oleridge's. Where does he speak of it, and
what is it? It is quite new to me; but curiously enough, I
have a complete scheme drawn up for a ballad, to be called
_Michael Scott's Wooing_, not the one I proposed beginning
now--and also have long designed a picture under the same
title, but of quite different motif! Allan Cunningham wrote
a romance called _Sir Michael Scott_, but I never saw it.

I have heard from Walter Severn about a subscription
proposed to erect a gravestone to his father beside that of
Keats. I should like you to copy for me your sonnet on
Severn. I hear it is in _The Athenaeum_, but have not seen
it. I was asked to prepare an inscription, which I send you.
Nothing would be so good as Severn's own words.

I strongly urge you to go on with your book on the
_Supernatural_. The closing chapter should, I think, be on
the _weird_ element in its perfection, as shown by recent
poets in the mess--i.e. those who take any lead. Tennyson
has it certainly here and there in imagery, but there is no
great success in the part it plays through his _Idylls_. The
Old Romaunt beats him there. The strongest instance of this
feeling in Tennyson that I remember is in a few lines of
_The Palace of Art_:

And hollow breasts enclosing hearts of flame;
And with dim-fretted foreheads all
On corpses three months old at morn she came
That stood against the wall.

I won't answer for the precise age of the corpses--perhaps I
have staled them somewhat.

CHAPTER IX.

It is in the nature of these Recollections that they should be personal,
and it can hardly occur to any reader to complain of them for being that
which above all else they purport to be. I have hitherto, however, been
conscious of a desire (made manifest to my own mind by the character of
my selections from the letters written to me) to impart to this volume
an interest as broad and general as may be. But my primary purpose is
now, and has been from the first, to afford the best view at my command
of Rossetti as a man; and more helpful to such purpose than any number
of critical opinions, however interesting, have often been those
passages in his letters where the writer has got closest to his
correspondent in revealing most of himself. In the chapter I am now
about to write I must perforce set asi