his life, his daily
companion and housemate. It is a part of my purpose to help towards the
elucidation of Rossetti's personal character by a simple, and I
trust, unaffected statement of my relations to him, and so I begin by
explaining that my knowledge of the man was the sequel to my admiration
of the poet. Not accident (the agency that usually operates in such
cases), but his genius and my love of it, began the friendship between
us. Of Rossetti's pictorial art I knew little, until very recent years,
beyond what could be gathered from a few illustrations to books. My
acquaintance with his poetry must have been made at the time of the
publication of the first volume in 1870, but as I did not then possess a
copy of the book, and do not remember to have seen one, my knowledge of
the work must have been merely such as could be gleaned from the reading
of reviews. The unlucky controversy, that subsequently arose out of it,
directed afresh my attention, in common with that of others, to Rossetti
and his school of poetry, with the result of impressing my mind with
qualities of the work that were certainly quite outside the issues
involved in the discussion. Some two or three years after that
acrimonious controversy had subsided, an accident, sufficiently curious
to warrant my describing it, produced the effect of converting me from a
temperate believer in the charm of music and colour in Rossetti's lyric
verse, to an ardent admirer of his imaginative genius as displayed in
the higher walks of his art.

I had set out with a knapsack to make one of my many periodical walking
tours of the beautiful lake country of Westmoreland and Cumberland.
Beginning the journey at Bowness--as tourists, if they will accept the
advice of one who knows perhaps the whole of the country, ought always
to do--I walked through Dungeon Ghyll, climbed the Stake Pass, descended
into Borrowdale, and traced the course of the winding Derwent to that
point at which it meets the estuary of the lake, and where stands the
Derwentwater Hotel. A rain and thunder storm was gathering over the
Black Sail and Great Gable as I reached the summit of the Pass, and
travelling slowly northwards it had overtaken me. Before I reached the
hotel, my resting-place for the night, I was certainly as thoroughly
saturated as any one in reasonable moments could wish to be. I remember
that as I passed into the shelter of the porch an elderly gentleman, who
was standing there, re