imagination
that never stirred or shifted, but scintillated in all directions. The
function of Gabriel Rossetti, or at least his most obvious function,
was to sit in isolation, and to have vaguely glimmering spirits
presented to him for complete illumination. He was the most prompt in
suggestion, the most regal in giving, the most sympathetic in
response, of the men I have known or seen; and this without a single
touch of the prophetic manner, the air of such professional seers as
Coleridge or Carlyle. What he had to give was not mystical or
abstract; it was purely concrete. His mind was full of practical
artistic schemes, only a few of which were suited to his own practice
in painting or poetry; the rest were at the service of whoever would
come in a friendly spirit and take them. I find among his letters to
me, which I have just been reading once again, a paper of delightful
suggestions about the cover of a book of verse; the next youth who
waited upon him would perhaps be a painter, and would find that the
great genius and master did not disdain the discussion of
picture-frames. This was but the undercurrent of his influence; as we
shall see more and more every year as the central decades of this
century become history, its main stream directed the two great arts of
painting and poetry into new channels, and set a score of diverse
talents in motion.

But, as far as anything can be seen plainly about Rossetti at present,
to me the fact of his immovability, his self-support, his curious
reserve, seems to be the most interesting. He held in all things to
the essential and not to the accidental; he preferred the dry grain of
musk to a diluted flood of perfume. An Italian by birth and deeply
moved by all things Italian, he never visited Italy; a lover of ritual
and a sympathizer with all the mysteries of the Roman creed, he never
joined the Catholic Church; a poet whose form and substance alike
influenced almost all the men of his generation, he was more than
forty years of age before he gave his verse to the public; a painter
who considered the attitude of the past with more ardor and faith than
almost any artist of his time, he never chose to visit the churches or
galleries of Europe. It has been said, among the many absurd things
which his death has provoked, that he shrank from publicity from
timidity, or spurned it from ill-temper. One brilliant journalist has
described him as sulking like Hector in his tent. It us