tion. It sadly wants new
punctuation, being vilely printed just as I first saw it
when a boy in some twopenny edition.

In a memoir of Gilchrist, appended now by his widow to the
_Life of Blake_, there is a sonnet by G., perhaps
interesting enough, as being exceptional, for you to ask for
it; but I don't advise you, if you don't think it worth.

I have received from Mrs. Meynell, a sister of Eliz.
Thompson, the painter, a most genuine little book of poems
containing some sonnets of true spiritual beauty. I must
send it you.

This book had just then been introduced to Rossetti with
much warmth of praise by Mr. Watts, and he took to it
vastly.

This closes Rossetti's interesting letters on sonnet literature. In
reprinting his first volume of _Poems_ he had determined to remove
the sonnets of _The House of Life_ to the new volume of _Ballads and
Sonnets_, and fill the space with the fragment of a poem written in
youth, and now called _The Bride's Prelude_. He sent me a proof. The
reader will remember that as a narrative fragment it is less
remarkable for striking incident (though never failing of interest
and picturesqueness) than for a slow and psychical development which
ultimately gained a great hold of the sympathies. The poem leaves behind
it a sense as of a sultry day. Judging first of its merits as a song
(using the word in its broad and simple sense), the poem flows on the
tongue with unbroken sweetness and with a variety of cadence and light
and shade of melody which might admit of its pursuing its meanderings
through five times its less than 50 pages, and still keeping one's
senses awake to the constantly recurring advent of new and pleasing
literary forms. The story is a striking one, with a great wealth of
highly effective incident,--notably the episode of the card-playing,
and of the father striking down the sword which Raoul turns against the
breast of the bride. Almost equally memorable are the scenes in which
the lover appears, and the occasional interludes of incident in which,
between the pauses of the narrative, the bridegroom's retinue are heard
sporting in the courtyard without.

The whole atmosphere of the poem is saturated in a medievalism of spirit
to which no lapse of modernism does violence, and the spell of romance
which comes with that atmosphere of the middle ages is never broken, but
preserved in the minutest most matter-o