en we left him his
sister took our place and remained with him the whole of that and
subsequent nights. He sat up in bed most of the time and said a sort of
stupefaction had removed all pain. He crooned over odd lines of poetry.
"My own verses torment me," he said. Then he half-sang, half-recited,
snatches from one of Iago's songs in _Othello_. "Strange things," he
murmured, "to come into one's head at such a moment." I told him his
brother and Mr. Watts would be with him to-morrow. "Then you really
think that I am dying? At _last_ you think so; but _I_ was right from
the first."

Next day, Good Friday, the friends named did come, and weak as he was,
he was much cheered by their presence. The following day Mr. Marshall
arrived.

That gentleman recognised the alarming position of affairs, but he was
not without hope. He administered a sort of hot bath, and on Sunday
morning Rossetti was perceptibly brighter. Mr. Shields had now arrived,
and one after one of his friends, including Mr. Leyland, who was at the
time staying at Ramsgate, and made frequent calls, visited him in his
room and found him able to listen and sometimes to talk. In the evening
the nurse gave a cheering report of his condition, and encouraged by
such prospects, Mr. Watts, Mr. Shields, and myself, gave way to good
spirits, and retired to an adjoining room. About nine o'clock Mr.
Watts left us, and returning in a short time, said he had been in the
sickroom, and had had some talk with Rossetti, and found him cheerful.
An instant afterwards we heard a scream, followed by a loud rapping at
our door. We hurried into Rossetti's room and found him in convulsions.
Mr. Watts raised him on one side, whilst I raised him on the other; his
mother, sister, and brother, were immediately present (Mr. Shields had
fled away for the doctor); there were a few moments of suspense, and
then we saw him die in our arms. Mrs. William Rossetti arrived from
Manchester at this moment.

Thus on Easter Day Rossetti died. It was hard to realise that he was
actually dead; but so it was, and the dreadful fact had at last come
upon us with a horrible suddenness. Of the business of the next few
days I need say nothing. I went up to London in the interval between the
death and burial, and the old house at Chelsea, which, to my mind, in my
time had always been desolate, was now more than ever so, that the man
who had been its vitalising spirit lay dead eighty miles away by the
side of