knew him,
Rossetti was destitute of cheerfulness or content. At that instant,
at which the worst of his shadowy fears had been banished by some
fortuitous occurrence that lit up with an unceasing radiation of hope
every prospect of life, he conjured out of its very brightness fresh
cause for fear and sadness. True, indeed, these may have been no more
than symptoms of those later phenomena which came of disease, and
foreshadowed death. Other minds may reduce to a statement of cause and
effect what I am content to offer as fact.

Upon settling with Rossetti in July 1881, I perceived that his health
was weaker. His tendency to corpulence had entirely disappeared, his
feebleness of step had become at certain moments painfully apparent,
and his temper occasionally betrayed signs of bitterness. To myself,
personally, he was at this stage as genial as of old, or if for an
instant he gave vent to an unprovoked outburst of wrath, he would far
more than atone for it by a look of inexpressible remorse and some
feeling words of regret, whereof the import sometimes was--

I wish you were indeed my son, for though then I should still have no
right to address you so, I should at least have some right to expect
your forgiveness.

In such moods of more than needful solicitude for one's acutest
sensibilities, Rossetti was absolutely irresistible.

As I have said, the occupant of this great gloomy house, in which I had
now become a resident, had rarely been outside its doors for two years;
certainly never afoot, and only in carriages with his friends. Upon the
second night of my stay, I announced my intention of taking a walk on
the Chelsea embankment, and begged him to accompany me. To my amazement
he yielded, and every night for a week following, I succeeded in
inducing him to repeat the now unfamiliar experience. It was obvious
enough to himself that he walked totteringly, with infinite expenditure
of physical energy, and returned in a condition of exhaustion that left
him prostrate for an hour afterwards. The root of all this evil was soon
apparent. He was exceeding with the chloral, and little as I expected or
desired to exercise a moral guardianship over the habits of this great
man, I found myself insensibly dropping into that office.

Negotiations for the sale of the Liverpool picture were now complete;
the new volume of poems and the altered edition of the old volume had
been satisfactorily passed through the press; and it m