portrait, by the fact that the latter was finished in the same year that Mr. Tennyson published Maud, and that he, Rossetti, and a few others were present at a private proof-reading. While there Rossetti made, from an unobserved coign of vantage, a rapid but very good pen-and-ink sketch of Mr. Tennyson as he read the proof-sheets of Maud, and this he gave to Mr. Browning, who still possesses and duly values it.1

To return to The Germ period. It was about this time or a year or so later that Rossetti, who had continued living (with studios elsewhere) in his parent's house at 50 Charlotte Street, Portland Place, whither Mr. and Mrs. Gabriele Rossetti had removed in 1833 from No. 38 in the same street, left home and took chambers in 14 Chatham Place, Blackfriars Bridge. No such place now exists, but before the erection of the present bridge a row of handsome houses so-called overlooked the Thames, and in these rooms some of the most important events of his life took place and many fine compositions in verse and on canvas saw the light. Amongst the first things he wrote in his own residence was the weird and dramatic ballad Sister Helen, which a year or two subsequently he sent to Mary Howitt for a magazine which she then edited and published in Germany and which was known as the Düsseldorf Annual. The poem is there printed as Sister Helen. By H. H. H.," and on the margin of the copy of the pages belonging to Mr. William Rossetti,

1 The sketch has a memorandum on the back of the frame with the date and particulars. The reading took place at 13 Dorset Street, Portman Square, on the 27th September 1855, and those present besides Mr. Tennyson were Mr. Browning, Mrs. E. B. Browning, Miss Arabella Browning, and Rossetti.

the following pencil note is inscribed by the author:"This is the first form in which the ballad was printed; the pages are from the Düsseldorf Annual, printed in Germany about 1853 or '54, and edited by Mary Howitt, who asked me to contribute. She altered 'seeth'd' into 'melted.' I think the ballad had been written in 1851, or the beginning of '52. The initials as above were taken from the lead-pencil, because people used to say my style was hard.D. G. R."1 A design fully as weird as the ballad of Sister Helen was made about the same time, the impressive and, comparatively speaking, well-known How They Met Themselves, called also The Doubles, and both titles suggesting the Döppelgänger legend on which it is, of course, founded. Rossetti at this time took pleasure in deriving subjects for pictorial designs from Mr. Browning's poetry, but at present it will be sufficient to merely mention the large painting begun on a hint given in Pippa Passes, but given up afterwards in despair owing to what were at that time insurmountable technical difficulties (and now extant only in part in a water-colour drawing called Two Mothers—certainly in name unsuggestive of Kate the Queen)—and in an interesting water-colour drawing founded on some lines in The Laboratory. But at the time of the composition of The Doubles he was enthusiastic on the merits of Sir Henry Taylor's Philip van Artevelde, the result of this enthusiasm being the powerful Hesterna Rosa, or Elena's Song, founded on some lines therein.

1 These and many of the foregoing details will now be familiar to many who read the interesting and sympathetic article by Miss A. Mary F. Robinson in Harper's Magazine for October.

In 1853 Rossetti visited Mr. Scott in Newcastle, profiting much thereby in instruction in the technicalities of art. For the next four or five years he devoted himself to the production of those poetic and brilliantly-coloured small water-colours that are replete with such individuality and such charm, and of which Mr. George Rae of Birkenhead and Mr. William Graham possess so many striking examples; and, in addition to these, the fine designs for the illustrated "Tennyson quarto," published by Moxon, and the exquisite, if in drawing faulty, Mary Magdalene at the Door of Simon the Pharisee, of which Mr. Ruskin has spoken so highly in literature, contributing some of his now well-known poems to the Orford and Cambridge Magazine, which lasted the twelve months of 1856. About 1857 the young painter was asked to take part in the decoration of the Union Debating Room at Oxford, and thus was originated what proved an experiment exerting a subsequent wide influence on English art; but as I shall, of course, have occasion to refer to the famous Oxford Frescoes in the portion of this book forming the artistic record I will not now dwell upon the subject, only regretting what has long been a matter of notoriety, that the so-called frescoes are fast fading and peeling off and threaten soon to become existent only in memory. In this undertaking, as wherever else he came into union with sympathetic workers, he took by right of strongest gift the place of guide and inspirer, the vigorously magnetic personality of the man being in itself almost sufficient to account for this, that irresistible magnetism which may be defined as bodily genius. It was at this time that he made the acquaintance of Mr. William Morris, Mr.

Burne Jones, and Mr. A. C. Swinburne, who had just left Eton to become an undergraduate at Oxford,-of these he knew first Mr. Burne Jones, that gentleman having called upon him in London before the Oxford attempt was commenced. It is now a well-known fact that the famous painter of Laus Veneris and The Golden Stairs owed his embracing art as a profession to the advice and solicitation of the poetartist who influenced also to such an extent Mr. Morris and Mr. Swinburne, Rossetti urging Mr. Burne Jones to give up the idea of entering the Church, and to study painting, for which he detected the latter's genius.

Early in 1860 Rossetti made great changes at 14 Chatham Place, enlarging the accommodation and adding in other ways to the comfort of his residence, and here in "the mating time o' the year" he brought home his wife, Elizabeth Eleanor Siddall. This lady, who was very beautiful, and who showed brilliant promise as a colourist, he had known for a considerable time, and the short-lived happiness of their union in some respects recalls another marriage of like with like when the author of Aurora Leigh married the author of The Ring and the Book. Her face is very familiar in compositions belonging to this period, but though there are one or two interesting portraits of her the best likeness in every way is the pathetically faithful face of Beatrice in the lovely Beata Beatrix belonging to Lord Mount-Temple,-painted, indeed, subsequent to the death of Mrs. Rossetti, but none the less a direct portrait. Several friends possess pencil and other drawings of her as she appeared before her husband in daily life, many of them of ex

quisite and delicate execution, and in each there is to be traced the artist lover's gaze as it caught pose after pose and expression after expression, the latter, however, varying more in shades of sadness, for it seemed almost as if a premonition of early death overshadowed her life. In the year following their marriage a daughter was born, but only for death, and in February of 1862 Mrs. Dante Rossetti herself suddenly died. The blow was in many respects an exceptionally terrible one to Rossetti. In the impulse of his grief it came about that, before the coffin-lid was closed on the face he should not see on earth again, he hastily gathered together the MSS. of the greater number of the poems now so familiar in England and America, and laid them as a last gift on his wife's breast. As his chief friend, Mr. Theodore Watts, said in the obituary notice in the Athenæum, like Prospero he literally buried his wand. Many years passed, and still it seemed that the old interest and the old creative impulse would not again take possession of him, but this only in so far as concerns poetry; the statements in several press and other notices that he abandoned creative work of all kinds for a lengthened period being very far from the truth, as a glance at the years 1862 to 1869 (the period meant), in the supplementary list to Chapter III., at the end of this volume will show-a lustrum, and more, wherein some of the artist's most famous pictures were painted, amongst others, Beata Beatrix, Sibylla Palmifera, Monna Vanna, Venus Verticordia, Lady Lilith, and The Beloved. At the time of his wife's death Rossetti was only thirty-three, yet at this early age he had accomplished work in art and literature which might well have been considered a fair achieve