tion. This was the key to his depreciation of Wordsworth,
and doubtless it was this that ultimately operated with him to exclude
the story from his published works. I took another view, and did not
see that an accidental difference of outward form ought to prevent his
uniting within single book-covers productions that had so much of their
essential spirit in common. Unlike the Chinese, we do not read by sight
only, and there is in the story such richness, freshness, and variety
of cadence, as appeal to the ear also. Prose may be the lowest order
of rhythmic composition, but we know it is capable of such purity,
sweetness, strength, and elasticity, as entitle it to a place as a
sister art with poetry. Milton, however, although he wrote the noblest
of English prose, seemed more than half ashamed of it, as of a kind of
left-handed performance. Goethe and Wordsworth, on the other hand, not
to speak of Coleridge and Shelley (or yet of Keats, whose letters are
among the very best examples extant of the English epistolary style),
wrote prose of wonderful beauty and were not ashamed of it. In Milton's
case the subjects, I imagine, were to blame for his indifference to his
achievements in prose, for not even the Westminster Convention, or
the divorce topics of _Tetrachordon_, or yet the liberty of the press,
albeit raised to a level of philosophic first principles, were quite up
to those fixed stars of sublimity about which it was Milton's pleasure
to revolve. _Hand and Soul_ is in faultless harmony with Rossetti's work
in verse, because distinguished by the same strength of imagination.
That it was written in a single night seems extraordinary when viewed
in relation to its sustained beauty; but it is done in a breath, and has
all the excellencies of fervour and force that result upon that method
of composition only.

A year or two later than the date of the correspondence with which I am
now dealing, Rossetti read aloud a fragment of a story written about
the period of _Hand and Soul_. It was to be entitled _St. Agnes of
Intercession_, and it dealt in a mystic way with the doctrine of the
transmigration of souls. He constantly expressed his intention of
finishing the story, and said that, although in its existing condition
it was fully as long as the companion story, it would require twice as
much more to complete it. During the time of our stay at Birchington, at
the beginning of 1882, he seemed anxious to get to work upon it,