r's "craft," although certain examples of modern art called forth
his warmest eulogies. In serious moods he would speak of pictures by
Millais, Watts, Leighton, Burne Jones, and others, as works of the
highest genius.

Reverting to my inquiry as to whether his work took much out of him, he
remarked that his poetry usually did. "In that respect," he said, "I am
the reverse of Swinburne. For his method of production inspiration is
indeed the word. With me the case is different. I lie on the couch, the
racked and tortured medium, never permitted an instant's surcease of
agony until the thing on hand is finished."

It was obvious that what Rossetti meant by being racked and tortured,
was that his subject possessed him; that he was enslaved by his own
"shaping imagination." Assuredly he was the reverse of a costive poet:
impulse was, to use his own phrase, fully developed in his muse.

I made some playful allusion, assuredly not meant to involve Mr.
Swinburne, to Sheridan's epigram on easy writing and hard reading; and
to the Abbe de Marolles, who exultingly told some poet that his verses
cost no trouble: "They cost you what they are worth," replied the bard.

"One benefit I do derive," Rossetti added, "as a result of my method of
composition; my work becomes condensed. Probably the man does not live
who could write what I have written more briefly than I have done."

Emphasis and condensation, I remarked, were indubitably the
characteristics of his muse. He then read me a great body of the new
sonnets of _The House of Life_. Sitting in that studio listening to his
reading and looking up meantime at the chalk-drawings that hung on the
walls, I realised how truly he had said, in correspondence, that the
feeling pervading his pictures was such as his poetry ought to suggest.
The affinity between the two seemed to me at that moment to be complete:
the same half-sad, half-resigned view of life, the same glimpses of
hope, the same foreshadowings of gloom.

"You doubtless think it odd," he said at one moment, "to hear an old
fellow read such love-poetry as much of this is, but I may tell you that
the larger part of it, though still unpublished, was written when I was
as young as you are. When I print these sonnets, I shall probably affix
a note saying, that though many of them are of recent production, not a
few are obviously the work of earlier years."

I expressed admiration of the pathetic sonnet entitled _Without Her_.