heir portraits
before he saw them, and loved them on sight because they looked like his
Ideal.

* * * * *

After Dante Gabriel and Elizabeth Eleanor had been engaged for more than
five years--that is, in the year Eighteen Hundred Fifty-five--Madox
Brown asked Rossetti this very obvious question: "Why do you not marry
her?" One reason was that Rossetti was afraid if he married her he would
lose her. He doted on her, fed on her, still wrote sonnets just for her,
and counted the hours when they parted until he could see her again.
Miss Siddal was not quite firm enough in moral and mental fiber to cut
out her own career. She deferred constantly to her lover, adopted his
likes and dislikes, and went partners with him even in his prejudices.
They dwelt in Bohemia, which is a good place to camp, but a very poor
place in which to settle down.

The precarious ways of Bohemia do not make for length of days. Miss
Siddal seemed to fall into a decline, her spirits lost their buoyancy,
she grew nervous when required to pose for several hours at a time.
Rossetti scraped together all his funds and sent her on a trip alone
through France. She fell sick there, and we hear of Rossetti working
like mad on a canvas, so as to sell the picture and send her money.

When she returned, a good deal of her old-time beauty seemed to have
vanished: the fine disdain, that noble touch of scorn, was gone--and
Rossetti wrote a sonnet declaring her more beautiful than ever. Ruskin
thought he saw the hectic flush of death upon her cheek.

[Illustration: ELIZABETH E. SIDDAL]

Sorrow, love, ill-health, poverty, tamed her spirit, and Swinburne
telling of her, years after, speaks of "her matchless loveliness,
courage, endurance, humor and sweetness--too dear and sacred to be
profaned by any attempt at expression."

Rossetti writing to Allingham says: "It seems to me when I look at her
working, or too ill to work, and think of how many without one tithe of
her genius or greatness of spirit have granted them abundant health and
opportunity to labor 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 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 have I known