ious
charity: "The poor of Chelsea," he said, "always spoke well of her."
"George Eliot," whose genius he much admired, he had ceased to know long
before her death, but he spoke of the lady as modest and retiring, and
amiable to a fault when the outer crust of reticence had been broken
through. Longfellow had called upon him whilst he was painting the
_Dante's Dream_. The old poet was Courteous and complimentary in
the last degree; he seemed, however, to know little or nothing about
painting as an art, and also to have fallen into the error of thinking
that Rossetti the painter and Sossetti the poet were different men; in
short, that the Dante of that name was the painter, and the William the
poet. Upon leaving the house, Longfellow had said: "I have been glad to
meet you, and should like to have met your brother; pray, tell him how
much I admire his beautiful poem, _The Blessed Damozel_" Giving no
hint of the error, Rossetti said he had answered, "I will tell him." He
painted a little during our stay in the North, for it was whilst
there that he began the beautiful replica of his _Proserpina_, now the
property of Mr. Valpy. I found it one of my best pleasures to watch a
picture growing under his hand, and thought it easy to see through
the medium of his idealised heads, cold even in their loveliness,
unsubstantial in their passion, that to the painter life had been a
dream into which nothing entered that was not as impalpable as itself.
Tainted by the touch of melancholy that is the blight that clings to the
purest beauty, his pictured faces were, in my view, akin to his poetry,
every line of which, as he sometimes recited it, seemed as though it
echoed the burden of a bygone sorrow--the sorrow of a dream rather than
that of a life, or of a life that had been itself a dream. I also then
realised what Mr. Theodore Watts has said in a letter just now
written to me from Sark, that, "apart from any question of technical
shortcomings, one of Rossetti's strongest claims to the attention of
posterity was that of having invented, in the three-quarter-length
pictures painted from one face, a type of female beauty which was akin
to none other,--which was entirely new, in short,--and which, for
wealth of sublime and mysterious suggestion, unaided by complex dramatic
design, was unique in the art of the world."

On one occasion the talk turned on the eccentricities and affectations
of men of genius, and I did my best to-ridicule t