d this very frank devotion
and did not enter into competition with it, as they surely would have
done had it been merely admiration. They did not even make gentle fun
of it--it was too serious a matter with Rossetti: it was to him a
religion, and was to remain so to the day of his death. Within a week
after their meeting, "The House of Life" began to find form. He wrote to
her and for her, and always and forever she was his model. The color of
her hair got into his brush, and her features were enshrined in his
heart.

He called her "Guggums" or "Gug." Occasionally, he showed impatience if
any one by even the lifting of an eyebrow seemed to doubt the divinity
of the Guggums.

There was no time for ardent wooing on his part, no vacillation nor
coyness on hers. He loved her with an absorbing passion--loved her for
her wonderful physical beauty, and what she may have lacked in mind he
was able to make good.

And she accepted his love as if it were her due, and as if it had always
been hers. She was not agitated under the burning impetus; no, she just
calmly and placidly accepted it as a matter of course.

It will hardly do to say that she was indifferent, but Burne-Jones was
led by Miss Siddal's beautiful calm to say, "Love is never mutual--one
loves and the other consents to be loved."

The family of Rossetti, his mother and sisters, must have known how much
of the ideal was in his passion. Mentally, Miss Siddal was not on their
plane; but the joy of Dante Gabriel was their joy, and so they never
opposed the inevitable. He, however, acknowledged Christina's mental
superiority by somewhat imperiously demanding that Christina should
converse with Miss Siddal on "great themes."

Ruskin has added his endorsement to Miss Siddal's worth by calling her
"a glorious creature."

Dante Gabriel's own descriptions of Elizabeth Eleanor are too much
retouched to be accurate; but William Rossetti, who viewed her with a
critical eye, describes her as "tall, finely formed, with lofty neck;
regular, yet uncommon, features; greenish-blue, unsparkling eyes; large,
perfect eyelids; brilliant complexion, and a lavish wealth of dark
molten-gold hair."

In the diary of Madox Brown for October Sixth, Eighteen Hundred
Fifty-four, is this: "Called on Dante Rossetti. Saw Miss Siddal, looking
thinner and more death-like, and more beautiful and more ragged than
ever; a real artist, a woman without parallel for many a long year.
Gabriel as usu