Letters of D. G. Rossetti: Iii. 1855-1857

THE introduction to this series of papers I wrote, as my readers may remember, at the little town of Alassio, on the western Riviera. The proofs of this third article I am correcting in Florence. It is no longer by the waves of the Mediterranean, but by the murmur of the Arno as it falls over a weir, that my ears are soothed. I am in that beautiful city which had so profound an influence on Rossetti’s mind, though he never visited it. He was a Florentine of the Florentines, even though he passed all his days on the banks of the Thames. The sunny south was unknown to him. Paris was the limit of his wanderings. With the account of his second visit to that city, and of “ the glorious Robert,” whom he met there, his next letter opens : —

XIV.

Sunday, 25 November, 1855.

... I have just come back from a ten-days’ trip to Paris, in pursuit of various things and persons. The Brownings are there for the winter, on account of the cholera at Florence, and had previously been some time in London, where I saw them a good many times, and indeed may boast of some intimacy with the glorious Robert by this time. What a magnificent series is Men and Women ! Of course you have it half by heart ere this. The comparative stagnation, even among those I see, and complete torpor elsewhere, which greet this my Elixir of Life, are awful signs of the times to me — “ and I must hold my peace ! ” — for it is n’t fair to Browning (besides, indeed, being too much trouble) to bicker and flicker about it. I fancy we shall agree pretty well on favorites, though one’s mind has no right to be quite made up so soon on such a subject. For my own part, I don’t reckon I’ve read them at all yet, as I only got them the day before leaving town, and could n’t possibly read them then, — the best proof to you how hard at work I was for once, — so heard them read by William ; since then read them on the journey again, and some a third time at intervals ; but they ’ll bear lots of squeezing yet. My prime favorites hitherto (without the book by me) are Childc Roland, Bishop Blougram, Karshish, the Contemporary, Lippo Lippi, Cleon, and Popularity ; about the other lyrical ones I can’t quite speak yet, and their names don’t stick in my head; but I ’m afraid The Heretic’s Tragedy rather gave me the gripes at first, though I’ve tried since to think it did n’t, on finding the Athenæum similarly affected.

8 January, 1856.

A month and a half actually, dear A., since the last sheet, already long behindhand, yet which has lain in my drawer ever since, till it is too late now to wish you Merry Christmas, too late to wish you Happy New Year, only not too late to feel just the same towards you as if I were the best correspondent in the world, and to know you feel the same towards me. I am sure, too, you believe that, little as I do to deserve and obtain frequent letters from you, your letters are as great a pleasure to me as any I get, — greater, I think, than any, except certain ones which you ’ll be glad to hear come now dated Nice, their writer having left England three months ago, and benefiting already, I trust, by the genial climate she is now enjoying, which, while that bitter cold weather was ailing us here, remained as warm as the best English May.

Many thanks indeed for your New Year’s gift, — a most delightful one. Old Blake is quite as lovable by his oddities as by his genius, and the drawings to the Ballads abound with both. The two nearly faultless are The Eagle and The Hermit Dog. Ruskin’s favorite (who has just been looking at it) is The Horse ; but I can’t myself quite get over the intensity of comic decorum in the brute’s face. He seems absolutely snuffling with propriety. The Lion seems singing a comic song with a pen behind his ear, but the glimpse of distant landscape below is lovely. The only drawing where the comic element riots almost unrebuked is the one of the dog jumping down the crocodile.

As regards engraving, these drawings, with the Job, present the only good medium between etching and the formal line that I ever met with. I see that in coming to me the book returns home ; having set out from No. 6 Bridge Street, Blackfriars, just fifty years ago. Strange to think of it as then new literature and art. Those ballads of Hayley — some of the quaintest human bosh in the world — picked their way, no doubt, in highly respectable quarters, where poor Blake’s unadorned hero at page 1 was probably often stared at, and sometimes torn out.

I broke off at the last sheet in midBrowning. Of course I’ve been drenching myself with him at intervals since, only he got carried off by friends, and I have him not always by me. I wish you would let me hear in a speedy answer (there’s cheek for you!) all you think about his new work, and it shall nerve me to express my ideas in return ; but since I have given up poetry as a pursuit of my own, I really find my thoughts on the subject generally require a starting-point from somebody else to bring them into activity ; and as you ’re the only man I know who ’d be really in my mood of receptiveness in regard to Browning, and as I can’t get at you, I ’ve been bottled up ever since Men and Women came out. By the bye, I don’t reckon William, the intensity of fellowfeeling on the subject making the discussion of it between us rather flat. I went the other day to a penny readingroom, — a real blessing, which now occupies the place of Burford’s Panorama, and where all papers and reviews whatsoever are taken in. There I saw two articles on Browning : one by Masson — really thoroughly appreciative, but slow — in the British Quarterly ; and one by a certain Brimley, of Trinity College, Cambridge, in Fraser, — the cheekiest of human products. This man, less than two years ago, had not read a line of Browning, as I know through my brother, and I have no doubt he has just read him up to write this article ; which opens, nevertheless, with accusations against R. B. of nothing less than personal selfishness and vanity, so plumply put as to be justified by nothing less than personal intimacy of many years. When I went to Paris, I took my copy of Men and Women (which had been sent me the day before) with me, and got B. to write my name in it. Did you get a copy? We spoke often of you, — he with great personal and poetical regard, I of course with loathing. I inclose herewith a note which reached me before the book, containing emendations; copy them, if you please, and return the note. I spent some most delightful time with Browning at Paris, both in the evenings and at the Louvre, where (and throughout conversation) I found his knowledge of early Italian art beyond that of any one I ever met, — encyclopaedically beyond that of Ruskin himself. What a jolly thing is Old Pictures in Florence ! It seems all the pictures desired, by the poet are in his possession, in fact. At Paris I met his father, and in London an uncle of his and his sister, who, it appears, performed the singular female feat of copying Sordello for him, to which some of its eccentricities may possibly be referred. However, she remembers it all, and even Squarcialupe, Zin the Horrid, and the sad disheveled ghost. But no doubt you know her. The father and uncle — father especially — show just that submissive yet highly cheerful and capable simplicity of character which often, I think, appears in the family of a great man who uses at last what the others have kept for him. The father is a complete oddity, with a real genius for drawing, but caring for nothing in the least except Dutch boors, — fancy the father of Browning ! — and as innocent as a child. In the new volumes, the only thing he seemed to care for much was that about the sermon to the Jews,

At B.’s house at Paris I met a miraculous French critic named Milsand, who actually before ever meeting Browning knew his works to the very dregs, and had even been years in search of Pauline, — how heard of I know not, — and wrote a famous article on him in the Revue des Deux Mondes, through which B. somehow came to know him. I hear he has translated some of the Men and Women, which must be curiosities. In London I showed Browning Miss Siddal’s drawing from Pippa Passes, with which he was delighted beyond measure, and wanted excessively to know her. However, though afterwards she was in Paris at the same time as he and I were, he only met her once for a few minutes : she being very unwell then and averse to going anywhere ; and Mrs. B. being forbidden to go out, and so unable to call. What a delightfully unliterary person Mrs. B. is to meet! During two evenings when Tennyson was at their house in London, Mrs. Browning left T. with her husband and William and me (who were the fortunate remnant of the male party) to discuss the universe, and gave all her attention to some certainly not very exciting ladies in the next room. . ..

Have you reviewed Browning anywhere, or shall you ? Hannay has my copy for a similar purpose, but I see no fruit coming of it. In B.’s note inclosed, the portrait referred to is one of himself by Page, an American living at Rome, which he has confided to my care with the idea of its going to the Royal Academy. After much delay I have only just got hold of it, and am much disappointed in it, so shall advise its non-exhibition, as a portrait of Browning ought n’t to be put out of sight or kicked out. I have done one in water-color myself, which hangs now over my mantelpiece, and which every one says is very like. Next time I have the chance I shall paint him in oil, and probably Mrs. B. too, with him. Ruskin, on reading Men and Women (and with it some of the other works which he did not know before), declared them, rebelliously, to be a mass of conundrums, and compelled me to sit down before him and lay siege for one whole night, the result of which was that he sent me next morning a bulky letter to be forwarded to B., in which I trust he told him that he was the greatest man since Shakespeare. . . .

Ruskin’s new volume will be in my hands, I believe, on Tuesday. WHAT ARE YOU AT ? I have just, seen a capital sonnet of yours, — a star shot as rubbish into a dust-bin labeled The Idler. I’ve done lots of work latety (that is, for me), but all in water-colors, and nearly all for Ruskin. Among the later of my drawings finished are Francesca da Rimini in three compartments ; Dante cut by Beatrice at a marriage feast; Lancelot and Guenever parting at tomb of Arthur : at finishing of each of which, and of various others I have done, I have very much wished you were by to show them to. I ’m sorry to say my modern picture remains untouched since last Christmas; but this has really not been through idleness, as I have done more during the past year than for a long while previously, and I think I can myself perceive an advance in my entire work. Pray, again, what are you up to ?

I’ve left no space for the French Exhibition, to which indeed I devoted only one of the ten days I spent in Paris, — my heart not being a teetotum nor my mind an old-clothes shop. Delacroix is of the mighty ones of the earth, and Ingres misses being so creditably. There is a German, Knaus, who is perfection in a way something between Hogarth and Millais ; Millais and Hunt are marvels and omens. Water-color Hunt and Lewis are the only things in their department. The rest is silence, or must be so for the present.

What do you think of Browning being able to read The Mystake ? Could you ?

Yours affectionately,

D. G. ROSSETTI.

Of this trip to Paris Munro wrote to W. B. Scott: “ I have been to Paris to see the great exhibition with D. G. R. We enjoyed Paris immensely ; in different ways, of course, for Rossetti was every day with his sweetheart, of whom he is more foolishly fond than I ever saw lover.”

W. M. Rossetti, tracing his brother’s early favorites among the poets, says: “ At last it may have been 1847 [when lie was nineteen years old] — everything took a secondary place in comparison with Robert Browning. Paracelsus, Sordello, Pippa Passes, the Blot in the ’Scutcheon, and the short poems in the Bells and Pomegranates series were endless delights; endless were the readings, and endless the recitations.”

The letter from Nice was from Miss Siddal, who was spending the winter there in the vain hope of winning back health.

The book that “ returns home ; having set out from No. 6 Bridge Street, Blackfriars, just fifty years ago,’ was “ Ballads by William Hayley, founded on anecdotes relating to animals, with prints, designed and engraved by William Blake. Chichester, printed by J. Seagrave for Richard Phillips, Bridge Street, Blackfriars, London, 1805.”

On May 16, 1802, Hayley wrote of Blake: “ He is at this moment by my side, representing on copper an Adam of his own, surrounded by animals, — a frontispiece to the projected ballads.

Porson thus ridiculed the mutual flattery of Hayley and Miss Seward: —

Miss Seward loquitur.

Hayley respondet.

Miss Seward.

Hayley.

It was in 1853 that Rossetti “ first definitely decided to adhere to painting as his profession, to the comparative neglect of poetry.” At a still earlier date, on August 13, 1852, he wrote to his brother, “ I have abandoned poetry.”

I remember seeing a pen - and - ink drawing by Rossetti, of Browning, with a look of angry scorn, tearing out from a magazine the pages in which his poems were criticised. I have little doubt that it was Brimley’s article that was thus treated. We see a different side of this reviewer’s character in the following extract from a letter by T. S. Baynes, dated June 12, 1854, published in The Table-Talk of Shirley : “ Only a day or two ago, in looking over some papers, I met with the note I received when with you last year from poor Brimley, in which he speaks so calmly, yet so despondingly, about his health. He died last week. For a long time he had worked on at his post in the immediate presence of death, waiting calmly amidst pain and toil for the moment of release and rest.”

Six years before Rossetti “ spent some most delightful time with Browning at the Louvre,” he had visited it with Holman Hunt, as he thus describes in the last six lines of a sonnet: —

Squarcialupe is found on page 66, the “ sad disheveled ghost ” on page 99, and Zin the Horrid on page 104, of Sordello, London edition of 1885.

J. Milsand reviewed Browning in the Revue des Deux Mondes of August 15, 1851, the second part of an article on La Poésie Anglaise depuis Byron ; and also in the Revue Contemporaine of September 15, 1856. In 1864 he published L’Esthétique Anglaise, Etude sur M. John Ruskin. Of Pauline, for which “ he had been years in search,” the following anecdote is told by W. M. Rossetti : “ In the British Museum my brother had come across an anonymous poem entitled Pauline. He admired it much, and copied out every line of it.” He inferred that it was by Browning. On writing to the poet, he learned that his inference was right.

In 1863 Browning dedicated a new edition of Sordello “to J. Milsand of Dijon;" and later on he honored his memory by the following dedication of Parleyings with Certain People : —

IN MEMORIAM

J. MILSAND

OBIIT IV SEPT. MDCCCLXXXVI

Absens absentem auditque videtque

Matthew Arnold, writing on November 9, 1866, says: “I had asked Lake to dine quite alone with us ; then a M. Milsand, a Frenchman and a remarkable writer, called unexpectedly, and I added him to Lake ; then I found Milsand was staying with Browning, and I added Browning; I found that Lord Houghton was a friend of Milsand’s, and so I asked him too. Everybody made themselves pleasant, and it did extremely well.”

“ The portrait that Rossetti took of Browning, after he took a fanciful prejudice against him, he gave away. It is a very fine portrait.” (W. M. R.) On one of the two evenings which Tennyson spent at Browning’s house, Rossetti heard one poet read aloud his Maud, and the other his Fra Lippo Lippi.

“ Ruskin’s new volume ” was, I think, the third volume of Modern Painters. On July 1 of this year Rossetti had written : “ Ruskin is very hard at work on the third volume of Modern Painters, who, I tell him, will be old masters before the work is ended.” In the summer of 1856, Rossetti, as will be seen, was reading the fourth volume.

Allingham’s sonnet is entitled The Three Sisters (the three Brontës). The Idler was edited by E. Wilberforce. It came to an end with its sixth number.

That Rossetti at this time did “ nearly all" his pictures for Ruskin is explained by the following statement by W. M. Rossetti: “ From an early date in their acquaintance, Mr. Ruskin undertook to buy, if he happened to like it. whatever Rossetti produced, at a range of prices such as he would have asked from any other purchaser, and up to a certain maximum of expenditure on his own part. . . . My brother availed himself of Ruskin’s easy liberality without abusing it. In fact, he was made comfortable in his professional position.”

The picture which he describes as “ Dante cut by Beatrice at a marriage feast ” bears the title Beatrice at a Marriage Feast denies Dante her Salutation. His “ modern picture ” was Found.

Of Delacroix, whom he praises so highly in this letter, he wrote from Paris in 1849 : “ Delacroix (except in two pictures which show a kind of savage genius) is a perfect beast, though almost worshiped here.”

Of Ingres he wrote : “ This fellow is quite unaccountable. One picture of his in the Luxembourg is unsurpassed for exquisite perfection by anything I have ever seen, and he has others there for which I would not give two sous.”

“ The Mystake ” was Rossetti’s perversion of The Mystic, by P. J. Bailey, published this year. That author’s Festus he had in earlier years “read over and over again.”

XV.

Thursday. [Indorsed March 7, 1856.]

. . . Dalziel (very good naturedly, considering) called here the other day to enlist me for an illustrated selection of poets which he has the getting up of, it being edited by Revd. Wilmott. That venerable person had not, it seems, included Browning, for whose introduction I made an immediate stand, and said in that case I would illustrate him. I think it will probably be done, and I shall propose (I fancy as yet) Count Gismond, — “Say, hast thou lied?” — which I designed some years ago. But I should also like to do one from you, if anything illustratable of yours is included and you are not preëngaged. Something of yours, I gathered from D., was to be in. Would you tell me what ? That is, if you know. I told him I should not be able to do them for several months, as the Tennyson ones still hung on my hands ; but he seemed to say that would do. I am to write to him about subject from Browning, so would you let me also hear of yours at once, if you can ?

That notice in The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine was the most gratifying thing by far that has ever happened to me, being unmistakably genuine. I thought it must be by your old acquaintance Fryer, of Cambridge, he having called on me once about those same things. But it turns out to be by a certain youthful Jones, who was in London the other day, and whom (being known to some of the Working Men’s College Council) I have now met. One of the nicest young fellows in — Dreamland ; for there most of the writers in that miraculous piece of literature seem to be. Surely, this cometh in some wise of The Germ, with which it might bind up. But how much more the right thing — in kind — than The Idler ! I see it monthly. The new number has a story called A Dream, which really is remarkable in some respects, — I think in color.

This brings me to my water-colors. I ’m doing a large one I’d like you to see, — Dante’s vision of Beatrice dead, Vita Nuova, — one of my very best. I ’ve done, too, lately, a Monk Illuminating, and other beginnings. I’ve got (I think) a commission to paint a reredos (altar-piece) for Llandaff Cathedral, a big thing, which I shall go into with a howl of delight after all my small work. I fancy it will pay wellish, too. . . .

Rossetti was not enlisted for this “illustrated selection of poets,” which, towards the end of the year, was published under the title of The Poets of the Nineteenth Century, selected and edited by R. A. Willmott.

To The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine Rossetti contributed The Burden of Nineveh, The Staff and the Scrip, and The Blessed Damozel, slightly altered from the form it bore in The Germ. The mention of this magazine brings back to my memory a little front parlor in a small lodging-house in Pembroke Street, Oxford, in which, in the Michaelmas term of 1855, I often heard a knot of eager young men plan its foundation. They were all my seniors in standing, some of them by two or three years. I was only in my second term. The two leaders were Burne-Jones and William Morris. Next to them was Richard Watson Dixon (now a canon of the Church of England), whom Rossetti “ described, towards 1880, as ‘ an admirable but totally unknown living poet. His finest passages are as fine as any living man can do.’ ” All of them but Morris had been born, or at all events had been educated, in Birmingham. Another of the set, the late Edwin Hatch, afterwards became distinguished as a theological scholar. Between him and the others I never discovered any bond of sympathy but this common Birmingham origin. I had been introduced to this little fraternity by the future editor of the Magazine, William Fulford, a poet of no mean power. It was, in fact, “a nest of singing birds,” who, night after night, were found together in the close neighborhood of Dr. Johnson’s old college, often in the college itself. It was a new world into which I was brought. I knew nothing of art, and nothing of Tennyson, Browning, and Ruskin. The subjects which I had always heard discussed were never discussed here, while matters on which I had never heard any one speak formed here the staple of the talk. I recall how, one evening, the nineteenth century was denounced for its utter want of poetry. This was more than I could bear, for the nineteenth century was almost an object of adoration in my father’s house. I ventured to assert that it could boast, at all events, of one piece of poetry, — the steam-engine. The roar of laughter which burst forth nearly overwhelmed me. The author of The Earthly Paradise almost overturned his chair as he flung himself backwards, overpowered with mirth. I was too much abashed to explain that I was recalling the sight I had once had of an engine rushing through the darkness along a high embankment, drawing after it a cloud of flame and fiery steam.

In the first number of the Magazine, the editor, in an article on Tennyson, praised the music to which Sweet and Low had been set. I recall the pleasure with which he read to us a letter from the poet, asking for the name of the publisher of the music, as no setting that he knew of pleased either himself or his wife.

What “the youthful Jones” thought of Rossetti we learn from Canon Dixon, who wrote, “The great painter who first took me to him said, ' We shall see the greatest man in Europe.’ ”

The water-color of Dante’s vision “is the same subject as the large oil-picture now in the Walker Gallery at Liverpool, but not at all the same composition.” “ The Monk Illuminating is the watercolor named Fra Pace.”

For the triptych for Llandaff Cathedral Rossetti was to receive £400. It was not finished till 1864.

XVI.

Monday [May, 1856].

. . . The Royal Academy Exhibition is full of P. R. work this year. Hughes’s Eve of St. Agnes is a real success. The finest thing of all in the place, to my feeling, is a picture by one Windus (of Liverpool), from the old ballad of Burd Helen, another version of Childe Waters. It belongs, I hear, to your friend Miller. Yours, D. G. ROSSETTI.

Windus was not, of course, the picture-buyer of that name mentioned in an earlier letter.

Miller was “John Miller, of Liverpool, — an elderly Scotch gentleman, a merchant, a prime mover in artistic matters in Liverpool, and admirably kind and energetic in all his doings.” He was so strong in belief as to be a skeptic as regards the absence of belief. I once heard him say, in his strong Scotch accent, “ An atheist, if such an animal ever really existed.” What the supposititious animal would do I forget

XVII.

Friday [May or June, 1856].

DEAR ALLINGHAM, — Many thanks for your “ sunny memory ” of me. The photograph interests me as in some degree embodying your whereabouts.

I have just been turning over the three parcels of books left for you with me, and a dismaler collection I never saw. Is it possible yon read all that? The only one to my taste is a nice clean Mrs. Boddington. I have met lately with a lady, one Mrs. Burr, who always brings her to my mind, having the same tendency to poetic traveling, and being much what I fancy her in age and person, — about thirty-two, refined and very nearly beautiful, energetic withal to an extraordinary degree in Ruskin’s style, but quite mild and feminine ; ten hours at the top of a ladder to copy a Giotto ceiling being nothing to her. She has been traveling all over Italy with Layard, and they together have given one one’s first real chance of forming a congruous idea of early art without going there; he having traced all he could get at by single figures and groups, and she having made colored drawings of the whole compositions, and the chapels, etc., where they are painted on the walls. They have hundreds, whole reams of these things, — of course more interesting than one can say. Benozzo Gozzoli was a god. It is fearful to hear them describe the havoc going on among the originals of their tracings, etc. In one instance, specially admiring a glorious fresco by Pietro della Francesca. I was told that while the tracing was being made, some demons came with an order to knock it out of the wall to make a window, which was done ! I believe some means will be taken to publish or show publicly all these things. A most glorious treat which I had yesterday is the sight of the Giotto tracings made for the Arundel Society, and now in the Crystal Palace. I hope you ’ll be in time for them. The woodcuts published give no idea.

I’ve just finished a largish drawing for one Miss Heaton, of Leeds, of Dante’s dream of Beatrice lying dead. It has taken me nearly two months, and is the best I have done. I fear it must go before you come, or I should like of all things to show it you. . . .

I agree partly about Ruskin as far as I’ve read the fourth volume, but there are glorious things, of course: Calais Church at beginning is one.

Really, the omissions in Browning’s passage are awful, and the union with Longfellow worse. How I loathe Wishiwashi, — 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. I should like just to have the writing of a valentine to him in one of the reviews.

Perhaps you’ve heard of Academy pictures, so I give you but a summary. Millais sends five : Peace Concluded, a stupid affair to suit the day, but very big, and fetching him £900 ! without copyright, for which he expects £1000 more ; Children burning Autumn Leaves, very lovely indeed ; Blind Girl and Rainbow, one of the most touching and perfect things I know; Church besieged in Cromwell’s Time, with child lying wounded on knight’s tomb, have n’t seen ; Boy looking at Leech’s Picture Book. Hunt sends only Scapegoat, a grand thing, but not for the public, and a few lovely landscape drawings. His big picture of Christ and the Doctors in tlie Temple is about the greatest thing, perhaps, he has done, but only half done yet. Hughes’s Eve of St. Agnes will make his fortune, I feel sure. . . .

Mary Boddington published a volume of poems in 1839. “I fancy,” writes Mr. W. M. Rossetti, “ that her name has now passed out of all remembrance. It may be as far back as 1847 that my brother (and myself) grew very familiar with a few specimens of poetry by Mrs. Boddington, and had a great liking for them. I could still repeat most of one poem about a lady who had drowned herself, beginning, —

This poem is given in Allingham’s Nightingale Valley, page 184.

In 1868 Sir H. A. Layard published for the Arundel Society a monograph on The Brancacci Chapel, at Florence, in which he describes the mosaics. This was his first publication on Italian art.

Benozzo Gozzoli had long been admired by Rossetti. “ Mr. Holman Hunt considers that it was the inspection of the Campo Santo engravings ’ at this special time [1848] which caused the establishment of the Preraphaelite Brotherhood.’ These engravings give some idea of the motives, feeling, and treatment of the paintings of Gozzoli,” etc.

“ The omissions in Browning’s passage ” were omissions in a quotation in Modern Painters, vol. iv. p. 377, from The Bishop orders his Tomb at Saint Praxed’s Church. “ The union with Longfellow ” is in the following passage on the same page : “ Thus Longfellow in The Golden Legend has entered more closely into the temper of the monk, for good and for evil, than ever yet theological writer or historian, though they may have given their life’s labor to the analysis ; and again, Robert Browning is unerring in every sentence he writes of the Middle Ages,” etc.

Matthew Arnold, this same spring, described Ruskin’s new volume as “ full of excellent aperçus, as usual, but the man and character too febrile, irritable, and weak to allow him to possess the ordo concatenatioque veri.”

Leaves of Grass must be Whitman’s poems ; though why Rossetti should describe the author as “ that Orson of yours ” I cannot understand. The following extracts from two of Allingham’s letters to W. M. Rossetti show that Allingham had not at this time read the book : —

March 15, 1857. “ Leaves of Grass I have bought partly from what you say (7s. 6d., mind!), but not read. First glimpse shows something of a got-up air. Is ‘ Whitman ’ real ? Do you know Thoreau’s Concord and Life in the Woods ? They are worth having.”

April 10,1857. “ I’ve read Leaves of Grass, and found it rather pleasant, but little new or original ; the portrait the best thing. Of course, to call it poetry, in any sense, would be mere abuse of language. In poetry there is a special freedom, which, however, is not lawlessness and incoherence.”

On May 19 of the same year he returns to the subject: —

“ I have been very flat and heavy lately, and out of humor with poetry-writing. The fact is I am dismal for want of some society. Local statistics under that head would be nil. I’m weary of wandering about the fields, — sermons in stones, and no good in anything. ‘ Rusty ’ is derived from ‘ rus.’ I must get out of this desolate Ballyshannon village, — and long for it again, perhaps, in another mood. But in any mood, case, or tense, I could n’t allow Leaves of Grass to be poetry. I wish we had some accepted word like ‘ poeticality.’ The Leaves are suggestive, like the advertisement columns of a newspaper, or a stroll along Fleet Street and Thames Street, but poetry without form is — what shall I say ? Proportion seems to me the most inalienable quality of a poem. From the chaos of incident and reflection arise the rounded worlds of poetry, and go singing on their way.”

Rossetti, writing in 1878 about his brother’s Lives of Famous Poets, says of Whitman : “ By the bye, I am sorry to see that name winding up a summary of great poets ; he is really out of court in comparison with any one who writes what is not sublimated Tupper ; though you know that I am not without appreciation of his fine qualities.”

XVIII.

MRS. GREEN’S, 17 ORANGE GROVE, BATH [December 18, 1856].

. . . The piece of news freshest in my mind is Aurora Leigh, — an astounding work, surely. You said nothing of it. I know that St. Francis and Poverty do not wed in these days at St. James’s Church, with rows of portrait figures on either side, and the corners neatly finished with angels. I know that if a blind man were to enter the room this evening and talk to me for some hours, I should, with the best intentions, be in danger of twigging his blindness before the right moment came, if such there were, for the chord in the orchestra and the proper theatrical start: yet with all my knowledge I have felt something like a bug ever since reading Aurora Leigh. Oh, the wonder of it! and oh, the bore of writing about it!

The Brownings are long gone back now, and with them one of my delights, — an evening resort where I never felt unhappy. How large a part of the real world, I wonder, are those two small people ? — taking meanwhile so little room in any railway carriage, and hardly needing a double bed at the inn. . . .

What of London friends ?

Woolner is still doing his bust of Tennyson, and his medallion, you know, is to face the title of the new edition. His statue of Bacon, for the Oxford Museum, turned out a very first-rate thing, and is likely, I hope, to do him great good. . . . Hunt is going on with his great picture, and is painting at present in the Alhambra Court at the Crystal Palace, where he finds some architectural matters for his background. Hughes has three or four pictures in hand ; but of these you are likely to have heard. Munro is still at work for Woodward. Brown has lately got the £50 prize at Liverpool for his Christ washing Peter’s Feet, which is proving of use to him. He has a 400 guinea commission from Mr. Plint, of Leeds, for a large modern picture which he began some time ago, called Work, and illustrating all kinds of Carlylianisms. It will be a most noble affair, and will at last, I should hope, settle the question of his fame, which is making some steps at last. Did you see his woodcut in The Poets of the Nineteenth Century ? — very fine still, though rather mauled. They have treated you snobbily enough there. I had engaged to do Browning; but what could have been done with Evelyn Hope or Two in the Campagna ? Count Gismond now ! — but they would n’t. How truly glorious are both of Millais’s drawings ! Among his very finest doings, I think, and preferable to any I have yet seen by him in the Tennyson.

Hunt’s Oriana and Lady of Shalott are my favorites, both masterpieces. I have done, as yet, four, — Mariana in the South, Sir Galahad, and two to The Palace of Art. I hope to do a second to Sir Galahad, but am very uncertain as to any more. But these engravers ! 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 great while. It came back to me on paper, the other day, with Dalziel performing his cannibal jig in the corner, and I have 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.

By the bye, what do you think of Alexander Smith’s Tennysonian poem in The National Magazine ? I think it an advance ; indeed, very fine in parts. Woolner met him and Dobell in Edinburgh lately ; liked Smith much, who inquired a great deal about you, on whose head he heaps coals of appreciation. Read told me that The Angel in the House has had a wild success in America. . . .

You will see no more of the poor Oxford and Cambridge. It was too like the spirit of Germ — "Down, down ! ” and has vanished into the witches’ caldron. Morris and Jones have now been some time settled in London, and are both, I find, 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, though one or two short ones in the Magazine were not of his best. By the bye, though, The Chapel in Lyoness was glorious, — did you not think so ? In his last tale, — Golden Wings, — the printer, after no doubt considering himself personally insulted all along by the nature of those compositions, wound up matters with an avenging blow, and inserted some comic touches, such as prefixing old to woman. or lady in several instances, and other commissions and omissions. Morris’s facility at poetizing puts one in a rage. He has been writing at all for little more than a year, I believe, 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 water-colors of mine, and a landscape by Brown, — indeed, seems as if he would never stop, as I have three or four more commissions from him. To one of my water-colors, 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 incoherent, 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 inquire, all dusty and unused, was an address written up by us on the wall of the bedroom, so pale and watery had been all subsequent inmates, not a trace of whom remained. Morris is rather doing the magnificent there, and is having some intensely mediæval furniture made, — tables and chairs like incubi and 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 unrivaled by anything modem that I know ; Ruskin says, better than anything ancient. By the bye, it was Ruskin made me alter that line in The Blessed D. I had never meant to show him any of my versifyings, but he wrote to me one day asking if I knew the author of Nineveh, and could introduce him, — being really ignorant, as I found ; so after that the flesh was weak. Indeed, I do not know that it will not end in a volume of mine, one of these days. But first I want to bring out those translations, which I have not found time yet to get together for Macmillan. Do you not think Vernon Lushington’s Carlyle very good in Oxford and Cambridge Magazine ? His things and his brother’s, Morris’s, and the one or two by Jones (who never wrote before or since) are the staple of that magazine. The rest — had better have been — silence. Another matter which shall be silence — mainly — on my part is your picture at Tom Taylor’s — merciful silence, oh ! W. A. ! were it better, would n’t I tell its faults ? . . .

Have you heard of the Howitts ? I have seen them, though not very lately, and fear that Miss H. is anything but well. Spiritualism has begun to be in the ascendant at the Hermitage, and this to a degree you could not conceive possible without witnessing it. Do not say anything to anybody, though. I elicited from W. Howitt, before his family, his opinion of it with some trouble, and found it to be a modified form of my own, which of course I give without reserve ; but the ladies of the house seem to take but one view of the subject, and, astounding as it may appear, Mrs. Browning has given in her adherence. I hope Aurora Leigh is not to be followed by “ that style only.” Browning, of course, pockets his hands and shakes his mane over the question, with occasional foamings at the mouth, and he and I laid siege to the subject one night, but to no purpose.

Here we are in the third sheet and third hour A. M. Good-by for the present. Do let us keep it up now.

Yours ever affectionately,

D. G. ROSSETTI.

“Aurora Leigh.” wrote W. M. Rossetti to W. B. Scott. “ was sent to Gabriel, and also to Woolner, by Mrs. Browning herself, and both are unboundedly enthusiastic about it.”

“ Rossetti, towards 1845—47, was a semi-idolater of Mrs. Browning ; but in more mature years he saw very clearly the defects (along with the beauties) of her tendencies and style.”(W. M. R.)

Rossetti’s friendship with Mr. Browning came to an end through a wild suspicion that in some lines in Fifine at the Fair he was attacked. “ On one or two occasions,” writes W. M. Rossetti, “ when the great poet, the object of my brother’s early and unbounded homage, kindly inquired of me concerning him, and expressed a wish to look him up, I was compelled to fence with the suggestion, lest worse should ensue. ’

Thomas Woolner, the sculptor, was one of the Brotherhood.

Benjamin Woodward was the architect of the Oxford Museum. “ which was in course of erection, much under the influence of Mr. Ruskin.” On his death, in 1861. Rossetti wrote of him to a friend : “ If I am ever found worthy to meet him again, it will be where the dejection is unneeded which I cannot but feel at this moment; for the power of further and better work must be the reward bestowed on the deserts and checked aspirations of such a sincere soul as his.”

Madox Brown’s picture of Christ washing Peter’s Feet is in the London National Gallery. Work is in the Public Gallery of Manchester. That his fame was slow in “ making steps ” was owing in some measure to “ the absolute silence which Mr. Ruskin in all his published writings preserved as to Brown’s works.” Rossetti was the warm friend of both men. “ Brown soon got to hate the very name of Ruskin. So Rossetti had, in some degree, to steer a middle course between his warm feelings for Brown on one side, and for Ruskin on the other.”

Allingham had only a single poem in The Poets of the Nineteenth Century, — An Autumnal Sonnet. Rossetti contributed no illustration.

Dalziel’s “cannibal jig” was his signature in very unequal letters at the bottom of the engraving, of which Rossetti gives Allingham an imitation.

In a letter to W. B. Scott, two months later, he again brought in Agag: “ After a fortnight’s work, my block goes to the engraver, like Agag, delicately, and is hewn to pieces before the — Lord Harry.”

The “coals of appreciation ” heaped by Smith are explained by the following passage in Allingliam’s letter to W. M. Rossetti, dated March 15, 1857 : “Don’t waste sympathy on Alexander Smith. I hear he is coming out with Macmillan shortly; but if he ever produces a good book I undertake to eat it, literally, as St. John did, miraculously, I suppose, that one in the Revelation. Smith, Dobell, Festus, and all that sort of tiling is a mere passing hubbub.” Matthew Arnold. in one of his letters, says of Smith : “ It can do me no good to be irritated with that young man, who has certainly an extraordinary faculty, although I think ho is a phenomenon of a very dubious character ; but il fait son métier — faisons le nôtre.”

Golden Wings was published in the December number of the Magazine. The printer’s “ comic touches ” are found in the following passages : “ Old knights who fought in that battle, and who told me it was all about an old lady, etc. “ I put my shield before me and drew my sword, and the old women drew together aside and whispered fearfully.”

Morris’s first book, The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems, was dedicated to Rossetti. The statement made in this letter that Morris was a millionaire was the wild exaggeration of a poor painter.

“ The subject of The Blue Closet,” Rossetti wrote, “ is some people playing music.” John Parker, the editor of Fraser’s Magazine, wrote to “ Shirley ” on May 14, 1860 : “ I saw Morris’s poems in manuscript. The man who brought the manuscript (himself well known as a poet) said ‘that one of the poems which described a picture of Rossetti was a very fine poem ; that the picture was not understandable. and the poem made it no clearer, but that it was a fine poem, nevertheless.’ ”

“Poor Deverell” had died nearly three years earlier. “ He was,” Mr. Arthur Hughes tells me, “ a manly young fellow, with a feminine beauty added to his manliness ; exquisite manners and a most affectionate disposition. He died early, after painting two or three pictures. Had he lived, he would have been a poetic painter, but not a strong one. Millais, hard working and ambitious though he was, used to sit hour after hour by his bedside reading to him.” I have seen him described by one of the artist set in a letter to Allingham as “little Deverell, with his soft, effeminate, alluring face.”

The following is Ruskin’s letter to Rossetti: —

“ DEAR ROSSETTI, — I am wild to know who is the author of The Burden of Nineveh, in No. 8 of Oxford and Cambridge. It is glorious. Please find out for me, and see if I can get acquainted with him.”

On Rossetti’s mention of Spiritualism in this letter, his brother remarks : “ He here speaks scornfully of it. In later years (beginning, say. in 1864) he believed in it not a little.”

XIX.

14 CHATHAM PLACE, BLACKFRIARS. [End of 1856.]

. . . What sort of Christmas weather have you out there ? Is it any good wishing you merriment out of it ? Today here is neither a bright day nor a dark day, but a white smutty day, — piebald, — wherein, accordingly, life seems neither worth keeping nor getting rid of. The thick sky has a thin red sun stuck in the middle of it, like the specimen wafer stuck outside a box of them. Even if you turned back the lid, there would be nothing behind it, be sure, but a jumble of such flat, dead suns. I am going to sleep.

Are you to write the next great modern epic ? If so, you may put the above into blank verse. I give it you. And meanwhile, be sure to talk to me about Aurora Leigh. . . .

Ruskin wants me very much to enter the Old Water-Color Society, and says John Lewis will do anything to facilitate my entrance. This would be a great advantage to the sale of my water-colors, but I fear it might chance to bonnet my oil-painting for good. I don’t know what to do.

Your friend, D. G. ROSSETTI.

“ Out there ” where Allingham was living was Ballyshannon, Ireland.

Rossetti never entered the Old WaterColor Society.

George Birkbeck Hill.