-
Save what is secret and unknown,
Below the earth, above the sky.

The words "yet" and "save" seemed to me (and to another friend) somewhat
puzzling, and I asked if "but" in the sense of _only_ had been meant. He
wrote:

That is a very just remark of yours about the passage in
_Portrait_ beginning _yet_. I meant to infer _yet only_, but
it certainly is truncated. I shall change the line to

Yet only this, of love's whole prize,
Remains, etc.

But would again be dubious though explicable. Thanks for the
hint.... I shall be much obliged to you for any such hints
of a verbal nature.

CHAPTER V.

The letters printed in the foregoing chapter are valuable as settling
at first-hand all question of the chronology of the poems of Rossetti's
volume of 1870. The poems of the volume of 1881 (Rose Mary and certain
of the sonnets excepted) grew under his hand during the period of my
acquaintance with him, and their origin I shall in due course record.
The two preceding chapters have been for the most part devoted to such
letters (and such explanatory matter as must needs accompany them) as
concern principally, perhaps, the poet and his correspondent; but I
have thrown into two further chapters a great body of highly interesting
letters on subjects of general literary interest (embracing the fullest
statement yet published of Rossetti's critical opinions), and have
reserved for a more advanced section of the work a body of further
letters on sonnet literature which arose out of the discussion of an
anthology that I was at the time engaged in compiling.

It was very natural that Coleridge should prove to be one of the first
subjects discussed by Rossetti, who admired him greatly, and when it
transpired that Coleridge was, perhaps, my own chief idol, and that
whilst even yet a child I had perused and reperused not only his poetry
but even his mystical philosophy (impalpable or obscure even to his
maturer and more enlightened, if no more zealous, admirers), the
disposition to write upon him became great upon both sides. "You can
never say too much about Coleridge for me," Rossetti would write, "for
I worship him on the right side of idolatry, and I perceive you know
him well." Upon this one of my first remarks was that there was much in
Coleridge's higher descriptive verse equivalent to the landscape art
of Turner. The critical parallel Rossetti warmly approved