o whose judgment his poetry
was always submitted, but had as frequently failed to do so from the
physical impossibility of restraining the tears that at every stage
welled up out of an overwrought nature, for the poet never existed
perhaps who, while at work, lived so vividly in the imagined situation.
And the weight of that work was still upon him when we met again. His
voice seemed to have lost much in quality, and in compass too to have
diminished: or if the volume of sound remained the same, it appeared to
have retired (so to express it) inwards, and to convey, when he spoke,
the idea of a man speaking as much to himself as to others. More than
ever now the scene of his life lacked for me some necessary vitality: it
breathed an atmosphere of sorrow: it was like the dream of a distempered
imagination out of which there came no welcome awakening, to say it was
not true. On the side of his intellectual life Rossetti was obviously
under less constraint with me than ever before. Previously he had seemed
to make a conscious effort to speak generously of all contemporaries,
and cordially of every friend with whom he was brought into active
relations; and if, by force of some stray impulse, he was ever led to
say a disparaging word of any one, he forthwith made a palpable, and
sometimes amusing, effort so to obliterate the injurious impression
as to convey the idea that he wished it to appear that he had not said
anything at all. But now this restraint was thrown aside.

I perceived that the drug by which he was enslaved caused what I may
best characterise as intermittent waves of morbid suspiciousness as
to the good faith of every individual, including his best, oldest,
and truest friends, as to whom the most inexplicable delusions would
suddenly come, and as suddenly go. He would talk in the gravest and most
earnest way of the wrongs he had suffered at the hands of a dear friend,
and then the moment his eloquence had drawn from me an exclamation of
sympathy for him, he would turn round and heap upon the same individual
an extravagance of praise for his fidelity and good faith. And now,
he so classed his contemporaries as to leave no doubt that he was
duly sensible of his own place amongst them, preserving, meantime, a
dignified reticence as to the extent of his personal claims.

His life was an anachronism. Such a man should have had no dealings with
the nineteenth century: he belonged to the sixteenth, or perhaps the
th