de all limitations of reserve if
I am to convey such an idea of Rossetti's last days as fills my mind; I
must be content to speak almost exclusively of my personal relations to
him, to the enforced neglect of the more intimate relations of others.

About six months after my first visit, Rossetti invited me to spend
a week with him at his house, and this I was glad to be able to do. I
found him in many important particulars a changed man. His complexion
was brighter than before, and this circumstance taken alone might have
been understood to indicate improved bodily health, but in actual fact
it rather denoted in his case a retrograde physical tendency, as being
indicative chiefly of some recent excess in the use of his pernicious
drug. He was distinctly less inclined to corpulence, his eyes were less
bright, and had more frequently than formerly the appearance of gazing
upon vacancy, and when he walked to and fro in the studio, as it was
his habit to do at intervals of about an hour, he did so with a more
laboured sidelong motion than I had previously noticed, as though the
body unconsciously lost and then regained some necessary control and
command at almost every step. Half sensible, no doubt, of a reduced
condition, or guessing perhaps the nature of my reflections from a
certain uneasiness which it baffled my efforts to conceal, he paused for
an instant one evening in the midst of these melancholy perambulations
and asked me how he struck me as to health. More frankly than
judiciously I answered promptly, Less well than formerly. It was a
luckless remark, for Rossetti's prevailing wish at that moment was to
conceal even from himself his lowered state, and the time was still to
come when he should crave the questionable sympathy of those who said he
looked even more ill than he felt. Just before this, my second visit,
he had completed his _King's Tragedy_, and I had heard from his own lips
how prostrate the emotional strain involved in the production of the
poem had first left him. Casting himself now on the couch in an attitude
indicative of unusual exhaustion, he said the ballad had taken much out
of him. "It was as though my life ebbed out with it," he said, and in
saying so much of the nervous tension occasioned by the work in question
he did not overstate the truth as it presented itself to other eyes.
Time after time while the ballad was in course of production, he had
made effort to read it aloud to the friend t