ields (the fine tissue of whose
highly-strung nature must have been sorely tried by the strain to which
it was subjected), Mr. W. B. Scott, whose visits were never more warmly
welcomed by Rossetti than at this season, the good and gifted Miss Boyd,
and of course Rossetti's brother, sister, and mother, to each of whom he
was affectionately attached. Strange enough it seemed that this man who,
for years had shunned the world and chosen solitude when he might have
had society, seemed at last to grow weary of his loneliness. But so it
was. Rossetti became daily more and more dependent upon his friends
for company that should not fail him, for never for an hour now could he
endure to be alone. Remembering this, I almost doubt if by nature he was
at any time a solitary. There are men who feel more deeply the sense of
isolation amidst the busiest crowds than within the narrowest circle of
intimates, and I have heard from Rossetti reminiscences of his earlier
life that led me to believe that he was one of the number. Perhaps,
after all, he wandered from the world rather from the dread than with
the hope of solitude. In such pleasant intercourse as the visits of the
friends I have named afforded, was the sadness of the day in a measure
dissipated, but when night came I never failed to realise that no
progress whatever had been made. I tried to check the craving for
chloral, but I could as easily have checked the rising tide: and where
the lifelong assiduity of older friends had failed to eradicate a
morbid, ruinous, and fatal thirst, it was presumptous if not ridiculous
to imagine that the task could be compassed by a frail creature with
heart and nerves of wax. But the whole scene was now beginning to have
an interest for me more personal and more serious than I have yet given
hint of. The constant fret and fume of this life of baffled effort,
of struggle with a deadly drug that had grown to have an objective
existence in my mind as the existence of a fiend, was not without a
sensible effect upon myself. I became ill for a few days with a low
fever, but far worse than this was the fact that there was creeping over
me the wild influence of Rossetti's own distempered imaginings.

Once conscious of such influence I determined to resist it, but how to
do so I knew not without flying utterly away from an atmosphere in which
my best senses seemed to stagnate, and burying the memory of it for
ever.

The crisis was pending, and sooner