st was received in a way which turned irritation into
wrath, wrath into violence; and then ensued the paper war
which lasted for years. If you compare what I have written
of Rossetti with what his admirers have written of myself, I
think you will admit that there has been some cause for me
to complain, to shun society, to feel bitter against the
world; but happily, I have a thick epidermis, and the
courage of an approving conscience. I was unjust, as I have
said; most unjust when I impugned the purity and
misconceived the passion of writings too hurriedly read and
reviewed currente calamo; but I was at least honest and
fearless, and wrote with no personal malignity. Save for the
action of the literary defence, if I may so term it, my
article would have been as ephemeral as the mood which
induced its composition. I make full admission of Rossetti's
claims to the purest kind of literary renown, and if I were
to criticise his poems now, I should write very differently.
But nothing will shake my conviction that the cruelty, the
unfairness, the pusillanimity has been on the other side,
not on mine. The amende of my Dedication in God and the Man
was a sacred thing; between his spirit and mine; not between
my character and the cowards who have attacked it. I thought
he would understand,--which would have been, and indeed is,
sufficient. I cried, and cry, no truce with the horde of
slanderers who hid themselves within his shadow. That is
all. But when all is said, there still remains the pity that
our quarrel should ever have been. Our little lives are too
short for such animosities. Your friend is at peace with
God,--that God who will justify and cherish him, who has
dried his tears, and who will turn the shadow of his sad
life-dream into full sunshine. My only regret now is that we
did not meet,--that I did not take him by the hand; but I am
old-fashioned enough to believe that this world is only a
prelude, and that our meeting may take place--even yet."

To Rossetti, the poet, the accusation of extolling fleshliness as
the distinct and supreme end of art was, after all, only an error of
critical judgment; but to Rossetti, the man, the charge was something
far more serious. It was a cruel and irremediable wound inflicted upon a
fine spirit, sensitive to attack b