written from their
own convictions and of their own free will. Never
theless, Rossetti was noticeably solicitous and did
plan for a favourable reception to the legitimate
extent of sending his book first to two or three
papers where he could count upon friendly reviews,
and waiting until such reviews appeared before send
ing it to other papers. This plan seems not to have
miscarried, for the Poems were received on the very
threshold of their publicity with a fine burst of ap
plause, opened by Mr. Swinburne's loud and joyous
hymn of praise in the Fortnightly Review.
Immediate financial success ensued, the first edi
tion of a thousand selling within three weeks, and
Rossetti realising four hundred and fifty pounds in
three months' time. With this result he was natu
rally elate, but his first melancholy collision with the
inimical critics he had dreaded followed hard upon.
In October, 1871, an article appeared in the Con
temporary Review, signed Thomas Maitland, and
entitled : The Fleshly School of Poetry : Mr. D. G.

138 ftbe IRossettis.
Rossetti, a title indicating perhaps as much the pro
clivities as the intention ofthe writer. Rossetti was
arraigned on grounds of reserve and delicacy in a
manner the unreserve and indelicacy of which would
be difficult to surpass, and which was certainly not
justified by the fact that parts of Rossetti's poetry
emphatically invited condemnation. For a writer
who proposes seriously to illustrate the human soul,
Mr. James says with reference to Balzac, there is
absolutely no forbidden ground. There was, unfort
unately, no forbidden ground for Rossetti, but con
sciously or flippantly immoral in his writings, even
the freest of them, he was not, and he deeply re
sented the imputations which involved his character
quite as much as his literary ability. The review
contained misstatements and mutilated quotations
which offered a chance for more or less dignified re
futation and explanation, a chance Rossetti grasped
to the regret of his personal friends, although his
response to Mr. Maitland (who turned out to be Mr.
Robert Buchanan) was temperate and well expressed.
In 1872 Mr. Buchanan reissued his article as a pam
phlet volume of about a hundred pages, much en
larged, with further denunciatory matter and with no
retractions. Nine years later, when Rossetti was
under the shadow of death, he did retract, dedicating
his romance, entitled God and the Man, to Rossetti,
— An Old Enemy. After Rossetti's death the fol
lowing year he withdrew even from the conviction
which had formed the basis of his criticism. " Mr.

ftranslations anb ©riginal poems. 139
Rossetti, I freely admit now, was never a Fleshly
Poet at all," he wrote in The Academy.
This incident in Rossetti's career would be un
worthy of any detailed mention were it not for the
physical effect upon its victim attributed to it by
those nearest him and most entitled to judge of such
effect. At the time the article appeared Rossetti was
at Kelmscott, and by his own admission "far from
exempt from signs of failing health." Insomnia had
begun its devastating work some years before, and
the use of chloral had recently been adopted. The
end was perhaps in sight independently of any fur
ther evils, but the strain upon the nerves by the un
expected and violent criticism apparently induced
greater sufferings from sleeplessness and correspond
ingly increased dosing with chloral, so that by the
time Mr. Buchanan's pamphlet appeared Rossetti
was in a condition to regard it as the first step in " a
widespread conspiracy for crushing his fair fame as
an artist and a man, and for hounding him out of
honest society." In the collection of his family let
ters those immediately following the one in which
he mentions the matter of The Contemporary Review
tell sadly enough the story of permanently broken
health, depressed spirits, and " an utter sleeplessness
in spite of heavy narcotics." The relation of cause
to effect is best stated in his brother's words : " It
is a simple fact," he says, " that, from the time when
the pamphlet had begun to work into the inner tis
sue of his feelings Dante Rossetti was a changed

140 ftbe IRossettis.
man, and so continued to the close of his life. Diffi
cult though it may be to believe this of a person so
self-reliant in essentials as Rossetti, — one who had all
his life been doing so many things just as he chose,
and because he so chose, and whether other people
liked them or not, — it is nevertheless the truth, as I
know but too well."1
1 Mr. Buchanan's dedication is quoted in Mr. Hall Caine's Recollections of
Rossetti. It runs as follows : 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.
To a later edition, published after Rossetti's death, were added these lines :
To Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
Calmly, the royal robe of death around thee,
Thou sleepest 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 ! "
By the stanzas To An Old Enemy, Rossetti, according to Mr. Caine, was
" manifestly touched." He was at all events sufficiently forgiving to discuss with
sympathy, upon his death-bed, Mr. Buchanan's then new volume of poems.

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CHAPTER VII.
LIFE AT CHEYNE WALK AND KELMSCOTT.
IN speaking of the publication of Rossetti's poetry
we have anticipated the order of events in his
life. To return to the date of his wife's death :
he almost immediately removed from the Chambers
in Chatham Place to 16 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, the
old Tudor House of many associations. The Thames
Embankment did not then exist, and in front of the
house were all the "boating bustle and longshore
litter of the old days." Behind it was a garden of
something less than an acre in extent, dotted over
with lime-trees, and enclosed by a high wall ; also,
after Rossetti's advent, populated by as large a va
riety of beasts as can well be imagined outside of a
" zoo." Within were rooms, " old-fashioned, home
like, and comfortable," with many cupboards and
odd nooks, and of curious architectural construction.
The room adopted for a studio was large (in the
neighbourhood of thirty by twenty feet), and a series
of columns and arches on one side suggested the
presence in former times of a wide staircase. It was
lighted by a mullioned window which Rossetti had
'4'
J42 Gbe IRossettis.
enlarged until it reached to the ceiling, and so filled
with easels, furniture, bric-a-brac, and pictures that
it took an appreciable time for a visitor to thread his
way from the door to the sofa on which Rossetti was
in the habit of lolling, according to Mr. Hall Caine's
account of him, " with his head laid low and his feet
thrown up in a favourite attitude on the back." In
this studio, hung with his own paintings (which lay
also on the floor and against the easels in all stages
of completion), Rossetti received his friends with the
spontaneous hearty greeting of which Mr. Hall Caine
and Mr. Gosse and Mr. Watts-Dunton have spoken,
and which never even in sickness or depression was
denied those to whom he was really attached. Here
he sat late into the night or all night long, as in
his Pre-Raphaelite years, in the veritable conversa
zioni of which he was the leader in spirit if not in
loquacity. In talk he seems not to have dominated
as much as might have been supposed from the pre-
emptory, positive cast of his opinions and his incisive
expression. At the time Mr. Caine knew him he
" required to be constantly interrogated," but caught
the drift of a suggestion at once and led it on from
point to point, "almost removing the necessity for
more than occasional words." A certain amount of
wit he had, and more, perhaps, of humour, but in his
conversation, as in his letters, the lighter charm was
given apparently by a sportive fancy and banter,
sometimes sarcastic and always stimulating, the
familiar and social side of that great imagination

Xife at Cbepne "Mall, anb Ikelmscott. H3
which was his bane as surely as it was his glory.
His mind was teeming with suggestions of a practical
sort and with schemes beyond his own compass,
which were always at the disposal of those who
wanted them. He was as ready to plan a book-cover
or a picture frame for a rival as for himself, and the
exquisite cover of his Poems, and the fitness and odd
ity of his many frames show the value of suggestions
from such a source.
Despite the genuine and deep grief attending the
loss of his wife, he was far from succumbing at this
time to the melancholia that lies always in wait for
temperaments such as his. Mr. Gosse, who did not
know him until 1870, declares that any sketch of him
would be incomplete that did not describe his loud
and infectious laughter ; and his brother " apologises
to his loved memory " for even alluding to the
"trumpery misconception" of him in the current
notion that he was " a vague and gloomy phantasist,
combined of mysticism and self-opinion, who was
always sunk in despondency or fizzing with affecta
tion or airing some intangible ideal." Nothing testi
fies more conclusively to the excellent fibre of his
manliness than the decision and energy with which
he threw himself into a variety of interests and wel
comed society of a tonic kind during even the first
months of bereavement Indeed, so far from dis
liking society, he seemed to Mr. Gosse to crave it as
a necessity, although he chose to select its constitu
ents and to narrow its range.

144 ftbe IRossettis.
When he took Tudor House he was still on the
hither side of prosperity, and his rent (a hundred
pounds a year, only), was lightened by his taking as
subtenants Swinburne, whose enlivening acquaint
ance he had made at Oxford, George Meredith,
whose unlikeness to Rossetti was of a sort to dis
courage great familiarity between the two, and Wil
liam Rossetti, who came only on three fixed days of
the week, and was, he says, on the footing of a
guest after affairs had got into their regular course.
Later, when Rossetti's pictures began to be in
steady demand and to bring high prices, he occupied
the house alone, although its rent was presently
doubled. He entertained sometimes quite regally,
and always with frank hospitality. The amount of
pains he took to perfect the details of his more formal
dinners may be measured by his disapprobation of
one Christmas feast for which he had not been able
to superintend preparations, and at which the guests
were arranged with "all the ladies in comfortable
seats on the side of the table near the fire, all the
gentlemen facing them," and himself at the head of
the table "as though about to deliver a funeral ora
tion." The meats, on this occasion, moreover, were
carved in the room, "at least two minutes elapsing
before serving each guest," and the butler, "like a
fool," asked each which he preferred, beef or fowl !
We hear also, however, of the easier practice of
inviting " a few blokes and coves " for the evening,
" with nothing but oysters and of course the seed-

Xife at ftbe .me XKTlaln anb Ikelmscott. 145
iest of clothes." Mr. Gilchrist has reported the
simple method of his housekeeping: "when his
housekeeper wearied him with a dish, he abruptly
changed the diet. ' Oh, let me have woodcock
to - morrow ! ' Whereupon his housekeeper with
Chinese precision served woodcock in season and
out of season."
Not only was he thus a liberal host, but he had
the not too usual grace sometimes to receive as
guests for months at a time — apparently as long as
it suited their convenience — friends who were out
of health or "out of luck," without exploiting the
service. Among the companions he liked, but did not
grapple to his soul, was Whistler, to whose competi
tive spirit Tudor House owed much of its interests
as a storehouse of antiquities, he and Rossetti estab
lishing a friendly rivalry in the collection of blue
china and Japanese treasures. There are tales of
Rossetti dashing away from his visitors to secure a
bargain which, were it left till morning, might fall
into Whistler's clutches, and the market strengthened
rapidly under the effect of such zeal and persistence.
Old oak was another passion before, as his brother
says, the collecting mania became extinct in Ross
etti, and he possessed also large numbers of curi
osities in bronze, and many pieces of jewelry such
as the necklace encircling the strong young throat
of his Joan of Arc, and the black pearl set in silver
in the picture Monna Vanna, to say nothing of the

146 ftbe IRossettis.
incense burners, the brass ewer, the loving-cup,
the Peruvian featherwork ornaments, the ebony
and ivory mirrors, familiar to those who know the
pictures of his later life. It was he who gave to
the celebrated hawthorn jars their name, and he
anticipated also the modern taste for Botticelli. His
Madonna by that master was bought for the trifling
sum of twenty pounds and sold toward the end of
his life for three hundred and fifteen pounds.
His collection of animals was significant of a
predilection dating back to the days when Christina
and he as children visited the Zoological Gardens.
In the great garden of his new home this predilec
tion had full play and a truly marvellous procession
of pets passed through those heavy gates. At one
time or another, according to his brother's incomplete
list, he owned dogs, rabbits, dormice, hedgehogs,
two successive wombats, a Canadian marmot or
woodchuck, an ordinary marmot, armadillos, kan
garoos, wallabies, a deer, white mice, a raccoon, squir
rels, a mole, peacocks, wood-owls, Virginian owls,
Chinese horned owls, a jackdaw, Australian king
fishers, parrakeets, a talking grey parrot, a raven,
chameleons, green lizards, and Japanese salaman
ders, besides a zebu who incurred his master's dis
pleasure by ungratefully treeing him. The first
wombat was the favourite of these " beasts," occu
pying a place of honour at Rossetti's dinners, on top
of the epergne in the centre of the table, where it
would usually remain politely dormant. On one

Xife at ftbe .me Main anb IRelmscott. 147
occasion, however, we hear of its descending at a
propitious moment to devour the entire contents of
a box of valuable cigars, a story that matches well
the account of the eupeptic raccoon who devoured
shillings' worth of prussic acid with impunity.
Other stories tell us of the mole who was found
dead "after being all right over night and eating
worms like fun " ; of the armadillo who burrowed
his way out of the premises and turned up at a
neighbouring hearthstone, to dismay the cook with
suggestions of the evil one ; and of the dormice who
ate up their own tails and perished. The wombat,
however, was the darling of the menagerie. "The
Wombat is 'A Joy, a Triumph, a Delight, a Mad
ness ! ' " wrote its master soon after acquiring it.
This sluggish marsupial, according to Madox Brown
was the prototype of the now historic dormouse in
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, the same who
had to have hot tea poured on his nose to keep him
awake at dinner, but declared that he had n't been
asleep but "had heard every word you fellows
were saying." Many a word worth hearing must
have travelled along the auditory canal of Rossetti's
wombat, as it dreamed in its own particular and
actual Wonderland.
Rossetti's interest in his peculiar playmates was
quite independent of zoological knowledge, of which
he possessed little or none. If we may once more
consider Watts-Dunton's D'Arcy as his mouthpiece
the following passage shows the particular turn of

148 ftbe IRossettis.
his affection for them : "I have a love of animals
which, I suppose, I may call a passion," says D'Arcy.
" The kind of amusement they can afford me is like
none other. It is the self-consciousness of men and
women that makes them, in a general way, im
mensely unamusing. I turn from them to the un
conscious brutes, and often get a world of enjoyment.
To watch a kitten or a puppy play, or the funny
antics of a parrot or a cockatoo, or the wise move
ments of a wombat, will keep me for hours from
being bored."
'"And children,'" I said, "'do you like child
ren?'" " ' Yes, so long as they remain like young animals
— until they become self-conscious, I mean, and that
is very soon. Then their charm goes.' "
Rossetti's letters contain many an allusion to his
"beasts," and from Morris's house at Kelmscott he
records an instance of one of the ways in which an
obliging puppy (named Dizzy) kept him from being
bored. " At present," he says, "I am going about
with a black patch over my nose. Last night Jenny
fille and I agreed to shriek at the same moment
(one ' Creepy ' and the other ' Crawly ') in Dizzy's
two ears, while May beat a tattoo on the top of his
head. The instant result was that he turned round
howling, and bit me (fortunately not Jenny) across
the nose, at which I am not surprised."
At one time an attractive young elephant was
under consideration as a possible purchase, and to

Rosa Triplex.
National Gallery: London.

IPS

D"Arc

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it KelriT:

Xife at ftbe^ne Waft anb Ikelmscott. 149
the dissuasions of his friends Rossetti replied by
explaining how useful such ah animal might be
made to him in his profession. "I mean to teach
him to clean the windows," he said; "then, when
someone passes by the house he will seethe elephant
cleaning the windows and will say, ' Who lives in
that house ? ' and people will tell him, ' Oh, that's a
painter called Rossetti,' and he will say, 'I think I
should like to buy one of that man's pictures. ' So
he will ring to come in, and I shall sell him a picture."
There is no record that an elephant was ever
among Rossetti's pets, but his intimate acquaintance
with the appearance of that picturesque mammal is
well proven by a series of humorous sketches en
closed in letters to one of his correspondents, in
which the elephant is engaged in various human
occupations, such as playing cards, digging in the
ground, or unlocking secret closets. These sketches
are irresistibly amusing and illustrate perfectly Ros
setti's whimsical, confidential attitude toward the
animal world.
The garden which formed the theatre of many
dramas in the lives of his pets was purposely kept a
tangled wilderness of luxuriant growth. This was
his own taste, as the letters show, but he was en
couraged by his friend Watts-Dunton to emphasise
its " raggedness " as much as possible, the latter
having a passion for " weeds," and Rossetti, " with
a good-humoured but uninterested smile," allowing
him to indulge it. Jessamine, roses, and marigolds

iso ftbe IRossettis.
mingled with thistles. There were Solomon's seal,
daisies, blue irises, and rhubarb ; fig-trees grew at
their own sweet will, and a mulberry-tree and a
sycamore are mentioned as particularly beautiful
among the trees. As Rossetti became more disin
clined to going out into the bustle of the streets he
was in the habit of tramping about the untamed
place at the rate of five miles an hour for his daily
exercise. In the early sixties we find him making some
attempts at being a man of the world. He was a
member of three clubs, — the Garrick, the Arun
del, and the Burlington Fine Arts. Some of his
friends remember whist as having been among his
occasional amusements, though he was a poor
player and "rather addicted to abstruse specula
tions on the reasons which had induced him to play
the wrong card. " "No amount of respect or attach
ment to his genius," Mr. Knight reflects, "could
reconcile players to a partner who ignored or
scorned the elementary rules of the game and who
could only be regarded as a third enemy. In 1863
he was in Belgium again, and in the following year
revisited Paris, this being the last of his short, in
frequent trips to the Continent. Manet had re
cently come up with his new point of view and
iconoclastic methods, and this is what Rossetti in
full maturity found to say of him and his followers :
" It is well worth while for English painters to try
and do something now, as the new French school is

Xife at Cbepne TKHalJ. anb Ikelmscott. 151
simple putrescence and decomposition. There is a
man named Manet (to whose studio I was taken
by Fantin), whose pictures are for the most part
mere scrawls, and who seems to be one ofthe lights
of the school. Courbet, the head of it, is not much
better." Much more truly than he realised did Ros
setti describe himself when he said on this same
visit : "I keep in so narrow a circle that I see little
ofthe change."
The financial history of the decade between his
wife's death and the first serious breakdown in his
health, in 1872, is a triumphant record of increasing
prosperity. He had not long been settled in Cheyne
Walk before needing an art assistant. In 1866 he
was getting four hundred and fifty guineas for his
Lady Lilith and considering three hundred guineas a
small price for the Beata Beatrix. That year his in
come was rather more than a thousand pounds and
the next year it fell little if any below three thousand.
In business transactions he was no dreamer, but
clear-headed, firm, and competent. In managing
the money he thus efficiently earned he was little
better than a child. The cheques he received he
cashed, and stuffed the money into an open drawer.
" Money dripped from his fingers," says his brother,
' ' in all sorts of ways, unforecast at the time, and
not always easily accounted for afterwards." He
was lavish, both in generosity and in self-indulgence,
feeling himself " doubly bound " by his exemption
from the cares of a family to provide for the children

152 ftbe IRossettis.
of an old friend, and unable to deny himself a super
fluous zebu though he must borrow to pay for it.
Although to the end his income was large, he had,
in his own words, " never a penny to fly with."
While he was positive and uncompromising with
the purchasers of his pictures, and at times kept
them waiting long and anxiously for the work they
had commissioned and paid for (as in the case of
Professor Norton's Before the Battle, commissioned
in 1858 and delivered in 1862), he was nevertheless
usually on excellent terms with them. Mr. Leyland,
who at the time of Rossetti's death owned a collec
tion of his pictures "second to none — or indeed
superior to all others," held him in a regard rather
more than brotherly as the relations of brothers
commonly stand. Leyland, Mr. Prinsep says, was
a proud, reserved man, who from his youth made
few friends. He " hated disorder, untidiness, or
unpunctuality." Rossetti on the other hand "was
impressionable, enthusiastic, unmethodical, yet Ley-
land, though he was often tried by Rossetti's want
of method never wavered in his affection for him
from the moment he became intimate with him till
he went over to see him die, and stood by his grave
at Birchington-by-the-Sea. Nor after his death did
his affection diminish."
Rossetti's habits of work during these years were
more methodical, perhaps, but not more reasonable
than in his youth. Going to bed at three, four, or
five o'clock in the morning, he rose when he liked

Xife at Cbepne Mall, anb Ikelmscott. 153
and breakfasted at the hour he chose and alone, ir
respective of any guests who might be staying in
the house. He then painted as long as the light
served him, and at nine or ten o'clock in the evening
started off on his nocturnal rambles or cab drives,
something after the fashion of Haroun Al Raschid,
giving rise to many a rumour concerning him, and
accentuating the impression of eccentricity made on
the public mind. In 1867 and 1868 there are omin
ous intimations of sinking vitality. The question
of his ability to sleep comes into his letters, in
somnia had obviously begun, and he was, in his
brother's words, "one of the worst men living to
cope with the fell antagonist." In addition, toward
the end of the summer of 1867 his eyesight weak
ened greatly as a result of overstrained nerves, and
he was fearful of repeating his father's fate of almost
total blindness. This never happened, nor did his
health decline steadily, but there were frequent and
distressing lapses from a normal condition. In 1870,
he tried the experiment of chloral at the suggestion
of Mr. W. J. Stillman, but this first introduction to
the drug was not, it seems, the actual beginning of
the habit later formed. The facts are given in a let
ter by Mr. Stillman to The Academy (March 19,
1898), from which the following extracts are taken:
" During the first year of my intimacy with Dante
(1870)," he says, " and when I was a good deal at
Cheyne Walk, he was greatly troubled by insom
nia, to such an extent indeed, that he had then

154 ftbe IRossettis.
suspended work, and had fallen into a morbid and
despondent mood with delusions. The efforts of his
family to induce him to go into the country, or take
any change, were ineffective, and finding him in a
really dangerous state of mind, I advised trying
chloral, which I had been using under the advice of
my physician, and I gave him of my own supply,
twenty grains dissolved in three ounces of water, a
tablespoonful to be taken three nights in succession,
and then no more until three days had elapsed, when
if it had the effect desired I would have repeated the
supply. He forgot it until the third day, and then
took the three doses at once. The effect was not
satisfactory, and he reported that he did not care to
repeat it, as it gave him a short fit of profound
stupor after which his sleeplessness was worse than
before and he refused to try it again. At that junc
ture Mme. Bodichon, who was a dear friend of both
Dante and myself, had offered me her cottage at
Scalands for a few weeks' residence, and with her
consent I invited Dante to make me a visit there.
He accepted and we stayed, I think, three months,
in which time he entirely recovered his sleep and
power of working, making some of his best draw
ings there, but during the whole time he thought no
more of chloral, nor did he need any soporific. I
left him, with Mme. Bodichon's consent, at Sca
lands, and returned to America. At a later date I
learned that he had taken to chloral and had fallen
into the morbid state in which I had found him in

Xife at Cbepne "Main anb Ikelmscott. 155
1870, with delusions still more distressing, intensi
fied by some of the criticisms on his book which he
had finished and published while we were at Sca
lands. He had taken the chloral by the advice of a
physician, whose prescription he had made up at
several druggists' simultaneously as the amount did
not satisfy his craving. Between my prescription
and his acquiring the habit of misuse of the drug
there was no connection whatever, for a consider
able time had elapsed between the two events. It
was at some time when I was away from London
that the habit began, for the intimacy between us
when I was in London was such that he could not
have taken it up without my knowledge, and I was
unaware that he had done so until the misuse had
become very grave. In any case I declare in the
most positive manner that my recommendation of
the drug had only produced peremptory rejection of
it as a remedy for his insomnia."
The description of Rossetti forgetting the remedy
for a couple of nights and then taking three doses of
it at once, recalls the story in Mr. Caine's book
which Rossetti is said to have told of himself " with
infinite zest." Having nux vomica to take for a con
dition of nervous exhaustion, he remembered one
afternoon that he had not yet taken the first of his
three daily doses. " 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

156 ftbe IRossettis.
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, Mr. Caine declares, and in the last year of
his life was more aghast at seeing him take a harm
less dose of it than he would have been at hearing
that fifty grains of chloral had been taken. Unquest
ionably he was not sufficiently strong in pharma
cology to dally with a powefrul drug. However it
came about that the chloral habit was formed, by
1872 its effects were wofully prominent. The 2nd of
June of that year his brother declares the most mis
erable day of his life, as Rossetti's wild talk on that
day showed that beyond doubt he was not entirely
sane. Delusions ran riot in his mind, and were of the

Xife at ftbevne Main anb Ikelmscott. 157
unhappy nature of prejudices against friends of
long standing and complete fidelity. Browning,
the "glorious Robert" ofthe early visit to Paris,
was one of these. His Fifine at the Fair, just then
published, was supposed to contain at its close some
lines of spiteful reference to Rossetti, and that friend
ship collapsed in hopeless ruin, the two men never
again meeting or holding any communication with
one another. An even more extravagant fancy
ranged Mr. Dodgson with the conspirators who as
sailed him, the famous verses on the Hunting of the
Snark constituting a pasquinade against him.
After a consultation of physicians, Dr. Hake, a
friend who, to borrow the words of William Ros
setti, was the earthly Providence of the Rossetti
family in those dark days, opened his house at Roe-
hampton to the patient, for whom change of scene
was prescribed. On the journey and after his arrival
poor Rossetti's mental disturbance was shown in a
variety of disquieting manifestations. He was per
secuted by the sound of imaginary voices besetting
him with terms of obloquy, and during his second
night at Roehampton, goaded to the limit of endur
ance, he made an attempt to end his life by means
of laudanum, which, unknown to his friends, he had
brought with him. He was unconscious for some
thing more than twenty-four hours, and his family
hastened to his bedside hopeless of his recovery.
The efforts of Dr. Hake and of his old friend John
Marshall were successful, however, in rescuing him,

158 ftbe IRossettis.
and he revived, to enter upon his last decade in
utter prostration of spirit and in bodily discomfort.
Thereafter he was to sink gradually, though still
with frequent respites and returns to the appearance
of health, under the dominion of a drug as insidious
and deadly as that which reigned over the minds of
Coleridge and De Quincy.
His way of life had for some time been changing
toward increased seclusion and freedom from the
responsibility of social claims. A few of his early
friends had dropped out of his circle. Ruskin was
estranged, and Hunt ; and Woolner, the P.-R. B., was
no longer his intimate ; but when the crash in his
health came his old friend Madox Brown, Bell Scott,
and Dr. Hake whom he had then known three years,
drew at once to his side, and with one or more of
them to give care and companionship he was taken
to Perthshire, Scotland, where Mr. Graham, the pur
chaser of many of his pictures, put his two country-
places at his disposal. In each of these he stayed
for a little time, and then settled for a month or
more at a quiet farmhouse at Trowan Crieff, where
he lived as wholesome a life as possible, " stumping
his way," Dr. Hake records, "over long areas of
path and road with his thick stick in hand, but hold
ing no intercourse with Nature" ; eating heartily as
was his habit, and supplied by the attentive Graham
with hampers of grouse, hares, partridges, and gain
ing steadily in the power to sleep through Dr.
Hake's devotion in sitting nightly by his bedside and

Xife at Cbe^ne Malf. anb Ikelmscott. 159
repeating every anecdote he had ever heard, and
relating every amusing incident of his intercourse
with the world. In this way he presently was in a
condition to resume work, and left Scotland toward
the end of September to go to Kelmscott Manor-
house which he had taken in conjunction with Mor
ris the year before, in order to have a place in the
country where he could leave his belongings, and
to which he could retreat for work as opportunity
offered. The opportunity had now come in the
shape of a virtual necessity, and until the end
of July, 1874, Rossetti made his headquarters at
Kelmscott. " It is a most lovely old house," he had written
from there in 1871. "It still belongs to the family
whose ancestors built it, and whose arms are still on
some of the chimney-breasts. The garden and
meadows leading to the river-brink are truly de
licious — indeed the place is perfect : and the river
side walks are most charming in their way, though
I must say the flatness of the country renders it
monotonous and uninspiring to me. However, it is
the very essence of all that is peaceful and retired —
the solitude almost absolute. Kelmscott is a hamlet
containing, I am told, 1 17 people, and these even one
may be said never to see, if one keeps, as I do, the
field-paths rather than the highroad."
During his long sojourn the solitude within the
house was by no means absolute. One or more
members ofthe Morris family were most of the time

160 ftbe IRossettis.
present, Rossetti's friends and family visited him
from time to time, and Dr. Hake's son, Mr. George
Hake, was with him in the capacity of secretary.
His family letters of this period are not conspicuous
for gloom or even great dejection. The letters to
his mother in particular are affectionately playful in
tone and contain many details of the beautiful gar
den and surrounding country apparently observed
chiefly for her entertainment. The antics of his
dogs are also chronicled, and there are very pleasant
glimpses of his kindly relations to the Morris child
ren who served him both as models and companions.
While his health lapsed again toward the close of
his stay, and his mischievous habits of dining late,
and sitting up most of the night, to purchase sleep
at last with heavy doses of chloral, were all tending
to make permanent recovery impossible, he was
nevertheless neither morose nor devoid of consola
tions. During his first year at Kelmscott he found
a friend after his own heart, Theodore Watts-Dunton,
who came to understand him on the most hidden
and subtle sides of his nature, and who would one
day, he thought, show him as he was to a world
of misinterpreters. The versatility of Mr. Watts-
Dunton's mind and Dr. Hake's custom of quoting
him as an authority on every subject that came up
in conversation, caused Rossetti before meeting him
to regard him with amusement. The " Oraculum
of the hayfields " he called him, but after meeting
him he won from him a tender regard and devotion

Xife at Gbe^ne Main anb Ikelmscott. 161
that made the friendship between the two unique in
beauty. Their first intercourse came about through
some legal service that Mr. Watts - Dunton in his
capacity of solicitor rendered Rossetti. In the end
there seems to have been hardly any service that he
did not render him. A poet himself and a discern
ing and original critic, his companionship was stimul
ating to him in his best hours, and in his worst there is
perhaps but one — Mr. Watts-Dunton himself — who
knows the extent to which was exercised that power
to soothe and cheer by which Rossetti's life, accord
ing to his physician, was more than once actually
saved. One of the last phrases upon Rossetti's lips
was this : "Watts is a hero of friendship," and so
much a hero he was that he has never, since Ros
setti's death, magnified by an infinitesimal degree his
office of friendship — that office most difficult of any
to estimate with true humility. "What was called
my 'self-sacrifice,'" he writes, "was not and could
not be, any self-sacrifice at all. It is no self-sacrifice
to spend one's time with a man whose society gives
such an immensity of pleasure as Rossetti's gave
me," and the best tribute to be paid is absolutely to
believe this statement of his feeling.
Rossetti's personal appearance at this time has
been described by several of his friends, who remem
ber it in every detail, they think, with precision.
No two of these accounts agree in all particulars,
but the composite portrait gained from them shows
a man of rather low middle stature (five feet seven

1 62 ftbe IRossettis.
or eight) with feet and hands as small as a woman's,
and a tendency to stoutness. On the face alone was
the signature of his winning and impressive person
ality. Here in the noble forehead on which the thin
hair curled slightly about the temples, in the eyes of
a colour between hazel and blue-grey, with inde
scribable lights moving and alive in the deeps of the
pupils ; and the strongly marked straight nose with
wide nostrils, we see all that was beautiful or im
posing in Rossetti's physical aspect. His mouth,
covered by a dark-brown moustache, was rather too
full and loose-lipped to be attractive, and was slightly
satirical in expression. His voice was singularly
rich, mellow, sympathetic, and powerful, of bell-like
tone and sonority; "a voice," Mr. Gosse declares,
"capable of expressing without effort every shade
of emotion from rage and terror to the most sublime
tenderness. I have never heard a voice so fitted for
poetical effect, so purely imaginative, and yet, in its
absence of rhetoric, so clear and various as that of
Gabriel Rossetti."
Those whose privilege it was to meet him, says
the same writer, " in the plenitude of his powers
and in the freshness of their own impressions, will
not expect to be moved again through life by so
magnetic a presence."

CHAPTER VIII.
PAINTING FROM 1862 TO 1870.
ROSSETTI'S paintings during this interval be
tween his wife's death and the great break
down in his health just recorded, were
gradually changing character, and taking on certain
qualities of colour and type and handling associated
now in the public mind with what has come to be
considered his peculiar style, the kind of picture that,
when his name is mentioned, rises before the mental
vision of those unfamiliar with the widest range of
his work. From the full and varied compositions,
the small canvases, the dry, lustreless medium of
the earlier period, he passed to the large single-figure
subjects, rich and fervid in colour, and painted with
a comparatively fluid vehicle. Romantic and re
ligious symbols largely gave place to magnificence
of decoration, sensitive and refined forms to full and
massive ones. The picture that heralded this Vene
tian manner in its chief attributes was one to which
it was triumphantly appropriate : The Beloued. " I
mean it to be like jewels," Rossetti wrote of it to
163

1 64 ftbe IRossettis.
Mr. Rae for whom it was painted ; and " no one who
has not seen it," says Mr. Marillier, "can form the
most remote conception of its brilliance." The sub
ject is the bride of Solomon's Song : " Behold, thou
art fair, my love, behold, thou art fair : thou hast
dove's eyes." In the centre is the bride sumptuously
clad in green embroidered robes, behind her a group
of four virgins, and before her a little negro boy
with a golden vase of roses in his hands. In the
bride's hair and on her neck are gorgeous ornaments,
and the negro is also thus bedecked ; the virgins are
carrying branches of japonica and tiger-lily. Ros
setti's old friend and P.-R. Brother, F. G. Stephens,
finds The Beloved the "finest production of his
genius " with the exception of one or two later
works, " where sentiment of a more exalted sort, as
in Proserpine, inspired the designs." " Of his skill in
the high artistic sense," he adds, "implying the
vanquishment of prodigious difficulties — difficulties
the greater because of his imperfect technical educa
tion — there cannot be two just opinions as to the
preeminence of Mr. Rae's magnificent possession.
It indicates the consummation of Rossetti's powers
in the highest order of modern art, and is in har
mony with that poetic inspiration which is found in
every one of his more ambitious pictures." In this
picture Rossetti took more than usual satisfaction,
perhaps because he had tried for the beauty of visible
form and colour and left out of consideration the
more subtle psychological suggestions ordinarily

Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
From a photograph, Cheyne Walk, 1864.

Mmm

Wmi

painting from 1862 to 1870. 165
engrossing his ardent attention. He had taken a
painter's subject, had employed for his principal
figure a hired model, and had momentarily freed
himself from the mystical side of his temperament.
He was in a sense asserting his independence of
himself and at the same time giving play to his ap
preciation of purely external beauty. Looking at
the reproduction in Mr. Marillier's book which to a
great degree preserves the impression of a canvas
dyed with resplendent hues, we see how much of
Rossetti is left out of The Beloved, and how compar
atively tame is the result divested of its colour. In
the sweet eyes of the bride, in the little face of the
negro, chosen as a bit of " invaluable jet" and in the
spirited face of the gypsy, we have vital hints of
reality and suggestion, but the Rossetti elements of
strangeness and fervour are absent. Very different
is the case with Lady Lilith, painted about the same
time (1864), in which there is a similar frank attempt
to realise the utmost charm of radiant loveliness in
colour and line. This was one of the pictures that
Rossetti could not let alone, and in 1873 he scraped
out the head, which was painted from the model
"Fanny Cornforth " (Mrs. Schott), and replaced it
with a very different type of head painted from Miss
Alexa Wilding who was then posing for his more
important pictures. Those who have seen both
versions are unanimous in preferring the earlier, but
the photograph obtained from it certainly in some
respects upholds Rossetti's own favourable view of

1 66 Gbe IRossettis.
the change. His problem was to paint a fair, witch
like woman, magnificently beautiful, with sinister
intimations of cruelty and craft in her expression.
The first type of face, with parted Hps, calm eyes,
level lids and full chin, represents a combination of
coldness and vanity adequately enough, but fails
entirely to give the expression of sorcery, of un
earthly enchantment, which was in his mind and
which he embodied in the sonnet engraved upon the
frame.1 In the later face his craftsmanship came to
the aid of his imagination and fixed upon the can
vas the primary idea with a power and refinement
of interpretation singular even in Rossetti. The
significant changes are in the languid eyes with the
arched shadow above them, and the peculiar curve
of the lids lending a passionless melancholy to the
look ; in the drooping lines of the richly modelled
mouth, and in the firmer and more delicate line of
the throat and the deeper cutting of the chin. The
character thus introduced saves the subject from the
merely commonplace vanity of the earlier presenta-
1 The sonnet on the frame of the Lady Lilith which belongs to Mr. Bancroft of
Wilmington, Delaware, differs in the sestet from that quoted in Mr. Stephens's mono
graph and published in the collected poems. Mr. Bancroft's version runs :
" Rose, foxglove, poppy are her flowers ; for where
Is he not found, O Lilith, whom shed scent
And soft-shed fingers and soft sleep shall snare ?
Lo ! as that youth's eyes burned at thine, so went
Thy spell through him, and left his straight neck bent
And round his heart one strangling golden hair."
In the other versions the first line reads :
" The rose and poppy are her flowers ; " and in the third line "kisses "
is substituted for " fingers."

painting from 1862 to 1870. 167
tion, and gives to it the shadow of fatality and the
potent magnetism necessary to dignify it and raise it
above the ordinary conception of the pride of beauty.
The colouring carries out the impression of sombre
interest subduing the ample splendour of the effect.
Rossetti somewhere speaks of Coleridge as possess
ing the sense of the momentous : "not the weird
and ominous only, but the value of monumental
moments," and the corresponding sense in himself
of the strangeness of certain aspects of life, the
tremendous importance of the tendencies toward
good or evil ofthe soul, forbade his leaving this sub
ject of "the Strangler" drawing men "to watch the
bright net she can weave till heart and body and life
are in its hold," before he had made it express not
merely the superficial meaning obvious to the lightest
thinker, but also the tragedy of its perilous charm.
To do this by virtue of facial expression alone, or
supported only by a sympathetic treatment of colour
was the triumph of Rossetti's idiosyncrasy. What
others might have done by illustrative composition,
he achieved by his power to see the human soul at
its most elusive moments revealed in the human
face. The Lady Lilith hangs in the home of its present
owner adjacent to the noble Council Chamber by
Burne Jones, and majestically superior to it in pro-
founder symbolism and mastery of one chapter in
the psychological story. To have read of the mas
sive waves of reddish golden hair, the crimson

1 68 ftbe IRossettis.
mouth, the abundant roses of the background, the
creamy draperies, the flashing landscape reflected in
the larger mirror leads one to expect a sudden greet
ing of blazing colour from the big canvas confronting
the door. The eyes most certainly meet nothing
dark or heavy, but they are not for a moment dazzled.
The strong, vivid hues are fused into such unity, the
accents of light and of pure colour have been so
restrained, the large surfaces kept so low in tone,
as to give such an effect as might be gained from a
southern landscape shielded from the sun except
where a single ray might touch a cardinal-flower.
The white roses with their occasional pink buds are
softened to a warm grey tone mottling the back
ground in dim patches ; the wealth of tumbling hair
through which Lilith is drawing her comb is dark
red in its shadow, a dusky brown in its half-tones,
with crisp gold high lights on the crests of its rich
waves; the dress and mantle are nearly all in partial
shadow ; the firm flesh of the throat and bust,
modelled with a feeling for massive forms greatly
unlike the slim shapes of Rossetti's early pictures, is
dark for the fair skin of the face, with warm green
ish tones ; the reds that gleam through the colour
scheme like a bright thread in tapestry, range from
the reddish violet of the foxglove, through the crim
son cord of the hand mirror, the coral bracelet, the
red of the mouth and the scarcely deeper red of
the poppy, to the shadows of the hair. The eyes
are grey ; the sunny landscape reflected in the glass

Lady Lilith.
Photographed from original ly courtesy ofthe owner,
Mr. Samuel Bancroft, Jr.

painting from 1862 to 1870. 169
is the tint of ripening foliage. In connection with
this combination of colours it is interesting to read a
fragmentary note made by Rossetti in 1 866. ' ' Think
ing in what order I love colours," he wrote, "found
the following : —
1 . Pure light warm green.
2. Deep gold-colour.
3. Certain tints of grey.
4. Shadowy or steel blue.
5. Brown, with crimson tinge.
6. Scarlet.
" Other colours (comparatively) only lovable ac
cording to the relations in which they are placed."
The association of colour and sentiment was al
ways a marked feature of Rossetti's painting, from
the white purity of the early religious pictures to
the cold, gloomy blues of Proserpine, and Mr. Ste
phens draws attention to instances in which he
seems also to have adopted the rather modern no
tion of symbolising music with colour, notably The
Blue Closet, which Mr. Stephens describes as follows :
" Four damsels appear in the composition, two of
whom sing. Their dresses are respectively subdued
purple and black, and pure emerald green and white.
They occupy the rear of the group. The other pair
are instrumentalists, and play on a double-keyed
clavichord (a sort of a dulcimer) placed between
them, while the one pinches the strings of a lute at
her side, and her companion pulls the string of a
little bell hanging next to the lute. The chief

170 ftbe IRossettis.
colours of the foreground and its figures are those
of the black-and-gold tapestry over the clavichord,
the gold of the musical instruments, the white and
crimson of the lute-player's garments, the scarlet,
green, and white of those of her companion. As to
the association of colour with music we may notice
that the sharp accents of the scarlet and green seem
to go with the sound of the bell ; the softer crimson,
purple, and white accord with the throbbing notes
of the lute and the clavichord, while the dulcet,
flute-like voices of the girls appear to agree with
those azure tiles on the wall and floor which gave
this fascinating drawing its name of The Blue Closet. "
We have already seen that Rossetti's pictures,
while they bear the impress in almost every case of
his subtle individuality, and are readily grouped to
correspond in a general way to definite divisions of
his life, occasionally include extreme variations. In
the remarkable picture called Found, for example, be
gun in 1854 and worked upon for the last time in
1882, only to be left unfinished in the end, we have
a nineteenth-century subject, treated in a modern
spirit, and painted in a general tone of cold grey,
not, certainly, in Rossetti's list of "lovable colours "
at any period of his artistic career. In the Dr. John
son at the Mitre, already described, we have the one
genre-painting, the one homely and humorous, to
be found in his collected works. And again in the
Joan of Arc, painted probably in 1862 (though possi
bly later), and now in the possession of Mr. S. T.

painting from 1862 to 1870. 171
Peters of New York, we have a type of face entirely
unlike the types usually chosen by him, and a subject
equally removed from the bent of his fancy, as in it
he devoted his energies to bringing out the martial
and not the mystical side of the warrior maid. It
would be natural to expect from a painter of his tem
perament the Joan of the visions, with eyes at least
as full of dreams as Bastien Lepage has painted them.
Instead he has shown her in the act of kissing the
sword of deliverance, with resolution, not revery or
inspiration, in her look. The face was painted from
a German model, is boyish in feature, and fierce and
strong in expression. The dark hair is thrown back
from the forehead, and falls heavily over a fine mus
cular throat. The hands are nearly as expressive as
the face, clenching the sword with eloquent gesture.
In handling, this picture resembles the Magdalen,
painted in 1877, the colour lying thick and slightly
stringy on the canvas as if oil had been freely used as
a medium. "Neither in expression, colour, nor de
sign did I ever do a better thing," Rossetti wrote of
it, and it is undeniably more vigorous and bold and
inspiriting than many of the works that show more
intimately his personal attitude toward life. Nor did
he, in this instance, sacrifice to the ascetic sentiment
ofthe subject his colour preferences, now growing so
intense. The blue steel cuff gleaming sharply on
the right arm is the only note of colour that does not
suggest the opulence of luxurious surroundings in a
time of peace.

172 ftbe IRossettis.
Another picture that was in a sense an experiment,
although typifying Rossetti's tendency during his
later years to alternate pretty and meaningless faces
with those oppressed with psychological significance,
is the Venus Verticordia of 1864, in which the head
and the undraped shoulders of a tall, handsome wo
man rise above a grove of honeysuckle and against
a background of roses. The original is in oil and a
small replica was done in water-colour. In this
composition Rossetti said he could not introduce
drapery of any kind without entirely killing his idea,
and it is the only known case in which he used the
nude model in a painting.
This picture was the rock on which Ruskin's
friendship with Rossetti finally went to pieces,
although as late as 1870, according to Mr. Marillier,
the two were in amicable correspondence. Ruskin
"frankly detested" the picture, Mr. Marillier says,
and Mr. William Rossetti quotes pregnant extracts
from his letters to Rossetti anent the bone of conten
tion. "You are, it seems, under the (for the present)
fatal mistake of thinking that you will ever learn to
paint well by painting badly, i. e., coarsely. But
come back to me when you have found out your
mistake, or (if you are right in your method) when
you can do better. I purposely used the word
' wonderfully ' painted about those flowers. They
were wonderful to me, in their realism, awful —
I can use no other word— in their coarseness. Come
and see me now if you like." And at last : " I am

Joan of Arc.
From the painting in possession of Mr. S. T. Peters, New York.

painting from 1862 to 1870. 173
very grateful to you for this letter, and for the feeling
it expresses towards me. You meant them— the
first and second—just as rightly as this pretty third ;
and yet they conclusively showed me that we could
not at present — nor for sometime yet — be com
panions any more, though true friends, I hope, as
ever. I do not choose any more to talk to you until
you can recognise my superiorities as / can yours.
You simply cannot see certain characters in me. A
day may come when you will be able : then — with
out apology, without restraint, merely as being differ
ent from what you are now — come back to me and
we will be as we used to be."
The " wonderful " and " awful " flowers were un
dertaken by Rossetti in a sufficiently careful spirit to
have brought about good results. He writes to his
mother of being tied down to his canvas until all the
flower part of it is finished. " I have done many
more roses," he says, "and have established an ar
rangement with a nursery gardener at Cheshunt,
whereby they reach me every two days at 2s. 6d. for
a couple of dozen each time, which is better than
paying a shilling apiece at Covent Garden. Also
honeysuckles I have succeeded in getting at the
Crystal Palace, and have painted a lot already in my
foreground, and hope for more. All these achieve
ments were made only with infinite labour on my
part, and the loss of nearly a whole week in search
ing." And again : " I have been so busy that I have
not been anywhere except where my picture took

174 ftbe IRossettis.
me to look for flowers. I got three different parcels
of honeysuckles from three different friends in three
different parts of England, none of which were of
any use, being broken and faded. Then I got some
from a nursery at Waltham Cross which were not
much good either, and lastly from the Crystal Palace.
All with much delay and bother. So you see I have
had a time of it."
However desultory in his methods of work Ros
setti had been in his youth, by the time he was
thirty-five he had formed strict habits of industry.
In a letter of 1865, he mentions that "during the
five months ending with the close of October " there
had been only twelve days which he had not spent
at his easel.
The record in Mr. Marillier's book of work accom
plished between 1862 and 1870 includes more than
sixty oil- and water-colours, besides numerous car
toons and crayon studies, the last amounting in many
cases to important pictures, owing to Rossetti's
unique method of treating this flexible medium. In
1864 he wrote to his aunt, with whom he kept up a
faithful friendship: "I trust shortly to begin a very
large work on commission, and henceforward to do
almost exclusively large works in oil. Small things
and water-colours I should never have done at all, ex
cept for the long continuance of a necessity for ' pot
boilers." To this resolution he held in the main,
most of the water-colours done after that date being
replicas of earlier pictures, a form of "pot-boiling"

painting from 1862 to 1870. 175
in which he indulged to a considerable extent.
"Certain qualities of oil-painting he mastered with
entire success," Mr. Colvin says, in speaking of
this transition. " Depth of tone and chiaroscuro he
did not as yet seek, but he attacked and vanquished
the most daring problems of colour in equal and dif
fused light. For the combination of keen and flash
ing intensity with mystery and delightfulness of
quality, his painting of tissues and jewels and flowers
at this period stands, it is no extravagance to say,
alone in art." A later critic, however, writing ofthe
exhibition at the New Gallery in 1898, of some of
Rossetti's pictures, considered the charm of the col
lection to lie in the fact that it was' composed chiefly
of early work and water-colours. " Rossetti devel
oped a water-colour technique peculiar to himself,"
he says, "which was strong and vigorous, a tech
nique which he wielded with power. Never has
this medium been made to yield more intense or
richer colour ; and although the iridescent washes
which Turner used with such magical effects are left
on one side, nevertheless the results Rossetti wished
to attain are reached with complete success. It was
different when he used oil-colour ; the painter and
the paint appear at variance ; the artist seems to be
trying to compel his colours to work in a way foreign
to their nature. Beautiful chromatic effects were
often arrived at, no doubt, but generally in spite of
the paint."
In whatever way he could best reach it, colour

176 ftbe IRossettis.
was at all events the preoccupation of Rossetti's
mind when he was considering the problems of his
art. To make his canvases rich garden-plots of
living and glowing hues, this seemed to be his great
idea. He cared little for light and shade, he was
apparently blind to atmospheric effects ; with much
feeling for the pattern of his composition, and for the
general direction of lines he seems to have been
indifferent to the sensitive outline of the human
figure and almost devoid ofthe architectonic faculty.
Planes and values were not often in his thoughts, we
may fancy, but his enthusiasm for colour grew and
ripened almost to decay.
As early as 1854 he wrote to Mr. MacCracken
(the dealer who bought the Ecce Ancilla Domini):
"I believe colour to be a quite indispensable
quality in the highest art, and that no picture ever
belonged to the highest order without it ; while
many, by possessing it— as the works of Titian— are
raised certainly into the highest class, though not
to the very highest grade of that class, in spite of
the limited degree of their other great qualities.
"Perhaps the only exception which I should be
inclined to admit exists in the works of Hogarth, to
which I should never dare to assign any but the
very highest place, though their colour is certainly
not a prominent feature in them. I must add, how
ever, that Hogarth's colour is seldom other than
pleasing to myself, and that for my part I should
almost call him a colourist, though not aiming at

painting from 1862 to 1870. 177
colour. Colour is the physiognomy of a picture ;
and, like the shape of the human forehead, it cannot
be perfectly beautiful without proving goodness and
greatness. Other qualities are its life exercised ; but
this is the body of its life, by which we know and
love it at first sight." This creed, announced when
Rossetti was twenty-six, might have been repeated
with redoubled emphasis when he was thirty-six or
at any subsequent time of his life.
Despite the fact that Rossetti in these later years
preferred to concentrate his power upon the half-
length figures which, after all, were best suited to
his technical capacity, it must not be assumed that
the abundant and dramatic schemes for pictures in
which he took so much delight in his youth ceased
suddenly to interest him. The contrary is proven
by the recurrence from time to time of such designs
as Mary Magdalene at the Door of Simon, and the
famous Dante's Dream. The Return of Tibullus to
Delia was carried out during his middle years, and
an entirely new design for a Salutation of Beatrice
was begun in 1880. These, however, were develop
ments from suggestions of the earlier time. As his
hand grew more methodical his brain grew a little
less eager, though retaining its capability. More
over, as his brother has pointed out, he was depend
ent upon a very limited circle of buyers and was
constrained to consult their taste as well as his own
in the pictures he painted for them, and Mr. Watts-
Dunton offers the additional explanation that he

178 ftbe IRossettis.
wanted more time for poetry. In a letter to Mr.
Hall Caine he himself charges many of his defici-
ences to sloth. That, he says, is one of his reasons,
though not the only one, for falling back on quality
rather than quantity in his work, and he is tempted
to think 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.
Remembering, however, the conditions of tem
perament and health under which Rossetti worked,
and the great physical strain involved in working
upon subjects complicated by many figures and
problems, one can hardly refrain from extending to
him the consideration shown by himself in revising
his sonnet on Coleridge. The revised passage reads:
Yet 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.
Mr. Caine doubted if "deepening pain" could be
charged with the whole burden of Coleridge's con
stitutional procrastination, and Rossetti responded
with characteristic impetuosity :
" Line eleven in my first reading was 'deepening
sloth,' but it seemed harsh— and— damn it all ! too
much like the spirit of Banquo ! "
It was his repugnance to exhibit his pictures that
confined him to the small number of dealers and
buyers by whom he and his work were known, but

painting from 1862 to 1870. 179
the repugnance could never be overcome. Even
when the Grosvenor Gallery was started in 1877 and
he was asked to send his pictures to the annual
exhibitions through which Burne-Jones gained his
large public, he declined, with the idea that he was
doing so because pictures that failed to satisfy him
in his studio were not for exhibition rooms. He
had in mind a collection of his best work selected
by himself some day to represent him before the
world, but this plan was never carried out, and not
until after his death, when the walls of both the
Royal Academy and the Burlington Fine Arts Club
suddenly glowed with the rich product of his genius,
did the public fairly see him.
He has left so little expression of his personal
opinions about painting (has written so few precept-
tive words on his particular craft), that any indica
tions of his convictions or theories regarding it are
precious, and one source of such enlightenment is
found in a little enterprise quite out of his ordinary
line, undertaken immediately after his wife's death,
which sent him back to his old haunts in the British
Museum to burrow again among Blake's • designs.
His aid had been sought in i860 by Alexander Gil
christ, then about to commence a Life of Blake.
The little volume of Blake manuscript picked up in
the Museum by the young Rossetti so many years
before was useful in providing fresh material, and
the Life was nearly complete when Gilchrist died
suddenly in 1861. His widow tried to carry on the

180 ftbe IRossettis.
work and Rossetti helped her with the ungrudging
cordiality and enthusiasm well known to his friends
when in trouble. Besides criticisms on Blake's
poems and pictures, he wrote a supplementary
chapter for the Life, from which may be extracted
a passage of much interest in the light it throws on
his own attitude toward the combined use of nature
and imagination in art. Blake held that nature
should be learned by heart and remembered by the
painter as the poet remembers language. ' ' Models, "
said he, "are difficult — enslave one — efface from
one's mind a conception or reminiscence which was
better." " The truth on this point is," Rossetti com
ments, "that no imaginative artist can fully express
his own tone of mind without sometimes in his life
working untrammelled by present reference to na
ture ; and, indeed, that the first conception of every
serious work must be wrought into something like
complete form, as a preparatory design, without
such aid, before having recourse to it in the carrying
out of the work. But it is equally or still more im
perative that immediate study of nature should per
vade the whole completed work. Tenderness, the
constant unison of wonder and familiarity so mys
teriously allied in nature, the sense of fulness and
abundance such as we feel in a field, not because we
pry into it all, but because it is all there ; these are
the inestimable prizes to be. secured only by such
study in the painter's every picture. And all this
Blake, as thoroughly as any painter, was gifted to

painting from 1862 to 1870. 181
have attained, as we may see especially in his works
of that smallest size where memory and genius may
really almost stand in lieu of immediate consultation
of nature. But the larger his works are, the further
he departs from this lovely impression of natural
truth ; and when we read the above maxim, we
know why."
Although Rossetti had been called affected, man
nered, and not even desirous to attain natural effects,
he himself was late in departing from the use of the
model in his work. He was forty-nine years old
before we find him writing in a tone of deprecation
to his brother :
" I rather project painting a picture without refer
ence to Nature from some one of the careful draw
ings which hang in the drawing-room. This, I have
always thought, would be perfectly feasible ; and
just at present I should find the use of models
somewhat onerous, as it interferes with resting
when one feels tired." There is no further reference
to anything of the kind, and presently he writes of
painting from Mrs. Stillman for five hours on the
stretch, and in another instance congratulates him
self that the season is backward so that he can still
get the young sycamore buds to pose for him !
Obviously the old Pre-Raphaelite habit of seeking
truth clung like a garment, draping his own imagina
tions. Painting from nature is, however, a very
different thing from imitating nature, and the latter
is what Rossetti — for better or for worse — was not

1 82 ftbe IRossettis.
equal to. His pictures of people seem always to
have been likenesses, yet never, perhaps, the kind
of likeness known as "faithful." On the other
hand, he was true to the spirit of his sitter as well
as to his own highly wrought imagination. In
Beata Beatrix and Proserpine we know that we
have penetrated the envelope of flesh and found the
personality shielded by it. But in Found and other
pictures painted from " Fanny Cornforth " we can
see plainly, by comparing them with a little photo
graph ofthe model once taken in Rossetti's garden,
how uncompromisingly he has refrained from intro
ducing more spirituality than those comely features
revealed to him, and how carefully he has studied
their forms. In the painting of flesh, as has been
pointed out by one of his critics, he seemed not to
care for reproducing the texture, and he used the
expressive features,— the eyes and the mouth, — as
symbols of the soul and body. " As the sense of
mystery grew upon him," Mr. Watts-Dunton says,
" the corporeal part of man seemed more and more
to be but a symbol of the spiritual ; and more and
more did he try to render it so." He tried indeed
to make painting as fully as possible a language in
which feeling and thought should be told as ade
quately as in words. While he was prone to help
out his pictures with his sonnets he none the less
strove mightily to impose upon the pictures them
selves the burden of his message. This became in
the latter part of his life a morbid tendency, but in its

painting from 1862 to 1870. 183
modified manifestations it constitutes his claim to
being not only the most personal painter of his time,
but the most attractive to those in sympathy with his
attitude toward his material.
Of inanimate nature, the world of outdoors, we
see little enough in his work. Just at the end of the
period we have been discussing he took an old can
vas on which he had in 1850 painted a landscape, and
added to it a composition of four figures, two playing
on instruments and two dancing in the middle dis
tance, and while he was at Kelmscott he painted the
picture called Water Willow, in which the pale face
and dusky hair of Mrs. Morris are seen against aback-
ground showing the old manor-house and the wind
ing river with its green, sloping banks. With the
setting ofthe figures in Found he struggled for nearly
thirty years, and finally Burne-Jones washed in the
sky and brought the various details together after a
fashion. This seems to be the extent to which land
scape entered into his painting. A number of his
acquaintances have recorded his great indifference to
the actual world even under its most beautiful as
pects. Apparently it did not stir him to any marked
degree, yet it cannot truly be said to have made no
impression upon him. In his poetry, if not in his
painting, we come upon descriptions as accurate as
any by Tennyson or Wordsworth, and imbued with
psychological suggestion such as Coleridge might
have given them.
In one of his letters from Hastings during the sum-

1 84 ftbe IRossettis.
mer of 1 856, is a passage difficult to surpass in its rend
ering of an emotional phase of natural scenery, and the
description was later repeated in the poem Even So.
"There are dense fogs of heat here now," he
wrote in the letter, "through which sea and sky
loom as one wall with the webbed craft creeping on
it like flies, or standing there as if they would drop
off dead. I wandered over the baked cliffs, seeking
rest and finding none."
And here is the verse from the poem, not quite
so poetic as the prose :
But the sea stands spread
As one wall with the flat skies,
Where the lean black craft like flies
Seem well-nigh stagnated,
Soon to drop off dead.
Some of his appreciations of Blake's hand-col
oured prints in the Life just now referred to also re
veal a sympathy both sensitive and deep with effects
of light and air and the colour of the fair natural
world. He speaks of " the almost miraculous expres
sion ofthe glow of freedom and of air in closing sun
set" in a plate where "a youth and maiden, lightly
embraced, are racing along a saddened low-lit hill
against an open sky of blazing and changing won
der"; of "a soft-complexioned sky of fleeting rose
and tingling grey such as only dawn and dreams
can show us " ; of "the momentary sense of spring
in winter sunshine, the long sunsets long ago, and
falling fires on many distant hills."

painting from 1862 to 1870. 185
At Kelmscott, too, he wrote two or three ex
quisite poems " from nature " as he said, one of them
Sunset Wings, in which is recorded the habit of
the starlings thereto sink "ere they rest with day."
Clamorous like mill-waters at wild play
By turns in every copse.
Not in any respect a devotee of Nature he cannot
fairly be called insensitive to her moods when they
chanced within the range of his introspective vision.
Perhaps his comment on Wordsworth will best sug
gest his own very different attitude : " He thought
Wordsworth was too much the High Priest of Nature
to be her lover," Mr. Caine reports, "too much con
cerned to transfigure into poetry his pantheo-Christ-
ian philosophy regarding Nature, to drop to his knees
in simple love of her to thank God that she was
beautiful."

CHAPTER IX.
THE CLOSING YEARS.
THE two years spent by Rossetti at Kelmscott
seem to have been passed under conditions
most favourable to him. From the tone of
his family letters one would conjecture a man busy
with affairs that interested him and finding a natural
relaxation in simple amusements. He was painting
from Mrs. Morris and from Miss Wilding with much
satisfaction in the results, considering the Prosperine
and the Ghirlandata each in turn "about the best
thing " he had done. He produced little poetry, but
his cordial review of Dr. Hake's Parables and Poems
was written at this time, and a new edition of the
Italian translations was brought out under the title,
Dante and His Circle. He had also an idea of trans
lating and editing the poems of Michelangelo and sent
for a number of books to aid him in the task. " My
own impression," he said, "is that Michelangelo
stands about alone as a good Italian poet after Dante
etc., unless we except Poliziano." This scheme
came to nothing, but shows that his interest in liter-
186

Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
By G. F. IVatts.
By permission of Mr. Frederick Holly er.

ftbe Closing j^ears. 187
ary enterprises was not quenched by the criticism
that so seriously had affected his mind and spirits.
The idea of a trip to Italy also tempted him at
last, and this, too, came to nothing. The spring
before his return to London his brother was married,
and we find him demurring at joining in the wedding
festivities. " I am most loath, even to great regret,
to be away from the party on the eve of your wed
ding ; but the fact is that, at such a gathering as
you indicate, every bore I know and don't know
would swoop down on me after these two years'
absence, and I am not equal to it, now that solitude
is the habit of my life."
This sentence is the only hint that reaches us
through his letters of the sad drama going on be
neath the apparently commonplace surface of a daily
existence marked by records of frolics with children
and dogs, of the blooming of flowers in their sea
sons, of books read and friends affectionately re
membered, and of long walks over the country
about Kelmscott.
Solitude, however, had indeed become the habit
of Rossetti's inner even more than of his outer life.
He was living more and more in a world of illusions,
isolating him from those nearest him and dogging
the wholesome natural thoughts that never entirely
forsook him, with sleuth-hound persistence. Morris
thought him from the first " unromantically discon
tented " with Kelmscott, and "in all sorts of ways
unsympathetic with the sweet, simple old place,"

1 88 Gbe IRossettis.
and was glad when he was out of it. But the con
dition into which he was lapsing might better have
provoked pity than irritation. Like Coleridge he
was constantly in the presence of
a lurid light, a trampling throng,
Sense of intolerable wrong,
but, unlike Coleridge, he kept his sufferings out of
his writing, and his intimates only knew them. On
one of his walks beside the river in the company of
young Hake, he encountered a party of anglers.
His imagination took sudden fire, and he fancied
them insulting him and calling out to him in offens
ive language. Incensed beyond control, he ran up
to them and lustily abused them to their not unnat
ural astonishment. The story was promptly circul
ated through the little hamlet "of 117 people," and
Rossetti left Kelmscott never to go back to it.
His departure from the house which he had
shared with Morris was closely followed by the dis
solution of the firm of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner
& Co. The business had been built up chiefly by
the energy and talent of Morris, who also had con
tributed most ofthe capital. According to the terms'
of the partnership, however, each of the other part
ners, who had contributed but a trifling sum towards
capital, and who had been paid at the time for any
assistance they gave, was entitled to an equal share
of the value of the business. This legal right
Burne-Jones, Faulkner, and Webb refused to accept.

ftbe Closing J^ears. 189
Madox Brown was not willing to forego it and was
finally bought out. Rossetti, according to his
brother's account, "retired from the firm without
desiring any compensation for his own benefit," and
set aside the portion assigned him " for the eventual
advantage of a member of the Morris family," but —
characteristically — trenched upon it before his death.
Mr. Mackail in his Life of Morris declares that the
transaction "snapped the chain of attachment be
tween Morris and Rossetti which had for other
reasons long been wearing thin," and adds that from
this time forward Morris was no longer to be seen in
Rossetti's house at Cheyne Walk, as "the estrange
ment between the two powerful and self-centred
personalities was final." Obviously Rossetti's atti
tude did not convince Morris of his disinterested
ness, but greed is not a fault easy to reconcile with
his qualities, and if this occasion appeared to bring
it out, it is entirely conceivable that he was influ
enced more by a sense of loyalty to Madox Brown,
who was his oldest friend, than by any desire to
turn the labours of others to his own profit. At
about this time he was offering a predella picture to
Mr. Graham at a reduced price, stipulating that the
difference should be spent in buying pictures from a
friend in difficulties, and the constant indication of
such impulses makes it impossible to think of him as
sordidly inclined, although it is possible to imagine
in him a streak of obstinate hardness that would
resist opposition to the last instant of recorded time.

1 90 ftbe IRossettis.
After his return to Cheyne Walk he led a life of
comparative seclusion, going out chiefly at night and
making few visits among his friends. Mr. George
Hake continued for a time to live with him, and also
his assistant, Mr. Treffry Dunn. A number of the
friends who came most frequently to the house be
longed to a generation later than his own, although
certain ones of the older circle were constant in at
tendance. His industry was not yet lessened by his
waning vitality. Mrs. Darmesteter is authority for
the story of his having made quite early in his career
a resolution to do something, be it little or great, in
the way of work each day of his life. To the spirit
of this resolution, she says, he remained true through
sorrow, illness, and dire despondency, and she tells
a pretty anecdote in illustration of his persistence.
One day, returning from a forlorn walk, unfit for
work and depressed by idleness, he turned mechan
ically the leaves of a book on plants and opened it at
a page on which was an illustration of the wood-
spurge. Racking his brain for an idea with which to
save the day from utter worthlessness as a working
period, he could think of nothing but the meaningless
little flower beneath his eye. The outcome was a
vivid poem, the last two verses of which are these :
My eyes, wide open, had the run
Of some ten weeds to fix upon ;
Among those few, out of the sun,
The wood-spurge flowered, three cups in one.
From perfect grief there need not be
Wisdom or even memory :

ftbe Closing Jl)ears. 191
One thing then learnt remains to me,
The wood-spurge has a cup of three.
Whatever his method of discipline, he managed
to keep his hand busy, and if the old desultory in
consequence still abode with him, his biographers
have not enlightened us, and his work does not be
tray him. A couple of years before his death he told
Mr. Caine that although in early life his painting had
tormented him more than enough, it now took little
out of him. " I paint," he said, "by a set of un
written but clearly defined rules, which I could teach
to a man as systematically as you could teach arith
metic." Beyond the fundamental conception, to
which he always gave its importance, he declared
there was little in a picture that could not thus be
done by rule. " 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."
Making due allowance for his tendency to bluff
aside any reference to his art that savoured of mag
niloquence, this comment shows him in very com
plete possession of his instrument for the limited
uses to which he chose to put it.
Of his poetry, however, he spoke in a different
tone, and perhaps with some conscious exaggera
tion, when he described himself as the reverse of
a poet like Swinburne, for whose method of pro
duction "inspiration is indeed the word. With
me the case is different. I lie on the couch, the

192 ftbe IRossettis.
racked and tortured medium, never permitted an in
stant's surcease of agony until the thing on hand is
finished." His painting toward the end of his life brought
him large prices, owing less to his own efforts, per
haps, than to those of a certain Mr. Howell who was
his agent during his Kelmscott exile and for some
years after. In 1876 he himself regarded the three
thousand seven hundred and twenty-five pounds
which he had made during the preceding year as
representing his average income. The picture called
Venus Astarte, finished early in 1877, had brought
the large sum of two thousand one hundred pounds,
and the Proserpine precisely half that amount. To
some enthusiasts the pictures of this late time are
the true Rossetti pictures, but most of his critics
agree in finding even in the lovely Fiammetta, gra
cious and young against her apple-blossom back
ground, traces of deterioration. It was not, Mr.
Watts-Dunton insists, that Rossetti could not now
have equalled the best work of his sturdiest years,
had he wished to do so, but that in his chase of
symbol to the very doorway of the dead, he chose
to relinquish much of his more comprehensible
method. " Down to the very last his faculties re
mained unimpaired," says this loyal friend, "and he
could have painted flesh as brilliantly as he painted
it in The Beloved and Monna Vanna ; but by a
method of his own (laying in his heads in genuine
ultramarine and white), he hoped to give, and did

ftbe Closing H?ears. 193
give, in his after - painting that mysterious and
dreamy suggestiveness to the flesh which his mys
terious conceptions required." The Venus Astarte
was one of the paintings in which especially this
tendency held sway over the ordinary elements of
the artistic medium. The idea of the Syrian Venus
worshipped in Carthage may possibly have been
suggested to Rossetti by Flaubert's Carthaginian
novel, Salammbo, which he was reading during the
first months of his stay at Kelmscott, and which
seemed to him "the work of a nation from which
mercy had been cast out." Whether this was the
case or whether, as Mr. Watts-Dunton intimates, the
idea came from one of Rossetti's friends who saw
in a study of Mrs. Morris's head the attributes of an
Oriental Venus, he could not constrain his imaginat
ive sympathy with the type, and made his painting
so sombre, powerful, and mystical that the British
mind has constantly been perplexed and irritated
by it. In the same year with the commencement of the
Venus Astarte, the commonplace and elaborate de
sign for The Sphinx (never to be carried out in
colour) was made, and is only interesting from the
fact that it was suggested by the death of Madox
Brown's boy Oliver, who died at twenty, denied the
fulfilment of exceptional promise. The sonnet on
his death is a direct expression of Rossetti's attitude
toward the question of immortality, an expression;
of complete and frank agnosticism :

194 ftbe IRossettis.
A mist has risen : we see the youth no more :
Does he see on and strive on ? And may we
Late-tottering world-worn hence, find his to be
The young strong hand which helps us up that shore ?
Or, echoing the No More with Nevermore,
Must Night be ours and his ? We hope : and he ?
Much of Rossetti's work after 1872 consisted of
replicas. The Beata Beatrix was four times re
peated, once in water-colour and three times in oil.
The Blessed Damo^el, inspired by the early poem,
was painted in 1876 and repeated with modifications
two years later. The Proserpine met with a variety
of accidents, and five or six versions exist, the latest
one having been completed the very year of Ros
setti's death. To that last year also belongs a replica
of the Joan of Arc. His largest but not his greatest
picture, the Dante's Dream, now hanging in the
Walker Art Gallery at Liverpool, was begun in 1870
and painted again on a smaller scale in 1880. This
picture is a striking example of Rossetti's occasional
perversity in dealing with buyers. Mr. Graham had
commissioned it at the price of fifteen hundred and
seventy-five pounds, suggesting that the size should
be six feet by three and a half. Rossetti, however,
had in mind to do a magnum opus and started in on
a canvas of nearly twice the size. The result was
that it could be hung nowhere in Mr. Graham's
house unless on the stairway. This ignominious
position did not suit Rossetti, and he reclaimed it,
to replace it with the smaller version. The original
became a white elephant on his hands, and when it

Fiammetta.
Painted from Mrs. Stillman.

ftbe Closing JDears. 195
was finally disposed of he had been paid for it three
times over, twice getting it back in exchange for its
equivalent in smaller work.
Among the pictures of 1877 was the Magdalen,
now owned by Mr. Bancroft, in which the most
winning qualities of Rossetti's final style are dis
played. Like the Lady Lilith it is painted from Miss
Wilding, but there is no occult suggestion in the
sweet almost childish face, with its tender, full lips,
not firmly enough modelled for beauty, its innocent,
meditative eyes, its smooth young oval, its surround
ing glory of bright hair. It has been painted obvi
ously with a slow vehicle, and one might almost
surmise with a slow hand. There is no vivacity of
touch or freshness of colour. The effect is even a
little turbid, but the richness and unity of the tone
and the loveliness of the type are compensations to
silence all fault-finding. Unfortunately the repro
duction in this book fails, owing to the ridgy quality
of the paint, to give the peculiar gracious beauty of
the hands as they are rendered in the original.
In this year 1877 we find Rossetti again away
from Chelsea, and in a very low condition of health.
Since his return from Kelmscott he had twice left
town, once at the end of 1875 for a stay of several
months at Bognor, where he rented a place called
Aldwick Lodge near "the roughest bit of beach on
the Sussex coast " ; and again in the summer of 1876
for a visit at Broadlands, Hampshire, the home of
Lord and Lady Mount-Temple, where he met a Mrs.

196 ftbe IRossettis,
Sumner who became an attached friend, and who
sat, the tallest and stateliest of his various tall and
stately types, for his unfinished picture, the Domi^ia
Scaligera. The next summer he was ill from an organic dis
turbance to which he was subject and which rend
ered an operation necessary. From the nervous
strain thus laid upon him he was slow in reviving,
due in part to the subjugation of his system to
chloral of which he continued to take heavy doses.
In August he went with Madox Brown and a hired
nurse to Heme Bay for the very essential change of
air and scene. Brown gives an amusing account of
their difficulties in finding suitable lodgings, and it
may well be imagined that Rossetti was not a very
pliable tenant.
"Our first landlady," Brown writes, "proved a
vixen and we had to decamp, sacrificing a week's
rent. But there was no help for it, for the house
was small and her tongue resounded all over it.
She was indignant at our having baths. She was
indignant at our late dinners. She was indignant at
our wish to shut in the sound of her children's
voices. She was most of all indignant at eggs being
poached and macaroni eaten. We found this pretty
house and left. D. G. is really better since, and
walks and talks of painting again." "This pretty
house " was a little removed from Heme Bay proper,
at Hunter's Forestall, and here Rossetti was joined by
Mr. Watts-Dunton and by his mother and Christina.

Mary Magdalen with the Alabaster Box.
Photographed from original painting, hitherto unphotographed, by
courtesy ofthe owner, Mr. Samuel Bancroft , Jr.

ftbe Closing Jj)ears. 197
His talk of painting again led to no result for some
time, and his improvement in health was much
retarded by the extreme depression of his spirits.
"The absolute lack of occupation is rotting my life
away, hour by hour," he had written home, shortly
after his arrival. His companions vied with one
another to lift his melancholy and spur him toward
his old pursuits, and Mr. Watts-Dunton has given a
detailed account of the way in which the latter was
finally accomplished. Rossetti, he says, was un
doubtedly very weak, "but not nearly so weak as
his vivid imagination declared him to be. He was
convinced that he would never be able to paint
again, and consequently, the moment he touched
the brush, his hand shook as with the palsy, and the
brush fell from his fingers. Many an anxious con
ference we had as to the best means of grappling
with this all-powerful imagination. An accident dis
closed the lines on which we could work. We got
talking about W. B. Scott and his absolute baldness,
which extended not only to the head, but to the
eyebrows and the eyelashes — the result, I believe, of
some aggravated form of dyspepsia. Rossetti said
that he had seen him without his wig, and tried to
describe the phenomenon. I said, ' Sketch Scotus's
bald pate for us.' He went to the easel and made
the sketch rapidly and perfectly. Of course we made
no comment upon the fact of his powers of work
being suddenly restored. But the next day Christina
was seized by a burning desire to have her mother's

198 ftbe IRossettis.
portrait drawn in chalk. Simultaneously Mrs. Ros
setti was seized by a burning desire to possess a
portrait of Christina in chalk. When Rossetti de
clared that he could not even hold a piece of chalk,
Scotus's bald pate was pointed to. The result of the
little plot was a very successful chalk portrait-group,
life-size, of Christina and her mother, head and
shoulders." This was followed by other portraits of
Christina, and Rossetti's emancipation from the im
aginative part of his weakness was complete. The
rule of Rossetti's imagination over his physical sens
ations has elsewhere been emphasised by this same
friend, whose opportunities for observing it were
unrivalled. Some of his remarks have therefore a
value above those of any other writer about Ros
setti and may well be quoted literally to convey the
precise impression produced upon him. Rossetti, he
says, "was the slave of his own imagination — an
imagination of a power and vividness such as I have
never seen equalled. Of its vividness, no artistic
expression of his can give any notion. He had not
the smallest command over it. And let it not be
supposed that this was a slight affliction : nor let
anyone think less of Rossetti because, having lost
the governance of the most powerful of all the
human faculties, he suffered much misery. . . .
It is asserted that a drop of cold water will scald, if
the person upon whose flesh it falls really imagines
it to be boiling. And I believe it : I feel certain that
Rossetti could have been so scalded. Like fire the

ftbe Closing pears. 199
imagination is a good servant but a bad master.
This I say was Rossetti's curse, that like Professor
Tyndall's 'sensitive flame,' which rises and falls to
the tiny sounds of a tuning-fork or the rustle of a
dress, or the plashing of a rain-drop, the tremulous
flame of his soul was disturbed by every breath.
"To tell him anything of a specially pathetic or
tragic nature was cruel, so vividly did he realise
every situation. A friend of his used to amuse him,
when strolling by the Thames at Kelmscott, by tell
ing him anecdotes and stories gathered from out-of-
the-way books, or else invented for the occasion.
So powerful (that is to say, so childlike) was Ros
setti's imagination, so entirely did it dominate an
intellect of unusual subtlety, that these stories in
terested him just as much as real adventures, and,
though he knew them to be gossamer fictions woven
at the moment of telling, he would be as much
affected by an unhappy catastrophe as though they
had been incidents of real life, and would sometimes
beg for the catastrophe to be altered. He was an
idealist, I say, if ever there was one ; he paid the
penalty for living in the idealist's world of beautiful
dreams, if ever that penalty was paid by man."
It is by mere chance that we know more of Ros
setti the thinker during the last few years of his life
than at any other stage of his development. In 1878
Mr. Hall Caine sent him the copy of a lecture on his
poetry delivered the year before, and thus began a
correspondence in which many of his opinions upon

200 Cbe IRossettis.
literature, especially upon poetry, find expression,
his readiness to aid a much younger writer leading
him to discussion of technical points in addition to
ordinary statement of literary sympathies. He obvi
ously was not a critic in any extended sense, Mr.
Caine observes, but " you might always distrust your
judgment," he adds, "if you found* it at variance
with his where abstract power and beauty were con
cerned." On Wordsworth, whose faults were ofthe
kind to impress him deeply, he utters one or two
sagacious judgments. "No one regards the great
Ode," he says, "with more special and unique
homage than I do, as a thing absolutely alone of its
kind among all greatest things." But he could not
say that anything else by Wordsworth seemed on a
level with it. "A reticence almost invariably present
is fatal in my eyes to the highest pretensions on
behalf of his sonnets, "he adds elsewhere. "Reticence
is but a poor sort of muse, nor is tentativeness (so
often to be traced in his work) a good accompani
ment in music. Take the sonnet on Toussaint L'Ou-
verture (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. . . .
Primary vital impulse was surely not fully devel
oped in his muse." Primary vital impulse was with
Rossetti the first essential of poetry. "You have
much too great a habit of speaking of a special oc
tave, sestette, or line," he warns his correspondent,

ftbe Closing pears. 201
"Conception, my boy, Fundamental Brain work,
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 Shakespearian
sonnet is better than the most perfect in form, be
cause Shakespeare wrote it."
Despite his care for form in his own work he had
no sympathy whatever with formality. " It would
not be at all found," he says, "that my best son
nets are always in the mere form which I think the
best. The question with me is regulated by what I
have to say."
He prided himself on keeping his verse up to his
own standard : " If I have a distinction as a sonnet
writer it is that I never admit a sonnet that is not
fully on the level of every other." For indiscrimi
nate publishing he had a vast contempt. Of Keats
he says that he hardly died so much too early, and
not at all too early had there been any danger of his
"taking to the modern habit eventually — treating
material as product and shooting it all out as it
comes " ; but he would not have thought a longer
career thrown away upon him if he had continued
to the age of anything to give joy. " Nor would he
ever have done any 'good' at all," he adds, with
relish. " Shelley did good, and perhaps some harm
with it. Keats' joy was after all a flawless gift."
In his praise of Coleridge, he was naturally en
thusiastic, in a sense recognising his "master."
" You can never say too much about Coleridge for

202 £be IRossettis.
me," he wrote, "for I worship him on the right side
of idolatry," but the worship was confined to the
poetry : the philosophy was an unread book to him.
" I doubt," says Mr. Caine, " 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 to so much as look at the Biographia
Literaria, though once he listened whilst I read a
chapter from it."
He was a great denouncer of the prose style in
poetry, a sentiment probably at the source of his
antagonism to Wordsworth, but he had no patience
with unusual or curious words, and firmly took his
correspondent to task for using them.
" I am sure," he says, " I could write one hun
dred essays, on all possible subjects, without once
experiencing the ' aching void ' which is filled by
such words as ' mythopceic ' and ' anthropomor
phism.' 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 suggest
ing to me a Vampire or Somnambulant Cannibal.
(To speak rationally, would not ' man-evolved God
head ' be an English equivalent?)1 'eheumeristic' also
found me somewhat on my beam-ends though ex
planation is here given ; yet I felt I could do with
out 'eheumerous' and you perhaps without the
'numerous.' You can pardon me now ; for so bad
1 An excellent proof of the truth of his declaration that he " does not know in the
least " what the word means.

ftbe Closing Pears. 203
a pun places me at your mercy indeed. But seri
ously, simple English in prose writing and in all
narrative poetry (however monumental language
may become in abstract verse) seems to me a treas
ure not to be foregone in favour of German innova
tions." For Chatterton he had a late-blossoming enthusi
asm. He owned his works in 1848, but it was thirty
years after that he began to make a special study of
him, and then he wrote : "Not to know Chatterton
is to be ignorant of the true dayspring of romantic
poetry." Someone said that Oliver Madox Brown
had " genius enough to stock a good few Chatter-
tons," which drew from him a scornful tirade against
comparing the genius of one age and environment
with the genius of another. Oliver, he said, was
the product of the most teeming hotbeds of art and
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."
In politics, as by this time we have seen, Rossetti
was no champion. He says that he never read a
parliamentary debate in his life. Early in his youth
he wrote an indignant little sonnet, On the Refusal
of Aid between Nations, in reference to the apathy
with which other countries regarded the struggles of
Italy and Hungary against Austria ; and occasional

204 ftbe IRossettis.
sonnets written later, together with a few which he
said he had written but had not printed, and which
"would not prove him a Tory," show him tempor
arily stirred by phases of public life ; but he had
no real sympathy with political questions as such.
"He had ideas," his brother says, "and applied
them to national as well as other problems ; but he
paid no attention at all to the hourly and yearly
scuffle over questions of practical legislation and ad
ministration, whether in this country or in others."
"You must simply view me as a nonentity in
any practical relation to such matters," he replied,
when Mr. Caine asked permission to dedicate to
him his essay on the relation of politics to art. In
the essay it was urged that as great artists in the
past had participated in political struggles, they
should not now hold aloof from controversies im
mediately concerning them. This was not at all
Rossetti's idea. He pointed out that even Michel
angelo, patriot and hero as he was, "when he had
done all that he thought became him, 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," and
on one occasion did not hesitate to betake himself
to Venice as a refuge. To paint in a trackless and
forgotten tower would have been much to Rossetti's
taste, but he repudiated sharply enough the idea
advanced by Mr. Caine in his essay that to certain
minds the preservation of such a pitiful possession

The Loving Cup.
Crayon.

ftbe Closing pears. 205
as the poetical remains of Cecco Angiolieri seemed
more important than to secure the unity of a great
nation. He could not conceive such an individual
and thought the passage would be much better
modified to "a thing of some moment even while
the contest is waging for the political unity of a
great nation."
In this correspondence Rossetti's own poetry was
frequently discussed and with a zest almost boyish
in its expression. The references to his emendations
are full of interest in their suggestion of the hold
taken upon him by his poems, and the importance
he attached to each alteration. "The next point I
have marked in your letter," he writes on one impres
sive occasion, "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 humanise Helen, besides lifting the tragedy
to a yet sterner height."
It was quite a habit with him, after explaining
such changes in his work or showing any new poem
to his friends, to warn them against letting the pub
lic get wind of the matter. He wanted everything
he printed to strike fresh upon his readers, and for
this reason seldom let any of his poems go to peri-

206 £fee IRossettis.
odicals ; keeping them almost as jealously as he
kept his pictures.
His intimacy with Mr. Caine and Mr. Watts-
Dunton was undoubtedly the influence that spurred
him on to new efforts in poetry during the last three
or four years of his life. The latter was untiring in
his zeal to rescue Rossetti's great gifts from the ob
scurity that threatened him. When he laid down
his pen, as when he laid down his brush, this most
untiring of friends stimulated, cajoled, and finally
coerced him until the brain resumed its natural func
tion and the imagination began to play about safer
themes than his personal experiences and sufferings.
Thus after a long lapse and at a time when gloomy
forebodings were uppermost in his mind he was per
suaded with infinite difficulty to try his hand at a
sonnet. The outcome was of no value, but truth
was sacrificed to policy, and his companion lavished
praise upon it until more sonnets were written and
the old dexterity was regained. Again, he was
challenged to write a ballad in the simple, direct
style of the ballad proper, and The White Ship and
The King's Tragedy resulted. The former, written
in 1 880, is the dramatic story of the death at sea of
Henry the First's son and shows no sign of diminish
ing vigour. Berold the butcher, the one survivor of
the wreck, tells the story, and the language is sturdy
and lucid enough. The character of the young
Prince is concisely indicated and its one redeeming
trait of heroism is finely conceived and rendered :

ftbe Closing Pears. 207
He was a prince of lust and pride ;
He showed no grace till the hour he died.
When he should be King, he oft would vow,
He 'd yoke the peasant to his own plow.
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.
In constructing this ballad Rossetti showed all his
customary care in perfecting details : every point
in his treatment of the subject, he said, even down
to the incident of "the fair boy dressed in black"
who announced to the King the news of his son's
death, was derived from the ancient chroniclers. He
sent his manuscript to Madox Brown for criticism
and received some nautical hints which he needed,
" being one of those men to whom such words as
sea, ship, and boat are generic terms."
The King's Tragedy, completed just a year be
fore his death, is founded upon the tradition that
Catherine Douglas received her popular name "Bar-
lass " from having barred the door with her arm
against the murderers of James the First of Scots.
It begins with the free ballad swing, and reaches
the romantic height, though lacking the flexible
spontaneity of the best of the old ballad literature.
Mr. Watts-Dunton finds those portions of it the
finest which deal with the supernatural, but they are
closely pressed by the dramatic passage describing
the finding of the King, and by the splendid stanzas
picturing the Scottish sea under the rising moon :

208 £be IRossettis.
That eve was clenched for a boding storm,
'Neath a toilsome moon half seen ;
The cloud stooped low and the surf rose high ;
And where there was a line of the sky
Wild wings loomed dark between.
'T was then the moon sailed clear of the rack
On high in her hollow dome ;
And still as aloft with heavy crest
Each clamorous wave rang home,
Like fire in snow the moonlight blazed
Amid the champing foam.
With these two ballads and a third (Rose Mary,
written immediately after the publication of his first
volume) and a number of new sonnets, Rossetti de
cided that he had enough material for another vol
ume. This he got out in 1 88 1 under the name
Ballads and Sonnets, transferring to it the now com
pleted House of Life. At the same time he reissued
the Poems, filling up the gap left by the removal of
The House of Life chiefly by inserting the early and
unfinished poem, The Bride's Prelude.
In two months' time he had realised from the
royalty on these two volumes over thirteen hundred
dollars, and they were favourably received by the
critics, but the fire of life was sinking very fast in
Rossetti, and he was almost indifferent now to the
fate of his work. To use his brother's words : "Not
for the applause of a big or a little crowd had he
worked all his life long, rather for adequate self-
expression and attainment in art. The work was
done, but — except in a remote or abstracted sense

ftbe Closing pears. 209
— it did not prove to be its own exceeding great
reward." His mind turned to new projects, however, among
them an historical ballad on Joan of Arc (also the
subject of the last picture on which he painted), for
which he had transcripts and abstracts made from
documents in the British Museum ; and a ballad on
The Death of Abraham Lincoln in which he in
tended to include a tribute to John Brown. These
were not carried out, and the last poetry he actually
produced was, characteristically enough, a ballad con
ceived many years before, embodying an eccentric
story of a Dutchman's wager to smoke against the
devil, and two sonnets dictated from his death-bed
on his own design The Sphinx.
He had grown gradually weaker in body and more
and more variable in mood, and those who knew him
only during these later years remember periods of
terrible depression against which he would struggle
manfully, and spasms of morbid suspicion in which
his oldest and truest friends were charged with grave
disloyalty to him. His native resolution had waned
in small matters so much that Mr. Caine, becoming
his housemate in 1881, found him devoid of it, and
also "destitute of cheerfulness and content." He
was doubtless an unmanageable companion, filled as
he was with imaginings, and nervous at times to the
point of frenzy, but his outbursts had always their
corresponding reactions in which he was pathetically
eager to atone. " I wish you were indeed my son,"

210 £be IRossettis.
he said to Mr. Caine on one of these occasions, " for
though then I should still have no right to address
you so, I should at least have some right to expect
your forgiveness." He kept to the end his capacity
to attach people to him with extraordinary intensity
of affection. The young blind poet, Philip Bourke
Marston, who knew and loved him in the decline of
his life, expressed this in the language of youthful
romanticism when he wrote to a young friend :
" What a supreme man is Rossetti ! Why is he not
some great exiled king, that we might give our lives
in trying to restore him to his kingdom ! "
He was something very like an exiled king during
the four years that he shut himself within the walls
of his Chelsea garden, or held his limited court in the
studio, and more than one of his friends gave a liberal
share of life in the vain effort to restore him to his
kingdom. But he could still be royal company at
times, and show in his gracious manner and quick
sympathy that he was the Rossetti of his most pro
pitious period. Mr. Sharp tells us of evenings spent
with him that began in the depths of fathomless de
spair, by dinnertime reached shallower seas of de
spondency, and between the hours of ten and three
rose to a high tide of cheerfulness. Then, he says,
"many a jest and hearty laugh,(keen criticism and
pungent remark, recondite reminiscence and poetic
quotation, would make the lurking blue devils depart
altogether from the studio — to await their victim
when, in the sleepless morning-hours, he should be

Sketch of Ruth Herbert.
An experiment in method. The high lights are the
bare paper ; the i olour is gold powder mixed on
the palette in gum ; the shadows accentu
ated in umber ; the lips slightly
reddened ; the eyes blue.
Photographed from Ihe original, which has not before been repro
duced, by ihe courtesy of Mr. Samuel Bancroft, Jr.

ftbe Closing pears.

21 I

alone once more with his sufferings and unquiet
thoughts." His relations with his family, always affectionate,
grew closer than ever as his need deepened. " It
makes life less bleak as it advances," he writes to
Christina, "to find the old care and love still prompt
to hand. " With his mother he was uniformly tender
and considerate. However he might confide his
misery to his intimates, and reticence was not his
quality, to her he presented a brave face and a loving
one. In the society of his friends he took pleasure,
dreading nothing so much as loneliness ; but meeting
with strangers was an ordeal that more and more
grew impossible to him. Even after his long corre
spondence with Mr. Caine and repeated invitations
to him to visit Cheyne Walk, the first suggestion
toward carrying out such a plan brought about the
utmost agitation. Mr. Caine describes the prelimin
aries in the following words :
" By return of the post that bore him my mis
sive 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

212 £be IRossettis.
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 cere
mony 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 midday, 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 re
flect 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." On the occasion of this first meeting Mr. Caine
saw a man who looked to him ten years older than
his actual age, which was then fifty-two, with a pale
face and heavy moustache and beard streaked with
grey. He wore 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 Michelangelo.'" He was negligently
dressed, and wore a straight sack coat of his own
designing, "buttoned at the throat, descending at
least to the knees, and having large pockets cut into

ftbe Closing pears. 213
it perpendicularly at the sides." The black, tumbling
hair had grown thin, and the forehead showed the
plainer its nobility of structure. His voice had lost
nothing of its richness and compass and "had every
gradation of tone at command " for the readings and
recitations which now as in his youth gave him the
keenest enjoyment. This is the last glimpse we get
of Rossetti before his appearance changed to that of
an invalid for whom there is no recovery.
In September, 1881, shortly after Mr. Caine took
up his residence with Rossetti, the two went together
to the Vale of St. John in the mountains of Cumber
land, where they stayed a month. It was the last
trip from which Rossetti was to return, and as he
re-entered his Cheyne Walk house, much feebler
than when he left it, he uttered the words : "Thank
God ! home at last, and never shall I leave it again ! "
Early in December he was stricken with a numbness
resembling paralysis, and chloral, of which he had
been taking enormous doses,1 was cut off entirely,
never to be resumed. After an interval of great suf
fering and delirium, he awoke " calm in body, and
clear in mind, and grateful in heart." His delusions
were chiefly over, and he appeared to the small
circle of his devoted friends a changed man. But in
all ways he was weaker and his physical condition
went from bad to worse. On the fourth of February,

1 The amount has been estimated at 180 grains a night ; but owing to the skill of
his house companions in diluting the drug it was probably considerably less at the
utmost.

214 ftbe IRossettis.
1882, he went with Mr. Caine and his little sister (a
girl of thirteen) to Birchington-by-the-Sea, where he
occupied a bungalow that was placed at his disposal
by his old friend, John P. Seddon.
On the journey he was affectionate and gentle
with the child, who thought she had never met a
man so full of interesting and attractive ideas, and
during her stay at the bungalow he was continually
thoughtful of her entertainment. In March his
mother, not far from eighty-two years of age, and
Christina, went down to Birchington. Expecting
them, Rossetti sent for a chair the twin of the one
his mother used at home, thus completing the long
series of his loving attentions to her. His brother
William, Mr. Shields, Mr. Watts-Dunton, Mr. Ley-
land, and Mr. Sharp were also there from time to
time up to the last. Rossetti's dejection increased
with his infirmity, but even at this eleventh hour
there were rallyings to cheerfulness and interest in
the external world. Mr. Sharp recalls one lovely
day when he and Rossetti stood on the cliffs looking
seaward. In reply to his comment on the beauty
of the scene, Rossetti said with feeling: "It is
beautiful — the world, and life itself. I am glad I
have lived."
In a letter written a week before his death he is
eagerly praising the work of the French painter,
Gustave Moreau, of which an example had been sent
him. He read and had read to him at Birchington,
a number of novels, among them Dickens's Tale of

Pencil Drawing by Frederick Shields of
"The Dead Rossetti" the Morning
after his Death at Birchington.
Photographed from the original by courtesy of the owner,
Mr. Samuel Bancroft, Jr.

ftbe Closing Pears. 215
Two Cities, and was interested in the reviews of Mr.
Caine's book of collected sonnets which had just
been published. He painted fitfully on a replica of
the Joan of Arc, improving it, Miss Caine recalls,
"with every touch." Thus mustering his faculties,
he retained the semblance, at least, of his old dis
tinctive individuality until within a few days of the
end, which came on Easter Sunday, the ninth of
April, 1882.
After his death Mr. Shields made a drawing of his
face in its unfamiliar repose, and a cast of his head
was taken. On the fourteenth of April the simple
funeral took place, attended by a score or so of
friends, and all that was left of Rossetti was laid in
the Birchington churchyard, within sound of " the
sea's listless chime." There a tombstone was de
signed for him by Madox Brown, and before his
house in Cheyne Walk is a bronze bust by the same
loyal hand, surmounting a fountain designed by John
Seddon. This second memorial was erected by sub
scription, and was essentially a labour of love on the
part of Madox Brown, who wrote after the friend
of more than thirty years was lost to him :
" I cannot make out how things are to go on, in
so many directions things must be changed."

CHAPTER X.
CHARACTER AND TEMPERAMENT.
" TN many phases of outward nature," said Ros-
I setti in his reply to Robert Buchanan's article
A on his poetry, '.'the principle of chaff and
grains holds good, — the base enveloping the precious
continually ; but an untruth was never yet the husk
of a truth." Certainly the husk that lay about
Rossetti's finer qualities was not that of untruth in
any of its forms. "Nothing in him stands clearer
to my mind," says his brother, "than his total
freedom from pretence." Many a time he forged
from this high quality a weapon for others to wound
him. His eager and outspoken temper made the
management of life difficult for him. He could not
understand in others any lack of the generosity so
natural to himself, or any hesitation in upholding the
cause of a friend. He was chivalrous to the point
of Quixotry in pushing the claims of others, and
ready to accept from those he loved what he as
readily would give. Things pitiful touched him,
things brave stirred him, things beautiful inspired
216

Rossetti Fountain.
Designed by J. P. Seddon. Bust by Ford Madox Brown.

Character anb ftemperament, 217
him. In many ways he was selfish ; he was cer
tainly a spendthrift ; he was often unreasonable and
illogical in his demands upon the world ; he did
some indefensible things, but no other human being
could have done them with so little consciousness
of evil, with such terrible simplicity of intention.
He seems seldom to have felt the bracing sense of
duty even toward his art, following his own will
wherever it led him. Fortunately, however, it led
him for the most part toward kind acts, robust in
dustry, deep sympathies, and a dignified attitude
toward life. "As the years rolled on," his brother
reflects concerning him, "what he ought to do was
very often what he chose and liked to do." He de
spised anything like rivalry or professional jealousy,
and his ability to sell his pictures with judgment and
to advantage was untainted by any grasping instinct.
He much resented a personal slight and showed in
his later years undue susceptibility, but where he
found loyalty he repaid it loyally, and was never
weary of disclosing the best qualities of his friends
to those who knew them less intimately than he.
Much of the mental suffering that marked the close
of his life was due to his self-torment for the errors of
his faulty but not ignoble career. The key-note of
his ethical creed seems to have been never to treat
any great emotion or conviction trivially. He rushed
headlong into many wayward experiences, but it
could not be said of him that he was ever irreverent
toward the nobler impulses of the mind and soul.

218 (Tbe IRossettis.
Much has been made of the assertion that he could
not keep his friends and it is true that many dropped
away from him, but his demand upon friendship
was exacting, and he could count to the very end an
extraordinary number of those who were willing to
sacrifice their other interests to serve him and bear
him company, and who found it well worth their
while to undergo his tempestuous moods for the
reward of his winning and affectionate companion
ship, and the stimulus of his talk. Some of the
breaks that occurred between him and the men who
were at first attracted to him were due to their own
lack of indulgence toward a nature that could not
conform itself to the ordinary standards. Finding him
so full of nobility at certain points, so open of heart
and generous of speech, they seem not unnaturally
to have expected a consistency of attitude and act
which he could not compass and a departure from
which they could not brook. In one or two cases they
failed to maintain the reticence their intimacy with
him ought to have imposed, and he, becoming aware
of it, would have no more of them. A couple of stan
zas from his poem Soothsay, written in 1881, show
him reflecting upon this aspect of human relations.
Let thy soul strive that still the same
Be early friendship's sacred flame.
The affinities have strongest part
In youth, and draw men heart to heart :
As life wears on and finds no rest,
The individual in each breast
Is tyrannous to sunder them.

MEMORIAL FOUNTAIN TO DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI.
Designed by John P. Seddon, Architect.
(Bust of Rossetti by Ford Madox Brown.)

Character ant) ftemperament. 219
In the life-drama's stern cue-call,
A friend 's a part well-prized by all :
And if thou meet an enemy,
What art thou that none such should be ?
Even so : but if the two parts run
Into each other and grow one,
Then comes the curtain's cue to fall.
That he was not stubborn to hold out against
reconciliation the history of a disagreement with
Madox Brown gives evidence. Brown, displeased,
had withdrawn himself from Rossetti's society for
a considerable time. Then he wrote suggesting a
renewal of intercourse. Rossetti's reply was char
acteristic in its warm simplicity: "You would of
course have been most welcome all along, and will
be simply the same now. ... I am very glad
you have written and never loved you better than I
do now, as I said to Watts before we went to bed
last night."
Many of Rossetti's difficulties arose from a want
of consideration, but it should not be forgotten that
from his childhood he had cherished imaginative
thoughts and feelings that made him, as Mr. Caine
has said, an anachronism in the nineteenth century,
and, despite his cordial, welcoming manner, essen
tially out of touch with most ofthe people by whom
he was surrounded. No account of him could be so
misleading as one that should drag down quite to the
commonplace that curious, unworldly, unbalanced,
wholly loving, and inspiring personality.
"He was a man," says his most understanding

220 ftbe IRossettis.
friend and critic, Watts-Dunton, "whom it was im
possible to know without deeply loving, and I will
not deny that it was necessary that he should be
deeply loved before he could be fully known."
Rossetti the painter and Rossetti the poet were
much at one with Rossetti the man. He lived in his
studio, and not, as many artists of his own day, in a
world outside of it, going to it as to a counting-house
for the working hours. Nevertheless he put into his
pictures, and into his poems as well, only a partial
suggestion of himself. If we should look to them
alone for biographical material we should find a fair
support for the theory long current, that their author
was a being of abnormal sensibilities who had from
the beginning of his career held himself aloof in an
atmosphere of visions and pensive interests, not to be
associated with people of lusty tastes ; leading a life
of artificial aesthetic culture, and a proper target for
the gibes of men and women preoccupied with solid
reality. We get from them not a trace of the exuber
ant animal spirits, the decision of manner, the fear
less, positive utterance, the quickness of intellectual
perception, the bluff aversion to anything approach
ing sentimentality of phrase or attitude, by which he
was characterised the greater part of his life. What we
do get from them is a combination of the qualities
least in evidence to the casual eye in his personality,
— the romantic temper which sees even in common
events the essential and underlying mystery, the
passion for beauty in the human face and in the colour

Cbaracter anb ftemperament. 221
and texture of flowers and stuffs and ornaments, the
overpowering sense of the beauty and holiness of
human affections, the profound conviction that per
sonal happiness is only to be achieved through these
affections. This absorption in his personal feelings united to
his imaginative power resulted in work of a very
narrow range but of intense significance. One of his
housemates has said that he was "somewhat borne
in his interests both on canvas and in verse," and un
willing to care for "certain forms of literature and life
which he admitted were worth caring for." That he
did not try to care for those forms to which he was
naturally indifferent is one of the chief sources of his
artistic strength. His efforts would have been fruit
less and could only have drawn from his power of
self-expression. His entire sincerity preserved him
both from formality and from affected originality, and
fortified his prodigious imagination as no conformity
to a general standard could possibly have done. He
detested systems, political, social, and artistic, and
he let them alone. In the letter to Mr. Caine on
the relation of artists to politics he recognises his
utter inability to stand in any practical relation to
such matters of general importance :
" For all I might desire in the direction spoken of,"
he says, "volition is vain without vocation ; and I
had better really stick to knowing how to mix ver
milion and ultramarine for a flesh-grey, and how to
manage their equivalents in verse. To speak with-

222 ftbe IRossettis.
out 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."
His consideration of pigments and of words used
as pigments was not the kind of consideration em
ployed by the painter who chooses the forms best
suited to a large and liberal or to a small and fastidi
ous brush, or the colours that seem to him best to
represent a dark or creamy skin, and by the poet
whose desire is chiefly to express his thought in
musical metres. More than one of his critics has
discovered his tendency to place a double load on
each of his vehicles of expression in turn : to make
sumptuously coloured pictures of his poems, and of
his pictures romantic and eloquent poems, but no
one has made his mental processes so clear as Mr.
Watts-Dunton in his article, The Truth about Rossetti.
Of all who know him as a colourist of superb endow
ment there is but a small proportion who see in his
choice of types more than an individual and inexplic
able taste for sad eyes and long necks and large
arms and full lips and thin cheeks. But in this
choice, as we have seen, an elaborate scheme of
symbolism was involved, and applied to nearly all
of his later pictures.
"Every feature had its suggestive value. To

Cbaracter anb ftemperament. 223
him the mouth really represented the sensuous part
of the face no less certainly than the eyes repre
sented the spiritual part ; and if, in certain heads,
the sensuous fulness of the lips became scarcely
Caucasian, this was a necessary correction to eyes
which became on their part over-mystical in their
spirituality." In his poetry we get a corresponding lack of sim
plicity and a passion for the details that render the
greatest possible suggestion and association. The
value of each word as an interpreter of esoteric
meaning is weighed, and he had the zest of Flaubert
in seeking the unique epithet to express his idea
with more than Flaubert's subtlety of sense. Wal
ter Pater, the most competent of critics in this sort,
emphasises the sincerity prompting him to this or-
nateness, as it prompted him to most of the results
he achieved either in life or in art. "His own
meaning," he says, "was always personal and even
recondite, in a certain sense learned and casuistical,
sometimes complex or obscure ; but the term was
always, one could see, deliberately chosen from
many competitors, as the just transcript of that pe
culiar phase of soul which he alone knew, precisely
as he knew it."
In his sonnets his wealth of imagery is most
striking, and to many minds obstructive. Mr.
Watts-Dunton compares their language in its inter
laced fabric of metaphors to " a lovely gauze behind
which the thought is seen iridescent and alive like a

224 ftbe IRossettis.
fish in a net," and sometimes the fish is rather small
and unimportant to be detained by a net of such
elaborate construction. His mastery of the sonnet-
form, however, is so complete, and his skill in carving
it to his own idea " in ivory or in ebony, as Day or
Night may rule," so consummate, that he makes on
the whole for delight in this form of poetry as in
others. Mr. Caine has found him the first English
writer to obey, 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. It is surprising to find him
punctilious in his observance of this most restrictive
poetic form when he so persistently refused to con
form in painting to the severer models of that art,
and Mr. Caine traces his technical proficiency to the
early training which taught him poetry as he best
liked to be taught, in the form of a game. To those
"bouts-rimes" in which the little Rossettis found
an escape from the tediousness of school duties we
probably owe the two most perfectly constructed
series of sonnets the century has produced, — Dante
Gabriel's House of Life and Christina's Monna In-
nominata. Despite Rossetti's care in revising his work and
his patient zeal in perfecting it, his fault is that
which usually belongs to the hasty worker,— super
fluity. In his little note-book of maxims he has
noted that moderation is the highest law of poetry,
but no one could oftener forget to apply this law.

Cbaracter anb ftemperament. 225
Given a beautiful subject, the inexhaustible subject
of life, for example, he is at a loss to understand why
he should not talk about it unrestrainedly, and much
more unrestrainedly than "the modest Saxon point
of view," as Mr. James calls it in referring to De
Musset's similar tendency, can justify. The lack
of reticence we find in his sentiment extends to
his manner, and he is not guiltless even of the
worst indulgence of the naturally garrulous tem
perament ; of saying discursively what should be
said tersely, or at least with the utmost simplic
ity. While he respects the limitations of the son
net with the respect of a true artist, he deliberately
crowds within those limits every figure of speech
that he can call up from his full mind. This is
the side of his poetic art which it is easy to attack.
But the reason is that he was an Italian writing in
English. Even Dante, "the cast-iron man," says
Lowell, grows "pliable as a field of grain at the
breath of Beatrice, and flows away in waves of sun
shine." It would be unintelligent indeed to expect
of Rossetti, who derived from the same expansive
nation and was anything else than a cast-iron man,
the taste and the method of a Milton. To himself he
seemed to have exercised the utmost control and to
have condensed his work to rather an astonishing
degree. " Probably the man does not live," he said
to Mr. Caine, "who could write what I have writ
ten more briefly than I have done." Of individual
poems this is true, and where it is not true, — where

226 ftbe IRossettis.
he amplifies and teases his metaphors to the verge
of obscurity,— he constantly introduces exquisite sin
gle fancies that reconcile the mind and bewitch the
imagination. Such images as these lines convey :
Each hour until we meet is as a bird
That wings from far his gradual way along
The rustling covert of my soul ;
or these : The sunrise blooms and withers on the hill
Like any hill-flower,
compensate a reader for the fluency that occasionally
palls. It is not, however, any particular characteristic of
his style in painting or in poetry that makes Rossetti
so important a figure among his contemporaries. It
is what Mr. Watts-Dunton calls his "vision," his
power of always seeing beneath the prosaic aspect
of things and confronting us with realities that are
hidden to the common sight. "A sustained im
pressibility towards the mysterious conditions of
man's every-day life, towards the very mystery itself
in it," says Pater, "gives a singular gravity to all his
work ; these matters never became trite to him."
They have become trite to most of us, and we have
certainly to thank him for affording us one glimpse
at this late time of a spirit that languishes in the
same environment with science and civilisation.
He quoted with appreciation the saying of Keats :
" I value more the privilege of seeing great things

Proserpine.

Cbaracter anb ftemperament.

227

in loneliness than the fame of a prophet." And with
still greater zest he recounts the anecdote of Keats's
proposing as a toast, " Confusion to the memory of
Newton !" On Wordsworth's wishing to know why
before he drank it, the reply was, "Because he de
stroyed the poetry of the rainbow by reducing it to
a prism." "That is magnificent!" he comments.
And Rossetti also is magnificent because in his soul,
"that vexed island hung between the upper and
nether world and liable to incursions from both," his
imagination never grew dim and his interest in hu
man affections never flagged, from the beginning to
the end.

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CHAPTER XI.
CHRISTINA ROSSETTI.
THE first mention we find of Christina Rossetti
in the family letters of her brother, Dante
Gabriel, shows her a poet of twelve, con
tributing to one of the magazines edited by the
young Rossettis two poems, in Dante's opinion
" very good " and according to the later judgment
of her brother William, indisputably bad. Beyond
such fragmentary glimpses of a thoughtful little girl,
"not precocious," somewhat irritable, worshipping
animals, reading little and only what hit her fancy,
but knowing Keats at nine, and following the family
occupations of verse-making and drawing, we see
nothing of her until at eighteen she is posing for the
Virgin in Rossetti's first picture. She was then of
slight figure, with regular, serious features, lovely
eyes, and an extraordinary expression of pensive
sweetness. Her manner was characterised by a cer
tain reserve and hauteur which, according to one of
her friends, gave her an air of doing everything
" from self-respect, not from fellow-feeling with
22s
Christina G. Rossetti.

Cbristina IRossetti. 229
others, or from kindly consideration for them." Her
health was delicate, and for some years her family
believed her destined to an early death. A decided
tendency to melancholy marked her temperament
and her early poems are extravagantly gloomy. She
was also very shy, but charmingly, not painfully
so, her trepidation in the presence of strangers tak
ing simple and winning forms. Her amusements
throughout her childhood had not been of just the
sort to counteract a morbid habit of mind. She had
known little of country life, her infrequent visits to
her grandfather's house at Holmer Green in Bucking
hamshire, about thirty miles from London, constitut
ing her one chance to cultivate a love of trees and
flowers and fields and ponds. From these she had
gained something, but her principal interest in them
seems to have been the same that she took in the
London Zoological Gardens, — a vivid curiosity, that
is, concerning the animal life within range. Her
friendship with frogs, her sympathy with mice, her
affectionate regard for caterpillars, moved her friends
to astonishment long after she was a woman grown,
and at twenty-eight we find her filling a letter to her
brother William with news of the lizard, armadillos,
wombats, porcupines, and pumas of the Gardens.
This passion was entirely her own and not, as some
times has been said, an effect of Dante Gabriel.
Landor is the one other example among the poets
of England of a similar attitude toward brute creation.
To him, as to the Rossettis, animals were individuals

230 ftbe IRossettis.
with opinions worthy of respect and idiosyncrasies
demanding attention, but with him dogs played a
much more important part than they did with the
Rossettis, for whom, perhaps, they had too much the
self-consciousness of the human being. Christina's
education was carried on at home by her capable
mother, and she was of course brought up in much
the same environment as Dante Gabriel. Her name
" Christina" was derived from one ofthe Bonaparte
family, Lady Dudley Stuart, and as her biographer,
Mr. Mackenzie Bell, has noted, her life, uneventful as
it was in personal incident, brought her constantly
in touch with eminent and interesting persons. She
was early trained to religious observances by her
mother, and became an earnest adherent of the
Church of England. At eighteen she declined an offer
of marriage from a Roman Catholic on the ground
of religious considerations, and this act fairly typified
her course throughout her life. Her emotions, her
personal desires, and even her talent became sub
dued to her zest for righteousness, and the plain
story of her days is little more than a chronicle of her
service to others. She had absolutely nothing of
Dante Gabriel's belief in the necessary selfishness of
those possessed of an originating gift, and frequently
she let her own gift lapse in favour of duty where
more persistence might perhaps eventually have made
for the greater comfort of the household by increas
ing their very moderate means. Her first volume
of poems was printed privately at Polidori's little

CHRISTINA ROSSETTI.
(Early sketch by Dante Gabriel Rossetti.)
From "New Poems," etc., Macmillan & Co.

Cbristina IRossetti. 231
printing-press when she was seventeen years old, and
her next volume was the Goblin Market, and Other
Poems, published in 1862, fifteen years later. Not
until 1890 did she earn more than a hundred and fifty
or two hundred dollars a year from her writing.
During the most depressed period of the family
fortunes she helped her mother in the management
of a little day-school which was not a very success
ful venture. Italian was of course as familiar to her
as English, but her reading seems to have been
chiefly English, and not until she was eighteen did
she feel the spell of Dante. As she did not lean
toward scholarship she never became a very thor
ough student of the great Florentine, but her senti
ment toward him is indicated by her wish that she
too "could have done something for Dante in Eng
land," as her sister and both her brothers had done.
In her youth the characteristics of her brother
Dante Gabriel and of her sister Maria seem to have
met in her and struggled against each other for mas
tery, the latter finally gaining the upper hand ; al
though a certain strain of strong common sense
prevented her sharing Maria's ecstasy of religious de
votion. Deeply admiring the spirit that prompted
her sister to refrain from looking at the mummies in
the British Museum "because she realised how the
general Resurrection might happen 'even as she
looked at those solemn corpses turned into a sight
for sight-seers,' " and made her afraid to let her eyes
rest on some prints from the Book of Job which

232 ftbe IRossettis.
" went counter to the Second Commandment," she
herself nevertheless seems free from its extremes.
Setting to herself the model, however, of her sister's
saintly career, she grew more and more away from
the untutored Caprice of Dante Gabriel, and merged
her strong individuality in an ideal not colourless
certainly, but not varying or complex. Maria event
ually entered an Anglican convent, and Christina
contented herself with living a life of almost convent
ual isolation, caring for her mother and for two aunts,
all of whom lived to a great age and greatly required
her loving attention.
For her mother she had a feeling that fell but little
short of adoration. Her first little privately printed
volume was dedicated to her, and later dedications
ran: "To my Beloved Example, Friend, Mother,"
" My Mother, to whom I inscribe my Book in all
Reverence and Love," "My Dear and Honoured Ex
ample," up to the final work sorrowfully inscribed to
her mother's "Beloved, Revered, and Cherished
Memory." Fortunately both mother and daughter
were endowed with that gift of the gods, the faculty
of keeping their youthfulness of spirit, and they seem
to have lived together as sisters might, with similar
interests and tastes. Domestic as Mrs. Rossetti was
in her care for the physical comfort of her family, she
was fully in sympathy with them on their intellectual
side, and her opinion on niceties of expression was
deferred to hardly more by Christina than by Dante
Gabriel. In the matter of pronunciation, for example,

Cbristina IRossetti. 233
she was a recognised authority with her children, Gab
riel refusing to take even Mr. Watts-Dunton's judg
ment against hers. In her old age she liked well to hear
Christina read poetry in her clear, vibrant, bell-like
voice, " the wonderful Rossetti voice" that claimed
the notice of all who heard it, and Mr. Sharp remem
bers that his first experience of Southwell's poetry
dates from his first call on the mother and daughter :
" I can still see that small and rather gloomy
room," he says, "with Mrs. Rossetti sitting back,
with a woollen Shetland shawl across her shoulders,
and the lamplight falling on her white hair and clear-
cut, ivory-hued features, as she waited with
closed eyes, the better to listen ; at the table, Miss
Rossetti, leaning her head on her right hand, with
her right elbow on the table and with her left hand
turning the leaves ofthe book." The poem was The
Burning Babe, and Mr. Sharp observed the curious
suspiration with which the music of certain lines was
prolonged, and the way in which each word was
enunciated as completely and separately as notes of
music slowly struck on the piano. Another friendly
witness speaks of the mother as having still the re
mains of the noble beauty which is in all Rossetti's
portraits of her, "looking a really great old woman,"
and remembers the gesture with which she would
turn to her daughter, laying a fine old hand on hers,
and saying: "My affectionate Christina." This
dedication of herself to duties beautiful if not rejuve
nating had the effect upon Christina of turning her

234 ftbe IRossettis.
early dejection into a much more blithe and jocund
temper. "I was a very melancholy girl," she once
said toward the end of her life, " but now I am a very
cheerful old woman."
In 1866, at the age of thirty-six, she again suffered
from her deep interest in a suitor, whom she could
not marry owing to her religious scruples. This inci
dent, which involved a genuine and strong attach
ment, is probably responsible for what is most
moving and most exquisite in her poetry. Without
some such personal experience it is doubtful if she
could have attained the noble passion of the Monna
Innominata series of sonnets in which, speaking for
the unknown Italian ladies preceding Beatrice and
Laura, and sung by poets less conspicuous than Dantq
and Petrarch, she reveals the power and grace of an
emotional nature veiled by the steady practice of
self-abnegation. In her note to the series she says :
" In that land and in that period which gave si
multaneous birth to Catholics, to Albigenses, and to
Troubadours, one can imagine many a lady as shar
ing her lover's poetic aptitude, while the barrier
between them might be one held sacred by both,
yet not such as to render mutual love incompatible
with mutual honour. Had such a lady spoken for
herself, the portrait left us might have appeared more
tender, if less dignified, than any drawn even by a
devoted friend. Or had the Great Poetess of our
own day and nation only been unhappy instead of
happy, her circumstances would have invited her to

Mrs. and Miss Christina Rossetti, 1877.

Cbristina IRossetti. 235
bequeath to us, in lieu of the Portuguese Sonnets, an
inimitable ' donna innominata ' drawn not from fancy
but from feeling, and worthy to occupy a niche beside
Beatrice and Laura. " No intelligent reader, however,
could fail to find in the grave, exalted sentiment of
these sonnets, with their undercurrent of pain, a
more human and living spirit than can ever exist in
work based on fancy alone. The message of the
eleventh sonnet is poignantly conveyed by them all,
— a message of dignity and pathos :
Even let them prate: who know not what we knew
Of love and parting in exceeding pain,
Of parting hopeless, here to meet again,
Hopeless on earth, and heaven is out of view.
But by my heart of love laid bare to you,
My love that you cannot make void nor vain,
Love that foregoes you but to claim anew
Beyond this passage of the gate of death,
I charge you at the Judgment make it plain
My love of you was life and not a breath.
Her brother has regretted the morbid note in
much of Christina's poetry and in the early poems it
is sufficiently apparent, but one has only to compare
such poetry as the lyric Memory, the sonnet Love Lies
Bleeding, The Twilight Night, Shall I Forget ? and all
the sonnets of Monna Innominata with the poems
in which her nearest approach to passive sobriety
and perfectly controlled feeling is made, to realise
that the union of her impetuous sorrow at the real
ities shadowing her impressionable soul with the
capacity to suppress and regulate her actions, and
ultimately her thoughts, was the spring of her rare

236 ftbe IRossettis.
poetic grace, and that of the two elements her
poetry could best have spared the latter. Chris
tina's interest in the heart and soul of man entirely
prevented any regret on her part that she was so
largely cut off from the heart of nature. Except
for eleven months of 1853-4 which were spent with
her father and mother at Frome, Selwood, and a few
visits to friends in country places, she was as con
firmed a Londoner as Charles Lamb, and doubted
whether she would really be bettered by long or
frequent sojourns out of town. A friend once urged
her to admit that she would be much happier in the
peace and beauty of the country, but she responded
by quoting Bacon's assertion that " the Souls ofthe
Living are the Beauty of the World." Her friend,
still unconvinced, asked her if she did not at least
find her best inspiration in the country, but this
drew forth her delightfully clear and rippling laugh
ter, and the persistent answer that while it ought to
be so, it was not ; that she did not derive anything
at all from the country at first hand, and that she
was positively in the place that suited her best.
It is clear, however, that she somewhat exagger
ated her indifference to the outdoor world. One of
her critics has noted the singularity of her living out
almost the whole of her life in "a city so majestic,
sober, and inspiring as London," and never bringing
the consciousness of streets and thoroughfares and
populous murmurs into her writings. "She whose
heart was so with birds and fruits, corn-fields and

Cbristina IRossetti. 237
farmyard sounds," he says, "never even revolts
against or despairs of the huge desolation, the labor
ious monotony of a great town. She does not sing
of the caged bird, with exotic memories of freedom
stirred by the flashing water, the hanging groundsel
of her wired prison, but with a wild voice, with
visions only limited by the rustic conventionalities
of toil and tillage. The dewy English woodland,
the sharp silences of winter, the gloom of low-hung
clouds, and the sigh of weeping rains are her back
grounds." She cared for nature, according to her
own admission, much more than she cared for art,
and when it came in her way to observe it, she
memorized its phenomena to an astonishing degree.
She had the habit in composition of closing her eyes
and calling up her subject before her mental vision,
especially its landscape setting when this was a part
of her scheme, and her imagination, like Dante
Gabriel's, was so vivid that she was able thus to
produce a realistic impression of the most minute
details of country scenery while sitting in her upper
bedroom whose outlook was toward nothing more
rural than the dingy walls of adjacent houses. One
ofthe series of sonnets called Later Life commences:
A host of things I take on trust; I take
The nightingales on trust, for few and far
Between those actual summer moments are
When I have heard what melody they make,
and until she was forty-six or -seven years old a sun
rise was one of the host of things to be taken on

238 ftbe IRossettis.
trust. Then under the persuasion of Mr. Watts-
Dunton's belief that a sunrise was a very different
spectacle from a sunset, and that most poets derived
their descriptions of the former from the latter, she
decided that a sunrise she would see. Mr. Watts-
Dunton thus describes the experience :
" One morning we went out just as the chilly but
bewitching shiver ofthe dawn-breeze began to move,
and the eastern sky began slowly to grow grey.
Early as it was, however, many of the birds were
awake, and waiting to see what we went out to see,
as we knew by the twitter after twitter coming from
the hedgerows. Christina was not much interested
at first, but when the grey became slowly changed
into a kind of apple-green crossed by bars of lilac,
and then by bars of pink and gold, and, finally, when
the sun rose behind a tall clump of slender elms so
close together that they looked like one enormous
tree, whose foliage was sufficiently thin to allow the
sunbeams to pour through it as a glittering lacework
of dewy leaves, she confessed that no sunset could
surpass it. And when the sun, growing brighter
still, and falling upon a silver sheet of mist in which
the cows were lying, turned it into a sheet of gold,
and made each brown patch on each cow's coat gleam
like burnished copper, then she admitted that a sun
rise surpassed a sunset, and was worth getting up to
see. She stood and looked at it, and her lips moved
out in a whisper that I could not hear." "Yet so
powerful is the force of habit," he adds, "that I

Cbristina IRossetti. 239
greatly doubt whether Christina ever took the
trouble to see another sunrise."
In 1865 Christina Rossetti made the journey to
Italy never accomplished by Dante Gabriel who was
so much more an Italian than she. To her "half-
Italian heart " as she called it, the appeal was strong.
The "country half her own," seemed to her the
loveliest of lands : "Its people is a noble people,"
she writes, " and its very cattle are of high-born
aspect." Leaving it, she embodied her thrill ofthe
true inimitable patriotism in the little poem En Route :
Farewell, land of love, Italy,
Sister-land of Paradise :
With mine own feet I have trodden thee
Have seen with mine own eyes :
I remember, thou forgettest me,
I remember thee.
Blessed be the land that warms my heart,
And the kindly clime that cheers,
And the cordial faces clear from art,
And the tongue sweet in mine ears :
Take my heart, its truest, tenderest part,
Dear land, take my tears.
From this time until 1871 Christina's life seems to
have been set in paths of great serenity. In 1866
she made a visit of seven weeks at Penkill Castle
where Rossetti visited two years later, and returned
"well content to be at home again and take her turn
at housekeeping." She went occasionally into so
ciety, and wrote a considerable number of poems.
In 1866 The Prince's Progress, and Other Poems, with

240 ftbe IRossettis.
two beautiful designs by Dante Gabriel, was brought
out. In 1870 the prose volume Commonplace and
Other Short Stories made its appearance. Dante Ga
briel's verdict concerning it— that it was certainly not
dangerously exciting to the nervous system — was
truer than his less discouraging assurance that it was
nevertheless far from being dull and would be likely
to take. It did not take, and she went back for a
time to the poetry which he told her was her proper
business to write instead of Commonplaces.
In 1 87 1 she was stricken with the terrible disease
that so changed her appearance during the remaining
three-and-twenty years of her life, the exophthalmic
bronchocele which has for its most noticeable symp
tom a marked protrusion of the eyeballs.
Dante Gabriel's chalk drawing of her, made five
years before, shows her face at its most attractive
period, in the calmness of its maturity, before this
cruel disfigurement, which to her friends was never
theless negligible and which diminished with time.
Later in life she grew stout with a certain heaviness
of expression dissipated by her exquisite smile. Mr.
Sharp has described her as she appeared to him at
their first meeting in the early eighties :
"In some ways," he says, "she reminded me of
Mrs. Craik, the author of John Halifax, Gentleman ;
that is, in the Quaker-like simplicity of her dress, and
the extreme and almost demure plainness of the ma
terial, with, in her mien, something of that serene
passivity which has always a charm of its own. She

Cbristina IRossetti. 241
was so pale as to suggest anaemia, though there was
a bright and alert look in her large and expressive
azure-grey eyes, a colour which often deepened to a
dark, shadowy, velvety grey ; and though many
lines were imprinted on her features, the contours
were smooth and young. Her hair, once a rich
brown, now looked dark, and was thickly threaded
with solitary white hairs, rather than sheaves of grey.
She was about the medium height of women, though
at the time I thought her considerably shorter. With
all her quietude of manner and self-possession, there
was a certain perturbation from this meeting with a
stranger, though one so young and unknown. I
noted the quick, alighting, glance, its swift with
drawal ; also the restless, intermittent fingering of
the long, thin, double watch-guard of linked gold
which hung from below the one piece of colour she
wore, a quaint, old-fashioned bow of mauve or pale
purple ribbon, fastening a white frill at the neck."
Her quietness, the "drab colour" of her exist
ence, of her manner, and of much of her later writ
ing, is the quality that seems most to have impressed
those who have written reminiscently of her, the
qualities showing her kinship with Dante Gabriel's
anything but drab-coloured temperament having
been successfully buried. Yet, as we find her by his
side whenever his own condition is more than usu
ally perturbing — at Kelmscott, at Bognor, at Hunt
er's Forestall, and finally at Birchington-by-the-Sea
— we feel in her devotion to him something much
16

242 ftbe IRossettis.
more than duteous impulse and family affection.
The sympathetic fire at the basis of her own heroic
ally controlled nature seems to give her an indulgent
comprehension of his, and despite their diametrically
opposite ways in life the two remained in some re
spects alike to the end. Their memoirs show absol
utely distinct types fitted to set each other off by
the force of contrast, but one can hardly read the
poems of both, so expressive of their inner life, with
out realising that Christina needed little of her bound
less generosity toward those differing from her in act
and opinion to help her fathom Rossetti. Many of
the impulses that swayed him frequently toward
his own unhappiness found their counterpart in one
who could write before she was eighteen the son
net The Whole Head is Sick and the Whole Heart
Faint. The tendency toward symbolism that led
him to read disaster in a tree felled by a storm, and
see in a bird fluttering at his feet the re-incarnated
spirit of his wife, appears in almost every poem she
wrote. Like him she was practical on certain sides,
and, like him also, lavish with worldly goods. In
both the spirit struggled gallantly with the flesh, and
in Christina's nature at least won the victory without
dispute. In The Face of the Deep, that fine failure of her
last days, she writes with irresistible quaintness :
"Whilst studying the devil I must take heed that
my study become not devilish by reason of sympa
thy," but her study of what she called the devil, and

Cbristina IRossetti. 243
of his two companions, the world and the flesh, had
given her a power to grapple with realities denied to
the born ascetic. The image in her mind is seldom
seen in the typical dimness of religious light, but in
the full glory ofthe world's warm sunshine. What
one of her critics has called her "fair, stern philoso
phy " is learned not in a guarded retreat or cloister,
but on a battlefield of clashing emotions. Her peni
tent on the convent threshold looks earthward not
to see, in the world she is leaving, dross and vanity,
but to realise a pageant as fair as it might appear to
the merriest reveller taking part in it :
Milk-white, wine-flushed among the vines,
Up and down leaping, to and fro,
Most glad, most full, made strong with wines,
Blooming as peaches pearled with dew,
Their golden windy hair afloat,
Love-music warbling in their throat,
Young men and women come and go.
And, looking forward to the heaven she hopes by
fasting and prayer to enter, the same penitent fore
sees no visionary Paradise of song and praise and
passive peace, but the joy of earth renewed :
There we shall meet as once we met,
And love with old familiar love.
Mr. Watts-Dunton, knowing Christina only dur
ing the wholly self-abnegating years of her life, was
still acute enough to catch the suggestion of this
fervid strain linking her sympathetically to the man
he so much loved. "No doubt," he says, "there

244 ftbe IRossettis.
was mixed with her spiritualism, or perhaps under
lying it, a rich sensuousness that under other cir
cumstances of life would have made itself manifest,
and also a rare potentiality of deep passion."
For this reason many of her poems on sin, of
which, of course, she knew nothing at all experi
mentally, are quick with intelligence and move the
heart profoundly. For this reason, too, she empha
sised the straitness and narrowness of the positively
virtuous path. It was no part of her scheme of
morality to point out its pleasantness. Renuncia
tion is not pleasant. The generous capacity to love
and to enjoy the jocund life of careless self-indulg
ence will see no beauty, she well knows, in the
patient ascent. Thus, without descending to com
promise or hypocrisy, she trusts to the spur of the
truth : Does the road wind up-hill all the way ?
Yes, to the very end.
Will the day's journey take the whole long day ?
From morn till night, my friend.
Someone has said that the warmth of her person
ality revealed itself in her eyes,
That seemed to love whate'er they looked upon.
After her fierce illness she liked to veil these eyes
from strangers, her friends say, and as her bodily
infirmities increased she certainly veiled more and
more the ardour of her temperament. The purpose
of her life became firmly repressive, and to such

Cbristina IRossetti. 245
repression she counselled others, dropping gradually
into the conventionalities of real religious expression.
Certain passages of her prose are the very children
of the spirit in which the Imitation of Christ was
written by that gentle monk who to the outer eye
knew a life more placid even than Christina's.
"Strip sin bare from the voluptuousness of
music, fascination of gesture, entrancement of the
stage, rapture of poetry, glamour of eloquence, se
duction of imaginative emotion ; strip it of every
adornment ; let it stand out bald as in the Ten stern
Commandments. Study sin, when study it we
must, not as a relishing pastime but as an embitter
ing deterrent. Lavish sympathy on the sinner,
never on the sin."
In 1876 Maria Rossetti died, and in the autumn of
the same year Christina, her mother, and her two
aunts settled at 30 Torrington Square, which con
tinued to be Christina's home for the remaining
eighteen years of her life. The house was a com
monplace abode of dingy brick. The interior im
pressed all those who have written of it by its
sombre aspect, one witness characterising its spiritual
atmosphere as that of old age, " a silence that draped
and muffled " the place. It was plainly furnished,
but Dante Gabriel's gifts of old furniture, to which
he alludes from time to time in his letters, were scat
tered through the rooms, and some of his pictures
hung lipon the walls. In the drawing-room was a
little glass case of ferns which Christina cherished.

246 ftbe IRossettis.
She had the belief that plants were conscious in a
way of their own, and when she was told that sci
ence upheld this idea she exclaimed, as her brother
might have done : " There is something in science
after all."
There was no garden to the house, merely a little
yard at the back, and this defect made Dante Gabriel
wonder that they could go on living there when for
the same rent they could find places with ample
grounds. It is a significant detail that Christina's
library contained few books, and that nineteen-twen-
tieths of these, according to her brother William,
were of her mother's choosing. Cranford was one
of her favourites, and she liked certain novels, but
bookishness was not her foible.
After Dante Gabriel's death in 1882 Christina and
her mother spent nine weeks at Birchington awaiting
the completion of the stained-glass window to his
memory placed in the church there at his mother's
expense. Christina undertook the correspondence
involved, and her letters to Mr. Shields who exe
cuted the work are models of fine tact and good-
feeling, and throw also much light on the practical
methods of the splendid old lady to whom now, as
of old, debt was an enemy to grapple with untiringly.
'It will always remain your labour of love,"
Christina writes at the close of the episode, "but my
Mother begs you as soon as possible to let her have
an exhaustive list of her money debts to the Glass
Firm and much more to yourself: that she may as

ROSSETTI'S TOMBSTONE IN BIRCHINGTON CHURCHYARD.

Cbristina IRossetti. 247
quickly as she can meet her liabilities. At 84 she
feels that to-day's duty had more than ever better
be performed to-day and not postponed until to
morrow." In 1886 Mrs. Rossetti died: "I am glad it is I
and not she that is left sorrowful and lonely," Chris
tina said : but after this she herself grew old and
lost much of the brightness so bravely cultivated in
the unpropitious ground other natural temperament.
Her passionate attachment to her mother had taken
tender and protecting forms as age made its pitiful
appeal. The "Beloved Example" became also the
beloved child, to be pleased with playful attentions.
One of these was a habit begun in 1876 and carried
on for ten years, of writing verses to her on St.
Valentine's day. she having reflected that she had
never received a valentine. Each one that came
thereafter was a fresh surprise, as in the interval the
good lady had forgotten all about the new custom.
The little verses are all of them touching enough in
their simplicity, and those dated 1885 are especially
so in their picture of the gentle companionship so
soon to be dissolved :
You and I, my Mother,
Have lived the winter through,
And still we play our daily parts
And still find work to do :
And still the cornfields flourish,
The olive and the vine,
And still you reign my Queen of Hearts
And I 'm your Valentine.

248 ftbe IRossettis.
Christina's two aunts outlived her mother, one
by three, the other by seven years, so it was not
until 1893 that she was left to fight her own long
last battle comparatively alone. She survived eight
een months, dying of cancer, complicated by a func
tional disease of the heart and by dropsy, on the
29th of December, in her sixty-fourth year. Her
life had not been eventful, but she was worn by its
inner tumults and even at the last was troubled in
conscience for Heaven knows what imaginary failures
in attaining her austere ideal. She who was called
above all writers "the singer of death," and who had
kept it in view, not always with the exaltation ofthe
saint, frequently with the very human hope of find
ing through it the love long relinquished on earth,
and sometimes with the human dread of being for
gotten by those whose "life stood full at blessed
noon," was tired enough finally to regard it in her
last poem as pure and simple rest :
Fast asleep. Singing birds in their leafy cover
Cannot wake her, nor shake her the gusty blast —
Under the purple thyme and the purple clover
Sleeping at last.
She was buried in the family plot at Highgate
Cemetery. The outline of Christina Rossetti's life is so slender
and so monotonous that it is almost impossible to
gain from it a definite portrait of her mental and
spiritual aspect. For this we must look within her
work, and play at the dangerous game of inferences.

Cbristina IRossetti. 249
Certain features seem to stand out descriptive in this
exceedingly personal work of hers and tend to make
us believe that the image of her in the minds of the
persons who knew her last, and who have written
of her from the standpoint of that knowledge, is a
very partial image from which much life has fled.
With their eyes fixed on the saintliness of her
ways they lose sight of the contest in which that
saintliness has been won. And yet no writer has
been at less pains to conceal or disguise this con
test. Perhaps the explanation of her lifelong as
piration toward a goal from which her thought
constantly wandered earthward was her depend
ence upon natures firmer than her own. Of his
sisters Rossetti once said, "Maria was the leader.
Christina could never lead anyone." And it is
apparently true enough that she followed Maria's
footsteps to the very threshold ofthe convent, paus
ing there only because the qualities that kept her
from leadership made her the one to assume the
duties of family life. To humble herself seemed to
be her great ambition. Just before she died she said,
"This illness has humbled me. I was so proud be
fore." And thus humility has naturally been set
down as one of her conspicuous virtues. But this
gentle characteristic becomes more attractive if we
remember that it was the conscious reaction of a
temperament not free from pride. Whatever she
was, she was not quiescent. She never forgot that
happiness consists in getting what we want and not

250 ftbe IRossettis.
of doing without it. She never cheated herself into
thinking that self-denial was pleasant or that the joys
of the religious life were the only joys worth know
ing. With all her sincere belief in the vast import
ance of her own methods of nourishing the soul she
had a liberal indulgence toward those who found the
pagan world beautiful. "The poet and saint, who
has passed from a world she never loved," wrote one
of her friends after her death, " lived a life of sacrifice,
suffered many partings, unreluctantly endured the
pains of her spirituality ; but she kept, in their quick
ness, her simple and natural love of love and hope of
joy for another time. Such sufferings as hers do in
deed refuse, but they have not denied, delight. De
light is all their faith." Perhaps it would have been
even truer to say that she passed from a world whose
passionate wooing of her nature had won her love in
deed, but which she had resolutely put aside, hoping
none the less to find it and no other world in a
heaven where she could innocently yield to it.

CHAPTER XII.
CHRISTINA ROSSETTI : HER POETRY.
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI, writing to
Christina on the subject of her poetry, bade
her beware "of what might be called a
falsetto-muscularity of style." For this brotherly
anxiety there was little cause. The quality of Chris
tina's imagination and the quality of her expression
are alike feminine. Even her thoughts are restricted
to the simple round of "woman's sphere," — ofthe
mediaeval woman's sphere, indeed, which encom
passed loving and grieving and praying. We find in
her poetry neither politics nor socialism nor pedan
try ; we hear only the subdued tones of pathos and
of sentiment in a voice so plaintive and so sweet that
we hardly notice its penetrating power. Neither
do we notice very much the art with which the
poetry is made. The lines are frequently so way
ward, the lapses in metre and rhyme are so surpris
ing, the language is usually so homely and direct,
that we are sometimes inclined to deny that the
form is artistic at all, and to base the extraordinary
251

252 ftbe IRossettis.
appeal made by her poems upon their message and
the purity of their suggestion. One of her critics did,
in fact, say with kindly hesitation : " At its best her
work is almost art." Perhaps this is true. Certainly
at its best her genius pours the thought into a mould
so beautiful that no fastidious selection could improve
it, but so vital and characteristic that to speak of it
as art seems almost to belittle it. The informing
spirit at these moments seems, as far as such a thing
is possible, independent of the form. The emotion
may be conveyed, as in the sonnets of Monna Innomi
nata, by lines of exquisitely tender dignity, flowing
like a broad and stately river unbrokenly toward the
deeps of feeling, or by lines as rugged as The Despised
and Rejected contains, or as halting and wilful as
those of The Autumn stanzas, without differing greatly
in its power over the reader. Sometimes, indeed,
her caprice of method lends charm to the result, giv
ing it the unexpectedness of inspiration, bringing the
poetic vision uncorrected into the reader's presence
with the confiding boldness and fascination of a
beautiful child. Nor is her attitude toward her poetry
an artful one in any sense of the word. It is her
father's mantle of improvisation that has descended
upon her, and she sings at her work, at her monot
onous and commonplace tasks, with the spontaneity
of a thrush. She had no gift of self-criticism, and her
Muse played her at times the shabbiest of tricks, let
ting her admit what Lowell calls " an every-dayness"
of phrase or a reflection hopelessly prosaic to the

Cbristina IRossetti: 1ber (poetry. 253
same page with her true Daemon. In The Lambs of
Grasmere, for example, she seems overwhelmed by
the influence of Grasmere's poet at his most ludicrous
moments when in good faith she can write :
Day after day, night after night,
From lamb to lamb the shepherds went,
With teapots for the bleating mouths,
Instead of nature's nourishment.
Yet following this unpoetical outpouring come the
rapturous verses called A Birthday, the gayest and
blithest she ever wrote, overrunning with exultant
metaphor and liberal vitality :
My heart is like a singing bird
Whose nest is in a watered shoot ;
My heart is like an apple-tree
Whose boughs are bent with thick-set fruit ;
My heart is like a rainbow shell
That paddles in a halcyon sea ;
My heart is gladder than all these
Because my love is come to me.
Raise me a dais of silk and down :
Hang it with rare and purple dyes :
Carve it in doves and pomegranates,
And peacocks with a hundred eyes :
Work it in gold and silver grapes,
In leaves and silver fleurs-de-lys :
Because the birthday of my life
Is come, my love is come to me.
We know from her brother William how much
she was actually at the service of her gift. " Some
thing would come into her mind and her hand would
obey the dictation." He supposes that afterward she
took the pains she thought requisite to the form, but

254 ftbe IRossettis.
there is no evidence that she laboured greatly to this
end, and as a matter of fact, although he was almost
constantly in the same house with her up to her
forty-sixth year, he cannot remember ever seeing her
(except in their childish rhyming games) " in the act
of composition." She had none of Dante Gabriel's
passion for revision, nor did she have the habit of
submitting her work to others for criticism, although
to him she sent two volumes of her poems before
their publication that he might advise her concerning
them. Her first volume, setting aside the little book pri
vately printed by her grandfather, bore the title Gob
lin Market, and Other Poems. The opening poem,
Goblin Market, is her witch-child. It has been com
pared to The Pied Piper of Hamelin and to The Rime
ofthe Ancient Mariner and to Grimm's Fairy Tales,
and it is not in the least like any of them except that
it journeys through the land of unreality. It is surely,
said a critic in the London Quarterly Review, "the
most naive and childlike poem in our language.
The narrative has so matter-of-fact, and at the same
time so fantastic and bewildering an air, that we are
fairly puzzled into acceptance of everything. The
very rhythm, the leaping and hopping rhythm, which
renders the goblin merchantmen visible to us, has
something elfin and proper to the ' little people ' in its
almost infantile jingle and cadence. It is all as fresh
and as strange as the dreams of childhood." Accept
ing this infantile jingle and cadence, this whimsical,

Cbristina IRossetti: 1ber fl>oetr\>. 255
leaping spirit of childhood, as the great characteristic
of the poem, we get from it also something decidedly
unchildish ; or perhaps it would be truer to say that
the unconscious sensibility of childhood to the glow
ing beauty of the pagan natural world and to its lus
cious and liberal delights is rendered with mature
consciousness. Only an Italian — a grown-up child,
that is — could have brought about the combination
in just such a way.
The story is itself childish enough, with an obvi
ous moral. Two sisters, Laura and Lizzie, visit the
typical glen where one "dare n't go a-hunting for
fear of little men." The little men are there —
One had a cat's face,
One whisked a tail,
One tramped at a rat's pace,
One crawled like a snail,
One like a wombat prowled obtuse and furry,
One like a ratel tumbled hurry-scurry.
They try to sell fruit to the sisters, and "sweet-
toothed Laura " presently succumbs. She has no
money, so they accept in payment a golden curl cut
from her head. She eats the fruit in spite of Lizzie's
warning reminders of a certain dead Jeanie who had
done likewise and had pined and pined away, to fall
with the first snow. In time Laura also begins to
dwindle and grow pale, and Lizzie, to save her, re
turns to the glen and buys the wares of the little
men, but will not eat. They crush the fruit against
her face and the juice flows over her dimpled cheeks

256 ftbe IRossettis.
and chin. Then, escaping, she hastens back to Laura,
who kisses the juice away, thus tasting it again. This
time it scorches her lips, and she loathes the feast
and falls down in agony. When she awakes the
spell is broken and all danger is past for her. She
lives to tell her children years after
— " how her sister stood
In deadly peril to do her good,
And win the fiery antidote :
Then joining hands to little hands
Would bid them cling together,
For there is no friend like a sister,
In calm or stormy weather,
To cheer one on the tedious way,
To fetch one if one goes astray,
To lift one if one totters down,
To strengthen whilst one stands.
The glory of the poem is in the splendid play of
fiery-coloured imagery constantly interrupting the
plain narrative style. It opens with an astounding
fall of rich tropical fruits,
Apples and quinces,
Lemons and oranges,
Plump, unpecked cherries,
Melons and raspberries,
Bloom-down-cheeked peaches,
Swart-headed mulberries,
Wild, free-born cranberries,
Crab-apples, dewberries,
Pine-apples, blackberries,
Apricots, strawberries ; —
All ripe together
In summer weather, —
Morns that pass by,

Cbristina IRossetti: 1ber poetry. 257
Fair eves that fly ;
Come, buy ; come, buy :
Our grapes fresh from the vine,
Pomegranates full and fine,
Dates and sharp bullaces,
Rare pears and greengages,
Damsons and bilberries,
Taste them and try :
Currants and gooseberries,
Bright, fire-like barberries,
Figs to fill your mouth,
Citrons from the South,
Sweet to tongue and sound to eye;
Come, buy ; come, buy.
In this category ofthe goblin's song what suggest
ions do we not get of hot southern orchards 'and the
terraced vineyards of Italy ! And in the descriptions
of the two girls there is the same opulent sense of
the delicious fairness of visible things, expressed this
time in lavish metaphors that a child might feel in
deed, but could hardly understand : they are scat
tered over the plainer fabric of the piece like gems
incrusting pure, translucent glass. After the gro
tesque procession of animal-faced men has passed
we gain a sudden flashing glimpse of Laura stretch
ing out her gleaming neck,
Like a rush-imbedded swan,
Like a lily from the beck,
Like a moonlit poplar branch,
Like a vessel at the launch
When its last restraint is gone.
And delicately set among the visions ofthe fierce
summer day is the exquisite picture of the two girls
asleep as Dante Gabriel drew them for the title-page :

258 ftbe IRossettis.
Golden head by golden head,
Like two pigeons in one nest
Folded in each other's wings,
They lay down in their curtained bed:
Like two blossoms on one stem,
Like two flakes of new-fallen snow,
Like two wands of ivory
Tipped with gold for awful kings.
Moon and stars gazed in at them,
Wind sang to them lullaby,
Lumbering owls forebore to fly,
Not a bat flapped to and fro
Round their rest :
Cheek to cheek and breast to breast
Locked together in one nest.
Then, following the rugged passage in which
Lizzie is mauled by the angry little men, comes this
image of the fair resisting maiden :
White and golden Lizzie stood,
Like a lily in a flood, —
Like a rock of blue-veined stone
Lashed by tides obstreperously, —
Like a beacon left alone
In a hoary roaring sea,
Sending up a golden fire, —
Like a fruit-crowned orange-tree
White with blossoms honey-sweet
Sore beset by wasp and bee, —
Like a royal virgin town
Topped with gilded dome and spire
Close beleaguered by a fleet
Mad to tug her standard down.
This poem — named by Dante Gabriel, and dedi
cated to Maria Rossetti in the original manuscript —
emphasised at the start Christina's place among the
few who write " first-best " things. Nothing like it

Cbristina IRossetti: Iber poetry. 259
preceded it and nothing of precisely the same flavour
can ever follow it.
Among the "other poems" of the volume are
some of the best examples of Christina's various
styles. In nearly all of them we get the characteristic
note of a melancholy deep but not languid, and a
curious interrogation of the inmost recesses of the
human spirit that haunts the imagination. Of what
may be called intellectual curiosity she has nothing,
but her questioning of the unseen region at the door
of which the intellect stands baffled is unceasing.
She never doubts but she always wonders. Again
and again in imagination she crosses the bridge of
death and explores the further shore. Her ghosts
come back with familiar forms, familiar sensations,
and familiar words. The gruesome little At Home
vies with the stanzas ofthe Persian pessimist himself
in its poignant rendering of the interest felt by the
dead concerning the world relinquished. No imagery
could be so pitilessly terrible as its homely actuality,
and no mist-enshrouded ghost of the literary stage is
so impressive as the poor spirit standing lonely in its
old place among the feasting friends.
" To-morrow," said they, strong with hope,
And dwelt upon the pleasant way :
" To-morrow," cried they, one and all,
While no one spoke of yesterday.
Their life stood full at blessed noon ;
I, only I, had passed away :
" To-morrow and to-day," they cried :
I was of yesterday.

260 ftbe IRossettis.
I shivered comfortless, but cast
No chill across the table-cloth ;
I, all forgotten, shivered, sad
To stay, and yet to part how loath :
I passed from the familiar room
I who from love had passed away,
Like the remembrance of a guest
That tarrieth but a day.
The preoccupation with the moods of the dead
is not always expressed in lamentation. One of the
best-known lyrics is the peaceful one beginning,
When I am dead, my dearest,
Sing no sad songs for me,
but it must be granted that in the main this early
volume, after we leave the fantastic market-place of
the goblins, is essentially a sombre one. lt contains,
however, the four poems one or another of which
has been selected by her brother, Dante Gabriel, by
her most instructed critic, by Mr. Swinburne, and by
the public, as representing the purest essence of her
genius. These are The Convent Threshold, An Ap
ple-Gathering, Advent, and Uphill. Beside them
for singular strength and technical distinction should
be placed The Three Enemies and the third of the Old
and New Year Ditties. The former won the suf
ferances of her most adverse critic, a writer for the
Catholic World. After condemning the greater part
of the volume in terms of contemptuous disapproval
he greets The Three Enemies with the phrase,
"What in the wide realm of English poetry is
more beautiful or more Catholic than this ! " The

<2l

c8-

THE PRINCE'S PROGRESS
AND OTHER POEMS
BY CHRISTINA.ROSSETTI

<2>

-8>

The lorig hours_go and come and_go

fr

MACMILLAN&CO. 1866

TITLE-PAGE TO " THE PRINCE'S PROGRESS."

^

Cbristina IRossetti: 1ber poetry. 261
latter is peculiar for its rhyme endings, the twenty-
six lines having but one rhyme among them, yet
keeping the effect of dignity and variety. The ir
regular length of the lines, a trick of the Italian
" canzone " Mr. Rossetti reminds us, their rapid
dactylic movement, the simplicity of the whole
scheme, are appalling in view of the high intention
of the poem, but the intention is fully realised though
it is difficult to think of any other hands through
which it could have passed triumphantly.
In 1866 came another volume, The Prince's Pro
gress, and Other Poems, opening with another long
narrative poem, this time a romantic ballad, ex
tremely unequal in the merit of its stanzas, with
touches of magical sweetness and with exquisite
cadences, but without the robust vitality of the
earlier fairy-story. Some one has found in the de
scription of the waiting princess given at the end of
the poem a portrait of its author as from this time
on she grew to be. Whatever truth there is in the
rather fanciful suggestion, this rendering ofthe mood
in which all earthly happenings are unimportant is
consummate :
We never heard her speak in haste :
Her tones were sweet,
And modulated just so much
As it was meet :
Her heart sat silent through the noise
And concourse of the street.
There was no hurry in her hands,

262 ftbe IRossettis.
No hurry in her feet ;
There was no bliss drew nigh to her,
That she might run to greet.
The other poems in this second volume are all
inferior to the finer work of the first, but the curious
Eve is a very remarkable illustration of Christina's
attitude of mind toward animals. The spectacle of
the "piteous beasts" pausing in their customary
occupations to condole with Eve on the death of
Abel would be ridiculous were it not so convincing.
Bring what sceptical spirit you may to the scene,
you cannot discredit the emotion of these kneeling
camels, these wistful storks, these " kind harts "
weeping, these doves cooing desolation, and those
who have known the sympathy of a sympathetic
animal will not need to go through the process of
conversion. The conceit is so Rossettian in its dar
ing simplicity that it might almost stand as a family
poem, representing the zoological spirit pervading
that quaint community of kindred souls and disparate
minds. To reach the perfect blossom of Christina's gift,
we must pass over a quantity of her prose, and a
book of children's verses much admired by some of
her critics, to the collection called A Pageant and
Other Poems, published in 1881. In this volume oc
cur the Monna Innominata sonnets, the " sonnet of
sonnets" their author calls them, fourteen nearly
perfect examples of the most purely artistic form of
verse, embodying an emotion as controlled and

Cbristina IRossetti: Iber poetry 263
sincere as the emotion ofthe lyrics is sometimes per-
fervid and youthful. Because they express love
thwarted and not realised, and the repression instead
ofthe overflow of sentiment, they are usually placed
second to Mrs. Browning's Sonnets from the Portu
guese. At least there would seem to be no other
reason for such an order of position. In technical and
spiritual beauty they are indisputably far above the
rare achievement ofthe happier lover and lesser poet.
From a writer of Christina's predilection we should
have expected the Shakespearian sonnet form, — the
three quatrains with the couplet at the end, — as af
fording a more flexible model to convey a greater
suggestion of sweetness and melody, just as we
should have expected the utterance to be more
conspicuous for fervour than for power and depth.
In contradicting this natural inference she uncon
sciously shows the scope of her extraordinary char
acter. Her sonnets, and these sonnets in particular,
are her most subjective work, and in them she re
veals both the force of the passionate devotion by
which she is constantly inspired, and the sovereignty
she attains over it. She also reveals her instinct for
fitness of form by choosing the noblest and most
balanced intellectual structure to convey her exalted
emotion. While the rhyme endings of her sonnets
are sometimes irregular, the radical and essential
arrangement of thought and design is maintained
with great fidelity. The structure in the main is
that of the contemporary type of English sonnet in

264 ftbe IRossettis.
which what is called the " wave form " is conspicu
ous ; in which, that is, the emotions and the melody
rise gradually in the octave and fall back in shorter
beats of rhythm and with a contrasting thought in
the sestet. The purest models of this type, like the
sonnets of The House of Life, emphasise the turning
of the thought and of the metre by separating the
sestet by a little distance from the octave. Christina
makes no such division nor does she use a quicker
metre for her sestet than for her octave ; and in these
respects her sonnet resembles the Miltonian model,
in which a continuous thought is expressed by a
continuity of form. While nearly all of the Monna
Innominata sonnets show two contrasting sides of
the intellectual conception, and the sestet forms a
kind of antiphonal response to the octave, the idea
is always the outcome of a fixed emotion, a mighty
love in the shadow of renunciation in which the
lighter play of the mind has no part. Hence this
general continuity of the form is appropriate and
gives unity and dignity to the two aspects of the
thought. Take, for example, the ninth sonnet :
Thinking of you, and all that was, and all
That might have been and now can never be,
I feel your honoured excellence, and see
Myself unworthy of the happier call :
For woe is me who walk so apt to fall,
So apt to shrink afraid, so apt to flee,
Apt to lie down and die (ah, woe is me ! )
Faithless and hopeless turning to the wall.
And yet not hopeless quite nor faithless quite,
Because not loveless : love may toil all night,

Cbristina IRossetti: Iber poetry. 265
But take at morning : wrestle till the break
Of day, but then wield power with God and man : —
So take I heart of grace as best I can,
Ready to spend and be spent for your sake.
If there were a sharp division here between the
melancholy cadence of the first eight lines and the
accruing strength of the last six we should altogether
lose the fine, slow turn ofthe feeling from despair to
courage and from quiescence to action.
The diction unlike that of Dante Gabriel's sonnets,
is simple to severity. Where he links symbol to
symbol in an ecstasy of elaboration, Christina aban
dons even her customary tendency to decorative use
of words and sets her thought before us with scarcely
an appeal to our aesthetic sensibilities beyond the
appeal made by the superb architecture of her lines.
The metaphors employed are grave in character and
invariably harmonious with the nobility of the emo
tion depicted. Herein is the greatest point of depart
ure from the Sonnets from the Portuguese. We could
search the Monna Innominata series from its begin
ning to its end without unearthing a passage so dis
concerting as this from Mrs. Browning :
Antidotes
Of medicated music, answering for
Mankind's forlornest uses thou canst pour
From thence into their ears,
or so strained as this one :
The dancers will break footing, from the care
Of watching up thy pregnant lips for more.

266 ftbe IRossettis.
And if we miss the rush of emotion that certainly
enlivens Mrs. Browning's sonnets, we also escape a
sense of hurry and confusion that is felt in some of
them. Regarding Christina's series as a whole we re
ceive an impression, rendered possible by their sad
significance, of a great passion swelling to its height
to fall back in an ebbing surge " to the deeps of Life's
tumultuous sea," the "wave form" repeated in the
construction of the entire conception. This impres
sion, produced by the sequence of the individual
sonnets, those expressing the pure enchantment of
love upon the mind and heart preceding the ones in
which the doom of unfulfilment is foreseen, gives
the same intellectual pleasure that we get from all
the stately rhythms of nature, and so far from seem
ing an artifice intensifies the effect of unpremeditated
art. It is not too much — it is not really enough — to
say that the love poems of this little group, consid
ered both technically and emotionally, combine
more faultlessly the great qualities of passion and
spiritual reticence, than any other love poetry of the
present century.
To turn back for a moment to the two children's
books, Sing-Song and Speaking Likenesses, published
in 1872 and 1874, we find them curiously out of
touch with the world of little people to which the
Goblin Market certainly appealed. Sing-Song is a
collection of short poems, some of them only quat
rains, written for children of an age, one might guess,

Cbristina IRossetti: 1ber poetrp. 267
ranging from two to three. One does not ask for
more than Mother Goose ditties at this simple time
of life and would not welcome elaboration if it were
offered. But there is simplicity and simplicity. It is
difficult to find the moment antedating the birth of
romance in a child's mind. Even the most prosaic
men and women can most of them remember a na
tive fairyland of one kind or another in which they
spent a little time before the painful necessity of
growing up was forced upon them, and during this
sojourn they knew the capacity for wonder that stays
so long with certain childlike temperaments, that
stayed so long with Christina's own, and that never
left her brother, Dante Gabriel. No child is well
worth telling stories to, moreover, who has not
transmigrated into some other inhabitant of the
world he wonders about, to explore his sensations
and compare them with his own. In his extrospect-
ive zeal he " pretends " to be a pirate or a soldier or
a policeman, or anyone likely to meet with stirring
adventures. Or if he happens to be a girl he plays
at keeping house and having sick children and a
drunken husband, and a tea-party, and fifty other
excitements of a more purely social nature. He is
not usually clever enough to reverse this operation,
and play that his most sympathetic companions, his
dogs and his cats, are endowed with his own partic
ular faculties, but he is uniformly delighted to have
other people play this for him. Mr. Kipling is good
at it, and so was Mr. Stevenson, and so has many a

268 ftbe IRossettis.
humbler writer proved himself. But Christina, who
spent her quaint childhood in a very wonderland of
imaginations, fails to unlock its door for the children
to whom she writes so lovingly. Compare the little
poem from A Child's Garden of Verses, beginning
My bed is like a little boat ;
Nurse helps me in when I embark ;
with one of Christina's boating fancies, such as
Ferry me across the water,
Do, boatman, do ;
If you 've a penny in your purse
I '11 ferry you ;
to realise the difference between writing for children
and writing at them. The little verses of Sing-Song
are pleasant and amiable, and point little morals in
an unobtrusive way, as when a kindly dispositioned
child observes My clothes are soft and warm
Fold upon fold,
But I 'm so sorry for the poor
Out in the cold.
Not one of them, however, suggests the true deli
cious experiences of a child's first gay plunge into
the capital game of life on that glorious playground
the name of which is youth.
The prose stories for children in Speaking Like
nesses are a trifle better in this respect. In the words
of one of their young readers they are decidedly
"goody-goody," but quaint descriptions help along
the moral, and the agreeable puppies, intelligent

Cbristina IRossetti: 1ber poetry. 269
frogs, and helpful moles, add a degree of piquancy
to the very simple tales. Just why there was not
more put into them of the fascination which animals
unmistakably had for Christina, however, is a ques
tion. Perhaps she was more at ease in the company
of children of her own age or older, as people who
are trying very hard to behave their best often are,
but it is certainly a pity that her sweet, gracious,
playful temperament should not have found its
chance to forget the stress of restraint and aspiration
in the most inspiriting amusements of that world
"so full of a number of things," which something
very like shyness seems to have shut her out of.1
To write of Christina's poetry without specific
reference to her devotional poems would be to
1 It is fair, perhaps, to quote in connection with this expression of individual
judgment the diametrically opposite opinion of a capable writer in the London
Quarterly Review. He says :
" Children, we must remember, especially very small children, play a great part
in the world of Miss Rossetti's poetry. They have, indeed, a book all to themselves,
one of the loveliest books in the language, comparable with nothing that has gone
before it, and touched, in its own realm, by nothing before it or since, save only the
divinest ofthe Songs of Innocence. Sing-Song : A Nursery Rhyme-Book, illustrated
with pictures almost equal to the poems, by Arthur Hughes, makes a very little
book for all its hundred and twenty poems of pictures ; but its covers contain a
lyric treasure such as few books, small or great, can boast of. It used to be thought
a slight and unimportant thing to have written children's songs or children's stories :
we are getting beyond that delusion and beginning to see that children's art is a
vastly important matter, that it is by no means easy work to do, and that it can be
done as well from a purely artistic point of view, as the art which appeals to grown
up people. Who can tell how many times we should have to multiply the imagin
ation shown in the portentous She, to find the imagination required for a single
chapter of The Cuckoo Clock : and who would not give twenty Epics of Hades for
the little volume of Sing-Song ? Such poetry evades analysis ; we could as easily
dissect a butterfly's wing. It is simply a child's mood, a child's fancies and ideas
set to song ; with grave touches and tones of sudden seriousness here and there
among the blithe April weather of its little world, like the voice of a wise elder who
is still a child at heart, and among children."

270 ftbe IRossettis.
neglect not the essence of her genius as the larger
number of her readers would doubtless have us be
lieve, but certainly one of its most curious and inter
esting phenomena. We hear that her first formulated
ambition was to write a really fine hymn. By the
time she reached the end of her life by far the greater
proportion of her verse was religious. She has been
compared to Herbert and to Vaughn and to Keble,
whom she disliked, and even to Crashaw, whom
she did not remotely resemble. The two great qual
ities of her religious poems are those that also dis
tinguish her most purely secular songs, — sincerity
and favour. The point of separation between her
devout religious poetry and that of the writers
named above is her imaginative grasp of human ex
perience. No reclaimed sinner who has tasted the
bitter and the sweet of self-indulgence could more
liberally appraise its pleasures.
We feel this not so much from any categorical
statement of the world's attractions, but from the
wrench of parting with that worthless world, a
wrench she is too honest ever to ignore.
My fellow-pilgrims pass me and attain
That hidden mansion of perpetual peace,
Where keen desire and hope dwell free from pain :
That gate stands open of perennial ease ;
I view the glory till I partly long,
Yet lack the fire of love which quickens these,
O, passing Angel, speed me with a song,
A melody of heaven to reach my heart
And rouse me to the race and make me strong ;
Till in such music I take up my part.

Cbristina IRossetti: Iber poetry. 271
In the comparatively few poems that ring with
such music as she here prays to make, however, we
miss the note that sets her poetry in the place it occu
pies with those who value the sum of her rich, ten
der, appealing, and courageous personality far above
any one detached quality, even that of saintliness.
The passage the spirit of which gives to the poem
called A Martyr its chief strength and its unique
beauty is that in which she speaks to the one she is
leaving from a heart " unsatisfied and young,"
Alas, alas, mine earthly love, alas,
For whom I thought to don the garments white
And white wreath of a bride, this rugged pass
Hath utterly divorced me from thy care ;
Yea, I am to thee as a shattered glass
Worthless with no more beauty lodging there,
Abhorred lest I involve thee in my doom :
For sweet are sunshine and this upper air,
And life and youth are sweet, and give us room
For all most sweetest sweetnesses we taste :
Dear, what hast thou in common with a tomb ?
It was, after all, what she self-reproachingly calls
The foolishest fond folly of a heart
That hankers after Heaven, but clings to earth ;
which gave her the great distinction she has won as
a religious poet and the power to appeal to an audi
ence ordinarily untouched by religious poetry. In
the commemorative service held in the church she
had been accustomed to attend, when the reredos
painted by Burne-Jones was placed there to her
memory, the venerable Bishop of Durham told the

272 ftbe IRossettis.
large concourse of people assembled in her honour
that the dedication of her poetical genius to the serv
ice of God had been the most complete this century
had known. And this was true, but not perhaps
quite in the sense the Bishop meant it, for he went
on to say that the passionate and sensuous quality
of her early secular verse was merely the apprentice
ship and basis of her production as an artist. The
judgment of a recent writer in the Quarterly Review
comes much nearer to plucking out the heart of the
truly baffling mystery of her devotional poetry.
"One is tempted," he says, "to advance the
seeming paradox that it is in her least personal
poems, those in which symbolism and allegory pre
dominate, that we get the truest presentment of her
personality. For the purely devotional writings,
outcome as they are of an elementary part of her na
ture, are to a great extent the expression of that one
part only, and lack the peculiar quality which is the
hallmark of her veritable self. They are poetical, but
the poetry is less inevitable in them than the religious
feeling ; the soul of the poet is dominated by the
heart ofthe saint. The statement again sounds par
adoxical, inasmuch as the soul is generally credited
with qualities more spiritual than those assigned to
the heart : but the spirit of Christina Rossetti had
a wider vision, understanding, and sympathy than
could be contained within the limits of a definite re
ligious feeling or a conscious creed ; and the poet's
perception, apprehending intuitively the spiritual

Cbristina IRossetti : Iber poetry. 273
element and import in much not commonly associ
ated with religion, was more inherently part of herself
than the devotional consciousness which both ani
mated and controlled her heart."
We can at least say without doing violence to the
purity of her exalted and exalting nature that her
poetry served God most fully when it gave fullest
expression to her deep love of all good things earthly
or divine. Love that preserved the lesser in the
greater was, we repeat, what she longed for most,
if we read her poetry aright.
Many have sung of love a root of bane
While to my mind a root of balm it is,
For love at length breeds love ; sufficient bliss
For life and death and rising up again.
Surely when light of Heaven makes all things plain,
Love will grow plain with all its mysteries ;
Nor shall we need to fetch from over seas
Wisdom or wealth or pleasure safe from pain.
Love in our borders, love within our heart,
Love all in all, we then shall bide at rest,
Ending forever life's unending quest,
Ended for ever effort, change and fear ;
Love all in all ; no more that better part
Purchased, but at the cost of all things here.
Mr. Watts-Dunton has said that in her brother
Gabriel a mystic and sensuous temper struggled with
the asceticism of early Christian art until the sensu
ous nature gained the mastery and asceticism was
eliminated while mysticism remained. In her much
the same struggle took place, but asceticism gained
ground and all that was opposed to it gradually
passed out of sight.

274 ftbe IRossettis.
As she advanced in years prose took the place of
poetry with her, and her prose pitilessly betrays
every defect of her style and every limitation of her
mind. To the general reader it is incurably dull, al
though great numbers of those who lean upon de
votional books have found in its humility of spirit
and unassuming holiness of intention, — precisely the
qualities to make it most acceptable. The Face of the
Deep, published in 1892 by the Society for Promoting
Christian Knowledge, is her last accomplishment,
and is a volume of over five hundred and fifty pages,
to the making of which she took between two and
three years. It is in the form of a commentary on
the Apocalypse, written chiefly in a didactic style
with garrulous reflections. Lyrics of more or less
merit are scattered up and down it and relieve to
some extent the commonplace effect, but the indi
vidual charm, the free movement and leaping imag
ination of Christina the poet is hopelessly forfeited.
The Christian cry of entreaty and adoration that
rings with so melodious a sound in the devotional
poems of her best type has become the conventional
intonation of an uninspired though devout worshipper.
In her sweet capricious metres we are frequently re
minded of her own suggestive lines :
Without, within me, music seemed to be :
Something not music, yet most musical,
Silence and sound in heavenly harmony,
but her incongruous prose seems to have forgotten
the name of harmony. It is, indeed, to paraphrase

Cbristina IRossetti: Iber poetry. 275
Lowell's definition of Dryden, " prose with a kind of
yEolian attachment." There are passages here and
there to persuade the reader of the author's identity
with the poet of Confluents and An Apple-Gathering,
but it lacks sadly enough the fine literary sense by
which prose is made at once plastic to its meaning,
unhackneyed, and beautiful. Perhaps it was only
the kind of failure sure to result when a nature of
strong idiosyncrasy attempts to break its own natural
spirit and part company with itself. In the light of
her literary biography none of her poems reads more
significantly than Who Shall Deliver Me :
God harden me against myself,
This coward with pathetic voice
Who craves for ease and rest and joys.
Myself, arch-traitor to myself :
My hollowest friend, my deadliest foe,
My clog whatever road I go.
Yet One there is can curb myself,
Can roll the strangling load from me,
Break off the yoke and set me free.

LIST OF THE MORE IMPORTANT WRITINGS

OF DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI.

Arranged in chronological sequence. The dates indicate the
approximate time of composition without reference to the
time of publication. The list is compiled chiefly from
the one given by Mr. William Rossetti in his book : Dante
Gabriel Rossetti as Designer and Writer, but has been
somewhat extended.

1843. 1843.1844?1845. 1845 ?
1845-6.1846?1846-7? 1846-81 ?
1847?1847?1847-8. 1847-9.1847-9. 1847-60? 1847-69.

Sorrentino. {Prose.) Unfinished and unpublished.
Sir Hugh the Heron. {Prose.) Privately printed.
Burger's Lenore. {Translation.)
Corsican Ballad from Merimee's Colomba. {Transla
tion.)
To Mary in Summer.
The Niebelungenlied. Unfinished.
Diary by Rossetti. {Prose.) Unpublished.
Henry the Leper. Translation from Der Arme Hein-
rich.
Collected Works.
Two Songs. {Translations from Victor Hugo.)
The Choice.
Dante's Vita Nuova. {Prose and Poetry.) Translation.
The Early Italian Poets. {Translations.)
Dante and His Circle. {Prose and Poetry.) Transla
tions.
The Bride's Prelude, or Bride-Chamber Talk. Unfin
ished.
The Portrait.

277

278

ftbe IRossettis.

1847-8?1847-69. 1847-69.1847-70.
1847-81.1847-81.1847-82?1848 ?
1848?1848-9.1848-9?
1848-69? 1848-70.
1849.

;?<?
1849-52 ?
1849-55 ?
1850.1850?

Capitolo : A. M. Salirni to Francesco Ridi, 16-
{Translation.)
The Blessed Damozel.
My Sister's Sleep.
Poems.
The House of Life.
Ballads and Sonnets.
The Dutchman's Pipe. Unpublished.
Autumn Song.
At the Sunrise in 1848.
The Girlhood of Mary Virgin. Two Sonnets.
On Refusal of Aid between Nations.
The Card-dealer.
St. Agnes of Intercession. {Prose.) Unfinished.
London to Folkestone.
Boulogne to Amiens and Paris.
The Staircase of Notre Dame, Paris.
On the Place de la Bastille.
For a Venetian Pastoral by Giorgione.
On the Louvre Gallery.
On a Cancan at the Salle Valentino.
On a Last Visit to the Louvre.
Last Sonnets in Paris. Three.
For Ruggiero and Angelica, by Ingres. Two Sonnets.
From Paris to Brussels.
L' Envoi.
Vox Ecclesise Vox Christi.
On the Road to Waterloo.
The Field of Waterloo.
Return to Brussels.
Near Brussels, — A Half-way Pause.
Between Ghent and Bruges.
Antwerp and Bruges (or The Carillon).
Hand and Soul. {Prose.)
Ave. A Song and Music.
Dante at Verona.
The Sea Limits (or Boulogne Cliffs).
The Mirror.
A Last Confession.

Xist of tbe flfeore limportant Waitings. 279
1850 ? A Young Fir Wood.
1850-8? Jenny.
185 1. Poole's Picture : The Goths in Italy. {Prose criticism.)
185 1. During Music.
1851. Exhibition of Sketches and Drawings. {Prose criti
cism.)
1 85 1. Wellington's Funeral.
1851-6. The Burden of Nineveh.
1852. The Modern Pictures of All Nations, Lichfield House.
{Prose criticism.)
1852. The Church Porches. Two Sonnets. (The second
has been excluded from the collected works, but
may be found in The Century Magazine, Sept.,
1882.)
1852? The Staff and Scrip.
1853. Sonnet on McCracken : Parody from Tennyson's
Kraken.
1853-80? Sister Helen.
1854 ? Beauty and the Bird (or The Bullfinch).
1854 ? English May.
1855 ? The Passover in the Holy Family.
1856. Madox Brown's Pictures in Liverpool. {Prose criticism.)
1857. Madox Brown — Notice in Men of the Time. {Prose.)
1857 ? On a Mulberry-tree Planted by Shakespeare.
1857? Known in Vain.
1858 ? A New Year's Burden.
1858? Lost Days.
1858 ? Vain Virtues.
1859. On the French Liberation of Italy. Privately printed.
1859? Love's Nocturn.
1859 ? Mary Magdalene at the Door of Simon the Pharisee.
1859? A Little While.
1859 ? The Song of the Bower.
i860? Inclusiveness.
1 86 1 ? Cassandra.
1862-80. Life of William Blake, Contributions to. {Prose.)
1865 ? Body's Beauty (or Lady Lilith).
1865 ? Venus Verticordia.
1866. Soul's Beauty (or Sybilla Palmifera).
1867. Aspecta Medusa.

280 ftbe IRossettis.
1868? Nuptial Sleep.
1868? The Love-moon.
1869. Eden Bower.
1869. The Glen.
1869. Troy Town.
1869. The Stream's Secret.
1869. The Orchard-pit. Unfinished.
1869? Willow- wood.
1869? Broken Music.
1869? Stillborn Love.
1869 ? The One Hope.
1869? Newborn Death.
1 870. Ebenezer Jones — Notice in Notes and Queries. {Prose.)
1 87 1. Down Stream (or The River's Record).
1 87 1 . Barcarola.
1 87 1. Cloud Confines.
1 87 1. Rose Mary.
1 87 1. Sunset Wings.
1871. The Stealthy School of Criticism. {Prose.)
1 87 1. Ballad on the Fleshly School of Poetry. Unpublished.
1 87 1. Hake's Madeline, and other Poems. {Prose criticism.)
1 87 1. Letter to Robert Buchanan. {Prose.) Unpublished.
1 87 1. Maclise's Character-portraits. {Prose.)
1871 ? Three Shadows.
1 87 1 ? Love and Hope.
1 87 1 ? Cloud and Wind.
1872. Proserpina.
1873. Hake's Parables and Tales. {Prose criticism.)
1873. Notice of Gabriele Rossetti in Maunder's Treasury.
{Prose.)
1873. Spring.
1874. Winter.
1874. Oliver Madox Brown. Sonnet.
1874 ? The Heart of the Night.
1874? Memorial Thresholds.
1875-81. Samuel Palmer, Prose Observations on.
1877. Astarte Syriaca.
1877. Letter in the Times (as to non-exhibition of pictures).
{Prose.)
1878. A Vision of Fiammetta.

Xist of tbe fl&ore limportant Mritinas. 281
1878. To Philip Bourke Marston. Sonnet.
1878. Cyprus. Sonnet. Unpublished.
1880. Sonnet on the Sonnet.
1880. John Keats. Sonnet.
1880. The White Ship.
1880. William Blake. Sonne
1880. Thomas Chatterton. Sonnet.
1880. Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Sonnet.
1880. Pride of Youth.
1880-1. The King's Tragedy.
1 88 1. Tiber, Nile, and Thames.
1 88 1. Michelangelo's Kiss.
1881. Czar Alexander the Second.
1881. True Woman.
1882. The Sphinx. Two Sonnets.
Volumes of Published Works, with Dates of Publication.
1843. Sir Hugh the Heron. London. Privately printed.
1861. The Early Italian Poets from Ciullo d'Alcamo to Dante
Alighieri (i 100-1200- 1300) in the Original Metres.
Together with Dante's Vita Nuova.
1870. Poems. Two Editions. London.
1874. Dante and his Circle, with the Italian Poets preceding
him (1 100- 1 200-1 300). A Collection of Lyrics,
edited and translated in the original metres.
Revised and rearranged edition.
1881. Poems. New Edition. London.
1 88 1. Ballads and Sonnets. London.
1882. Ballads and Sonnets. Boston Edition.
1882. Ballads and Sonnets. Tauchnitz Edition.
1882. Poems by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Boston (U. S.).
1 886. The Collected Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. With
Preface and Notes by William Rossetti. 2 vols.
1898. The Poetical Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Edited,
with Preface by W. M. Rossetti. 1 vol.
1898-1900. The Siddal Edition of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's
Works.

CHRISTINA ROSSETTI'S POEMS.
Arranged chronologically, as published separately, with dates
and names of periodicals in which they appeared.
(Compiled from the List of J. P. Anderson, British Museum,
given in Mackenzie's Life of Christina Rossetti.)
Death's Chill Between. Atheneeum. Oct. 14, 1848.
Heart's Chill Between. Atheneeum. Oct. 21, 1848.
Dream Land. The Germ. Jan., 1850.
An End. The Germ. Jan., 1850.
A Pause of Thought. The Germ. Feb., 1850.
Song. The Germ. Feb., 1850.
A Testimony. The Germ. Feb., 1850.
Repining. The Germ. Mar., 1850.
Sweet Death. The Germ. Mar., 1850.
Versi. (Italian.) Printed in The Bouquet Culled from Marylebone
Gardens. June, 1851, to Jan., 1852.
L'Incognita. (Italian.) Printed in The Bouquet Culled from
Marylebone Gardens. June, 1851, to Jan., 1852.
Corrispondenza Famigliare. (Italian.) Printed in The Bouquet
Culled from Marylebone Gardens. Jan. to July, 1852 ; July
to December, 1852.
"Behold I Stand at the Door and Knock." Aiken's Year.
1852-4.
The Lost Titian. (Prose.) The Crayon. New York, 1856.
Maude Clare. Once A Week. Nov. 5, 1859.
Up-Hill. Macmillan' s Magazine. Feb., 1861.
A Birthday. Macmillan' s Magazine. April, 1861.
An Apple-Gathering. Macmillan' s Magazine. Aug., 186 1.
Light Love. Macmillan' s Magazine. Feb., 1863.
282

Cbristina IRossetti's poems. 283
The Bourne. Macmillan' s Magazine. March, 1863.
The Fairy Prince who Arrived too Late. Macmillan' s Magazine.
May, 1863.
A Bird's-Eye View. Macmillan' s Magazine. July, 1863.
The Queen of Hearts. Macmillan' s Magazine. Oct., 1863.
One Day. Macmillan' s Magazine. Dec, 1863.
Conference between Christ, The Saints, and The Soul. Lyra
Eucharistica. 1 863. (Reprinted as " I Will Lift up Mine Eyes
unto the Hills.")
A Royal Princess. Printed in An Offering to Lancashire.
1863.
Dream-Love. Printed in A Welcome. 1863.
The Offering of the New Law, The One Oblation Once Offered.
Lyra Eucharistica. 1863.
Articles on Italian Writers and Other Celebrities. (Prose.) Im
perial Dictionary of Biography. 1857-63.
Come unto Me. Lyra Eucharistica, 2nd Edition. 1864.
Sit Down in the Lowest Room. Macmillan' s Magazine. March,
1864.
My Friend. Macmillan' s Magazine. December, 1864.
Jesus, do I Love Thee. Lyra Eucharistica, 2nd Edition. 1864.
I Know You Not. Lyra Messianica. 1864.
Before the Paling ofthe Stars. Lyra Messianica. 1864.
Good Friday. Lyra Messianica. 1864.
Easter Even. Lyra Messianica. 1864.
Within the Veil. Lyra Messianica. 1865.
Paradise in a Symbol. Lyra Messianica. 1865.
Paradise in a Dream. Lyra Messianica. 1865.
After this the Judgment. Lyra Mystica. 1865.
Spring Fancies. Macmillan 's Magazine. April, 1865.
Last Night. Macmillan 's Magazine. May, 1865.
Martyr's Song. Lyra Mystica. 1865.
Amor Mundi. The Shilling Magazine. 1865.
Hero ; A Metamorphosis. (Prose.) The Argosy. Jan., 1866.
Who Shall Deliver Me? The Argosy. Feb., 1866.
If. The Argosy. March, 1866.
Consider. Macmillan 's Magazine. Jan., 1866.
Helen Gray. Macmillan' s Magazine. March, 1866.
By the Waters of Babylon. Macmillan' s Magazine. Oct.,
1866.

284 ftbe IRossettis.
Seasons. Macmillan' s Magazine. Dec, 1866.
The Waves of this Troublesome World : a Tale of Hastings Ten
Years Ago. (Prose.) The Churchman's Shilling Magazine.
1867.
Some Pros and Cons about Pews. (Prose.) The Churchman's
Shilling Magazine. 1867.
Dante, an English Classic. (Prose Essay.) The Churchman" s
Shilling Magazine. 1867.
A Safe Investment. (Prose Story.) The Churchman' s Shilling
Magazine. 1 867.
Mother Country. Macmillan' s Magazine. March, 1868.
A Smile and a Sigh. Macmillan' s Magazine. May, 1868.
Dead Hope. Macmillan' s Magazine. May, 1868.
Twilight Night. The Argosy. Jan., 1868.
Autumn Violets. Macmillan's Magazine. Nov., 1868.
They Desire a Better Country. Macmillan' s Magazine. March,
1869.
A Christmas Carol. Scribner's Monthly. Jan., 1872.
Days of Vanity. Scribner's Monthly. Nov., 1872.
A Bird Song. Scribner's Monthly. Jan., 1873.
Two Sonnets : 1. Venus's Looking-Glass ; 2. Love Lies Bleed
ing. The Argosy. Jan., 1873.
A Dirge. The Argosy. Jan., 1874.
An English Drawing-Room (or Enrica). Picture Posies. 1874.
By the Sea. Picture Posies. 1874.
A Bride Song. The Argosy. Jan., 1875.
Mirrors of Life and Death. Atheneeum. March 17, 1877.
An October Garden. Atheneeum. Oct. 27, 1877.
Yet a Little While. Dublin University Magazine. 1878.
Husband and Wife. A Masque of Poets. 1878.
A Harmony on First Corinthians. New and Old. Feb., 1879.
Thou Art the Same, and Thy Years shall not Fail. The Child
ren's Hymn Book. 1881.
Resurgam. Athenaium. Jan. 28, 1882.
Birchington Churchyard. Atheneeum. April 28, 1882.
To-day's Burden. Sonnets of Three Centuries. 1882.
True in the Main. Two sketches (Prose). Dawn of Day. May
1, 1882 ; June 1, 1882.
Michael F. M. Rossetti. Atheneeum. Feb. 17, 1883.
A Wintry Sonnet. Macmillan's Magazine. April, 1883.

Cbristina IRossetti's poems. 285
Dante : The Poet Illustrated out of the Poem. (Prose.) The
Century. Feb., 1884.
One Seaside Grave. The Century. May, 1884.
A Christmas Carol. Century Guild Hobby Horse. 1887.
A Hope Carol. Century Guild Hobby Horse. 1888.
There is a Budding Morrow in Midnight. Century Guild Hobby
Horse. 1889.
Cardinal Newman. Atheneeum. Aug. 16, 1890.
An Echo from Willowwood. Magazine of Art. Sept., 1890.
Yea, I Have a Goodly Heritage. Aialanta. Oct., 1890.
A Death of a First-Born. Literary Opinion. Jan. and Feb., 1892.
Faint yet Pursuing. Literary Opinion. 1892.
The House of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. (Prose.) Literary Opin
ion. 1 892.
The Way of the World. Magazine of Art. July, 1894.
\ Ash Wednesday.
) Lent. Dawn of Day. Feb. , 1 894.
The Chinaman. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, his Family Letters. 1895.
The P.-R. B. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, his Family Letters. 1895.
Maude. With an introduction by W. M. Rossetti. James Bow-
den. London, 1897.
Volumes of Published Works, with Dates of Publication.
First Verses. Privately printed by G. Polidori, London, 1842.
Verses. Privately printed at G. Polidori's, London, 1847.
Goblin Market, and Other Poems. With two designs by D. G.
Rossetti. Macmillan & Co. Cambridge, 1862.
Goblin Market, and Other Poems. Second edition. Macmillan
& Co. Cambridge, 1865.
The Prince's Progress, and Other Poems. With two designs by
D. G. Rossetti. Macmillan & Co. London, 1866.
Poems. Roberts Bros. Boston, 1866.
Poems. New edition enlarged. Roberts Bros. Boston, 1876.
Outlines for Illuminating. Consider. A poem. A. D. F. Ran
dolph & Co. New York, 1866.
II Mercato de Folletti (Goblin Market) ; poema tradolto in Itali-
ano da T. P. Rossetti. Firenze, 1867.
Commonplace, and Other Short Stories. F. S. Ellis. London,
1870.

286 ftbe IRossettis.
Commonplace, and Other Short Stories. Roberts Bros. Boston,
1870.
Sing-Song, A Nursery rhyme book. With 120 illustrations by
Arthur Hughes, engraved by the Brothers Dalziel. George
Routledge and Sons. London, 1872.
Sing-Song. Roberts Bros. Boston, 1872.
Sing-Song. Another Edition. George Routledge and Sons.
London, 1878.
Sing-Song. Another Edition. Macmillan & Co. London, 1893.
Annus Domini, a prayer for each day of the year, founded on a
text of Holy Scripture. Edited by the Rev. H. W. Burrows.
James Parker & Co. London, 1874.
Annus Domini. Roberts Bros. Boston.
Speaking Likenesses. With pictures thereof by Arthur Hughes.
Macmillan & Co. London, 1874.
Speaking Likenesses. Roberts Bros. Boston, 1874.
Goblin Market, The Prince's Progress, and Other Poems. With
four designs by D. G. Rossetti. New Edition. Macmillan
& Co. London, 1875. Reprinted, 1879, 1884, 1888.
Seek and Find. A double series of short studies of the Benedicite.
Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. London, 1879.
A Pageant, and Other Poems. Macmillan & Co. London, 1881.
Passages from the Bible relating to the Saints, with medita
tions.
Poems. Roberts Bros. Boston, 1882.
Letter and Spirit. Notes on the Commandments. Society for
Promoting Christian Knowledge. London, 1883.
Time Flies : a Reading Diary. Society for Promoting Christian
Knowledge. London, 1885.
Time Flies. Roberts Bros. Boston, 1886.
Poems. (With designs by D. G. Rossetti.) New and enlarged
Edition. Macmillan & Co. London, October, 1890. Re
printed, Dec, 1890, Feb. and Aug., 1891, 1892, 1894, 1895,
1896.
The Face of the Deep : a devotional commentary on the Apoca
lypse. (With the Text.) Society for Promoting Christian
Knowledge. London, 1892.
The Face of the Deep. E. and J. B. Young & Co. New York, 1892.
Goblin Market. Illustrated by Laurence Housman. Macmillan
& Co. London, 1893.

Cbristina IRossetti's poems.

287

Verses. Reprinted from Called to be Saints, Time Flies, and
The Face of the Deep. Society for Promoting Christian
Knowledge. London, 1893.
New Poems by Christina Rossetti, hitherto unpublished or un
collected. Edited by William Michael Rossetti. Macmillan
& Co. London and New York, 1896.
The Rossetti Birthday Book. Edited by Olivia Rossetti. Mac
millan & Co. London and New York, 1896.
Maude. With an Introduction by W. M. Rossetti. James Bow-
den. London, 1897.

CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF PAINTINGS AND
DRAWINGS BY DANTE GABRIEL
ROSSETTI.
This list is compiled almost entirely from the recent admirable
list by Mr. Marillier, omitting, however, the descriptions,
remarks, and verifications based upon his own extensive
research. It will be noticed that one painting, No. 3, is not
included in any previous list. This early and interesting
study is in the possession of Samuel Bancroft, Jr., of Wil
mington, Delaware. Paintings.

4 5
6
7 8
9
10.
1 1
12

1848. Gabriele Rossetti. {Oil.)
1848. Christina Rossetti. {Oil.)
1848. Oil Study of Bottles and Drapery, with Reclining
Figure introduced at a later period.
1848-9. The Girlhood of Mary Virgin. {Oil.)
1849. "Hist! said Kate the Queen." From Pippa
Passes. {Oil.) Unfinished.
1849. The Laboratory. From Browning. {Water-
colour.)
1850. Ecce Ancilla Domini. {Oil.)
1850. Rossovestita. {Water-colour.)
1851. Borgia. {Water-colour.)
1 85 1 . Beatrice at a Marriage Feast, Denying her Salutation
to Dante. {Water-colour.)
1851. "Hist! said Kate the Queen." {Small design in
oil. )
1852. Two Mothers. {Oil.)
288

'5-

1853.

1 6.

1853.

i7-

1853.

18.

1853.

19.

1854.

20.

1854.

21.

1854.

22.

1855.

23-

1855.

24.

.855.

IRossetti's paintings anb .Drawings 289
13. 1852. Giotto painting Dante's Portrait. {Water-colour.)
14. 1852. "Guardami ben; ben son, ben son Beatrice:"
The Meeting of Beatrice and Dante in Paradise.
{Water-colour.) Left compartment of triptych,
" II Saluto di Beatrice."
Miss Charlotte Polidori. {Oil.)
Dante Drawing the Angel. {Water-colour.)
Girl Singing to a Lute. {Water-colour.)
Carlisle Wall, or The Lovers. {Water-colour.)
Found. {Oil.) Worked upon at intervals up to
1882 and left incomplete. Sky finally washed
in by Burne-Jones.
Head of Miss Siddal. {Water-colour.)
Arthur's Tomb ; The Last Meeting of Launcelot
and Guinevere. {Water-colour.)
The Annunciation. {Water-colour.)
La Belle Dame sans Mercy. {Water-colour.)
Paolo and Francesca da Rimini. {Water-colour.)
Diptych.
25. 1855. Matilda Gathering Flowers. From Purgatorio.
{Water-colour.)
Miss Siddal, seated on Ground. {Water-colour.)
Robert Browning. {Water-colour.)
Dante's Vision of Rachel and Leah. From Purga
torio. { Water-colour. )
The Nativity. {Water-colour.)
The Carol. {Water-colour.)
Beatrice Denying Salutation. {Water-colour.)
Replica of No. 10.
Passover in the Holy Family. {Water-colour.)
Unfinished.
Dante's Dream. {Water-colour.) A small and
early version.
Fra Pace. {Water-colour.)
The Seed of David : Christ Adored by a Shepherd
and a King. With Two Figures of David.
{Water-colour.) First sketches for the Llandaff
Triptych.
36. 1856? Miss Eliza Polidori. {Oil.)
37. 1857. The Damsel of the Sane Grael. {Water-colour.)

26.27.28.

1855. 1855..855.

29.30.
3'-

.855. 1855-6.1855-6.

32-

.855-6.

33-

1856.

34- 35-

1856.1856.

39-

1857-64.

40.

1 897.

4i.

.857.

42.

1857.

A3-

1857.

44-

.857.

45-

1857-

290 ftbe IRossettis.
38. 1857-65. Death of Breuse sans Pitie. {Water-colour.) Re
touched or repainted in 1865.
The Chapel before the Lists. (Water-colour.)
The Tune of Seven Towers. {Water-colour.)
The Blue Closet. {Water-colour.)
The Wedding of St. George and the Princess
Sabra. ( Water-colour. )
The Gate of Memory. {Water-colour.)
The Garden Bower. {Water-colour.)
"Gwendolen in the Witch Tower" : A Knight
Arming. From the Christmas Mystery of Sir
Galahad. ' (Oil.) Two panels on chairs, done
for William Morris.
46. 1857. Launcelot at the Shrine of the Sane Grael. {Tem
pera.) Mural design for Oxford Reading-
Room. Now perished.
47. 1857. St. Cecilia. {Water-colour.) Same design as Ten
nyson woodcut.
St. Catherine. {Oil.)
A Christmas Carol. {Water-colour.)
Mary in the House of St. John. {Water-colour.)
Golden Water of Princess Parisade. From the
Arabian Nights. {Water-colour.)
Ruth and Boaz. {Water-colour.)
Before the Battle. {Water-colour.)
Head of Christ. {Water-colour and Oil.)
Giotto pajnting Dante's Portrait. {Water-colour.)
Replica of No. 13. Unfinished.
56. 1859. Mary in the House of St. John. {Water-colour.)
Replica of No. 50.
57. 1859. Sir Galahad at the Shrine. {Water-colour.) Same
design as Tennyson woodcut.
58. 1859. My Lady Greensleeves. {Water-colour.)
59. 1859. Bocca Baciata. {Oil.)
60. 1859. The Salutation of Beatrice. Dante meeting Bea
trice in Florence and in Paradise. {Oil.) Two
subjects. Panels painted on a cabinet for
William Morris.
61. 1859. Dantis Amor. {Oil.) Painted on panel of a cab
inet for William Morris.

48.

1857.

49-

1857-8.

so.

1858.

.'¦

1858.

52-

1858.

53-

1858.

S4-

.859.

55-

c. 1859.

IRossetti's paintings anb drawings 291
62. i860. Bonifazio's Mistress. {Water-colour.)
6}. i860? " Sweet Tooth." {Water-colour.)
64. 1860-1. Lucretia Borgia Administering the Poison-Draught.
{Water-colour.)
65. 1860-64. Triptych in Llandaff Cathedral. {Oil.) Subjects:
The Adoration, and on either side David as
Shepherd and David as King.
66. 1861. Love's Greeting. {Oil.) Panel.
67. 1861 ? Dr. Johnson at the Mitre. {Water-colour.) Re
plica of No. 265.
68. 1861. Paolo and Francesca da Rimini. (Water-colour.)
Drawing of first compartment of diptych No.
24.
69. 1861. Regina Cordium. (Oil.) Panel. Portrait of Ros
setti's wife.
70. 1861. Regina Cordium. (Oil.) Portrait of Mrs. Aldam
Heaton.
71. 186 1 . Burd Alane. (Oil.) Attributed to Rossetti.
72. 1 86 1. Fair Rosamund. (Oil.)
73. 1861 ? The Farmer's Daughter. (Water-colour.) A
study for "Found," and possibly of earlier date.
74. 1861. The Annunciation. (Water-colour.) Design for
two panels painted in oil on the pulpit of St.
Martin's Church, Scarborough.
75. 1861. King Rene's Honeymoon. Design for panel
"Music." (Water-colour?) Copied in oil on
the cabinet built for J. P. Seddon by Morris
and Co.
76. 1861. Spring. (Water-colour.) Design for small panel
on Seddon cabinet.
77. 1 86 1. The Painter's Wife. (Miss Siddal.) (Water-
colour.)
78. 1861. Algernon Charles Swinburne. (Water-colour.)
79. 1862. Tristram and Yseult Drinking the Love-Potion.
(Water-colour on cartoon.) One of the series
commissioned by Morris, Marshall, Falkner,
and Co. for stained-glass windows in Birket
Foster's house.
80. 1862? Christ in Glory. (Water-colour.)
81. 1862. Bethlehem Gate. (Water-colour.)

2Q2

ftbe IRossettis.

82. 1862. St. George and the Princess Sabra. (Water-colour.)
St. George washing hands in a helmet.
83. 1862. Girl at a Lattice. (Oil.)
84. 1862. Heart of the Night, or Mariana in the Moated
Grange. (Water-colour.) Same design as
Tennyson woodcut.
85. c. 1862. Amor, Amans, Amata. (Oil.) Three oval panels
on Rossetti's sofa.
862. Paolo and Francesca. (Water-colour.)
862. Joan of Arc. (Oil.)
862. Fanny Cornforth (Mrs. Schott). (Oil.)
S62. Mrs. Leathart. (Oil.)
863? Miss Herbert. (Oil.)
863 ? Miss Herbert. Study in gold and umber on white
paper.
863. Beata Beatrix. (Oil.)
863. Helen of Troy. (Oil.)
863. St. George Slaying the Dragon. (Water-colour.)
863. Belcolore. (Oil.)
863. Brimfull. (Water-colour.)
863. A Lady in Yellow. (Water-colour.)
863. Fazio's Mistress. (Oil.) Also called Aurelia.
863. Borgia. (Water-colour.)
864? King Rene's Honeymoon. (Oil .?) Replica of No. 7 5.
864. Lady in White at her Toilet. (Oil.)
864. Lady Lilith. (Oil.)
864. Venus Verticordia. (Oil.) First version.
864. Venus Verticordia. (Water-colour.) Second
and smaller version.
864. Morning Music. (Water-colour.)
864. Monna Pomona. (Water-colour.)
864. " How Sir Galahad, Sir Bors, and Sir Percival
were Fed with the Sane Grael, but Sir Percival's
Sister Died by the Way." (Water-colour.)
864. Roman de la Rose. (Water-colour.)
864. The Madness of Ophelia. (Water-colour.)
864. Socrates Taught to Dance by Aspasia. (Wash.)
864. II Saluto di Beatrice : Meeting of Dante and Bea
trice in Florence and in Paradise. (Water-
colour.) Replica of panel diptych No. 60.

87

90
9192 9394
9596979899
100101
102 103104105
106 107

108
1091 10
1 11

IRossetti's paintings anb Drawings 293
112. 1864. Beatrice in Paradise. (Water-colour.) Replica of
left compartment of triptych "II Saluto di Bea
trice." No. 14.
113. 1864. How They Met Themselves. (Water-colour.)
Replica of No. 264.
114. 1864. How They Met Themselves. (Water-colour.)
Replica of Nos. 264, 1 13.
115. 1864. Joan of Arc. (Water-colour.) Another version
of No. 87.
116. 1864? Joan of Arc. (Water-colour.) Replica of No. 87.
117. 1865. The Blue Bower. (Oil.)
118. 1865. The Merciless Lady. (Water-colour.)
119. 1865. Fight for a Woman. (Water-colour.)
120. 1865. Washing Hands. (Water-colour.)
121. 1865. II Ramoscello, or Bella e Buona. (Oil.)
122. 1865. Mary Magdalene at the Door of Simon. (Oil.)
Replica of No. 56.
(It is possible that this picture is not entirely Ros
setti's work.)
123. 1865. Mary Magdalene at the Door of Simon. (Water-
colour.) Replica of No. 56.
124. 1865. Hesterna Rosa. (Water-colour.) Replica of No.
234.
125. c 1865. Boccaccio's "Fiammetta." (Oil.) Head only.
126. 1865. Mrs. Vernon Lushington. (Water-colour.)
127. 1865-6. The Beloved, or The Bride. (Oil.)
128. 1866. Monna Vanna. (Oil.) Renamed Belcolore.
129. 1866-70. Sibylla Palmifera. (Oil.)
130. 1866. The Dancing Girl, or Daughter of Herodias. (Oil.)
131. 1866. Regina Cordium. (Oil.)
132. 1866. Hamlet and Ophelia. (Water-colour.)
133. 1866. The Painter's Mother. (Oil.)
134. 1867. A Christmas Carol. (Oil.)
135. 1867. Joli Coeur. (Oil.)
136. 1867. Monna Rosa. (Oil.)
137. 1867. The Loving-Cup. (Oil.)
138. 1867. The Loving-Cup. (Water-colour.) Replica of
No. 137.
139. 1867. The Loving-Cup. (Water-colour.) Replica of
No. 137.

294 ftbe IRossettis.
140. 1867. The Loving-Cup. Water-colour.) Replica of
No. 137.
141. 1867. The Return of Tibullus to Delia. (Water-colour.)
142. 1867. Aurora. (Water-colour.)
143. 1867. Tessa La Bionda.
144. 1867. Tristram and Yseult Drinking the Love-Potion.
( Water-colour. )
145. 1867. Lilith. (Water-colour.) Replica of No. 102.
146. 1867. Lilith. (Water-colour.) Replica of No. 102.
147. 1868. Bionda del Balcone. (Water-colour.) Enlarged
replica of Bocca Baciata.
148. 1868. The Rose — A Lady at a Window. (Water-colour.)
149. 1868. The Return of Tibullus to Delia. (Water-colour.)
Replica of No. 141.
150. 1868. Venus Verticordia. (Water-colour.) Replica of
No. 103.
151. 1868. St. George and the Princess Sabra. (Water-
colour. )
152. 1868. Mrs. Leyland. (Oil.)
153. 1868. Mrs. Morris. (Oil.)
154. 1870. Mariana. (Oil.)
155. 1 87 1. Lucretia Borgia. (Water-colour.) Replica of
No. 64.
156. 1871. Elena's Song. (Water-colour.) Replica on a
larger scale of Hesterna Rosa.
157. 1871. Beata Beatrix. (Water-colour.) Small replica of
No. 92.
158. 1 87 1. Pandora. (Oil.)
159. 1 87 1. Water- Willow. (Oil.)
160. 1 87 1 -8 1. Dante's Dream. (Oil.)
161. 1872. Beata Beatrix. (Oil.) Replica with predella of
No. 92.
162. 1872. The Bower Meadow. (Oil.)
163. 1872. Head of Beatrice. (Oil.)
164. 1872. Veronica Veronese. (Oil.)
165. 1872. Proserpine. (Oil.)
166. 1872. Blanzifiore. (Oil.)
167. c. 1872. Lady in Blue Dress. (Water-colour.)
168. 1873. La Ghirlandata. (Oil.)
169. 1873-7. Proserpine. (Oil.)

196.197- 198.
'99-

IRossetti's paintings anb Drawings 295
Proserpine. (Oil.) Replica of No. 169.
The Damsel of the Sane Grael. (Oil.)
The Roman Widow. (Oil.)
The Boat of Love. (Grisaille.)
Rosa Triplex. (Water-colour.) Replicaof No. 333.
The Blessed Damozel. (Oil.) Sometimes called
Sancta Lilias.
Marigolds ; also called Fleurs de Marie, Bower
Maiden, and Gardener's Daughter. (Oil.)
La Bella Mano. (Oil.)
The Blessed Damozel, with predella. (Oil.)
Mnemosyne, or The Lamp of Memory. Also
called Ricordanza. (Oil.)
Domizia Scaligera. (Oil.) Unfinished.
Mary Magdalene. (Oil.)
Astarte Syriaca. (Oil.)
The Sea-spell. (Oil.)
Beata Beatrix. Unfinished replica of No. 92,
worked on by Madox Brown. (Oil.)
A Vision of Fiammetta. (Oil.)
Bruna Brunelleschi. (Water-colour.)
Gretchen, or Risen at Dawn. (Oil.)
La Donna della Finestra. (Oil.)
The Blessed Damozel. (Oil.) Replica of No.
178, but without groups of lovers in the back
ground.
Dante's Dream. (Oil.) Reduced replica of No.
160, with double predella.
Proserpine. (Water-colour.) Reduced replica of
No. 169.
Beata Beatrix. (Oil.) Large replica of No. 92.
The Day-Dream. (Oil.)
The Salutation of Beatrice. (Oil.) Unfinished.
TheSalutation of Beatrice. (Oil.) Replica of No.
194, on a smaller scale.
881. La Donna della Finestra. Also called The Lady
of Pity. (Oil.) Unfinished replicaof No. 188.
881. La Pia. (Oil.)
882. Proserpine. (Oil.) Small replica of No. 169.
882. Joan of Arc. (Oil.) Replica of No. 1 15.

170.

1874.

171.

1874.

172.

1874.

"73-

c. 1874.

174.

1874.

«75-

1874.

176.

1874.

177.

1875.

178.

1876-7.

179.

1876.

180.

1876.

181.

1877.

182.

1877.

.83.

1877.

184.

1877.

.85.

1878.

186.

1878.

.87.

1878-80

188.

.879.

189.

.879.

190.

1880.

191.

1880.

192.

1880.

193.

1880.

194.

1880-1.

195.

1 880-1.

296 ftbe IRossettis.
Drawings and Cartoons in Crayon, Coloured Chalk,
Pencil, Etc.
200. 1834-47. Juvenilia and Student's Sketches.
201. 1846. W. M. Rossetti. (Pencil.)
202. 1847. Dante G. Rossetti. (Pencil and White Chalk.)
203. c. 1847. Miss Charlotte Polidori. (Pencil.)
204. 1848. The Sun may Shine, and We be Cold. (Pen-and-
ink.)
205. 1848. Gretchen and Mephistopheles in the Chapel.
(Pen-and-ink.)
206. 1848. Retro me Sathana. (Pen-and-ink.)
207. 1848. Genevieve. (Pen-and-ink.) From Coleridge.
208. c. 1848. Ulalume. (Pen-and-ink.) From Edgar A. Poe.
209. c. 1848. The Raven. (Pen-and-ink.) From Edgar A. Poe.
210. 1848. Gaetano Polidori. (Pencil.)
211. 1848? Christina Rossetti. (Pencil.)
212. 1848-9. Michael Scott's Wooing. (Pen-and-ink.)
213. 1848. Death of Marmion. (Pencil.)
214. 1849. Taurello's First Sight of Fortune. (Pen-and-ink.)
From Browning.
215. 1849. The First Anniversary of the Death of Beatrice:
Dante Drawing the Angel. (Pen-and-ink.)
216. 1849. Dorothy and Theophilus. (Pen-and-ink.)
217. 1849-50. II Saluto di Beatrice. (Pen-and-ink.) First design
for diptych of Dante and Beatrice.
218. 1850. Benedick and Beatrice. (Pencil.)
219. 1850. "To caper nimbly in a Lady's Chamber to the
Lascivious Pleasing of a Lute." (Pen-and-ink.)
220. c 1850. A Parable of Love. (Pen-and-ink.)
221. c. 1850. Major Calder Campbell. (Pencil.)
222. 1851. How They Met Themselves. (Pen-and-ink.)
223. 1852. Teodorico Pietrocola-Rossetti. (Pencil.)
224. 1852. Wm. Bell Scott. (Crayon.)
225. 1852. Ford Madox Brown. (Pencil.)
226. 1853. W. Holman Hunt. (Pencil.)
22-]. c. 1853. Miss Margaret Polidori. (Pencil.)
228. 1853. Gabriele Rossetti. (Pencil.)
229. 1853. The Painter's Mother. (Pen-and-ink.)
230. 1853. The Painter's Mother. (Pen-and-ink.)

IRossetti's paintings anb Drawings 297

231. 1853. Gaetano Polidori. (Pencil.)
2)2. 1853. D- G. and W. M. Rossetti. (Pen-and-ink.)
233- l853- D. G. R. sitting to Miss Siddal. (Pen-and-ink
and Wash.) <
234. 1853. Hesterna Rosa. (Pen-and-ink.)
235. 1853. Fra Angelico Painting, and Giorgione Painting
from a Model. (Pen-and-ink.)
236. 1853. Lo Marinaio oblia che passa per tal via. (Pen-
and-ink.)
237- l&53- Girl Trundling an Infant. (Pen-and-ink.)
238. 1853. Studies for " Found " in Pen-and-ink and Pencil.
239. 1854. The Queen's Page. (Pen-and-ink.)
240. 1854? Miss Siddal. (Pen-and-ink.)
241. 1854. Miss Siddal Seated at Window. (Pencil and Pen-
and-ink.)
242. 1854. The Painter's Mother. (Pencil.)
243. 1855. Dante G. Rossetti. (India ink.)
244. 1855. Tennyson reading Maud. (Pen-and-ink.)
245. 1855. The Maids of Elfen-Mere. (Woodcut.)
246. c. 1855. Dantesque Composition. (Pencil.)
247. c 1855. Composition of Three Kneeling Figures. (Pencil.)
248. c. 1855. Era in Pensier d' Amor : From a Ballata of Caval-
canti. (Pencil. )
249. c. 1855. Cat's-Cradle. (Pen-and-ink.)
250. c 1855. A Fencing Scene. (Pen-and-ink.)
251. 1856. Miss Siddal Reclining in an Arm-Chair. (Pencil.)
252. 1856? Miss Siddal in an Arm-Chair, Reading. (Pencil.)
253. 1856? Design for a Ballad. (India ink.)
254. 1856. Head of a Child with Bonnet. (Pencil.)
2<y<j. c. 1856. Faust and Margaret in the Prison. (Pen-and-
ink.)
256. 1856-7. Five Designs for Mox'on's Tennyson. (Woodcuts.)
257. 1857? St. Luke, the Painter. (Crayon.)
258. 1857. Miss Jane Burden, afterwards Mrs. Morris, set. 18.
(Pen-and-ink.)
259. 1857. Sir Galahad, Sir Bors and Sir Percival, Receiving
the Sane Grael. (Pen-and-ink.)
260. 1857. Launcelot escaping from Guinevere's Chamber.
(Pen-and-ink. )
261. 1858. Hamlet and Ophelia. (Pen-and-ink.)

298 ftbe IRossettis.
262. 1858. Mary Magdalene at the Door of Simon the Phari
see. (Pen-and-ink.)
Dantis Amor. (Pen-and-ink.)
How They Met Themselves. (Pen-and-ink.)
Dr. Johnson at the Mitre. (Pen-and-ink.)
Joseph accused by Potiphar's Wife. (Pen-and-
ink. )
Head of Mrs. Morris. (Pencil.)
Giuseppe Maenza. (Pencil.)
Mrs. F. M. Brown. (Pencil.)
The Painter's Wife. (Pencil.)
Giuseppe Maenza. (Pencil.)
Algernon Charles Swinburne. (Pencil.)
Miss Herbert. (Pencil.)
The Rose Garden. (Pen-and-ink.)
The Painter's Wife. (Pencil.)
The Rose Garden. (Etching.)
John Ruskin. (Red Chalk.)
Mrs. H. T. Wells. (Pencil.)
Lady Burne-Jones. (Pencil.)
D. G. Rossetti. (Pencil.)
The Artist's Wife Standing before a Picture on an
Easel. (Pencil.)
Lachesis. (Pencil. )
Cassandra. (Pen-and-ink.)
Goblin Market. (Woodcuts.)
Adam and Eve before the Fall. Cartoons.)
Parable ofthe Vineyard. (Cartoons.)
The Crucifixion. (Cartoon.)
The Last Judgment. (Cartoon.)
St. George and the Dragon. (Cartoons.)
King Rene's Honeymoon. (India ink.)
St. Margaret. (Cartoon.)
Angel Swinging a Censer. (Cartoon.)
The Annunciation. (Cartoon.)
Joseph and Mary at the House of St. Elizabeth.
(Cartoon.)
Threshing. (Sepia. )
The Crucifixion. (Pen-and-ink.)
Miss Boyd. (Pencil.)

26}.

859.

264.

860.

26^.

860.

266.

860.

267.

860.

268.

i860.

269.

[860.

270.

860.

271.

i860.

272.

860.

273.

860.

274.

860-1.

275.

861.

276.

861.

277.

861.

278.

861.

279.

861 ?

280.

861.

281. (

:. 1861.

282.

861.

283.

861.

284.

861.

285.

861.

286.

861.

287.

861.

288.

861.

289.

861-2.

290.

862.

291.

862.

292.

862.

293.

862.

294.

862.

295.

862?

296. (

:. 1862.

297.

862.

IRossetti's paintings anb Drawings 299
298. 1862. The Artist's Mother. (Black and red Chalk.)
299. c. 1862. The Hair-Net. (Pencil.)
300. c. 1862. The Laurel. (Pencil.)
301. 1863. Miss Henrietta Polidori. (Pencil.)
302. 1863. Miss Ada Vernon. (Pencil.)
303. 1865. Chas. A. Howell. (Black Crayon.)
304. c 1865. Three Sang of Love Together. (Pencil.)
305. c. 1865. Aspecta Medusa. (Pencil and Crayon.)
306. c. 1865. Juliet and the Old Nurse. (Pen-and-ink.)
307. c. 1865. Circe. (Crayon.)
308. c. 1865. Diana. (Crayon.)
309. 1866. Michael Scott's Wooing. (Crayon.)
310. 1866. The Prince's Progress. (Woodcuts.)
311. c. 1866. Dantis Amor. (Pen-and-ink.)
312. 1866. Heart's-ease. (Pencil.)
313. 1866. Christina Rossetti. (Crayon.)
314. 1867. F. Madox Brown. (Pencil.)
315. 1867. Head of a Magdalen. (Crayon.)
316. 1867. Peace. (Crayon.)
317. 1867. Contemplation. (Crayon.)
318. 1867. Venus Verticordia. (Crayon.)
319. c 1867-8. Lilith. (Crayon.)
320. c. 1867-8. Lilith. (Crayon.) Head and Bust.
321. 1868. Mrs. J. Fernandez: two subjects. (Pencil and
Crayon. )
322. c. 1868. Ricorditi di me che son La Pia. (Crayon.)
323. c. 1868. Aurea Catena. (Crayon.)
324. 1868. Reverie. (Crayon. )
325. 1868. La Penserosa. (Crayon.)
326. 1869. Miss Calliope Coronio. (Crayon.)
327. 1869. Mrs. Howell. (Crayon.)
328. 1869. Mrs. Stillman. (Miss Marie Spartali.) (Crayon.)
329. 1869. The Sermon on the Mount. (Cartoon.)
330. 1869. La Donna della Finestra. (Crayon.)
331. 1869. Beata Beatrix. (Crayon.) Replica of No. 92.
3)2. 1869. A Portrait. (Crayon.)
333. c. 1869. Rosa Triplex. (Crayon.)
334. 1869. Penelope. (Crayon.)
335. 1869. La Mandolinata. (Crayon.)
336. 1869. A Girl Holding her Knees. (Crayon.)

300 ftbe IRossettis.

337-

c. 1869.

338.

1869.

339-

1870.

340.

1870.

341.

1870.

342.

1870.

343-

1870.

344-

1870.

,345-

1870.

346.

1870.

347-

1870.

348.

;. 1870.

349-

1870.

350. (

:. 1870.

351. <

:. 1870?

352.

870-75.

353-

1870.

354-

1870.

355-

870.

356.

870.

357-

870?

358.

870.

359-

870.

360.

87..

36..

871.

362.

871.

363.

872.

364. <

:. 1872.

365.

872.

366.

872.

367.

872.

368.

873.

369.

873.

370.

873.

371. <

:. .873.

372.

874.

373-

1874.

Orpheus and Eurydice. (Pencil. )
Pandora. (Crayon.) Study for No. 158.
La Donna della Fiamma. (Crayon.)
Silence. (Crayon.)
The Roseleaf. (Pencil.)
The Prisoner's Daughter. (Crayon.)
The Couch. (Pen-and-ink.)
Lady with a Fan. (Crayon.)
Study for La Donna della Finestra, or the Lady of
Pity. (Crayon.)
Study for La Donna della Finestra, or the Lady of
Pity. (Cray 071.)
Mary Magdalene at the Door of Simon. (Crayon.)
Beata Beatrix. (Crayon.) Replica of No. 92.
Design for the Bride's Prelude. (Pencil.) Subject
and date conjectural.
Troy Town. (Crayon and Wash.)
Death of Lady Macbeth. (Pencil.)
Studies for Dante's Dream. (Crayon.)
W. J. Stillman. (Crayon.)
Mrs. Virtue Tebbs. (Crayon.)
Dante G. Rossetti. (Pencil.)
Mrs. Aglaia Coronio. (Crayon.)
Mrs. Cassavetti and Miss Cassavetti. (Crayons.)
Miss Baring. (Crayon.)
Mrs. William Morris. (Crayon.)
Miss Jane and Miss May Morris. (Crayon.)
Proserpine. (Crayon.)
Perlascura. (Crayon.)
Psetus and Arria. (Pencil.)
La Gitana. (Crayon.)
Miss May Morris. (Crayon ?)
Dr. Gordon Hake. (Crayon.)
Mrs. Valpy. (Crayon.)
Ligeia Siren. (Crayon.)
The Blessed Damozel. (Crayon.)
G. Gordon Hake. (Crayon.)
Mrs. Morris. (Pen-and-ink.)
Mrs. Lucy Rossetti. (Coloured Chalk.)
Theodore Watts-Dunton. (Crayon.)

IRossetti's paintings anb Drawings 301

374

1874.

375

.875.

376

1875.

377

1875.

378

187s.

379

c 1875.

380

c. 1875.

38.

1875.

382

1875.

3«3

1876.

384

1876.

385

1876.

386

1876.

387

1876.

388

1876?

389

1877.

390

1877.

391

.877.

392

1897.

393

1878-81

394

1879.

395

1879.

396

1879?

397

1880.

398. 1880.

Mrs. Schott. (Crayon.)
Mrs. Stillman. (Crayon.)
Mrs. Chas. A. Howell.
Portrait of Mrs. Morris with a Bowl of Flowers.
(Pen-and-ink.)
The Blessed Damozel. (Red Chalk.)
Blessed Damozel. (Crayon.)
Madonna Pietra. (Crayon.)
The Question, also called The Sphinx. (Pencil.)
Astarte Syriaca. (Pen-and-ink.)
Head of a Magdalen. (Crayon.)
The Dulcimer. (Crayon.)
Spirit of the Rainbow. (Crayon.)
Forced Music. (Crayon.)
Lady Mount Temple. Crayon.)
Mrs. Stillman. (Crayon. )
Mrs. Rossetti and Christina Rossetti. (Crayon.)
Christina Rossetti. (Crayon.)
Christina Rossetti. (Crayon.)
The Painter's Mother. (Crayon.)
Desdemona's Death Song. (Crayon, Pencil, etc.)
Designs for picture not executed.
Pandora. (Crayon.)
Sancta Lilias. (Crayon.)
F. R. Leyland. (Crayon.)
La Donna della Finestra, or The Lady of Pity.
(Crayon.)
The Sonnet. (Pen-and-ink.)

INDEX.

Abruzzo, home of Nicola Rossetti, i
Academy, The, 139 ; Mr. Stillman's let
ter to, 1 53"' 55
Advent, poem by Christina Rossetti,
260
After This the Judgment, poem by
Christina Rossetti, quoted, 270
Aldwick Lodge, 195
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland,
'47
Alleyn, Ellen, pseudonym of Christina
Rossetti, 66
Allingham, William, letter from Rossetti
to, 7', 87, 89, 96-98, 101-102, 120
Amore e Spema, poem by Gabriele Ros
setti, 3
Angelico, Fra, 55
Angiolieri, Cecco, 121, 205
Animals, the fondness of the Rossettis
for, 15, 146-149
Annunciation, The, see Ecce Ancilla
Domini
Apple-Gathering, An, poem by Chris
tina Rossetti, 260, 275
Art Journal, The, 36
Arundel Club, The, 150
Association for the Advancement of
Truth in Art, The, 46
Astarte Syriaca, see Venus Astarte
Atheneeum, The, on The Girlhood of
Mary Virgin, 36 ; on The Ecce An
cilla Domini, 39, 67
At Home, poem by Christina Rossetti,
259

At Last, poem by Christina Rossetti,
273
Aurea Catena, picture, 104
Autumn, poem by Christina Rossetti,
252
Ave, poem, 130
Aylwin, Watts-Dunton's, 105

B

Ballads and Sonnets, 208
Bancroft, Samuel, 26
Beata Beatrix, 90, 91, 151, 182, 194
Before the Battle, picture, 152
Belgium, 150
Bell, Mackenzie, quoted, 230
Beloved, The, painting of, 105, 164,
165, 192
Birchington-by-the-Sea, where Rossetti
died, 214, 241, 246
Birthday, A, poem by Christina Ros
setti, 253
Blake, William, 20 ; life of, 179-181
Blessed Damozel, The, picture, 194
Blessed Damozel, The, poem, 63, 6e),
1 16, 129, 130, 131
Blue Closet, The, picture, 169, 170
Blue Closet, poem by Morris, 101
Bocca B aetata, picture, 106
Bodichon, Mme., 154
Bognor, 241
Bonaparte, family of, 7
BothieofToper-na-fuosich, The, review
of, by Wm. Rossetti, 60
Boy Christ in the Carpenter's Shop,
The, picture by John E. Millais, 38

303

304

flnber.

Bride's Prelude, The, 208
Broadlands, 195
Brother Hilary, poem, 130
Brough, Mr., 78
Brown, Ford Madox, 25 ; as Rossetti's
teacher, 26, 42, 59, 67 ; his Chaucer,
72, 74 ; his description of a visit from
Rossetti, 76-86, 109, 111, 117, 158,
196, 207, 215, 219
Brown, Oliver Madox, 203
Browning, Robert, Rossetti's enthusiasm
for> -°> 55, 92, 93, 112-114, 137
Browning, Mrs., 1 13
Buchanan, Robert, 138-140, 216
Builder, The, 36
Burden, Miss Jane ; see Morris, Mrs.
Burlington Fine Arts Club, The, 150,
'79
Burne-Jones, Edward, 99, 100, 103, 109,
111, 1 88 ; his memorial to Christina
Rossetti, 271
Burning Babe, The, Southwell's, 233

C

Caine, Hall, 142, 155-156, 178, 199,
202, 204, 206, 209, 211, 214, 215,
219-220
Caine, Miss Lily, 214-15
Campbell, Calder, 66
Carillon, The, 56-58
Cary's Academy, 17, 18
Catholic World, The, 260
Cavalcanti, 121
Century Guild Hobby-Horse, The, 68
Chatterton, Thomas, 203
Cheswick Press, The, 68
Cheyne Walk, 141-150, 153, 189, 190,
213
Choice, The, poem, 136
Christian Missionary , The, picture by
Holman Hunt, 38
Church, F. E., 44
Coleridge, S. T., 167, 178, 188, 201
Collinson, James, 33, 42, 57, 66
Colvin, Sidney, 92, 137
Coming of Love, The, Watts-Dunton's,
106

Commonplace and Other Short Stories,
volume of prose by Christina Rossetti,
240
Confluents, poem by Christina Rossetti,
275
Contemporary Review, 137-139
Convent Threshold, The, poem by
Christina Rossetti, 261
Cook, Clarence, 52.
Cornforth, Fanny, 106 ; first model for
the Lady Lilith, 165, 182
Council Chamber, The, picture by
Burne-Jones, 167
Crashaw, Richard, 270
Crayon, The, 44-46
Cyclographic Society, The, }}

D

Dalziel, 96-98
Dante Alighieri, 6, 19, 64, 65, 92, 118,
121, 123-126, 132, 225
Dante aud His Circle, see Early Italian
Poets, The
Dante at Verona, poem, 132-135
Dante's Dream, picture, 177, 194
D'Arcy, character in Aylwin, 105, 106,
'47, '48
Dantis Amor, picture, 108
Day and Night Songs, William Ailing-
ham's, e)6, 97
Day-Dream, The, picture, 104
Death of Abraham Lincoln, Rossetti's
scheme for a ballad on, 209
Della Guardias, family of, 1
Despised and Rejected, poem by Chris
tina Rossetti, 252
Deverell, Walter Howard, 66
Dickens, Charles, on the Pre-Raphaelites,
36-38
Dr. Johnson ai the Mitre, picture, 93,
1 14, 1 15, 170
Dodgson, Mr. (Lewis Carroll), 157
Domi^ia Scaliger a, picture, 196
Dreamland, poem by Christina Ros
setti, 60
Dunn, Treffry, 190

flnbey.

305

Durham, Bishop of, on Christina Ros
setti, 271, 272
Dyce, William, 35

Early Italian Poets, The, volume of
translations, 119-122, 126
Ecce Ancilla Domini, picture, 38-40,
6^, 69, 176
En Route, poem by Christina Rossetti,
239
End, An, poem by Christina Rossetti,
60
Eve, poem by Christina Rossetti, 262

Face of the Deep, devotional prose by
Christina Rossetti, 245, 274
Falkner, Charles, 109, 188
Farrer, T. C. , 46, 49, 50
Faust, 1 1
Fazio's Mistress, picture, 106
Ferdinand I., 4
Fiammetta, picture, 105, 192
Fifine at the Fair, poem by Browning,
'57
Fleshly School of Poetry , The, 137-140
Fortnightly Review, 127, 137
Found, picture, 106, 170, 182, 183
Francesca da Rimini, picture, 79
Free Gallery, The, 38
From the Cliffs, poem, 56
Frome, 236

Garrick Club, The, 150
Genevieve, Coleridge's, 11, 19
Germ, The, 53-68
Gilchrist, Alexander, 179
Gilchrist, Herbert, 145
Giorgione, 55
Girlhood of Mary Virgin, 30-33
Goblin Market, and Other Poems, by
Christina Rossetti, 231, 254-259, 266
God and the Man, Buchanan's, 1 38
Gosse, Edmund, 142, 143, 162
Graham, Mr., 158, 189

H

Hake, Dr., 157, 158, 161
Hake, George, 188, 190
Hand and Soul, prose story by Ros
setti, 60, 62
Hannay, James, 78
Her First Season, poem by William
Rossetti, 60
Herbert, George, 270
Heme Bay, 196 \
Highgate Cemeteiy, burial-place of Chris
tina Rossetti, 248
Hill, John Henry, 49, 51
Hill, John W., 49, 50
Hogarth, Rossetti's opinion of his col
our, 176
Holmer Green, home of Rossetti's grand
father, 229
House of Life, The, series of sonnets by
Rossetti, 129, 136, 208, 224, 264
Household Words, 36-38
How They Met Themselves, picture, 62
Howell, Charles A., 192
Hueffer, Mr., 100
Hughes, Arthur, 101-103
Hughes, Mrs., see Fanny Cornforth
Hunt, Holman, 26-35, 42, A3, 54, 67,
93, 95, "3, 158
Hunt, Leigh, 1 17
Hunter's Forestall, 196, 241
Hunting of the Snark, The, Lewis Car
roll's, 157 I
In a Gondola, Browning's, 136
J
Jenny, poem, 134, 135
Joan of Arc, picture, 95, 170, 171, 194,
209, 215 K
Keats, John, life of, 114; 116, 201,
227

.o6

flnber.

Keble, John, 270
Kelmscott, 139, 148, 159-161, 183-188,
241
" King Rene's Honeymoon Cabinet,"
1 10
King's College School, 16, 17
King's Tragedy, The, poem, 206-208
Knight, Joseph, 137, 150

La Donna della Fiamma, picture, 104
La Rimembran^a, poem by Gabriele
Rossetti, 3
Laboratory, The, poem by Browning,
93
Lady Lilith, picture, 32, 95, 106, 151,
165-169, 195
Lady of Shalott, The, Rossetti's illus
tration to, 97, 98
Lady with the Fan, picture, 106
Lambs of Grasmere, The, poem by
Christina Rossetti, 253
Landor, W. S., his love of animals, 229
Lang, Andrew, 1 3 1
Last Confession,. A, poem, 129
Later Life, sonnets by Christina Ros
setti, 237
Layard, Mr., 95, 98, 99
Leaves of Grass, 1 1 4
Lenore, Burger's, Rossetti's translation
of, 118
Lentino, Jacopo da, 122
Leyland, Mr., 152, 214
Life of Johnson, Boswell's, Rossetti's
liking for, 1 14
Lionardo da Vinci, 55
Llandaff, Rossetti's work on cathedral
at, 99
London Quarterly Review, The, on
Sing-Song, 269
Longfellow, H. W., 114
Louis Philippe, 7
Love and Hope, translation of poem by
Gabriele Rossetti, 3
Love Lies Bleeding, poem by Christina
Rossetti, 235
Lowell, James Russell, on Gabriele Ros
setti's Disamina, 6

M
MacCracken, Mr., 176
Mackail, 107, 108, 189
Magdalen The, picture, 171, 195
Maids of Elfen-Mere, The, woodcut, 96,
97
Manet, 150, 151
Mantegna, 55
Mariana in the South, woodcut, 97
Marillier, H. C, ()¦}, 103, 106, 164, 172,
'74
Marshall, John, 157
Marshall, P. P., 109, 188
Marston, Philip Bourke, 210
Martin, Sir Theodore, 123-126
Martyr, A, poem by Christina Rossetti,
271
Maurice, F. D., 1 1 1
Mary Magdalene at the Door of Simon,
picture, 1 77
Mazzini, 7
Memling, John, 57, 58, 112
Memory, poem by Christina Rossetti,
235
Meredith, George, 144
Merimee, Prosper, 42
Millais, John, 23, 32-35, 43, 59, 72-73
Modem Painters, Ruskin's, 45, 114
Monet, 51
Monna Innominata, sonnets by Christina
Rossetti, 224, 234-236, 252, 262-266
Monna Vanna, picture, 145, 192
Moore, Geo., 38, 39
Moreau, Gustave, 214
Morris, William, 28, 51, 99-104; his
connection with the firm of Morris,
Falkner, & Co., 102, 108-110; work
at Oxford Union, 102-104 i Mackail's
description of, 107, 109, 110, 137,188
Morris, Mrs., 104-105, 107
Mount-Temple, Lord, 195
Moxon, 97, 98
My Sister's Sleep, poem, 60
N
National Academy of Design, 47-49
National Gallery, }c>
New Gallery, 1 75

flnber.

307

New Path, The, 47, 49, 5 1
Niebelungenlied , Rossetti's partial trans
lation of, 118
Noble, J. A., on The Germ, 66, 67
Norton, Charles Eliot, 103, 152
O
Old and New Art, poem, 130
Old and New Year Ditties, poems by
Christina Rossetti, 260
Old Enemy, An, Buchanan's verses to
Rossetti, 138, 140
Old-World Thicket, An, poem by
Christina Rossetti, 274
On the Refusal of Aid between Nations,
203
Orchard, John, 64
One Hope, The, 130
Orlandi, 121
Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, The,
68
Oxford Union, decorations by Morris,
Rossetti, and others, 102-104
P
Pageant and Other Poems, A, by Chris
tina Rossetti, 262
Palace of Art, The, Rossetti's illustration
to, 97, 98
Pandora, picture, 104
Paris, 150
Pater, Walter, on Rossetti, 69, 226
Patmore, Coventry, 40, 59, 60, 120
Patrick Spens, Sir, 132
Pauline, Rossetti's discovery of, 113
Pax Vobis, poem, 56
Peel, Sir Robert, 67
Penelope, picture, 32
Penkill Castle, 239
Penumbra, poem, 136
Perthshire, Scotland, 158
Peters, S. T., 171
Pippa Passes, Browning's 92
Poems, Rossetti's, 128-140; coverfor, 143
Poems, Christina Rossetti's, 261
Polidori, family of, 4
Polidori, Frances Mary Lavina, see Ros
setti, Mrs. Gabriele
Polidori, Charlotte, 25

Portrait, The, poem, 130
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, The, 22-
53 ; Rossetti's part in, 23, 24; the
code of, 34 ; Dickens on, }6 ; disso
lution of, 41, 53, 54
Pre-Raphaelitism, 43-52, 126
Prince's Progress and Other Poems,
The, by Christina Rossetti, 239
Prinsep, Valentine, on Rossetti's " Cock
ney " tastes, 87, 88, 103
Proserpine, picture, 104, 164, 167, 182,
186, 192-194 Q_
Quarterly Review, 35, 272
R
Raphael, 35, 55
Raven, The, Poe's, 6}
Recollection, translation of poem by
Gabriele Rossetti
Red House, Wm. Morris's home at, 108
Red Lion Square, Wm. Morris's rooms
in, 102
Revery, picture, 104
Return of Tibullus to Delia, The, pic
ture, 177
Roehampton, 157
Rose Mary, poem, 208
Rossetti, Christina Georgina, birth of, 5,
10 ; early reading, 12 ; her likeness to
Dante Gabriel in childhood ; as model
for The Girlhood of Mary Virgin, 31 ;
her contributions to The Germ, 60,
146, 196, 197, 21 1, 214, 227; her love
of animals, 229 ; her name, 230 ; her
religious scruples, 230 ; her first volume
of poems, 230 ; her sonnets, 234, 235 ;
her interest in nature, 236-238 ; her
trip to Italy, 239 ; her illness, 240 ; her
personal appearance, 241 ; her books,
246 ; her devotion to her mother,
247 ; her death, 248 ; her character,
249; her poetry, 251-265 ; her chil
dren's books, 266-289
Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, colour of his
hair, 1 ; birth ot, 5 ; early surround
ings, 5-9 ; his attitude towards his
mother, 10 ; his early education, 10,

;o8

Inbey.

Rossetti — Continued
1 1 ; his first poem, The Slave, 1 1 ;
his reading in boyhood, 1 1 ; his illus
tration of Genevieve, 1 2 ; lack of me
chanical skill, 12; favourite games in
childhood, 13 ; disposition as a child,
12, 13, 14; his innate simplicity, 15;
his schooling, 16-19 ; n's interest in
early Italian literature, 19 ; his tastes
in youth, 2 1 ; his start as an indepen
dent artist, 24-27 ; his acquaintance
with Ford Madox Brown, 25 ; his
"bottle-picture," 26; his habit of
work in his youth, 29 ; Holman
Hunt's description of, 30; Watts-Dun-
ton's description of, 30; his first studio,
30 ; his painting The Girlhood of
Mary ' Virgin, 30 ; his picture Ecce
Ancilla Domini, 39, 40 ; inaugurates
The Germ, 5 1 ; trip to Paris and Bel
gium with Holman Hunt, 54 ; his im
pressions of the Old Masters, 55-58 ;
his poems by the way, 56 ; his contri
bution to The Germ, 60-66 ; his meet
ing with Miss Siddal, 70 ; his appreci
ation of her qualities, 7 1 ; his engage
ment to her, 73 ; his marrige, 74 ; his
visit to Madox Brown, 76 ; his youth
ful eccentricity, 76, 77 ; his generosity,
78, 79 ; his relations with Ruskin, 84;
his married life, 86-89 i decoration of
his rooms, 87 ; his " cockney " tastes,
87, 88 ; his wife's death, 89-91 ; me
morial to her in the Beata Beatrix, 90
-91 ; his richest period, 92-94 ; his
habits of painting, 94-96 ; his wood
cuts, 96-98 ; his designs for the Ten
nyson volume, 99 ; his work for the
cathedral at Llandaff, 99 ; acquaint
ance with Morris and Burne-Jones,
100 ; work at Oxford Union, 102-104;
his favourite models, 104-107 ; his
paintings for the " Red House," 108 ;
painting on " King Rene's Honeymoon
Cabinet," 1 1 1 ; teaching in the Work-
ingmen's College, 1 1 1 ; method of
teaching, 1 1 1 , 112 ; associates during
his middle years, 112; visit to the

continent, 112; his resistance to for
eign influences, 112; on Modern
Painters, 114; his translations and
original poems, 1 16-140 ; on the duty
of a translator, 119; his profit on The
Early Italian Poets, 1 20 ; his Italian
sympathies, 121; burial of his poems
in his wife's coffin, 126; their recovery,
1 27 ; the romantic spirit of his poems,
130; his skill in ballad-writing, 131-
132 ; his fastidious workmanship as
shown in his poetry, 136 ; financial
success of The Poems, 137 ; anxiety
over the reception of his poems, 137;
influence upon him of Buchanan's at
tack, 138-140 ; beginning of break
down, 139 ; life at Cheyne Walk and
Kelmscott, 141-160; his cordiality of
manner, 142, 143 ; social tempera
ment, 143 ; his housekeeping, 145 ;
his collection of China, 145 ; his col
lection of animals, 146, 147 ; his gar
den, 149, 150; his attempt at being a
club-man, 150 ; his trip to Belgium,
and Paris, 150; his opinion of Manet,
150, 151 ; on Courbet, 151 ; his fin
ancial success, 151, 152 ; his lavish
expenditure, 151 ; his business meth
ods, 152 ; his habits of work, 152,
153 ; beginning of chloral habit, 153-
156; delusions, 156, 157 ; his attempt
at suicide, 157 ; his friendship with
Mr. Watts-Dunton, 160, 161 ; his
personal appearance, 161, 162; his
change of manner in painting, 163 ;
his favourite colours, 1 69 ; his indus
try, 174 ; his passion for colour, 176 ;
on the use of models, 180 ; his appre
ciation of nature, 183-185 ; at Kelm
scott, 186-189 i n's painting by rule,
191 ; his prices, 192; at Heme Bay, 196;
his vivid imagination as described by
Watts-Dunton, 196-199 ; on his own
poetry, 205 ; his dislike of meeting
strangers, 211; his last illness, 2 1 3-
215 ; his death, 215; resume of his
character and temperament, 216, 227;
his opinion of Commonplace, 240

flnber.

309

R

Rossetti, Gabriele, father of Dante Gab
riel, 2-9 ; his drawings, 2 ; his poetry,
2-4 ; his arrival in England, 4 ; his
marriage, 5 ; his children, 5 ; his oc
cupation, 6 ; his patriotism, 6-8 ; in
scription on his tombstone, 8 ; his
Disamina, 6
Rossetti, Mrs. Gabriele, 5 ; hei appear
ance, 9 ; her characteristics, 9, 10 ;
her education of her children, 10, 11;
as model in The Girlhood of Mary
Virgin, 31, 36, 214, 232 ; death of,
247
Rossetti, Maria Francesca, birth of, 5 ;
taste in reading, 1 2 ; her epitome of
the family temperaments, 16, 231, 232;
her death, 245-247 ; Goblin Market,
dedicated to, 258
Rossetti, Nicola, grandfather of Dante
Gabriel, 12
Rossetti, William Michael, his descrip
tion of his grandfather, 1 ; birth of, 5 ;
quoted, 5, 7, 1 1 ; his edition of Blake,
21, 33, 42, 58, 60, 68, 72, 73, 87,
105, 127, 139, 144, 214
Royal Academy, The, 179
Rubens, 57
Ruskin, John, 22, 35, 37 ; his defense of
the Pre-Raphaelites, 40, 41, 43, 44,
46 ; on Miss Siddal, 71, 74, 79-84,
102, 1 11-113, I20i '58> '72
Russell, Lord John, 67

Saffi, Count, 120
St. Agnes of the Intercession, story by
Rossetti, 62
Salutation of Beatrice, The, picture,
177
San Geminiano, Folgore da, 122
Schott, Mrs., see Cornforth, Fanny
Scott, Wm. Bell, 66, 87, 111, 137, 197
Sea Limits, The, see From the Cliffs
Seasons, The, poem by Coventry Pat-
more, 60

Seddon, John P., 214, 215
Shakespeare, 201
Shall I Forget, poem by Christina Ros
setti, 235
Sharp, William, 3, 210, 214
Shelley, 1 1
Shields, Frederick, 214, 215
Siddal, Elizabeth Eleanor, 69-92 ; her
tastes, 70 ; her appearance, 71 ; her
her experiences as a model for the P.-
R.-B., 73 ; her engagement to Ros
setti, 73 ; her marriage, 74 ; Ruskin's
kindness to, 84 ; birth of her child,
89 ; her death, 89, 90 ; the Beata Be
atrix, painted from her, 9-91, 107,
126
Sing-Song, by Christina Rossetti, 266,
268
Sir Galahad, Rossetti's illustration to,
Sir Hugh the Heron, early ballad by
Rossetti, 1 18
Sister Helen, poem, 129, 131, 312,
205
Sketch from Nature, A, poem by John
Lucas Tupper, 60
Slave, The, Dante Gabriel Rossetti's first
poem, 1 1
Sonnets for Pictures, 56
Sonnets from the Portuguese, Mrs.
Browning's, 235-265
Soothsay, poem, 219
Southwell, 233
Speaking Likenesses, prose stories by
Christina Rossetti, 266
Sphinx, The, picture, 193, 209
Stanhope, Spencer, 103
Stephens, F. G., 32, 33, 42, 66, 93, 103,
164, 169
Stillman, Wm. J., on Pre-Raphaelitism,
44-46 ; on Rossetti's chloral habit,
¦53-' 55
Stillman, Mrs. W. ]., 105, 181
Stratton Water, poem, 129
Sturgis, Russell, 43
Sumner, Mrs., 196
Sunset Wings, poem, 185
Swinburne, A. C, 64, 71, 89, 112, 127,
'37, '44

3io

Unbey.

Tennyson, Alfred, 54 ; illustrations to his
poems, 97, 98
Three Enemies, The, poem by Christina
Rossetti, 260
Titian, 55, 112
Torrington Square, last home of Chris
tina Rossetti, 245
Trowan Crieff, Rossetti at, 158
Troy Town, poem, 129
Tudor House, Rossetti's home, 141-150
Tupper, G. F., 59
Tupper, J. L., 66, 68
Turner, J. L. W., 51
Twilight Night, poem by Christina Ros
setti, 235 U
Uphill, poem by Christina Rossetti, 260
V
Vale of St. John, Cumberland, 2 1 3
Van Eyck, John, 55, 58
Vasto, home of Nicola Rossetti, 1
Vaughn, Henry, 270
Venus Astarte, picture, 192, 193

Venus Verticordia, picture, 32, 172
Vita Nuova, Dante's 64, 121, 123-126
W
Water -Willow, The, picture, 104, 183
Watts-Dunton, Theodore, 11, 14, 77,
'29, 143, '47, '49- '60, 161, 177,
192, 196, 197, 206, 207, 214, 219,
220, 233, 238, 244, 273
Webb, Philip, 109, 147, 188
Whistler, J. McNeill, 28, 32, 145
While Ship, The, poem, 206
Who Shall Deliver Me? Poem by
Christina Rossetti, 275
Whole Head is Sick and the Whole
Heart Faint, The, poem by Christina
Rossetti, 242
Wight, P. B., 47, 49
Wilding, Alexa, 165, 186
Wood-Spurge, The, poem, 191
Woodward, Benjamin, 102
Woolner, Thomas, 33, 58, 59, 67, 158
Wordsworth, William, 85, 200, 227
Working-Men's College, 89
World's Worth, see Pax Vobis
Z
Zoological Gardens, 16

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