as a man of average height, commonly loosely
clad in black, so as to give one something of the notion of an abbe;
the head very full, and domed like that of Shakespeare, as it was then
usual to say--to my thinking more like that of Chaucer--in any case a
head surcharged with imagination and power, strongly Italian in color
and cast. The eyes were exceedingly deep set, in cavernous sockets;
they were large, and black, and full of a restless brilliance, a
piercing quality which consoled the shy novice by not being
stationary. Lastly, a voice of bell-like tone and sonority, a voice
capable of expressing without effort every shade of emotion from rage
and terror to the most sublime tenderness. I have never heard a voice
so fitted for poetical effect, so purely imaginative, and yet, in its
absence of rhetoric, so clear and various, as that of Gabriel
Rossetti. I retain one special memory of his reading in his own
studio the unfinished MS. of "Rose Mary," in 1873, which surpassed in
this direction any pleasure which it has been my lot to enjoy; and on
various occasions I have listened to his reading of sonnets, his own
and those of others, with a sense that his intonation revealed a
beauty in the form of that species of verse which it had never been
seen to possess before. I have already spoken of his wonderful
courtliness to a new acquaintance, his bewitching air of sympathy; on
a closer intimacy this stately manner would break up into wild fits of
mirth, and any sketch of Rossetti would be incomplete that did not
describe his loud and infectious laughter. He lived very much apart
from the every-day life of mankind, not ostentatiously, but from a
genuine lack of interest in passing events. An old friend tells me
that during the French Revolution he burst into Rossetti's studio with
the incredible news, "Louis-Philippe has landed in England!" "Has he?"
said Rossetti, calmly. "What has he come for?" That certain political
events, in which he saw a great symbolic significance, could move him
deeply, is easily proved by such sonnets as the noble "On the Refusal
of Aid between Nations," and "Czar Alexander II." But such glances out
of window into the living street were rare, and formed no
characteristic part of his scheme of life.

As a poet in these great years he possessed rare gifts of passionate
utterance, and harmony of vision and expression. Mr. Swinburne has
characterized these qualities in words which leave no later
comm