readiness to hear it again,
he responded readily, and, taking a small manuscript volume out of a
section of the bookcase that had been locked, read us _The White Ship_.
I have spoken of the ballad as a poem at an earlier stage, but it
remains to me, in this place, to describe the effect produced upon me by
the author's reading. It seemed to me that I never heard anything at all
matchable with Rossetti's elocution; his rich deep voice lent an added
music to the music of the verse: it rose and fell in the passages
descriptive of the wreck with something of the surge and sibilation of
the sea itself; in the tenderer passages it was soft as a woman's, and
in the pathetic stanzas with which the ballad closes it was profoundly
moving. Effective as the reading sounded in that studio, I remember at
the moment to have doubted if it would prove quite so effective from a
public platform. Perhaps there seemed to be so much insistence on the
rhythm, and so prolonged a tension of the rhyme sounds, as would run
the risk of a charge of monotony if falling on ears less concerned with
points of metrical beauty than with fundamental substance. Personally,
however, I found the reading in the very highest degree enjoyable and
inspiring.

The evening was gone by the time the ballad was ended; and it was
arranged that upon my return to London from the house of a friend at
the sea-side I should again dine with Rossetti, and sleep the night
at Cheyne Walk. I was invited to come early in order to see certain
pictures by day-light, and it was then I saw the painter's most
important work,--the _Dantes Dream_, which finally (and before Rossetti
was made aware of any steps being taken to that end) I had prevailed
with Alderman Samuelson to purchase for the public gallery at Liverpool.
At my request, though only after some importunity, Rossetti read again
his _White Ship_, and afterwards _Rose Mary_, the latter of which he
told me had been written in the country shortly after the appearance of
the first volume of poems. He remarked that it had occupied three weeks
in the writing, and that the physical prostration ensuing had been more
than he would care to go through again. I observed on this head, that
though highly finished in every stanza, the ballad had an impetuous
rush of emotion, and swift current of diction, suggesting speed in its
composition, as contrasted with the laboured deliberation which the
sonnets, for example, appeared to denote. I