"I cannot tell you," he said, "at what terrible moment it was wrung from
me."

He had read it with tears of voice, subsiding at length into suppressed
sobs and intervals of silence. As though to explain away this emotion he
said:

"All poetry, that is really poetry, affects me deeply and often to
tears. It does not need to be pathetic or yet tender to produce such a
result. I have known in my life two men, and two only, who are similarly
sensitive--Tennyson, and my old friend and neighbour William Bell Scott.
I once heard Tennyson read _Maud_, and whilst the fiery passages were
delivered with a voice and vehemence which he alone of living men can
compass, the softer passages and the songs made the tears course down
his cheeks. Morris is a fine reader, and so, of his kind, though a
little prone to sing-song, is Swinburne. Browning both reads and talks
well--at least he did so when I knew him intimately as a young man."

Rossetti went on to say that he had been among Browning's earliest
admirers. As a boy he had seen something signed by the then unknown
name of the author of _Paracelsus_, and wrote to him. The result was
an intimacy. He spoke with warmest admiration of _Child Roland_; and
referred to Elizabeth Barrett Browning in terms of regard, and, I think
I may say, of reverence.

I asked if he had ever heard Ruskin read. He replied:

"I must have done so, but remember nothing clearly. On one occasion,
however, I heard him deliver a speech, and that was something never
to forget. When we were young, we helped Frederick Denison Maurice by
taking classes at the Working Men's College, and there Charles Kingsley
and others made speeches and delivered lectures. Ruskin was asked to
do something of the kind and at length consented. He made no sort of
preparation for the occasion: I know he did not; we were together at his
father's house the whole of the day in question. At night we drove
down to the College, and then he made the finest speech I ever heard. I
doubted at the time if any written words of his were equal to it! such
flaming diction! such emphasis! such appeal!--yet he had written his
first and second volumes of _Modern Painters_ by that time." I have
reproduced the substance of what Rossetti said on the occasion of my
return visit, and, by help of letters written at the time to a friend,
I have in many cases recalled his exact words. A certain incisiveness of
speech which distinguished his conversation, I