ite among
modern English poets. Our friend never tired of writing or talking about
Keats, and never wearied of the society of any one who could generate
a fresh thought concerning him. But his was a robust and
masculine admiration, having nothing in common with the effeminate
extra-affectionateness that has of late been so much ridiculed. His
letters now to be quoted shall speak for themselves as to the qualities
in Keats whereon Rossetti's appreciation of him was founded: but I may
say in general terms that it was not so much the wealth of expression
in the author of _Endymion_ which attracted the author of _Rose Mary_
as the perfect hold of the supernatural which is seen in _La Belle Dame
Sans Merci_ and in the fragment of the _Eve of St. Mark_. At the time of
our correspondence, I was engaged upon an essay on Keats, and _a propos_
of this Rossetti wrote:

I shall take pleasure in reading your Keats article when
ready. He was, among all his contemporaries who established
their names, the one true heir of Shakspeare. Another
(unestablished then, but partly revived since) was Charles
Wells. Did you ever read his splendid dramatic poem _Joseph
and his Brethren?_

In this connexion, as a better opportunity may not arise, I take
occasion to tell briefly the story of the revival of Wells. The facts
to be related were communicated to me by Rossetti in conversation years
after the date of the letter in which this first allusion to the
subject was made. As a boy, Rossetti's chief pleasure was to ransack
old book-stalls, and the catalogues of the British Museum, for forgotten
works in the bye-ways of English poetry. In this pursuit he became
acquainted with nearly every curiosity of modern poetic literature, and
many were the amusing stories he used to tell at that time, and in after
life, of the titles and contents of the literary oddities he
unearthed. If you chanced at any moment to alight upon any obscure book
particularly curious from its pretentiousness and pomposity, from the
audacity of its claim, or the obscurity and absurdity of its writing,
you might be sure that Rossetti would prove familiar with it, and be
able to recapitulate with infinite zest its salient features; but if you
happened to drop upon ever so interesting an edition of a book (not of
verse) which you supposed to be known to many a reader, the chances were
at least equal that Rossetti would prove to know nothing of it bu