irteenth, and in Italy not in England. It would, nevertheless, be
wrong to say that he was wholly indifferent to important political
issues, of which he took often a very judicial view. In dismissing
further mention of this second and prolonged meeting with Rossetti,
it only remains to me to say (as a necessary, if strictly personal,
explanation of much that will follow), that on the evening preceding my
departure, he asked me, in the event of my deciding to come to live in
London, to take up my quarters at his house. To this proposal I made no
reply: and neither his speech nor my silence needs any comment, and I
shall offer none.

A month or two later my own health gave way, and then, a change of
residence being inevitable, Rossetti repeated his invitation; but a
London campaign, under such conditions as were necessarily entailed
by pitching one's tent with him, got further and further away, until
I seemed to see it through the inverse end of a telescope whereof the
slides were being drawn out, out, every day further and further. I
determined to spend half a year among' the mountains of Cumberland,
and went up to the Vale of St. John. Scarcely had I settled there when
Rossetti wrote that he must himself soon leave London: that he was
wearied out absolutely, and unable to sleep at night, that if he could
only reach that secluded vale he would breathe a purer air mentally
as well as physically. The mood induced by contemplation of the
tranquillity of my retreat over-against the turmoil and distractions
of the city _in_ which, though not _of_ which, he was, added to the
deepening exhaustion which had already begun when I left him, had
prevailed with him, he said, to ask me to come down to London, and
travel back with him. "Supposing," he wrote, "I were to ask you to come
to town in a fortnight's time from now--I returning with you for a while
into the country--would that be feasible to you?"

Once unsettled in the environments within which for years he had moved
contentedly, a thousand reasons were found for the contemplated step,
and simultaneously a thousand obstacles arose to impede the execution of
it. "They have at length taken my garden," he said, "as they have long
threatened to do, and now they are really setting about building upon
it. I do not in the least know what my plans may be." And again: "It
seems certain that I must leave this house and seek another. Is there
any house in the neighbourhood of the Vale o